Does Materialism Have an a Priori Problem?
Assume you know nothing about reality except that you exist and you have a conscious mind, and some materialists are trying to make their case to you (or you're just thinking through materialism yourself, and asking yourself questions): there's this physical stuff that exists, independent of you, you are made of it, and your mind and consciousness are produced by this stuff. Eventually, you would ask the materialists (or yourself) how all this works, and of course, you would get explanations that are all over the place: consciousness is an illusion, it's a product of information processing, it's everywhere in the physical universe. The materialists cannot agree on an answer. They also admit they've been working on this problem for a long time.
Is this lack of explanation a detriment to materialism? Obviously. We want to know how and why things happen. A theory that can't explain a fundamental aspect of reality like conscious awareness is a theory that's already in trouble. The longer the explanatory gap remains, the further in trouble the theory gets.
Idealism and dualism suffer too from explanatory gaps. However, in an a priori state of knowledge, we know that ideas and at least one mind exists, so to claim reality is made of mind(s)/thoughts begs a lot of interesting questions that don't have answers, but it has one crucial advantage over materialism: the existence of mind and ideas can't be doubted. The existence of external physical stuff can be. Idealism should be the default starting position.
Thoughts?
Is this lack of explanation a detriment to materialism? Obviously. We want to know how and why things happen. A theory that can't explain a fundamental aspect of reality like conscious awareness is a theory that's already in trouble. The longer the explanatory gap remains, the further in trouble the theory gets.
Idealism and dualism suffer too from explanatory gaps. However, in an a priori state of knowledge, we know that ideas and at least one mind exists, so to claim reality is made of mind(s)/thoughts begs a lot of interesting questions that don't have answers, but it has one crucial advantage over materialism: the existence of mind and ideas can't be doubted. The existence of external physical stuff can be. Idealism should be the default starting position.
Thoughts?
Comments (386)
But is it intuitive that the trees and birds around you are made of mind stuff as if we're in a dream?
And what is mind stuff anyway?
I think the default will come from the culture you were born into. The destination is realizing that you don't have a vantage point to confirm either one, so ontological anti-realism.
So, you're introducing dreaming into my a priori world, eh? That's fine. Suppose the person knows they dream. Wouldn't that give idealism an even bigger boost? After all, I create worlds populated by real-seeming people in my dreams, so isn't it entirely possible I'm still doing all that even when I think I'm awake? I think the knowledge of dreaming strengthens the idealist position. If world-building during sleep is a thing, than world-building during non-sleep (or what we think is non-sleep) is definitely on the table.
That's a good question, but you can ask it about materialism too: and just what is this physical stuff anyway? A bunch of fields in a superposition that collapses when someone's looking? That's very bizarre. QM is extremely counter-intuitive. Why should a reality made of independent-existing physical stuff be dependent on observers?
But again, this is where idealism has an advantage. We can ask "what is matter," we can ask "what is mind," but in the end, we know mind exists. We can't be wrong about that. We know that the stuff the idealist says reality is made of exists. I think that's a big advantage for idealism
Yes, but I'm talking about what *should* be the case. Idealism *should* be the default position, even if it's not.
I guess you want to explain that there is no doubt that mind/ideas exist, but The complex situation born when we put everything in practice so the theory gets complexity.
If materialism has a prior problem probably could be. Therefore, I guess this depends a lot of how you were raised in the home/country you were born in. Because the ideas or mind are there, yes, but they are so stimulated in our reality. For this reason, I guess this is why we literally see the same reality in different perspectives. Then, I guess this is the problem of materialism.
Which is the significance we can put in materialism and physics through our ideas? Interesting.
What we empirically experience is not 'material stuff' but merely qualities of experience. Someone, somewhere, sometime, decided to call these qualities 'material' but there's no actual reason to do so. And as far as I know, nobody has ever given a reason to do so.
Qualities exist, what they are called is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant. The real question is: are these qualities true, and real? And that's the problem of universals. If these qualities aren't genuine, nothing is. Because reality exists only in relation to qualities in experience juxtaposed to other qualities. Hence, nominalism is nihilism. Only Platonism (in the broad sense) can make sense of our qualities of experience.
The 'string' upon which these 'pearls' rest.
Absolutely. It isn't to you? What made you believe reality is just what you see?
Quoting frank
Discussed above. Emphasis added.
[quote=Dharmi]The real question is: are these qualities true, and real? And that's the problem of universals. If these qualities aren't genuine,nothing is. Because reality exists only in relation to qualities in experience juxtaposed to other qualities. Hence, nominalism is nihilism. Only Platonism (in the broad sense) can make sense of our qualities of experience.[/quote]
Both can be seriously doubted because every time we look we see nothing of the sort. The idealist still has the herculean task of showing us where the mind ends and the body begins, but has consistently failed to do so.
Yes, I've had dreams that left me wondering for years about my ability to build worlds, and so led to my half-assed interpretation of Kant: that we're projecting outward the world that we subsequently respond to as if it's mind independent.
I found that this line if thinking works great for trees and birds, but not for the people I love. I wonder what Kant said about that.
Quoting RogueAI
Ok, I'll totally agree with that, mainly because I like the way it sounds.
Well, even in a dream I act like a materialist, so...
Irrelevant. Physicalism is the default starting position.
For psychopaths maybe.
Lol nobody acts like a materialist. Materialism hasn't been proved.
A dualist then.
Because the people who believe in it haven't thought through how facile it is. Not because it's some sort of neutral position. There's no neutrality. Even a neutral position in a debate between people for genocide and against genocide (or anything else, just an example) is a position. Neutrality is a position.
Which is just another assumption. Cartesian Dualism comes from mechanical philosophy. Already assuming materialism. You have access to nothing whatsoever outside of your own mentation.
How do you know that?
Because nobody does. All things are experienced from the first person subjective experience. Unless you're claiming you do, in which case, that's something that carries a burden of proof.
I'm trying to to point out that a mind independent world is the setting for your narrative.
You need material as the counterpoint to ideas. See what I mean?
No. That's just plainly false. The world is entirely mental. In a dream world, it's 100% mental. It's no different in the other case.
There's no need for a mind-independent world, if the world itself is mentation.
This is a conclusion an idealist comes to, but it's not the starting point. It can't be.
You have to start by comparing thought to material in order to conceive of either. They're a package deal conceptually.
Later you can declare one to be illusive.
Dualism is the default.
It wasn't the default for the vast majority of people in history. Dualism was created after Descartes couldn't reconcile his Dark Age Christian conception of the soul with the new scientific mechanical philosophy.
So you can assert that, but in the history of philosophy it's plainly untrue.
Western monistic idealism recognizes matter and thought. Matter is supposedly an emergent property of mind per Plotinus.
This clearly shows a dualistic frame in which one side has been declared illusive as I described.
Name an idealistic view, and I'll show you the same scheme.
Which is why phenomenologisits argue that idealism and empiricism are two sides of the same coin, and both depend on dualist assumptions.
Yes.
Quoting frank
And? It seems like you're confusing word-concept here. Ontologically, there's no distinction. If you're talking epistemologically, yes. Obviously. The whole point of philosophy is trying to relate the individual with the world, in one way or another.
I don't deny materiality exists, but I obviously believe it's derived from mind. My system is Vedantism: Qualified non-dualism.
I never claimed it was neutral. It is, however, the default. You're born a physicalist (or at least you are one by six months, which is the furthest back any meaningful investigation goes). By three you've already assumed other minds. By five you're expecting complex physical and social rules to be consistent across separate events.
Any later adoption of idealism or even (arguably) dualism is in rejection of that which you assumed at least up to late teenage years.
So, without good cause to reject that which has served you up to that point, your adoption is just a pretence.
That's just not the case. The vast majority of premodern societies were idealistic, spiritistic, animistic. It's just plainly false that physicalism is the default. It's a culturally, socially constructed deviation from the vast majority of people in the vast majority of historical time.
To say nothing about modern idealism, like British Platonism, Berkley's Idealism, German Idealism etc.
Exactly.
Quoting Dharmi
So you start with recognizing a duality: mind and matter. You then arrive at monism by declaring one side to be dependent or illusive, right?
We recognize the illusion of materiality, and we go beyond it to the absolute truth of consciousness. Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Do we start in illusion? Of course.
Right. You have to eat a meal with the lord of illusion before you kill him. Actually I know nothing about Hinduism (sorry!)
No, it's not that everything is illusion. That's a very common misunderstanding. The illusion is our identification with what is false. Materiality, our false sense of self, and all misunderstandings which arise from the three aspects of material nature: Sattva, Rajas and Tamas.
That's all. It's not saying reality itself is an illusion, it's saying reality is something greater and the illusion is thinking it is "as is."
Also, you don't have to be sorry. I had a dialogue with someone who really truly didn't understand or care to understand for many hours on this point, and at least you're honest about your understanding being limited. That's good enough. Even many Hindus are ignorant of the orthodox Vedic understanding.
I see. I actually do know what these are (I think). They're the gunas. On a sine wave, rajas is a rising curve, sattva is the point of 0 slope and tamas is the downward curve.
Rajas and Tamas are actually the same thing from different points of view.
yes, roughly correct. The mathematical metaphor is imprecise, but if you intend it to mean, how one relates to materiality, then yes. You could say sattva is the "up" and tamas is the "down" within the "ups and downs of life" if that makes sense.
And Rajas is mixed nature, so yes you could see it as tamasic. Or as a middle point. Both are correct.
I think I got sattva and rajas mixed up.
Rajas: Existence in the mixed mode of both aspects.
Tamas: Existence in the mode of corruption and evil.
Our true nature is sattva, because we are carriers of the Divine Spark. But our illusion of being material beings and only material things existing leads us to follow the modes of Rajas (passion and hedonism for material things) and Tamas (indulging in unhealthy, vile, evil or insane phenomena).
So how does good give birth to evil?
Well, because we chose to live our lives outside of God. If we didn;t choose this material nature, we'd still be with Godhead. We decided to choose materiality over Godhead, and evil is a result of finding ourselves in the material nature.
In our system, God is pure and absolute love. So, he cares deeply and truly for us more than we can even care for our own selves. So, he respects us thoroughly. If we decide to exist apart from Him, he obliges our request.
So, we chose to live in this prison, and God loves us, and respects us deeply, so he gave us what we desired.
But materiality is supposed to be an illusion, right? Did God create this illusion or did we?
He created it for our enjoyment, because he attends to our desires. But we have utilized it to our detriment, our suffering and our doom.
Because nothing can make us happy. Except being with our most sublime love, God.
We made up our minds that we should live our lives separated from God. Since God loves us, he created this world for us to reside in.
And by "us" not humans, but all organisms with spirit soul. So, even a blade of grass has spirit soul.
I see.
Schopenhauer has it right, to me. The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object.
The interesting question to me, is part of the title of this thread, namely the "a priori". Nevermind definitions. In actual lived experience, it's not at all clear to me that we have a good grasp of what is not a priori, in principle. In other words, if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience.
So I actually think that all speculative views have some serious clarifying to do when it comes to the a priori. It's a really hard question to elucidate.
Arthur Schopenhauer formulated his philosophy after reading the Vedic Scriptures. It's also based on Kantianism which all German Idealism is ultimately predicated on.
According to Schopenhauer as well as to his biographers, he developed his thought before reading the Vedas and after reading Kant. He just happened to read the Vedas after he finished his main work, and he found remarkable similarities in it with his philosophy.
He does base himself on Kant, as he says several times. But I also think he's more profound, but I'm in a minority position here.
I think they're complimentary. Kant and Schopenhauer, same with Husserl.
Husserl’s work represented an explicit critique of Kant. Kant invested the transcendental subject with formal (categorical) contents and the world with independent reality. Husser rejected both categorical subjective content and independent external reality.
I'm not denying there are differences between him and Kant, but there are clear continuities also.
:up:
What you're saying is true. Kant is the turning point in modern philosophy, for all kinds of philosophers and schools.
It sounds like you’re retaining Kant’s reification of subject and object here.
Quoting Manuel
What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities can be claimed? Isn’t THIS the primordial a priori , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? Don’t we need to jettison both the ‘empirically real’ and the categorical apriori?
I'm not entirely clear what you're describing. I'll attempt to reply as I understand it. The term "information" here is taken as a convenient label to describe everything that we can cognize or assimilate in terms of interactions as well as all the aspects of the world which we ascribe meaning to. You could use the term "sense data" as well. The given, as I see it, is what the world implies, what we take to be the world. Right now, for me, it includes a room, many books, a TV and so on. If I look out the window I'll see a few tress, maybe a few people, etc.
I'm not sure what "primordial a priori" would mean in this context. There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. But it looks to me that, on close scrutiny, experience cannot be disentangled from the a priori consistently or clearly. We can still speak of after experience or a posteriori for convivence and as a way to let others know that "this experience, event, whatever X" occurs on occasion Y.
But the whole causal structure must be determined by the way we organize the world. In principle, if we knew how to stimulate the brain properly, know everything we could about the world, or maybe if our dreams were accurate enough. But that's in principle, in fact we won't reach these levels of understanding, I don't think. Beside that, I can't think of something more a priori than that, in that there's nothing to say, no world or anything.
Things become more complicated, however, if we consider things in themselves. In that situation, I think I can point to something beyond what out best science can say, at least conceptually. So it's a kind of a posteriori a posteriori. :p
How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? I know that is Kant’s argument but the phenomenological argument is that only IN experience, and not before or outside of it, is there anything that we bring to the world, and what we bring to it is not fixed but co-constructed along with what we experience in the world, and the tow are constantly changing each other. Put differently, we interpret what we experience in the world according to our previous history of experiences in the world. So how we organize the world is constantly being transformed by the world itself. But the world itself has no meaning apart from how we organize it. This is structural coupling , or reciprocal causality. so no ‘thing in itself, since ‘things’ are themselves the products of subject-object reciprocal causality.
Really?.
All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, dust, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize.
Yes, I agree about what you say about "things", but I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence.
Quoting Dharmi
So, it follows that the nobodies you refer to are not "outside your mentation"?
I was talking about perceptual and conceptual contents, not the innate biological capacities for experience( but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment). All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions, and that includes the concepts of number, space and time.
Quoting Manuel
Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? Is knowing copying an outside or is it an interaction that transforms what we see?
Yes, this is a robust and familiar argument against materialism. Bertrand Russell described this one well decades ago in the History of Western Philosophy. John Searle has a series of rebuttals to this argument which I will try to dig up.
I think the best we can do is say this - as soon as someone can find a way to acquire reliable knowledge outside of what we call methodological naturalism, let's hear it. Until then we have no choice but to assume that physicalism is all we have access to and can measure. It serves us well.
Quoting Dharmi
For me it comes back to the question what alternative epistemology we should be using to decide what we will call true? (Bear in mind that a methodological naturalist generally does not believe in certainty or capital T truths, just truth we can justify.)
Partly, yes. What we see is a representation of that environment, not the only one. The one which we construct, categorize and make sense of. But we are the ones that do it, not the world.
Quoting Joshs
"Objects" in the world incite and elicit responses from us, but the world can't teach us what a tree is or what danger is nor what a book is. We have the concept book, tree and we apply it to certain objects in the world. A dog does not have the concept tree, nor does a wolf or an owl. In fact, most of the exotic animals we know of, we don't even encounter ever. We might get the idea from another person describing it, or from a book. Yet we've never experienced it.
Not only animals but most of the world, we never experience, yet we know what these things are. Our exposure to the world is way too brief to account for the richness of the reply we have of it.
If we have no innate concepts, how would we get them? You'll say from the world, but a similar creature to us, an ape, does not get any concept, which is not to deny it has a rich experience of objects. So here we are two creatures exposed to the world, one has concepts the other does not. Apes extremely likely have a construction of there own, but not in concepts.
Quoting Joshs
I think we largely construct the world. I don't think our manifest experience mirrors the world, though science appears to do so, in some respects.
Sounds reasonable , but are you taking into account the problematics of the scheme-content distinction that motivated Kuhn, Rouse , Fine and others to level
the playing field between science and other modalities
of cultural creativity? Is ‘reliable knowledge’ a pragmatic construction that is simply useful in relation to human goals or an attempt to make knowledge
correspond to an independently existing external
world? Is science simply a relation between propositions or the relation between a proposition and ‘the way the world really is’?
My epistemic state is not one of "reliable knowledge". I can't even justify my belief in the existence of other minds. I take it on faith. What reliable knowledge do you think methodological naturalism has provided us? That is to say, how do you know this sentence is false: "methodological naturalism does a great job of describing the dream world I've created"
True. Materialism is a theory, and as such, it can't be proven. Nothing can be proven. The only thing we know (not via proof, but via the mechanism of the structure) is cogito ergo sum.
Is this equivalent to "Does Materialism Have an a Priori Problem?" A problem...? You mean it is self-contradictory? No it is not. Is it a paradox (meaning switching between "yes" and "no" states depending on the state, which immediately brings us to its opposite state)? No. The problem, if you wish, is that it is not proven, it is not given. It is an assumption.
Are assumptions problems? That's a value judgment, not a given. If I want, it's a problem, if I no want, it is not a problem.
There is no end of games we can play with language and ideas. I can't, for instance refute the problem of hard solipsism. The question for me is this: do I have a good reason to deny the physical world? Can I just walk out in front of a bus or drink acid? 'No' seems the most reliable answer - I would even venture to call this knowledge. Now I am not 100% certain of this knowledge, but I think it is a reasonable position that can be justified. Knowledge is never about ultimate truth, it is about what we can justify with reasonable confidence. What is the alternative?
All things being equal, we should prefer the theory with the least amount of assumptions. Materialism makes two fundamental unjustified assumptions, and has (I believe) a catastrophic explanatory gap:
- non-conscious stuff exists
- non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness, but it's unknown how that happens.
