Brains in vats...again.
I have always loved that brain in a vat notion that is supposed to rattle epistemology students. On the simple level of a physical reduction, we most certainly already are a brain in a vat; I mean actually, for the vat in question is a human skull and there we are "wired up" to receive the world.
But the implications are never given their due. Such a concept is meant to challenge our basic thinking about knowing the world, for brains in vats are, to the events actually surrounding the brain, epistemically opaque. Nothing can be know about that room where the brain sits envatted given that knowledge is simply given through wires and programming. This makes the actual world metaphysical.
Such is the world of familiar perceptual events, no?
No matter how you slice it up theoretically, you will never explain the essential epistemic connection to make "out there" come "in here".
But the implications are never given their due. Such a concept is meant to challenge our basic thinking about knowing the world, for brains in vats are, to the events actually surrounding the brain, epistemically opaque. Nothing can be know about that room where the brain sits envatted given that knowledge is simply given through wires and programming. This makes the actual world metaphysical.
Such is the world of familiar perceptual events, no?
No matter how you slice it up theoretically, you will never explain the essential epistemic connection to make "out there" come "in here".
Comments (232)
Correct. When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work.
That's why Socrates said he stopped looking into physical matter like the materialists and took up inquiry into the mind instead ....
That reminds me of wisdom of the crowd and also a forum member, can't recall faer name though! My memory is kaput!
Maybe it's time to change the vat. Or its contents, as the case may be :wink:
I think that the 'out there' being 'in there' in the brain is probably captured in the idea, which goes back to Plato, of the microcosm and the macroscosm. The brain is so complex as the neuroscientists show, and if there are deficits, it affects the whole wiring, and psychedelics can create transformations, as suggested by Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'. But, we cannot step outside of our brains to perceive true objective reality, as suggested by Nagel in 'The View From Nowhere'.
It appears both, oddly, amount to the same thing! :chin:
Not quite. Not that everything could be an illusion at all, not even in the running, not withstanding what analytic theorists say. Talk about illusions implies talk about what is not an illusion, for there can only be the one with the other. So from where comes the basis for something Other than what is there, in experience? Well, there is no basis, for anything you can imagine is purely phenomenological. It's not as if one can reach beyond phenomena into a "real" world, affirm what it is, then return with a thesis about illusions and reality.
Descartes opened to door to aporia, but did not walk through, cheated, as it were, his way out of the very doubt he posited. But here, we are more genuine to the assumption, and it is not merely doubt anymore; it is a theoretical impossibility to establish foundational knowledge of something outside the phenomenological world.
It is guesswork? A bare phenomenological encounter is not this. Step barefooted on sharp glass, this is not guessing there is pain (putting aside Derrida, unless you don't want to. I mean, deconstruction has its limitation in metaethics). The "how" of things is never forthcoming at the level of basic assumptions as one comes face to face with the "what" of things, the "givenness" of things.
Anyway, it is at the level of acknowledging the world, the phenemenological level, where indeterminacy narrows and qualitative experience steps forward, that the guesswork becomes, not more pronounced, but less so, for the phenomenon is closer, perhaps even absolute.
I see no difference between what you say here and what Descartes and Gilbert Harman are implying with their thought experiments. The idea is to rattle the cage of dogmatists (?) - grasp them by their arms firmly and shake them hard till the come to their senses or simply slap them across their faces until they come to the realization that certainty is the aporia in the sense that it's impossible.
Am I sure? you might ask. Exactly, I would reply! The answer is the question!
Genetic engineering?
Or then, maybe it's time to realize it is not a vat or a brain at all. And in doing so, an awareness of existence as such creeps forward, not knowing what to affirm anymore, but clear that talk about brains in vats is itself a constructed idea, and the more language is given authority to give the world to paragraphs and theses, the deeper fall into the same error that our common categories that inform s about what it means to be here are the closest we can get to understanding the world.
After all, it is the proposition that holds reality in place, that fixates one's gaze.
Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. For good or ill, we're part of the world just like everything else--even that little homunculus in our head some people assume exists.
But Descartes escaped uncertainty with God. And it is not the rattling of a cage, as I see it. It is a revolution of the way we see the world. Science's assumptions about an independent and knowable exterior world is now completely untenable. Phenomena are now the true epistemic foundation, and so inquiring eyes turn here. The subjective world, largely ignored by empirical science, is now front and center, and meaning becomes first philosophy.
How does one ever affirm a "true objective reality" is has not encountered such a thing to even talk about? this becomes an entirely metaphysical affair, and the only direction there to address inquiry that remains open when doors are closed to some "exterior" affirmation, is toward interiority. This "outwardness" is now not even speakable, a nonsense term, say some (Rorty, e.g.) It is not nowhere at all, but being somewhere has undergone a dramatic shift on the order of a Copernican revolution.
But this ignores that issue at hand altogether. If you hold a materialist of physicalist view (or some convoluted compromise about these), then pray tell, how does anything out there get in here? this is a simple question, and certainly not one that invokes scientific responses. It is a prescience question that goes to the presuppositions of science, not science itself.
And keep in mind, if you are a pragmatist, then you do not hold the metaphysical view that there is some knowable stuff out there.
It seems such a thing has been given more than its due because it remains an issue after all the theoretical smoke has cleared. Analytic philosophers typically don't take it seriously as they don't read phenomenology. As a result, they go no where, but very slowly. It is a burned out approach.
This is not correct. It's not guess work at all. There's just a lot we don't know yet. Not the same thing. Because, you know, science.
I agree with this. The idea of objective reality can be really useful, but it's not true. Or false for that matter. That's how metaphysics works.
It seems to me that a big difference, maybe the most important one, is that we are not just wired up to the "world." We are also wired up to ourselves. Interoception, our sense of our body, is an integral part of our awareness and consciousness.
Quoting Constance
Not sure what "epistemically opaque" means. How is that different from our brains?
Quoting Constance
This doesn't seem right to me. What's the big mystery about getting stuff from out there in here? We are wired to the outside. Signals come down the wires. Our nervous and other systems process the signals. That processing is called "the mind." We send signals back.
The pain itself probably is not guessing since we seem to experience it. The guessing seems to come into it when we are trying to explain how contact with the sharp glass translates itself into the sensation of pain, who or what it is that perceives and interprets it and why, etc.
As the way we perceive things tends to change from one individual to another, and from situation to situation, at least some of it seems to be subjective.
Well, you have a point but the error in judgment you commit is that now you've swung to the other extreme - to believing in subjectivity. This is not the intent/aim/goal of skepticism (Cartesian & Harmanian). What Descartes and Harman want to accomplish is to only, I repeat only, sow the seed of doubt in the garden of epistemology. This seed of uncertainty has germinated and is now a healthy (dose of skepticism) plant in full bloom but...it in no way diminshes the value of the other flowers (knowledge) that it grows alongside. If it does anything, it makes us unsure as to whether the flowers present are real or fake. That's not a bad thing if you take the time to realize artificial flowers are so well-made that it's impossible to distinguish them from real ones. If so, does it matter subjective or objective? They're identical insofar as our ability to tell which.
Skepticism isn't/wasn't ever meant to make you come to a decision. It simply pleads or sometimes demands that you take all claims to knowledge with a pinch of sodium chloride. That's all.
"Guess work" was a slight exaggeration. However, if there is "a lot we don't know yet", then what we think we know may not be true after all. Or it may appear in a totally different light once new knowledge has been revealed. We don't even know who it is that knows or thinks that they know.
How Can We Know that We’re Not Brains in Vats?
There is an established discipline of cognitive psychology and science which works on issues of perception, emotion, consciousness, and other aspects of mind from a scientific viewpoint. The phenomena they study and theories they develop are not mysterious or outside the limits of mainstream science.
So that's what Pragmatists think!
I was under the impression that Dewey generally wasn't inclined to accept that there's an "out there" and an "in here." So, I think it's inappropriate even to refer to an "external world" in his view. We (including our minds) are parts of the same world, and our experience the result of our existing as a living organism in an environment and interacting with it. He's neither a realist nor an anti-realist as I understand him. I don't think he ever denied the existence of other components of the world. The "out there" and the "in here" merge as part of the manner in which we live in the same world, to put it very simply. There's no question of not knowing what's "out there" as a general proposition, i.e. it doesn't arise in general, though it may in particular.
That is in any case my interpretation of Dewey.
We interact with the rest of the world as we all do and have always done regardless of metaphysical concerns we claim to have.
It is a fun exploration. I took my first philosophy class the year after the matrix came out, so it was all the rage. I believe the scenario is shown to be in error (like other epistemological assumptions) because it suggest an infinite regression could exist. If I'm a brain in a vat, then some one is putting brains in vats, who could themselves be a brain in a vat, who must then account for some one putting brains in vats.
I agree.
Science, yes. Unfortunately, most people have no knowledge of science.
If everything were so well-known, clear-cut, and non-mysterious, then presumably people would not start threads like this one or, if they did, the issue would be settled with just one response.
Additionally, when people do have knowledge, it is not direct, personal knowledge, it is second-hand knowledge acquired from scientists. Scientists themselves have no direct knowledge of scientific facts but learn about them from other scientists, etc. Plus, they may have no knowledge of things that are outside their particular discipline or field, and so on.
Just because something is not well known does not mean it is mysterious.
Quoting Apollodorus
Most of what we know about everything we know because we've been told or shown by others.
There's your problem: "out there" vs "in here".
I'm not entirely sure about "shown". Personally, I don't recall being shown or even told how the brain produces sensory cognition, for example. And I think it would be safe to surmise that the same is true of most people.
So, are we "out there", or "in here"?
Unless the idea of objectivity is also turned on its head: What does this mean if not agreement, and what gives itself to agreement better than the immediacy of what is directly apprehended. As an empirical scientist, I agree that the sun has a greater mass than our moon, this is an evolved, historical idea, a thing of "parts," that is, analyzable. Prior to it becoming a scientific term, it is a phenomenological one, reductive to sensate intuitions, thoughts and a long history of scientific "revolutions" (Kuhn), and, as Kuhn tells us further, there is no reason to think these present theories along these lines will continue as they are, after all, nothing ever has.
What is objective, then? The matter turns to certainty, and degrees thereof. Let us now say the sun is best defined as a phenomenological aggregate of predicatively formed affairs (Husserl) which are witnessed, at the very basic level, as phenomena, first, logically prior to anything being taken up in an empirical theory. Science, of course, continues its course, but at the level of basic questions and assumptions, the entire business is turned on its head.
Take, say, a Hubble mirror as a model for perfect transparency (just a model of something "passing through" with near perfect accuracy. Then there is opacity: a piece of granite? A brick? Anyway. Now ask, regarding an object's "passing through" to meet and inquiring brain-thing, how opaque or transparent is the brain as a receiver of the object as it is, unmodified, undistorted; how epistemically transparent of opaque is this brain? Of course, it is absolutely opaque, and one has no more "knowledge" of the object than a dented car fender has of the offending guard rail.
Quoting T Clark
the big mystery is this: outside?? Talk about an outside implies one has the means to affirm what is not inside. Take a typical physicalist reductive position and say thought is reducible to brain activity. But how is it that "brain activity" is itself anything but brain activity? The "real" brain is supposed to be the truly real, yet one never gets "out" of the perceptual matrix to affirm it. One is always, already in that which is supposed to be reduced to something else.
I know, we witness things as if we know, but this knowledge's outside/insideness can never be anything but inside; therefore, there is no inside/outside at this level of analysis.
