Idealism and Materialism, what are the important consequences of both.
Well the first thing that can be said that distinguishes the two is the view on ontology. For a materialist, there is only one thing that exists, that being matter. For an idealist there is two different kinds of things, "mental stuff" and "physical stuff". How they then interact is a problem an idealist has to deal with with (or not as much if they're an epiphenomonolgist). On the other hand for the materialist, ask him "What is consciousness" and he'll reply that it's a "pattern" usually. Some specific neurological configuration mean "conscious" and most others mean "not consious". That or they'll say the ridiculous "consciousness is an illusion" bs. But the point is they either deal with it through reductionism or eliminitavism, either consciousness is a bunch of physical stuff put together or it doean't exist/is not important to talk about.
My question then is what really is the difference between idealists and materialists other than the words they use to describe the stuff that exists. Ask both "is consciousness real" and they would say yes (with the eliminitivists saying no). As both "can consciousness interact with the world and cause physical changes". They would say yes (with the epiphenomenalists saying no). Note, a materalist only agrees with this statement because "consciousness" to him is just another material thing. It would be like asking "Can rocks interact with the world and cause physical changes". Ask both "Can the material world affect consciousness" and they'll both say yes (though the idealist will have a hard time explaining how).
So what really is the difference between the two views? I can't particulary think of any significant question that members of both camps cannot give the same answers to fundamentally other than "Is there is a separate kind of stuff from material stuff that is called mental stuff?" I just never got the idealist materialist split. The idealists seem to be claiming the existence of something that's not needed for explaining anything.
I still remember asking someone on this site a while ago to define "mind" in such a way that it wouldn't just be part of the definition of "matter" for a materialist. They failed.
My question then is what really is the difference between idealists and materialists other than the words they use to describe the stuff that exists. Ask both "is consciousness real" and they would say yes (with the eliminitivists saying no). As both "can consciousness interact with the world and cause physical changes". They would say yes (with the epiphenomenalists saying no). Note, a materalist only agrees with this statement because "consciousness" to him is just another material thing. It would be like asking "Can rocks interact with the world and cause physical changes". Ask both "Can the material world affect consciousness" and they'll both say yes (though the idealist will have a hard time explaining how).
So what really is the difference between the two views? I can't particulary think of any significant question that members of both camps cannot give the same answers to fundamentally other than "Is there is a separate kind of stuff from material stuff that is called mental stuff?" I just never got the idealist materialist split. The idealists seem to be claiming the existence of something that's not needed for explaining anything.
I still remember asking someone on this site a while ago to define "mind" in such a way that it wouldn't just be part of the definition of "matter" for a materialist. They failed.
Comments (473)
[quote= Dan Lusthaus; http://www.acmuller.net/yogacara/articles/intro.html]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 primary 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 [i.e. a single meaning]. 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 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.[/quote]
I'm inclined to some combination of transcendental and epistemic idealism.
Quoting khaled
A materialist believes that there are material things with no minds, but there can't be mental things without a material basis. A big difference in idealism is that you can have mental things without a material component, at least in principle, and doubtless the most vital example is God. This in turn allows for a kind of coincidence of human mind and human matter, such that we can argue for the primacy of the mental which afaik is a matter of taste, not logic.
I can take this two ways. Either you mean there is 2 different kinds of "stuff", material stuff and mental stuff, or I could just take "mind" to mean a certain pattern of material things. I'd say the first interpretation, that there are 2 different kinds of stuff, mental stuff and physical stuff, and objects are made up of a combination of the stuff is already idealistic. Already not what a materialist would say. To a materialist, there is nothing but physical stuff.
To me, when materialists speak about minds they are speaking of patterns. "Consciousness" is a pattern. "Anger" is a pattern. Etc. So even God, can be seen as some sort of pattern or other (you know the whole "God is everything" kinds of cliches).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Again, I think if you say that there are 2 different kinds of stuff, mental stuff and physical stuff, you're already not a materialist.
Quoting khaled
You throw around ‘stuff’ pretty easily, but in the context its meaning ought to be carefully considered. What, I mean, would ‘mental stuff’ actually consist of? The point about our mental stuff, is that it is never known to us as an object. Our own mind is the subject of experience, whereas ‘stuff’ of all kinds occurs or appears to us as an objective reality. We cannot directly know whether what appears to us as other beings really do think, but our own thoughts are indubitable to us, as we can’t even doubt them without thinking (pace Descartes.)
A further point is that the investigation of matter itself has yielded nothing like an indivisible particle. The candidates for such a thing, such as the quark, are part of the quaintly-named ‘particle zoo’, which is a mathematical construct. The implication of the observer in the interpretation of physics is also by now a well-known aspect of modern science. All of which undermines the assumption of some independently-existing ‘stuff’.
Then I'll clarify. An argument for materialism is that there exist things that are material, like rocks, clouds, rivers, etc. that have no minds; however there are no apparent mental things (like humans) without matter (bodies). Therefore things with minds is a subset of material things.
Quoting khaled
I was describing the difference (as per your question) not my own views. It is difficult to argue against the above apparent subsetting if one cannot give an example of a mental thing that has no material component. If you believe in God or something similar, that could be an example.
For the record, I'm a physicalist athiest.
A materialist would not say that humans have any mental things attached if "mental thing" is to mean some other different kind of substance from physical thing. If it means a particular pattern of physical thing then maybe.
But the question was: What does each position allow you to say that doesn't fit with the other position? Because I can't think of anything.
Well at the very least we can agree that minds and matter share one thing. They're both stuff. You seem to have taken stuff to mean physical stuff. Maybe even more general. Both minds and brains are things is that better?
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to be putting a lot of baggage on the word stuff that I didn't put there. I didn't say that stuff need be indivisible. And I didn't say stuff needs to be constantly defined in absence of an observer.
There is no inconsistency with being a materialist and at the same time thinking that there is no indivisible particle and also that particles don't sit still when nothing is looking at them. I say this on many threads but what counts as "matter" has changed a lot. Beforehand matter was what you could see and hold. We can't see or hold electrons yet we consider them material nowadays. Heck they don't even have a fixed location yet we call them material. It just seems like whatever role was taken by "mind stuff" has all been sucked out and included in "physical stuff"
Which again makes me ask the question, What does each position allow you to say that the other cannot hold? Because I can't think of anything. Has the meaning of what is "material" expanded so much that it just encompasses everything now and there is no longer any need for a seperate sort of "mind stuff"? That's what it seems like to me.
The hard problem Is the result of this false dichotomy.
Ditto,the excesses of idealism and materialism.
Physicalism is the way to go. Everything is physical,not material or "ideal."
Nope. The mind is definitely not a thing. The brain, insofar as it’s a thing, is an object of study for the neurosciences, and is the most complex thing known to science. But operatively, it’s never a thing.
Quoting khaled
As you say that ‘stuff is all that exists’, and that both mind and matter are kinds of stuff, then it has to carry a lot of baggage. Otherwise it’s meaningless - not ‘stuff’ but ‘fluff’.
The point about physicalism or materialism, is the claim that the only real existents are material existents - those entities knowable to the physical sciences, either actually or potentially. Everything else is purported to be able to be reduced to physical things and physical laws. The purported connection between mental states and physical laws is, according to contemporary orthodoxy, evolutionary biology, whereby dumb stuff gives rise to living beings according to physical laws.
There are many criticisms of physicalism, including the argument from the hard problem of consciousness, the nomological argument, the argument from reason, and so on.
And mind is not res cogitans,but is also physical and extended.
I think many physicalists are slightly more nuanced than this and would say we currently don't have reliable evidence not to accept physicalism as the best hypothesis, but recognise alternative traditions and that religion is deeply rooted in human behaviour.
Or in Susan Haack's words, that we try to accommodate the grains of truth in various anti-realist positions—and to keep our own, modest metaphysical claims free of unnecessary and indefensible epistemological accretions.
You obviously haven't been introduced to Deus Deceptor (Descartes), Simulation Hypothesis (Nick Bostrom), and Brain In A Vat (Gilbert Harman), Solipsism (Gorigias), and Maya (Hinduism & Buddhism) to name a few!
My thoughts exactly. Just the other day, I was wondering if nonphysicalists would be ready to accept souls/minds as pure energy or some kind of mathematical formula reducible to, like Michio Kaku likes to say, an equation one inch long? This would be nuance as far as I can tell. How do you think physicalists would respond? Surely, they would be up in arms about how energy is physical
Quoting Wayfarer
Identity theorists don't have to deal with the first one. I find the nomological argument at worst silly and at best irrelevant (because I'm not talking about whether or not God exists). And I think a cursory view of AI will show the problem with the argument from reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
"Thing" is the most general word you can use. Yes minds are things. Not material things. Things.
Interesting. Is this worth developing? Transmigration of souls? Platonic realm of forms?
Question: what do you think belongs to epistemic idealism, that isn’t already included in transcendental idealism?
Quoting Wayfarer
If it was, it must be conditioned, hence the possible invocation of infinite regress. Or, in order to relax infinite regress, some condition for mind must be allowed that is itself unconditioned. Better to just let the mind be the unconditioned placeholder, otherwise speculative theory runs away with itself and we end up with nothing.
Materialists don't deny the mind afaik, they just deny that it's fundamentally non-material. You can still talk of minds and mental things like images, thoughts, feelings, but these arise from states of complex systems.
Quoting khaled
IF
Quoting khaled
But if
Quoting khaled
Quoting Kenosha Kid
They don’t “arise from” as that still leaves the door open for a dualist interpretation. They ARE states of complex systems.
Point is that by the materialist definition you get everything an idealist would want. Emotions that spur people to action, deliberation, free will, the whole suite. I’d say even more easily incorporated than an idealist would have it (because no interaction problems to deal with). So the pragmatist in me wants to know: What’s the actual difference between the two positions? What’s a significant position that cannot be put into materialist/idealist terms (whichever you want) without being contradictory. Existence of God? I’d say you’d be able to come up with a materialistic definition of God that gives him/her everything you’d want normally. Etc.
What’s something a materialist cannot say about the world that requires they be an idealist. Or vice versa
Because I’m the type to think that if the answer to the above is “nothing” then the debate isn’t worth a rat’s ass.
That's dualism. Idealists believe only mental stuff exists.
A materialist cannot say about the world (with confidence) that consciousness can arise from non-conscious stuff. They can assume and believe it's true, but there is (currently) no explanation for how that can happen, why we evolved to be conscious, or indeed why we should even assume mind arising from mindless stuff is possible in principle. The materialist, again, simply assumes there's not a category error going on.
The materialist also cannot say (again, with confidence) that non-conscious stuff exists at all. There is no way to verify it. It's simply a belief.
Extended states, yes. I'm never sure when people say brain states on here whether they mean instantaneous or over time. It is also convoluted: your experience right now does indeed arise, in part, from the state of your memory: that is, if your memory was in a different configuration (state), you would now be experiencing things (extended state) in a different way.
But yeah I'm comfortable using "state" to mean over time.
Quoting khaled
Well, you don't, that's why they're not materialists. Principally, you don't get magical humans. Lots of people don't like being described as a the same sort of thing as rocks, rivers, or even trees, apes, and computers. They find that quite offensive. Bear in mind we're coming from a world that was taught that God made us bespoke, with His divine breath, and made the universe just for us: being ever so special is important to many.
I think the distinction lies between the belief that the existence of things and substances are either dependent on or independent of the mind.
I'm more of a pluralist and believe there are many things and substances rather than just one, so I cannot relate to your view of materialism. But I am certainly not an idealist.
Yes he can. Because consciousness to a materialist is a certain pattern of matter. You can easily tell when things follow said pattern.
Quoting RogueAI
Quoting RogueAI
You seem to already have in mind a particular effect called "consciousness" that we cannot detect that arises from matter. That's not how a materialist would put it. To a materialist, again, consciousness is a pattern, not a seperate "secret sauce" added to things that have matter (usually). That's dualistic.
Consciousness is to a brain what a program is to a PC for a materialist. The program is not a seperate entity that acts on the PC, it's a specific configuration of the PC.
It depends on the materialist. Some believe that mental states are identical to physical states. Some are property dualists. Some are mysterianists (materialists who think we'll never figure out consciousness).
A materialist cannot say anything about consciousness* with confidence because A), there's no way to prove that matter exists in the first place, and B) even if matter does exist, if consciousness is patterns of matter, why does pattern A give rise to the feeling of stubbing a toe, while pattern B gives rise to the beauty of a sunset, while pattern C gives rise to no experience at all? How does that work? Why are we conscious in the first place? If pattern of matter XYZ gives rise to (or is the same as) experience ABC, and that machine over there looks like it's an instance of pattern of matter XYZ, how do we verify it's having experience ABC?
Since the answers to those questions are all unknown, any claims materialists make about what consciousness is and how it arises from matter cannot be made with confidence, at least at the moment. Agreed?
Quoting khaled
I think we can detect it, but only in ourselves. I cannot be wrong I'm conscious, but I ultimately have no idea whether you are or aren't and if you are if your consciousness is anything like mine. If you disagree, then explain how a scientist would go about detecting consciousness in a machine.
Again, it depends on the materialist. Let's take you. Do you believe that mental states are identical to brain states? If so, how is it that I can have a song playing in my head, but there's no music in my skull? If mental states are identical to brain states, then my mind weighs a couple pounds and is about the size of both of my fists. Do you really think your mind weighs anything? Isn't the idea that your mind is double-fist sized pretty absurd? And if you don't believe that mental states are identical to brain states, then how are they different?
Quoting khaled
This assumes there is a material thing called a brain that exists outside our minds. You need to prove that first before you start talking about what kinds of programs this hypothetical brain can run.
*I think IIT has some interesting things to say, but only at a trivial level.
I just got through talking about it:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Are idealists necessarily more susceptible to a bunch of unverifiable tosh? How does one discern 'good' idealism from 'bad' and how does this play out in a quotidian life?
They’re pretty close. I would say epistemic idealism makes it more clear that in referring to the primacy of mind, we’re not talking about objective reality. If I say ‘the world is structures in consciousness’, I don’t mean that there are literal objective structures, like tectonic plates or fields. It’s that our understanding, our ‘meaning-world’, comprises layers of understanding, by which we orient ourselves and navigate the world. That includes scientific theories, language and the 'laws of thought'. As Einstein told Heisenberg, ‘the theory dictates what we will find’.
But this is the reverse of the common opinion, which is that minds
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The problem with that is that there is nothing known to science which accounts for the first-person perspective, which has been debated many times under the heading of facing up to the hard problem, although many continue to deny that problem, and nothing can be done about that.
Secondly, as whateer we know about complex systems, or anything whatever, is already shaped and structured according to logical laws, then there's a circularity involved in saying that the things we're studying explain the subject which is studying them. That's the same circularity which, I believe, Kant noticed.
Quoting khaled
Got any other examples of non-material things?
Quoting khaled
I was reading an interesting article yesterday about a phenomenon called ‘representational drift’. Experimenters put electrodes on mouse brains and measure which neural systems respond to stimuli. The thing that they’re perplexed by is that the location of the responses keep changing. They would have expected that once a reaction to a familiar experience was habituated, that it would light up the same areas of the brain. But this doesn’t happen - the reactions 'drift' all over the brain. So, what is producing or co-ordinating the unified, holistic response which we call 'memory'? This is somewhat similar in a way to the problem of the subjective unity of perception.
We’ve talked about ‘implicit realism’ in earlier threads. I said that there’s a general tendency to believe that the brain pictures or represents the world - an idea which is anticipated in John Locke’s philosophy. The problem I see with such accounts is that the idea of ‘the world’ which these accounts invoke, is itself neural in origin. There’s no ‘outside’ of that. Both ‘inside the mind’ and ‘in the world’ are mental constructs, vorstellung (Schopenhauer) or Vijñ?na (Buddhism). But that cuts against realism, so generally it is instinctively rejected.
See also The Neural Buddhists, David Brooks.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It's not a matter of it being offensive - it's a matter of it being false, on account of the fact that the rational, linguistic and imaginative capacities of h. sapiens places us in a different category. 'Sapiens' purportedly means 'wise', in comparative religion, you will read references to 'the sapiential traditions', being the wisdom traditions of East and West. If that is a distinction which is lost to current culture, then, so much the worse for current culture.
I'm excluding those 2. When I say materialist or idealist I mean a purist, IE not a dualist in either case.
Quoting RogueAI
"A materialist cannot say anything about consciousness because there is no way to prove matter exists". Come on now. Matter existing is a given. Or else you're not talking to a materialist.
Quoting RogueAI
What answer here would satisfy you? These questions sound the same to me like "Why is pi equal to 3.14?" Or "Why does gravity exist?" It's just the case. If you want a materialist to answer those then you first answer why pi is equal to 3.14.
Quoting RogueAI
If you mean how to get from pattern A to pattern B (stubbing a toe to beauty of sunset) then we can figure that out pretty well.
Quoting RogueAI
Because a certain pattern happened. Why did the certain pattern happen? Why is pi equal to 3.14?
Quoting RogueAI
No verification necessary. Pattern XYZ is experience ABC. All we need to verify to say something is having ABC is that it has pattern XYZ. Because those are the same thing.
This is like asking "How do we verify that the red cup is red?"
Quoting RogueAI
No as above. Most of your questions don't make sense in a matrialist context. They're like asking "Why is pi 3.14"
Quoting RogueAI
Well what do you mean by consciousness first?
Quoting RogueAI
Yes.
Quoting RogueAI
Why would you think those two things imply each other? Having a certain song playing in your head is a certain brain state. One not necessarily produced by music.
Quoting RogueAI
A pattern doesn't weigh anything. A brain weighs something. A brain state weighs nothing.
Quoting RogueAI
It's much simpler to prove than the alternative, that there is no brain and only a mind. Tack a good wack on the back of the head with a baseball bat. Your mind goes away, your brain doesn't. So the brain must exist outside the mind. Or at least, something independent of your mind that sustains it must exist (that's the brain).
Today if someone calls themselves a materialist, they usually deny the reality of experience as experienced, as in experiences are epiphenomenal or reaction to a stimulus, etc. There are exceptions too, like Galen Strawson or Susan Haack.
With idealism, it's a bit harder. You can go from woo-Chopra to common sense "reality is whatever is presented to mind'.
So the real distinction, I think, is the status of experience more so than the primacy of matter or mind.
God as most people define him. Ghosts, angels, devils, etc as most people define them. Etc.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think it even brushes against it. That's what I tried to say last time too. You can maintain that we can't know anything outside of these "inside the mind" representations (by definition you can't), and at the same time that there is an "outside the mind" thing in itself. I'm talking about ontology not epistemology here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why do you think any of this is an issue for me? I never said I could reach into your brain, pull out a piece of meat and proclaim "Here is memory". All I said was that memory is a pattern. None of this is inconsistent with memory being a pattern.
Oh well, glad you've sorted this all out. Talk some other time.
You think mysterianism is the same thing as dualism?
:up:
Yeah. That's a pretty irrational view. It's hard to think of a philosophical view which is more irrational than that. I mean even like strict solipsism makes more sense.
Matter existing is not a "given" when I'm talking to a materialist any more than Christ rose from the dead is a "given" when I'm talking to a Christian. I didn't find your other answers compelling, either. Sorry.
I think the main reason you don't find the answers compelling is that you aren't actually entertaining the view. Half your questions wouldn't even make sense to a materialist.
Quoting RogueAI
"give rise to" assumes there is a "feelign of stubbing a toe" that is different from pattern A. Already not materialist. For example. The phrasing already assumes materialism is false somehow.
Quoting RogueAI
I don't expect you to but were they at least self consistent? Because I don't care about convincing people, just testing out ideas.
Ok. Thanks. While I hold with an inherent dualism with respect to human cognition, and primacy of reason rather than mind, I think T.I already contains epistemic idealism. It is, after all, we that tell the world what it is, not the other way around. All the world ever does, is present itself.
I suspect that Descarte's duality was a philosophical compromise to allow Materialist Science to do its thing, without stepping on the toes of Spiritualist Theologians. So the "split" was not really between Materialism (atomic theory) and Idealism (Plato's Forms), but between pragmatic Science (bodies) and hypothetical Religion (souls). Yet that rupture also reflected different values. Most of us are Materialists in our daily lives, as we tend to the needs of our physical bodies. But some among us are Spiritualists, in that they are also concerned with the needs of their meta-physical minds or souls.
The mind/soul/consciousness is not a thing at all, as far as our senses are concerned. But to our sixth sense of Reason, it's a non-physical property (Qualia) that we value because it seems to be the essence of each person. However, that idealized or reified essence doesn't "explain anything" in a measurable scientific sense. It merely gives us an idea to hang-our-hat-on so to speak, to indicate that I am more than a lump of meat. That practically useless concept (of Me, or You) is what makes the difference between im-personal objective Science, and inter-personal subjective Social relationships.
Since Descartes, Scientists, freed from concern for Souls, have gone-on to change the physical world radically. Meanwhile, Philosophers are still arguing about the same old ideas & ideals that the Hebrews & Greeks wrote about 2.5 millennia ago. And they seem to value those things-that-are-not-things, not because they are pragmatically useful, but because they are personally meaningful. Ideas (words, metaphors, memes) are "not needed to explain anything" in a scientific sense, but they are absolutely necessary to convey explanations (ideas, opinions) from one immaterial Mind to Another ghost-in-the-machine. :cool:
“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her value is far above rubies” (Proverbs 31:10-31).
"Mind exists" does not need to be proven. We know for a certainty that at least one mind exists. That is not the case with matter.
Sure, I agree we know mind exists. But it rests on matter - the brain. Without a brain we'd have no mind.
Unless someone would say something like "we don't know that mind depends on brain" or "the brain is mental stuff too". I think we can say that the first option here is too plausible.
On the other hand, if you say brains are a construction of mind, then yes this makes sense. What doesn't would be to say that brains aren't matter.
I know you have not been suggesting this at all, I'm just pointing our some options that would follow from the argument.
Apparently there are non-material things, though:
Quoting khaled
And angels are categorised as incorporeal, intelligent beings, although admittedly it is difficult or impossible to imagine such a mind.
There is correlation between brain states and mental states. Causation has not been established. I think the failure to come up with a causal explanation for how brain states lead to mental states, at this point in 2022, is catastrophic to materialism, which is evidenced by the recent popularity among materialists of panpsychism. You even have Mex Tagmark, out at MIT, claiming the universe is made of math.
My point is that the Explanatory Gap is evidence that we have a situation where brain states are correlated with mental states, but are not causing mental states- if brain states are causing mental states, we'd have at least some idea of how that happens, but it's still a complete mystery.
Quoting Manuel
I think idealism is the most plausible (second option). It certainly is the most parsimonious. Positing the existence of mindless external stuff creates problems, solves nothing, and is unverifiable.
Quoting Manuel
Under idealism, brains aren't matter, they're ideas, just like when we dream of physical objects- they only exist as ideas. Idealism simply posits that what happens in our dreams is also happening right now. I have no evidence of that, of course, but at least it's a case of going from the known to the known: dreaming. Materialism goes from the unknown (mindless stuff) to the known (mind) via an unknown (and possibly unknowable) mechanism. That's not parsimonious.
Quoting Manuel
I'm an idealist, although I don't know if I've suggested it in this particular thread.
I think the only way I can understand "non material" here would be to say "supernatural" entities. Whatever else anyone may say about mind being primary or matter, I think It would be difficult to argue against naturalism. By this, I don't mean science, I only mean things of nature.
So if we are going to speak about God and Angels, we'd speak of them as things of nature. Otherwise, I don't know what to say.
Yes. There are serious problems with mind=brain identity theories. As in, clearly our experience of the color yellow is not reflected in what we understand of brains.
I'm a mysterian honestly. I think that in principle, if we knew enough, we could see how the brain creates mind via some process which we are clueless about because we lack the relevant intellectual capacities to detect them. But we are so far away from that, maybe permanently, that to argue brain=mind is almost not saying anything. Sure, my mind doesn't come from my finger, I'll grant that.
Quoting RogueAI
Sounds like Kastrup. Which is fine, he's an interesting guy. I'd quibble with the terminology in that I don't see a contradiction in saying that mind is physical stuff, which is very different from saying mind is physicSal stuff.
I mean one can be a non-material physicalist. Or a experiential materialist, meaning the stuff of matter is not inherently different from the stuff of mind. Or we have no good reasons to think so. Of course, granting that these properties called "mental" are the most secure source of knowledge we have.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sam+harris+debate+consciousness
I saw parts of Hoffman's interview with Harris and Harris' wife, Anika. It was quite interesting.
I think Kaustrup's system is elegant, though his universal mind which you mention, is also not too convincing to me. Nonetheless, even if one doesn't frame the issue as Kastrup does, I think it is clear that many problems would dissolve if we just took for granted the mental as a given and everything else would be representation.
Thanks for sharing the link, I'll check it out. :up:
We know for certainty that one mind exists. But you haven’t given a justification for why we should treat that mind as a separate kind of object from matter. A materialist has no problem with a mind existing. Because a mind is just a material thing. And has no problem with only being able to know for sure that the mind exists. For the same reason.
Quoting RogueAI
This is the problem. “Correlated with”. No, brain states ARE mental states. To assume that there is a mental state beyond the brain state by definition makes it something you can’t inquire about. You’ve defined a separate kind of object, that arises magically when the brain works a certain way and disappears magically when it doesn’t. The emotion of “Anger” for example, which in your model is like a ghost in the machine, completely undetectable, yet somehow capable of causing changes in the brain and furthermore changes in the brain in turn affect IT. But no, it’s not material for….some reason. Nor is it a pattern again for some reason. It affects and is affected by the physical world yet is ontologically different from it and can never be detected by measurement.