Idealism does not need to make an assumption about the existence of the stuff that reality is made of, since we know with certainty that mind and thoughts exist. Also, idealism's lack of explanation for certain phenomena isn't as catastrophic as not being to explain how consciousness arises from matter. That's become an acute problem in science.
So, I would say all things exist in the Mind of God. The only things I in particular have access to is the things in my personal mentation. But I'm not a Solipsist. God's Mind is what underlies the energetic flux of reality we experience.
The Vedic Scriptures give us a method.
We prove logical things via logic. Empirical things via empiricism. Consciousness "things" (i.e., God, gods, spirits, demons, whatever) via consciousness.
If we follow the yoga system, and have proper predisposition, then one can "know" God, and other entities too theoretically. But you have to do the experiment. That's the requirement.
I don't know. Good questions. I do think an element of pragmatism ( a presupposition, if you like) is involved in as much as none of us can prove that we are not all simulations living in the laboratory of an extra terrestrial, who has created the illusion of our universe, complete with the illusion of physical laws.
Are you going to take up smoking and heroin use on the basis that we can't demonstrate to 100% that materialism is what our perceptions tell us it is?
The point for me is economical. It is not about endless parsing of the questions; Is all this a dream? What is perception? etc. It's that I fail to see how we have a choice but to accept that we live in a reality that we all share (despite the shades of grey in the word 'reality'). We need an epistemology in order to survive and make plans. What else can we use but methodological naturalism?
I fail to see how, for instance, mysticism, faith, religious visions, necromancy, astrology - insert alternative reality of your choice - can assist us in any way. The results are not demonstrable.
I don't think we exactly know that at least one mind exists or that matter exists. Both positions are tangled up in the same language. Concepts often come in interdependent pairs. Mind is only intelligible in the context of non-mind. Personally I think the metaphysical quest is hopeless.
Another opinion: smart materialism is more of an attitude than a crisp metaphysics. For instance:
[quote=Marx]
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.
[/quote]
One of the key things that I'd say I've learned from philosophy is the sociality of reason. Language is NOT the possession of an individual mind. Indeed, the individual mind is in a peculiar sense the founding fiction of modern philosophy. That does not mean that we have no intuitions of the single mind, that ordinary language on the topic is absurd. All I'm saying is that it's apparent feasibility as some absolute starting point has been demolished by (for instance) Wittgenstein & Heidegger. (Or one can look at some linguistics like Saussure or various sociology texts for a similar point.)
*I don't do this for a living, so I speak not as an expert but simply as someone who's read some books I've found convincing on this issue.
Two points: what we're experiencing is equally consistent with many different models of reality. There's no reason that getting hit by a bus in a simulation (or a dream) should be any different than in a materialistic reality. The other point is you do have a good reason to deny physicalism/materialism: it makes too many assumptions and can't explain a crucial aspect of reality (consciousness), nor is this explanatory gap a new problem.
So let me ask you, suppose we jump forward in time 5,000 years and amazing technological progress has been made, but scientists are still stumped about how matter produces consciousness. Wouldn't you question materialism at that point?
That seems unverifiable. And Scientologists, say, would argue the same point. What method do we use to determine which occult system is true? If someone doubts matter on epistemological grounds, how can they accept 'knowledge of God' as a sound premise.
No. Timeframes have no bearing on the truth of an idea. If however evidence of a supernatural is found. Then fine.
You have to do the experiment. That's the only way. Scientologists would not argue the same premise. All of these fools and rascals of other religions would say "because my Scripture says so" and when it comes to Scientology, it's founder was an admitted fraud. So that's a very tenuous thing to claim.
Our system is an epistemology. Not based on authority or hearsay.
Empiricism is about verifying empirical things via empirical means.
Rationalism is about verifying rational things through rational means.
So, it follows, that the only way you can prove "God-thing" is through a similar methodology? Do you disagree?
The argument that some materialists make that consciousness doesn't exist (or is an illusion) is not convincing (I don't know of any philosophers who doubt their own mind exists). If a materialist is forced to respond to a given point, "well, I don't know for sure if I have a mind", they've lost the game. That's not going to convince anyone, and certainly not myself.
Timeframes have a bearing on whether we should stick with a certain theory or not. Eventually, after progress hasn't been made, the theory itself will be questioned. Any theory that, after 5,000 years of study, purports to say what reality is made of yet can't explain how and why we're conscious is a failed theory. Wouldn't you agree? Wouldn't you have started looking for new tools to explain consciousness well before that point?
Are you assuming that materialism is "natural"? That's question begging (or circular reasoning, I always get those two mixed up).
One could say that the world is a constantly changing flow of events that never repeats itself identically or doubles back on itself. Our challenge to construe stabilities and patterns in that constantly changing flow. Our constructs attempt to find order in events via the ways in which aspects of the world replicate themselves.
In this way a chaos of visual, auditory and tactile sensations which constantly bombard us becomes sorted into stable objects. Other animals must also construe perceptual order out of constantly changing sensory stimulation. So we invent constructs but the world teaches us whether those constructs are useful or not are by either validating or invalidating our constructed patterns that we attempt to impose on the world in order to make sense of it’s changes.
When we use a concept like ‘tree’ we have certain expectations of how that concept will allow us to interact with an aspect of the world. If in a particular context of its use the concept of tree no longer applies to some piece of the world we will have to adjust it.
Many concepts that we use ( book, chair, democracy) are created via our interaction with the human world and so describe social objects. They still need to be validated by the flow of events, just as does a concept like ‘tree’ but in this case they will be validated or invalidated by the interpersonal world rather than events in the world of ‘nature’. Other animals also have concepts for nature as well as social interchanges in their communities. They don’t have the complex verbal language that we do but they do have simpler gestural and auditory language. When your dog responds to a command , or anticipates your next behavior( taking him for a walk) based on your currents actions (bringing him his leash)he has formed a concept. Animals, like us, don’t have to ever have encountered a particular object in order to recognize it as familiar based on its resemblance to something they know. This is due to use of concepts.
True, but only if two different theories explain the one and same thing.
But Idealism does not explain the material world. whereas materialism explains the material world. In your line of thinking, idealism stops at the end of "cogito ergo sum". It needs not to do anything more, I guess you surmise, because matter is not proven, so it needs no explanation. Or matter does not play a role in "cogito ergo sum", which is the only a priori proven proof of empirical truth. You simply dismiss that matter has to be explained by idealism.
Well, in case of a belief of solipsism, yes, you are right. But we can't decide if we live in a soliptical world. Precisely because matter is not explained let alone proved by idealism. Therefore if you take the assumption by idealism that matter exist, then and only then idealism inherits all the assumptions of the materialist explanations, and adds one more, which is, like I said, "matter exists".
Yes, I disagree but I certainly understand the thinking and have often heard it before. For starters no one has established what a 'God-thing' even is to any agreement. It is unknowable how a phenomenological/personal experience type method of verifying something can work.
It's not unknowable. That's what I am saying. It's very knowable, you just need to do the experiment. What you're saying is like what people would argue about quantum particles and atoms in the ancient world. "We can't see them, we don't know they're there, they're unknowable, there's no known method to know about them, we have to raise our hands up and just give up!" This is the type of reasoning you're using. And I'm telling you the method.
To put it simply, the foundation of idealism is stuff that *has* to exist: mind and thought. The foundation of materialism is stuff that *might* exist. I think it obvious idealism clearly has an a priori advantage. If idealism has to make certain assumptions to avoid solipsism (the existence of other minds), those assumptions are at least based on a certainty: mind and thought exist.
And I'll ask you the same question I asked another person: suppose in 5,000 years, science has explained pretty much everything except how consciousness arises from matter. What would you think about materialism? I would consider it an utter failure. What could be more important than an explanation for how and why we're conscious?
I'm comfortable with saying materialism is the natural world or physicalism.
I'm also comfortable with saying reason works as the most reliable tool we have to explore ideas. But I recognise that I am using reason to justify reason and that too is question begging. There are presuppositions we have to make and these have been addressed several times.
I don't think words such as "conscious", "mind" and "exist" would be meaningful to you if you otherwise knew nothing about reality.
Quoting RogueAI
By the time we begin to think philosophically, we have a vast amount of knowledge, language and experience that underpins our philosophical thoughts. The point of philosophy just is to develop a framework for bringing order to what we know. What can or can't be doubted depends itself on one's philosophical assumptions (which may be implicit). Materialists do doubt mind (at least in the Cartesian sense), just as idealists do doubt external physical stuff. Which leads to your final comment...
Quoting RogueAI
I think ordinary language should be the default starting position. J.L.Austin explains why:
Quoting J.L. Austin - A plea for excuses (via Ordinary Language Philosophy - IEP)
You have given me no useful information about method or experiment or even what it is that is being tested. Just claims. By the way, ancient people would have been correct in not accepting something until it can be demonstrated. The bit about raising hands and giving up is not really related and seems to be surplus, emotive dramatisation. Main point: once we can reliably test for it then we know it is likely to be true.
Like I said, the demonstration is through the third form of epistemology, which is consciousness. Through consciousness, we can know the Supreme Consciousness. This is what yoga aims to do. Yoga in Sanskrit means "unification" with ourselves, then the Divine. You have to do the proper yoga system under the guidance of a proper guru, that's the experiment.
Thank you, I thought you might have more detail. But this is fine for now.
I have no reason to accept that there is supreme consciousness - this needs to be demonstrated. The fact that Yoga means unification is understood, but so what? Sikh, for instance, means 'seeker of truth', is there evidence Sikhism has access to the truth? No. The notion that you have to do a proper Yoga system is exactly the kind of thing every cult, religion and belief system would maintain. How could they not? By what criteria do you tell genuine claims like this from phoney ones?
That's fine, but I'm asking you, what do you consider genuine epistemology? You can't have this double standard where I have to provide my epistemology but you don't have to provide yours.
More than that, I don't really care if you accept my epistemology or not. It's what it is, if you reject it, that's up to you.
I have provided it numerous times. No point repeating myself.
Uh, I haven't seen it a single time. Are you an empiricist? You disagreed with my analysis of empiricism. You also disagreed with my analysis of rationalism.
So are you just an anti-Foundationalist Skeptic? I don't know at all where you're coming from.
I am not a philosopher. I practice critical thinking with a philosophical bent. I'm not into labels. I have spelled out what I consider to be reliable and non reliable pathways to knowledge. I do privilege empiricism and methodological naturalism but I don't think we can be 100% certain of anything. To be called an anti foundational skeptic is thematically close, but way too grand and extreme. I am still working out what I am. Sorry if that sounds inadequate.
I think you misunderstand where I'm coming from. It's not a denial of mind but a 'denial' of the individual mind, of the single mind. This is a hyberbolic attack on the Cartesian starting point. 'I' is a piece of language that only exists socially. Obviously, in an everyday sense, we can hide in the closet and murmur to ourselves. But we've already absorbed the language from social interaction. Even if I were to somehow persuade you to my view, it wouldn't change you life much. You'd just be more bored with mind/matter talk (yet here I am, at least for the moment.)
Where I'm coming from, it's not about 'go mind !' or 'go matter!' but about seeing the futility of trying to make one the foundation of the other. All of our words are caught up in a system. Our practical distinctions of inner and outer are fine but way too flexible and leaky to take seriously for the construction of metaphysical castles in the air. (Mind-matter battles are like flower arrangement to me, and not like some grand science of the foundations. If anything is a foundation, I vote for practical life in all its ambiguity.)
Jeepers creepers, where'd you get those peepers?
I was talking about child development - as I thought should have been clear. The cultural affectations that adults later see value in appropriating are irrelevant.
No child acts as if the world were one of ideas, or all in their mind. They act as if there is a physical outside world which obeys rules that can be discovered by repeated testing. They are surprised when things behave outside of those rules (even at six months), they test objects in a deliberate fashion to establish these rules... they treat the world in every way as if it were external to them and obeyed the same rules for them as it does for others.
How much is this going to cost me? Do you get a cut for every referral?
I'll stick with scientology for now.
I'm running with A Course In Miracles, it changed my life.
Nice! I know someone who really is into that. Cool guy, but I just can't go there with him. For religion I choose....nothing at all. It's free, and I don't like to pay retail.
[quote=Dan Lusthaus]The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating it as the primary substance while reducing the remaining substance to derivative status.
Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.) Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.). Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.
Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists [e.g. Berkeley] who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists. Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe.
A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.
Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." A mundane example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself. By applying vision and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience. Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them.
With the exception of some epistemological idealists, what unites all the positions enumerated above, including the materialists, is that these positions are ontological. They are concerned with the ontological status of the objects of sense and thought, as well as the ontological nature of the self who knows. Mainstream Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle has treated ontology and metaphysics as the ultimate philosophic pursuit, with epistemology's role being little more than to provide access and justification for one's ontological pursuits and commitments. Since many of what are decried as philosophy's excesses - such as skepticism, solipsism, sophistry - could be and were accused of deriving from overactive epistemological questioning, epistemology has often been held suspect, and in some theological formulations, considered entirely dispensable in favor of faith. Ontology is primary, and epistemology is either secondary or expendable.[/quote]
What is, and isn't, Yog?c?ra
That's quite a bouquet!
But why choose 'ontology is primary' over 'epistemology is primary'? A case could be made for each. Another case could be made for neither.
I'm leaning toward the idea of the not-said as primary. A good (anti-)metaphysician is manifested in what he doesn't needlessly add to practical communication. By that I mean that philosophy teaches us to avoid wasted motion, to do more with less. Instead of choosing the correct grand metaphysical statement, we can simply abandon the entire project of making such statements.
It's a game that's won by no longer playing it, by seeing its emptiness, by seeing that it's not needed. Note that I'm talking about mind-matter confusion. I find the more directly human-practical-literary aspect of philosophy as important and interesting as ever.
He goes on to discuss that in the attached essay, but I picked that passage because it’s quite a good summary.
Quoting norm
There still remains a malady for which philosophy is the cure.
Well I'd hate to have not read some of the books I've read. I could have done without many other things, but give me the best books. So I agree with you, I guess. I don't know about a permanent cure, but I do think we can get ourselves half-civilized. I do think novels are as valuable as philosophy proper. ( Balzac's and Dostoevsky's narrators and characters philosophize for instance. It's all the same, statements about existence, sometimes ironic.)
I'm hard on the mind-matter thing because I think it's game that can't be won, usually driven in the background (?) by religious/political issues that would be more interesting to talk about directly. It's all so low stakes, at least in the foreground.
I agree that we are constantly bombarded by sense data. But we sort them out into stable objects, not the world.
Suppose I see something on the the floor, lying around in the grass, I think it's a snake. So I tell other people to avoid stepping on that area. However, another person points out to me that what's there is actually not a snake, but a stick. Other people come and verify this second account, indeed it was a stick all along, not a snake. Nothing changed in the world, my perception of what I saw was wrong.
You would say that the world was the one that "taught" me that my concept was wrong, since other people came along and verified I misjudged that object in the world. But nothing changed in the world, my perception was wrong.
You could then say, other people knew that was a snake because they've seen one before and maybe (not necessarily) they've mistaken them for sticks as well, but the world showed them that the concept they had was wrong. The concept was wrong, but the world did not teach them it was wrong. People discovered that they were using the wrong concept to describe something in the world.
Quoting Joshs
Animals don't have language in any sense of the word. They can communicate, sure. But that's not language. The have cries that signify things like this is edible, this is dangerous, come here and so on. I'm obviously anthropomorphizing the cries. They probably have categories of some kind that allows them to interpret something as a sound for something specific like food or predator, etc. As for dogs when they respond to a command, they are repeating a behavior which they have associated with that command. One command is for them to sit down, for example. They do an action which the human has shown leads to a reward, or a desired outcome. They always had the capacity to do this, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do it.
When turtles are born, they immediately rush towards the ocean. When a baby elephant is born, they immediately start walking, even if it takes them a few hours to get it right. It's all innate. There is a world, but that world is entirely interpreted by the relevant creature. You can't think of an apple and become satiated, nor of fire to get warm. You need to go to the place which, on occasion of sense data, you take to be an apple or fire.
Were you born into it? Or did you join as an adult?
Right. So that's exactly my point, you aren't even clear on what your own position is. So how can I answer your position if even you are not clear on it? This is just an unfair game you're playing at.
So I'm offering my system, and I'm asking you to tell me what's wrong with my system. You haven;t done that, you're just rejecting it for some unknown reason that you haven't explained yet.
The cost is discipline and time. And you're obviously not interested. Don't bother. You can stay in your post-truth worldview, and I have my worldview.
That's also false. Children are believers in gods, angels, demons, entities like that, until society socially conditions them out of it.
That's been studied. And Idealism doesn't say "the world is all in my mind" it says the world is constituted of mental/spiritual/conscious stuff. It doesn't have to be in any particular person's mind.
I'll ask you the question I suppose in 5,000 years, when spirituality has explained pretty much everything it is mandated to, except how matter arises from consciousness.
You can't turn it around on me, that's the advantage of idealism. When you say "how matter arises from consciousness", you're assuming matter is real. My position, on the other hand, doesn't depend on an assumption that consciousness exists. We know, irrefutably, that consciousness exists. I don't have to assume anything.
Or are you talking about the idea of the physical world? If idealism is true, why did we come up with the idea of matter? Is that what you're asking?
So? Do the children concerned believe that these gods, angels, and demons are material objects ideas? Believing something exists which, it turns out, doesn't is not a measure of one's commitment or otherwise to physicalism.
Quoting Dharmi
Great. Let's have the citations then.
Quoting Dharmi
Fair enough. So the studies which demonstrate that children believe this to be the case...
Nobody believed in "material objects" before the 16th century. Materialism was not believed by even the Epicureans. This is just a posthoc reading back into history something people didn't believe.
I'm not asserting the existence of just one mind. I'm claiming that we know for certain that at least one mind exists. There might be one, there might be billions of minds, but there can't be zero minds. That's powerful. We don't have that kind of certainty about the existence of anything else, except logical/mathematical truths.