I would remove "probably" above, agree with the idea that the "guessing" lies with the explaining, but then to say "some of it" seems to be subjective cancels the progress made in the statement. the explaining is interpretative, and it is here, when we talk, we complicate what is simple. Pain is simple as pain, but open your mouth about it, and you have to explain the context in which the event is thereby placed, and what is immediate and unquestioned now becomes bound to language and context. The pain that is there speaks very clearly as an injunction NOT to bring this into the world. This I argue, is a nonlinguistic phenomenon that "speaks".
Well, planting seeds of doubt is a far cry from what is being defended here. Look, if it were a seed of doubt "merely" then you would have recourse to to defend both sides with some margin of credibility. But there is none here. Phenomenology is the only wheel that rolls. That is, unless you can make the case for its opposition. But this simply isn't possible, and there is not an analytic philosopher worth his/her ink that will even try. Kant was never refuted only ignored, after a century of post Kantian fixation. they just gave up, took Wittgenstein seriously when he drew the line between sensible and nonsensible propositions, and proceeded with the assumption that empirical science is the best we can do, and epistemic issues can go hang. Just look at those absurd Gettier problems: they care nothing for P being a nonsense term, and simply proceed as if all were well.
As to subjectivity: all apparent dichotomies sustain and are not challenged, as long as the analysis doesn't attempt to make a claim about basic questions. At this level, subjective and objective lose their meanings, though talk sometimes suggests otherwise.
It gets complicated, and phenomenologists vary. I read, lately, the French theological post moderns like Michel Henry and Jean luc Marion, and Levinas, and others. Massively interesting stuff, but the old vocabulary of subjective/objective is replaced by other terms altogether.
Pragmatist epistemology is, well, pragmatic, so my "knowledge" relationship with the world is pragmatic. What is it that I know? I know pragmatics, not objects and there outer presence, but the pragmatics binds me to them. I don't "know" in any other way but the forward looking nature of the relationship. Walking down the street, my knowing all things around me is reduced to a pragmatic familiarity as to what they DO, like the sidewalk giving required support for each step and everything else duly anticipated. Pragmatism is a temporal epistemic theory about what things do when encountered. No metaphysics regarding some occult knowledge of things themselves.
Referring to an external world is perfectly fine. It is only at the level of basic questions that the nature of one's knowledge relationship is revealed. The world doesn't change in its natural relationships. One still walks and talks very naturally about the world out there, but ask philosophical question about what underlies all this, and there is no "out" or "in" at all. These are merely pragmatic terms that work. they have no import beyond this.
So I think this agrees with what you are saying. the real and the anti-real yield to this final reduction: everything is known by it forward looking effects. What is nitro? Well, take some, throw it against a wall with a certain force, observe. That is "what" it is. The "what" is thus no more than the "what it does".
This may seem innocuous enough, but then, consider: when you leave a room, and take all possible experience generating faculties with you, what is left behind is by no means a room, or anything else you think of. Most find such thinking impossible.
How so?
Skepticism is not contradictory - "...defend both sides..." All it states is given a proposition p, it can't be known whether p or ~p. In other words, the doubt (p/~p) can't be cleared. It definitely doesn't claim p and ~p which would be to "...defend both sides..." I can't stress this enough.
Quoting Constance
That's only true if you're certain that there's no objective reality. That is a luxury we can't afford.
Quoting Constance
I believe that some philosophers were of the opinion that sensible propositions are those that can be verified by which I suppose they meant the proposition should be amenable to testing.
Quoting Constance
As I said, once a proposition is formulated, it's either true/false. Not nonsense!
:100: Global skepticism refutes itself. Thank you.
Quoting Cuthbert
:smirk:
:brow:
No. Familiar perceptions do not reveal the world as it is. "Perceiving the world as it is" is a contradiction in terms. But, they do reveal mappings from the real world onto perceptual planes.
That is the difference between brain-in-a-skull and brain-in-a-vat. BiaS can still count on its perceptual machinery being functions on reality of some sort: given the output of these functions, things about the input can be deduced. But with BiaV that link is severed completely: perception tells us nothing about reality whatsoever, where reality is the world beyond the vat.
(you can argue that they tell you about persistent constructs in the simulation program which is feeding your brain, and that these constructs for all intents and purposes is your reality, etc)
I will grant you that in the end what becomes evident is a kind of skepticism, but the philosophical thrust of it all depends on the arguments and how they work out in a positive thesis. Scientific materialism, assumptions about what is there independently of cognitive, affective, pragmatic systems, make no sense at all. Such a strong statement carries the matter far beyond the wishy washy skepticism of doubt as a deterrent to belief. Demonstrate that p is nonsense, then one does not simply become skeptical of p. One dismisses p altogether.
Quoting TheMadFool
But then what do you mean by objective reality? This is the rub. Phenomenologists do not deny objective reality, they simply redefine it, for this is a philosophical concept, and is at issue at this level of analysis.
Quoting TheMadFool
But then, what is it to test? This is a philosophical question. Consider that one tests what stands before one, some thing of event. What are these at the level of basic assumptions? This is not a scientist's question, but one of science's presuppositions. Neil Degrasse Tyson has no insights to offer as a physicist, and the standard scientist's assumptions are out the window. they don't (typically) step outside their world to discuss questions like, What does it mean to call an object real at all? The ones that do end up speaking nonsense. (Keep in mind that someone like Daniel Dennett is not a naive realist. He simply doesn't read phenomenology, and in this he IS naive).
So, when it comes to brains in vats and the epistemic issues it raises, the matter turns decidedly against naïve realism, and does not preserve its standing at all, standing that would allow, well, doxastic resistance at all. It is relegated to the bin of moribund terminology, like a flat earth or cranial phrenology.
Quoting TheMadFool
Not propositions and logical validity. Looking for a way to epistemically connect P to S is nonsense if P is not analyzable as a singular entity. P's ontological status is bound to justification, that is, what it is cannot be removed from what it means to know it.
Begs the question: Real world?? Quoting hypericin
You are steeped in murky waters on this. To defend it, you would have explain how it is that anything out there gets in here, AT ALL, such talk about reality independent of perceptual machinery can make sense. A tall order; an impossible one, really. As to complete severance, it only makes sense if you can delineate what is being severed from what, and you can't, because all of you talk is necessarily confined to phenomena.
The true course to reality is within, where the world begins, that is, where generative springs produce emerging phenomena.
I think the relationship between the organism (a human, in this case) and the environment it which it lives is far too close and interrelated to come to such a conclusion. The "boundary" between the two is far more permeable than this conclusion would require--it would require it to be fixed and impermeable. We have no reason to believe that the rest of the world is so different from what we interact with every moment of our lives as to be inconceivable.
Most people have not been shown, or told, about quantum mechanics, number theory, or diesel engine repair either. That doesn't mean they are mysterious.
Quoting Constance
Witnessing and apprehending are not immediate or at the very basic level. They are up the ladder of mental processing from the place where objective reality is encountered. Unless there is something more basic, which makes sense to me.
Quoting Constance
Not at all transparent, but how is that different from a brain in a skull-vat rather than a glass-vat?
Quoting Constance
The idea of outside vs. inside always makes me think of this:
I imagine a baby "thinking" to itself as it holds it toes - "Hey, when I hold these things, I can feel something. Hey...wait a minute - I think they are part of me." So, anyway, I guess that means we learn inside from outside the same way we learn everything else. Why is that a mystery? It seems plausible to me.
But philosophy is open, because everything in the world is open at basic questions. You have EVERY reason to believe the rest of the world is so different, for everything, when followed to basic assumptions, falls apart. I mean what do you do with this condition that is laid before you? One thing I do know, and it is that yielding to pragmatic phenomenological ontology takes an existential revolution, I refer to putting down the text and letting its re-interpretation of affairs to take hold. Rorty though Heidegger, Wittgenstein Kuhn and Dewey were the most important thinkers (See his Irony, Contingency and Solidarity where is most transparent), all phenomenologists of sorts. There are many great things he says, but there is one principle one that leaps to mind (which, of course, is constructed out of Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and on and on): We MAKE the world; we do not discover it (note how this demonstrates the logical reasoning of a pragmatist's view). An act of perception is an act of apperception, and when I see my cat, there is no "mirror" in my head simply taking in the world, as if the world were simply giving itself to me, as if the cat just impossibly entered my head. Note that even on the simple materialist's model, it makes no sense at all not to acknowledge this.
As Rorty famously put it, on this very familiar model of the materialist/physicalist (regardless of how this is construed), how does anything out there get in here? Trace it: there is my cat, here is my brain thing. Proceed. You will find a reductio ad absurdum in your very first substantive premise. Put aside what SEEMS to be the case. Nothing is this.
Whether or not what we've left behind is a room is another, or rather the same, metaphysical question. People may find it "impossible" because it's hard to see beyond language. As long as "room" is hanging around, it's hard to conceive that the room itself may not be.
But...but.... Oh, wait, you resolved this conflict yourself?
Quoting hypericin
Do you find that unsatisfactory? I don't.
Now you're talking. It gets sticky from this astute observation; I mean, what phenomenologists are doing where I find interest is taking the matter of the phenomenological reduction, a reduction of the world to its "barest" phenomenological "presence" (what Derrida calls the metaphysical present. He, like you, insists, rightly, that IN the perceptual act itself, of any kind, any construal possible will never be free of the text, and text is this diffuse gathering of associated ideas. Think of brain storming in creative writing. This is the "text" and there is no genuine, singular, positive affirmation of a thing).
thinkers like Husserl believed (some disagreement here) that at the level of phenomenological apprehension, where one suspends all presuppositions and, well, stares at the object as the "thing itself" to encounter is qualitatively different than ordinary (naturalistic) perception. One is now truly aware of the object in the most primordial way. THIS kind of thing is at the heart of existential thought.
Husserl is criticized for the very reason you posit: nothing is free like this. Impossible.
But one has to wonder, and indeed, just allow the reduction to reach its end: it is true that there is NOTHING in the simple apprehension of an object that is there in an absolute way? How about this spear in my side? Is that pain truly not presented to my cognition in a "presence" of apprehension?
Big issue, fascinating, really. Quoting T Clark
Right. Not different. I think, by this physical model of vats and brains, things are the same. Quoting T Clark
Actually, I don't think this happens at all. This kind of thing comes much, much later. First there is the unconscious laying down of a foundation for language and its question, assertions, denials, universals and so on. One cannot say anything to oneself when one has not developed the ability to think. the word "I" has to be modelled, contextualized, assimilated, and so on.
No mystery when you put it like this, in a very familiar way of referring to things. But assume, if you like, that there is such a dialog going on inside the infant's head. Toe? How does this term, this recognition "KNOW" that digital extension? It takes in the sensation of the presence which is done in TIme: first there is the sensation, THEN there is the, oh my; what is this? This association between speech and phenomenon is what is in question.
Then we put aside what is hard to conceive, acknowledge the argument at hand, and admit: once the room is vacated of perceptual presence, the matter turns to metaphysics.
Now, after having said this, I am aware the there is an Other to things around me. I am not a chair or a pen. This is where talk of brains and vats has to end and it gets very weird, for we are in phenomenology's world now, and things are not grounded at all. In my view one has to yield to this conclusion: our finitude is really eternity. "Truth" is really eternal.
Very controversial, of course. I would only go into it if you are disposed to to do so.
I agree. That's why I put "thinking" in quotes. I was being a little cute, but It makes sense to me that babies that age are working with their parents to create a world, with and without language I guess, that includes inside and outside.