I just don’t see the point in defining things this way. You’ve defined something in a way that it cannot be touched by scientific method then you asked for a scientific explanation. I don’t see the point in defining emotions for instance this way. As “ghosts in the machine”. What does that explain or allow you to say that just defining them as patterns doesn’t?
Quoting RogueAI
Interesting. I’ve taken the opposite journey. Why’d you ever leave?
Though the longer I think about this the more I start to think that idealists and materialists aren't very different except for which words they want to use. I've asked on this thread since the start of one thing that requires a materialist/idealist viewpoint and no one has presented anything. It seems both positions can say the same things, provided you use their respective definitions.
You said, when asked for examples of non-material things:
Quoting khaled
So, do you believe that these non-material things (or rather, beings) are real? Because materialism would rule that out.
No I didn't say they existed. I thought that was obvious.
Were you asking a materialist for examples of non material things that exist? None obviously!
Quoting khaled
So, if immaterial things don't exist, then they're not things. Which means, you didn't really answer the question.
? A unicorn is a thing. Even if it doesn't exist.
I think we're getting stuck on technicalities here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which was?
You said, well, it's an immaterial thing - to which I responded, what are some other examples? But the examples you provided turned out to be things you don't think exist, so they're not actually examples at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Anything is a thing. It’s in the word.
The way you define it, mind is a thing in as much as unicorns are a thing as far as I’m concerned.
Way I define it mind is a pattern of physical things. Not a separate entity as you define it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you think the statement “Unicorns are things” is false on account of unicorns not existing? If not then minds as you define them, are things in the same way in my view.
Here is one difference I find pertinent: the reality or unreality of a goal-oriented processes, aka purpose, aka teleology.
Minds are purposeful. In an idealist’s cosmos - regardless of type - purpose will have an ontological presence because mind(s) have an ontological presence by default. Hence, teloi (i.e., goals or aims) will be real as determinants of what occurs, at the very least in some respect. As one simple example, my moving right rather than left was determined by my aim/telos of arriving at point B (had I traveled leftward I would not have arrived at point B, and so my goal of being at point B determined my traveling rightward). In an idealistic system, because everything is deemed mind-stuff of one sort or another (e.g., C.S. Peirce’s notion of physicality being effete mind), purpose will, or at least can, apply to many aspects of what is real, if not to everything.
Other than via thought experiments of what if we apply new senses to the semantics of well engraved terms, no materialist or physicalist system will accept matter or the physical to be to any degree determined by aims, teloi. Either under the construct that mind emerges from physical substrata via emergentism such that a property dualism unfolds or, else, that of brain = mind with no property dualism involved, because mind either is fully contingent upon matter or else is matter, and because matter is deemed to in no way be governed by any teleology, mind too then cannot be teleological in any real, or ontological, sense. There can be no ontological purpose in materialism/physicalism because matter / the physical cannot be teleological and because all that is real is matter / the physical.
The first alternative lacks much explanatory power in regard to many aspects of the physical (of effete mind in Peirce’s terminology). E.g., if idealism, then why the ubiquitously observed correlations between brain and mind in regard to brain damage? And so forth.
The second alternative results in a stark contradiction between experienced reality and theorized reality. For just as we know that minds occur, so too do we know that these minds, namely ourselves, function via goal-oriented processes. Even thought the theorized metaphysics of materialism, or physicalism, insists that no such thing takes place in actuality.
In short, a consequence of idealism is that purpose in the world is upheld. On the other hand, materialism/physicalism upholds an absence of purpose in everything, for here everything is material/physical.
Else expressed, the reality of purpose in any facet of the world requires a non-physicalist metaphysics, of which idealism is one form.
BTW, since I strongly lean toward there being such a thing as goal-oriented processes in the world, I’ll say that there being teleology in the world does not in any way necessitate that the world is thereby the creation of a deity. This being a notion that I find absurd, but this latter is a topic for different threads.
Quoting javra
Yes. There won't be any purpose above and beyond the material. But often the material moves purposefully. And I don't see a reason to propose a "ghost in the machine" that moves it. Again, unsupervised learning AI is a simple example of purposeful action born from purposeless components.
There is no "separate force" that forces things to move purposely over and beyond the physical forces, but the physical forces are enough as far as I can see.
Quoting javra
Ok so these are the two options. I subscribe to the second by the way.
Quoting javra
? You lost me at "we know minds occur". I thought the second option was that brain = mind. Minds don't occur separately from brains. The way you use "mind occur" here makes no sense assuming the second alternative.
Quoting javra
Not convinced. Do you think the self driving car that learned by trial and error moves purposelessly? It seems clear to me it doesn't. And equally clear to me that purpose for this car is NOT some "extra force" or "secret sauce" causing it to move this or that way. Nothing non-material is moving the car, yet it moves purposefully.
By the way, good job for actually answering the question and at least trying to give an example of something that requires an idealist metaphysics. I'm not convinced but at least you answered the question XD.
Idealists cannot rule out supernatural explanations, whereas materialists can.
So I take it that for you it makes perfect sense to deem material substance, or the physical, as purposeful. This conflicts with the history of materialism/physicalism, but I say, “hey, why not”. It does, however, require a metaphysical interpretation of determinants that – although hearkening back to Aristotle and his four causes – has nowadays been forsaken by most. Apropos, as a reminder, one of Aristotle conclusions given his premising of teleology what that of an ultimate final cause/telos as the unmoved mover of everything that changes/moves. Our of curiosity, would you say that this notion then conflicts with a purposeful materialism? Why or why not?
If it's "unmoveable" then yes (conflicts). If it's "unmoved" then no. If it's fundamentally unmovable it's not physical. I don't like the idea of an "unmoved mover" in in any metaphysics though.
Quoting javra
I'd ask whether or not you think a self driving car has purpose. And if it does, when exactly did we add the immaterial "purpose sauce"? Seems to have risen naturally.
Well, for what its worth, I think Aristotle's intent was that of this ultimate telos/aim/goal being metaphysically fixed, or pre-determinate; not in a partial way (the way an effect can be partially determined by one cause among many) but in a complete or absolute manner. Its my best hunch of what he might have meant. At any rate, not "unmovable" as though it were some concrete thing that could otherwise be moved by something other. It is, after all, only a telos (aim or goal or completion/end).
Quoting khaled
Wait a minute, I thought we were for the time being addressing the (now pejorative ?) purposefulness as as something material. And not as something immaterial.
As to the natural arising part: If mater, or the physical, is that which is natural, and if this is in itself purposeful, then you are just expressing that purposeful given X arose from purposeful given Y. So there's no add-on of purpose involved, because everything would be purposeful. BTW, this would apply just as well in Peirce's concept of physicality as effete mind.
As a heads up, I'm gonna sigh off for the time being.
Yes. I said "When did we add the purpose sauce" sarcastically to imply that there is no "purpose sauce". That there is no "guiding force" over and above the things that are moving.
Quoting javra
Yes. That was the point of the sarcastic comment.
Idealism _is_ unverifiable tosh.Quoting Tom Storm
I'm unaware of a good idealism. Could you provide an example?
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm talking about people who find the idea offensive. Are you telling me they don't find the idea offensive? (Also, finding an idea offensive inevitably leads one to reject it as false, so the above isn't really saying anything.) There's nothing about reason, language and imagination that leads an unbiased person to infer a second fundamental kind of stuff, some of-the-gaps arguments notwithstanding.
The point about reason, language and imagination is that it can 'see into the possible' - it can discover ideas and make them real. No animal can do anything remotely similar. As a consequence, the horizons of being are completely different for h. sapiens than for other creatures. Indeed, the differentiation between h. sapiens and other animals, let alone inanimate objects, ought not to be something that has to be defended. We have weighed and measured the cosmos, created technology that has changed the world. If you can't see how that is different to what non-rational animals do, then there's probably not a lot of point in trying to explain it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There's been a strong idealist strain in physics since the advent of quantum and the discovery of the 'observer problem'. Arthur Eddington's book The Nature of the Physical World, written between the wars, has a strong idealist bent, as exemplified by the oft-quoted passage from that text:
[quote=Arthur Eddington]The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind … To put the conclusion crudely — the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still that is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to feelings in our consciousness … Having granted this, the mental activity of the part of world constituting ourselves occasions no great surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or rather, it knows itself to be.[/quote]
As a physics lecturer, you must be aware of these and many other similar ideas expressed by modern physicists.
Not remotely. But I'm not a philosopher. I'm just curious. My sympathies are with physicalism and empiricism and I find it interesting how confident people are in their views on things unseen or unknown. Nevertheless it may well be us that is wrong on this. :razz:
Is idealism primarily speculation based on the 'observer problem' - can anyone say it's a certain conclusion?
There's a fair bit of finesse needed here.
The root is matter, the first advocates being the Ancient Greek atomism and their friends. The world as particles of stuff bumping in to each other. That thinking ended with the success of Newtonian action at a distance; physics became reliant on forces that were not transmitted by stuff. The model of choice became mechanistic, perhaps best seen in the description given by Laplace, without need for that hypothesis. Then Positivism came along, attempting to restrict meaningful statements to those that are verifiable in various ways, resulting in Physicalism, roughly the notion that the best account of how things are , or of the actual world, is given by physics.
Now think on that; physics as it stands now is one hell of a long way from Newtonian mechanistic physics, and even further from atomism. It's changed a lot since the cited quote from Eddington, too.
If there is a thread common to these variations on materialism, it's a methodological aversion to a certain sort of explanation, that involving what might be loosely called spiritual explanations. That approach has been extraordinarily successful. Putting it facetiously, rejecting the explanation that "God did it" resulted in the world we live in now.
Roughly, idealism is the view that the physical world is somehow derived from, or dependent on, mind; that the actual world is somehow a thing of the mind.
There's an interesting discrepancy that is well worth noting here. While there are a number of quite erudite and thoughtful supporters of idealism on this forum, the PhilPapers survey of philosophers found that amongst the philosophers surveyed support for Idealism sat at 4.3%.
Doubtless you will make of that what you will. But note, for our purposes here, the juxtaposition is not Idealism and Materialism, but Idealism and Realism.
(Somehow I forgot to post this about 12 hours ago ...)
Quoting Tom Storm
Their "tosh" is psychologically verified (i.e. "believing is seeing") rather than publicly corroborated.
"Good idealism" consists of noncognitive descriptions (e.g. phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism) and "bad idealism" posits noncognitive explanations (e.g. Buddhism, Platonism, Hegelianism). The latter derives life's meaning from 'a priori teleology' and the former from 'intersubjective (discursive) experience'.
Quoting khaled
A (philosophical) materialist, in order to be consistent, claims "immaterial g/G or persons (i.e. souls / spirits) do not exist". For her, material is synonymous with existent.
A (methodological) materialist eliminates "immaterial" data (e.g. qualia, final causes, souls/ghosts, miracles, spells, angels/demons) from her explanatory models.
And idealists posit that existence is experience-dependent (ideal) and deny unpurposeful (non-teleological) events, processes or objects.
update (re: idealism)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/552902
(I wrote a long and well-thought-out piece in response, but I deleted it, because I realised it would simply be dismissed as 'Stove's gem'. )
I think the difference is psychological. They both ignore the problems with verifying their respective ontologies. This implies an emotional basis that blinds them to this problem.
Depending on what the prevailing view is, they could be rebels or defenders of the status quo.
Idealism is methodological human cognition writ large, and because it is absurd to suppose humans do not think, by whichever name under which it is manifest, it is equally absurd for the idealism which follows from it, to not be. As such, while it may be rational to object to idealism’s initial conditions, it is always irrational to object to idealism itself.
If proper idealism is an epistemological doctrine, not ontological, it follows that the more cognizant juxtaposition with respect to it, is internal/external, which reduces to thought/experience, and not ideal/real. It is not contradictory for thought to contain both the ideal and the real, but it is contradictory for experience to contain both the ideal and the real.
So....do humans in fact think, experience, know? Dunno, maybe not. No empirical proofs. But it doesn’t really matter, does it. Even if wrong, best to be the least possible wrong.
That was an awesome post. But isn't idealism about the part ideas play in the makeup of the world?
From here, you'd need to distinguish between abstract thoughts about unicorns or hobbits and concrete experiences such as those objects in the world that interact with mind, which are not solely abstract thoughts.
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem with this is that the same people reject any evidence that there are some animals that would do something remotely similar, of which there are many. What would constitute "remotely similar" is always subject to revision by those that believe there can be no such thing.
Further, this is an explanation in need of a problem, not vice versa. People aren't scratching their heads about the sophistication of human language in the apparent absence of some fundamentally non-physical thing. It's an explanation that's only remotely compelling if you're really looking for a home for said fundamentally non-physical thing.
Accounting for the physical differences between humans and chimps largely accounts for the difference between how chimps communicate and how humans communicate, give or take some on-going research in the never-ending project that is science. The premature conclusion of non-physical stuff is not logical.
Quoting Wayfarer
We? Exceptional people have done this. "We" throw plastic bottles in the ocean and watch the Kardashians ;)
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course! (Although I was never a lecturer, just a researcher.) Referring back to myself:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Physics, science generally, has a long history of exceptionalism when it comes to the human mind. Creation myths are kind of prototypical scientific models.
The recent stuff on observer-dependence in QM is fascinating, I'm very excited about it, but it is just observer-dependence: no one* is saying that the cat, alive or dead, is created by minds, rather that the physical (!!!) states of brains can, in exotic circumstances, become entangled with quantum states, such that you might see dead cat and know that, for me, there's life in the thing yet.
How that entanglement occurs is very much because of the physicality of observers, cats, and whatnot.
That's a good point, but simulation theory provides a foundation for modern day materialists to seriously consider some pretty improbable events. For example, thirty years ago, I don't think any materialists would have given much credence to the possibility of the stars in the night sky rearranging themselves to spell out a message, but if this is a simulation, and that's what the simulation creators want...
Although, even in that case, the explanation for the stars rearranging themselves would still not be supernatural. I agree that idealists should be much more receptive to supernaturalism.
True, but if we discovered that, there'd have to be some compelling evidence... a paradox?
It was, generally, until Kant, and is still, from some more modern quarters, re: Royce via Hegel. For whatever all that’s worth.
I think the bottom line is....idealism is a doctrinal theory, but ideas are conceptions born of reason alone. And by attempting to quantify the empirical domain of the world, that is, to determine its makeup, with that which has no empirical content, there is immediate contradiction.
But it remains that all theories begin with either observation, or an idea that warrants a possible observation. If the latter, the theory may sustain itself pending empirical proof, or it may never obtain the certainty of experience, which is what an empirical proof actually is. SR, for instance, began with the idea of the simultaneity of relativity from a measly train station, of all things, but needed 35 years for observational justification. But even so, SR is not a condition of the makeup of the world, but only justifies a particular kind of intelligence’s particular kind of relation to it.
So, no, I don’t think ideas play a part in the makeup of the world. There’s a rather long segment in Kant that admonishes us to let established word/concept relations stand undiluted. From that, it may be best to let “makeup” of the world denote the substance of its constituency, and if so, and by the same token, if ideas have no substance, then it follows ideas cannot partake in the constituency of material things, such as worlds.
Objective idealism: consciousness creates matter (even its own body)
Now I think one has to be careful with materialism. If we are not subtle, we will find that we are all homeless according to the material proposition. If the walls of my house are just infinite electrons appearing and disappearing as the space it is in changes constantly and ridiculously fast as earth circles the sun, then I do not have a physical home. Modern philosophy has many tools to try to see this, however, in the proper light
That's wrong. You have a home, that is also electrons disappearing and appearing in space.
“ “We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object.”
But don't they partake as observed with the duck/rabbit? Isn't that sort of what Kant is saying here?:
"The capacity for receiving representations (receptivity) through the mode in which we are affected by objects, objects, is called sensibility. By means of sensibility, therefore, objects are given to us, and it alone furnishes us with intuitions; by the understanding they are thought, and from it arise conceptions. But an thought must directly, or indirectly, by means of certain signs, relate ultimately to intuitions; consequently, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by the said object, is sensation. That sort of intuition which relates to an object by means of sensation is called an empirical intuition. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called phenomenon. That which in the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. But that in which our sensations are merely arranged, and by which they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be itself sensation. It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us à posteriori; the form must lie ready à priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation."
--CPR, intro to the TA
That’s right. Realism is actually a form of idealism.
But I don't think many take notice given their entrenchment on either side.
Sure. Unless someone considers themselves eliminitavists, which I think is just crazy.
An eliminativist , like Dennett for instance , is also relying on a form of idealism.
From Rorty:
“ Dennett wants to say that it is as silly to ask whether beliefs are real as to ask whether his lost sock center is real. I quite agree, but not for Dennett's reasons. My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, spatially locatable, spatially divisible, tangible, visible, easily identified, made out of atoms, good to eat, and so on. Reality is a wheel that plays no part in any mechanism, once we have adopted the natural ontological attitude. So is the decision to be, or not be, "a realist about" something. So is the decision about what position to occupy on the spectrum that Dennett describes (with Fodor's industrial-strength realism at one end and what he calls, alas, "Rorty's milder-than-mild irrealism" at the other). Dennett should, on my view, drop his claim to have found "a mild and intermediate sort of realism" - the juste milieu along this spectrum. He should instead dismiss this spectrum as one of those things it is not useful to talk about - one of those metaphors that, like those which make up the image of the Cartesian Theater, looked promising but turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.”
It would be useful for Jack Torrance. Maybe for a QAnon member?
So your facts are real and QAnon’a
facts are fake? You might be surprised to discover what a vast web of interpretive plumbing your ‘facts’ sit on top of , and how subjective that deep foundation is.
I think it's materialists who are subject to more unverifiable tosh. One of the more frustrating elements of reading through the philosophers of yore is dealing with endless discourses on absolute junk science that turned out to be hilariously wrong. What's worse is that success in creating technologies is taken as evidence that they are correct, as if it isn't possible to develop a useful tool while being totally mistaken about how it actually works. Thinking fire was a prime element of the world didn't stop Aristotle from cooking his fish.
An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia.
I agree he relies on it. He just rejects that this is what he's doing.
The QAnon believer would do well to question whether the conspiracy he believes in is real.
So it's a valuable use for "real.”
What does subjectivity have to do with it?
It sounds to me like qualia is serving a function for the idealist much like materialism is for the empiricist. In both cases we have the claim for an intrinsically real object ( qualia or material thing) whose pure self -identity can be located independently of its interactions with an outside.
I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. They want to be in the know. They are not like a toddler stumbling around a dinner party with only faint concepts of what is going on. Or maybe they are, but at least they know they are at a dinner party (they think). Meanwhile the skeptic is being carried off for changing because he couldn't make up his mind if he needed to take a shit or not, and the idealist is eating crayons in the corner.
Sure, they can't tell you why material behaves the way it does or where it came from. If you peel the onion too far you always end up at a dead end (to mix metaphors). But they have something real to posit as the basis of reality. It's material (whatever that means).
I hear you. Although I have to say qualia is not an idea that resonates with me - it seems to be such a nebulous concept.
Quoting Joshs
That's a nice quip.
Quoting Joshs
Some of the things Rorty says about 'reality' and futility of trying to locate things 'as they are' are quite seductive. When Rorty says 'We know how to justify beliefs, we don't know anything about truth.' you can sense his antipathy towards the remnants of Greek philosophy (esp idealism) that still tempt us.
I can't tell if Rorty is a significant thinker or hopelessly lost.
Interesting - can you provide an example of a materialist wanting to be special?
All that intro is the groundwork for empirical knowledge, and as groundwork, we are not conscious of its operation. All that happens before conscious thought, which is shown by “...undetermined object...”. Ideas, on the other hand, are conscious thoughts insofar as we are aware of our ideas. So it is that ideas are not part of the groundwork of empirical knowledge, for ideas are not a product of sensibility. Ideas are not phenomena, which gives us the extension that ideas do not have objects that belong to them as intuitions, but only as conceptions.
As far as the duck/rabbit is concerned, it is the case that either the duck or the rabbit is given as sensible phenomenon. As far as our knowledge goes, it doesn’t matter which one it is; it just cannot be both simultaneously, and, it must be one or the other. Enter the conscious part of knowledge, found in the understanding, which is the source of concepts. If either one of the phenomenon is the immediate representation in intuition, then understanding relates the arrangement of that form (via imagination, if you were wondering) to the concept understanding thinks as belonging to it, and we cognize one or the other, each of its own time.
The duck/rabbit thing is not a fluke of perception, a “fancy of the mind”. There actually is a duck form and a rabbit form manifest in the illustration, thus it is not contradictory for understanding to synthesis one concept or the other, to it. Same with that table/little ol’ lady double perception. Even if a purposeful deceit, understanding compensates. But the system is not perfect, as the checkerboard/cylinder shadow illusion recently, and as far back as Plato’s equal lines, show. Those, and that damn dress. Leave it to a human, perhaps the most intelligent agency on the planet, to intentionally confuse himself.
'A physicist', said Neils Bohr, 'is an atom's way of looking at itself'.
Ultimately, we are not apart from, or outside of, reality. That is why the purported division of subjective and objective has no absolute foundation. That principle is made explicit in Kant and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I don’t accept has been superseded by anything that science has discovered since their day.
But, it’s exceedingly hard to grasp what exactly this means. As Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, humans are generally born with an instinctive sense of realism, the problems with which only become clear after considerable intellectual effort. Understanding the way the mind constructs the experience of the world from the elements of experience combined with the faculty of reason does not come naturally. That is why so few people, even philosophers, are inclined to accept it. On the whole, they don't see it, and since idealism fell out of favour they're not open to it. (It's one of the main reasons I discontinued undergraduate philosophy.)
In short - the world is not simply given. It is in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind. The sense in which it exists outside of or apart from that mind is an empty question, because nothing we can know is ever outside of or apart from the act of knowing by which we are concious of the existence of the world in the first place. This doesn't mean the world is all in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, the species and cultural mind of h. sapiens - is an inextricable foundation of the world we know, but we can't see it, because it is what we're looking through, and with.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
[quote=Jacques Maritain] what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.[/quote]
It's just a quip in response to one. I don't actually think the main motivation for idealism is to be special and have magic things, or that materialism is primarily motivated by the psychological desire to have answers where there are none.
Just pointing out that if you apply the same kind of dismissive reduction to materialism you have someone claiming they know better than the idealist, and what they know is that the essence of reality is material. Material which is...oh right, something we're quite in the dark on.
You really have to wonder about the people who choose skepticism; there is plenty, pretty much everything, still left to doubt on the materialist side without having to take that fence sitters position.
I'm sure someone could point out that we know tons about material. And we do, and they are useful things to know from a technological or scientific perspective. They just aren't very useful from an ontological perspective.
A fantastic source, by the way. :up:
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a big problem. I want to start a thread on this topic one day, but I'm working on how to articulate it. I'm very slowly re-reading C.I. Lewis' book on the topic, which is very interesting and talks a good deal about this.
People often associate "the myth of the given" through Sellars' essay, which is quite epistemological and can become quite technical. Lewis makes it epistemic-metaphysical, which makes for a more interesting read.
That's not a particular feature of materialism. Any firm, undoubted, unexamined position, whether right or wrong, would qualify, including religious ones, but also political ideology, conspiracy theories and, yes, philosophical positions.
Is it not possible that this is wrong and some version of realism might be the case instead?
Fascinating but very nebulous and how would you ever establish what is the case? There are so many theories about how human beings construct their 'reality' you almost need to choose one on faith... It's almost competing with postmodernism in the multifactorial construction of 'reality' stakes, except, presumably idealism has a foundation... is a foundation. If you can establish which version.
I discontinued undergraduate philosophy after being told by the professor that I was there to parrot back what he said, and not to learn. Incidentally he was a physicalist, objectivist. I went on instead to study Zoroastrianism, particularly the Gathas... go figure.
I certainly wouldn't have thought so. I am not even sure what counts as 'the world'.
That's true. It's part of the issue. In my teens I wrote a song, never finished, called 'Jigsaw of Sky'. It was about the idea that, usually with a jigsaw, you can use the figures in the finished artwork to work out where all the pieces go, but if they were all the same color - a jigsaw of sky - then it would be much harder to put it all together. But faith also comes into it. I had various conversion experiences earlier in life - not much use trying to convey them here, but they do happen. Various key books. It's a journey. Hence my forum name.
Quoting Tom Storm
'I am my world' ~ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Notebooks.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's not either-or. This is where Kant maintained that he was at once an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. Not one or the other. I feel exactly the same way. You can't deny empirical facts, but you can always argue about their interpretation. (See this blog post.)
There's a parallel in Mah?y?na Buddhism, the docrtine of the two truths. There's conventional truth, samvrittisatya, which is roughly speaking the domain of empiricism. Then there's higher truth, paramarthasatya, which 'the Buddha' knows. (Although ultimately, even these are not two, as a working distinction it helps keep your bearings.)
No dispute from me here. Say no to dualism, kids. But the rest seems to arise from the same prejudice: toward tying reality innately to the mind rather than trying the mind innately to (physical) reality. One of these follows logically from the fact that there are rocks and trees and insects and rodents and apes and humans; the other does not.