I don't agree. I don't think our situation is that hopeless.
So, no studies then?
Google's algorithm isn't helping me find the particular study, but here's a related study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm
And like, I don't know how you can expect me to have all of the scientific studies ever published ready on the spot, that's a very unreasonable standard of evidence.
That study shows that humans might be predisposed toward belief in gods and afterlife. It makes no mention of children at all.
Quoting Dharmi
If you assert something to be the case you should have the evidence to hand to back up that assertion. Otherwise, don't assert it, enquire instead. It's of no interest what you just happen to reckon. Why would anyone want to know what you think there might be studies of, we're not compiling your autobiography.
Quoting RogueAI
True. But you seem to be absolutely sure that mind is idealism stuff. I guess I hadn't clicked on "Post comment" for the following I had written up earlier today -- I was distracted.
Quoting RogueAI
Mind and thought exists for sure. But why are you so absolutely certain that they both are matters of idealism? Mind could be matter, from where we sit, we don't know if it is or not; and conversely, we don't know if mind is idealism stuff or not. You say it is obvious that mind is idealism stuff. To me it's not obvious.
That's A. B. is that while we can't at this point or in 5000 years explain how consciousness or mind arises from matter; but because we can't explain it, it is not inconceivable that it does.
Again, you may say: yes, but to know that mind and thought exist, we don't need any assumptions that they exist, but for matter to be known to exist, we must have assumptions.
Right. The material world is an empirical world; the rules of logic apply, but the existence of the material world is a belief. We sense the physical world, so we assume it exists. We sense our thoughts, we assume it exists, but hey, in the least thoughts exist in our mind, so two things exist for sure: mind and thought. This is the only EMPIRICAL truth that has an a priori foundation. If we had no mind, thought would not exist.
So far we agree. My objection, only objection, is that you are adamant that the mind is not a physical unit. You may be right, but just as equally likely you may be wrong. There is no proof or indication of any source, in the "Cogito ergo sum"'s logical structure, that denies that the mind is physical.
Oh my God dude really? This conversation is over. You're not actually interested in a serious discussion.
You have a very serious ego problem. You can't tolerate anyone else's opinion for even a second. That's pretty sad.
So, my reply is that it is so obvious to me that my mind is not a physical thing with physical characteristics, like size, shape, weight, volume, etc. that I'm not making an assumption when I say my mind is not a physical thing. It's clearly not. It makes sense to ask what a (supposedly) physical thing like a flower smells like, but it's incoherent to ask what my mind smells like, or looks like, or tastes like. To say minds and brains are identical is to make a fundamental category error. I think a materialist who asserts that has lost the game in the same way as a materialist who starts questioning whether minds/consciousness even exist.
Consider the following: two people from thousands of years ago can meaningfully talk about their minds, agreed? They can exchange meaningful information with each other about their mental states. Now, if minds and brains are the same thing, then two people in ancient times exchanging meaningful information about their minds must also be exchanging meaningful information about their brains. But of course, ancient peoples had no idea how the brain worked. They thought it cooled the blood. It's an absurdity to claim ancient peoples were meaningfully exchanging information about their brains, so the claim mind=brain entails an absurdity.
Good discussion!
I would not agree to that. It was already pointed out that all content that could be meaningfully be talked about is something that is for sure not the mind. And of what two people are you talking? You cannot even prove or be sure there is anyone to talk with. Who of both is you?
It sounds like you are using a combination of Stimulus Response theory and a notion of prewired innate categories to explain animal communication. But there is much new research showing that animals conceptualize in ways similar to humans.
Can Dogs Learn Concepts the Same Way We Do? Concept Formation in a German Shepherd
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pb6w96g
“Do animals have concepts?
The considerations above lead most cognitive scientists to assume that the meanings of words and sentences are to be cashed out in non-linguistic mental representations: ‘concepts’ hereafter. However, the cognitive revolution remains incomplete: while few today deny the existence of internal mental representations (concepts) in humans, many remain suspicious when attributing them to animals. Animal cognition researchers are typically required to reject all possible associative explanations, regardless of their complexity, before attributing mental representations to animals [23] and the discipline spends considerable energy and ingenuity refuting so-called killjoy associative explanations [10,24]. Fortunately, the field has matured to the point where, for many phenomena, there can be little doubt that mental representations exist in animals, and can be recalled, manipulated and themselves represented.”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0046
“ We suggest that several of the major varieties of conceptual classes claimed to be uniquely human are also exhibited by nonhuman animals. We present evidence for the formation of several sorts of conceptual stimulus classes by nonhuman animals: perceptual classes involving classification according to the shared attributes of objects, associative classes or functional equivalences in which stimuli form a class based on common associations, relational classes, in which the conceptual relationship between or among stimuli defines the class, and relations between relations, in which the conceptual (analogical) relationship is defined by the relation between classes of stimuli. We conclude that not only are nonhuman animals capable of acquiring a wide variety of concepts, but that the underlying processes that determine concept learning are also likely to be quite similar. ”
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-13159-002
This is dualist talk then?
There are many forms of physicalism.
For instance , what allows Barrett to reject naive realism is her indebtedness to Kantian idealism. That’s why she can talk about a veil of appearances separating us from a world we have no direct access to and must use interpretive faculties to understand. She would agree we can never access the thing in itself. That notion of the physical only emerged with Kant. So I would say the default position in most of the sciences is a physicalism
derived from , or at least consistent with, Kant’s idealism.
By the way, the discussion moves along nicely when no one talks about qualia.
Physical things are always changing. They're transient. We ourselves are transient. If ideas are eternal and unchanging (I think they are), and we're made of mind stuff, why aren't we immortal?
Yes, what they say could be true. There's a very good book on this topic called The Gap by Thomas Suddendorf, he covers "killjoys" and "romantics", it's very interesting.
Fine, for the sake of argument, let's grant them concepts more or less similar to ours. This doesn't touch the problem of innateness. Whatever a dog represents as a ball or food, isn't learned, it's represented, learning doesn't arise.
In either case representations aren't learned. They grow in the mind.
I’m not sure I understand the distinction you’re making between the act of representing a feature of the world , and learning. Isn’t all representation a creative act? Or are you arguing for innate hard-wired categories as an explanation of instinctive behavior?
Even from the first-person point of view we come into direct contact with the outer world. I think the burden of proof lies with those who claim otherwise.
Maybe I'm not being clear to myself! :)
I personally don't see those two options you provided as mutually exclusive. I suppose that the latter is what I have in mind. It's more or less classical rationalism, with some distinctions, of course.
The world and the phenomena in it, incite and orient our mind to recognize such objects as being such objects: a book as a book, a river as a river and so on. There's something "out there", which activates some part of our innate capacities such that we say that the object we see is a river. However, the river need not exist. Again, we could imagine a child living in the desert or in the snowy mountains, which has never seen a river, but knows what it is. It's a bit like never seeing snow prior to a certain age, yet you know what it is when you first see it in the actual world (as opposed to on TV, or seeing a picture, etc.)
What I think is wrong in this tradition is to think we can exhaust the ideas by merely thinking about them. For that we need to investigate the object which produces these effects in us. If we knew enough we wouldn't even need to investigate anything, but we don't know enough.
I think that Colin McGinn covers this pretty well in his recent book Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within. I think this innate knowledge is a mystery, then again, everything is under closer examination.
My favorite quote from Hume:
“ For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”
It’s true that we perceive all of the above, but the idea that we perceive “perceptions” and not the physical world is a step too far for me. This is the mistake of nominalizing, changing the grammatical character of an adjective or verb into that of a noun. Nominalizing allows us to construct scenarios where one will observe observations, perceive perceptions, be conscious of consciousness, as if these nouns represented things and substances.
interiority of consciousness falls apart when analysed closely, because when we search for ourselves what we find is always reshaped by exposure to an outside. If you want to call that outside ‘physical’ then you’re maintaining a kind of dualism between interior and exterior. I prefer ‘phenomena’ or appearances’ to physical objects( as Nietzsche wrote, there is nothing behind those appearances) , because it indicates the indissociable reciprocal depends of interior and exterior, making mind embodied and embedded in a world , which itself is co-constructed by its relationships with embodied mind. In this view of mind-body-environment no clear-cut interior or exterior can be discerned.
Where do you find yourself at all? All there is is the things that are there...
That’s an interesting question. There’s a consensus forming among a community of phenomenologically influenced writers in philosophy of mind that self-consciousness is intrinsic to all awareness. I am not only are aware of smelling the rose, I am aware that it is I use smell the rose. Ther is what, after Nagel, they call the feeling of what it is like to experience anything, a quality of for-meness’ that attaches to all my encounters with the world. Social constructionists take the opposite view , arguing that the self is just a socially created construct.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Dharmi
But then God must be "outside your mentation" unless he dies when you die. If you are not a solipsist, then you accept that others are also outside your mentation, no?
Of course you can just say it is that way. You say it is your encouters therefor there must be you - but where is the proof? Maybe the warmth just IS warm.
You are not only aware of the warmth. You are also aware of the mode of subjective access to the experience. Did you experience it directly or recollect it, or did you just fantasize about warmth? One is not only aware of an experience but can report what personal modality the experience arose from.
This again is an assumption. It just is warm.
Quoting Joshs
Experience? Do you mean the existence of the warmth? I try not to make an assumption here.
Quoting Joshs
So you relate the existence of the warmth to "modalities"?
We both access it and construct it, albeit not consciously. Much happens prior to experience if experience is taken to denote conscious awareness; we cannot talk about that except to allude to it. It is not a matter of "either/ or"; our knowledge does mirror an independent world in a sense, but not in the naive realist sense.
Our knowledge is mediated by that which exists prior to our awareness. Knowledge is not "copying an outside", it you are thinking of that outside as being already conceptually shaped. And knowledge is an interaction. But if you want to say "it transforms what we see" you have already presupposed that there is something there to be transformed, and some seeing which is unmediated.
We all do, according to studies. And what about the use of the world ‘I’ here? We can talk about the feeling of warmth in the abstract , in third personal terms, i. which case ‘I’ is irrelevant. But when I have a personal feeling of warmth, does it makes sense to ask the question, ‘is it ‘I’ who is feeling warm’?
But this was not exactly the initial question.
Quoting Joshs
Is that also related to "modalities"?
Quoting Joshs
It makes sense to ask if it is warm. If you say "it is", where is you?
There is a difference in meaning between ‘it is warm’ , which doesnt necessary require a subjective experience ( I could be looking at a thermostat) and proclaiming that it is I who feel warm. And what about my pain?Does it make sense to ask if it is ‘I’ who am in pain? Is my pain the same thing as ‘there is pain’?
My own arguments in favor of the idea that all experience has a ‘for-menses’ quality about it is a bit different from what I’ve been describing. These accounts depend on the idea of a certain felt sense of ‘ ‘ me ness’.
My own account is based on the argument that all of our sensory, perceptual , cognitive and affective experiences are defined i relation to our prior goal oriented understanding. We recognize the new in relation to pre-existing schemes of sense. So the ‘self is always changing but there is an ongoing integrity and unity to it. What I experience is always a variation on a prior theme for me.
There is.
Quoting Joshs
Not if you are a solipsist, for example.
Quoting Joshs
That also depends on certain assumptions.
A commentary on the elusive nature of 'the knower' from the Upani?ads:
[quote= Brihadaranyaka Upani?ad]Y?jñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ?tman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ?tman."
Nobody can know the ?tman inasmuch as the ?tman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ?tman can be put, such as "What is the ?tman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ?tman because the Shower is the ?tman; the Experiencer is the ?tman; the Seer is the ?tman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ?tman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ?tman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ?tman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self. It is not an object. 1 [/quote]
I would suggest it’s not so much dualism as it is pluralism, the simple act of distinguishing oneself from the vast amount of objects beyond the self. In my own view the self begins and ends at the exterior surface, which can be discerned from simple observation and direct contact. It cannot extend any further outward or inward, and any notion of the self that violates this principle is illusory.
If that's what you think you either haven't read me or are not able to understand. You sound like a Christian apologist except with Deepak Chopra instead of Jesus. No thanks.
Sounds simple but may not be so. Have you heard of the research on extended cognition? Drawing a boundary based on the physical body is somewhat arbitrary, since cognition is not a calculating computer in a bag of bones.
Cognition, like other organismic functions is interactive exchanges of activity with an environment. We eat , we breath, we excrete. Should the functioning body not include the oxygen we take in, and the aspects of our surrroudinga that keep our nerve and muscle cells from atrophying? Our perceptual-motor systems that power our actions in the world as well as allowing us to
perceive it in the first place cannot even be properly defined from a functional point of view without taking into account the complete interactive body-environment cycles. These are not machines that are designed first and then plopped into a world. Drawing a contour around an anatomical body and calling it self is artificially separating what was never separate to begin with.
I haven’t heard of the research of extended cognition, but no I do not think we should include everything that goes into the lungs into the notions of self. There is not doubt we are situated in an environment, that we interact with it, use it and learn from it. But I do not think such a brute fact should imply our minds or cognition or some other abstraction extends beyond our body, as if I could locate my being in the water I drink. Again, I don’t quite know enough about the thesis of that theory, but the name is enough to cause me to recoil.
I don’t need to draw a contour around my anatomy when that contour is already defined by the surface of my being and the nature of my form. There is nothing artificial about this. All I need do is point to myself to confirm this, in my view.
I'm a Panentheist, not a Pantheist. But, that's fair. If you aren't interested, you're not interested. Apologetics has nothing to do with it, we're talking about honest philosophy, which you're obviously not interested in.
Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.
Good point.
Now let's get back to the beginning. You assert, and I agree, that the only empirical thing that is proven in an a priori way is "I think therefore I am" or "My thoughts prove that my mind exists". This is absolutely true.
On the other hand, we both agree, that the physical world is doubtful that it exists.
My addition to this latter agreement is, that our senses tell us the physical world exist, but our senses can't be trusted. They may give us illusionary signals, true or false, we don't know.
So... we are unsure of the physical world because there is no way we can prove or ascertain that it exist. It may exist in the form we perceive, or it may not exist, or it may exist in a form that is completely different from what we perceive. At any rate, there is an assumption involved in each of the three scenarios, because of the lack of certainty.
This proves that the idea-world exists without any doubt, and the physical world does not.
All the above are true if we can guarantee that the mind is not physical, but only part of the world of ideas.
How can we guarantee that? That is the million dollar question. Our first clue that the physical world is independent of our scrutiny. This is due to the untrustworthiness of our senses.
If we can't rely on our senses to prove the physical world; can we rely on our senses to know that the mind is not physical? No, we can't. We have a mind; if it were physical, then we could sense it, but our sense can lie to us. If it were not physical, then we would not need to rely on our sense to realize that the mind exists, since we use it daily to generate thoughts.
But this is a slippery slope. If we can't rely on our senses to tell the objects and events in the physical world, and we can't rely on our senses to tell if something is in the world of ideals, then we actually are at a loss of knowing if our mind is physical or in the world of ideals.
So I put the question to you, again, @RogueAI: what makes it so sure for you that the mind is not physical? You say you can't measure it or smell it or weigh it. But can you measure, weigh, or smell anything else AND be sure that your perception is that of reality? If you can not measure, weight or smell, it does not mean the thing is not physical... it just means that your senses are not reliable.
I suggest to you therefore, that the mind is either physical (not part of the brain, but a physical entity of which we have no knowledge or concept), entity, or else a non-physical entity; but to declare that the mind is not physical with the confidence level of 100%, is a fallacy. Because, like I said, physical reality can't be known if we experience it as it is or differently.
I don't need my senses to know that my mind is not physical, in the sense that materialists/physicalists use the word. It's simply not in that category of things, because it's missing physical characteristics. You're saying it could have those physical characteristics, except my senses could be fooling me, but I don't need my senses to know my mind isn't a physical object. I don't need to try and smell it to know it doesn't have an odor, or try and look at it to know it doesn't have a shape.
You're proposing the mind might be a physical thing that's not the brain (I assume you're not talking simulation theory or Boltzmann Brains). If you say that the mind is some physical thing we have no conception of I have a feeling your physicalism is going to turn into idealism. In any case, if the materialist has to claim the mind might be a physical non-brain non-computer thing... I don't think that's very convincing.
I wish you would address my thought experiment about the two ancient people talking meaningfully about their mental states. If you believe the mind is identical some physical thing, your position commits you to claiming they are also talking meaningfully about some physical thing they know nothing of. You would be on much firmer ground claiming the mind is not a physical thing but is caused by a physical thing.
You use physical categories to help you decide that the mind is not physical. It lacks weight, volume, smell, etc. So it IS physical characteristics that you use to determine that it is not physical. However, physical characteristics are of objects in the physical realm, our knowledge of which is not reliable, because our senses can lie.
Therefore it is conceivable that the mind is physical; and the only reason you don't experience it is that your perception of it is distorted.
I think this is the biggest achievement of Descartes "cogito ergo sum": that it determines that physical things can and do exist, in case the mind is a physical thing. It is just as likely to be physical as non-phyiscal, as there is no indication as to its origin, to its working modus,that excludes the possibility of the mind being physical. I think (and I know you don't agree, which is fine with me) that it is a fallacy to exclude the possibitlity of the mind as being physical. The brilliant thing is that it does not have to be: "cogito ergo sum" works both ways, whether the mind is physical or not.
Where do I find the description of this thought experiment of yours?
I think I am staying away form defining the physical description of the physical mind, because our discussion assumes that the physical world is assumed. I in several places mentioned that we have no certain knowledge of the physical world. So I don't want to treat it in our discussion as anything but something which is not purely of ideas, and the very certainty of its existence is unclear.
This makes it impossible in our course of debate (between you and me here) for me to declare any knowledge of the physical world, beyond the facts that 1. It may or may not exist, and 2. our knowledge of it is unreliable.