One of T Clark's four Noble Truths is that metaphysical statements are not true or false, they are more or less useful in a particular situation. Most people don't see it that way. They think we have to choose just one way of seeing things all day, every day, forever. That means you have to throw something away to see things in a new way.
Quoting Constance
I'm not sure what you mean, but I'd be happy to take it further if you'd like. It's your thread, so we can do whatever you want. I will probably be gone for several hours soon.
Sure, but what is the world?
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
We do, and we can wave our hands about, kick rocks and debate with other people. But so can skeptics, idealists and other troublesome folk like Nick Bostrom. You might say that pragmatically the world is whatever it is we're interacting with, which includes other people and various objects.
But I can also do that in a limited sense when I put on my VR headset. You've probably familiar with Star Trek episodes when their holodeck malfunctions and some of the crew is trapped inside a realistic simulation. Or a hologram becomes aware that he's a simulation.
Rorty isn't necessarily representative of Pragmatism, as I assume you know. Susan Haack doesn't believe he is one, and I have my doubts as well. Anyone who claims Dewey is a postmodernist may have trouble understanding Pragmatism in general.
We don't "discover" the world of course, being part of it. But neither do we "make" it--again because we're part of it. We seem inclined to either consider ourselves separate from the rest of the world or consider ourselves creators of the rest of the world. But we're neither.
They not only can do it, they actually do it, quiet shamelessly. Personally, I think those who claim to be skeptics and then act just as if they were not skeptics have a credibility problem.
I think we should have a reason to doubt the world before we start doubting it.
Excelente! There must be a reason to doubt. Have you never been fooled? I've been, countless times, in the most humiliating ways possible. Worst of all, I've often fooled myself, unknowningly of course but that still counts as a good reason to be skeptical. What sayest thou?
Fooled by the world? Not in a manner which has caused me to doubt that I'm here in it with everything and everyone else.
It's not such a big step to go from being wary of conmen and false friends to entertain the possibility of Deus deceptor (Descartes).
In fact, I snuck in and wired up Ciceronianus's brain last night while they were asleep. The only problem is I wasn't sure of the address, so it might have been someone else.
Now I know why I'm feeling a little different today! :lol:
Please do! Boy, do I have a lot to kvetch about.
OK. So the pain and, presumably, the sharp glass are real but they are not "out there" but "in here", where the perception of pain, and the mental analysis of it, are also located.
But is the perceiving entity identical with the brain? And is it single or multiple?
Quoting T Clark
:100:
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
:up:
However, if most people do not know about quantum mechanics or neuroscience, then they do not know about it. And what they do not know about is unknown to them.
It's a leap, Fool: a groundless, or merely logical, "possibility". Big whup. Peirce refer to such as "paper doubts". BiV is idle child's play.
Damnation. I thought it was my cat Sulla pawing at me again. Not that I know he's a cat, of course.
Yes, a possibility but I accept arguments that dismiss possibilities only if it's based on probability.
I had to. It rhymed.
Well, the significant word there is "entertain." As an entertainment or as a matter of whimsy we might wonder if some demon is having a bit of fun with us, but it's not a true doubt.
A pity Dr. Seuss didn't think of the Cat in a Vat, I think.
Groundless possibilities strongly correlate with vanishingly low probabilities.
:up:
I like this. This is a far more satisfactory answer than "It's just silly lets not think about it." It takes the problem seriously and suggests a genuine solution. And this analysis seems right to me. It seems like Cuthbert has correctly articulated a niggling feeling of 'there's something wrong with the thought experiment, but I'm not quite sure what'.
If the brain in the vat was given the faculty of reasoning, then it will keep doubting about itself. Sooner or later, it will find out, that something is not right. It might say "I perceive, therefore I am connected."
The envattedness is a thing-in-itself.
You would have to explain to me how Rorty is not a pragmatist. Dewey a post modernist? But then, what is it to be this? Such terms. Post modernism? Such a wide concept, but what does it mean essentially? A denial that modernism fulfilled its promise to pin things down. Nothing pinnable like this. Certainly not ethics.
Anyway, does Dewey qualify? Why not? Pragmatists do not believe in absolute truths or any theory of truth that is beyond problem solving. Nietzsche is the first post modernist, they say. He was late 19th century, so being postmodern doesn't really have a period, a time limitation. Truth is something other than agreement with reason, and there are things that are more primordial than truth, though nothing is really primordial at all. The problem would be separating the post modern (in philosophy) from existentialism. It is the idea of epistemic indeterminacy that marks the post modern, and Dewey certainly qualifies.
There may be reasons to say Rorty may not be a pragmatist, but I would have to hear them. As far as I see it, pragmatism is the thesis that the most basic account of truth and the world is problem solving, a forward looking process that takes the consummatory event (Dewey) of a problem solved as the essence of truth.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
It's not a thesis about what we are, but about what it is to know something. Pragmatism will not allow to posit anything about what the world is, for it is bound to a ubiquitous epistemology that does not yield up things and there presence. Such is impossible, like walking on water. All the understanding can ever know is the forward looking end of a problem solved. Anything beyond this is just metaphysical hogwash. And problems and their solutions are manufactured in the process of engagement. See Dewey's Art As Experience: both the aesthetic and the cognitive issue from the consummatory conclusion of a problem solved. To know, in other words, is to put something to use successfully. This is a "made" affair.
dont understand why the world can't be made if we are part of it. The matter goes to knowing, and to know the I of me or you is to encounter it as a problem to solve. Look, there is not way out of this. All apprehension of the world are knowledge claims, and knowledge is pragmatic.
Which is my complaint about both. Physicists' language has no place in genuine philosophy. And Dennett does not deal in Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological body of texts. Therefore, he misses the boat. That may sound dismissive, but analytic philosophy is a waste of time, for the most part.
Brains in vats is nothing...do we even exist? Or is this how it seems to a string of information vibrating in a void somewhere?
the brain is just an a pattern of color in the mind
look and see
but dont look with your eyes. look with consciousness
You're equivocating. You know that right?
Not really. I am discussing two models of the relation between myself and the world: the common sense brain in a skull, and far fetched but technically possible brain in a vat. In the first, it is just a given that there is a perception independent real world.
Quoting Constance
Is the mystery here the hard problem? Because otherwise I don't really understand what's not to understand.
I do. In this view, how would you account for what happens when the brain is unplugged, housed in a new body, and "wakes up"?
Quoting T Clark
Not sure what you're getting at?
What does this mean? It means look with your understanding, and here, where ideas convince, structures of consciousness change, that is, if the ideas in question are not trivial, but momentous, like realizing you actually are a brain in a vat: suddenly you look around and realize that all along all there was was a laboratory fabrication. Imagine if voices issued from the sky one day announcing the news.
But then, and this is the rub, if you will, this is exactly the way reality is, for our brains are in vats of blood in skulls.
Now, you can't say the brain is just a pattern of color for our affairs are organized and consistent as we "see" them in daily life. But the real question is, what does your understanding tell? I claim it tells you that your finitude is the foundational condition of neuronal representation, and the reality is infinity. As I lift my cup from the table, such an event is eternal.
Glib, but confrontational. Not a good combination. You need more than this. Don't be shy, spell it out: what is it I don't get?
I don't see how that is relevant to what we're discussing.
Quoting hypericin
Sad to say, I can't remember what my point was.
No it doesn't.
Consciousness and mind are two very different things.
The argument that the simulation is the reality for the brain in the vat cannot accommodate the situation where the brain is housd in a body again
See also:
[quote = Nietzsche] To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. What? And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs — ? [/quote]
But then every night I dream and the external world is, in fact, the work of my nervous system (if I take as true that brains are the source of dreams) and global skepticism holds. The world we occupy while dreaming is essentially that of a brain in a vat, or in Nietzsche's words - the external world IS the work of my organs (but, the work of those organs/brain of the body that I occupy as a dream homunculus). If I doubt the external world while dreaming, I can (occasionally) become lucid and have some sort of control over the dreamscape (flying, moving objects at will, etc). Dream characters have even directly told me I'm dreaming. It seems to me there is no fundamental difference between waking life and dream life (see Thomas Metzingers: The Ego Tunnel), other than the stability of waking life and the inability to become lucid and control the world around me at will. We live in an ideal world every night, as a body in what seems an external world.
But in waking life people have only told me I'm dreaming in jest, and their true externality appears incoherent to doubt. After all, jumping off dreams cliffs shocks you awake, but kills you in waking (real?) life.
[quote=Zhuangzi]“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”[/quote]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/576434
I don't understand why it would matter.
I read this quickly while passing through, but didn't stop. Now I keep thinking about it. Do I believe this? Let's see.
First off, I get annoyed when people claim that each new discovery calls for a reevaluation of our understanding of reality. Does quantum mechanics require us to rethink metaphysics? My first reaction is to say no. I want to keep my metaphysics separate from physics. But on the other hand, I'm wonder if I'm being rigid.
I went back to your previous comment in this exchange.
Quoting Constance
Doesn't this point to a weakness of understanding in the scientists? Shouldn't they be interested in the metaphysical underpinnings of what they study? Can you effectively study something without being aware of your presuppositions? How can you apply the scientific method unless you understand it? Doesn't that mean that physicist's language does have a place in philosophy?
Am I talking about the same things you are?
If BiS, then BiV is imaginary.
BiV is imaginary.
BiS.
The noumena. The same issue rises for the simulation argument. If reality as we experience it is a simulation, then what sort of world is the simulation running in? Bostrom assumes the likelihood of an ancestor simulation by future civilizations with the technology to run such simulations, but his calculations are based on the reality he experiences now. Same with the argument for envatted brains. It's based on the reality we experience, not some envatted scenario.
In which case we, or more likely just I, are calculating a probability based on a false appearance.
If Boston is all of a person's reality, what do you call the world outside it?
It's Putnam's argument informally expressed. But there is an answer:
"If I accept the argument, I must conclude that a brain in a vat can’t think truly that it is a brain in a vat, even though others can think this about it. What follows? Only that I cannot express my skepticism by saying “Perhaps I am a brain in a vat.” Instead I must say “Perhaps I can’t even think the truth about what I am, because I lack the necessary concepts and my circumstances make it impossible for me to acquire them!” If this doesn’t qualify as skepticism, I don’t know what does." (Nagel, 1986)
So perhaps we are back where we started.
https://iep.utm.edu/brainvat/
Great point, except for the fact that Boston is not a computer simulation for the benefit of a brain in a vat.
I'm not sure I buy this. Since we are making up the vat scenario anyway, why not make it up such that vat world concepts correspond with trans vat concepts?
So? Computer simulations are real things, you can buy them in the shops. Why would they present some problem for what to call them?
I know how you feel, of course, but there is the an essential element missing from the objection, inevitably: the question, what IS philosophy? It's not love of wisdom, because that begs the same question. What is wisdom? What sets philosophy apart from other disciplines is its desire to know the truth at the level of basic questions, which is why all categories of thought are inherently philosophical regardless of way they differ in content. Going through your mail and doing quantum mechanics share that same foundation of structured thought and experience taking up the world. What does it mean at all to think, to solve problems, to experience pain and pleasure or art and music. Not this art or that love affair, but At ALL, how does one analytically approach those truly basic questions that are presupposed by all the things we say and do?
Metaphysics? There is bad and good metaphysics. The former asks about, say, God's angels, actions, responses to sin, his kingdom, accessibility through prayer, God's omniscience, omnipotence, and so on, and so on. This kind of thing is usually accepted on faith and dogma. Good metaphysics is found in phenomenology's analyses of time, metavalue, metaethics (what is the nature of suffering? A non-natural property??), analyses of the concept of presence, the possibility of pure phenomenological understanding of the world, and so on.