The problem being that physics, intent on discovering the fundamental physical constituents of reality, found itself embroiled in epistemology instead. Einstein asked, I presume exasperatedly, 'Doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody is observing it?' Presumably, he asked this question rhetorically, with the implicit answer being that 'of course it does!' Nevertheless he was obliged to ask the question. Variations on this very question were at the centre of the famous Bohr Einstein debates which occupied the subsequent two decades. And I believe the overall consensus is that Bohr's view, the 'Copenhagen interpretation', has prevalied.
If, at that time, an unequivocable, 'mind-independent' stratum of reality had been disclosed by physics, then the sentiment might be truthful. But it was not. This was even noted by Bertrand Russell in the concluding chapter of HWP in 1946, so it's not news.
It's trickier than just adding idea to matter to equal a thing. It's that a thing is a fusion of idea, the unchanging identity, versus matter (in the sense of unformed or underdetermined) ever-changing, coming and passing away.
It's those pair of opposites: changing/unchanging, form/unformed, etc. They come as packages.
The duck rabbit reference was just supposed to point to the everpresent situation.
I think this is in the TA. It's in Schopenhauer, and he credits the TA as a good explanation.
:up:
I wouldn't call that idealism. It's not even talking about ontology, more so epistemology. I incidentally agree with everything you've said in that comment. And nowhere did you actually propose "mind stuff" as different from "physical stuff". Only that what we can know about physical stuff is inextricable from our perceptions. Not that the actual physical stuff is inextricable from our perceptions.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ontological realism isn't the problem. Saying that there is a real world independent of our minds isn't the problem. Saying we can know about said world is. But really, who cares about the world independent of our perceptions? We can't see it.
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
We can't know. But we can sure guess. That's what we do in physics. Try to guess what the mind independent world is like. And stop when we've fulfilled our practical purposes and matched all the observations. We make a guess and see if it's wrong or not. If it is, make another guess. If it isn't, rejoice, until the guess turns out to be wrong.
But we can in fact know some things are not what the mind independent world is like. For instance, we can know the moon doesn't disappear when no one looks at it by organizing an experiment where no one looks at the moon, yet there will still be moonlight. So the mind independent world must have some sort of continuity that doens't require human observation at least.
Very similar to Bertrand Russell:
“...we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience.”
or
"...we have no reason to assert that events in us are so very different from the events outside us - as to this we must remain ignorant, since the outside events are only known as to their abstract mathematical characteristics, which do not show whether these events are like 'thoughts' or unlike them."
And so on.
That's because that's not what I think idealism means. Ever since we've discussed this topic, I've tried to make this point. I don't think any of the idealist philosophers seriously contemplate that mind is an objective constituent of things. (The pan-psychists do, which is why I don't like them.) That is why I keep going back to the point about not trying to objectify the mind, to make it an object of perception. (Perhaps it one of the unfortunate consequences of Cartesian dualism, which really does lend itself to the idea of there being 'thinking substance' - but note that 'substance' in the philosophical literature, doesn't mean 'a type of material with uniform properties', but 'the bearer of attributes' - more like 'a subject' than 'a substance' as such.)
Look at the first few liines of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation:
[quote=Schopenhauer]"The world is my idea”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. [/quote]
Schopenhauer is not positing a theory about the constitution of the world, but of the constitution of knowledge.
The urge is to dismiss this as 'philosophical obfuscation', and to get on with 'what is really there'. But if you really think it through, it misses the point. (Not to mention that Schopenhauer himself had a lifelong interest in, and considerable knowledge of, the science of his day. )
Quoting khaled
I understand the perplexity about this point. The way I put it is this: that you're imagining the Universe going out of existence when not observed - there one minute, and not there the next.
G.E. Moore said something similar - that, according to idealists, the train wheels dissappear from under the train when the passengers are all boarded, because nobody can see them.
But that is 'imagined non-existence' - picturing the world (or whatever) as being non-existent, in the absence of observers. So again it turns out to be a form of naive realism. The idea of existence or non-existence are both entertained by the mind.
The problem with the much modern philosophy, is that it believes it can imagine the universe as it truly is in itself, with no observer present. After all, science has estimated the duration and size of the Cosmos, and within that theory, h. sapiens appears as a mere blip, an infinitesmal speck. But this overlooks a fundamental ingredient of any theory - that of perspective. The mind's ordering of experience and its ability to quantize and rationalise, is what makes measurement and theory possible in the first place. But according to the same science, 'the mind' is simply an evolved attribute of this insignificant blip known as h. sapiens - an accidental product of a mindless process. That's where the conflict really lies. It comes from treating the human merely as an object of the sciences and overlooking the role the mind plays in their construction - until the experiments of early quantum mechanics made acknowledgment of that unavoidable.
Only an idealist can find the results of a "beauty pageant"-like preference poll credible in a physical science context. Have you ever considered (and contrasted) the spectrum of QM interpretations still under discussion by contemporary theoretical physicists?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
Yeah all the time. The second most popular interpretation is Everett, which I find ridiculous. I think QBism has a lot going for it. You know that one? Chris Fuchs? https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/
Restores the concept of 'degrees of reality'.
Well not the universe, the moon. Because that's what was being asked. "Is the moon still there when no one is looking at it"? Yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not a belief. I just did it. I just imagined my room with no one in it. You can do it too.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, but the mind does only that. Orders and quantizes. Does NOT create. So the moon will still be there when no one is looking at it. And the wheels of the train will still be there when no one is looking at them.
If there was no one around then the moon doesn't exist conceptually. There will be no mind to label this particular rock "moon" (or to recognize what a rock is), and contrast it with the empty space around it as its own thing. But the rock itself won't go anywhere.
If tomorrow an evil scientist made everyone forget about the ancient egyptians and made sure no one was looking at the pyramids for a certain period of time, the pyramids will still be there when people wake up and look at them. We would think they're just a weird prank of some sort and take them down maybe, but they'd still be there.
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to me to be saying that the mind, doesn't only categorize and label, but literally physically creates the room. No observers, no room. I can understand the concept of "room" ceasing to exist without some intelligent being to label it so. But the "base matter" that we labeled room? That should still be there no?
But when all are gone, no world is left. Or no intelligible world at any rate...
Like a boss, Gore! :rofl: That one's new to me, TS. Thanks.
Agreed. But not "no world". The "base matter" of which we make the presentation in the first place stays.
Can't you see?? The 'base matter' has been found to have no base. That is why there was/is a conceptual crisis in physics. That is why the books I keep mentioning about it have subtitles like ;what is reality' or 'the battle for the soul of science'. What you call 'base matter' is simply a cultural construct that has been drummed into you by social conditioning. You know the Everett interpretation has it that there are infinite numbers of every individual, replicating infinitely many variations of everything you do in infinitely many worlds. That is seriously believed, evangalised even, by various science popularisers. If that doesn't tell us there's a conceptual crisis in physics, then probably nothing will.
Well we are the ones who designate a world. I don't know what else in biology could even have a concept of a "world".
If we don't want to say that we create everything - and some do - then we'd have to say that something remains, which does not depend on us. Presumably physical stuff ("base matter").
But how this physical stuff remains - what nature it has absent us - is quite obscure. Some can say colorless, odorless particles remain, or perhaps quantum fields. But the only thing we can attribute to them is whatever physics says about them.
But if Russell (and Strawson and Chomsky) is correct, then only those characteristics picked out by our mathematical equations remain, but that wouldn't exhaust what these things are.
Another view is that structure is all there is, so in this respects we do exhaust the nature of the physical with our physics.
False. I don't want to get into QM again but this is far from the only (or even popular) view.
What's been found is 1 of 2 things. Either:
1- There is a base matter about which we can't know. As in the uncertainty principle is an epistemological problem not an ontological one. These are the "epistemological interpretations". The electron IS in a certain space at a certain time acting a certain way, we just can't know where. Incidentally, I don't think this is the case.
2- The base matter itself is affected when observed. An "ontological interpretation". The uncertainty principle isn't us being uncertain where the electron is while it's actually at position X, more like the electron itself is uncertain, it cannot be said to be at X ontologically. But this doesn't negate that the base matter must exist independently of us. The fact that we don't know where an electron is until we look at it DOES NOT lead to the conclusion that the looking is what created the electron which sounds to me like what you're saying.
You say the "base matter has no base". Even so. All I'm putting forward here is that there exists base matter regardless of anyone looking at it. There exists SOMETHING when no one is looking, not an electron sure, but something.
If everyone died tomorrow there would still be something left behind, agreed?
There was something, which we then designated a world. And something we designated "rock" and another thing we designated "river" and so on. All we did was designate. Label. We didn't create the something. And the something will stay behind after we die. Agreed?
Furthermore I'll add that we are also made of that "something". And that that "something" is called matter. And that there is no "other type of thing".
Quoting Manuel
Sure.
Quoting Manuel
And that's what I don't get. A structure, needs something to get structured. A "structure without base matter" is like a building without bricks.
I agree with the latter part, there is something we call "matter" not depending on us.
Speaking of "creating" can become complicated. By virtue of how a specific object induces in us certain sensations and perceptions, we put these properties together in what we call a "rock", a "river" or anything else.
If by creating you mean bringing matter into existence, sure we did not create it. If you mean all the concepts, associations and uses any object has, we do create these specific objects automatically, I think. Other animals likely don't have such concepts such as tree or river or rock.
Quoting khaled
It's the debate between epistemic structural realists and ontological structural realists. The former are what Strawson and Russell favor. As well as you and me. The latter view, is favored by Ladyman and Ross. These two think that there are only structures all the way down.
Yes, I also agree that it is incoherent to say structure is all there is: a structure is a structure of something.
I have never read the expression 'base matter'. I google it, and the #1 hit is Aristotle's 'prima materia'. Somehow, I'm sure that's not what you mean.
I am not denying that matter exists, but what I am denying is that it possesses intrinsic or inherent reality. I know that's a difficult concept, but it's a very difficult subject.
Quoting khaled
That is precisely what is at issue, it is what seems to occur. Avoiding that implication is the main motivation behind the 'many worlds' alternative, seems to me.
Quoting khaled
Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
Quoting Manuel
Lewis Carroll was one hip cat.
Our powers of abstraction and reasoning are sublime. Carroll wrote brilliant stories. I should actually re-read that some day.
Great. Fantastic. That's all I'm asking for.
Quoting Manuel
We agree then. I wonder where @Wayfarer is here.
Great.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I know what that means now that it's in context. I'll take it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed. As I said, I don't agree with the "episemic" interpretations of QM. Many worlds is the only one of those I know about.
I think we agree more than we disagree but I'm too tired to think of it right now. I'll read the quotes more carefully later and respond if I find something I disagree with.
Weird to me that you call this idealist. Especially with:
Quoting Wayfarer
The form of idealism I subscribe to, on the contrary, is not denying that material objects possess empirical reality - deny it at your peril - but saying that reality comprises both the observed object and the observing subject. But the observing subject is not anywhere to be found in the objective domain, so in no sense can be derived from or imputed to the properties or attributes of objects. That is the only way to loosen the Gordian knot. For a beautiful exposition of this principle, see It is Never Known, but it is the Knower by Michel Bitbol. He is a philosopher I learned of through this forum, and one of the best discoveries I have made here.
It seems to me that so many of these discussions keep coming down to this point and few people seem to fully engage with it or remember this is your key point of difference. It's a point I read and understand but I don't think I actually 'get' it. I need to mull over it and try and get through Bitbol.
Quoting Wayfarer
Can you put this into ordinary English?
This would be problematic if reality had presented us with anything that obviously did not sit in physics' purview. However, the success of physics relies on their being no such thing. Every physical change appears to have a physical cause: wishing the cup to be moved is insufficient; I must physically move it, which means moving, say, my arm as an intermediary. And between my wish and this intermediary, we discover other physical intermediaries such that most of the process is understood and is physical. Nothing jumps out as needing a second kind of stuff to explain, including the wish itself which is an example of processes increasingly understood by neuroscience and that are physical. The only _opportunity_ for non-physical stuff lies in the sliver of remaining mystery, as is the case for all magical human theories.
Scientists of my generation and younger are well aware of the roles of language, consensus, modelling, epistemology, ontology and phenomenology in what they do. It isn't remotely tricky; it's actually really interesting, but it only really says anything about scientific progress, not reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I've already treated much the same point earlier. Quantum mechanics is not a suitable basis for idealism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Demands for certainty usually are this asymmetrical. On the one hand, all we need for idealism to be certain is a sliver of mystery in the physical sciences. For physicalism to be even considered, we need a formal proof that there's e.g. nothing non-physical that we don't know about yet. Obviously no such proof will ever be forthcoming, nor is it necessary if one is not so asymmetrically afflicted.
For hundreds of years, the simplest, best, and maximally sufficient explanation for our experiences, their continuities, and our consensus about them has been the existence of a single objective reality that obeys physical laws. Nothing has changed. Yes, there will always be little gaps to fit gods and dualism and idealism in, but these necessarily explain less and less as physicalism explains more and more. Quite likely, the less idealism could explain and the more physicalism does explain, the more enthusiastically idealists (or dualists or theists) must insist that science doesn't work but the unavoidable fact is that it does: we are drowning in an ocean of applications of physicalist assumptions to control our world, each one asking the question: If physicalism is false, why must I act as if it is true?
Equivalent hit rate for idealism? At last count, zero. All you can really do with it is believe it or not believe it. It's an inert notion on a shrinking stage without an audience. Physicalism is a conclusion; idealism an assumption. They're not in the same league.
What do you understand by this:
Quoting Wayfarer
Neat dodge!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So I take it you’re not an Everettian?
Quoting Tom Storm
Bitbol’s article is an easy read.
Won't open for me. Looking for it.
[quote=Michel Bitbol] Ironically, then, omnipresence of experience is tantamount to its absence. Experience is obvious; it is everywhere at this very moment. There is nothing apart from experience. Even when you think of past moments in which you do not remember having had any experience, this is still an experience, a present experience of thinking about them. But this background immediate experience goes unnoticed because there is nothing with which to contrast it.[/quote]
It is this ‘absence’ that eliminative materialism is appealing to. Because it is is omnipresent, the constant given in any and all experience, then its reality can be forgotten - which is almost precisely the meaning of ‘avidya’, ‘ignorance’.
That’s Schopenhauer, not Kant. The use of “idea” is an earlier translator’s choice, because “vorstellung” can be and was translated as representation in later publications. Taken as representation, Schopenhauer follows Kant, but taken as idea, he does not. The world as will and representation is a direct affirmation of Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason, but the world as will and idea is something quite different.
But whether adding idea, or adding representation.....neither of those is what the respective authors want us to take away from his theory. In both, objects become something else, which makes adding to them, a misunderstanding.
————-
TA? The only TA I am familiar with is transcendental aesthetic or the transcendental analytic, in the CPR. I guess I’m not grasping the point you’re making with this part. Neither of those speak to ideas, or packages, or pairs of opposites. Unless you’re taking a shallow dive into dialectics, but that’s TD, not TA.
Ya lost me, bud. “Everpresent situation”? Dunno what that is, sorry.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's just a belief. If a neuron fires (objective) when someone has a particular experience (subjective), a physicalist would likely say that that firing was identically that 'having that experience', while a dualist would say that the neuron firing is some physical effect of a non-physical subjective mind, and an idealist... well, frankly an idealist has nothing interesting to say as neurons firing are a redundancy.
It's similar to what I said earlier:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Because there's an element of magic involved (mystery is apparently only terminal for physicalism), idealism, dualism, theism et al are always free to add and revise criteria ad hoc. Just as a notion of what it is to be human must be refined as we discover more about other animals (the soulful elephant, the cooperative dolphin, the chatty gorilla), the notion of consciousness can also be whittled down to what, in the end, is a plain assertion: the neuron firing is not identically the having of the experience, there is an extra bit that can only be known in the first person.
In reality, I don't know what it is like to be a bat and never will. But nor will I know what it is like to be a little girl, a gay man in '50s Utah, a gorgeous Hollywood star, autistic, dyslexic, left-handed, or a dwarf. I will never know what it is like to be you, Wayfarer, Nagel, or Trump. There is a necessary gap between the first person and the third person that arises from purely physical considerations: I am a physically distinct entity, with my own unique initial state; I am an autowiring brain which will learn from the same information (in principle) in my own idiosyncratic way (I never learned to wink with my right eye, for instance); and most importantly, I am not subject to the same causes of perception as anyone else (even in a common experience, like going to the cinema, I have a slightly different perspective, have come with a different companion, am surrounded by differently disruptive assholes...).
Empathy relies on the fact that different humans are at least similar enough that we can mirror their first person perspective with enough accuracy to, e.g., predict a threat or help a suffering person. The more different another mind is to our own, the more likely our empathy is to fail us. Psychopaths are unnerving precisely because we cannot empathise with them or them with us, and this is still within the realm of purely physicalist considerations. It's very difficult for me to empathise with individualists, racists, misogynists, etc., and these people exhibit lack of, or counter-action to, empathy themselves. (Note that when people like NOS lament the lawlessness and socialism of BLM, the one thing that never factors into their thinking is the plight of black Americans. They're not even on their radar as considerations.)
This is what I meant when I said that idealism (likewise dualism) is an explanation in search of a problem: the first/third person gap arises from purely physicalist considerations, and not at the human/animal or human/rock boundary. Nonetheless, many (most?) people insist without compelling justification that there is an additional thing: the so-called hard problem of consciousness, such that if all of the physical barriers to knowing what it is like to be a bat were overcome, we would still not know what it is like to be a bat. This is just proof that sentences can be valid without conveying understanding or meaning imo.
The observing subject is overwhelmingly likely to be found in the objective domain: imo this has been achieved, curious details notwithstanding. This does not mean that anyone should or could know what it is like to be something else. We have purely physical explanations for this that are consistent with the same purely physicalist explanations that render our world explicable and predictable, with no need of magical concepts that explain and predict nothing, not even the thing they're conjured to explain.
Please, if you would, clarify / explicate the non-trivial differences between "intrinsic" and "non-intrinsic" (modes? degrees? types? of) "reality".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:clap: :100:
:fire:
The 'what is it like to be' schtick leaves me a little cold. I'm not sure what it is like to be me, let alone Nagel's winged mammal.
As in your body is a representation of the Will. This is not indirect realism, bud.
OK. Thanks.
I don’t see how this follows or why it would be necessary. I was with you until here:
Quoting Wayfarer
I may read the PDF tomorrow but it’s time for me to sign off today.
What would be the problem with having our reality depend on our perception of the objective domain AND have us be part of the objective domain, no different from the other things in it. Why cut us off?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.....I would ask, can we also say we don’t know what it’s like for our neurons to fire? Assuming, of course, that what happens after, is not the same as what happens. If granted, it is easy to see why the dualist maintains that the conscious subject is not to be found in the objective apparatus.
Quite right. :100: I did actually mean to add... We don't actually have a great deal of insight into ourselves. Our consciousness is of second-hand and incomplete metadata about our own state, including our beliefs about ourselves, and our senses. In some ways, others know us better than we do.
Ah! Perfect timing Mww, see my above response to Tom.
Are you claiming Mary's Room is meaningless/devoid of meaning?
Again, the dualist will admonish against claims regarding insight into ourselves, for which there is a plethora of justifiable speculation, in juxtaposition to claims about the mechanistic origin of ourselves, for which there is barely any insight at all. In short, we have been given what’s necessary for insight into ourselves (brains/matter), but not yet what is sufficient (causality).
Now, the pure undifferentiated idealist does have something interesting to say, if he is so bold as to invoke the cum hoc ergo proper hoc argument, in that it is because we don’t think in terms of natural law, that unknowable mitigating factors are proved, which demand explanation, over and above mere brains. And of course, under those conditions, an explanation will be impossible.
Anyway....didn’t mean to butt in. Ok, fine. I did. Now I’ll butt out.
Sorry, shouldn't have added the bud.
What is the causality you're talking about? How matter causes experience?
In philosophy? No way.
I take it from this that you subscribe to a pragmatic view of truth, "the truth is the end of inquiry?"
This isn't my understanding of the recent history of natural sciences. This may have been a fair sentiment circa the end of the 19th century, when positivism was riding high and a "unified theory of everything," seemed on the horizon. These hopes collapsed in spectacular fashion with the onslaught of new geometries, the Incompleteness Theorem, QM, the continual discovery of new elementary particles underlying the previously "elementary" ones, etc. Now there seems to be more room for the relevance of observers in physics than there was a century ago; the progress of physicalism you're describing has been creeping backwards if anything.
As to hit rates, something being useful doesn't make it true. Newtonian views of space and time work just fine for getting an automobile or airplane to work. That doesn't make its fundemental claims about the nature of space true; indeed some turned out to be demonstrably false. Further reversals and paradigm shifts will continue. Casual locality might be the next victim.
A "hit rate," that describes hits as being "predictive enough to be useful," doesn't seem to correspond to truth to me. From the coherence view, these are at best small progressions towards the truth, at worst misleading because we confuse usefulness with truth.
The problem for materialists, and I say this as one, is that you are essentially stuck making the claim that subjective experience, the world of ideas, the only world we have access to, the immanent and apparent world, is in fact dependant on and emergent from something else: material, which is something we can't define very well. What is this material? Where did it come from? Why does it behave the way it does? These are all very open questions, and if you're the one making the counter intuitive claim "the world isn't actually composed of what it seems to be made of, its nature is actually something completely different," it seems to me that you get stuck with the burden of proof. And, in terms of advancing this proof the line of "material is a thing, the only real thing, I know this with certainty but I can't define material for you," is a real weakness. You can start with Newtonian physics and get down to elementary particles, but as you keep peeling the onion the line of description suddenly disappears on you.
You say physics necissarily encompasses everything, but physics does not pretend to explain the origin of material objects, it only studies the relationships of material objects as they exist. In popular cosmology, there is a hard stop at the Big Bang. The claim isn't just that physics can't currently explain where matter came from, it's that physics as a field cannot examine that topic. It can't have anything to say about origins past the initial explosion of matter that left physical evidence or itself. It's entirely possible that it will also never have an explanation for why physical laws are what they are, it will only be able to describe how those laws work relationally. These are the gaps you mentioned, but to my mind they aren't small gaps, they are massive fissures that are opening not closing.
It's also worth noting that serious scientists doing work on panpsychism aren't doing it because they want to work out a place for "magic" in the gaps, they are doing it to keep materialism from collapsing.
I find it ironic that Many Worlds has been used to justify materialism because the idea of reality as a Pleroma of all potential realities, infinitely branching out to encompass all potentialities sounds conceptually like something you'd read about in a idealist tract about being positing itself in sublation of non-being, resulting in a contingent becoming of all potentiality.
As in neuroscience is an on-going project? Yes, I'm well aware (and you're probably aware of one of catchphrases in response :) ).
All numbers are large compared with zero, so I'd argue we know a lot! To do neuroscience, you have to be able to make predictions, and to develop theory you have to have some of those predictions be reliable. This makes it the only player in Explanation Town, however many gaps there remain (as long as they shrink with time).
Quoting Mww
I'm reminded of people typing on computers connected to the internet that science cannot possibly work...
Quoting Mww
All butts welcome, I always appreciate your posts.
In general, yes. How amazing, a.k.a., fantasmagorically convoluted, is it, that because some sufficient neural network is not yet enabled, we are permitted to say we have no idea how the brain causes experience, but that only because some other network is enabled that permits us to say it. Taken a step further, we find that the brain tells us both, that it is responsible for experience, because we’ve already thought so, but at the same time cannot tell us how, because those thoughts have never come about. We, being rational agents, on our own accord, go even further, and rightfully assert that if we do not know a thing, it is possible there is either no thing to know, or we are simply not equipped to know it.
Aaaannnndddd.....the brain falsifies itself. Figuratively.
Then the argument comes up, that philosophy is just making stuff up, which is exactly what it is. I know, cuz I just did it. But we’re allowed, because the brain won’t inform us of making-stuff-up’s pathological uselessness by informing us of the truth of it all. And maybe.....just maybe....it doesn’t because it can’t.
Those guys.....deserving of little mention and even less respect.
“...For although education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse. Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy....”
—————
And I, yours.
Respect.
Heck no. That didn’t bother me. I’m just not agreeing with what you said (it very much is indirect realism, and the body is in no way representation of Will), but didn’t quite understand why you said it. So I decided to leave it alone.
Hey.
Thanks.
Additions/changes welcome, if you’re so inclined.
Three points to make:
Your claim is dualistic. You're saying that brains cause experience, which is to say that for any mental state, there's a causal brain state. Brain states and mental states aren't the same thing; one causes the other. So, if brain states and mental states are different, how are they different?
We're permitted to say "we have no idea how the brain causes experience" because it corresponds to reality (i.e., is true): we have no idea how matter can cause experience.
Suppose we're still in the dark about the Hard Problem 100 years from now. How damaging would that be to physicalism? What about 1,000 years from now? Or do you think physicalism can survive an infinitely long explanatory gap?
I don't know if we're talking past one another, but Schopenhauer is not indirect realism as it's usually imagined. He thinks reality is unified. He thinks the thing-in-itself is indivisible.
As the SEP says:
" At this point in his argumentation, Schopenhauer has established only that among his many ideas, or representations, only one of them (viz., the [complex] representation of his body) has this special double-aspected quality. When he perceives the moon or a mountain, he does not under ordinary circumstances have any direct access to the metaphysical inside of such objects; they remain as representations that reveal to him only their objective side. Schopenhauer asks, though, how he might understand the world as an integrated whole, or how he might render his entire field of perception more comprehensible, for as things stand, he can directly experience the inside of one of his representations, but of no others. To answer this question, he uses the double-knowledge of his own body as the key to the inner being of every other natural phenomenon: he regards — as if he were trying to make the notion of universal empathy theoretically possible — every object in the world as being metaphysically double-aspected, and as having an inside or inner aspect of its own, just as his consciousness is the inner aspect of his own body. This is his rationale for rejecting Descartes’s causal interactionism, where thinking substance is said to cause changes in an independent material substance and vice-versa.