Could you please tell me on which page, and from the top, how manieth post it is that contains it? I really, but really don't want to read posts only to reject the necessity of reading them (because they are other than what the conversation between the two ancient men).
I think it’s not so much missing physical characteristics as undefinable by its physical characteristics - in a similar way that a photon is considered physical, yet undefinable by its physical characteristics as such. We know a photon by its predicted potentiality or by an observable result. In between is an event structure that is probabilistic at best.
Yes, I know. But what you are missing is the metaphor. 'Trust me guys, if you just do [some difficult thing] then you'll see how right I am!' It's like asking a stranger to read your novel. In theory, you are possibly right, and maybe you are best friends with god. But there's something iffy about gesturing to prerequisites on a forum. Lots of people are eager to share their religion. It's a thing. And most people have come to some decision about it by now.
I was joking! Though I did read Hubbard's crazy sci-fi as a teen.
'The true religion is no religion.' That sums up my actual position. (It's an overstatement, but I like it.)
To me it's less wrong (but not quite right) to say that we know that there is language. Just because we have the words 'I' and 'mind' don't mean that they correspond to some absolute foundation for further reasoning. They only make sense within an entire language, and a language only makes sense in an entire world. It's all of a piece. *I'm coming around to the idea that there's always an error, in the sense that every grand statement leaves an opening for retort, gets something wrong. So the game proceeds forever.
Quoting RogueAI
Fair enough. I can't prove my position, not do I think proofs of such matters are even possible/intelligible. Nor do I think that 'proof' has some exactly specifiable meaning. I think we learn to use lots of words at once in the context of other people, never quite grabbing them but getting things done nevertheless. That's why IMO it's the practical world (whatever that inexactly means) that already serves as the less unreal foundation of our existence --and that it's neither mind nor matter (though that phrase is merely less misleading than others to a goal lost in the mist.)
:up:
Yeah, and there's maybe insufficiently critical use in general of 'physical' and 'mental.' The tendency is perhaps to talk about talk when one thinks one is talking about something outside of talk. The seemingly familiar is taken for granted and not examined before being passionately applied within a fool's-errand-in-retrospect.
(I talk about the futility of certain mental-physical debates, but I should myself consider the futility of talking about this futility. )
Either I acknowledge the existence of some materialists, external to me - and therefore rather prove their point about the existence of the external world; or I am imagining them, which is to say - I am not imagining that I know nothing about reality.
Does it not bother you that the existence of the external, material world is beyond question outside of philosophy? Even you, RogueAI, who propose this, do so by assuming the existence of the physical world, of computers, and other people using their computers to read and respond to your post.
I could imagine I know nothing about reality except that I exist and I have a conscious mind, but then I'm stuck in an endless solipsism - where that is all I can ever know. That is the nature of the subjectivist victory over materialism; the cost of certainty is that the subjectivist can know nothing else but that he exists.
I would rather assume that the world exists external to me; and acknowledge this is at some level, an assumption. It's a safe and prudent assumption; one that recommends itself in all ways, such that I would need good reason to doubt it. Is there good reason?
Absolutely. Model-dependant realism I've heard it called.
I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose.
Their beliefs and worldviews might have been influenced by Kant, unbeknown to them. Scientist do not live outside of society and they are influenced by the culture in which they live.
That we can't be wrong about it is a warning sign, not a feature. Is whether mind exists an empirical question? It's obvious because of the way we use 'mind' for something (roughly) that is closer to us than anything, more certain than anything.
Quoting RogueAI
I agree that this is fascinating issue. But aren't you automatically interpreting dreams as insubstantial? Perhaps you are suddenly transported to a different parallel world, with some 'physical kernel.' If that sounds too wild, it's maybe just as wild to think of the real world as one more dream.
Perfectly possible. As is its opposite. They might also have been influenced by Kant's house-cleaner.
Popper, you mean?
Only half a joke, since Popper was Kantian and had an undeniable, modern influence on epistemology and philosophy of science.
This is great quote, but an issue occurs to me. Hume refers to 'he' in the ordinary language way, as a unity, a person. He also uses 'I' in the normal way. So he makes one good point about the self while accidentally making a point about ordinary language. A self is also a public bearer of responsiblity, awash in the same language, a thing that has a notion of itself, who may be in the right about himself. Lots of complexities!
He also dissolves the self and yet still speaks in terms of perceptions, clinging to the image of a single something that perceives, that is separate from the world. He doesn't say that he finds telephones and biscuits in what he calls himself but only perceptions (implicitly mediated, by what?). Hume might be playing with us here.
:up:
emph added
Yes. Start with that and the familiar world which doesn't even have to reduce to mind or matter or anything else. Why take such a project for granted? Especially after so many have shown what's questionable about it... Call it the 'lifeworld' or whatever. It's where we talk and what we talk about.
Probably. But none of that has anything much to do with whether he had an influence on scientists.
Although my absolute favourite is from Paul Dirac
I am sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this paragraph to our discussion. I am not saying that the mind is the brain. I am saying that we can dismiss any knowledge of the physical world when we say "cogito ergo sum". We already agreed that our physical world is a huge uncertainty for both its existence and its details of existence. Any forays into its workings or structure is futile. So we ought not to do that in this discussion. Therefore when I say "the mind is not known to be physical or an idealistic entity" I am saying it is not necessarily the brain, because the brain we perceive in the physical world, and therefore it is uncertain for its appearance, and physical qualities. I am saying instead, that since we can't rely on our senses that the physical world is as it presents itself, we can't say anything more about the mind if it's physical than that it's physical.
Kidney function: people talked about their pees, but they could not talk about their kidneys producing the pees.
A state of the mind is not the mind. I really don't even know what you or I mean by mind. If I am sad, is that the state of my mind? So it's not my mind, but a feeling it generates. Much like my pee is not my kidney, but what my kidney generates.
The state of one's mind is not the mind; it is its product. So no, it is not true that the ancients would have needed to know that the mind is the brain (and that is not my proposition, anyway.)
Popper defined the boundaries of modern science based on a fairly robust synthesis of Hume's empiricism and Kantian idealism, to simplify a bit. Scientists were influenced alright, whether they like to admit it or not. And whether they are conscious of this influence or not. Don't take take their word for it.
Interesting. So what was the mechanism by which a scientist becomes influenced despite neither reading, nor being constrained by the writing in these publications? Is it telepathy?
Some scientists read Popper, argue with Popper, discuss Popper between themselves. The idea of falsifiability (and others) makes its way in the discourse.
And that's a one way system because...?
Meaning?
Scientists discuss theory with Popper, they're "influenced by Popper". Popper discusses theory with scientists he's not "influenced by scientists"?
Or if he is, they why not just that we're all influenced by ideas that have come before us?
You've implied a route through published works of philosophy, then argued that even those who haven't read those works are nonetheless influenced by them via the social uptake of those ideas. So the same's true of Popper, right? Or is he immune?
Oh good.
Of course, Popper was influenced by scientists, mainly by QM. I happen to think he should have paid more attention to biologists.
Right. So they influenced themselves?
Point is, just because someone wrote something down is insufficient to say anyone after then has been 'Influenced' by it. You'd need either evidence they'd read the work, or evidence that the work was so unprecedented that any use of it could only have come from that source.
Anything less than that and you have only a much weaker version of 'influenced' into which the author themselves also falls, rendering the whole issue of who influenced whom moot.
Very few scientists seriously study Popper, even fear read Kant. Neither's ideas were earth-shatteringly unique. So you've not got that strong use of 'influenced'.
Scientists, as a loose collection, use, have used, and will continue to use, a weakly related collection of methods and assumptions which will be very broadly influenced by the general academic culture in which they were taught and work.
Historicism without a shred of evidence.
Who invented philosophy then?
And yet we needed to call in specialists to invent science?
That's not what I said. What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. In other words, the whole point of existence is that question. If we never come to knowledge of the answer, that doesn't mean we give up. You seem to believe that "philosophers and philosophy can't answer that question, so that question is unsolvable, so I'm done with philosophy and good riddance." Well, I don't accept that.
I might not have the answer, nobody might very well have the answer. It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. First, that is a logical non-sequitur to say "because we cannot know x, therefore there is no x." That's a fallacy. Second, that's not the point of philosophy. The point of philosophy is to know the Good, know the Truth, know what is Real. Socrates went to his death asking those questions, and all should model his life in that regard. He never said, "I don't know the answer yet, so I guess I'll just stop asking the questions." That's laziness. That's a cop-out. That's what I'd call philosophical suicide.
Philosophers invented science and philosophy. Isaac Newton was a philosopher, he didn't call himself a scientist. Neither did Galileo. Plenty of others. Copernicus. Kepler.
Well, peeing isn't identical to kidney function, but I can anticipate your response: peeing is identical to biological functions XYZ, so when ancient people meaningfully talk of peeing, they must be meaningfully talking about biological functions XYZ, but of course they didn't know about such functions.
I ran my argument about ancient people talking about mental states by David Chalmers and he said that water=H2O, and that if ancient people meaningfully were talking about water, they have to also be meaningfully talking about H2O, but of course they had no idea what H2O is.
That stumped me for a long time. However, I think I know what's bugging me: it's not obvious that water=H2O. I think Kant would say there's an unjustified move there in going from "water", which is a collection of perceptions of a thing to an ontological claim about the actual thing itself: H2O exists and it's what water actually is. When you unpack the claim water=H2O (or peeing=biological functions XYZ), it's not just a case of label switching, like bachelors=unmarried men. You're going to have to argue that peeing is a set of biological functions XYZ, and I think you're going to end up in a circular argument because you're going to end up assuming materialism is the case by asserting the material existence of organs and biological processes in order to address an objection to materialism being the case.
That probably wasn't the clearest thing in the world.
Quoting Dharmi
Descartes, Leibniz, Giordano Bruno, Gassendi, Averroes, Avicenna...
Ari-fuckin-stotle.
That’s true, but for me the significant point is that the scientists are usually playing catch-up with the philosophers. I’m glad they don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German, but knowing a bit about my perspective , I don’t think you’d be surprised if I suggested that they could do worse that to borrow the intellect of certain 20th century philosophers, since they seem to be playing catch-up again.
Looking at your conversation with Olivier, I should add that there are no fixed boundaries between what constitutes science vs philosophy. There are more and less theoretical or applied sciences , and the same goes for philosophy( analytic vs continental) . I’m less interested in whether a particular set of ideas is labeled philosophy or science that how profound and useful
those ideas are. I should add that all other areas of
culture including poetry, literature , music and art , contribute to the shaping of theoretical ideas. That’s why I’m fascinated by the way a particular scientific theory belongs to a large cultural
movement.
I do not doubt any of that. But no matter the child’s or schizophrenic’s model of his body, it’s there, visible, available, measurable, if not to him than to other bodies. I am just unable to doubt that.
William James thought Hume came close to recognizing the difficulty of maintaining an ideal separation of self and world , but settled for a traditional metaphysical explanation.
:up:
As Peter Hacker (co-author of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience) says:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
I'm suggesting that within that pursuit we come to question the intelligibility of the project itself.
When we start, we think we are playing cosmic chess with fixed concept, but eventually we realize that we were jazz musicians the whole time, lost in a riff inspired by the vague image of cosmic chess, heavenly mathematics, ultra-super-physics in an armchair.
Quoting Dharmi
It's not just a matter of coming to think that finding the answer is impossible, though of course if one was certain of that then it would make sense to quit. Nor does one lurch into nihilism simply because ultra-physics is a bust. Quietism is more likely. No need to destroy the world or ourselves because we can't take word-math about god seriously anymore.
It's more like...the idea of what 'getting the answer' even means becomes uncertain. It's more like we finally realize how hazy our concepts were in the first place. Couple this with beetle-in-the-box realizations, and the whole enterprise looks funny in retrospect. What did we think we were up to? Why did we believe in some science beyond science? Why couldn't we be unpretentiously religious, or unpretentiously secular, etc.?
Excellent quote! Yes! And yet it's hard to get people immersed in the game to see how strange it is. Conventions of an obsolete genre are taken for granted as absolute starting points!
It seems like you're just a usual academic obscurantist.
All this 'obscurantism' and 'nihilism' stuff reminds me frankly of conspiracy theory. Am I a cultural marxist too? We all do it to some degree. It's...economical...to paste some crude level on critiques we don't have the energy for. We all do it. I'm not going to read some 50 page proof of god's existence handed to me by a homeless person...or even an earnest undergrad...or a homegrown basement prophet. There are things we can and can't take seriously. Some ideas are too threatening to our current self-image or just too implausible to seem relevant.
From my POV, lots of armchair ultra-physics looks like circle-squaring by people who have refused to read proofs that such a thing is impossible (or just haven't been exposed to them yet, as I once wasn't.) In the realm of words, we don't proofs in the same way, but we do have something like 'soft' results, persuasive arguments, liberating metaphors...
No, you just clearly say what you mean.
Thanks for the reply. I remain skeptical about any of us knowing these things full well. Personally I attribute that the deceptiveness of familiarity, to the ease with which we talk. The underlined part basically just unwinds the grammar of the word subjective. It's (all-too-vaguely) what we mean by subjective. IMO, it's like the discovery that bachelors are unmarried.
I do think that it's weird that we are conscious. Existence is mysterious. I say that because I'm not in the camp of the denialists who ignore the claims of 'subjectivity.' (I would critique vague materialism in the same way, fishing after what 'physical' is exactly supposed to me outside of all contexts.) Anyway, what kind of answer would even make sense here? Can you even imagine a correct answer? If not, the issue may be a discovery about thinking and language. What exactly do we even mean by explanation? Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad.
IMV, it's an illusion/assumption that important things can be said clearly. Yes, you can tell me that the dishes are done. That's pretty clear. But talk about gods and ultimate truth....that stuff is far from clear.
Okay, but then making things even more unclear doesn't help anyone solve those problems. This is one thing Wittgenstein is right about. Trying to conjure up obscurantistic vocabulary to bewilder and confuse, doesn't help one get closer to the truth.
I don't like obscurantism either, but I've seen great thinkers called obscurantists because they are difficult, perceived as political foes, or because some of those who champion them don't write clearly.
It's not as if all thinking people agree on who's obscure and who's not. I know that I used to find writers obscure that now make pretty good sense to me (are we ever done clarifying?). I remember (and it embarrasses me now) calling excellent thinkers dismissive names. It was the usual self-flattering bigotry, which is perhaps the intellectual type's worst enemy, the worm in the apple.
Also, you are clearly a believer in God (or something like that), so when you attack secular thinkers it's all too tempting to read it as religious bias. Here's my bias: when believers barge in so aggressively, pejoratively labeling otherness in little bins, I find them less convincing. If I really and deeply believed in God, I expect that I'd be at peace. I'd be magnanimous, an insider with nothing to prove.
Still. for Dharmi there is a range of contexts that he is likely putting together with his concepts without realizing the synthetic act he is pulling off, and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation.
That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..."
Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument.
You're right, he is not addressing the point as such but then both guys are talking past each other, which seems the necessary end result of competing epistemologies like this. I am more in sympathy with Norm's worldview than Dharmi's.
However, I was just taken by Dharmi's succinct words on this matter of finding wisdom which would apply in a range of contexts and it occurred to me that the old joke, 'I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy' might be applicable. Hence my point about holding statements. Probably too obtuse... sorry.
A number is simply a concept. There's no difficulty that I can see here.
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
That sounds both defeatist and strangely preposterous.
Indeed, and I like to think of them as chunks of heroic identity. People kill and die for such things. Flags made of words. Perhaps you'll agree that communities swim in a certain shared stability, and this is what makes deviations or adjustments more or less intelligible within that community. (This is the who of the everyday dasein, form of life, etc.)
Quoting Joshs
Exactly! Very well said. In other words, we are networks of beliefs and desires, some more central at the moment than others. And who of us posting publicly doesn't wrestle with intellectual vanity? Who enjoys submitting to a just rebuke?
Another issue: 'understanding Wittgenstein' is very enjoyable first-person but comes with no superpowers. I can't turn water into wine. Why should dharmi or a believer trade what they have for what I have? I'd describe what I have as a hard-won revolution in my vision of language. I see what we never know exactly what we are talking about and that we usually don't even know that we don't know. The superstition is that we have to try to be ironic or subversive, when in fact it's difficult not to lie. The goal is adjusted so that one strives for the least wrong way of saying an 'it' that's never definitely possessed. Would a nihilist bother? Sadly it's the caution and seriousness in trying for something like truth that gets one mistaken for an obscurantist.
I realize that @Dharmi in fact won't understand what I'm getting at. It might not even be in their interest to understand me. The question remains: is Dharmi an evangelist? If someone is content with their god, why enter the realm of reason? Isn't philosophy essentially critical? So I'm guilty of using Dharmi as a foil just as he wants to cast me as a nihilist or obscurantist. FWIW, I think of myself as having a common-sense informed-by-science practical epistemology. I think this can be done without grand theories about the 'physical' and the 'mental' as they feature in old-fashioned debates that simply ignore the best of 20th century philosophy (like Wittgenstein, but not only him.) But maybe old-fashioned believers should ignore more recent philosophy. Who needs philosophy if they have God? I do understand that theology can bleed into philosophy, since I made that transition myself, wrestling with religious absurdities many years ago.
I like the squaring-the-circle metaphor. I can imagine passionate squarers hearing rumors of a proof of the impossibility of their mission and saying the same thing.