Empirical science? This is the naturalistic attitude. Philosophy is about what is presupposed by this, what assumptions are in place for this that make it possible to think and experience at all. Otherwise, you just doing scientific speculation, not philosophy.
Quoting T Clark
Physics is already, and has for some time (such that I've read, which is little, except for my college course) understood that an object is a synthesis of overt, observable, features, and the contributions of the observer, and ponders the question as to whether there is any epistemic connection at all between out there and in here.
What they usually do is take the naturalistic world, assume there is a connection, and simply move forward with that, putting aside any presuppositional objections. They are usually qualified materialists or physical reductionists and know nothing of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and others.
Yes, you can effectively study something and not be aware of is presuppositions; in fact, there is no though without ignoring presuppositions. As I type, I am not aware of the analysis ot typing, the language and its execution and many things. Were I to become aware of these, I couldn't type. Doing philosophy is not doing science, or, when a scientist does science, if she starts wondering about underlying philosophical issues, to that extent, she breaks away from her discipline.
That would be a problem to demonstrate. Most would say impossible to demonstrate, as well as undesirable. Consciousness without thought and understanding reduces consciousness to a kind of thing, like a tree or a table. A different kind of thing, no doubt, but a thing that is just there.
But then, I would need your account of how it is that consciousness and mind are different. Where is the line drawn such that being conscious and knowing (cognitively) are different?
I claim there is no real difference. The brain in a vat, as a descriptive scenario for a counterexample to naive realism, is descriptively incidental. Brain in vats, mechanical brains, electronic brains, virtual brains in vats, shoe boxes, I mean, this kind of thing has no bearing and the difference is really only one: in the conditions set up for the brain in a vat, there is the aspect of there "actually" being such things as brains, scientists and their vats. In the philosophical counterpart, any claim at all about such things would be what I call bad metaphysics. Positing, if you will, beyond the inner conditions of the "brain", is nonsense. this doesn't by any means, I further claim, deny the validity of metaphysics, but the good kind always prevails, the kind that sees an exhaustive examination of the world must include, as Putman put it, the existential affair where the words run out, and interpretation stunningly falls on its face, and yet, there we are in the midst of what utterly denies language's hold on things, for it is not a thing, but....thingness, or Being in the world, of the world.
This brings philosophy to its only recourse, which is phenomenology. Quoting hypericin
I suspect philosophy rather gets in the way of the simplicity of the issue. Is it a causal process that delivers an object to conscious recognition? There is my cat, and I know it, but how does, and this is the question of all questions, this opaque brain thing internalize epistemically that over there that is not a brain thing or any of its interior manifestations?
when you try to answer that question, you will see why claims about any exteriority of objects are impossible to justify. It is not a denial of naive realism in play here, but its most basic assumption that objects are all there, in some space and time that is beyond the margins of thought and experience (regardless of how modern science wants to construe this) that leads to the conclusion that such extra-experiential positing is impossible. That over there, my cat, is certainly NOT synapses firing into axonal fibers of physical brain connectivity. They are, of course, not simply different. they are radically OTHER.
Mind = thoughts and beliefs
Consciousness = awareness, being, presence.
Ya, the most amazing thing, and the only thing, in existence.
akin to God.
But then, how can one be aware without having beliefs? The trouble lies here: if there is an utter vacancy of thought and belief, there is no you, even if you take the self to be a kind of existence that thought cannot comprehend, if thought is not conceived to be in any way a part of it, then all terms of identity become lost. How is this so? Try to imagine such an independent existence and you will find thought to be an integral of affirming it. What remains is nothingness, that is, a thoughtless transcendental ego. You would have to invent something to make consciousness conscious that is not understanding, and this would be nonsense; that is to be conscious yet not to "know" this things in any way. Perhaps in the way a rabbit knows there is a carrot somewhere: non cognitive, or better, proto cognitive, yet the concept of agency is radically reduced, and there would be non cognitive, instinctual knowing, but this kind of thing is hardly where you want to go. You want to affirm something sublime and profound, so one imagines a disembodied soul without thought but endowed with something else, like unthinking divinity, beyond thought. A kind of agency that is intuitively "aware". The question here is, can you make sense of this withou going over the deep end of metaphysics? I mean, to think philosophically is to take what the world presents to us, and establish a basis for understanding it at the most basic level. Where is the justification for positing something that cannot be even made sense of: this thoughtless consciousness?
Consciousness = soul, god, self, identity, presence, here, now, experience, evidence, omniscience, eternity, infinity, etc...
All those things are intrinsic to it. So self is not a problem. Self and consciousness are the same thing. You don't need to think to exist. Read/Watch some Eckhart Tolle.
My objection is that this is free of analysis. All of what you mention are extremely problematic, each one; and each one has to be gone into. It is certainly NOT that what Tolle says is wrong, but you can't accept what someone says and call it truth. Consciousness is eternal? Of course, what else. But the matter simply begs for analysis. This requires reading people who analyze experience in competent ways. Kant is a good start.
Btw, I have listened to Tolle and found him an inspiration, but certainly not a substitute for research into phenomenology.
Yes but there is a distinction between the world they present and the real world. This distinction is what the word "reality" delineates, without it the word has no meaning.
Are simulations observer dependent? That is to say, is it possible for a simulation to exist in a universe with no minds?
That is interesting. If vat-world concepts correspond with trans-vat concepts, then the name 'Paris' in both vat-world and trans-world refers to Paris. [True? or not?] If I can successfully refer to Paris even in a scenario in which I'm a brain in a vat then we seem to have a way out of scepticism. [But have I just played a trick with sense and reference?] I think this is Putnam territory.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/577242
But 'Paris' is a proper noun, and here there are two of them.
Quoting Cuthbert
How? We can just as readily imagine a scenario where no vat-concept corresponds in any way with a trans-concept.
True. In that case 'I might be a brain in a vat' does not refer to a brain or a vat as we understand them, which is Putnam's argument.
On Paris, yes, true. If the concepts correspond then there is a corresponding ambiguity. Vat-Texas is Trans-Vat-Texas.
I don't think so. In any ordinary sense, doubt is uncertainty; it involves calling something into question ("doubting" it); hesitating. Descartes was never uncertain about the existence of the desk he wrote on, or that of the pot he pissed in, or that of the other items he used every moment of his life. He didn't really ask himself "Art thou real, oh pot in which I'm pissing?" He engaged in an exercise, employing a faux doubt. He no more believed in a demon intent on deceiving him than you would believe that an enormous rodent dressed in a tuxedo typed the words you read.
Dewey as I understand him thought of knowledge as the result of inquiry. He thought it was an error to characterize each of our encounters with the rest of the world as a "knowledge" relationship or event, or as the result of a process by which we "know" something. When we see something we've seen thousands of times before we don't engage in reasoning in order to say we've seen it, or to see it. We recognize it. When we believe we undergo or engage in a process to "know" each time we perceive something, we misunderstand what we are and what the rest of the world is, and how we interact with it.
It's clear to me that Dewey thought ignoring context was a fundamental problem of philosophy. Reasoning, experimenting, is something we do to know something we don't already know--that's how we learn things about the world around us. But we don't do that all the time, because we don't have to. And the fact we do so or don't do so has nothing to do with the existence of the rest of the world.
As for Rorty, I think he departed from Pragmatism because he never accepted the respect both Peirce and Dewey had in method, specifically the scientific method and intelligent inquiry, as a means to resolve problems and questions, to understand and act. That's something I believe is essential to Pragmatism. No absolute truth, but "warranted assertibility" based on the best evidence available. This is what I think "saves" pragmatism from claims of relativism. Also, while Rorty thought Dewey was right to criticize metaphysics and metaphysicians, he also thought his effort at metaphysics was misguided.
If philosophy is nothing more than our everyday experience and actions, then it is really nothing at all. At least nothing worth mentioning. You talk about philosophy consisting of analytic approaches to truly basic questions. Much, most, almost all of our daily experience is non-analytical, and good thing. It seems to me, without being able to point to specific evidence, that the only presuppositions to most of our daily experiences are more related to the structure of the mind than to analytic propositions.
Quoting Constance
I don't share your... prejudice against religion, but it has always bothered me that the existence of God is considered a metaphysical question. That's because the existence of a monotheistic God present as a conscious entity is a matter of fact, true or false. That takes it out of the realm of metaphysics to me. I think other aspects of Gods and religions are appropriate subjects for metaphysical discussion.
Quoting Constance
Agreed, except I think that science has presuppositions beyond those for other modes of thinking and experience. If not, you've diluted the idea of metaphysics, including epistemology, to insignificance.
Quoting Constance
This is a metaphysical position. I think very few scientists have this kind of abstract understanding of what they do. Maybe I'm wrong.
Quoting Constance
This probably answers my question, although I thought the two statements were contradictory. I think I misunderstood.
Quoting Constance
I agree that doing philosophy is not doing science, but I don't agree that scientists don't need to understand underlying philosophical issues. Unless, I guess, you want to significantly limit the scope of science.
I've enjoyed this discussion. I am skeptical of the role you give phenomenology in your philosophy, but my understanding is based on reading summaries rather than primary sources.
I strongly suspect this is not an epistemic act at all, but rather a distinction brains are hardwired to make. Witness organic brain disorders like schizophrenia where this distinction breaks down.
Instead of discarding as "bad metaphysics" what is called naïve realism here, why not instead bracket it with the disclaimer that this is not absolutely certain, but rather our best guess at the state of affairs. And describe why this qualifies as the best available guess (i.e. why brain in a vat can be cut away with Occam's Razor).
After all, whether or not we are envatted (love this coinage) is an empirical fact of the world, and empirical facts cannot, in principle, be proven with absolute certainty. All we can ever do is construct models which explain what we experience at the phenomenological level.
Absolute certainty is one of the great chimeras of philosophy.
I don't see how it applies to the BIV. 'Reality' is just a word which in the computer game case we're using to distinguish between the game world and the outside world. The word is embedded in a language, and act of social communication between two people, with a context and with intent. The word is being used to do something (in this case draw a distinction). It's not necessary to apply the exact same distinction to every single time the word is used, in every context. Language isn't like that.
So the language we use when describing a computer game doesn't tell us something about what is the case, it's not a window into the mind of God, it just a tool that gets a job done.
So the point with your BIV is that the situation would simply not be described by anyone in it as anything other than 'reality'. They wouldn't need another word because there's nothing to distinguish. There's no metaphysical truth being revealed here.
Insofar as an outside observer is concerned (maybe the only person in the world who isn't a BIV) their represented world would probably be called 'reality' and the simulation a 'simulation', but that would depend entirely on how useful whoever he was communicating with found the distinction to be and what language developed around that utility.
From our perspective imagining we're the non BIVs talking about the BIVs and wondering what word to use, I'd say 'reality' and 'simulation' would be a good choice.
From our perspective imagining we are the BIVs, 'simulation' would be a silly choice of word, it doesn't distinguish anything useful yet.
All we have from that perspective is that some of our representations come to us via an electrical signal from an electrode, others from an electromagnetic signal from a light wave. Why would we label one 'real' and the other a 'simulation' at that stage?
Quoting RogueAI
Again, dependent on language. 'Simulation' is a construct, amodel we make in our minds of some hidden states. Those hidden states, I believe, would continue to exist without minds, but there'd be no cause to distinguish them with the label 'simulation', because such a distinction can only be relevant to the models that minds make. I doubt an ant would have any use for such a distinction either, for example.