"This precipitates a position that characterizes the inner aspect of things, as far as we can describe it, as Will. Hence, Schopenhauer regards the world as a whole as having two sides: the world is Will and the world is representation. The world as Will (“for us”, as he sometimes qualifies it) is the world as it is in itself, which is a unity, and the world as representation is the world of appearances, of our ideas, or of objects, which is a diversity. An alternative title for Schopenhauer’s main book, The World as Will and Representation, might well have been, The World as Reality and Appearance. Similarly, his book might have been entitled, The Inner and Outer Nature of Reality."
If it's indirect realism, it's a bizarre brand of it.
If Idealism is correct, should I sell all my worldly possessions and become an ascetic?
If Materialism is correct, should I invest in petroleum stocks and $1000/night hookers?
BTW - If it isn't obvious, I'm exaggerating for comic effect. . . :razz:
... as per general relativity, a physical theory...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
... which is why we can know more but not everything...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
... a physical theory...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
... the on-going improvement of physical theory...
Where is the rejection of the hypothesis that there is a single objective reality?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Being able to predict how things will be is useful, but equally insightful if you want to know anything meaningful. Impotence is not a virtue here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, but I don't claim to be a materialist, I claim to be a physicalist, which has none of the ambiguity of that archaic term.
Yes. Shameless plug: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8732/natural-and-existential-morality
Well let's see... Is that what I said?
I left it open for disagreement. If you can't disagree, then I guess we agree?
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not, but same goes there. In MWI, the universe is described by a single wavefunction containing all of the branching through its history. This is still physics.
Another version of parallel universes is in some inflation theories, in which the inflaton field collapses locally to form new universes potentially an infinite number of times. But it's still a physical field creating physical universes in a single objective multiverse reality.
I wasn't clear on what you were saying, hence my question. Can you answer it? Is Mary's Room meaningful?
Yes, it is. It's a good example of:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Knowing the wavelength of a shade of red, how it will refract in a centimeter of glass, which materials absorb and emit it is a way of knowing things about that shade of red, but it is not equivalent to knowing what it causes in someone's perceptions when photons of it have struck their retina, causing a characteristic current in their optic nerve, cascading idiosyncratic neural events (like memory recall) forged by that person's learning before being transformed by their imaging centre in particular into the metadata only they can see. Blind people can't do this: that's a subset of the information about that shade of red not available to them, just as what's going on in the oldest alien's home in the nearest star system with intelligent life is not available to me.
Mary needs to (to keep it short) process red photons into images in order to have information about how Mary processes red photons into images, which is close enough. There is no "what it is like to see red," that's idealism. The above involves only physical processes.
I think it is trivially true that there IS "what is it like to see red/be in pain/lose a loved one" and denying the reality of that is crazy, but we're at the axiomatic level here, and your claim is similar to the move some materialists make when they try to deny consciousness (or claim it's an illusion). I think it's just totally obvious that such moves are not persuasive and are doomed to failure.
Well, I know this is a big ask but how about giving the opposing argument an airing rather than just claiming it to be true, calling others crazy, and doubting their motives and prospects.
I've given a pretty comprehensive explanation as to why there is no "what it's like to see red" and you're not presenting any specific problems with anything I've said. Park that, and make a compelling case for:
Quoting RogueAI
“....all causation, that is to say, all matter, or the whole of reality, is only for the understanding, through the understanding, and in the understanding. The first, simplest, and ever-present example of understanding is the perception of the actual world. This is throughout knowledge of the cause from the effect, and therefore all perception is intellectual....”
(WWR, 1.1.4., 1818, in Haldane/Kemp, 1883)
I can’t read that as anything but indirect realism. He does say “actual world”, implying an objective reality, but that actual world is “in understanding” because of intellectual perception. Thus, it looks like the world isn’t directly there, otherwise we must have a head full of actual world objects, but only intellectually there, hence is indirectly. The world is mediated by intellect, mediated is the same as contingent upon, which is the same as indirect. Can be viewed as indirect?
Schopenhauer didn’t like Kant’s ding an sich, so went on his merry way towards working around it. Representation is internal; the object represented is external, with respect to the subject. Subjects can only know the representation. If the representation can be external, and knowledge is still only possible by means of them, then the thing-in-itself is representable and therefore knowable. POOF!!! Kant is refuted, but....oh oh.....transcendental idealism, for all present intents and purposes a Kantian creation, is sustained.
Not to infringe on your understandings herein; you’re probably quite comfortable with them as they are. Just carryin’ on the conversation.
Maybe it was obvious to you that I haven't read Kant very thoroughly. Same here. You haven't read Schopenhauer. Especially the third book. Trust me, the one Will, the multiplicity. That shit is not indirect realism.
I'd like to read the CPR at some point though.
Are you then making the argument that the most satisfying explanations of aspects of behavior such as cognition, motivation, affectivity, empathy and perception is being offered by neuroscientists rather than , for instance, philosophers of mind , clinical psychologists or phenomenological philosophers?
Quoting Mww
Could you humor me and mention some names?
I'm not calling you crazy, I'm saying your claim is crazy. I didn't mean any offense. Idealism is completely out there, so I know about making crazy-seeming claims.
Look at a red thing, stub a toe, lose a loved one (though hopefully not). I'm looking at a red object in my room. I'm having the experience of seeing red. There is something that is it like for me to see this red object: me seeing this red object. That is a mental state I can access through introspection. I assume all this is true for you as well, so when you say "There is no "what it is like to see red," and I also know that you, like me, can have the experience of seeing red, I honestly have no idea what to say. We're at first principles here. I can't wrap my head around denying the existence of "what is it like" statements.
I can't resist making a comment here:
I don't think Schopenhauer would've minded that he be labeled a TI. He believed he was carrying forward that tradition which was cemented by Kant but was foreshadowed and articulated by Cudworth and other Neo-Platonists.
I'll likely be is "losing" territory here speaking to you about Kantian affairs but what the heck, I'll embarrass myself once in a while, why not? It's not clear to me that Schopenhauer is wrong here in that what is represented is internal.
We may receive some "residue", as it were, of the thing in itself, but only the side which is represented is what we can call knowledge. Sure, Schopenhauer can say that our bodies are also part of the world of representation and that in experience we are acquainted with will - energy essentially - in merely having experience of our bodies.
But there's an open textual problem here in which it is not entirely clear whether will for Schopenhauer is "in-itself" or mediated as well. I think it is mediated, thus we are mostly overwhelmingly ignorant about things in themselves.
But I don't think I've seen an argument that refutes "things in themselves" that is satisfactory. Probably because I think it is true.
Absolutely. Making no bones about it.
Quoting RogueAI
I never said anything like that. Never mentioned a mental state. That’s a knowledge claim, and I’m showing that particular knowledge is not available to us. I said the the brain enables us to think the brain is responsible for experience.
Hmmm.....now that you bring it up, I’ll add, it is we that give brains mental states; the brain does not give them to us. Technically, the brain is wholly at the mercy of natural law, whereas it is not so obvious that mental states are. I mean....if mental states wholly followed natural law, why would we need two instances of the same thing? Nahhhhh....better that mental states are wholly at the mercy of logical law, and even if that begs a whole buncha nagging questions, at least we’ve got someplace from which to start explaining the ground of experience.
Quoting RogueAI
The set of Planck limits? Dunno about an infinitely long explanatory gap, but we got it right now. I don’t hold so much with Penrose’s quantum tubules, but I do more so with the interference problem, in that attempting to penetrate to the piccoscale with instruments might just disrupt the very thing we’re trying to look at. I know there are pictures of clefts.....blew my mind, that did.....but to assimilate all involved clefts into an instrumental observation of the experience of bungee jumping? Can you even image the size of THAT helmet???
Besides, if it is possible that natural law relinquishes it intrinsic certainty at some infinitesimally small scale, why couldn’t they relinquish it at the scale of 30B synapses/mm3? Seems reasonable to me, but then......I’m me.
That wasn't actually my intent, and with respect to that intent my wording was too narrow. But now that you've asked me, I think... yes? Yes, that's probably true, with no disrespect at all to philosophers of mind , clinical psychologists or phenomenological philosophers.
That was the intent behind the thread. “What are the important consequences of both”. It turned into a generic materialism vs idealism debate though :/. Something I don’t care much about if there is no important consequence behind both. Still fun to participate in.
So far the attempts were: You can’t have purpose with a materialist metaphysics. And you can’t have a house with materialist metaphysics. I’m not convinced of either but at least there were attempts.
QM can be seen as a refutation to that. It only refutes the “in themselves” part, it doesn’t refute the “things” part. There is things outside of us but that depend on us for their existence. Electrons in a double slit experiment for example.
This leads people to say that the world comprises of things-not-in-themselves and the observers which come together to make observations, “creating reality” in a sense. Things need another thing to define them. They’re not “in themselves”
Now wayfarer has stated that this “other thing” is a separate sort of thing from the “things not in themselves” if you understand what I’m saying. I don’t know where the justification for the split came from so I’m not sold on that.
Now there are theories of QM that maintain a “thing in itself” world that doesn’t require our observation in any way, but the only one of those I know is multiple worlds interpretation. If you want to introduce collapse, you’re gonna have to say that things aren’t in themselves until they’re collapsed. I’m just not sold that we doing the collapsing are in any way special, or that the collapsing couldn’t be done by the exact same type of stuff as the stuff getting collapsed.
All of these are physical requirements. A brightly red room, a cup emitting a certain wavelength, and working eyes and visual systems. So the “experience of seeing red” is a physical state. And to have the “experience of seeing red” is to have that (or largely similar) physical state.
The “experience of seeing red” isn’t a different sort of thing from the physical configuration while seeing red. It’s precisely that physical configuration.
That’s how I would answer it. The “experience of seeing red” isn’t a “different kind of object”, it’s just a configuration of the brain.
Maybe. That is if we think that QM exhausts everything there is to know about reality. It could be the case. It could also be the case that there are things that exist which we have no capacity to cognize, but an intelligent alien species could and they might be able to sort out some of the difficulties we have in physics.
It's not an unreasonable suggestion, I don't think.
Quoting khaled
I can't speak for him but I have my own views. The gist of it would be that a part of "things in themselves" is cognized by us, the rest is not, because we don't have the necessary intellectual or sensory apparatus to detect them. So more exists than what we can detect.
This is extremely speculative, but if I had to guess, I'd agree with you that a "separate sort of thing" need not be of a different nature: it's all physical stuff, or ground stuff. The claim is monist.
Quoting khaled
We are special in so far as we can discover this aspect of the universe. But as to what causes the collapse, I don't know. I believe most physicists say we don't play a role in that, so I'd defer to them for now.
As for a practical application of materialism vs idealism, if materialism a la Dennett or Chuchland is true, then nothing really matters, we are just bags of molecules that don't actually suffer or laugh or think. We are mere illusions. I don't think that's true, nor do I believe people think this is the case either. Even scientists don't behave as if they were mere chemicals or molecules.
Probably not, considering.....
“...The whole actual, that is, active world is determined as such through the understanding, and apart from it is nothing. This, however, is not the only reason for altogether denying such a reality of the outer world as is taught by the dogmatist, who explains its reality as its independence of the subject. We also deny it, because no object apart from a subject can be conceived without contradiction. The whole world of objects is and remains idea, and therefore wholly and for ever determined by the subject; that is to say, it has transcendental ideality....”
....even if I can’t find a reference where he actually calls himself one, as does Kant, practically, in CPR A370, “From the start we have declared ourselves in favor of this transcendental idealism...”, which grants immediate acknowledgement for objective reality, while at the same time withholding knowledge of it in itself.
—————-
Quoting Manuel
Agreed, and because, or, iff, the human cognitive system is in fact representational, and iff our empirical knowledge is of those representations alone. Otherwise, some new theory is required in order to refute it. Somehow. Ain’t been done yet, but maybe just because nobody cares anymore.
Be happy to, but I don’t know any of them. Heard of ‘em, though. Those guys.....in general, whoever denies the workings of science.
Perhaps. I think some people do, very few obviously.
I think some conceptual work can be done in TI, but it's just extremely difficult.
Such as? Synopsis?
The knowledge of mental states is not available to us?
Well take Schopenhauer, he added the idea of will to TI.
Or Cudworth before both of them argued that we know nothing of the things themselves outside of "motion" and "pressure".
Although Russell certainly would have not called himself a TI and he didn't agree with Kant, some of his statements carry forth a TIist flavor when he says "we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events except when these are mental events that we directly experience.”
Or Einstein when he discovered that space and time aren't absolutes and independent of each other, but relative.
One can disagree with Kant having so many categories or with Schopenhauer on will. One can argue that things in themselves is misleading, as we should speak of events in themselves, because nature is constantly in flux and not stable. And so forth.
It's building on the edifice, not taking it down.
So yeah, I think there are a few paths open in TI.
I don’t think so, but it’s fine if you do. Hell.....I don’t even know what a mental state actually is. How would I know it, such that it couldn’t be anything else?
So we'll state simple. You know what the experience of a toothache is, right?
You know the experience of a toothache is different than the experience of listening to your favorite song, so then the experience of a toothache can't be the experience of listening to your favorite song.
Depends on whose T.I. you’re talking about. Won’t be Kant's, because.....
“...My chief aim in this work has been thoroughness; and I make bold to say that there is not a single metaphysical problem that does not find its solution, or at least the key to its solution, here....”
The paths open, are the changing of it, by finding a metaphysical problem it doesn’t solve or isn’t able to solve. Seems like a lot of trouble.
Absolutely no offense taken. I was just highlighting the conversational dead end of your change in mode of conversation.
Quoting RogueAI
Ah but here you've switched from "what it is like to see red") to "what it is like for me to see red". I was rejecting the former. But I would reject a "what it is like for me to see red" too.
A good demonstration that there is no "what it is like to see " is the infamous blue and black/white and gold dress, where the colours of a photograph depend very much on who is doing the looking. But even considering only a single person, what colour an object appears to have is very much in the moment: the unconscious brain does a lot of preprocessing before your consciousness gets its hands on data. You see white, even when it's yellow. To test this, just film a white wall in your house with a camcorder and play it back on your TV at various times of day, with and without interior lighting. How a colour looks even just to you is not fixed, but is context-dependent. You are the most important context (there is no "what it is like to see red"), but not the extent of that context (there is no "what it is like for you to see red").
No, they don't. See my explanation on page 3. Idealism is the converse of realism, not materialism.
And ducks are a form of non-ducks.
Sure you can stay with Kant. Nothing wrong with that at all.
I personally follow Schopenhauer and Chomsky, but I don't always agree with them.
I asked how to know a mental state, such that it couldn’t be anything else. But you referred me to experience. Am I to infer that the only thing a mental state can be, is an experience?
Apparently I cannot have a mental state of driving a GT40 at 150mph. Never having done that, never having seen it done, thus having no experience of it, in the context of your pain and music, how is it possible for that sentence to come to me?
Then it must be that imagination is a mental state, but imagination is not experience, therefore, experience is not all a mental state can be.
Because you stipulated simplicity, I won’t pursue the correctness that a toothache is a feeling, not an experience. Just sayin’.......
Sure, because I don't see a reason to stipulate that these things need be incompatible.
One can be a materialist like Dennett or a materialist like Strawson which are extremely different.
One can be an idealist like Berkeley or Schopenhauer also very different.
Similarly, I don't see why realism and idealism need to be in tension. It could be that only those aspects of the world that interact with our innate science forming faculties give us access to reality absent people.
Or mind could be an illusion or reaction like Dennett says. Many options to choose from.
Chomsky is too modern, too political, and FAR too analytic, for me, so what about Schopenhauer do you find disagreeable?
and flippancy makes my balls itch.
Well I guess it depends what you find satisfying. This criteria suggests 'that which comes first'. What I had in mind, after you'd prompted it, is that only neuroscience is explaining *how*, i.e. what is fundamentally going on. This isn't to diss cognitive psychology or philosophy of mind -- big fan -- any more than the satisfaction of quantum electrodynamics disses chemistry.
I thought materialism was a form
of realism
:up:
Well, here's a problem - the assumption that there is an internal and an external world, rather than just a world. The world is just what is the case; the concatenation of true statements, as it has been phrased elsewhere.
Some see the world as inherently divided in twain, and then feels a need to choose one side or the other. Idealists choose mind. There are materialists who do much the same thing, only to choose the opposite side. The victims of Descartes' folly. If a physicist is an atom's way of looking at itself, then there are atoms. Not only does the purported division of subjective and objective have no absolute foundation, it is misleads us from the very start. It requires years of misleading philosophical study before one begins to doubt the human instinctive sense of realism. Years spent trying to understand the way the mind constructs the experience of the world from the elements of experience can erroneously lead to one mistaking the experience for the world for the world - to Stove's Gem.
This might be somewhat of what @Manuel and @Joshs have at the back of their discussion.
The opposition between realism and idealism is one of the many ways in which philosophical myth building leas on astray.
There's just the world, and included in it are our reactions to it.
The point I was making was that the materialist position was stronger a a century so ago when we felt we had a good grip on what matter was and it seemed like all that was left was to tie up some loose ends. The problem is in claiming all reality is something, and then being unable to define what that something is. Without a definition for the material you risk falling into a tautology, "everything that exists is matter. What is matter? It's everything that exists."
Physical models of yore would have rejected non-local causality as magical nonsense, but here it is. The necessity of an observer might be here to stay too. Maybe the definition of the physical can be stretched to contain these factors, but at that point it seems at risk of becoming meaningless, a stand in for "reality." It would be quite different from the materialism of the 19th century. Yet because that 19th century model is simple and useful, we still use it routinely, out of convenience and habit. However, we shouldn't confuse "useful" with "true."
As to impotence, if results are what matter, the idealists have plenty of those. As the grand father of communism and nationalism, the arch idealist Hegel certainly can't be accused of not getting results; the last two centuries have revolved around the ideas he helped birth.
Sure I understand your Chomsky angle. I do like Kant, but I think he is way too obscure at times.
As for disagreements with Schopenhauer, let's see:
I believe we have freedom of the will, unlike him.
I'm unclear if will is actually continuous or discrete. I'm more sympathetic to the continuous angle, but am I'm not convinced yet.
I don't think his doctrine of Platonic ideas makes much sense. It allows for way too many ideas. Not that I'm unsympathetic to Platonism, on the contrary I very much like this school of thought, just not as articulated by him.
I think history is more important than he gives it credit for.
Obviously he was quite wrong about phrenology and vision and women.
But these are not huge disagreements, just different points of emphasis so far as philosophy is concerned.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/551863
In other words, if I take your meaning correctly, the territory includes making and using maps of the territory. Agreed.
And good that we did mistrust this instinct, it led to the great discoveries made by Galileo and Newton and many others. The way the world is (absent us) , is not the way it appears to us.
Had we stayed with instinctive realism, we'd still be debating in scholastic terms.
Yep; but more than that, it includes making maps of the territory. The world it is a recursive process, not just a concatenation of true statements. That's a pivotal critique of stuff from the Tractatus to
I don't agree. But you've presented only half an argument here. What exactly is it in Newtonian physics that you think disagrees with how things appear?
Apples seem to fall, because that's what they do. So does almost every concrete object. They want to fall down.
Except that they don't and the force that keeps the moon orbiting the Earth is the same force that causes apples to fall.
And Newton agreed with this, it was incomprehensible to him that objects can affect each other absent physical contact.
What evidence could you possibly have that the world is "in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind." if the fundamental nature of the world is, by your own argument, ineluctably hidden from us? How would you explain the easily testable fact that we all project the same objects in the same locations except by appealing to a collective mind? Is there any evidence of a collective mind? If not, would not the most parsimonious explanation be that we divide the world up conceptually in ways which reflect the actual structures which appear to us as objects and events, as well as the actual hidden structures of our own constitutions?
I'm not going to try to articulate your ideas for you. Put them together yourself, then get back to me.
Let me rephrase:
Apples fall because of gravity, not because they're "going to there natural place". That's what the scholastic philosophers used to say about apples falling, because that's what seems to be happening when we look at apples falling.
Yes, Newton was forced to accept it. Because to him, it was obvious that the idea of gravity made no sense. Otherwise he wouldn't have been forced to accept anything.
Having no inherent reality or real being; their nature is imputed to them, not intrinsic to them, in accordance with their causes, context and the intentions of the observer (per the madhyamika dialectic of Mah?y?na Buddhists.)
In the context of physics, that manifested as the inability to discern an absolute point-particle - an atom, in fact. It was found that sub-atomic entities have a kind of ambiguous or indeterminate nature rather than being indivisible atoms.
Quoting khaled
That's where the experiment i mentioned, about 'representational drift', is relevant. What it shows is that the same stimuli produce completely different patterns of neural activity over time - it drifts around different areas of the brain. The experimenters had assumed that habitual reactions to stimuli would produce habitual patterns in the neurons. But they don't. The the brain is constantly reconfiguring itself, it is an immensely dynamic and highly complex system (actually the most complex phenomenon known to science.) SO it is easy to believe that a configuration 'stands for' or 'represents' an experience, but we're not ever really in a position of comparing the object of the experience with the neural data. Partially because the neural data is so complex, but also because we're never in a position to stand outside the idea or the experience, and the object of experience.
So you a have a mental construction, where you imagine red 'in the world' and the experience of red as a pattern - but that too is a pattern! It is precisely 'the eye trying to see itself'. You set up this world picture, here the subject with his ideas, there the world with it things, and think that it's all settled.
Quoting Banno
I am aware of that. The kind of approach I take is closer to phenomenology, and also Buddhist forms of non-dualism, so I'm very much aware of that conceptual division, which I've mentioned a few times in this thread already. You should take the time to peruse Michel Bitbol, that paper contains numerous references to Wittgenstein.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well said. Quoting Janus
It's an a priori argument, based on the observation that there's no light inside the skull.
Quoting Janus
I do accept that there is a collective consciousness. This Forum is a splendid example. But so are culture and society, generally. H. Sapiens has the longest period of extra-somatic enculturation of any creature - 18 years, give or take - during which we onboard our understanding of the world. And as we see on this site, the current culture is generally scientific in orientation with respect to that. What I draw attention to is the deficiency of science as a source of values.
So within that matrix of culture and society we have common cultures, languages, and so on.
Quoting Janus
The first is pretty straightforward, the second much less so.
For whatever reason, that link will not work. Nor have you elicited much enthusiasm for it's contents. I've a half-dozen other things to read first.
But that observation, according to your own argument, is derived from what is empirically given and hence must be (according to you) unreliable as a guide to what is real, and also the argument, being based as it is on an empirically given observation does not, according to the standard definition, qualify as an a priori argument.
It is not physics. It is metaphysics. But because it is associated with physics, then it attracts a kind of scientific imprameteur, which is fallacious, in my opinion.
The question I always ask, and I've asked this on Physics Forum - where I didn't receive a good answer - is that if 'many worlds' is the solution, then what is the problem? What conceptual problem is so vast that as extravagant a speculation as infinite numbers of universes is a solution? I think it is trying to avoid the implication that the act of observation seems to have material consequences. In other words, it wishes to rationalise away the strongest piece of evidence of non-physical causation that physics has thrown up so as to avoid the philosophical consequences of that.
I don’t think Karl Popper would agree with you here. He was heavily influenced by Kant in his philosophy of science. He would want to say that the influence of Kantian idealism on notions of the relation between the subject and the world led to a change from naive or metaphysical realism to forms of positivism.
Beyond Popper and Kant , phenomenology recognized that pointing to a world out there that we simply react to is an incoherent way of thinking. Each change in our account of this world carved up its particulars differently.
One of my favorite quotes on the relation between subject and object:
“Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes (Putnam 1992, 120). Putnam is not denying that there are “external facts”; he even thinks that we can say what they are; but as he writes, “what we cannot say – because it makes no sense – is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices” (Putnam 1987, 33). We cannot hold all our current beliefs about the world up against the world and somehow measure the degree of correspondence between the two. It is, in other words, nonsensical to suggest that we should try to peel our perceptions and beliefs off the world, as it were, in order to compare them in some direct way with what they are about (Stroud 2000, 27). This is not to say that our conceptual schemes create the world, but as Putnam writes, they don't just mirror it either (Putnam 1978, 1). Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned (Putnam 1990, 28, 1981, 54, 1987, 77)
Dam Zahavi on Putnam
In that case, you misunderstand my position, as often, but with the amount of incoming flak, I can't really deal with it right now.
@Banno - that paper I mentioned is here http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/NEVER_KNOWN.pdf
You're the second person who has reported it not working, don't know why. Still say it's worth the read. Bitbol has done a lot of excellent writing on the philosophical texts of Schrodinger and the integration of Kant and quantum physics.
There's always an excuse for your inability to deal with objections that threaten your beliefs. You always claim I misunderstand your position and yet always fail to explain how I am misunderstanding it.
I really have tried, many, many times in the past.
Let me have another go. I've already said, in this thread, that I'm an empical realist. As I understand it, Kant also says that whilst he is a transcendental idealist, he's an empirical realist also. I don't see a conflict. But almost everyone here immediately assumes, well, if you're an idealist, 'you think the world is all in your mind'. People said the same of Kant after the first edition of CPR! That's why in the second edition he included the critique of Berkeley.