[quote=Carroll]
[The first of these two misguided visionaries filled me with a great ambition to do a feat I have never heard of as accomplished by man, namely to convince a circle squarer of his error! The value my friend selected for Pi was 3.2: the enormous error tempted me with the idea that it could be easily demonstrated to BE an error. More than a score of letters were interchanged before I became sadly convinced that I had no chance.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle
Back to mind-matter talk: from my POV, the issue is not that so-and-so just got bored or tired and gave up and became a spoilsport. No. Instead so-and-so kept trying and trying to make sense of 'mind' and 'matter' and finally traced various difficulties back to the medium itself, to how language works. The absurdity of the project becomes sufficiently (but never perfectly) 'visible' to drop the game with confidence. To me it's one of the main lessons of 20th century philosophy, and I mean the big names, not obscure rebels. IMO, philosophy has actually figured a few things out, made some progress, though it can't shine like new Mars rover, and no one has any practical reason to study and accept the soft but substantial results.
And a concept is simply a what? And so on, until the whole dictionary hovers without foundation.
What I tend to see in philosophical theist is something like a depersonalized god, perhaps a crystalline super-self. For some theists it seems that the epistemological issue is primary, a god who pins our concepts down so that they don't float away, something guaranteeing the certain and the definite, a kind of crystal ship against decay and birth.
The irony here is that you suggest that I'm a philosophical suicide because I'm serving as your gadfly. Socrates stung people by making it clear to them that they were unclear, that they didn't know what they were talking about, not really, despite their pride. His wisdom was knowing that he didn't know. Meanwhile you are eager to argue that there is a god, and that anyone doubting that and your method is corrupt, craven, or indolent. I really don't hold it against you. This place only works because/when people get fired up.
This applies to any concept, not just numbers, and thus it is irrelevant to the point I am making about Hacker's quote. To ask what sort of entity is a number is not any more pernicious than to ask what sort of entity is a chair.
I agree. Giving up on a specific method of questioning (because you've learned something about it by doing) isn't giving up on questioning altogether. For me it's about better getting to the heart of the issue. It's about not handling a hammer like a saw or not using a fork to eat soup.
So philosophers then? Yet it was somehow the height of illogic for me to suggests that scientists invented science?
Quoting Joshs
If you can show some general progress that philosophy has made you'd be in a very small minority. Even among its advocates, it's generally accepted that philosophy doesn't actually 'progress' in that way. So whilst I don't doubt that professional philosophers have widened the scope of enquiry into the philosophy of science, It's just personal bias to suggest that there's a direction of thought that they should be moving toward but aren't (or are doing so too slowly). It's not as if all the philosophers in the philosophy of science have all agreed on anything, there's no "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists" on any issue at all.
Quoting Joshs
I agree with you here. It's the point I was making, only more so than you it seems. The biggest difference between philosophy/art and science (even in the loosest sense of 'science' to include some humanities) is that the sciences are, even when wholly speculative, based on a body of empirical knowledge acquired by testing that is usually too extensive or specialised for a single person to carry out. This may seem like a trivial difference, and it is, when it comes to the utility or social contribution of the work. The non-trivial difference is in exactly that which we're discussing here. Anyone can do what Kant did. I could write something similar tomorrow. His insights were gained entirely by introspection using his mind, and we all have one of those. Even the authors he may or may not have read (Wittgenstein had famously read very little philosophy) he has simply chosen to agree or disagree with using nothing but introspection.
Even the most trivial scientific theory, by contrast, is based on a set of empirical findings which a non-scientists would be usually prevented from replicating or testing, simply for pragmatic reasons - the sample size is too large or the equipment too technical. There is a body of such empirical knowledge which, if you haven't read it, you will be unable, no matter how hard you try, to replicate it.
So I agree, in the Quinean sense, with the non-binary definitions of science and philosophy as regards their method of theorising, but there is a difference as to who can rightly claim to be carrying out such theorising. If you don't have the empirical data on which scientific theories are based, then you're not doing science (and yes, before the inevitable question, I am one of those people who thinks some theoretical physics is philosophy, not science).
What I objected to in the line of argument here is a kind of opposite framing, that anyone could do science, but only philosophers could do philosophy. That's just obviously wrong given that the sole source of data for philosophy is the mind and we all have one of those, whereas at least a partial source of data for science is a previous body of empirical test results and one may or may not have access to that.
OK, but you said 'a number is simply a concept.' That's linking one controversial word to an even more controversial word. There's no question that we can use both words in practical life with no problem, but when we play the game of metaphysics and try to make some concept (whatever those are exactly supposed to be) absolute, [fizzle, endless confusion].
Science is indeed a by-product of philosophy.
It doesn't just get truer if you keep repeating it.
Until you ask the grocer for six bananas, and he gives you five, protesting that 'six is only a concept'.
'Concept, schmoncept', you say, storming out, without paying.
Hence my accusation of historicism. That science did develop from philosophy tells us nothing at all about the necessary relationship between the two.
That a sequence of events happened to take place is not evidence that they are causally connected even, let alone necessarily so.
Empiricism is not necessarily science. Or, put another way, empiricism is one of the facets of modern science. Empiricism insists that what is proposed must be able to be validated by sense data, including data acquired by instruments.
Quoting Isaac
:grin:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
That is true, but so what? 'The mind is not an object'. Nevertheless we all possess one, or are one. So, 'the mind', which is not an object, is the ground of everything we know, including objects.
There's a current Smithsonian Institute essay on what is math that is worth perusing. I'm *still* with the Platonists. The metaphysical impact of 'the reality of number' is that 'number is real but not materially existent'. Therefore, there is an important class of things, that is real but not materially existent. Therefore, materialism is false.
Yep. And?
I'm not sure what point you're making here. It's still the case that science is based on a corpus of such data.
It's still the case that such data cannot be acquired by any other means than direct technical experiment or reading of such.
Whatever non-empirical data you want to include as 'knowledge' it is acquired with a mind, something we all have access to.
Yeah, as we're all Kant, that is likely true.
I will agree that something that might be called 'metaphysical materialism' is false or unintelligible. I'm just as 'against' rigid materialism as against rigid mentalism.
FWIW, I grant that some kind of 'ideality' is 'obviously' going on in math and language. At the same time I do not have an intuition of 2,343,546,343,454,654,765. I can't see it in my mind. I am confident that it can be handled with calculations, that we can make objective statements about such integers. And that's extremely simple math! Already beyond our intuition. I could quote some proofs that take hours to work through. I remember expanding one terse proof, and I never had all of it in my intuition at once. I could only check individual links in the logic. Another issue: are non-computable numbers in Platonic heaven? Who's the authority when it comes to philosophical controversies? Personally I have a vague intuition of what's meant by math platonism, but that's it.
to me that is the definition of mysticism: embracing the fact that you don't know what you don't know
That's supposed to be a refutation, I think, but instead or also points to the dependence of meaning on social interaction. I can peel a banana but not a concept. If I claim to peel a concept, more charitable listeners will look for a metaphor. Others will think I don't know English that well.
IMO, the temptation is to think of our minds all having separate access to the same platonic essence, and that's why we can coordinate our behavior. This is not an absurd temptation in the context of a heritage of egocentric, private-mind assumptions. But it's been shown to be faulty. The beetle in the box, the secret peepshow, cancels out, does not bear weight. The private mind, however convenient and plausible in ordinary language, falls apart as a foundation upon close examination.
The problem or comedy is that philosophical realizations (breakthroughs, revolutions) don't necessarily provide wonder-working technical power. No one needs to (always imperfectly) grasp later Wittgenstein and others to live a happy life, be good person. No one will be convinced who doesn't want to be, which is fine.
But here your confusing conception and imagination. A concept is different to what you can imagine. Descartes gave the example of a chilliagon, a thousand-sided polygon. You can’t reliably imagine such a thing, but if I tell you what it is, you can understand the concept and even reproduce it, albeit painstakingly. Therefore the chilliagon is a concept, not a mental image, a distinction modernity has generally forgotten.
‘Platonic heaven’ is also a misconception. There is a ‘domain of natural numbers’, right? Where is it? Obviously no place. It’s not some ‘ethereal ghostly domain’. It’s not ‘out there somewhere’. Nevertheless it’s real, because 2 is ‘in’ it, while the square root of 2 is not.
Platonic realism regarding numbers does not mean that imaginary number systems are real. They’re imaginary, by definition. Given the ability to grasp number, then we have the ability to invent such things. But that doesn’t undermine platonic realism.
The philosophical realisation that underlies our world began with Descartes’ algebraic geometry combined with Newton’s and Galileo’s science. That philosophical revolution certainly provided wonder-working technical power. You’re looking at it.
I agree that there are shades of meaning between the words, but what is it to 'understand' a concept? Call it 'grasping' (a metaphor) or whatever. The point is that some kind of 'having' of some private experience is invoked. I 'understand' what is meant in the usual way. My objection is pushing these ambiguous havings into something impossible sharp. We can't mind meld. We are stuck debating English usage, and yet the temptation is to think it's a kind of science of immaterial realms.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course I understand something like a shared space of meanings. If that's all that's meant, then of course! But what is meaning? What is mentality? We don't exactly know. We just know how to use the words in practical life, and we've learned to use them in certain vague ways in a philosophical context. Anyway, a domain is what a function is defined on, set of 'inputs' that work, while natural numbers are often thought of as a set. But if you are being metaphorical, a domain is a place or a region. Or a space. Not arguing against some kind of space of meanings that's 'immaterial' in some ambiguous sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which numbers are imaginary? Do you just mean complex numbers? Why are they kicked out? Who decides which number systems are merely inventions? Guassian integers are far simpler to think about than real numbers. The real numbers still give people headaches and were a matter of huge controversy before one side emerged victorious (very roughly speaking.)
I'm well aware that science & math do get results. That's why I get paid for math and programming skills and not for studying Wittgenstein. I'm saying that classical metaphysical arguments don't have obvious winners in the real world. And if I give reasons for their futility, I'm also just wasting my time in practical terms, because in general people don't take such things seriously to begin with, and those who like metaphysics are often religiously-politically motivated or just still captured by the notion that they are doing some kind of higher Science. It's a harmless vice, as is critiquing it.
For me the larger point is just to point my attention to the stuff that matters more. It's good to have wrestled with certain confusions so I could move beyond them to still better confusions.
The Euro mission's Mars Rover crashed because of a confusion between Metric and Imperial in some table. The requirements for such a mission are indeed 'impossibly sharp', get it wrong and there are consequences in the real world.
Man is the interface between the imaginal and the material domains, the prejudices of our age notwithstanding.
There's something i haven't run by you, but you in particular might appreciate. I've discovered a peculiar article on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on 'the indispensability argument for mathematics'. This is all a response to some geezer called Paul Benacerraf whom I think the mathematical gurus on the site, like @Fishfry and @fdrake, will be familiar with.
Anyway, it starts with this: 'Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects. ' What are 'our best theories' and why do they 'debar' such knowledge?
(I love the phrase 'some philosophers, called rationalists' - I always imagine David Attenborough intoning this, whilst peering into a laboratory - 'there they are, stooped over their books, in that characteristic state of absorption in abstractions....').
But, anyway, I hope you see the point. The fact that rationlism says that we have certain knowledge of mathematical truths arising from pure thought, actually conflicts with 'an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' But rather than throw out the belief in the fact that 'we're physical creatures', Quine et al go into an intricate argument that we must 'save' or 'respect' maths anyway, whilst still not preparted to acknowlege the fact that we have such faculties throws into doubt our station as 'purely physical beings'. The dogma must be maintained at all costs!
That just says so much about the current state of philosophy, in my view. As you're a bit of a math whiz yourself, and one of the all-around best read people on the site, thought I'd run it by you. :-)
Possibly the most elegant summary of the situation I've yet read.
I get that people like to feel part of a special group of initiated outliers who challenge the mainstream and embrace a numinous reality outside of conventional lifestyles and the ostensible limitations of crass science. I get the attractions of wanting to be one with a higher consciousness through the contemplative life.
What I don't get is the lack of joy in the communication of these ideas. It seems most of what I read is a thick soup of quotes, name dropping and terminology, with the requisite 'my reality is better than theirs' powerplay. I expect that from some atheists. There's almost nothing explaining the benefits or bliss found through the spiritual path and what it actually achieves. Is there somewhere here where this comes up or do we never get past the pissing competition?
There is a difference between historicism (the idea that history follows determinist laws à la Marx) and recognizing established historical facts.
That science as we know it grew historically out of a branch of philosophy (natural philosophy as it was called) is simply a fact, just like it's a fact that Homo sapiens evolved from earlier primates. We share a lot of DNA with our ancestors, and science still shares a lot of concepts with philosophy. And this should encourage you to respect your predecessors a little more, simian or not.
They can do it again, too. In fact they have. There are two broad types of sciences: the natural sciences and the social (or human) sciences, and they were not born at the same time. As is well known, the first to assert their independence from philosophy were natural sciences. This process was complete by the 18th century roughly. Social sciences came later, end 19th-early 20th century. In both cases they carved out a domain that was previously dealt with by philosophers, a set of empirical questions that science could answer. Sociology, psychology, history etc. emerged as sciences historically, and in doing so they tried to take a distance with philosophy (metaphysics) by stressing empiricism and the "laws of history". This led to exciting new theories such as social darwinism and scientific racism... :-\
That is where Popper disagreed and demonstrated (in the Poverty of Historicism) that social sciences ought not to ape natural sciences, and in particular ought not to try and discern immutable laws as historicists wrongly do. Social sciences are not determinist, not anymore -- far less in fact -- than QM. Man makes history, not vice versa.
This provides an example that the divorce was never complete. Philosophers can still tell us useful things about how scientists should go about their business.
I know. That's why I'm accusing you of historicism and not of pointing out historical facts.
You've just repeated more historical facts, none of which have any bearing on the matter of whether science is necessarily dependant on philosophy. The question is not whether it just so happened to have emerged from it.
I don’t think philosophy is about who wins the argument. The practical value of philosophical thinking and discussion is in the distribution of human effort and attention.
While I don’t think metaphysics is necessarily a higher science, I do think it frames scientific endeavour, and as such is prone to religious and political motivations, among others. You can try to dismiss metaphysical discussion as a ‘harmless vice’, but all human endeavour nevertheless occurs under a variable framework of distributable effort and attention, and metaphysics is part of that, however it’s described. Learning how to map it, make predictions from it and alter it requires science to somehow accommodate quantitative uncertainty, intersubjectivity and qualitative structure. Until then, I think the distributed effort and attention of science will continue to be determined by those with religious, ideological, political and especially commercial motivations.
That was never the question, to my knowledge. The question was: do philosophers influence scientists. The response is yes, they do. A lot.
Obviously. Everyone has a bias, that's part of the contingency of knowledge. You can't escape your culture, history, etc. when you are making claims or having views or positions.
Quoting norm
For those people who care, I'm an "evangelist" for those people who don't, I'm not. Same as anyone.
Quoting norm
Recent philosophy is not something I ignore, but I still regard it as not being philosophy.
Uh, no. Socrates wasn't a sophist. Socrates questioned beliefs, which is correct, but he wasn't a skeptic for skepticism's sake. That's not Socratic, that's sophistry.
I don't say that, science is methodological. It goes on without God, if you're interested in philosophy of science on the other hand, then yes, you need laws of nature at the very least, otherwise you're just a pragmatist/instrumentalist. When you start asking for justification of those laws themselves, then God comes into it.
If you want to do philosophy, you have to use concepts. A philosopher who thinks that "concept" is a controversial concept is like a plumber who is not quite sure about the advantages of tap water.
Quoting norm
Thanks for saying that; I was afraid something awful would happen to me for daring to mention the concept of "concept" publicly on a philosophy board...
Who spoke of anything absolute, or of any game? I repeat: To ask what sort of entity is a number is not any more pernicious than to ask what sort of entity is a chair. Let's not get confused by numbers. Or by chairs. These are the simple stuff.
Materialists consider it common sense to believe in science. A 'higher order" justification doesn't seem necessary
None do
Because materialists are philosophically unsophisticated.
Hegel says at the end of Philosophy of Mind:
1) you are the Holy Ghost
2) your reasoning powers (logos) is Jesus
3) you memory is that Father
so he was an atheist. But you said he was a good philosopher
I bet you don't know how to read Hegel. Yet you say he wasn't sophisticated, or would say so if you read him
Hegel was an Idealist. He was not a materialist. And I don't have his writings in my library. I have an introduction to Hegel book though.
I've read Phenomogy of Mind twice and Philosophy of Mind 3 times. There wasn't a sentence I didn't understand
Okay. Many scholars disagree with you. Even people who know German and are translators get confused by Hegel.
But, I'll take your word for it.
What do you mean by philosophical sophistication? You said Aquinas was an atheist (yes) but give Essence and Existence are overview. It's sophisticated in a way
He's a crypto-atheist. So is Hegel really. Marx was a true Hegelian.
By sophistication, I mean the idea that what we see is roughly what exists. That's a huge lack of sophistication.
Name something that you know with 100 percent certainty
Nothing. Certainty is impossible.
No, the question was whether scientists with Kant-like ideas were influenced by Kant. My point was that scientists are just as capable of arriving at ideas like those of Kant as Kant was, so there's no justification at all for assuming that, where we see similarities, the former must have been influenced by the latter, they're just as likely to have got there themselves.
Why? In my mind it takes an unsophisticated leap to believe some barrier or other exists between the seer and what is seen. What is it exactly that prohibits me from seeing what exists?
I don't know. I saw an article on Hegel and Heraclitus by an Islamic scholar that was really good. I don't know how they connect their theology to his but there are a lot of moving pieces. I'm finishing up the Encyclopedia brief on Logic today
As I started to say in the previous post, but want to expand upon now, I don’t think there is any stable way of defining the difference between a concept called ‘science’ and one called ‘philosophy’ , not in terms of methods, goals , the possibility of ,or rate of , progress.
I do want to say that I believe that we can talk of a progress in ideas over the course of cultural history, as long as we understand this not in the 19th century sense of a linear accumulation, but rather in pragmatic terms of periods of Kuhnian normal science and transformative revolutions. In fact, I view this progress as accelerative.
And unlike those who argue that human nature does not change , I believe that inter-personal
insight , the ability to adapt to and empathize with the alien other , and to predict others actions and ways of thinking , is at the core of this cultural progress.