Quoting Isaac
If we are participating in the thought experiment and imagining we are BIVs, then we must be imagining the world outside the vats. So then 'simulation' distinguishes our imagined vat world from the imagined world outside the imagined vats.
Tricky. None of us know the state of the world outside our Markov blanket, so we infer it. If we're BIVs (prior to any thought that we might be), then we infer the perception of a 'tree' in front of me is caused by some external state exciting sensory neurons. Aren't we in no different position once we become aware of the possibility of being a BIV? The assumption that the perception of a 'tree' in front of me is caused by some external state exciting sensory neurons, still holds. The 'external state' is just now an electrode (with perhaps a mad scientists at the controls), but the theory that some external state has excited some sensory neurons in such a way as to represent 'tree's remains unaltered.
It's only from the outsiders perspective 'seeing' the electrodes and the scientists, that these objects (electrode, scientist) are usefully distinguished from the objects they're causing to be represented in the BIV. From the BIV's perspective, they're the hidden external states they always assumed were there all along.
Here I think 'external state' means light waves in BIS, electrode in BIV. But our analysis usually extends further than the immediate carrier of sensory information.
In BIS our mental model might be:
Tree -> reflected light -> eye -> brain signal -> perception of tree
But then supposed we imagine, or are convinced by, BIV. Then the analysis of looking at a tree might be:
Computer -> simulation software -> software state of tree -> electrode -> brain signal -> perception of
tree
But this is analogous to our model of say playing a video game with a tree in it:
Computer -> simulation software -> software state of tree -> screen emission -> eye -> brain signal -> perception of tree
In both the latter two cases our model of the object of our perception is that of a software construct, which is an aspect of software hosted on a physical computer. So in both cases it is linguistically meaningful and useful to designate the objects of perception as "simulations", as opposed to the rest of the physical world which hosts these simulations.
OK, I see where you're coming from. When I model, both the front ends are just 'Hidden State', so they're equal, to me.
One last fling...
Even in the last two, does it not really go;
Tree-> reflected light -> eye -> brain signal -> perception of tree (in the mind of the coder/programmer) ->computer -> simulation software -> software state of tree -> electrode -> brain signal -> perception of
tree (in the mind of the BIV).
Still coming from a tree, but going a long way round?
It makes sense to me that there are aspects of what we know that are not learned, but hardwired. On the other hand, the distinction between inside; what Constance calls "a brain thing or any of its interior manifestations;" and outside seems like something that would have to be learned.
He said without knowing what he was talking about. I really should do some more reading. Recommendations - science, not philosophy.
Well you can analyze any number of ways. But these are models of a single perceptual event of a single object. Yours seems to mix this with a history of that object. Once the software is programmed and installed on the computer, the system is an independent object like any other.
I think that BIVs are more significant for you, perhaps, for this reason.
I don't believe the object is out there in the 'real world' in the first place. I believe we construct the objects of our perception, so for me, the means by which the data we use for this construction arrives is of fairly minor importance.
I believe the source of the data for each of my inferences is external to the model doing that inferring. I also believe that the source of the sensory data I model is external to me (everything I detect by interoception). That's about as far as it goes.
Rorty is a post modern philosopher, which sets him apart from the old school of pragmatism, and this means he is looking at language and vocabularies as the foundational discussion about the world. Dewey and the rest did not think in terms like this, but what I think is the essence of pragmatism is what connects them, and this is in the scientific method, which is the foundation: the hypothetical deductive method, making the basic structure for thought and Being the conditional proposition, If...then....What is the concept and the proposition reducible to? What works. Look at what Rorty says about contingency:
[i]For Kant and Hegel went only halfway in their repudiation of
the idea that truth is "out there." They were willing to view the wodd of
empirical science as a made wodd - to see matter as constructed by
mind, or as consisting in mind insufficiently conscious of its own mental
character. But they persisted in seeing mind, spirit, the depths of the
human self, as having an intrinsic nature - one which could be known by
a kind of nonempirical super sciencecatled philosophy. This meant that
only half of truth - the bottom, scientific half - was made. Higher truth,
the truth about mind, the province of philosophy, was still a matter of
discovery rather than creation.[/i]
He goes on to emphasize that any such "discovery" notion is shear metaphysical nonsense. Consider how this goes: If you think there is something "out there" that our knowledge is telling us about, that this aboutness that we have as our knowledge condition includes actual features of that object of knowledge, then you haven't understood pragmatism's unavoidable "truth" structure, viz, that all the understanding every has, is the pragmatics. On the ontological end, it is just familiarity, reified familiarity, so in the end, the present moment , that very powerful sense of reality and presence one has about the cat being on the couch, the couch being blue in color, and so on, is a synthesis of the pragmatic conditions that give knowledge that famous forward-looking anticipation about what a thing does, the If.....Then.... conditional structure, and the simple "presence" that is familiar (habitual beliefs, says Dewey) since childhood.
The difference between Rorty and the traditional construal is focus on language, which makes him a post modern pragmatist. And what is language? Language is a pragmatic construction that is foundational for our "being in the world" and it is not as if Dewey actually talked like this, I don't think he did (reading through Nature and Wxperience. I have read others, like Art As Experience, some works on education, others? Don't recall), it's just that post modern thinking puts the burden of the real to language's language's interpretative nature, but giving full due to the things Dewey thought essential to a comprehensive accounting of the world, the non cognitive dimensions of affect, desire, motivation, fantasy and imagination and so on. Note that that Rorty's pragmatism, following Heidegger (if you like pragmatism, Heidegger's Being and Time is the perfect existential counterpart), makes the everydayness of the world and all of its affairs equal in their descriptive relevance, but when it comes to talking about what all this is, philosophy, then all eyes are on language and its meanings, as so an analysis of language is paramount.
I guess you're right, and Rorty does not follow Dewey and Peirce, but he does follow through on them in post modern themes. And there is no room at all for any positing an exteriority apart from experience, apart from t he language and logic that construct thought. The thoroughgoing pragmatic position cannot support any notion what ever of an "out there" to things discovered in experience.
Wouldn't it be important for figuring out the truth of your model of perception? If you're a BIV, then you're not perceiving anything. It's all a generated hallucination based on whatever the programmer wants you to believe you perceive. You don't have any sensory organs, so it can't be a perception.
If you're Kantian, then your model of perception is entirely empirical. Who knows what the act of perceiving in-itself actually is.
That's what perception is. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-42986-7_5
Yeah. But we want to minimise surprise, so a good match between the probability function of the model and the distribution of the hidden state is something we evolve toward, purely by energy efficiency.
Also we're a social species, we invest quite a lot in making sure your model matches my model to a good degree of similarity.
The trouble is that under the view that, "all perception is generated hallucination", other people, your own body, and the wider world around you is itself included in this generated hallucination. Essentially your perceptual 'world', which includes your own body, and other people, functions as a sort of internally generated self/world model, which is theorized to be caused by the brain/nervous system of something unknowable ("hidden state"). Its a kind of solipsism.
Quoting Isaac
I would imagine a "good match" (I don't even know how a good match would even be possible between hallucination and the unknowable..) is irrelevant in terms of our evolution, and the content of our 'hallucinations' would evolve towards what is useful in an evolutionary context (survival, gene replication, etc).
I'm not seeing the 'trouble' you started out claiming was there.
Quoting Inyenzi
You may well imagine that, yes.
If one’s identity is expanded to include the entire body, beyond the surface of the brain and nervous system to the surface of one’s skin, observation of the external world is direct. There is no longer some medium or veil between perceiver and perceived.
Look at it like this: Philosophy asks the most basic questions. About what? Everything. Then what are basic questions? Questions that underlie everything. They sit quiet as assumptions in a place that gives all knowledge claims there foundation. The technical side of philosophy lies in the disciplined body of theory and inquiry regarding all things at this foundation. E.g., the way analytic philosophy goes after the givenness of the world lies with Dennett's "pumps" that examine qualia to see if the term makes any sense. Where do we get this qualia idea? From ordinary experience. Continental philosophy handles it much differently, but the source is always everydayness, Heidegger's "always, already there" that is the starting point of any inquiry: our everydayness is the beginning of any philosophical question.
Of course, there is that nagging history of metaphysics that plagues inquiry, but everybody wants to be rid of this. Nietzsche blames it on Christianity, Kierkegaard on Christendom, Heidegger on the Greeks, Dewey on rationalism, and so on.
Quoting T Clark
It depends on what you mean by religion. If you are talking about the an anthropomorphism that has a will, a wrath, who is king of all and bows to no one, who insists on obedience, who does this and that like people do, then religion is just interpretatively superfluous, to put it nicely. You know, a lot of narrative accounts that fill an empty space that needs filling. But if you mean the jumping off place where the "totality" of our understanding leaves off and all that is meaningful and important is left hanging for want of a foundation, then I can think of nothing more important than religion. Metaphysics is now real, I claim. But where does it make its appearance? In experience. For example, in the question, Why are we born to suffer and die? Such things are handily dismissed in philosophy given that no empirical answer shows up and Wittgenstein made it clear language cannot talk about value. But then (See Critchley's very interesting account in his Very Little....Almost Nothing) there is something powerful and profound about the question, for once the context is taken out of familiar contingencies, you know, explanations that rest with science, with evolution (suffering is conducive to survival), with biology, with historical narratives, and so on, all of which fail entirely because they beg the ultimate question where Why?, then one is without context, and dreadful suffering simply sits there, and expression of Being, a reality not generated by language and culture, but by the "world" itself, THEN religion becomes a very different affair. This I call good metaphysics, this standing at the threshold (See Levinas' Totality and Infinity: the idea that is exceeded by the ideatum; the desire exceeded by the desideratum) is, well, beyond merely humanizing. There is deep philosophical discussion that brings this to light. John Caputo's Weakness of God and his Prayers and Tears of Derrida; and there is the recent French theological turn with Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion and others. These play off Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety, as does all existential philosophy.
Quoting T Clark
Not sure what other modes of thinking would be. As I see it, science is in all we do and think, for it is at the basis for understanding. I am referring to the scientific method, the conditional proposition, if....then that is the structure of thought itself. This may sound odd, but one has to consider that the world is Time, it is Heraclitus' world, so a thought is a temporal event, and so its analysis looks at a beginning, a middle and an end. Dewey called this the consummation. All knowledge is consummatory. Ciceronianus the White, above, thinks like this.
Quoting T Clark
I think they don't care, and the matter is alien to their concerns. If pressed, they would have to concede, would then dismiss it. Most analytic philosophers hold with Wittgenstein: philosophy simply has nothing to say about it. The world doesn't rest on metaphysics, for metaphysics is just nonsense talk. I haven't read anything lately from this side of things, but I suspect nothing has changed. Obviously, they are mistaken.
To me it is not abstract at all. Two people face to face in conversation. "Between" them is palpable mystery. Metaphysics has to be seen this way, and the way for this is in the concept of "presence" or "givenness". The infamous phenomenological reduction of Husserl. See is his Ideas I, his Cartesian Meditations. Then Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Extraordinary, these are.
Quoting T Clark
I apologize for all the philosophers I threw out at you. But they are what I think. These guys are simply too interesting not to mention. Phenomenology is, as I see it, the only wheel that rolls in philosophy.