I think a lot of those bagging out 'idealism' in this thread have not the least inkling of what it means. So anyone advocating it is constantly battling a barrage of straw man arguments based on a total misconception.
This is, as Banno rightly says, one of the baleful consequences of Cartesian dualism, but most people are still entrenched in the mind/body dualism that it generated. It was Kant who saw through that and worked out a way past it.
Quoting khaled
That's really the bit I care about.
Quoting Wayfarer
Even given this (which I agree with though, again MWI exists and is valid), why do you go on to split the observer as a different type of thing from the thing being observed?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's dualism and I precisely don't do that.
Quoting Wayfarer
No a configuration IS an experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is no "object of experience". The configuration IS the experience. That's my view.
I wouldn’t say he worked his way past it so much as pushed it to its limit. It took phenomenology to get past dualism.
SO much the worse for Popper. I wish I had a fire poker at hand... Would you care to summarise that horrifying quote? I'm not reading it, for fear of burning the porridge.
Is the appearance of the configuration unique to each subject or can the configuration be described as existing as what it is independently of any given observer?
You've lost me. A lot of terms and distinctions that make no discernible differences. "The inability to discern an absolute point particle" ... so what? "Imputed, not intrinsic" ... wtf difference does that make?
And you're an idealist of some flavor, right? Well then, how can you use physical sciences and (interpretations of) physical theories to support your purportedly non-physicalist (idealist) philosophical positions without being flagrantly inconsistent?
Yes you may be right. But he pointed the way, I think.
BTW, a good single page primer on Kant is this.
Quoting khaled
What do you mean 'cut off'? Objects appear to us, for us. We ourselves are not objects to ourselves - well, the body is, in a way. But ourselves, as knowing subjects, and by extension, the mind, as the knowing subject, never appear to us as objects. I mean, isn't that self-evident?
Here's an alternative source
Bitbol should appeal to Joshs also.
Sorry for the length , but I couldn’t possibly say it better than Zahavi and Putnam.
I do like Bitbol
There's an obvious similarity between Schopenhauer and Neoplatonists. Is that also true of Kant?
I shouldn't have to explain that. Science went looking for the fundamental constituents of physical reality. What did they find? Some references:
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Einstein-Debate-Nature-Reality/dp/0393339882
https://www.amazon.com.au/Uncertainty-David-Lindley/dp/1400079969
Notice the subtitles of those books...'struggle for the soul of science'....'great debate about the nature of reality'....they're not kidding about that.
Bohr gave a lecture in the 1940's or 50's to the Vienna Circle. At the end, they all applauded and nodded. Bohr was completely taken aback. He looked at them and said, 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you haven't understood it'.
Quoting 180 Proof
Straw man. You're trapped in the 'mind versus matter' dichotomy. I recognize science as the method by which facts are disclosed, hypthoses developed, and laws discerned. But reality exceeds the bounds of science - obviously - and furthermore, modern scientific method is not the only cognitive mode available to humankind.
What does it mean to be an empirical realist if not to say that the phenomena we collectively experience are independent of any mind? From my readings of Kant and his expositors I think that is what he thought. The way in which these things appear to us, but not the things themselves, are dependent on the kinds of senses and minds we have, or as I would prefer to put it, the kinds of embodied beings we are.
As to his transcendental idealism, I take that to mean that we can only speculate what things are "in themselves", or what anything even the mind itself is "in itself" via ideas, and that those ideas can never constitute knowledge. That is why Kant is understood to have undermined traditional metaphysics which had always been based on the idea that we have a faculty of intellectual intuition which was taken to yield knowledge of the real.
Not sure what you mean but we have different brains so I think so?
Quoting Joshs
No clue what this means though.
This:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
No.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why this split? That's what I'm asking.
The thing doing the knowing is not an ontologically different type of thing to the thing getting known. I don't see a reason to split them like that.
Both idealism and materialism are forms of ontological realism, which just means they both want to make hard claims about ontology.
I just made the same point, and have done in the past, but that is an objection Wayfarer simply refuses to address. I wonder why?
I don't see how you can't discern the distinction between subject and object. Balls and hammers and rocks are objects, and that humans are rational sentient beings and subjects of experience. If you can't see the distinction then it's pointless to discuss it.
Quoting Janus
I refer you to the answers I've given you many previous times, which you say are a dodge, or are not answering your question, or failing to see the point. I might address it, and others might fail to understand what I've said. There's really nothing further I can do about that, either. But to recap:
I see no conflict between idealism and science. The conflict is between idealism and scientific materialism. Scientific materialism, physicalism and (in some forms) scientific naturalism are not themselves scientific theories, they're philosophical attitudes that interpret science and philosophy in a particular way, insofar as they treat science as normative with respect to what can be known. And, I might add, @Janus, I've seen you say the very same things any number of times, to other posters. :angry:
I think the question of science and normative judgement is where Kant comes into the picture:
[quote=Emarys Westacott, The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant;https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/the-continuing-relevance-of-immanuel-kant.html] Kant understood that both everyday life and scientific knowledge rests on, and is made orderly, by some very basic assumptions that aren't self-evident but can't be entirely justified by empirical observations. For instance, we assume that the physical world will conform to mathematical principles. Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that our belief that every event has a cause is such an assumption; perhaps, also, our belief that effects follow necessarily from their causes; but many today reject his classification of such claims as “synthetic a priori.” Regardless of whether one agrees with Kant's account of what these assumptions are, his justification of them is thoroughly modern since it is essentially pragmatic. They make science possible. More generally, they make the world knowable. Kant in fact argues that in their absence our experience from one moment to the next would not be the coherent and intelligible stream that it is.
Kant never lost sight of the fact that while modern science is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, we are not just knowers: we are also agents who make choices and hold ourselves responsible for our actions. In addition, we have a peculiar capacity to be affected by beauty, and a strange inextinguishable sense of wonder about the world we find ourselves in. Feelings of awe, an appreciation of beauty, and an ability to make moral choices on the basis of rational deliberation do not constitute knowledge, but this doesn't mean they lack value. On the contrary. But a danger carried by the scientific understanding of the world is that its power and elegance may lead us to undervalue those things that don't count as science.
According to Kant, the very nature of science means that it is limited to certain kinds of understanding and explanation, and these will never satisfy us completely. For as he says in the first sentence of the Critique, human reason has this peculiarity: it is driven by its very nature to pose questions that it is incapable of answering. Now hardheaded types may dismiss out of hand as not worth asking any questions that don't admit of scientific answers. This, one imagines, is Mr. Spock's position, and possibly such an attitude will one day take over completely. But I suspect Kant is right on this matter for two reasons.
One reason is that in our search for explanations we find it hard to be content with brute contingency. If we ask, “Why did this happen?” we will not be satisfied with the answer, “It just did.” If we ask, “Why are things this way?” we expect more than, “That's just the way things are.” Yet however deep science penetrates into the origin of things or the nature of things, it never seems to eliminate that element of contingency, and it is hard to see how it ever can. Leibniz's question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” will always be waiting.
A second reason, which I suspect is related to the first, is that some questions we pose probably can't be answered, yet we ask them anyway because they express an abiding sense of wonder, mystery, concern, gratitude or despair over the conditions of our existence. Why am I this particular subject of experience? Why am I alive now and not at some other time? What should I do with my life? Why do I love this person, and why is our love so important? Such thoughts may take the form of questions, but they are really expressions of amazement and perplexity. The feelings expressed fuel religion, poetry, music, and the other arts. They also often accompany experiences we think of as especially valuable or profound: for instance, being present at a birth or a death, feeling great love, witnessing heroism, or encountering overwhelming natural beauty.[/quote]
But yea if your argument for why there should be this subject object split is because "There should be this subject object split, can't you see how this subject is split from this object!" then yea there isn't much to discuss.
You claim you have given answers, but I have never seen anything from you that I would count as a satisfactory answer to the question. Now I'm not criticising you for assuming idealism; when it comes to that question we all have to assume something or remain undecided, what I object to is the claim that you have evidence for your assumption.
I object to the same claim in realists for their assumption of realism, although I do believe that some form of realism (taken to mean that the objects and processes we experience are independently existent, even though the ways we experience them is obviously not) is a more parsimonious explanation of how it could be that we all experience the same objects in the same locations.
And I've never seen anything from you that indicates you understand what I'm talking about. Fault may well be at my end, but again, there's nothing I can do about it.
Anyway, as I tried to say before, it's Saturday morning here, my other half is annoyed with me playing with my invisible friends, so have to sign out for a while. Bye.
Anybody who takes a dim view of metaphysics is a type of anti-realist.
"Real" just has a use in social settings. Don't get carried away such that you're making unverifiable claims.
No, Frank. The term has a specific meaning that you would drown by your inattention.
Sure. Take a look at Lovejoy's essay here. Keep in mind that for some strange reason, Lovejoy was very anti-German, so take his critique with a grain of salt:
https://archive.org/details/essaysphilosoph00unknuoft/page/264/mode/2up
I do hope so.
You're wrong.
Wait, keep going. This might be your most fuck-witted feat.
Quoting Wayfarer
Oh, okay. You draw distinctions without presenting any differences they make? I guess I'll just have to do without and ignore your posts, sir.
No. This "dichotomy" you're pinning on me is the strawman, Wayf. No worries though, you're entitled to your inconsistencies (& woo); I won't trouble your dogmatic slumber again.
Do you do a wayfarer and then say that "Thus the subject is a separate sort of thing from the object" or do you stay monist? I don't see the reason behind doing a wayfarer. Maybe you could enlighten me (assuming that's what you want to do).
You should explain to your "other half" that from the fact that she cannot see us it does not follow that we are invisible. :brow:
QM modifies the terms of realism but stays within its bounds. Phenomenology argues that the subject is not separate from the object. What wayfarer’s move does is turn the subject into a kind of object. Phenomenology doesn’t begin from a subject looking at an object. Rather, it begins from indissociable interaction wherein each moment of experience is an intentional act composed of a subjective and objective pole. Neither exists by itself and each reciprocally determines the other.
Here’s a critique of representational realism from a phenomenological vantage:
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism
I will have another try, then.
Quoting Janus
I think it's a priori. The skull is not transparent. The cornea is, and light strikes the receptors in the retina, but those stimuli are then interpreted - which is the point at issue.
Quoting Janus
Kant argues against Berkeley's idealism in which he agrees that there is indeed something beyond ideas themselves. But as I have already said, I don't agree that idealism means that 'the world is all in the mind'. What I'm arguing is that all knowledge of the world has an inextricably subjective component, which is not apparent in experience (as per Kant and Husserl) but without which knowledge is not possible.
Materialism and physicalism both overlook or ignore the irreducibly subjective nature of knowledge in that sense. I say that 'the physical' is itself a construct - that is why the definition continually changes. The notion of what constitutes 'the physical' is completely different now than it was a century ago, and may be completely different again in 100 years. Which is precisely Hempel's dilemma.
Quoting Janus
Right - they can constitute knowledge of phenomena, but not knowledge of things as they are in themselves. I am in agreement with the quote that @Joshs provided in this post - which I take to be neo- or post-Kantian in spirit.
I suppose you can say that, but we can have certain knowledge of mathematical proofs, and so on.
Quoting 180 Proof
No skin off my nose.
In what sense could we be said to be not separate from, for example, galaxies which are yet to be discovered? This would only make sense conceptually if a universal or collective mind were posited in which all the things and events we call the universe are thoughts or imaginings that our own experiences, thoughts and imaginings are "mirroring". In this view the essence of things would be ideal and physicality itself a manifestation of this ideality.
There can be no definitive evidence either way, but the assumption of mind independent energetic structures and processes is arguably the more parsimonious hypothesis, and to me, the more plausible. I acknowledge that in the final analysis plausibility, if not parsimony, is a matter of taste, though.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but mathematics is conceptual, so the knowledge there is analytic and does not by itself tell us anything about the world. It seems that the world is mathematical and patterned in structure, though, and even some animals can do rudimentary counting, so it does not seem implausible that it should evolve out of pattern recognition. Animals can also recognize things, obviously; otherwise they would be unable to survive.
Yes and I don't like that.
Quoting Joshs
As long as the "subjective and objective poles" are made of the same stuff then I can live with that. But I have a problem with splitting the things in the world into objects that need observing and observers that observe them, as 2 ontologically different categories.
Our observation ontologically "creates" reality. That's just QM (at least the versions with collapse, MWI disagrees). My problem is when people say that the observation, and observers, are different kinds of things from the things getting observed. I see no evidence for it and I a lot of problems that can arise.
Please show me where I've done that. As far as I'm concerned that is what I've been arguing against.
Quoting khaled
So you would say that when a biologist observes lions in the wild, that the biologist is a lion?
No but that the biologist is a bunch of matter just like the lion.
The quote says I disagree with observers and observed being different kinds of things. A lion and a biologist are the same kind of thing in many respects. Being a physical object for one.
What I disagree with is the idea that the biologist is onotologically different from the lion, not physical somehow. That seems to me to be what you're saying.
This is an empirical observation, not an a priori judgement.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think this is a strawman. Of course all knowledge (ours at least) is human knowledge, and as such, is not independent of the human mind, or indeed, of the human body and its senses.
Berkeley argued that the world is in God's mind (any universal mind would do). Kant rejects this, and he does not posit a universal mind in which individual minds partake. Kant considers the appearances of things to be dependent on the human mind, but not things in themselves. What he says is that, although we can imagine that things in themselves are "something" we cannot imagine or understand what that something is, because any such imagination or understanding would not be (human) mind-independent. He rejects the traditional (and specifically Spinozistic) notion of the veracity of intellectual intution, and thus puts paid to traditional metaphysics.
So, in summary, it is trivially true that all knowledge of the world has an inextricably subjective component, and from that trivial truth no further knowledge may be gleaned.
It is contested by all those who advocate physicalism, it's the very point at issue. Designating it 'trivially true' is simply a deflection.
Quoting Joshs
Bolds added. That's what I've been saying throughout, if it isn't clear, apologies for that.
Quoting Janus
But they're still trying to eliminate something. What, pray tell?
Ah guess every monist is wrong. Riveting argumentation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Saying "you're too dumb" in 15 words instead of 3 doesn't make it smart. Or less of an ad hom. We were being civil so far and it was enjoyable. So why?
I don't think you have enough evidence to conclude that my thinking is not precise enough. Considering so far you've talked to countless people who have had as much or more experience than you in the field and found none of their thinking to be precise enough. So either you're a genius and truly everyone is just not precise enough, or just confused. From what I've gathered, it's the latter. You think there needs to be an ontological split where it isn't necessary.
Quoting Wayfarer
False.
Then again the way you use physicalism and idealism is weird.Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Unnecessary ontological splitting that you haven't been able to justify despite being asked by everyone to justify it.
If knowledge is true (and if it is not then it is not knowledge at all) then it is a faithful mirroring of how things are presented to the community of inquirers. We can thus surmise that our knowledge grows out of our pre-cognitive interactions with the things in themselves, and such interactions count as mind-independent insofar as we cannot be aware of them at all.
So, I repeat that it is trivially true that all (apart from other animal) knowledge is human knowledge and thus cannot, by definition, be said to be independent of the human, and that there can be no absolute sentient being-independent knowledge; we are entitled, indeed bound, to say that much.
Quoting Wayfarer
They are trying to eliminate the intuitive notions we have of consciousness and experience and subjectivity.
You really can't because the contributions of subjects to the appearances of objects are pre-cognitive. Essence is just an idea.There is no essence beyond the idea of one, or at least if there were, we could never apprehend it without it becoming just another idea, or at least we could have no way of knowing that it was anything more than just an idea.
No. They are saying that everything there is to know about the mind, can be known by way of the objective sciences. And that's all I have to say at this point, thanks for your responses.
Everything that can be known about the brain ( at least about how it appears to us) can only be known by way of the objective sciences. We can know (directly in the sense of familiarity) our experiences, what we think and how we feel and so on, but that knowledge does not tell us anything about how they those experiences, thought and feelings came to be just as they appear to us to be.
Quoting khaled
So, without “purpose sauce” in a materialist or physicalist universe, either:
a) There is no purpose, period.
b) Everything has purpose, including little subatomic quarks and such; i.e., matter/the physical is ubiquitously purposeful and so AI purpose and human purposefulness are nothing but emergent aspects of matter’s purpose in general.
c) ???, but do express what option “c” might logically be as a rational option, if option (c) is needed.
As a reminder, I started off by claiming that there can be no purpose in a materialist/physicalist universe, this being option (a).
Also as a reminder, you’ve claimed it ridiculous that matter/the physical is of itself purposeful, thereby denying option (b), here (if I’ve misinterpreted, please clarify):
Quoting khaled
It's OK, you can say it if you want to: you're a materialist and for you goal-directed behavior - this, again, being purpose - is not real.
Quoting javra
When? Quote it.
Quoting javra
When did I say "goal directed behavior is impossible"?
Please reread what I've written more carefully. From my previous post:
Quoting javra
Again, "if I've misinterpreted, please clarify".
I'll again ask from two day's back: Do you find that matter/the physical is in and of itself purposeful, i.e. consists of goal-directed processes?
You've now answered, Quoting khaled
If "closest" then maybe not quite it. In which case do you believe there is a duality between non-purposeful matter and purposeful matter wherein the "purpose sauce" emerges?
This, though, would be a form of dualism, and not monism.
---------
Apropos, you are aware that the vast majority of materialists/physicalists would find it absurd that a subatomic quark, as well as any matter in general, engages in goal-oriented processes. Right?
"Goal oriented" is a human construct. Nothing is inherently goal oriented. Humans are what see purposes in things and people. I think we can agree so far.
Now I also think these humans are not any more than matter. So does "matter itself" consist of goal-oriented processes? Yes and no. Some matter (humans) see purpose in other matter. Rocks don't have purpose inherently, but what gives them purpose (humans) is made up no differently from the rocks themselves (IE made up of matter).
There is no ethereal spirit that decides what does or doesn't have purpose. No "second kind of thing" that decides what matter (the first kind of thing) is to be used for. What is doing the deciding is the same type of thing as the thing whose purpose is getting decided. Because I don't see a need to create a split here. And all I've got in support of one is "Oh it's self evident" which it isn't.
If you think there needs to be some split here please explain why. I asked wayfarer and he told me it's because there is a split there.
Quoting javra
No. See above.
Quoting javra
Inherently? Yes. But we say that a self driving car engages in purposeful behavior. Is there any more to the self driving car than the matter that makes it up? Does the self driving car have a mind? Or whatever you want to call the "second sort of thing" that assigns purposes (which I think there is no need for).
While I think I can see the commonsense understanding you're likely espousing, I also see an inherent logical contradiction in terms of the monism which is materialism/physicalism. If:
Quoting khaled
And, if matter / the physical is of itself purposeful, then purpose would logically be ubiquitous, in which case inherent goal/aim/end/completion-driven processes would obtain for everything.
Again, we're currently working with the premise that purpose is real, and not merely an illusion which we assign to others as well as to ourselves.
Quoting khaled
Yes we humans, and other lesser animals, can assign purposes to things. But this is confounding the act of assigning X with the the process itself of being X. Goal/aim/end/completion-driven processes can be assigned to some object, rightly or wrongly, yes. But this is not the same as the given addressed in fact being goal/aim/end/completion-driven in what they do. And no, there is no "second sort of thing" required for there to actually be purpose.
The question is, can materialism in any way account for purpose? So far, not that much, here being very accommodating.
It isn't inherently. Some matter we assign purpose. Some matter we don't. Which is identical to saying that some matter has purpose and some doesn't, respectively.
Now, we, are also made of matter. I don't see a need to suggest we're different. What's the problem with this?
Quoting javra
I'd say it's real and assigned to others as well as ourselves. Don't know where the "illusion" thing came from. You think it's NOT assigned by us? That purpose is somehow inherent in the matter itself?
Quoting javra
How does something having purpose due to assigenment differ from it "itself having purpose". What are you suggesting here?
Something has a purpose when we assign it a purpose.
Quoting javra
Ye..Yes it is.
Also how do you "wrongly assign purpose"? If I use rocks to build something have I "misused the rocks" because rocks are "actually" supposed to be used for lighting fires? I don't get this notion of something inherently having purpose. No we assign things purpose, it isn't inherent.
Quoting javra
?
So you're suggesting some sort of monism in the first sentence. Then asserting that materialism doesn't do it. So idealism? I'm losing you.
You are in essence saying that the "we" you're addressing is the "second sort of thing". Does a quark assign purpose? You and I might both agree on a "no". Yet we're built from quarks and such, and we assign purpose.
No, to me you're not getting the difference between assigning X to Y and Y in fact being X. As one difference: The first can be wrong. The second addresses what is factual.
Quoting khaled
I'm not here intending to provide a coherent alternative metaphysics to materialism via the soundbites of of a forum. I'm simply saying that materialism fails to account for the reality of purpose, and that only a non-physicalist metaphysics can do so.
Yes. There is no contradiction here. Quarks aren't at the level of complexity to be thinking about the purposes of things. We are. Now, where's the problem?
Why do you believe that a collection of quarks is incapable of assigning a purpose to something because one quark cannot assign a purpose to something? What is the logical operation being used to go from "Quarks can't assign purposes" to "Humans (a very complicated collection of quarks and such) can't assign purposes". I don't see one. I don't see the need to add any special "purpose assigning powers" to us. The complexity is good enough as an explanation for why we can assign purposes and quarks individually cannot. Just like how a single logic gate cannot drive a car, but a computer can drive a car. Hope I've made it clear now.
Quoting javra
False. You seem to think I need to say this. Again, what's the logical operation you use to come to that conclusion? That if a quark can't assign a purpose then a very complicated collection of quarks and such cannot assign purpose. It doens't follow. I can maintain that a single quark cannot assign purpose, but a very complicated collection of quarks and other subatomic particles put a certain way (humans) can.
Quoting javra
That difference doesn't exist here. Replace X and Y with what we're actually talking about. You're suggesting a difference between assigning a purpose to a rock and a rock in fact having a purpose. The idea that a rock can "in fact" have a purpose outside of the assigned purpose is absurd. Do you actually defend this idea? You think we can assign the "wrong purpose" to a rock? What's the right purpose of a rock, factually?
Quoting javra
If by reality of purpose you're suggesting that things inherently have purpose without anyone assigning it to them then, not only is that not even incompataible with materialism (just say that the matter itself has purpose, your original option b) but it's also, again, absurd in my view. If you think things have inherent real purposes then please tell me the "real purpose" of a PC. Is it to chat on forums? Answer emails? Play games? Which is it?
See my answer below:
Quoting khaled
Was this written material purposely written by you? I'm not asking if your existence has "a purpose". I'm asking if you were purposeful in what you typed. If I'm to assume this text was purposefully written by you, then you were goal-driven in so writing. Were the goal(s) that drove you assigned to you by some other the way you assign purpose to a rock? If not, how was your purpose, your goal-driven behavior, in writing this text not inherent to you? Inherent relative to your brain, if you prefer.
Likewise, is my purpose in replying obtained due to some other assigning purpose to me?
-------
Ah, I won't erase this, even as I recognize there being too many questions in this post. And I'm frankly getting tired.
We disagree. I'll leave it at that.
No. My goal was assigned to me by me. I decided to respond. No contradiction there either. If you see one point it out.
Quoting javra
If I'm to have an inherent purpose I would be very very sad if that inherent purpose was responding to philosophy forum posts :rofl:. Reminds me of the "you pass butter" meme.
Quoting javra
I'd assume you assigned it to yourself too, though it's possible you're being forced to type at gunpoint, in whichcase it would be assigned by someone else.
Quoting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inherent
What definition of inherent are you using?
Then again ...
Not assigned. In the thing in the first place. This one:
Quoting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inherent
These also do:
Quoting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inherent
You are pushing the idea that things have inherent purposes that we can be factually wrong about. But every time I've asked you to name the inherent purpose of this or that object you haven't answered. Why is that? My guess is because things don't actually have inherent purposes and that purpose is assigned, not inherent.
And furthermore, you want to argue that if a bit of matter can't assign purpose, therefore any configuration of matter cannot assign purpose. I don't see how that follows. So I don't see what your problem is with purpose in a materialist metaphysics. You haven't actually shown why a materialist metaphysics cannot support purpose. I keep asking you to show the contradiction you think is there.
It's direction of fit.
Having an attitude towards stuff comes pretty quickly from being able to move stuff around. Working out what is around you involves changing belief to fit the world. Moving stuff around involves changing the world to suit your belief.
Neuroscience cannot explain logic, rather, you have to use logic to learn brain science. I’m not making this up: one of the articles I’ve been referring to is about the fact that science can find no kind of correspondence between stimuli and neural patterns in mice. The ‘laws of logic’ are such that any being that evolves has to recognise them, not that they’re an output of a meat brain. The idea that you’re going to find ‘neural correlates’ of, say, the law of the excluded middle, is scientistic fantasy. (Yet for all that, we still know what it is!)
Where brain science is useful, is in treating neural disorders, something for which we should all be profoundly grateful. But the idea you can understand philosophy of mind by studying brain science is, well, just the kind of myth that the Dennett’s and Churchlands put about masquerading as ‘philosophy’. (They should be penalised for misuse of science.)
Quoting javra
Beat you to it. :-)
:rofl: Yea, point taken.
Interesting read. Thanks for it.
But we didn't. You're treating ignorance as a strength.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So your response to the fact that I'm not a materialist is that I need to be because you know how to dismiss that? I'm a physicalist, in the Popper sense. It doesn't matter (haha) whether one considers spacetime or photons to be matter: they are physical.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's clearly not what I had in mind.