Now , one particular view of science is that it offers a privileged access to truth through its methods in comparison to other cultural modalities , including philosophy. The thinking goes that the rigorous social process of hypothesis , definition , test , validation and replication (not to mention quantification) that developed during the Enlightenment led to a rapid acceleration of knowledge that would not have been possible without the use of its methods.
I started out a firm believer in this narrative , and in my grad school days in experiment psychology , as I was working out my own psychological perspective , I firmly believed that any the pricks innovation in the field
could , as. must, be demonstrable though construction of the right experimental design.
I had no interest in what I understood to be the role of philosophy , and I even wrote a piece in a student publication arguing that philosophy was essentially obsolete, given that all the old philosophical questions concerning memory, emotion, perception and cognition could now be submitted to empirical test.
It took a few years of restless, futile attempts to force my psychological model into the confines of the reigning cognitive science paradigm for me to begin reading original sources of philosophy, and I did so with great skepticism and suspicion. It told a few years for me to be won over to the view that the ‘introspective methods’ of continental philosophy allow them to make as much progress as the sciences, because it is this same introspection that causes scientific revolutions. You might say, sure , of course there are conceptual ‘introspectively originating’ leaps in science , but what gives it its advantage is that it submits such leaps to the communal processes of method I mentioned above.
My response is that those methods serve to define in a certain way , for a certain audience , a scientific paradigm. They bring its definitions into sharp focus and clarity , so that the community can agree on what it is testing. but this testing process mainly describes the period of normal science when there is more or less a consensus concerning the hypotheses involved.
During shifts from one paradigm to another , much of that painstaking detailed work of validation may be jettisoned. For instance , how useful are the decades of intricate research studies within the S-R paradigm today when almost no one is making use of that framework any more?
So it is quite possible to have a number of psychological research communities operating in the same era on the basis of mutually incompatible paradigms. One of them will likely to ultimately be determined as more useful than the others , resulting in the discarding of all of the detailed research results belonging to the rival approaches. This parallels the progression of philosophical positions over cultural history( from Greek to Medieval to Enlightenment to Idealist to postmodern philosophy, we have a direct parallel to the progress of science. ).
I think the main difference between your thinking about scientific ideas ( or ideas in general) and mine is that I view any particular fact as belonging to a holistic gestalt ( what you would call a theory ). All the terms of a theory are interlocked in such a way that each term is mutually defined by its relation to all the other terms and no term can be removed from the whole.
When a paradigm is replaced by another , every concept within the old paradigm, no mater how insignificant or subordinate , is transformed along with the whole. And what is the relation between this gestalt and the world which it is attempting to predict? The shift in paradigm is
also a shift in world , because the paradigm isn’t a template designed to match itself to the world , it is a remaking of the world. Science ,( as well as all
other cultural modalities ) is in a sense the world coming to know itself through its becoming, and our inquiries are a part of that becoming.
The most difficult implication of this gestalt view for most empirically oriented types is that one can translate from one field of culture to another and recognize them as variations on a shared theme. For instance, it would mean that Einstein’s relativity is just a variation of Kant’s
idealism, translated into an operationalized language of physics. This implies the even more outrageous supposition that there are a range of post-Kantian philosophies that imply a post -Einsteinian view of physics that needs to be ‘ filled in’ by the next generation of physicists. ( for a preview of what this may look like , check out Lee Smolin or Ilya Prigogine).
I don’t expect you to buy this , but it should at least look a bit familiar ,because you’re seeing more and more argumentation of this sort coming from the Left concerning the ideological underpinnings of science.
Quoting Isaac
‘Introspection’ in philosophy and in science will not lead to a revolution in thinking unless it takes as its starting point the most advanced forms of thinking of its era, so not everyone can do what Kant did. The most innovative philosophers were extremely knowledgeable about the mathematics and science of their day, which is why so many contributed new forms of mathematics or participated in the loftiest debates about the field (Descartes, Leibniz, Husserl, Wittgenstein ). So when they introspect, they are connecting the cutting edge of ideas of their era with something new., and it becomes irrelevant which specific empirical facts
they may be missing , be user those facts are just variations within the larger frame that they are turning on its head The ‘intro’ of introspect implies something sealed up inside a subject , but it should instead be seen as the subject’s encountering something new in the world. If what they create is validated by a community then that person will have a lucrative career ahead of them , it will not likely have ventured very far from conventional thinking. But didnt Einstein venture significantly from the conventional thinking in physics? Maybe in physics but not in philosophy. There was already a ready intellectual home for his ideas thanks to the prior work of philosophers, artists, psychologists and biologists( remember now , I’m sticking with my outrageous notion of different modalities
of culture as variations on shared intellectual
themes ).
The most cutting edge thinking in philosophy as well as psychology sits out in the wilderness with no community able to understand it well enough to validate it( James, Dewey , Meade, Kelly).
I used to think that nothing could match the precision of quantitative measurement within the sciences, so it was a shock to me when I was forced to reverse that view and consider the most powerful continental
philosophies to embody a more intricate and profound precision than that of empirical styles of theorization .
This is because precision cannot simply be a function of measured variables with an empirical system. It has to include everything f that allows us to define the terms of the system , what its fundamental propositions mean and how they are grounded. For the purposes of designing tools, machines, medical treatments, a less comprehensively defined precision is appropriate , since , like a commercial commodity , by definition technology or scientific products must be accessible to a wider range of people( In fact, can there be something like science’ without a conventional community defining what counts as empirical and what doesn’t? If a scientist co struts their model outside of what is defined as properly empirical by the. irma of that community they willbe derided as a crank, a mystic or worse yet , a philosopher). This to me describes the philosophy-empirical-technological-commercial spectrum of ideation as ranging from the most comprehensively defined to the most generic and operationalized( Nietzche to Freud to Friston).
My belief is that those who prefer to work within empirical communities rather than philosophical communities do so because their style of ideation is better suited for a more generic operationalized language than the
comprehensive language of continental
philosophy( the same
reason one prefers to work in applied sciences like engineering rather than in theoretical sciences). This is true even though they may tell themselves that only science advances , because only science validates itself effectively in relation to the real world.
It is true that embracing a very rich style
of ideation of like that of continental philosophers encourages mediocre thinkers to confuse vagueness and vacuity with profundity. Most of the academic output is of this sort. At the other end of the spectrum, less talented empirically oriented researchers an clog up
the research pipeline with hyper-detailed studies on trivial
themes. So we have the dangers of vacuous in coherence at one end and mind-numbing conformity at the other.
Quoting Isaac
It certainly is a personal bias. . But that’s all we have to rely on in the end , even with all our empirical proofs.
You’ll never find any issue in which all the psychologist agree either, but that shouldn’t stop them from saying ‘ "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists". And they do that all the time. ( extended mind and enactivism vs pp). Again, I shouldn’t have put this as a rivalry between empiricism and philosophy. I think i the leading edge of psychology is close to the same page as the leading edge of philosophy ( phenomenology).
That we're not not programmed with the means to do so? Why would assume we are? We're just animals evolved to behave in a certain way. Why would you assume our programming just maps 1-to-1 onto the way the world "is"?
Did you mean for there to be a period there?
Numbers are simple stuff? I disagree. The philosophy of math is rich. How do numbers exist? But philosophers can't even decide if they see a chair or the image of a chair. Etc.
That's something a 'sophist' or 'pomo' 'obscurantist' would say.
Despite our little ideological clash, I do hope you are enjoying the forum, and it's good that not everyone here sees things the same way.
I ultimately agree with Popper about metaphysics. Also, please take what I write with a grain of salt. I'm joking and not joking, pushing buttons, trying to loosen up fixed ways of thinking. I'll probably stop bothering those ultimately enjoy wriggling in this particular spiderweb. I will sum up my view though: a crude materialism and a crude idealism are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
Norm is referring to a different philosophical breakthrough than that of enlightenment era science( the later Wittgenstein , and I would add to that a boat of other post Hegelian philosophies that have yet to be translated into wonder-working technical power). I anticipate that these more recent philosophical realizations will produce a new generation of technologies. They are already being translated into artificial intelligence platforms.
I would have thought you’d prefer Kuhn to Popper. There just aren’t enough Kuhnians on this forum. Popper is too much of a realist for me. Let me ask you this: who would you side with in the following debate?
“While Rorty claims that his view is "almost, but not quite, the same as Putnam's" internalist conception of philosophy" , Putnam is uncomfortable with this association. Putnam claims to be preserving the realist spirit but he takes Rorty to be "rejecting the intuitions that underlie every kind of realism (and not just metaphysical realism)" . Putnam views Rorty's pragmatism as a self-refuting relativism driven by a deep irrationalism that casts doubt on the very possibility of thought. Yet in the paper Putnam cites to support his charge Rorty insists that he shares Putnam's desire for a middle ground between metaphysical realism and relativism and that his pragmatism fills the bill. Putnam does not concur.”
I like Kuhn too. I just meant that I liked Popper's appreciation of what's good about metaphysics. (I actually have come to dislike the word metaphysics. Maybe because it's pompous? Or because there's such a thing as physics? Or because I think of metaphysicks ?)
I don't understand what you mean here?
There's a period there.
No, that's something anyone who is realistic about the problems in knowledge would say.
No, I'm a spirit soul that has a divine consciousness, that's inhabiting an animal body, a machine.
I'm with you in criticisms of the 'physical' and physicalism. I don't know what to make of 'purely physical beings.' It's all just fuzz and attitude. I can't help but suspect that what we are really dealing with is a clash of religious and secular attitudes. Some people don't believe in gods and ghosts and miracles. A subset of these people feel the need to dress that up with ambiguous metaphysical baggage. The word 'physical' has no context-free meaning. All the grand talk about the 'physical' is parasitic upon an unformalizable know-how (this critique applies to 'mental' too.) I'd describe my position as that of one who has been smacked by certain thinkers into an awareness of the rampant ambiguity of language. It mostly works fine in practical life, probably because we are trained in a context of serious practical consequences (getting crushed by machinery, ostracized, punched, cheated...) Our fancy talk is like a flower in the soil of everyday language, and the higher we climb the less we know what we are talking about (which doesn't mean we shouldn't bother, but only notice.)
Anyway, the soft version of 'we're physical creatures' doesn't interest people much. We have bodies. Too obvious! We also clearly have something like a 'space of reasons.' Denying either is absurd. Denying the second is perhaps even more absurd, because that denial occurs within the space of reasons. But it's an absurdity one can get away with, because it's understood as part of a goofy low-stakes game. As I see it, this 'dogma that must be maintained' is still only held by a minority of people without much power. This is not to deny that a secular attitude dominates our age.
:roll:
I think I agree with you, but I still dislike the word. The old problem is...if everything is metaphysics, then nothing is metaphysics. Any sentence that just hangs there is vulnerable. It was often chosen for a particular person in a particular moment. I know you know this. I know atheists have a system of beliefs and desires, etc. The goal is least misleading word for the moment. It's impossible to say everything at once.
I love Derrida & Heidegger & many others. I think of thinkers like Derrida as the system trying to climb out of itself. Oh to be unthrown! Oh to awake from the nightmare of history, that nightmare that ... I am ! But there shall be no final word. We'll just keep stacking them.
Well, the question, it seems to me, is whether you ultimately just hate the secular attitude.
I'm an atheist who respects and learns from Christian texts. Is that not enough?
I trust science for practical purposes, without adopting some complicated metaphysics to explain that trust.
Is the problem really not physicalism but atheism? Do you object to the practical prestige of science?
Indeed, and that's what your 'sophists' and 'obscurantists' say. Is that not even the point of so much recent philosophy? The sociality and therefore the 'historicality' of reason itself? We inherited this language, English, as is. Our most secret thoughts are arrangements of marks and noises we did not choose. Our rebellions only make sense against a background that makes them intelligible. It's terribly difficult to not end up a cliche. And even the project of avoid being one is a inherited project, something we were taught to strive toward, a scripted rebellion. The role of the uncorrupted, unseduced reactionary is old hat, as is the in-on-the-new-thing joker.
It's not hate. It's the sense that there's a pervasive misunderstanding or 'urban myth' - something which 'everyone knows to be true', but which is mistaken. I think this specific issue, regarding the reality of number, makes this clear - the fact that mathematics, which is at the basis of so much of the success of science, has to be defended because it can't be accomodated naturalistically. I've noticed chatter on the internet about the 'war on math'.
Decades ago - so long I've forgotten the details - I read about the notion of there being an heirarchy of understanding which was fundamental to Western philoosphy, in particular. First there was sensory knowledge - now subsumed under empiricism; then there was knowledge of mathematical and logical truths; and finally there was a form of higher knowledge, something like noesis, I guess. But that vertical dimension, the sense in which there is a qualitative heirarchy, is what has been lost. And I question whether what remains actually qualifies as 'philosophy'.
OK, thanks for the direct answer! I do indeed think that you are in the underdog position. As a first approximation, someone might describe you as some kind of neoplatonist. It's an awkward position out there in no-man's-land.
It's fair to say that Wittgenstein (who's just a nice example here) is a very different beast than Plotinus (same).
My own view involves something like a continuum. There is 'higher knowledge' but no tiered system. For me all the great books just add up. There's no exact goal, but the usual virtues are involved.
Thank you!Quoting Tom Storm
That's quite elegant and to the point! The pissing contest is seriously one of the things I think most about. I'm going to name drop (which we'll get to) and say that I love Kojeve for pointing out how essentially human it is to fight for prestige. 'I am part of the elite' is the fundamental hope and the fundamental message. That's it. The rest is details. (That's not all there is to life. We are also 'just animals' with all that entails, including a mammalian affection for our cubs and our allies, etc. And I don't embrace Kojeve's itself-borrowed theory 100%.)
On name dropping: sometimes it's about advertising one's education or leaning on the authority of fame, granted. That's the vanity and superstition part. But it can also be modest and generous. 'I didn't come up with this, and there's this cool thinker you can look up if you like the sound of it.' It's probably usually a little of both. (Maybe some of the vanity is because we're here among the few others who give a flying shit about Plato and Wittgenstein. The world outside yawns. )
I very much agree about the joy issue. The utopian vision of this place is something like us all sharing good discoveries modestly. On the other hand, we love to fight. We just can't help ourselves. There is no elite without the excluded. Maybe the supremely confident don't even show up, scorning our base minds. Or maybe the real world gives the self-anointed no fit stage. On top of that, philosophy is creative, which means its infected with the cult of the individual genius. (I can't deny the hope of scratching some good graffiti on the wall that only I could scratch on it.)
Octopuses and cuttlefish can count. I guess they would agree with me that numbers aren't that complicated. To each his capacity for abstraction. I suppose any annal analytic philosopher could spend three hundred pages trying to clarify the number 2, but that is philosophy for computers, and only fools care for that.
That's speculative. Most scientists don't try and think too hard, in my experience. Glorified lab technicians. A lot of them have no clue why they do what they do. They just go along with the motion and get the paycheck.
Whatever.
You think scientists are the only ones entitled to facile comtemp of other folks?
Insightful.
Quoting norm
I have this mischeivious idea that science is unwittingly demonstrating the ancient notion that the physical world is unintelligible. Supporting evidence: the 4% universe. Battles about multiverses. That 97% of the gene is 'junk DNA’. Maybe it’s not all converging on ‘knowing the mind of God’ at all.
Quoting Olivier5
Or, respond to stimuli in accordance with what we categorise as numerical. Ask ‘em what a prime number is. :-)
We have the means to directly observe and interact with the world. There is no veil between me and the rest. With such a vast plane of interactivity at my disposal no assumptions are even required here.
The whole 'TOE' thing does look questionable. Sometimes I see what I think is folks trying to wring spirituality out of science (including metaphysical baggage.) Push it out the door and sometimes it crawls in through the window.
What can't be denied is technological advance. I'm not saying it's all good for us. But to me that's the actual payload. Prediction and control. I'm not surprised that there are anomalies at the fringes. That's even to be expected.
But I can't relate to a religious feeling toward science. I'm a literary guy at heart. I render science its due, but that's all.
Couldn’t argue with that. Although sometimes, when I’m pushing my trolley around our exquisitely-merchandised supermarkets, I hear a voice as if from some celestial PA, intoning ‘Sorry, but your civilisation has just been cancelled. It has been found to be too expensive to maintain.’
Then I proceed to the checkout.
I can understand the allure of something like a neoplatonist position (for instance, through my love of math.) I've even had some intense 'spiritual' experiences. But they always made me want to reach for metaphors.
The most frequent objection is the ‘ghostly realm’ objection: where is this ‘ghostly realm’ of abstract objects and ideas? That is simply based on the inherent naturalism which can only conceive of what exists and is locatable in terms of space and time as being real. But notice, in the indispensability argument for mathematics, the presumption that only what exists in the space-time continuum can be considered real. This is the basis that the reality of abstract objects is contested. It is the one thing that ‘naturalist epistemology’ can never endorse, as it undermines the whole naturalist project.
I take solace from the fact that many great mathematical intellects, including Sir Roger Penrose and Kurt Godel, are or were mathematical Platonists (even while acknowledging that I can’t understand their mathematical work).
The one textbook reference I have found that I frequently refer to is a passage in the Cambridge Companion to Augustine on the nature of intelligible objects.
Note this passage:
The crucial question then becomes, in what sense do intelligible objects exist? My claim is that ‘existence’ is the wrong predicate for such things as number. They are real, but as they can only be grasped by a rational mind, they’re not existent in the sense that phenomena are. The whole of metaphysics hinges on understanding this point in my view, because it introduces, or rather restores, the idea of ‘modes of being’, which was lost in the transition to modernity.
So, the idea is, numbers (etc) are those objects which can only be grasped by a mind, but which are not the product of your or my mind. That I take to be the basis of objective idealism, which is the philosophical understanding I aspire to. I think it has a long and venerable lineage in the Western tradition of philosophy (and that C S Pierce was one of it’s last exponents).