Best guess is the way of philosophers like Searle, and, as far as I've read of analytic philosophy, it is dismissive merely. It is hard to put this into a paragraph, but analytic philosophy, grounded in the assumption that meaningful language ends where clarity ends (a positivist leaning) altogether misses the point of philosophy. There is no Wittgensteinian hard line between facts and nonsense. Rather, the world is fluid, thought and its experiences bleed, if you will, together in the known and the unknown, and this can lead to bad metaphysics, which is all too clear to require explaining, but Good metaphysics is a different matter. It is what emerges out of the attempt to move beyond a long history careless thinking, and to discover what is there, in the world, presupposed by all of this and is the foundation of it. Wittgenstein loved Kierkegaard! And Kierkegaard is the father some very penetrating metaphysics.
And what is there at the "phenomenological level" you mention? This is the question. What is there in the everydayness of our world, analytically inaccessible because foreign to familiarity? Husserl's epoche, in a letter he wrote, is said to have inspired students to join the church. He was no metaphysician (putting aside complaints later on), but simply wanted philosophy to to return to the "things themselves" and it was Husserl who brought matters to the phenomenological level. What can be religiously inspiring about this very rigorous (see Husserl's Ideas I and II. His Logical Investigations I haven't read much of. But The Idea of Phenomenology opens his later thought) and "scientific" (not empirical) turn? The answer is that it brings attention to the world apart from the empirical explanatory models as a qualitative move, that is, a very different content. This suspends all knowledge claims that would otherwise take hold, which he labels the "naturalistic attitude". What rises out of this is existentialism, aka, phenomenology.
As far as absolute certainty goes, then concept itself is chimera, and while logical necessity (certainty) certainly is there, clearly a structure of meaningful utterances (all logic is tautology, say Witt) one has to see that this and actuality run on a collision course (Kierkegaard). Logic words like certainty do not possess the world, but are an essential part of institutions that pragmatically take up the world. The world, its loves, hates, passions, motivations, compulsions, miseries, joys, and so on, are NOT tautological constructions. They are actual, not eidetic, merely, and this actual world is our metaphysics (of course, the same holds for logic itself: unknowable in its generative source, for, as Witt tells us, it would take logic to conceive of this source, which begs the question).
This, of course, moves along with the assumption of physical science. So, there is this cat thing over there, and my brain thing here, and my awareness extends all the way to the outer edge of my skin. Pls proceed to explain how it is that my cat gets "in" the brain thing. Note that the moment you begin explaining how the electromagnetic spectrum is of different wavelengths, some are reflected, others absorbed in a given material, in this case, the fur of my cat, I have to stop you: How did you brain thing come to understand those electromagnetic spectrum wavelength things, and how did THEY get in the brain thing?
All references to out there, are really references to events "in here". It is not that there is no out there; the question is, how is it possible to make this claim?
Viewing humans as living organisms in an environment (which is what we are, I believe), I can't help but think this is tantamount to asking someone to explain how our food gets into our stomachs.
The assumption is that something exists between perceiver and perceived, that some kind of medium makes what appears to be direct observation of the world, indirect observation. So what is it exactly that prohibits you from directly observing the world? What is it, exactly, that exists between you and what you perceive?
I see, but don't you see the difference? It would be as if explaining how food get in the stomach included an explanatory dead zone, and so there would be nothing to say. Explaining how the cat gets into a brain, BEGINS with a brain phenomenon, not with some affirmation of something that is not a phenomenon. The cat out there the knowledge of which you are trying to explain is not a phenomenon, but is supposed to have an existence beyond phenomena, something there that is discoverable to which you knowledge has found access. But how can this discoverable thing every make its way into that which makes it into a phenomenon, when to affirm this would require you to affirm what-is-not-a-phenomenon? How can a phenomenal system affirm what is not a phenomenon? Or even make sense out of such a thing? All thinking, causality, anything posited at all, is a brain event, so even when you start talking about electromagnetic waves being absorbed or reflected by the cats fur, you are stopped right there: How does light and its properties ever make it into the explanatory matrix of a brain? to be used to explain how the cat gets "in there"?
There is simply no non question begging way to affirm this.
I recall pointing out once in another thread roughly half a year ago that there's only one thing we can be absolutely certain about - mental experience. The so-called physical world could be an illusion/ a simulation. Compare that to how there's no plausible way we could cast doubt of a similar nature regarding the mind. To doubt the mind is to admit there's mind; how else can you doubt it?
Actually, it goes beyond this. It is NOT a matter that all that can be affirmed is mental activity. There is only one conclusion, and I mean only one, that issues form this radical hermenuetics of the brain in vat problem: Nothing whatever can be affirmed outside phenomena, thus, the inside and outside of the brain in a vat is nonsense, for it is nonsense to speak of an outside to something all possible insides and outsides contexts of which are bound to a singularity. It would be like talk about the extension of a point, or angels on the head of a pin. Just nonsense. It can only not be. You would have to reach out, beyond phenomena.
Near death experiencers talk like this. But then, they borrow language from the singularity called the world.
What does this mean, really? Why even speak of the cat "getting into" the brain?
You seem to assume the existence of something in the brain, which we are to be addressing. You seem to believe that "thing" must be explained. This appears to distinguish the brain and the things within it or which are a part of it from everything else, or at least in this case from the cat or whatever it is, if anything at all.
Why do you believe there's a cat-thing in the brain? It would seem to me you must establish that there is such a thing before demanding an explanation for it.
Agreed but that doesn't seem to negate the existence of noumena. The point of BiV gedanken experiment is only to show that our total dependence on phenomena raises the possibility but not certainty of the absence of the noumenal world.
As I mentioned in my previous posts, neither Descartes' nor Harman's thought experiments prove the nonexistence of a physical world out there. All they do is cast doubt on it. You need a good reason to go from possible that noumen not there to certain that noumena not there and you don't have one.
Neurons?? What do you mean?
Noumena?? Whos is talking about noumena? You understand that Kant said nothing about this unknown X save that he was compelled to bring it up. It is not in space or time, certainly NOT the "physical world"; it is unthinkable, as it is beyond the conceptual world. No sense can be made of noumena at all. It's just that in order for representations to be what they are, they have to be OF something. kant goes to great lengths to steer us clear of bad metaphysics in the Dialectics. But Harman knows this and all analytic philosophers know this. Kant was an idealist, and he was never refuted, only ignored, and they very well know that it is categorically impossible to generate an epistemic nexus between "noumena" and the conceptual/sensible intuition object one observes. One would have to grasp noumena as a causal entity!! One would have to fit noumena into an observable sequence of events tracing one to the other. Is causality an "out there" feature? Nobody holds this. What they do is assume causality in discussions about things because they claim, with Wittgenstein, that factual "states of affairs" are the only things that make sense. But Witt never for a moment thought one could talk about conditions that are free of logical structure.
The point is, no sense can be made of an epistemic connection between transcendental object and observer because one can use phenomenological models of possible connections to talk about things that are not phenomena. And all we have are phenomenological models.
Finally note how the question posed is entirely ignored. It is intended to be a very simple thought construction in "how does anything out there get in here?" You seem to want some kind of qualified knowledge of the cat. But it is worse than it seems: it is using the physicalist model of the world, the (standard, putting aside quantum entanglement) empirical scientist's model, that knowledge becomes impossible for knowing my cat, for there is nothing epistemic about causality, and tracing a causal sequence from the cat to my receptive faculties says nothing about how knowledge is related to the cat. Indeed, it shows just the opposite. I know my "cat" as well as a dented car fender "knows' the offending guard rail.
But how does one explain knowledge? this idea of getting the cat in the brain is just a way saying how absurd it would be if such knowledge were possible. Simply put, according the language of neuroanatomy, a bunch of neurons connected by axonal fibers firing together is not a cat. But it goes further than this: in order to even conceive of neurons firing, one has to have other neurons firing to do the conceiving. So, even on this model of neurophysiology, knowledge about the "outside" world doesn't even begin to make sense. What is "outside" anyway, but phenomenon generated by brain matter? But again, to call something a brain is no more foundational than calling something outside, for both are equal as phenomena. There IS no "out" to this if we follow the very simple and accessible logic here.
I see it as a problem of identity. You are “wired up to receive the world”, which is presumably hidden beyond your vat, the skull. In this story you identify as the brain or some locus within. If you expand your identity to include the rest of you, you’ll find that you are in direct contact with the rest of the world. From there the “essential epistemic connection to make out there come in here” falls apart.
Well, it is not that there is nothing, its just that this is entirely beyond conceiving, because it is supposed to be outside of experience. Forget Wittgenstein, because we don't need him to tell us that two things in the world cannot have an epistemic nexus between them. To me, it is as simple as the opacity test. Just how opaque is a brain? I give it a 10, and a zero for transparency. All who object to this avoid the simplicity of it, and I think it is because there is a blind assumption in place that to know a thing is as plain as a thing can be, which is true, until the question is raised as to what and how. Then it falls apart instantly. What do we usually say about such things that have no explanatory basis? It is not that we simply doubt them. that would be like doubting the earth is round. No, we flat out dismiss them.
I am convinced that the epistemic distance between me and my cat is infinite at the level of basic analysis, that whatever that is is completely Other.
so are you saying the solution lies in this expansion? And I would say the world is what we experience, not what is beyond this. We are wired up to something, but then, this something is beyond the language we can use to talk about it. So where does this put "wired up to receive"? In this matrix of experience, "wired up" makes sense, but to talk about things that are outside of language, logic and sensation, and beyond time and space? What is the basis any meaningful statement?
You have a point and I detect pragmatic undertones in your approach. Why bother about noumena at all; after all we can never know them (epistemic distance is for all intents and purposes infinite).
However, ontologically, we're not warranted to dismiss noumena - we may doubt it à la Descartes & Harman but we may not assert that noumena don't exist.
The other way to look at this is through the concept of time. This is front and center in phenomenology, for apprehensions of the world are temporal events, which is why pragmatism is good way account for things: there are no "things", just events, with beginnings, middles and ends, and so the "real" is sought in the reductive "eternal present". This gets way over the top but it is THE principle ontological claim of 20th century Continental philosophy.
All roads lead to phenomenology. And the quest for truth in phenomenology leads, I claim, to one place: meditation, an existential destruction of the world whereby language as a dogmatic perceptual determination is annihilated. This sounds very weird, I know. But did we really think the world was not a weird place at the level of basic assumptions?
Truth Is Not Truth Until Truth Is Eternal.
Quoting Constance
Big claims! I like the last sentence! G'day!
You appear to assume that we're somehow apart from the world, and then ask why we seem to be a part of it. I'm not sure how else to construe what you've written. I don't think you've been very clear regarding just what you intend to say, as it now seems you were never serious about the cat getting into our brains in some fashion. But I may just be dull, or incapable of understanding, not being an initiate of phenomenology. I've been told when I've complained about Heidegger's mysterious use of words and jargon that I was expected to learn what he meant and shouldn't comment until I did so. This has given me to wonder if there's a "Heidegger Code" similar to that of Da Vinci according to that popular book.
Regardless, the assumption we're apart from the world is unfounded, to me; it's not something we can we merely take as a given.
If you accept that we're part of the world, our brains aren't outside the world. What we think is part of the world. What we know is part of the world. Our emotions are part of the world. There's no outside world except in context. In other words, no one speaks of or thinks of a cat as being "inside us." We think and speak of it as "outside us." It doesn't follow that we're not in the world with the cat and everything or everyone else. We're not inside looking out, in other words. Dewey criticized what he called the "spectator" theory of knowledge. That theory uses the metaphor of vision, of seeing, as the model of knowing. Knowing becomes passive, objects known are "out there" and are impressed on us in some fashion which must be explained. But we're not spectators. We're participants.