No, the wavefunction is physics, not metaphysics. You're mixing up the interpretation with what it's interpreting. MWI describes a single physical reality: the universal wavefunction which doesn't need MWI itself. The branching (superposition) is just ordinary quantum mechanics.
[quote=Phys.org] The wave function, also known as the quantum state, is the description of a quantum object and plays a central role in quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, the nature of the wave function is still debated.[/quote]
I’m not the one mixing up here.
If you hold that QM is not a physical theory, then we don't have the same language.
Interesting read, as well. Thanks to you too.
I think this actually the problem. There are multiple ways to define physicalism. I've seen physicists refer to their own experiments on non-local causality as "experimental metaphysics," but perhaps others would say the term doesn't fit.
My beef with some of the definitions of either physicalism or materialism (they get used somewhat interchangeably in many places) are those theories that expand their definition to mean essentially "whatever is shown as true fits the definition." Thus, non-local causality is now "physical." If we were to discover solid support for panpsychism and "phi" at work in the universe (IMO, unlikely), this too would become physical/material. The term becomes a stand in, not for any real hard set of statements about the world, but "whatever ends up supported by science." Again, the problem of nearing tautology.
This can be seen in the fact that materialism died as "everything is material," when physics began identifying things that are non-material, and was forced to accept more components of its monism. Now it seems likely it will have to do a paradigm shift into something new again. If physics has to start accepting things like phi (this is a dot out on the horizon now, not a real challenge) then physicalism might as well become defined as the statement that "real things are reality."
Never heard of it and sounds like a contradiction, but assuming someone can and does do experimental metaphysics, what impact can that have on the definition of physical? Would you doubt your own steak if someone else ordered pasta?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is the problem with "materialism" and the reason I do not self-identity as a materialist. I think it's also the reason why anti-physicalists insist on keeping the word current.
No such issue with "physical": either it regularly interacts with other physical stuff such that it can be indirectly observed, or it doesn't. If it does, it's also physical. If it doesn't, there's no way of verifying whether it does or does not exist, and can therefore be discarded as an idea.
Mass tells spacetime how to curve; the curvature of spacetime tells mass where to go. If mass is physical, then spacetime is physical. Atoms de-excite and release photons which then excite other atoms. If atoms are physical, then photons are physical. Everything observable is physical (Popper). Follow that along and everything is physical.
What would destroy this definition is finding something observable (directly or indirectly) that was genuinely inexplicable, for instance an uncaused effect or genesis. That would be a dualism: we'd have physical observables that interacted in a regular way, and non-physical observables that did not.
The reason I bring this up is this is effectively a schema for generating of-the-gaps arguments. Creationists, for instance, rarely debate the laws of gravity; they are interested in the big bang and the origins of life because they see the potential for an uncaused, irregular effects there. Likewise dualists like the first/third person gap because they see the potential for non-physical causes and effects.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Why?
Sure. :up:
What is "physical stuff"? I'm assuming some kind of mindless stuff that exists independently of and external to our minds? Do you believe that if all minds in the universe disappeared, the universe would change in any way (except for the fact that there are no more minds)?
Stuff that is observable, directly or indirectly, to the senses to behave in a regular, predictable way. Basically something is physical if it can be measured and modelled, hence the name for what does exactly that: the physical sciences.
Isn't your experience observable to you?
My experience is not observable, no: it is the process, not the object, of observing.
Quoting RogueAI
I have already mentioned several. I could cite the standard model as a starting point, but that is just a model. The above covers whatever exists, not just whatever we think exists. Counterfactual physical things are constrained also to be observable and regular, however there's an interpretive layer. For instance, the gravitational force field was thought to be physical: we could indirectly observed it through it supervening on more directly observable stuff, and it was regular-seeming. But it didn't exist, that is: the model was only a (very good) approximation.
Physical properties (from my above definition) are necessarily properties that dictate what a physical object does. So observing something is the same as seeing it's properties. We see that the boulder takes ten men to shift a little, we see that it has the property of mass, high-valued compared to the cup that a cat alone can knock off the table.
We see the cup, so it has the property of being seeable, which we now know means that it is a configuration of bound charged particles. Further, now we know about the visible range of light, we can also see that that configuration is made up of smaller configurations of bound charged particles (we call those atoms). The physical property of charge is, in part, the capacity to be seen, i.e. to emit light.
Generally, if A supervenes on B, then A has the property of being able to supervene on B, and B has the property of being subject to B. If, in this process, B also supervenes on A, then:
a) B has the property of being able to supervene on A;
b) A has the property of being supervened upon by B;
c) if A or B are directly or indirectly observable, A and B are physical.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Actually, I'll correct myself here. Yes, my experience is observable. For instance, you can watch me experiencing a film (in principle, not a weird invitation). Obviously I can't watch me experiencing a film.
I agree completely.
Quoting khaled
Yes, but does our observation create the content of that reality: the object and its properties? More specifically , is there a normative relation between the object observed and the subject observing it , such that the kbjsext can be understood as emerging as a variation on a subjectively constituted theme? This would be the organizing and constraining role of a paradigm in relation to what can appear as an empirical object. It seems to me that this kind of intrinsic constituting role for the subject in relation to what is ‘observed’ is missing from qm. Time,space , the content of the object with all its properties, don’t seem to be co-constituted by a subject , but independent of it.
Copenhagen also disagrees, in its original guise anyway. The wavefunction in Copenhagen is epistemological, not ontological. It contains the factual and counterfactual information about a system. Once a measurement is made, we can identify the factual term and discard the rest. This was called "wavefunction reduction" at the time, now it's known as "wavefunction collapse".
Even wavefunction ontologists who believe in collapse are still usually describing "universal collapse", i.e. the collapse is true for all observers. Observation may cause the collapse, but it is not a subjective collapse. If you spill the coffee, yes, it's you that did it and in effect you "realised" the coffee spillage, but it's still a universal fact with a physical explanation.
Bohm would also disagree, as is the case in any QM interpretation with no collapse mechanism (MWI, like you say).
Is the existence of the cup dependent on mind(s) in any way?
:sad:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure, I agree with how you present this.
What about reading a novel, don't you observe images in your head? Or when you are lost in thought?
It sounds like your view of the subject is compatible with that of Zahavi and Michel Henry.
From a recent paper or mine :
“ Zahavi(2005) says he is among those phenomenologists who “deny that the type of self-consciousness entailed by phenomenal consciousness is intentionally structured, that is, a question of a subject–object relation”. “Any convincing theory of consciousness has to respect the difference between our consciousness of an object, and our consciousness of our own subjectivity, and must be able to explain the distinction between intentionality, which is characterized by a difference between the subject and the object of experience, and self-awareness, which implies some form of identity.”(Zahavi 2004)
While Zahavi finds inconsistent support in Husserl's work for his model of minimal ‘for-meness', Zahavi appreciates phenomenologist Michel Henry's unwavering insistence that pre-reflective self-awareness is a non-ecstatic and radical other to object consciousness.
Zahavi (1999) approvingly paraphrases Henry:
“Unless phenomenology were able to show that there is in fact a decisive and radical difference between the phenomenality of constituted objects and the phenomenality of constituting subjectivity, i.e., a radical difference between object-manifestation and self-manifestation, its entire project would be threatened.”
“Henry conceives of this self-affection as a purely interior and self-sufficient occurrence involving no difference, distance or mediation between that which affects and that which is affected. It is immediate, both in the sense that the self-affection takes place without being mediated by the world, but also in the sense that it is neither temporally delayed nor retentionally mediated. It is in short an event which is strictly non-horizontal and non- ecstatic.”
My argument is that construing the subjective dimension of experience as a pure self-identify turns it into precisely what Heidegger critiques as Cartesian substance and Husserl describes as res extentia, that a thing endure as itself over time. These are the pre-conditions for an object.
A property isn't for a particular event. The single-objective-universe hypothesis has it that the cup has the capacity to emit light without the evolution of conscious observers, and, if provided with energy, will emit light whether it's seen or not.
But... putting aside minds for the moment, my view is that no photon is created that is not destroyed, that is: a photon's final destination is a boundary condition of its existence. From a panpsychist point of view, whatever that destination is, that is a conscious observer. So there's that.
Of course, I personally have no direct evidence of any cup that I am not seeing. If I look away, I cannot see it. The opposite of objectivism (in the above sense, not the Randian sense) is solipsism: the belief that only my conscious experiences are real. Solipsism cannot explain why the cup appears the same when I go back to it, or why it disappeared after I heard a meow and a crash. This is why the single objective universe is the best explanation for our conscious experiences. Science is the test of that: the hunt for exotic phenomena that puts that hypothesis through its paces (falsification, null-hypothesis).
Quoting Manuel
Yes, of course. I think that's evidence in favour of physicalism, not against. Physicalism can explain why we see things that aren't there, because physicalism casts experience as information processes by hardware (the brain).
Dennett talks about this. You read about, say, the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List (or was it yellow?) and you *see* that red coat, right? Where is it? It's not on the screen, you're not watching any screen, you're reading a book. It's not in the book, that's all black ink on white paper. If we cut open your skull and tear apart your brains, we won't find a little red coat, not before we're arrested anyway. So where is it? In your mind, but what does that mean?
Red is a physical property. It tells you lots about the material that's emitting it. But even when we see it, there's no red in our retina, in the optic nerve carrying the signal to our brains, in the imaging centres in our brains or in the distributed memory of that red coat. What we have there is _representations_ of red things. 'The little girl's red coat' is a representation of a red thing, as is the network of neurons that encodes our memory of it and the particular electrical signal that carries information about it (obtained from the projection of photons from the screen onto the retina) to our brains. And what neuroscience is starting to figure out is how the red coat is represented in our consciousness.
In effect, we are never apprehending a red coat, only representations of a red coat, specifically that limited subset of representations of a red coat that is available to the part of the brain that's responsible for conscious knowledge (the hippocampus): knowledge about representations.
We have to get away from the whole notion of understanding and truth as mirroring , correspondence , representation, adequation to ‘ what is’ independently of us. Instead, we have to conceive of knowing as production , enaction. We don’t discover the world, we enact it. Let’s take a step back from empirical observation and start from the model of an organism
interacting with an environment. The older forms of Darwinism made this essentially a one-way street. The organism adapts itself to the constraints of the environment it finds itself in. The environment , however , is considered as independent of the organism. This is consistent with the idea that knowledge is the mirroring of an independent world. Newer interpretations of Darwin reject this one-way approach, arguing instead that what constitutes an environment for a organism is determined by the normative aims of its own functioning. What constitutes an ‘object’ for a creature is a function of what emerges as useful and relevant in the context of the organisms goals. We need to look at the empirical objects that emerge for the scientist in this way, not as dead independent self-identical things, but as what emerges for us out of the environment that we create in relation to our goals and purposes. What we discover , such as a distant galaxy , isn’t a thing sitting out there waiting for us to find it, but a useful component of our schemes
of interaction with our world. We only see something f as what it is to the extent that it serves a purpose for us, no what it is in itself cannot be separated out from the function it serves. What the ancients observed weren’t galaxies or stars or planets in the 21at century sense , but what had meaning in relation to their very different purposes.
This is a reasonable summary of neo-Kantianism , or representational realism. I’d really love your take on this paper , which critiques this approach from a phenomenological perspective:
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism
Here’s a snippet:
“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition.
Husserl embraces a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and thereby dismisses the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different. “
It sounds like you think the cup still exists if no one's observing it. I was going to ask if it's conscious, but you seem to answer that:
You're claiming that whatever a photon hits is a conscious observer?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Solipsism can explain the behavior of the cup by positing that you're creating the reality you're experiencing (i.e., you're dreaming all this). It can't prove this explanation, but the "it's all a dream" explanation does explain why reality is the way it is.
Ah, so you follow the Dennett type of thinking. OK, got it. :up:
I'm in the Galen Strawson camp in this argument.
Thanks for the examples and the reply. I don't have much to add to that.
No, not me, panpsychists. I think consciousness is a capability of brains (and maybe other, similarly complex and malleable information processing systems). Panpsychists believe that consciousness is a property of _everything_. (I don't know if that includes photons and spacetime. I've never gone into it that deeply with one.)
Quoting RogueAI
Well no, it can't. Physicalism can explain why I don't see the cup on the table: there is a me-independent cup on the me-independent table knocked off by a me-independent cat. This explanation tells us that experiencing no cup on the table was the only possible experience I could have. Solipsism has no explanation for why I experience no cup on the table rather than any of the infinite other experiences I might have.
You experience no cup on the table because you're dreaming there's no cup on the table, and you're experiencing what you're dreaming. That's an explanation.
Also, you earlier stated that there is no "what it is like to be red". So if you go and do x and someone asks you "what was it like to do x?" do you understand what they're asking? Do you think it's just a language game going on?
That's not an explanation. It explains absolutely nothing about why I'm having that experience and not some other.
Quoting RogueAI
I'd infer they're asking me what it was like to do x on that occasion. If I frequently do x, they're asking for a summary of my impressions when doing x, each of which might be quite different.
I watched Fight Club a couple of nights ago and I enjoyed it a lot less than I did 20 years ago. I'd interpret the question "What is Fight Club like?" as meaning my current view on it, which isn't what it was like to me 20 years ago. "What it is like to watch Fight Club" isn't a thing; "What it is like for me to watch Fight Club" isn't even a thing. In fact, "What it was like for me to watch Fight Club the last time" isn't even *a* thing, it's lots and lots of events.
OK, so instead of a dream, let's pretend this is a simulation, and you notice a cup in the simulation. Why am I seeing a cup? you ask. Because the simulation is programmed that way. Do you accept that as an explanation?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is unclear. Let's look at the following conversation:
"I went skydiving."
"What was it like?"
"It was scary and fun."
What part of that conversation is unclear or "not a thing"?
Is the same true of the experience of a cup? Is there an intrinsic meaning of fight club , one that transcends time and context? Even for the author, screenwriter and actors? What about the physical recordings of the movie? Don’t they maintain their intrinsic self-sameness over time? But even so , their meaning must be experienced by a subject. Is my experience of the cup
the same as yours, or the same as my experience
of it a moment ago? Is the cup different than Fight Club? Is there an intrinsically self-identical object surviving the myriad changing perceptual experiences of it? This is what science tells us. It defines for us objects that move in space time that are what they are in themselves apart from their interaction with us, apart from the purposes they serve for us, apart from any of the varying contexts in which they appear for us. There is no doubt this way of describing the world has its uses, but can we then go back from the abstraction of the mathematical object to the original perceiving and claim to found the latter on the former? Or is the object in geometric space-time a useful but impoverished derivative of the acts of intentional constitution that produce such idealized abstractions as the mathematical object?
The simulation hypothesis leads to a lot of other questions about our experiences. If we are living in a simulation, it does appear that it has been programmed according to what physicalists call physical law: a simulated moon will always orbit a simulated planet orbiting a simulated star according to Einstein's equations. Why? Because it must do so? Or because it is one of many possible simulations? Why do electrons have the same charge and mass and magnitude of spin?
These are the same questions physicalists ask of the single objective reality too. I don't think there'd be any significant difference if the simulated universe always obeyed physical laws.
However if I am the only player, or if the simulation glitched or was patched, we'd end up with the kind of seemingly uncaused and/or irregular behaviour I was talking about earlier. If we ever saw such a thing, something else other than physicalism might have to be entertained.
Quoting RogueAI
I didn't say it was unclear; in fact I specifically worked through how I'd interpret such a question.
I think I'd be typical in interpreting that as "what was it like the last time you went skydiving," not "what is skydiving like" generally. But skydiving isn't a single experience. There's the nervousness in the build-up, the overcoming of one's fears to jump out of the plane, the sense of falling, the rush of air in your face, perhaps disorientation, exhilaration, more fear that your parachute might not open or will open twisted, the jolt of the parachute opening, the view you have from the air, the feeling of hitting the ground, the awkwardness of getting clear of the chute, the happiness of having done it, the memory of all of the above.
The next time I go, I'm a different me, having a different parachuting experience, perhaps in a different place. The nervousness beforehand, the fear of jumping, etc. will all be different. The thought of the parachute not opening might not occur to me. I might hurt myself as I land, end up a sprained ankle. I might be in a bad mood that day.
I can have different kinds of memories of different parts of one skydiving "experience" because it's not one experience, and I might have very different individual experiences the next time.
I can summarise this. "Skydiving is great if everything goes okay," but packed behind all of that are a bunch of different, sometimes conflicting experiences.
Yes that’s what I meant by “ontologically”. It is the most popular interpretation of QM, that the wave function somehow “collapses”. And “collapse” isn’t just is “finding out” where the electron “really was all along”, it is literally the electron changing from an undefined wave to a defined particle.
Quoting Joshs
How do you explain what happens in a double slit experiment. If all the electrons are “really somewhere” we just don’t know where then why is it that they ACT as if they’re “really everywhere” until they are observed and collapse into being “really somewhere”.
I don’t know what “constituted by a subject” means. We don’t decide where the electron appears, but without observation, there is no electron, just a quantum wave (or quantum soup as I like to call it).
Most interpretations of QM as far as I understand don’t have it be that electrons are “really somewhere” bumping into each other, but what is “really there” is quantum soup, until something takes a look, then it collapses, ontologically, to electrons bumping into each other. We know this because quantum soup looks different when going through two slits than when electrons go through two slits.
Yes I know it’s not the only interpretation. But I don’t understand epistemological interpretations. And I thought they were the minority with ontological being more popular.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I didn’t say the collapse wasn’t universal. I have no clue whether or not it is. Nor do I particularly care much to research it right now.
I'm not sure any more tbh. But Copenhagen is the original, and that has an epistemic wavefunction, i.e. it represents our knowledge about a system, not the real system itself. You're probably right that this isn't the default position it once was. MWI seems very popular, and recent Wigner's friend experiments suggest a more observer-dependent collapse.
Quoting RogueAI
Yeah, enjoyed talking to you, Rogue.
Quoting khaled
Constituted by a subject means all we first perceive are
undetermined phenomena with no particular order or pattern to them , just sensations ( not yet colors or sounds , since these are already more advanced constructions), that never repeat themselves. Then we gradually come to see a flow of events , such as the changing perspectives of a visual scene , as interlocked , and we come to hypothesize these correlated events as aspects of a single self-same object. But it doesn’t become a stable ‘it’ for us until we correlate its changing appearances with the movement of our body in relation to it , how it changes predictably in response to the movement of our head, eyes , body. It only becomes an empirical object when we correlate our private experience of it with that of other persons, who have their own vantage on it. Then our own perspective of it changes to just an aspect of ‘the’ empirical object for all of us. As you can see, from this vantage there is. thing primordial about an electron . It is a highly complex concept.
And this is an object than no one actually sees. It is an abstraction, just as the personal object for me is an abstraction composed of a flow of events. We never actually attain the ‘object’ , not because the thing in itself is out there inaccessible to us, but because there never was a thing in itself, just the appearances that are construed by us in more and more complex and abstract ways through intersubjective science. This is what I mean by the electron being a construction. It is founded in our subjective constitution of objectness, coupled and elaborated by our intersubjective rendering of it as empirical object. Just as the empirical object is an abstraction, so is the space time within which such abstractions ‘move’ . Displacement in space only makes sense if we presume a self-identical object.
So it seems to me that qm doesn’t want to get rid of the ‘real’ space time grid and the concept of movement as displacement in space. It can’t do this because it still believes in the primordiality of the self-identical object , even if that object needs us to look at it in order for it to appear.
Quantum mechanics is a physical theory, but the nature of theory is never a matter for physics. It's the true nature of the wavefunction which is at issue - if it were cut-and-dried, there would be no competing interpretations.
Quoting Joshs
My view of the subject that the self/mind is unknowable (although not in the way the 'new mysterians' mean it.) That's why I referred to the Bitbol paper, 'It is not known but it is the knower', a principle articulated in the Upani?ad, which he references, which is rarely referenced. I see it as a fundamental but mostly neglected epistemological principle. (See this passage.)
I know you aren't talking about O'Dowd. He knows more about QM than you ever will.
So - a lot of later philosophy wants to ignore this - to say 'well, it's all too difficult to spell out in plain language, leave it to the scientists'. But few of the scientists have much knowledge of, or interest in, the philosophical implications (with exceptions.) Many of them are employed to produce outcomes, hardly any to wonder about what it all means. But there is a large and growing literature on it, not least by philosophically-literate scientists (not least Werner Heisenberg himself.)
Just google the phrase consciousness creates reality and scroll through the various papers and articles that this brings back. No, that doesn't prove that 'consciousness creates reality'. But it does certainly show that it's a serious subject of discussion in physics and philosophy. And it should be! In the absence of the Democritean atom, of 'atoms and the void' fame, then what foundation can philosphical materialism stand on, without simply becoming an appeal to scientific method (which is what usually happens.)
I think you're using philosophy as a license to ignore the work of physicists. Not good.
All you can say is that consciousness was taken very seriously as a factor in QM by some if the founders of the science, so those who speak in terms of woo are out of their depth.
:up:
This is a much better primer than the video (which incidentally I now recall I did watch most of a couple of weeks back.)
Although it's been reincarnated (pardon the pun) in many new-age circles, although they're bound to be controversial.
The interpretation of the wavefunction is not the issue. That already assumes primacy of our conceptions, rather than demonstrating it. However we think about it, the maths comes out the same, the predictions come out the same, therefore the regularity and physicality of what we're describing is the same. This is why, at least at present, the interpretation of the wavefunction is not a scientific problem, because all interpretations are currently indistinguishable. (This doesn't mean we'll never have physical grounds for whittling it down in future, e.g. the recent glut of Wigner's friend experiments.)
There's a huge difference between disagreement about what the single objective reality is, given the constraints of limited and imperfect phenomenology, and there not being a single objective reality.
'The material' is identified with Science, 'the spiritual' is identified with Religion - and these issues of interpretation are then viewed through that prism, often unconsciously. Hence the hostility towards the mystical interpretations of physics - 'mysticism! woo!!'. It's doubly threatening, because of it being associated with science, which is supposed to be a defender of an empirical rationality.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You mean, they don't make any difference to the outcomes. But they're certainly not indistinguishable as ideas. Don't you think that the Everett formulation that the Universe literally splits or divides into copies of itself when a measurement is made has philosophical implications? Don't you think there's a difference between what the 'Copenhagen' school makes of it, and the Everett makes of it? You're saying there's no difference between the two?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality, MIT Technology Review, March 2019.
I have already referred to this a couple of times. I have a feeling you might be the kinder if reader that magazines have in mind when they keep running covers that say WAS EINSTEIN WRONG?
The Wigner's friend experiments are interesting. What they suggest is that you could measure the alive/dead cat, even tell me you have done so such that I know collapse has occurred for you, but I could still in principle verify that collapse has not occurred for me.
There are a number of assumptions:
1. The wavefunction is an ontological one
2. Collapse occurs
3. Non-destructive measurement (a disputed technique) is reliable.
But even if it all holds up (and part of me wants it to, because it's precisely the kind of interpretation-selecting measurement I spoke of), there's still no issue for a single universal wavefunction. There's nothing objectionable about me being in a superposed entangled state and you being in a pure state in the same universal wavefunction (what would be problematic is if this were true and we were entangled, which is precisely why you can only tell me _that_ you've made a measurement and not _what_ measurement outcome you obtained in Wigner's friend).
Hyperbolic click-bait titles aren't the answer here. Your subjective reality may be different to mine, but no one is disputing this. But nor is anyone saying the cat might have been a dog, it depends on the observer. Ultimately, after I've made my measurement, you and I have to agree.
Idealism: everything is mind. Ergo, matter = mind
Materialism: everything is matter. Ergo, mind = matter
In the sense above, in both cases, mind = matter. There's no difference at all between idealism and materialism.
Why assume that matter and mind are distinct?
Until someone can tell me where matter "stops" and mind "begins", this distinction doesn't make sense.
Another thing altogether is to say that mind (consciousness specifically) doesn't really exist, in a manner like Dennett argues, that everything is an illusion.
In that scenario we can only contrast a version of the world in which experience exists and one in which it does not. But this distinction between mind and matter can't be coherently formulated, I don't think.
Isn’t that exactly what the article I linked to calls into question? ‘Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.’ It then goes on to say that the two subjects can experience different objective realities, not have two different subjective interpretations of the same thing…. So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co.’
If I’m misunderstanding what they’ve said please explain it better.
And I would never presume to say that Einstein was wrong about matters of physics, but I believe that his philosophical stance has been called into question by later science.
I just found it funny that idealism and materialism were actually claiming the same thing but in different ways. After all, if idealism (all is mind) is true, matter is mind and if materialism (all is matter) is true, mind is matter. Could you please point out where I've goofed up?
No, I think in essence you are correct. It's just that sometimes when I see "mind" as opposed to "matter", I just type automatically. It's not a critique.
Just emphasizing that back in 17th and 18th century, you could make such a distinction. But by now it's not very substantive.
The only thing to stress in these metaphysical disputes would be how much consciousness matters, no pun intended.
:cool:
Anyone else? It's not like I can stop you from turning it into another QM thread but I'd like to remind everyone those go nowhere.
There's something off about it, I can feel it. Luckily or unluckily, I can't seem to put my finger on it. As far as I can tell, I'm stuck! Thanks for the help though. Much appreciated. G'day.
I though I gave a reply somewhere in the thread. In any case, let me start again.