Timelessness seems like the key point to me. Early thinkers were also fascinated by the stars. What is t that endures as all else is born and dies? And why do humans love the timeless so much? One theory is that endurance is the test of the real. That which is persistently present is the most real. The laws of physics are like that and they are expressed mathematically. (What I learned later is that these are projected models on messy data. It's far messier than I expected.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I still hold that only really bad philosophers deny something like a 'space of reasons.' A good scientist could be a bad philosopher. Give people prediction and control, and they don't care what spin you put on it as a non-scientist. Some of the good OLP stuff addresses the complexity of a word like 'real.' What do people even mean? Outside of all practical contexts, it's just not clear.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think there's a fuzzier version of that that most people would assent to. We see colors with the eye and 'grasp' concepts with our reason. It's fine to invent a terminology, but I don't know if this solves the issue. It's my impression that most people grant some kind of intuitive experience of number. They don't agree about whether they are 'seeing' something extra-human or whether such intuitions are just built-in. I don't see how we could see around our cognition. But I also have concerns about the intelligibility of these issues. I think you said you weren't moved much by the beetle-in-the-box argument, but I think it (and the cloud of ideas around it) are revolutionary. It's also extremely relevant to the thread so I'll include it here:
[quote=W]
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
[/quote]
The idea is that all the secret beetles don't matter. As long as people emit the right words when appropriate, everything runs smoothly. So for me there's no exact meaning of 'mental' or 'physical.' It's more like learning to ride a bike. Wittgenstein asks when children learn that physical objects exist. This is one the strange, mind-opening lines in On Certainty .
We just keep living and talking and finding ourselves better able to fit in, engage in patterns we did not create, and sometimes weave new patterns in among the old. (One could project something like this insight on the real Socrates (who wrote no books). He grilled the experts to try to claw through the fuzz and eventually perhaps to reveal the fuzz. Might be mostly a projection, but the whole 'what is x, really?' game eventually leads to thinking about how language works. What are concepts, really? What is mind? Is it about some kind of radical immediacy? Some absolute presence? It's right there, infinitely intimate. Are things so simple?
That's something that Paul the Octopus never considered (not to our knowledge, anyway.)
But more seriously, being human presents a predicament. Animals don't wonder 'how the f**ck did I end up in this situation?' (not to our knowledge, anyway.) In the ancient world, philosophy was said to be an amelioration for that; but for it, said one ancient worthy, 'man would be the most unfortunate of animals'.
Quoting norm
I beg to differ. There's a philosophical issue at stake here, which is not fuzzy or vague. The fact is, through the languages of mathematics, we convey facts that are true for all observers, and perhaps even true in possible worlds. What people don't agree on, is what this means. Naturalism wants to be able to 'explain' human faculties in terms of biological adaptation. The article I pointed to talks about the project of 'naturalised epistemology'. That is the attempt by Quine and his ilk to uncouple mathematics from the sky-hooks of platonist idealism. The idea that the intellect can perceive inherent truths - the basic contention of rationalist philosophy - is denied by them. That has lead to arguments like fictionalism and so on. So instead of facing what mathematical insight suggests, it has to be demoted to a natural faculty, such as possessed by Paul the Octopus. Otherwise you fall foul of the empiricist dogma, and our station as evolved hominids.
Check out this Feser blog post (if you do read it, you will notice that this is where I got the 'chilliagon'.)
Quoting norm
I'm of the view that there is a traditional philosophical framework within which these terms really do have reasonably clear meanings, but that this has been forgotten or obscured by modernity. The key term that has been forgotten is the Greek term 'nous', and the way in which it was used.
Nothing to do with the issue in my view. But, again, thanks a heap for your feedback and interest, deeply appreciated.
There's some tension between this and your critique of science (dark matter, junk DNA). I lean toward instrumentalism. Also 'all possible worlds' seems to bleed physics and math together? What exactly is a possible world? I'm not saying that I don't have a rough idea, not am I trying to play stupid. I do think the issue is fuzzy. I think that even practical issues are fuzzy, just not too fuzzy to keep us from making the donuts. As we drift from those, it's smokestacks. Not worthless, but smoky!
Quoting Wayfarer
I still think late Wittgenstein & early Derrida & early Heidegger & later Husserl & many others are crucial here. The issue of the presence of a mind to itself...a central entity in all these discussions, the root issue. I think it's a rigid idealization. A case has been made. But it's not that important, ultimately.
Thanks for the conversation. It's very late here.
Another way of saying the same thing, no?
Quoting Wayfarer
Unfortunately I don't speak their language. :-) As you must be aware of, many people do not know what a prime number is, and they still know by and large what a number is or isn't. Granted that octopuses may not reach the same proficiency as humans in manipulating numbers. Granted too that one can find infinite puzzlement and wonder in the smallest thing, even in the number 2 (or even better, the number 1!) and that definitions are an endless game. ranted therefore that there is legitimately such a thing as the philosophy of mathematics.
However, I still maintain that it is irrational to consider a question about what numbers are as "pernicious". For one because the adjective "pernicious" is very emotional and judgmental, not rational. For two because all questions in philosophy could be considered "pernicious". In fact Hacker himself, in the paper quoted by , concludes that:
There is a breed of philosophers who think that their job is to deconstruct concepts, show how they cannot possibly mean anything, and leave every body confused. That's one way of taking the "linguistic turn", I guess. Another is to use the tools we have, including concepts, to try and make sense with them.
No, it isn't. People like Wittgenstein, Derrida are adamant it totally comes down to language. Foucault believed it was totally based on power.
That's a totally different approach to philosophy. They're committed to saying there's no truth outside of our socially constructed paradigm. That's not honest Socratic dialogue, that's dogmatism. Which is fine, I don't mind dogmatism, as long as it's honest.
Postmodernists want to have their cake and eat it, on the one hand all knowledge is limited, relative and contingent, EXCEPT for what Postmodernists claim. That's a dogma.
I'm a Kuhnian and a Abendite. I also like Lakatos. Popper not so much.
Absolutely. Scientists don't know anything at all about the world outside of the very narrow field they've specialized in. Which is fine by me, it's just not fine to those who need science to be an infallible oracle of Delphi. They cannot accept that.
Metaphysics in the way authors like Derrida mean it has to do with organizing particulars via a category some sort of a priori , that is , irreducible status.
Let me give examples of metaphysical
systems. There’s Descartes’ rationalism, in which an a priori pre-established harmony prevails between world and reasoning subject , and Kant’s a prior categories of the understanding , and Hegel’s
formal dialectic of history. And then there’s the metaphysics of naive realism that Wittgenstein unravels , the picture model of meaning in which facts can be separated from interpretations of facts.
I always get that from corporate types( not that you’re necessarily a corporate type). If an idea is worth anything it should be explicable in a simple
sentence. That works well in the world of
commerce because by definition a commercial product only has a market if it’s value is understood by a sizable number of people. But philosophy traffics in ideas
that are not already well understood by the mainstream , so buzzwords, soundbites and tweets will only be coherent to whose already well versed in a particular philosophical approach. Plus, different philosophical orientations define metaphysics in their own ways. Since I’m using Derrida’s definition , I’d need to introduce you to his vocabulary and way of thinking before his notion of metaphysics will make sense.
I could, however, respond to focused questions from you.
Quoting Joshs
Thank you for the offer. The only corporate types I know generally use weasel words, convoluted syntax and jargon to hide or massage the facts. They are terrified of clear sentences, as some philosophers seem to be. What was it Foucault said about Derrida - that he practiced obscurantist terrorism? I know Foucault told John Searle that writing deliberately incomprehensible prose to appear profound was an especially French practice. This may be true.
But outside of all that I generally take the view that if an idea is understood well it can be expressed simply and clearly. I'll keep reading your responses and see if there are further questions. Appreciated.
You agree that someone with no background in physics is not in a position to tackle QM or Einstein’s general
relativity. Why should it be any different for philosophy? I’ve never found anything Derrida wrote to be onscurantist or convoluted. On the other hand , given the limitations of Foucault’s worldview, I’m not surprised he blamed Derrida writing style for his failure to understand the fundamental concepts. Sealer writes in a nice clear style and I find his work to be utterly banal in comparisons to Derrida, Heidegger , Nietzsche and many other continentals.
Some philosophers are obscurantist. They tend to be the mediocre thinkers who don’t have much new to say.
Don’t confuse them with writers offering difficult new ideas. If you think any set of philosophical ideas should be immediately readable by you in particular in a way that appears ‘simple and clear’ then I suggest what you really are looking for is a set of ideas that fit within a worldview that is already eminently familiar to you. So if you’re only interested in ideas that conform to what you already know ( your metaphysical framework) , then continental philosophy isn’t for you.
But i think it goes further than that for you. I think your worldview itself may possibly be a naive realist one,( our scientific theories attempt to correspond to an independently existing external world ) and if that is the case then the notion of a philosophical perspective requiring a whole new way of thinking and a transformation of your language is alien to you.
I think you are using my comment to engage in a little patronizing ad hominem. Noam Chomsky - a highly complex theorist - made this exact same point about some French thinkers. Not a naïve realist or simple man by any means.
I personally don't hold this view (as yet) but I see why it is said and offered it as an alternative to your response which seemed to go straight to 'I have superior recondite knowledge'. I reject the position that complex ideas can be explained in less convoluted imprecise ways. But this is a useless digression. If I have further questions I may ask them.
His view actually comes pretty close to naive realism. He certainly is not much of a constructivist, believing as he does in innate semantic primitives. Jerry Fodor’s comment about 1st generation cognitive science applies well to Chomsky’s approach.
“the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.”
His comment about French thinkers was probably aimed at Foucault.
Good philosophy is clear and accessible, even to the novice: Mary's Room, Defense of Abortion, Trolley Car, Allegory of the Cave, Riddle of Induction, What is it like to be a Bat, Ship of Theseus, Transporter Problem, and so on.
There are many marvelous scientists who do a great job, and often manage to share the results of their work with much passion, because they care, but also the necessary humility, because they care. And one can learn a lot from them. Gould for instance.
Then you have the type that goes around telling non-scientists that they know nothing worthwhile because they never entered a science lab, and if they did they couldn't use the instruments... It's only the latter type that I call "glorified lab technicians". They tend to be quite jealous of their exclusive access to truth, and from them, the common man can learn very little.
Well, again, the science popularizers are the extreme minority of real actual scientists.
Quoting Olivier5
I'm more concerned about their acolytes, who are totally untrained or unaware of science or scientific method but still fly the flag of scientism uncritically.
Not just talking of those writing books. I'm just describing the approachable, passionate scientist type.
An anarchist is a realist? Explain how that works.
Chomsky is a charlatan and a fraud. He got famous for an unfalsifiable pseudo-theory about language that's been challenged by multiple linguists, and it's not even clear what the actual theory is except that language is somehow innate. His political views might be interesting, but they belong to a bygone era.
Lacan iirc. Who, of all French thinkers, might possibly deserve the title of obscurantist.
I have no feelings about Chomsky's integrity, my point addressed the issues of complexity not validity.
I have met anarchists who are realists but I did not make the point C is a realist. I doubt he is.
discussing Lacan’s ideas. I like his response:
“Lacan's style: its sometimes remarkable, and also sometimes anachronistic (I do not say untimely) effects (in relation to a certain advance and to a certain "program" of the times) seemed to me to be governed by the delay of a scene, conferring upon it, as I do not doubt, a certain necessity. (I am designating whatever constrained him to deal with institutionalized psychoanalysis in a certain way: this is Lacan's argument.) In relation to the theoretical difficulties that interested me, I read this style, above all, as an art of evasion. The vivacity of ellipsis too often seemed to me to serve as an avoidance or an envelopment of diverse problems.
Even if these reservations are far from exhausting Lacan's work, of which I remain persuaded, they were already important enough for me not to seek references (in the form of a guarantee) in a discourse so different, in its mode of elocution, its site, its aims, its presuppositions, from the texts that I was proposing. Such references would only result in the accumulation of fog in a field already not lacking it. They also risked compromising the possibility of a rigorous juxtaposition that perhaps remained to be constructed.”
No. But the Wikipedia entry on it is quite good, especially the section which details the dialogues that discuss the forms, and also the biblography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
Much of what you are listing as ‘good’ philosophy seems to belong to the conventional style of thinking of analytic philosophy, which brackets the era from
Hume to Hegel and renders those ideas palatable to a wider audience. I call it ‘applied’ continental
thought. Analytic is to continental philosophy as engineering is to theoretical physics. It doesn’t attempt to dig beneath the deepest presuppositions of an era of thinking i. sweepingly comprehensive fashion , as the continentals do.
That’s why it seems clear and accessible to you. Its language was designed for that purpose. For me Heidegger, Derrida and Husserl are clear and accessible, but then again my goal is to turn the conventional on its head, not work away at its edges.
Certainty early Heidegger and Nietzsche are accessible to the novice in the sen that they write completed , coherent thoughts, don’t use arcane language without first defining it for the layman, and circle around repeated themes of general interest. But their aim is to teach you a very different way of thinking about your world, so you end up having g to reread every apparently ‘simple’ sentence multiple times.
Thanks already know this one. I was referring to Joshs other terminology and asking if it was in the same vein as Plato's forms.
You can say that but how do we know you understand them? And I am not saying you don't, just that we have no way of knowing this. Heidegger is notoriously difficult to follow. Derrida is understood so differently by so many closes readers who can say what he really means?
I’ve struggled with the term as well. There are many who interpret it as ‘outside’ or ‘what isn’t physics’, and while I can understand the desire to isolate science from not-science, I think a complete scientific methodology at the outset must include both a framing of the question and a structuring of our uncertainty about the topic that are decidedly metaphysical - ie. inclusive of, but importantly not limited to, scientifically processed experience. Without this, scientific research risks stagnation from a kind of myopia and inbreeding.
So, for me, metaphysics amounts to refining the frameworks of uncertainty and potentiality from which we interact with the world.
This is true. But what if you say, or somebody else said, "was influenced by the ideas within it?" Still not always true, as people can come to brilliant ideas, published ones, by themselves without familiarizing themselves with the work aforehand.
We will never know what a philosopher ‘really means’, but I don’t think that should be considered the aim of reading them. What we should aim for is to learn a new way of looking at the world which we find pragmatically useful in our lives in it’s different facets ( interpersonal understanding and ethics, spiritual concerns , education and political thought, aesthetic experience and creativity).
It is unlikely that we will prevented from sharing the insights we gain, because even though as you pointed out there are multiple interpretive camps for every major thinker , it is quite likely we will identify with one of those camps and be able to share and learn alongside them.
It has to be a very long sentence.
For the record, I still don't understand the theory of forms. Are they real? Do they exist? Are they imitable? I imagine having heard that they are real but not existing in this world. I also heard from others that they are real and necessarily exist in this world. Yet others told me they are not of matter, and they don't exist in our physical world.
:100:
I don't agree that a number is a concept. However I have a concept of a number, just as I have a concept of a tree, and also a concept of a unicorn.
I see no difficulty either, yet we have a different opinion on this. This gets into the problem of universals.
Quoting Olivier5
A problem can be insoluble if it is badly formulated or has false assumptions. In this case, the mind/body problem has Cartesian assumptions which can be questioned and potentially rejected.
Hacker is pointing out that the Cartesian mind/body conception is broken and offers an alternative
Aristotelian conception:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
..
Quoting Wayfarer
The 'so-what' is that the mind/body problem misleads. We're human beings first and foremost, and our experience and reasoning as human beings is the ground of everything we know.
This quote is the title of a book written and drawn by the cartoonist Ashleigh Brilliant. Some of it is very good—made me laugh anyway!
I am not saying that anyone who disagrees with me is disengenous, just that you will need to argue your case if you want to be taken seriously. "Well, I disagree" is not enough.
Quoting Andrew M
Yes, it is possible to prove that a problem, as stated, makes no sense or allows for no solution. Which amounts to solving it, mind you. For instance the problem of how many unicorns live on earth has been solved, at least to my satisfaction, and the solution is zero.
But I find Hacker's attempt at deconstructing the mind-body problem laughable in its casuistry and naivety. To wit:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections PETER M.S. HACKER, OXFORD
And yet people also say that a body has appetites, desires, a preservation instinct, and that in this sense the body wants certain things.
[I]Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.[/i] -- Pascal
If the English word 'cat' has a meaning, its relationship to its meaning is one of having... :smirk:
Again, the color of the five-pound note codes for its value, allows people to quickly spot the note's value, is a proxy for it, so there is a relationship there between color and value.
Likewise, if Hacker has a mind and also has a body, these two entities ARE in a relationship with one another, an indirect one, via the entity called "Hacker". He has both of them so they are two things Mr Hacker happens to have.
One could still validly ask: how come Mr Hacker has a body AND a mind, and how do these two work together (or not) within the entity called "Mr Hacker"? So the problem has not disappeared at all. It was just a slight of hands...
No, not in the least. It's a conceptual paradigm (i.e. methodological coarse-graining filter), btw, and is N O T itself a scientific model (i.e. explanatory hypothesis). Yeah, materialism is also the least adequate paradigm ... except for all of the others (i.e. 'immaterialisms' ...) ever tried.
Sure it can. "Mind" and "ideas" are just words. Why not simply start where Descartes does, with conscious awareness?
But here again we're back to dualism, a subject/object distinction (or "mind/body"), which may be fine when reflecting on the world abstractly, but which doesn't tell the entire story.
Also, we cannot say whether or not materialism has a problem until someone explains what "material" means. Or "physical," for that matter. No explanation has been given for hundreds of years. There was one, and it was destroyed by Newton. There hasn't been one since. So the so-called problems of mind vs. body is essentially meaningless, because dividing the world up dualistically is derivative and because no one can tell us what "body" means.