So, I'm not really sure what it is that you're asking, or what you're point is. I assume you're not asking for an explanation of how our bodies work or how we see or how our brains work. But the "basic questions" you speak of seem to me to arise only if you assume were on the inside looking out.
I agree, but is that all of philosophy or just metaphysics, including epistemology?
Quoting Constance
I like this. I might even agree with it. I'll think more about it. Except, for me, there is no "givenness of the world.
Quoting Constance
The idea of "qualia" does not match my experience. This is my objection to much of western philosophy, even phenomenology, acknowledging my limited knowledge. Philosophers say it's from experience, but it's not. Not directly, anyway. They take experience and cover it with jelly and syrup and marshmallow. Rational jelly and syrup and marshmallow I guess. It obscures true experience.
Quoting Constance
I'm not sure how to respond to this long paragraph. It feels like the Constance philosophy train has switched tracks and is headed off in a different direction than mine. We probably were on different tracks to start with.
Quoting Constance
I think most of what we know, understand, use is not knowledge of facts or propositions at all, i.e. justified true belief; Gettier; etc. I think there is a model of the world built into each of us. The model is built up from our interactions with the world, our parents, language, education from the time we are babies. It probably also includes factors that are hardwired into us. I feel this model of the world in myself very viscerally all the time. I recognize it as the source most of my day to day decisions both consciously and unconsciously. I guess you would call it intuition. Generally, new knowledge has to get incorporated into that model before it is used. That is vastly oversimplified.
Quoting Constance
I was getting worried until I came to this.
Quoting Constance
I took two courses in philosophy in my first try at college back in 19(mumble, mumble). The first was "The Mind/Brain Identity Problem." I remember thinking in my first week of class "This is all bullshit." And I was right. That set the stage for the rest of my experience with western philosophy. I have maintained this bias to a certain extent up till today. I found a home of sorts with Lao Tzu and Alan Watts. They were talking about things that really did match my personal experience of the world.
Since I've been on the forum, I've met several people, yourself included, who've convinced me that western philosophy can be a powerful tool to understand what is going on. I've found some of the discussions moving. People have showed me that they have the same goal I have always had, but their paths have been a little different. In some cases, I've felt that philosophy saved those people. Gave them a ladder out of confusion and despair. It's hard to argue with that, even though that path definitely doesn't work for me.
So - no need to apologize.
I don't mean to complain, but I find the above suspiciously unresponsive. If you are clear in your position, why not just tell me what it is?
Apart from the world? What is it you mean by "world"?
As to my assumption, I merely raised a question, not an ontological thesis about different kinds of being. It may turn out that judgment about the epistemic distance between me and my cat is perfectly compatible with not being apart from the world. But I don't know what you mean by world, nor what you mean by being a part of it.
Of course, not everything is the same, and things certainly stand apart from other things, like dogs from cats from Chinese pictograms; I mean, things being what they are rests with difference, so I'm at all sure what not being apart is about.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
But then, what does it mean to be a participant? Of course, no one thinks of a cat being inside us. This idea is just a way of showing what it might be like if knowledge and the justificatory conditions for knowing actually were about things that were independent of phenomena. That "aboutness" would have to stretch to the thing in some unimaginable way, like spooky "action at a distance". I mean, if you can't say in any way that the cat I perceive is beyond the phenomenological presentation, then you might as well just say so and call yourself a pragmatic phenomenologist. As I am. As Rorty was, though Rorty misses the boat in ways I won't go into (pragmatism is not descriptive at the most basic level of apprehending the world).
Frankly, when you say "in the world with the cat and everything and everyone else" I think you nailed it. But if this kind of thinking issues from an empirical scientist's "world" then no; in my view it all gets very peculiar: I do see that there is this "otherness" that is presented in and among the phenomena of the world which cannot be explained on a simply physical model. Putnam argued with Rorty on just this, saying when he looked at his wife, it is simply patently implausible to say all that is there is a pragmatic phenomenon. There is this very mysterious Other, other people, things, things NOT me that have a presence that is unquestionably "out there". Don't really know how far Rorty went, but his idea of ethics and pragmatic truth simply fails utterly (Simon Critchley argues) . THEN: how is it that we explain knowledge of this OTher? This metaphysical OTher? There must be, as you say, an underlying unity of all things that does indeed connect the world in unseen ways, One thing the Brain in a Vat counterexample to knowledge does is it makes us aware of the metaphysics of ordinary affairs.
The BIV scenario takes for granted that there is an outside and an inside.
That is pretty much what philosophy is about. But it is, in my view, very important to know that in doing this, philosophy is an existential matter, and not merely an abstract logical exercise. The world is literally made of thought and habits and the familiar, and the nameless intrusion that gives rise to all of this is utterly transcendental. Ideas are not abstractions, but are as real as any sensory intuition. So, when we talk about truly basic assumptions dealing with the truth, reality, value and ethics, and so on, we are restructuring reality. As I said earlier, in a letter Husserl once wrote that his readers, many of them, were inspired to turn to religion because his "epoche" had an existential enlightenment dimension to it. Husserl himself didn't seem to get it, and few do, for it is after all, strangely, well, mystical. Wittgenstein knew this, as do the current French post modern theological thinkers like Jean luc Marion and Michel Henry.
This kind of thinking is generally something confined to the mystical arts of Eastern thought. I read through much of the Abhidhamma arguing with Baker in another thread, and was taken as to how the Buddha could be seen as the ultimate phenomenologist.
Thoughts are, to use a metaphor, the threads of the living fabric of the world, and hence, when we think, we do more than interpret or define' we "make" our world, and the epoche takes one into its core (though always keeping in mind what Derrida says about the text. Tough issue to discuss here).
Quoting T Clark
Such an interesting thing to say, for it places you right in the middle of a very important, post modern debate that deals with has been called the "metaphysics of presence". It is a long historical argument, but the entire affair rests with Time: To see and know is an historical event, the past and all of that language acquisition moving into the "present" to define, interpret, make familiar, and so on. How can one ever affirm a present in the midst of all this? All of this that is essentially anticipatory, forward looking in the structure of knowing itself?
But then, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Is this an interpretative matter? "When" is it? Is there not a present that itself intrudes into the stream or conscious events? So much going on here. Derrida says we are stuck in "difference".
Quoting T Clark
Qualia is tough because when w talk about it, it vanishes, which is why Derrida writes "under erasure". You find the same thing in Wittgenstein who in the Tractatus insist he is speaking nonsense in drawing a line between nonsense and sense. We find ourselves at a crossroad where actuality and language "meet" and we cannot speak of it, but cannot deny actuality. Buddhists tell us to put the entire enterprise down, and "ultimate reality" will step forward (Abhidhamma).
Spooky. But there is something to this, I know. Something powerful and sublime about being a person, and it hangs there just beyond the threshold of our everydayness. Try to think it, and it slips away. I think, again, that language is pragmatic, and cannot hold actuality (Kierkegaard).
Quoting T Clark
I thought you mentioned religion and how your views were not expressed in something I said.
Quoting T Clark
You are in Heidegger's world now. He calls it dasein. Being and Time takes your thoughts here and gives them hundreds of pages of penetrating thought. Hardwired is a problem, but cannot explain Heidegger here. All is hermeneutics.
Quoting T Clark
Analytic philosophy is very bullshitty. Smart, but entirely outside the substantive issues. Gettier problems? Barn facsimiles and severed heads?? Such a disappointment. Continental philosophy is profound, but it takes work (what doesn';t?). Being and Time might just convince you.
Does it? Keep in mind that the scientists are supposed to be the truly real, but then, the purpose of this challenge is to insert doubt into this very idea. How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats? This makes the BIV a metaphysical problem, for there is nothing foundational presented. See the difference here between this and say some standard problem where doubt has asserted itself, as when you turn the key and the care doesn't start. Here, the assumption is not questioned according the premises of the condition given, for once the doubt is relieved and the battery cable secured, there is no metaphysics to deal with.
I'd ask you the same question. I suspect my confusion results from my lack of familiarity with the mysteries of phenomenology. I'd apply to an appropriate hierophant for admission, but have my doubts it would be worth the effort. If initiation is required, we may well use words differently or mean different things when we use them.
What do I mean by "world"? If we limit it to a place with cats (the context of the example which has been discussed) it would be Earth, the planet, but I mean in general the universe of which the Earth is a tiny part, and of which we're even tinier parts. The environment in which we live. By "we" I mean human beings--all of us, including our brains.
We participate in the world by being part of it, but also by living. Living isn't merely beholding. By living we eat, drink, reproduce, think, feel, see, hear, create, make things out of other things that are in the world--we do everything we do, and interact with other constituents of the world, things and creatures. We shape the world and it shapes us in this fashion. Cats participate in the world as well; they do what they do, and so interact with us and other creatures and things of the world. Cats and people participate in the world. There's nothing remarkable about this. We don't ask how we get in the brain of a cat; why ask how a cat gets in ours?
There's nothing lying between us and the rest of the world--no sense datum, or whatever. We're just creatures of a particular kind. We experience the world as humans do, given our physical and mental characteristics; cats experience the world as cats do, given their physical and mental characteristics. The world we live in isn't different from the world cats live in; we're just different from cats.
I'm not sure what more I can say.
Phenomenology is what existentialists are.When theories of natural science break down the the level of basic questions, one can only turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics for foundational thinking. This latter insists that knowledge is inherently interpretative, that is, language which is the medium for understanding the world, does not, at this level of analysis, simply observe this world, it literally constitutes the world. So it is not as if there is the world there, that tree, those shoes on the floor, and so on, and there we are to take in its nature as it informs us as to what it is; rather, there is no world at all until an experience constructing agency is there to make it. BUT: it is not as if there is nothing at all whatsoever there prior to this agency making an appearance; but rather it is not "a world". It is entirely other than a world, and I want to say for obvious reasons.
So talk about the world, philosophical talk, is talk about this very complex horizon that is reducible to phenomena. These are considered foundational because beyond this kind of talk is ismply more hermeneutics. Derrida calls this "difference": an endless system of deferred meaning in which one concept is contingent on others, and so there is NO affirmation apart from this.
And so on. For Rorty, this foundation of interlinguistic (wd?) reference is pragmatic, grounded in what works. I think this right.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I agree with everything you say, except for one: That there is nothing remarkable here. It all gets very remarkable at the more basic level. You say we it is where we eat, drink, and so on, but I ask, what are these things?, and you think I've lost a marble or two. But it is here where centuries of philosophy BEGIN. It begins with the father of phenomenology, Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. Once you have read this, you will see what all the fuss is about, this "Copernican Revolution" of philosophy.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
What you have here is empirical science's view point. I wonder why. All of this has an underpinning of presuppositions, and philosophy's job is to expose these and analyze them. What makes physics even possible? Do you think the logic that identifies things in the world is actually IN the world apart from the perceptual act?
The greatest philosopher by analytic standards, not phenomenological, is Wittgenstein. Yes he was a phenomenologist, of sorts.
I know you dislike empirical science, or at least its pretensions as alleged by some. You might consider what empirical science has achieved before you wonder why it's view point has value--then ask yourself what philosophy has achieved.
But when you ask what makes physics or any science possible I don't know what you mean. Are you asking a question about we humans--what is it about us that caused us to create science, or how we did so? Are you asking a question about the universe--how it came to be subject to scientific analysis, investigation, with predictable, testable results? Are you asking about both?
I don't know what you mean by "the perceptual act." Nor do I understand what you think is "actually in the world" if we're unable to know what is actually in the world, which is what you appear to think--sometimes, at least. If we can't know what's actually in the world, then what's actually in the world is not a matter we should devote any time or effort to determine. We're better off devoting time and effort to that which can make a positive difference in our lives. And that, for good or ill, means dealing with what we interact with in our daily lives, no matter how many "presuppositions" we must accept to do that.