If Dennett is right in his "materialism", the view that the phenomena of the mind are illusion or bad theoretical postulates, then it should follow that one should react very little to a loved on dying or seeing people being massacred in a war.
I mean, if it's all mere reaction to stimuli and the like, then the loved one is merely a bag of chemicals, so we should be rational and think to ourselves that, I thought this person was unique, funny, smart, perceptive and so on, but I'm wrong, all it was was cleaver reactions to external stimuli. So let me not slip into the fallacy that human beings are in any way special at all.
If mind was an illusion, then most of the things I love in this life color experience, music, novels, travel all of it is just fake.
With extreme "idealism", I could start saying the words "quantum consciousness", as if that says anything, and believe I'm being profound, when I'm saying nothing at all.
Then this would be delusional, a wrong way to think about the world.
Eliminative materialism isn't the only materialism.
Quoting Manuel
A person can be funny and also be merely a bag of chemicals. IE reductionist materialism.
Quoting Manuel
:up:
Or more importantly, why that distinction would be needed.
Quoting Manuel
Makes no sense no matter how you look at it imo.
I know, but since I think most materialisms are incoherent, outside of Strawson's, then I could signal out one which I think has some implications for ordinary life.
Quoting khaled
It's not that a person is not chemicals, in part, it's just that these are different levels of description. The level at which we interact with people in a day to day basis, is not the level at which we usually think of them as chemicals. It is much more complex and rich than that, or so it seems to me.
But then that's why we have so many aspects to study: physics, chemistry, psychology on to history and literature. Each one "up" encompasses more and more complexity, while often sacrificing depth in many respects.
Quoting khaled
It's not. At least not on these metaphysical terms. Epistemically we can speak of the experiential aspects of life (consciousness, mental going ons, thoughts, dreams, qualia) and the non-experiential aspects of life, those aspects of life which lack experience such as a rock or or particles or anything else we think has no experience. Putting panpsychism aside, of course.
And which part of this is not supported by a reductive materialism?
Quoting Manuel
Right again, which part of this contradicts a reductive materialism? As long as consciousness, mental goingons, etc are not identified as a "different type of thing" then you can still be a materialist and talk about them.
Well you can try to reduce mental goings on with brain states, brain states to electro-chemical activity then reduce these to atoms and reduce atoms to quarks and these in turn to fields. I don't what would be gained or illuminated by doing this. At the end one is just left with fundamental equations...
Quoting khaled
I don't know how reducing mind to brain or brain helps much. It depends on what you want to study. If you are a perceptual psychologist, studying chemistry is not of much use. Likewise if you're a chemist, I don't know how psychology will help with chemistry.
The neuroscience doesn't work with a reductive approach due to multiple realizability.
Again, what does "the neuroscience doesn't work" mean?
Agreed. :ok:
I never claimed it's possible to cover the "diverse physical basis" neurologically. I claimed that every instance of a mental event can be reduced to a physical event. Not that we can reduce every instance of a mental event to a single neurological event.
And I would disagree. I don't think you need strong emergence. Just more robust definitions. So instead of trying to reduce something like pain to a single neurological state, you can define it in terms of behavior. So being in pain due to X is acting to avoid X for example. That's an example of a definition that would cover the diverse physical basis. At best I would say this is weak emergence.
Then you're using 'reduction' in an unusual way. What you're describing is nonreductive physicalism.
Quoting khaled
Few would accept that definition at this point.
"Non-reductive physicalism is the view that mental properties form a separate ontological class to physical properties"
They're not ontologically different. I erased my example but this was what I was about to type:
Jeff's pain is a neurological event that is different from Jane's pain, which is again different from a cow's pain. But they are all neurological events.
Quoting frank
Really? Few would accept a behavioral definition of pain?
How do you know when someone's in pain? Do you directly assess what qualia they're experiencing or do you look at their behavior?
Look a little further into the use of "reductive" ok?
Quoting khaled
That's correct. Pain is thought of as an experience, not a behavior.
Sure thing. These recent experiments are laser interferometer experiments aimed at simulating Wigner's friend experiment* in which Wigner's friend makes a quantum measurement inside the laboratory but Wigner is outside.
In the original formulation of the Schroedinger cat experiment, Schroedinger assumed that when the experimenter opened the box, the wave of the cat would collapse from a superposition of |alive cat> + |dead cat> to one pure state (|alive> or |dead>) absolutely. For instance, if the experimenter closed the box, left the room, and another one came in to check, not knowing the first's result, the cat would still be in a pure state of one or the other. This is universal collapse.
Wigner argued that if he were to observe the laboratory his friend was in, it would remain in a superposition of live+dead cat even after his friend had made a measurement, so long as Wigner didn't know what the actual measurement outcome was, i.e. Wigner had made no measurement that should resolve the state of the cat.
This is to do with how things entangle. If the cat is in state |alive> + |dead> and Wigner's friend interacts with it (performs a measurement that should yield a single measurement outcome), Wigner's friend will be in superposition (until collapse):
|friend> X ( |alive cat> + |dead cat> ) = |friend>|alive cat> + |friend>|dead cat> = |friend measured alive cat> + |friend measured dead cat>
In MWI, things would even evolve from there without collapse, the two terms being parallel worlds that would never interact again. If collapse occurs, it is assumed to be at measurement, so as soon as the friend is consciously aware of the contents of the box, one of the two terms vanishes.
When Wigner's friend sends him a message to say that measurement is complete, there's nothing about that message that can resolve Wigner's view of the lab as still being in superposition. He is also an observer and, in his observations, his friend is another physical component of the experimental setup.
If his friend told him which measurement outcome was achieved, this wouldn't make much difference. Either collapse has occurred universally and the state of the message would be |friend measured alive cat> or |friend measured dead cat>, or collapse did not occur until Wigner received the message |friend measured alive cat> + |friend measured dead cat>, at which point collapse occurs and Wigner arrives at a single measurement outcome.
By only telling Wigner _that_ measurement has occurred, i.e. by sending exactly the same signal irrespective of measurement outcome, any superposition of the lab* remains unresolved. Wigner cannot collapse the signal because it's not in superposition. Wigner's paradox was that Wigner could be sure that he had not collapsed the lab while also being sure that his friend had collapsed the cat.
These recent experiments show that a measurement can be made by part of the experimental apparatus but still demonstrate superposition to a separate part of the experimental apparatus.
* Oh yeah...
4. You can simulate humans and labs with a laser.
5. Laboratories can be in quantum superposition.
The OP. "How should I live my life" is a question about ethics. The OP argues a) why such questions occur now, b) that they would have been rare for most of our history, c) that we evolved biological apparatus to bypass asking these questions in our natural state, d) this social apparatus is part of what makes us uniquely human, e) that we still inherit apparatus from more distant, pre-social ancestors that does not make us uniquely human, f) that meeting the impossibility of acting on our social instincts in the modern world with antisocial behaviour is therefore subhuman, g) that moral existentialism is the state of humans in the modern world, and h) to be human, that existentialism must be constrained by that which makes us human: in this context, social behaviour.
Plus side:
Agreed. From somebody else’s observation of my behavior if I’m in pain......it is possible I can project a behavior directly inconsistent with the pain I feel. When I go to the doctor, it is possible to inform him of effects having nothing to do with the cause. Senseless to do, but proves someone’s observation of my behavior does not necessarily correspond to the pain I feel.
From my own point to view, it is entirely possible that the behavior I exhibit is an intentional disguise for the pain I feel. If it’s, say, the most important game of the year, and the coach knows I’ve pulled a muscle in my leg, I may falsify my behavior to an extent sufficient for his observation to allow me to play, even if it hurts like hell. ‘Course....if I screw up....well, that’s on me, but.....the point stands.
Everyone probably has the diversity of experience, when, e.g., a twist of the ankle, once in public, once in private. I’m here to tell ya, even with the exact same degree and occasion of pain, I’ll cuss like a sailor, throw things and kick the dog in private, but exhibit an entirely different behavior in a crowd. But I can’t distinguish the pain in the one scenario, from the pain in the other.
Another may/may not know that I feel pain, in direct accordance to my display/disguise of it, but only I may know of it, regardless of any display at all.
Still, these days, people do associate pain with behavior, first because of the rise of psychology, in which case the rest of us are merely being told some arbitrary truth of Nature’s Way, and second because humans have become a tribe of whining crybabies, looking for sympathy they may not deserve.
Minus side:
Pain is not an experience, in the truest sense. Experience is always of a known cause, pain is not. One will have a direct corresponding pain or pleasure given an experience which is its cause, but one will not necessarily have a direct corresponding experience caused by pain or pleasure itself, re: a simple headache.
Sure, because it wasn’t you that measured. This is the quantum elaboration derived from the metaphysical truism....only experience is empirical knowledge.
This is an intriguing paragraph because I don't know how you're using "experience."
The way I meant it, pain would usually be a component of experience. Pleasure could be a component of the very same experience.
I was thinking of experience as just awareness if things. How are you using it?
Superposition is an epistemological situation, right?
My guess is that you're on the materialism side of this debate, yes?
In another thread we were exploring a notion that phenomena like logic is just a symptom of a deeper property shared by all things. We were struggling with how to name such a deeper universal property. Intelligence? Information?
My best guess at the moment is that should such a deeper property exist, it would be so universal and pervasive as to not qualify as a separate thing, and thus any attempt to assign a noun may be misguided.
Which is fine, in the General Grand Scheme of Things. But then....what would consciousness be?
In the Reduced Critical Scheme of Things, where only one conception can relate exactly to an idea, experience and awareness cannot both represent things.
SO...............there’s Frank, walking down the street, only hears a BOOM!! Frank can indeed tell himself he is aware of a sound, but he cannot tell himself of the thing that made the sound, because he only heard it. So he cannot say, even when aware of the one, that he is aware of the certainty of the other. So Frank has no experience of a particular thing relating to the sound. So Frank’s notion of experience as awareness doesn’t hold, in the Reduced Critical Scheme of Things.
Now, Frank is certainly authorized to tell himself he has never ever heard a sound that didn’t have a thing immediately connected to it, he’d be correct, he could just walk on, and his notion of experience as awareness, in the General Grand Scheme of Things, holds.
The question becomes, for those bothering to ask it.....under what conditions is it possible for the General and the Critical Schemes to be completely irrelevant. And that can only occur if experience of things and awareness of things, are at all times and under any conditions, exactly the same, without exception. Which is, of course, quite unfounded, for it is completely logical to be aware of some things for which there never has been a corresponding experience.
Quoting frank
Experience: a posteriori cognition by a subject as mediate ends, by means of sensation;
Awareness: immediate affect on the subject by means of sensation, such that a posteriori cognitions become possible. Experience absolutely requires awareness, but awareness does not absolutely promise experience. Which reduces to the validity of pain awareness absent experience for its immediate cause.
It is permissible for pain to be a component of experience, which is different than to say pain is an experience. Which is what all the above jaw-flappin’ was about.
Hmm. What I can say is that you aren't using "experience" the way Chalmers does. Since he's a solar figure in philosophy of mind at this point, I'll have to let your spaceship cruise on unmolested.
We may meet again at the Tannhäuser Gate.
(Chuckles to self)
Yeah, I get that a lot, as you can tell from the fact my comments far outnumber my mentions.
But however unknowable to us the self/mind is , can we assume that it is constant in itself , unlike intentional objects which are contingent , relative and fleeting? Or is this self constantly change alongside objects of experience?
They are idealized constructions derived from perceptual interaction with a world. They would. it be possible without our first having constructed the concept of a self-identical object. The construction of the object is dependent on our embodied interactions with our perceptual environment. Thus logic originates in embodied interactions between organism
and environment.
Suppose we were introduced to strong evidence that the universe was a simulation, such as say, some aliens coming down and pausing some of the laws of physics and telling us as much.
So the universe that our species evolved in is an advanced simulation running on some sort of "computer" in a "higher" reality.
What would you call that?
It sure doesn't seem like idealism to me, although idealist epistemological claims could still be relevant. However, it also doesn't seem like materialism. I mean, you could suppose that the universe that contains the computer running our simulation truly does exist materially, but your evidence for that would necissarily be limited since you're stuck in the simulation. You'd also have to posit the likelihood that you are in a simulation of a simulation, which could itself be simulation, and so on.
What exactly holds there, some sort of souless neo-gnostic monism?
I suppose an advantage of the thought of Boehme and his descendants is that it paints a logical, beautiful world that can encompass all these contingencies. However, Boehme tilts towards the mystic and away from the more concrete world of philosophy, although I think his major impact in philosophy is underrated. And the system breaks down in its coherence as you continue from the logic of negation and make the leap to Christ.
a) an episode of the Twilight Zone
b) Classic Cartesian thinking
Quoting EricH
The debate isn't of interest, but your belief does make a difference. Knowing about ourselves, rather than simply adopting attractive beliefs about ourselves, can teach us how to better live our lives and how to understand the actions of others.
You notice how you've subtly made the mind or self an object by asking this question - an 'it'. The mind, the self are not an object. There is no 'it' but then neither is it correct to say there is no mind or self. That's a very subtle point but crucial to get.
Quoting Joshs
Logic inheres in the relation of ideas, not on the ‘exchange of ions across membranes’ or other such physical processes. It is assumed that the sophistication of the brain allows for the origination of logic, but the principles of logic are discovered, not invented; however the brain evolves, it has to conform to them, it doesn't produce them out of itself.
Yes, hopefully you will continue to expand on this. It seems a translation challenge.
I may have misunderstood you. I thought you were arguing that logic is grounded in a transcendent platonic category of mind. If you are saying instead that logic is an empirical endeavor( discovered rather than invented) then I agree. But then this is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s account of the basis of mathematical logic in embodied interactions( not physical
causation but higher order intentionality).
I don't see logic as empirical in the sense of being 'dependent on experience'. It can be tested or validated against experience - if you use logic to make a claim, and then discover that the claim is wrong, then there's something faulty with your logic. But I see logic as innate to the structure of the mind, an innate capacity. In that sense, I'm sympathetic to the generally platonist view.
I've read about Lakoff and Johnson, but they seem to me to be part of the 'naturalised epistemology' approach. Whereas I accept the facts of evolution I question the sense in which such faculties can be understood solely through the lense of evolutionary biology. That of course is a controversy in evolutionary theory itself.
But at the same time, I'm trying to make a fairly simple point: that logic or reason, the capacity to understand terms such as 'the same as', 'greater than', 'because', and so on - are based on the mind's ability to grasp the relations of ideas. Those abilities can't be explained in materialist terms.
This argument finds some support from biosemiotics:
[quote=Howard Pattee, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis]The concept of biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world. [/quote]
I'm saying, this distinction exists within the structure of reason itself. It goes on:
That's a pretty killer argument, from science, against physical-chemical reductionism. There are many more coming out of that science.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a good idea for a new thread. This particular issue has preoccupied me for years. It relates also to some Christian/Islamic apologists (via Kant's transcendental argument) and their proposition that atheism/physicalism/evolution is self-refuting - no meaning can come from no meaning.
I have no substantive view on this as I am not a philosopher, but I would be interested to hear a strong physicalist rebuttal of this. The argument to develop, I assume, is is how do the structures of logic and language humans appear to have as innate occur in a physicalist universe? Did Chomksy plead mysterianism to this one too?
Is this not analogous to the argument that math is discovered, not invented? Morality? I think the basic principle can be applied to many things.
Is the Platonic interpretation of this however more of a 'magical warehouse' we point to where things we can't explain are 'stored'? It seems to me that with a putative realm of Platonic forms we explain a mystery with another mystery. And I appreciate the venerable tradition in Western culture of such idealist positions before science started to cut away ideas that were not directly empirical. I guess the next step in this thesis is that all ideas are held in the mind of God and we partake of this higher consciousness in our own small ways.
Your use of the term idealism is weird then. So idealism for you does not include that minds are a different sort of "it" from matter? The mind is not an object, yet you're an idealist?
Quoting Wayfarer
Where do you get this? I wouldn't place logic above an evolutionarily advantageous adaptation. I wouldn't place it "out there" in the world. Laws of logic are about how we think, they're not inherent in the world itself. Otherwise we wouldn't have different logics.
It's weird to me because you seem to think that having any concept of "pattern" or "structure" automatically counts as a form of idealism. Whereas I would assume idealism is a position that proposes the existence of ideas as a separate sort of object from matter, like how the panpsychists or dualists do it.
Actually I had a recent thread on this, Platonic Realism and Scientific Method.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think the obvious answer is, they evolved, and I think that's true. What I'm trying to get at, however, is that the furniture of reason, let's say, ought not to be considered as products of natural selection, on account of the fact that they don't come into existence when we discover them. I think that's in keeping with the passage I quoted. I think there's simply an assumption that everything about the mind can be understood as a result of evolutionary biology, because that has become the de facto explanation for human faculties.
My philosophical view is not at all Biblical intelligent design oriented. It's that when h. sapiens evolved to the point of being language-using, rational beings, then they discover horizons of being that aren't available to other creatures, and that at this point they (or we) transcend biological determinism. Controversial point, I know. There's a lot of debate over these kinds of ideas.
As for Chomksy, have a look at this review.
Quoting khaled
I'm an idealist because I don't think of the mind as an object. I keep trying to communicate this idea, and obviously keep failing. Idealism is not about 'what things are made from' but about 'the nature of knowing'. What we know, including what we understand the world to be, is a cognitive act, a constructive effort on the part of the embodied mind.
Quoting khaled
There's a saying, God created the integers, all else is the work of man. It's like that. There are fundamental, general and simple logical principles, such as the law of identity and the law of the excluded middle, which must be true in all possible worlds. They are not 'the product' of anything, insofar as any species that develops will need to be able to recognize them. Certainly above those basics all kinds of systems and abstractions and inventions can be created, but the fundamental laws are not invented. 'God created the integers....'
Quoting khaled
Not any form. The notion of 'the ideas' in Platonist philosophy is one of the underlying principles of Western philosophy, but it's very difficult to understand. (Not saying I'm an expert, either.) Suffice to say in current philosophy, where I see it best represented is in neo-thomism e.g.
[quote=Jacques Maritain]the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in reality as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).
Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.[/quote]
Universal ideas, in that sense, are inextricably bound with the capacity for abstraction, language, reasoning, and so on. Where this is impossible for modern thought to understand, is that those universals don't exist anywhere, they're not 'out there somewhere'. They're more like the constituents of thought or reason, than the constituents of objects. (See Russell 'World of Universals'). That is why I think with the ascendance of nominalism, and then empiricism, the Western tradition lost its connection to real metaphysics, the last vestiges of which, as a living philosophy, are found in neo-thomism. (Oh, and in Pierre Hadot.)
Quoting khaled
Not a separate sort of object from matter. A different orientation with respect to the nature of things. A different philosophical stance.
Quoting Wayfarer
Husserl wrote a book called Formal and Transcendental
Logic. In it he attempts to untangle centuries old
confusions concerning the origin and nature of formal logic.
“ Its naive presupposing of a world ranks logic among the positive sciences. We were saying above that logic, by its relation to a real world, presupposes not only a real world's being-in-itself but also the possibility, existing "in itself", of acquiring cognition of a world as genuine knowledge, genuine science, either empirically or a priori. This implies: Just as the realities belonging to the world are what they are, in and of themselves, so also they are substrates for truths that are valid in themselves — "truths in themselves"”.
Quoting Wayfarer
Husserl argues that the above terms are not irreducible primitives of mind but are in fact products of higher levels constructions based on interaction with a world. ‘The same as’, ‘ greater than’ and ‘because’ are no more innate, world independent capabilities than the understanding of causality is a Kantian category of mind. When he performs the transcendental reduction, every sense associated with interaction with real or ideal
objects , such as ‘same as’ and ‘greater than’ , vanishes along with these objects What remains as irreducible is the structure of intentionality , the appearing of something in consciousness as what it is in the particular mode of givenness by which I intend it. Intentionality is neither the province of the mind in itself nor that of the material world . It precedes both of these derivative and inadequate ideas. It is the inseparable mutually dependent relation between a subjective (egoic) and objective pole of the intentional act.
“ Experience is the performance in which for me, the experiencer, experienced being "is there", and is there as what it is, with the whole content and the mode of being that experience itself, by the performance going on in its intentionality, attributes to it.”
Comparisons, differentiations , additions and subtractions are actions performed on already constituted formal objects. But how is it that we are able to experience an object as a singular unit , separated out from a
multiplicity of which we deem it to belong , such that we can proceed to perform these feats of logic? Husserl’s fist published work , the philosophy of arithmetic, offers a fascinating genesis of such seemingly irreducible concepts as that of the discrete , self-persisting object from mix more basic acts , wherein there is as yet no concept of formal object.
For instance, according to Husserl, the basis of any sort of whole of independently apprehended parts(a whole in the pregnant sense) is the collective combination, which is an abstracting act of consciousness uniting parts.
“Collective combination plays a highly significant role in our mental life as a whole. Every complex phenomenon which presupposes parts that are separately and specifically noticed, every higher mental and emotional activity, requires, in order to be able to arise at all, collective combinations of partial phenomena. There could never even be a representation of one of the more simple relations (e.g., identity, similarity, etc.) if a unitary interest and, simultaneously with it, an act of noticing did not pick out the terms of the relation and hold them together as unified. This 'psychical' relation is, thus, an indispensable psychological precondition of every relation and combination whatsoever.”(p.78)
He conducted these researches under a psychological rubric , leading to accusations of psychologism from Frege and others. Ten years later he understood his method to be phenomenological, correcting the impressions of psychologism without affecting the substance of his description of the constitution of totality. In Experience and Judgement, he conducts a similar investigation under the heading of apprehension of plurality.
In any such whole the parts are united in a specific manner. Fundamental to the genesis of almost all totalities is that its parts initially appear as a temporal succession.
“Succession in time constitutes an insuppressible psychological precondition for the formation of by far the most number concepts and concrete multiplicities - and practically all of the more complicated concepts in general.”(Phil of Arithmetic, p.29) “Almost all representations of multiplicities - and, in any case, all representations of numbers - are results of processes, are wholes originated gradually out of their elements. Insofar as this is so, each element bears in itself a different temporal determination.”(p.33) “Temporal succession forms the only common element in all cases of multiplicity, which therefore must constitute the foundation for the abstraction of that concept.”(p.30)
While the first step of constitution of a multiplicity is the awareness of the temporal succession of parts, each of which we are made aware of as elements “separately and specifically noticed” , the collective combination itself only emerges from a secondary act of consciousness. This higher order constituting sense changes what was originally a temporal succession into a simultaneity by ‘bringing' back ‘ the previous parts via reflecting on them in memory. Husserl says that a combination of objects is similar to the continuity of a tone. In both cases, a temporal succession is perceived through reflection as a simultaneity.
“For the apprehension of each one of the colligated contents there is required a distinct psychical act. Grasping them together then requires a new act, which obviously includes those distinct acts, and thus forms a psychical act of second order.”(p.77) “It is essential that the partial representations united in the representation of the multiplicity or number be present in our consciousness simultaneously [in an act of reflection].”(p.33)
A reader, or, start from scratch, never mind the title: “Cartesian Meditations”, 1931.
You probably don’t need to start from the beginning, as I did, so if not........never mind.
By the way Dan Zahavi is a very good Husserl scholar, he transmits Husserl in a way that is very accesible and (mostly) intelligible.
He has many articles for free at Academia.edu, you might be interested at looking at some of them.
There are important constraints on an epistemological view of QM. The main difference between a superposition and classical ignorance is that a superposition exhibits interference effects (an analogy is with a superposed photo).
In the Wigner's Friend scenario that described, the friend reports to Wigner that she has recorded a definite result (without reporting what it is) but for Wigner, the cat and the friend's lab remains in superposition, continuing to exhibit interference effects.
The PBR theorem "shows that models in which the quantum state is interpreted as mere information about an objective physical state of a system cannot reproduce the predictions of quantum theory." Which is to say that interpretations understood in that epistemological sense (and assuming QM is correct) are impossible.
(Neo-)Copenhagen interpretations get around it by saying that you can't talk about the state of reality independent of measurement.
Quoting Get real - Scott Aaronson, Nature Physics, June 2012
As long as this "embodied mind" is not a separate sort of thing, I don't think anyone would dispute this. Maybe MWI or other "epistimological quantum mechanics interpretations" fans but I would think that the idea that we construct the world is pretty common now. Not to say that's it's all made up, but that we play an integral part in what the world looks like ontologically not just epistemologically.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I don't see the need to place logical principles in the world. I would say even these simple logical principles are akin to sight and hearing. Reasoning is a capacity, not something that's "out there". And again, we humans have made multiple logics, not just formal logic. This isn't to say we made up the laws any more than we "made up" sight or hearing. We have a capacity of reasoning. Reasoning isn't "out there".
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we agree more than we disagree but just use different words for things.
I’ve read essays and excerpts about Husserl, and Dermot Moran’s edition of ‘Crisis of the Modern Sciences’.
Quoting Joshs
There's a resemblance to Kant's 'synthesis', isn't there?
[quote=SEP]Kant characterizes synthesis as “the act of putting different representations together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” (A77/B103); it is a process that “gathers the elements for cognition, and unites them to form a certain content” (A78/B103). [/quote]
Also, the very idea of ‘formal objects’ and ‘formal logic’ is an expression characteristic of philosophical discourse, seems to me.
Quoting khaled
Except for the fact that it enables us to discover hitherto unknown things that are (which is the exact meaning of 'discover'). The stoics said that reasoning is more than a capacity of thought, because it's also a principle of cosmic order. Reason is efficacious because the reason that orders the world is also a characteristic of the reason that is internal to the mind. But I don't think that is comprehended by modern materialist philosophy.