The entire tradiitonal emphasis on truth (as correctness, as certainty) and knowledge in which you pose this question is itself questionable, and worth studying historically. You go back to Descartes, and the beginning of modern science, and the picture becomes clearer. Most of the questions just fade away. If you go back to the origins of Western thought even prior to Descartes, in the ancient Greeks, even more insights get revealed. For example, that this entire Western tradition has inherited the ontology of Plato and Aristotle.
"The greatest enemy of Truth and Wisdom (philosophy) is the Tooth of Wisdom. If it aches, you can't think straight." - Ashleigh Brilliant
This guy is err... brilliant.
I looked up his website. Apparently "Brilliant" is his last name by birth. He changed to Ashleigh from Imbecilius, though.
"Will"? "You"? "Please"? "Study"? (Excellent argument, yes?)
Your obsession with Spinoza is your own. Putting quotation marks over those words explains exactly nothing -- especially considering that you've not demonstrated that you've understood anything I said. If you want to explain, do so. Otherwise I'm really not interested in your recommendations -- you've not earned being taken seriously.
PS -- for others who haven't settled upon their philosopher-guru: Spinoza is still operating on the basis of Greek ontology, and was influenced by Descartes. This appears in his references to "substance," of which he discusses at length. Even ideas of "nature" date back to Greek ontology. So while Spinoza may be worthwhile in many other ways, referencing him has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Might as well recommend Sinclair Lewis.
Good -- so next time spare me your incoherent blathering. I have no interest in it. Go read more Spinoza.
Right -- stick with Spinoza. Doing so has clearly benefited you. :yawn:
Yet still incoherent. :lol: Can't expect miracles!
I think Thomas Metzinger should study Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Dan Zahavi for a more enlightened approach to cognition
I know -- funny because it's true. I wonder what Spinoza would say? :lol: Perhaps you should go study him.
"Conscious awareness" is words too. More to the point, do you seriously think you might be "mindless"?
They are just words as well, yes. But I’m not claiming they’re beyond question. As I went on to explain.
Before we decide if we’re mindless, tell us what mind means. Otherwise it’s like discussing God. Are you Godless?
But first, what do you mean by "means"? I don't care to go down this rabbit hole.
But if you want to get anywhere, you really should. Same as in the sciences. When we talk about mind, or body, or tree, or anything else in everyday life, of course I know what you mean. I have a good sense of what most people mean by God, too, But this is a philosophy forum, in which you ask a question about materialism and oppose it to the mental. The answer is simple enough: your question is meaningless. Not simply because mind hasn’t been explained, but because there hasn’t been a scientific notion of material for centuries, since the destruction of the mechanical philosophy and notions of contact action.
True, you can go on debating if you’d like. But we can debate the weight of ectoplasm as well. What’s more of a rabbit hole?
Regardless— only my opinion. You’re welcome to continue.
Not by minds and their ideas, in any case.
As mentioned, this is the problem of universals. Your position, conceptualism, is one of the many possible views that people have held about numbers, and universals generally. My position on universals is Aristotle's immanent realism which I describe here.
But note that Hacker said that asking what sort of entity a number is is a pernicious question. Which is to say, is it a question that is decidable according to some obvious or accepted criteria, or is it just a matter of deciding in favor of one's preferred philosophy (say, idealism or materialism)?
Hacker, following Wittgenstein, would suggest looking at how we use numbers in our language and activities. One use is when counting things. For example, I look in the fruit bowl and count three apples. The number three, here, is a quantity.
In the Categories, Aristotle considered the kinds of things that can be the subject or predicate of a proposition - quantity is one of those categories. As used in the apples example above, the quantity three is said of the apples. The quantity of apples in the fruit bowl doesn't depend on any person's mind hence it's real, not nominal or conceptual. If an apple is added to the fruit bowl, the quantity changes, so the quantity is immanent in the apples. Hence Aristotle's immanent realism.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't think you're appreciating that the ordinary use of the word "mind" is idiomatic (I changed my mind, I'm of two minds, that was a mindless act, etc.). One's body and mind aren't entities that "work together" any more than the wax "works together" with the impression on it. As Hacker puts it:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
That is not how I read the word pernicious, which to me implies that there is something untoward in the question. Otherwise all questions of philosophy would be pernicious: they are all about what criteria to use to judge things or categorize them. So "what is a chair?" would be just as pernicious as "what is a number?".
I suspect Hacker has a specific problem with concepts.
So do you, apparently. In your example of the basket of apples, the basket functions as a set, whose cardinality is the number of apples. When you add an apple to the basket, you are adding an element to a set. And a set is a concept.
Quoting Andrew M
It does. The impressions change the shape of the wax. Wax accepts impressions, can be impressed. Aristotle chose the example of wax for a reason: because among all the materials that he could think of, wax was the most easily malleable. A piece of wood (xyle in greek, a word which Aristotle often used for his concept of matter) would not "work" as well in this metaphor.
by what metric?
Quoting 180 Proof
Of course. But like you said, "mind" doesn't necessarily refer to consciousness or awareness, which (in my opinion only) are slightly better terms for what you're talking about, also called "subjective experience," etc. If "mind" is taken as reason, or a kind of "soul," or the brain, or Descartes' res cogitans, then a different set of issues may arise. But let's just take your definition: here we are. It's impossible to really "deny" that, however we want to speak about it. All of this is as true as day, and I'm not so naive as to make the presumptuous claim that Descartes or later thinkers are "wrong."
My only gripes would be (a) whether or not "mind" in this sense describes the entirety of human being and (b) if not, whether "mind" (and consciousness generally) is primary. At first these gripes sound ridiculous, I admit. But again, this isn't to say they're wrong and it isn't to doubt conscious experience or existence.
Quoting RogueAI
Maybe it isn't -- maybe it's more conceptual. Because in this case, although it seems obvious that there are non-conscious entities in the world (rocks and planets and trees and molecules, etc), I don't see a way around the fact that whatever these non-conscious objects are (or any objects whatsoever), they are objects for me, the conscious subject, and so conditioned in part by how I perceive them. (Obviously this is Kant, Descartes, Berkley, etc. etc.) And since that's the case, to fully grasp how this "outside" world of (material?) stuff evolved into my consciousness is perhaps impossible to understand fully. As hard as understanding the big bang, in any case. Whatever story we tell, with mathematics, precise terminology, and evidence, is still just thinking. I'm not convinced that materialism or "naturalism" or physicalism are ever going to get us to any satisfactory answer; I think they're off-track in this sense.
For two reasons. First, these issues are so complex and so poorly understood that it's next to impossible to currently study. But secondly, science too is based on a perspective and thus an interpretation of the world -- an ontology. I do think it's the most successful and most powerful ontology we have to date, -- but like anything else, it has its scope and limits.
So again, maybe your question can be answered -- or maybe there are unjustified, tacit assumptions in there that makes it a dead end. Since we really don't know what consciousness is (in the sense of an explanatory theory), and any scientific notion of "material" (or "body") was abandoned in the 17th century, it's hard to even imagine a right answer to the question of how material, non-conscious stuff assembled into what you and I are (if we say that's a mind or a consciousness).
Seems nit-picky and like entering a rabbit hole, yes. But again, I mean this strictly in a sense of theory, not in an everyday, common sense respect. In the latter, yes of course we have minds, of course we're conscious, of course there are material objects "out there" that I interact with, and so forth.
That's not quite the question originally asked. Let me quote Hacker to set the context:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
Note Hacker's italicization of entity above. Here's the Lexico definition for entity:
A chair meets the criteria for an entity in the first sense. So it needn't be problematic to investigate what kind of entity it is, assuming some distinguishing criteria (animal, vegetable, or mineral, say).
But does mind and number meet that criteria? See how chairs (and other ordinary things we observe like trees and rocks, etc.) set our expectations? If we don't first understand how these words are used in their ordinary context, it's easy to start imagining minds and numbers as things with distinct and independent existence. Before we have a chance to get our bearings, we're thinking of minds without bodies, and numbers in Platonic realms. That's why the question is pernicious.
Now suppose a child comes to you and asks "What is a number?" The ordinary answer involves looking at how we use numbers, in counting and as quantities, which is what I attempted to do with the apples example. Similarly, the ordinary answer of "What is a mind?" is that it has an idiomatic usage - it's an abstraction over our intellectual abilities and their exercise. But to ascribe substance or agency or independence to an abstraction is a conceptual confusion, and that's the legacy of the mind/body problem.
Quoting Olivier5
First, Hacker uses the terms "concept" and "conceptual" throughout his essay in a conventional way, so I don't think he finds concepts problematic. And neither do I. Second, the word concept derives from the Latin conceptum, meaning "something conceived". It's also related to thought and imagination. So to claim that a set or a number is a concept is to create a dependence on human thought (in a way that trees and rocks apparently aren't - i.e., are they concepts?) Yet a water molecule was composed of three atoms prior to the emergence of humans in the universe, violating that dependency.
Quoting Olivier5
:up: I can "work" with that! The point for me here is that the Aristotelian (holistic) conception of form and matter is fundamentally different to the Cartesian (dualistic) conception of mind and body.
Quoting Andrew M
Aren't you contradicting yourself in those two paragraphs? In the first you say numbers have no mind- independent existence, and then you say the opposite in the second para.
Quoting Andrew M
Sure, and yet there is still a duality here: that of matter and form. No matter without form, no form without matter.
I kind of like the analogy too. It is pointing at a possible direction for an answer, but it doesn't bring you very far. The body already has a form, a structure, which seems quite different from what we call "minds". And if the mind is the form of the body, why does it need to go on holiday every 24 hours? Do wax impressions sleep???
I think we can do better than Aristotle.
No. Per the above example, the quantity of atoms is independent of mind (real), but dependent on the atoms (immanent). So the quantity doesn't have an independent existence.
Quoting Olivier5
Maybe, but it's worth noting that Aristotle's project was very different to Descartes'. Aristotle was seeking to provide a natural and investigative account of living organisms (what they have in common and what differentiates them), whereas Descartes was seeking a foundation of certainty against the skeptic. From Hacker again:
Quoting Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007
This is a mistake. Before you can count anything, you have to set the boundaries of what you want to count. Those boundaries are not real, they are postulated, conceived by the person counting.
Quoting Andrew M
Supposedly we can also do better than Descartes.
I like the Aristotelian idea of the form-matter duality. It fits with my bio semiotics. It is the shape of molecules that gives them their power. Stericiy. But that's as far as it goes. For instance, I fail to see how to ground logic on forms.
how do you entrench yourself in the realm of materialism without trickling down into excessive hedonism? materialism may be more “efficient” per say as for the survival of an organism, but it doesn’t explain why im amazed at gazing out into the void of the universe, or the experience of a song that i really like. if it’s just material, why does it ultimately matter? why not focus on biological goals exclusively such as reproduction then?
i don’t think much good philosophy can come from by how “useful” it is in a practical manner.
this is very beautiful.
I'm an 'epicurean-spinozist' (or absurdist) meaning that aponia & ataraxia without transcendent illusions (or sisyphusean eudaimonia) is (my) "hedonism".
Materialism is, in my understanding, an enabling-constraint on explanations (that coarse-grains away 'immaterialist' considerations & ad hockery) and is not itself an explanatory hypothesis. Read some studies in cultural anthropology (re: amazement) & cognitive / developmental psychology (re: musical experience).
Why wouldn't it for that very reason? Besides, we humans are proximate, not "ultimate", beings, so things need not "matter ultimately" to us – what could "ultimately matter" even mean? – for them to matter at all.
Well, for starters, we humans have excessively large forebrains ... :smirk:
I never said "philosophy" was "useful" "in a practical manner". I say materiality offers a less maladaptive stance than any immaterialist stance (e.g. shared practices are less maladaptive than 'dogmas'; fallibility is less maladaptive than 'infallibility'; clinical medicine is less maladaptive than 'faith healing'; public health & hygiene are less maladaptive than 'exorcism & mortification'; sustainable ecology is less maladaptive than 'anthropocentricity'; esp. for humans, the cooked is less maladaptive than 'the raw'; dancing is less maladaptive than 'astral projecting', sound logic is less maladaptive than 'occult magic'; etc). :mask:
Not sure. I think if we can one day formulate a technical notion of "consciousness," then perhaps we can explain it. Right now it's obviously too hard -- but who knows what comes of it. I'm open to it. Clearly the brain has something to do with consciousness, for example -- I'd be crazy to deny that. And I think that's where a lot of mistakes are made -- with thought and language, too: it's as if because we currently don't understand something the only alternative is that we have to become mystics, and resort to magic. But that's not the alternative to our lack of scientific understanding in the realms of economics or politics or sociology or even the weather. We can make some progress here and there, but overall they're just too complex to currently grasp. It's not classical mechanics -- and even there it's only simple principles and processes that allow us to generalize.
My basic position is that before this project gets off the ground, before the question gets asked, we're already in troublesome waters. That shouldn't necessarily stop us from trying to answer, of course. But from my perspective it seems like a dead end.
I choose what to measure and how to measure it. But when I do so, that I measure three atoms in a water molecule doesn't depend on my mind, it depends on the water molecule itself.
Otherwise aren't you effectively saying that the world isn't real, but mind-dependent?
Quoting Olivier5
Here's a reference that I think gets at what Aristotle was doing.
Quoting Aristotle: Logic - IEP
The point here is that, for Aristotle, form is not separable from substantial things (except in an abstract sense). So logic about forms is, basically, logic about things that we investigate naturally. For example, what-is-it-to-be a human being? Well, what differentiates us from other animals is our language and reasoning capabilities. A word signifying that might be "rationality", i.e., what-it-is-to-be a human being is to be a rational animal. So that's a definition. But note that rationality isn't itself something substantial like a Cartesian mind. It is instead a formalization of one class of things (human beings) in terms of a broader class of things (animals), with a differentiating criterion (rationality).
This then becomes the ground for developing logic, such as:
Just as well, as it can't account for 96% of the mass of the universe, nor the behaviour of atomic particles without resorting to the many-worlds extravaganza.
Using Collingwood's presupposition analysis:
1) You are assuming there is such a thing as "the water molecule itself", as opposed to, say, one single Schrödinger equation describing the whole universe.
2) You are in your mind conceiving ONE such molecule, so you are already counting right from the start.
3) You are assuming that this ONE molecule is composed of atoms that are still somewhat countable within the molecule, rather than, say, thinking of the molecule of water as the result of atoms fusing into a coherent whole described by one single Schrödinger equation.
4) Once you have (unconsciously) assumed this ONE, INDIVIDUATED yet GENERIC molecule of water BREAKABLE into countable pieces, you are then defining the unit of measurement itself (the atom), ie the "countable pieces". The atom itself is a concept. Nobody ever saw one.
5) You are assuming that all molecules of water have the same structure and are composed of the same number of atoms. Chemists actually disagree. In its liquid form, they often write it down as H3O+, and see it as formed of 3 atoms and a half. (with H+ counted it as half an atom of hydrogen).
6) Finally, you are assuming that the counter is English-speaking and uses base 10. A computer would count 11 atoms in a molecule of water. A Frenchman would arrive at the result "trois". So what is the mind-independent number?
No. If one considers one's own mind as real, then things that are mind-dependent can be perfectly real so the distinction "mind vs real" does not apply.
All I am saying is that numbers are concepts. They are made in the mind. Otherwise, who's counting?
Quoting Andrew M
My question is not about how to use logic on forms, but how does logic itself emerge from the geometric (spatial) shape of things.
You are assuming those two notions are opposed. But, yes, I assume at least the first.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes. And you are assuming that the quantity of something (say, the number of atoms in a water molecule) depends on what you conceive of or count.
And so on...
So we all make assumptions. But that doesn't imply that what we're talking about - water molecules, say - have a dependency on our assumptions - or even on our existence. Though, of course, if someone's assumptions are false then they might not actually be describing anything in the world.
Quoting Olivier5
Do you consider that the world is mind-dependent?
Quoting Olivier5
Human beings such as you and I are counting. How would that imply that numbers (and in this case, the number of atoms in a water molecule) depend on one's mind?
Do you consider that the world is a concept?
Quoting Olivier5
Aristotle's logic is grounded in our observation and investigation of the world (i.e., Aristotle is seeking to understand the nature of things). So logical principles such as the LNC and LEM emerge from that observation and investigation. For example, a thing is not observed to both have some characteristic and not have it at the same time and in the same respect.
Also form (Greek: morphe or eidos or idea) is not merely about how a thing looks to us, but about a thing's deeper structure and organization that shapes the material (and which might only be "seen" in our speech). For example, human beings are reasoning and language-using creatures - that is their shape (or pattern) that we can describe in speech. As Joe Sachs puts it:
Note that "speech" in the above Aristotle's Physics quote is the translation of the Greek logos. From Wikipedia:
Quoting Logic: History - Wikipedia
So a possible answer to your question is that our reasoning in natural language just is an informal logic. Our language, and consequently logic, emerges as a result of our interactions with things in the world.
I agree, but still, the number of elements in a set depends on how the set is defined: what are its boundaries. I see countable sets as conceptual. In my view the world has no set. Everything is in everything and vice versa. So when we think of an object, the object may exist objectively. I can think of the Empire State Building for instance, a real, gigantic thing in real steel and concrete. But by doing so I also INDIVIDUATED this building as a THING. One could say that the skyscraper is in fact but a collection of steel beams and other elements, connected with each other but also connected to other structures eg the bedrock, other nearby structures and utility pipes. So where does the Empire State Building starts and ends? Well, one can make decisions about that, but these ARE decisions. We are setting the boundaries of things, often a bit artificially. We need to do so, we cannot embrace in our mind the full complexity of reality, so we simplify.
Reality is one. We conceptually cut the cake of reality into "things", but there's always several ways to cut a cake.
Quoting Andrew M
I can agree with that, as a broad brush sketch.