Point is, there is no use in talking about "the reason that orders the world". There will always be doubt about that. I remember Donald Hoffman claiming that whenever he tried to simulate evolution on a machine using some sort of "game system", the organisms that ended up surviving were ones that did not understand "the reason that orders the world" but who instead just managed to find a "reason internal to the mind" that specifically suits their survival needs and nothing more.
As such, I don't care about "the reason that orders the world". Maybe it is the same as the reason in my mind, or maybe the reason in my mind is just an "evolutionary shortcut", a hack, a parody of the real thing optimized for survival. Either way, I don't have access to "the reason that orders the world" so I don't care about it.
It is not necessarily true that reason is efficacious because the reason in our minds is the same as "the reason that orders the world" if anything, there is evidence that if our reasoning is efficacious, it is precisly because it is not the reason that orders the world as that would be unnecessarily complicated and not conducive for survival.
I guessed. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is basically an evolutionary argument. Also a faulty one.
I want to call that out. I can see why the ‘mind in itself’ and ‘material world’ are regarded as ‘derivative’.
Quoting Joshs
I want to call that out too. I think the qualification ‘formal’ is key here. Use of the qualifier ‘formal’ denotes this as a specifically philosophical expression.
I was just reading an article:
[quote=Quanta; https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-physics-that-only-math-can-solve-20210610/] While the temperature at a point on Earth is what it is, regardless of whether you measure it, electrons have no definite position until the moment you observe them. Prior to that, their positions can only be described probabilistically, by assigning values to every point in a quantum field that captures the likelihood you’ll find an electron there versus somewhere else. Prior to observation, electrons essentially exist nowhere — and everywhere.
“Most things in physics aren’t just objects; they’re something that lives in every point in space and time,” said Dijkgraaf.[/quote]
I would say, instead of ‘aren’t just objects’, that they ‘just aren’t objects’. They’re not objects until they’re formalised - given form - by observation; they’re ‘made manifest’. Which is, strangely enough, a kind of Platonist view.
Quoting Andrew M
That is the point that I was trying to make. I think it calls into question Kenosha Kid’s view that there is ‘one objective reality’ which all interpretations try to approximate or interpret. I agree that reality may be one, but that unity must necessarily transcend subject-object dualism, meaning that it’s out of scope for naturalism as such.
The philosophical mind has the desire to know. So such statements are very unphilosophical.
Quoting Wayfarer
What I find is the biggest problem with the materialist view is that it inevitably leads to determinism. The determinist perspective is "that there is 'one objective reality'", and this objective reality encompasses all of the past and future, in an eternalist sort of way.
This perspective completely ignores the very real, important and significant, difference between past and future, which we know very well through our experience. Ignoring this difference, and the fact that the undetermined nature of the future gives us the capacity for freely willed actions, while the fixed nature of the past renders us helpless in any desire to change what has already occurred, presents us with a very skewed conception of "one objective reality". The difficulty in understanding "objective reality" is the need to know how the undetermined becomes determined at the moment of the present.
Only a fool would want to know something they know they can’t know.
Quoting Get real - Scott Aaronson, Nature Physics, June 2012
So with the Copenhagen Int., we can talk about superposition, but we aren't talking about reality. That's so weird.
I don’t care about that which orders the world either, and I do not have access to it. But I wouldn’t say reason orders the world in the first place, which grants me access to it, whatever its composition or use.
Reason doesn’t organize.....order.....the world; it only informs me of the consistency and legitimacy of the ordering. And THAT I certainly do care about.
Haha that's excellent!
Quoting Wayfarer
Husserl from Philosophy of Arithmetic:
“Already Kant used the word "synthesis" (combination) in a double sense: first, in the sense of the unity of the parts of a whole, whether these parts are properties of a thing, parts of an extension, units in a number, and so on; second, in the sense of the mental activity (actus) of combining. Both significations are intimately related in Kant because, in his view, every whole, of whatever kind it may be, is developed from its parts by means of the spontaneous activity of the mind.
"Synthesis" therefore signifies simultaneously, for him, combining and the result of combination. That we presume to observe combinations in the phenomena themselves, and to extract them therefrom by means of abstraction: that is only an illusion. It is we ourselves who have furnished the combinations, and, of course, by means of the "pure concepts of the understanding," the categories.
“The theory of synthesis with which we have just become acquainted is untenable and is based upon essential misunderstandings. Kant failed to notice that many combinations of content are given to us where no trace of a synthesizing activity that produces connectedness of contents is to be found. Lange, again, pays no attention at all to those cases where composite representations owe their unity solely and only to synthesizing acts, while in the primary contents a combination is not present or does not come into consideration. According to him all combination is supposed to occur in the content, and of course in virtue of the form of space encompassing all content. This is false. The very concepts multiplicity and number resist this view. The combination of the colligated contents in the multiplicity, and of the enumerated ones in the number, is not a spatial combination, just as little as it can be taken for a temporal one - and, we can immediately add, just as little as any other combination within primary contents.
…it also is to be emphasized that the entire underlying intuition, for Lange as for Kant - according to which a relational content is the result of an act of relating - is psychologically untenable.
Inner experience, and it alone is decisive here, shows nothing of such 'creative' processes. Our mental activity does not make the relations. They are simply there, and, given an appropriate direction of interest, they are just as noticeable as any other type of content. Strictly speaking, creative acts that produce some new content as a result distinct from them are psychological monstrosities.
Certainly one distinguishes in complete generality the relating mental activity from the relation itself (the comparing lfrom the similarity, etc.). But where one speaks of such a type of relating activity, one thereby understands either the grasping of the relational content or the interest that picks out the terms of the relation and embraces them, which is the indispensable precondition for the relations combining those contents becoming observable. But whatever is the case, one will never be able to maintain that the respective act creatively produces its content.
One may perhaps reply to us by pointing precisely to those synthetic acts which we have above verified in representations of number, and which, as we will yet see, are identical with our “collective" combinations. In their case it is indeed the act alone that is supposed to procure the combination. - In a certain sense this is quite correct. The combination of course subsists solely and only in the unifying act itself, and consequently the representation of the combination also in the representation of the act. But there does not exist besides the act a relational content different
from the act itself, as its creative result, which the view we are attacking always presupposes.”
…it is clear that designation of numbers as purely mental creations of an inner intuition involves an exaggeration and a distortion of the true state of affairs. Numbers are mental creations insofar as they are results of activities which we exercise on concrete contents. But what these activities create are not new, absolute contents which could then be found again somewhere in space or in the "external world." Rather, they are peculiar, relational concepts, which can only be produced again and again, but which absolutely cannot be simply found somewhere already completed.”
Not sure what you mean. How would you define a formal
object in Husserl’s sense?
Agreed.
Quoting khaled
It was Wayfarer that was trying to conceive of an “order out there”, so I pointed it out that it’s useless to talk about such a thing because you’ll never have access to it.
Quoting Mww
Agreed with a minor nitpick. I would say the argument that our reasoning capacities can be trusted since there is evolutionary advantage in having good reasoning is valid. But not the argument that our reasoning or senses are complete. There’s been research showing that if you set up a “survival game” with multiple AI, the AI that survives longest is the one that has managed to “simplify” the game into as few variables as possible, neglecting vast parts of reality in favor of only being able to detect the things that matter for survival since computation power = need for more food and so is sometimes not worth it. The idea that it is evolutionarily advantageous to have an accurate and complete representation of reality is just plain false in many cases. Accuracy? Yes. The simplification must still be true, even if it’s not the full picture. Completeness is often unnecessary.
There is an argument that says the world must be ordered, for the simple reason our understanding is very seldom in conflict with it. With that being granted, and granting that “logical principles are not out there” is true, as you say, then we are given a method for explaining why there is seldom any conflict between experience and that which is the extant objects of it.
I agree with wayfarer if he says it is conceiveable that there is order out there, which makes perfect sense iff it is we who order, which, of course, we do. But it isn’t reason, it’s intuition, the subconscious part of the human cognitive system, responsible for it.
So....there is order out there, because we put it there. Or, it could be that we just recognize the world as it conforms to the order we ourselves have. Either way, and no matter what, without us and our system, the world, ordered or otherwise, is ontologically, epistemologically, and completely, irrelevant.
The reason there even is metaphysics, is because it is impossible to tell whether the world is ordered with the absolute certainty we think for it, or the world is as it is and our thinking conforms to it. So all we have with which to judge, is the least contradictory of two established doctrinal methods: idealism or materialism. Anything else is some combination of both with one or the other the superior.
—————-
Quoting khaled
In general, yes, they can be trusted. We seldom experience a thing today, and then worry about what our experience will be tomorrow, of the same thing. Still, humans are famous for errors in judgement, that being one of reasoning’s capacities.
As weak as they are, I think our sensory system is complete, insofar far as we are affected by the external world with the system we have. We’d be more or differently affected with a better of different system, but then, we wouldn’t be human.
As for our reasoning being complete....hell, I wouldn’t know about that. There would have to be something to compare it to, seems like. Other intelligent species might have a more complete system, but how would we find that out?
My two thalers worth......
• Interpretations of QM are not theoretical models.
• Interpretations of QM are how we speculatively close the gaps in our (current) knowledge of QM.
• Interpretations of QM tell us about ourselves – scientific reasoning – and nothing more about the world outside the remit of QM.
Maps (e.g. interpretations of QM) =/= territory (planck-scale facts) because the territory also includes every possible map (and making of maps) of the territory. We non-idealists – realists (@Banno) – don't suffer from this peculiar "idealist" confusion (or woo-of-the-gaps, abstractions-reifying delusion).
Quoting Joshs
All I’m saying is that you will only find the term ‘formal object’ in philosophical discourse. I would have to look up the definition to offer one, but it has to do with how the identity of objects are designated.
Quoting Mww
Isn't this related to what is famously called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences? Mathematical reason often enables prediction of outcomes which could never be discovered in its absence. The questions of whether the Universe 'obeys' mathematical laws or whether numbers are real are deep questions and still open questions. But the predictive power of mathematical hypotheses can't really be called into question. And that to me indicates that mathematical reason discerns an order which is already present in the universe, not 'imposed' on it.
Sure agreed.
Quoting Mww
:up:
Quoting Mww
I mean, we can't see UV waves for one but we're still affected by them. I think it's obvious our sensory system is not complete even when it comes to things that can affect us. Maybe the "food requirement" for having eyes that can detect UV and infrared was not worth the survival benefits. Maybe it is worth it but we just haven't evolved to that point yet.
Maybe our reasoning is incomplete in the same sense too, but so far there hasn't been anything we couldn't comprehend with it. Then again, I think the real evolutionary breakthrough humans have isn't our logic, but our malleability. We have made multiple logics for different uses, even when they are not intuitive, and eventually made them intuitive. We don't have a "single mode of logic".
Interesting article.
You are more well-versed than I, so I’m not about to bore you to tears with stuff you already know, or infuse you with metaphysical precepts you already hold. You’ve said it yourself, and I agree without equivocation....science has ostracized the subject, and doesn’t even realize the fault in doing so.
So briefly.....
For us, the only certainty is logical, and because mathematics is a form of logic, we are assured mathematics itself is certain, which in turn assures us that which is grounded in mathematics is certain.
I don’t find the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural world remarkable at all, because it is a logical system investigating it mathematically. The world isn’t mathematical; we are. If experience isn’t contradicted by observation, and observation is explained mathematically, then the system is justified.
Ahhhh, yes, I see what you mean. Can’t argue with that.
I doubt that. This particular article was one of those I discovered through this forum or its predecessor, and it's become an interest of mine.
Quoting Mww
I think that's an artificial distinction. The point is that we can predict, ascertain, control, discover, all through the application of mathematics. That is intrinsic to the mathematization of nature that was initiated by Galileo and is basic to modern scientific method. So I don't see how this can said to be only an attribute of the human mind. It's the predictive capabilities which suggest otherwise.
[quote=Wigner]Mathematics does play [a] sovereign role in physics. This was already implied in the statement, made when discussing the role of applied mathematics, that the laws of nature must have been formulated in the language of mathematics to be an object for the use of applied mathematics. The statement that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics was properly made three hundred years ago;[8 It is attributed to Galileo] it is now more true than ever before.[/quote]
Put another way, it's not just how 'the mind' works, but that there's a corresponding order in nature. Sure, it's a mystery - Einstein exclaimed 'The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.' Wigner likewise speaks in terms of 'the miracle' of the appropriateness of mathematics. I have never understood how or why this would be called into question.
Even if you know that you will never know the answer to a specific question, you can proceed in the direction toward finding the answer, and potentially help others, who are not so helpless as you, to find that answer. That the answer will not be found by you does not mean that it will not be found, so this ought not prevent you from working toward finding it. There's an interesting aspect of knowledge, it's cumulative, and not restricted by the limitations of the individual.
I didn't see that quote in this thread, but I think the Wigner's Friend scenario that described suggests one solution to be that Wigner and his friend both correctly describe reality from their particular contexts (as a superposition and a definite result respectively). Perhaps an analogy can be made with differing relativistic length descriptions of the same object for Einsteinian relativistic observers.
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
For modern naturalism maybe. But I'm partial to an Aristotelian four-causes naturalism that is broader in scope (no separable is/ought distinction, for example). Per SEP, "Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest (Physics 2.1, 192b20–23)." This opposed the Heraclitan and Parmenidean positions of the day that exclusively emphasized universal flux and universal stasis respectively (which to some extent are reflected in modern-day materialism and idealism).
And I'd be inclined to agree with that. It was the loss of the idea of formal and final causation that is the problem with modern scientific metaphysics, such as it is.
(Actually I'm reading a very interesting philosophy of physics book, Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin, which attempts to situate quantum physics in the broader context of Western classical philosophy. Pity you're not nearby, I'd lend it to you.)
Yep. A famous quote attributed to Bohr says:
Quoting Niels Bohr (as quoted by Aage Petersen)
That is, what we can say about nature is that you will find, with some well-defined probability, either a dead cat or a live cat in the box when you open it.
Some Neo-Copenhagen interpretations do add more interpretive meat to the formalist bones (and in interesting ways), but that's the gist.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:smile:
Yes, quite. Although there's a danger here of giving the sense that QM is a bottom-up theory of ignorance: it isn't. The version of QM that encodes such ignorance (density matrix theories) is mathematically distinct from QM, and will yield different experimental predictions.
Quantum superposition is experimentally verifiable, so the wavefunction captures something ontological. On the other hand, we cannot say anything about a system's state until we measure it, which is problematic because of the huge initial-state dependence of the mechanics. With good old-fashioned non-relativistic unidirectional time, that's a problem: we must capture every possibility in the wavefunction, not just to ensure that a possible outcome is represented, but to capture all possible interference effects that manifest over many measurements.
In principle, relativistic quantum mechanics does away with this. Instead of capturing all possible paths from a given initial state, we capture all possible paths between a given initial state and a given final state. There is no need to represent an outcome that will not happen, nor to represent interference between trajectories toward outcomes that are orthogonal.
This perspective seemingly differs from mine and it intrigues me. First, to be clear, I acknowledge that I have not read Husserl and so cannot offer a firsthand judgment of his philosophy, that I don’t know the extent to which you uphold Husserl’s ideas, and maybe most importantly, that I’m not fully certain as to this quote’s intended meaning.
That acknowledged, I find that wholes, forms (rather than shapes), or eidoi (I so far find no meaningful difference between the three terms), though cognizable to be the summation of parts, are primary to our awareness of what is, rather than being second-order abstractions from some more rudimentary awareness wherein wholes don’t occur. (This without denying that in adults many are indeed abstracted from immediately experienced wholes previously encountered.)
If this doesn’t conflict with what the quote is intended to imply, then I’ve misunderstood. My bad in advance. But to try to make myself clearer:
When we conceptualize the parts which constitute particular wholes, any cognized part, when focused upon, will itself be cognized as a whole, an eidos, onto itself. This though each part may itself be deemed to be constituted of yet smaller parts. Given current physics, this until we arrive at zero-point energy, wherein we again address wholes, eidoi, these either being specific fields or specific quanta, or, alternatively, the quantum vacuum field as itself being a whole, i.e. an eidos.
For me this ties in with the principle/law of identity: any identity we can be aware of is itself an eidos and, as such, is cognized by us to be a whole give that, most always if not always, can be abstracted as being constituted of parts, with each identifiable part then itself, again, being an eidos.
As one concrete example, we infer a whole rock to be constituted of rock fragments (themselves constituted of sand particles, and so on) but we hold no inkling of what these particular rock fragments might actually be until we take a hammer to the rock to break it apart. At which point the particular whole rock ceases to be, now being replaced by a multiplicity of whole rock fragments.
Else, if the development of object permanence is being addressed, I'd likewise argue that infant awareness innately consists of eidoi as primary. The relations which these wholes, eidoi, hold is what is learned via a conflux of experience and innate reasoning as the infant matures.
Alternatively argued, one cannot intentionally act if nothing is identifiable, if there is no identity of which one is in any way aware. Intention (aboutness) presupposes cognizance of identities; again, with each identity being a whole onto itself.
At any rate, if there in fact are disagreements, I’d like to learn more about where these disagreements take place.
I see no reason to agree with you. And I did read your statements. You stated a personal opinion; "there is no use in talking about 'the reason that orders the world'". And you made a further statement about your personal resignation; "I don't have access to 'the reason that orders the world' so I don't care about it."
Nowhere have I seen the claim that a human being has no direct access to the independent ordering of the world justified. Plato argued that the philosopher does have access to it through the means of apprehending "the good". This is the point of the cave allegory. And, it is the described responsibility of the philosopher to turn around, and go back to the others to assist them in their enlightenment.
So the statement, "no human being can have access to the reason that orders the world" is absolutely unsupported, as far as I can tell, yet the statement "it is possible for a human being to access the reason that orders the world" is flimsily supported. Flimsy support out weighs no support by an infinitely large magnitude, so I choose the flimsy support for my opinion; while your opinion ought to be banished from the philosophical mind as that held by those who are satisfied to be trapped in the cave of illusion for all eternity.
Quoting khaled
It appears like you do not believe in evolution then. If these limitations are truly the limitations of being human, as you believe, they are still not the limitations of being alive.
Right. Sorry for assuming that we're talking about humans. Once we meet aliens or once we evolve to the point where we classify as a different species then yes, we may see more.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is justified by definition. You have access to the reason in your mind. You don't have access to "the reason that orders the world". This is not to say that the reason in your mind is wrong, but that it could be incomplete. Any theory about "the reason that orders the world" is just that, a theory. As long as it accounts for own reasoning and perceptions the only thing separating it from any other theory is Occam's razor.
Quoting khaled
If you do believe in evolution then you ought to believe that it is more likely than not that our reasoning and perceptions are incomplete. Not only is this supported by experimental evidence (Hoffman) but also we can easily find scenarios where there are things we cannot detect that affect us, such as UV light.
So what's the alternative to Copenhagen?
Ok, fine. Artificial distinction because I was speaking euphemistically. We aren’t mathematical, exactly. Instead, because we do all those things you listed, and we do them through application of a logical system, then it follows we must be imbued with that very logical system. How can we apply that which we haven’t already authorized, and how can we authorize that which we haven’t already determined as sufficient?
I’m going to maintain......via cognitive prejudice, I readily admit......that the mathematical nature of the domain of phenomena is not given to us in the observations of it. Relations between members of the domain, or between its members and its investigators, are given, and that by which relations are comprehensible to the investigators, cannot be in the relations themselves, but derived solely from the method for understanding them.
————-
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah....that’s the ubiquitous on-the-other-hand, and the bane of metaphysics in general. Is it right because we think it, or is it and we think it rightly. The only possible solution to the epistemological dichotomy must arise from a critique of the commonality, which is “we think”, but when the prime of metaphysical reductionism is found regarding it alone, it turns out not to apodeitically solve anything at all.
As Michael Schenker, UFO, “Rock Bottom”, 1974, so fondly laments.....where do we go from here?
As I said, knowledge is a cumulative thing. Do you not agree that human beings have knowledge within themselves, instinctual knowledge, which was acquired by earlier life forms? If so, then you ought not define "what can and cannot be known" by the limitations of the human life form.
Quoting khaled
This is completely untrue. Human beings communicate. Through communication we have access to what is in the minds of others. And we only have access to the minds of others through the medium which is the physical world. Therefore we must have access to the physical world. You can deny that this is "access", but what's the point to restricting the use of "access" in this way? You might as well say that we don't have access to anything and we know nothing. What good is such a claim?
Quoting khaled
So, what's wrong with having theories? Remember, you claimed that talking about "the reason that orders the world" is pointless. Are you now claiming that theories, in general, are useless? That's not true, theories are very useful.
Quoting khaled
I'm sorry Khaled, but I cannot see your reasoning. You are claiming that because our reasoning and perceptions are incomplete, we ought not make any effort toward completion. How is such a defeatism ('because I don't have it I ought not try to get it') the approach of a rational being?
Nothing. And they’re very useful.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I claimed we will never know we if have access to it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
False. Maybe I just suck at communicating. I’m saying that despite all our efforts we have no evidence by which to tell that we’re “done”. That we “got it”. Therefore it’s useless to aim at “getting it”. We can and should get as close as we can, where it’s useful to do so, but again:
Quoting khaled
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I didn’t say we don’t have access. I said we have no reason to believe we have full access, nor any way to tell that we do. That there could always be something we’re missing (heck, as far as we know there most likely is something missing). It’s a very modest claim.
Quoting javra
This is indeed a different understanding of whole, part and their relation in comparison with Husserl’s phenomenological approach. Your method, which is consistent with much empirical thinking going back to Aristotle, assembles larger wholes out of parts which maintain their own identity as they are joined together to form larger totalitites. Thus, your notion of form, eidos, whole is linked to identity as persisting presence to self, substance and res extentia. Husserl and Heidegger unravel the concept of self-present identity.
Continuing to study, read, reflect and to discern.
That's always on option.
Or we can simply get ever more confused. Which is a problem. :meh:
I suppose if you have in mind a project along the broad lines of idealism in opposition to narrow empiricism of the scientistic sort, you'd have a good deal to go over.
I'm stuck with two main themes, which are maybe impossible to study and hard to think about. They are about things in themselves and innate knowledge. I suspect something from the 1870's to the 1940's would be best. It seems to me to be the a last gasp of brilliance, between the pragmatists, Mainländer Whitehead and some obscure author.
So I'm only getting more perplexed. Oh well...
I had the good fortune to dedicate some years of my life to study. It was satisfying in many ways.
Yeah you should do it, you know more than me and I submitted my dissertation almost a year ago but finished essentially a year prior to that, postponed due to the pandemic. Although it brought some (little) clarity, it opens more questions that didn't bother you so much before.
But certainly, you should go for it if you can. :up:
well, congratulations on that, I know how much work it is to finish one of those, and takes a lot of dedication.
Heidegger and Husserl are underappreciated these days. This tradition though started with Kant. I think that Kant's first two antimonies were more a question for math and physics than philosophy. His last two though are the core of the Kantian paradox: we feel like we are free but that we impose freedom on ourselves by something determining us to. Do we create ourselves, and even the world, or is there someone else besides us pulling the strings? Descartes had a greater influence on Kant than people realize I think. Wasn't it Descartes's ontological argument that Kant was referring to in his criticism? Anyway most German philosophy after Kant has been trying to figure out our relationship with the world and with ourselves. These questions are true puzzles
Thanks. :)
Well, fyi, this is not an accurate representation of my view. And I have quite an aversion to the Cartesian notion of res extensa and related themes. Is an individual paradigm, which we know to be constituted from a great plurality of interrelated ideas, not comparable in its magnitude to that of an individual idea? Only a Cartesian would so assume. For the rest of us, paradigms are of course larger than ideas and, in so being, hold a greater extension within cognitive spaces, and both are aspects of cognition rather than being corporeal. A potential idiosyncrasy of mine that I couldn't resist expressing.
All the same, I was mainly claiming that awareness of wholes is primary to both our cognizance and cognition, and that awareness of parts, or of constituency, is secondary. As one generalized consequence, we infer parts from wholes, rather than vice versa. But I wasn't aiming at a metaphysics for the principle of identity, if there were to be one.
Quoting Joshs
Guesstimating here, but the notion of identity being fully relative to relations as opposed to "self-present" (if this indeed touches upon their content) doesn't of itself refute the primacy of wholes over parts in respect to awareness, to not address in respect to aboutness.
Doesn't seem you're interested in a discussion on this subject, and that's fine. Just wanted to clarify my stance.
:up: Apropos my earlier post, I see that that book title comes from Heraclitus! :-)
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Indeed.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. On the other hand, QM can be considered as a generalization of probability theory over complex numbers (see Scott Aaronson's FAQ at the link below). In which case, it's not just Wigner that has no information about the friend's measurement, his entire local environment doesn't either (hence interference)!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm not quite clear on this point. Consider a MZI with equal arm lengths where the emitted photon always goes to the same detector. We would still need to add the amplitudes of the paths that go to the untriggered detector in order to make the correct predictions. Or do you mean we just don't have to represent path interference around Pluto (since we already know the photon couldn't tunnel out and make it there in time.)
Quoting frank
Maybe the Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? :-)
Quoting The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - Scott Aaronson
Not at all. Counterfactual final states contribute nothing to the amplitude at the factual final state. The amplitude at a given final state is the sum over histories between the initial state and that state, nothing more. Problem is not knowing what the factual state is.