I love empirical science, and took enough courses in college to know well what it is. But it is not philosophy. A scientist asks, how do we understand a fossil according to the applicable classifications? Philosophy asks, what is the structure of the thought that perceives at all? How is knowledge possible? What are concepts qua concepts and what is their relation to things? What is this substance that comprises all things?
Before you even get to science questions, you have more basic questions about what science takes up as a world. For example, look at experience and its structure: When I talk about a star's spectral analysis, I am talking about light. But any high schooler knows light as a phenomenon is manufactured in the brain. You know, visible light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and some parts of this are reflected, some absorbed, and the reflected parts are received by the eye, and there are cones and rods that process for color and intensity, and this goes to the brain that manufactures the phenomenon in clusters of axonally connected neurons. So it goes. The scientist will of course admit this, because what is " really" happening "out there" is not color, but waves; but then how do waves get internalized and what is this internal event that allows us to "know" what is out there?
Consider further that when a perception occurs, it occurs in Time, and this makes a perceptual affair one with a temporal structure: I "see" light but then, I am not a feral entity, nor am I an infant, whose world is "buzzing and blooming". When I register the seeing, it is learned language and its logical operation that makes this a knowledge event, and without this, there would be no understanding of light; and this knowing is predelineated, it issues from memory. This makes an actual present matter one that is not present at all, but a construction in time,with a past and a future; in deed, this is right up Dewey's tree, because this temporal dimension is the forward-looking nature of a pragmatist's theory of knowledge. Pragmatists, the old school, are necessarily phenomenologists.
Etc., etc. To really go into an analysis like this, look at Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, and so many more. There was a century of post Kantian philosophy, which turned into existentialism, which became post modern thinking with its deconstructive post structuralism. It is a massive enterprise. Rorty thought Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein the most important philosophers ever, and all three were, in some way, phenomenologists.
All of which science has little or nothing to say because this is not its job. Scientists are not philosophers.
I've read enough of Everyone's Favorite Nazi to satisfy me I'll not benefit from reading him further, and enough Kant as well. As for the others, I fear that if they focus on what you describe to be the purposes of philosophy, they'll have little to say about us as living creatures in the world in which we occur and how we actually live our lives and should live it. So, I'll pass.
You take this as implying that light is manufactured in the brain. That's an obvious mistake.
A flimsy rationalization for not wanting to do the hard work of reading perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. If you found out that Edison was a child molester, would you simply stop using light bulbs?
It depends on your level of analysis. A five year old will not understand the idea at al but simply talk about light i a natural way, but then, material reductionists talk like this all the time. Phenomenologists will say both are right, but rightness and wrongness depends on context. They do think, however, there is one context called phenomenology that looks at light as phenomenon, an eidetically formed predication. Here, one is not using light in the "naturalistic way" as in "turn off the light when you leave" but rather as reduced to its features as a phenomenological presence. The more reduction, the greater the presence, says Jean luc Marion.
No it doesn't. Light is not phenomenal. It's a thing in the world, not a sensation. In so far as phenomenology treats things that are not phenomenal as if they were, it is wrong.
So tell me how it is not a phenomenon.
You claim it is a phenomena; I claim it is stuff in the world.
I can explain how it bends in a prism.
Can you, using only phenomenal analysis?
But this is not philosophy's job. Obviously.
If Heidegger invented the light bulb, I'd use it. It actually has a use, and a beneficial one, apart from its inventor. But I don't read him merely because he was a loathsome man.
Quoting Constance
Perhaps it is, and what you are doing isn't.
Either way, this stands: Quoting Banno
This is pure flippancy. And arbitrary. If you put something out there, then you have to explain it. I mean, go into it, and don't be shy about it. Either way it stands???? How so?
But he is a beneficial one, philosophically. It's just easier to turn on a light than it is reading Heidegger. This is the essence of the matter.
But that's what such muddled thinking deserves. It goes astray here:
Quoting Constance
We don't need phenomenology in order to explain how a prism works. Indeed, it adds nothing.
It adds nothing in terms of explaining how a prism works. Nor does it explain how a prism is taken up as an amusement for a child, or how rainbows inspire or romanticize, or how the gaseous content of stars produces different spectral analyses, and so on. Looking at matters such as these are not the "how" of philosophical analysis, which is, as with all the above mentioned, distinct and assessed according to a different set of standards.
The question you should be looking at is, What is the standard for assessing the worth of phenomenological philosophy? Prior to this, one has to look at philosophy itself, and inquire as to where the value lies here.
I feel bad that I haven't responded before this. I really like talking to you. I think we share a common outlook, an openness, on many of the issues we're discussing. It's just that you are playing on a piano, maybe a pipe organ, and I am playing on a three-string banjo. This old banjo is just right for the song I'm trying to sing.
By that logic, everything is guess work.
Can we think of anything that is “true”?
If yes, how did we come to know that it is true, as opposed to being not true?
If we can’t think of anything that is true, then even that
Inability to think can’t be thought of as true.
So where do we stand, and what in fact is knowledge?
Knowledge is what we experience and what we believe to be true. Anything else is opinion. And then there are lots of things that we do not know.
So I agree with @Constance, above:
Quoting Constance
What is "philosophical inquiry"?
If we know that “knowledge is experience… etc”, then our knowledge must be outside of of our experience, and what we believe to be true. Otherwise what you say amounts to your experience, and what you believe to be true. Your observation of that… ? The same, as it is “knowledge” according to you.
Yet we know we can draw conclusions based on things we have not experienced. Like your analysis.
I think knowledge is part and parcel of the Truth, and either we want, the truth, or what we believe/accept is the truth
There are many forms of knowledge such as personal experience, conclusions we arrive at through reason, things we learn from others, etc.
One may also hold that everything we know is simply a "provisional truth" that we operate on until new truths are found that are deemed to have greater validity and authority.
Quoting Constance
I am looking at that question, and the answer I see is "it has no worth".
But an opinion is also what we believe to be true.
To count as knowledge, a statement must be true, not just believed.
There are, despite the ubiquitous, absurd pop philosophy to the contrary, very many things that we know.
There are different degrees of certainty.
Quoting Banno
"We" as the totality of knowers. Individuals know only a fraction of the total.
But not of truth.
Quoting Apollodorus
Yet there are things we know.
That is, Quoting Apollodorus
is a mischaracterisation.
Of certainty regarding truth.
Quoting Banno
And there are things we don't know. Few of us are omniscient.
If you read what I wrote and find agreement, then by all means, feel free to disagree here and there. "Play" as you please.
I see. No greater motivation for joining a philosophy club, eh? Analytic philosophers are in it for the "fun" of puzzles, and are generally bound to clarity and logic. But Continental philosophers can be quite different, sincere and intuitive. Trouble is, Continental philosophy is hard to read, though here is the foundation of basic inquiry as to the issues of the self, meaning, value, reason, and so on.It is unfortunate that important things are so difficult. Oh well.
How do we deal with the problem of private language? If naming-words refer necessarily to internal phenomena - all singularly private and mutually incomparable - then we cannot communicate. 'Yes, I understand, you are saying things are like such-and-such!' - But 'such and such' can be neither like nor unlike anything shared between us, for nothing is shared. Worse, we cannot distinguish one phenomenon from another even in our own case. If the distinctive criteria for some experience make sense to the person having that experience, then those criteria have a sense that can be explained, communicated and shared between us.
If your view is true then necessarily you cannot explain it to me. Your explanation is a kind of accompanying music to a phenomenal film that is playing in your mind. And my understanding is whatever I might be hearing.
Quoting Constance
I was interested to find that Dewey wrote of food and stomachs as well (from The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy):
[i]The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the world to be known, and who is defined in terms antithetical to the traits of the world. With analogous assumptions, we could invent and discuss a problem of digestion in general. All that would be required would be to conceive the stomach and food-material as inhabiting different worlds. Such an assumption would leave on our hands the question of the possibility, extent, nature, and genuineness of any transaction between stomach and food.
But because the stomach and food inhabit a continuous stretch of existence, because digestion is but a. correlation of diverse activities in one world, the problems of digestion are specific and plural: What are the particular correlations which constitute it? How does it proceed in different situations? What is favorable and what unfavorable to its best performance?—and so on. Can one deny that if we were to take our clue from the present empirical situation, including the scientific notion of evolution (biological continuity) and the existing arts of control of nature, subject and object would be treated as occupying the same natural world as unhesitatingly as we assume the natural conjunction of an animal and its food? Would it not follow that knowledge is one way in which natural energies cooperate? Would there be any problem save discovery of the peculiar structure of this cooperation, the conditions under which it occurs to best effect, and the consequences which issue from its occurrence?[/i]
Let the conditions unfold then. I don't think we are bound to this phenomenological singularity because I think it makes all problems go away. I simply ask the question about basic epistemology, and find this inevitable conclusion. How move from here is another question, but one thing remains very clear: on a materialist model of causal relationships, one cannot explain knowledge of objects. Causality does not deliver epistemology, for one thing. For another, all explanatory possibilities are inherently phenomenological. How does one ever get "out" of this?
But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.
This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.
List 3.
Of course, which is evidenced by asking questions such as, "How do the scientists know they are not brains in vats, themselves, being controlled and experimented on by other scientists who could also be brains in vats?" You wouldn't be asking this if you wouldn't think that inside vs. outside is a meaningful distinction.
No, it makes it a poorly conceived one.
Take it bit by bit. I don't assume there is a knower outside the world to be known. Assume the world and I are one. Then in this unity there is a divide that has to be explained. If it cannot be explained, it may be that there is in this unity something that is occurring perhaps requires a new assessment of what the unity is. Look, there are differences all around, in fact, if not for differences, no affirmation is possible: what is an affirmation without differences? (see Saussure) Anyway, what this brain in a vat suggests is that perhaps there is a primordial division in this unity, that is, a division that isn't about the phylar distinctions in some taxonomy, but about something at a fundamental level? How do scientists handle differences? They make a science out of them. That is what phenomenology is: the science of phenomena. It takes the world at the basic level, where experience (to use Dewey's language) takes up things and generates meaning, value, and everything else, at the generative level, where thing first "appear" and asks how should we understand this? Of course, Dewey answers this question in terms of pragmatism: all knowledge is essentially pragmatic. What does this mean? It means knowledge is forward looking and meaning is generated out of the consummatory product of problem solving. He of course, is a evolutionist, as am I, and when I think of a pragmatic concept of knowledge, I think about our personal and collective history out of which language issues, and I think about the structure of a thought as well as the ontology of the thing the thought is about: I see my cat, but how do I know it is a cat? I learned this term, of course, long ago, as it was modeled by others. pointing to that furry thing, I "made" the association, started using it myself, was encouraged, and it became knowledge of cats in various contexts in my world.
I would need to read a lot more of Dewey to draw on his ideas to make this point, but to be a pragmatist, you have to have a pragmatist theory of knowledge, and this reduces meaning and understanding to the essential thrust of a problem solved.
You may not like Heidegger, but he is certainly close to Dewey. What is a hammer? It is ready to hand; it is the picking up, the hammering, and the possibility of these there, when I turn to the hammer and "know" what it is, what I "know" is this future looking possible event, this "IF I approach the hammer, THEN it presents possibilities, which are x, y, and z and so on. There is for Dewey no of the mystical apprehension of a cat "out there". The cat's meaning and knowledge possibilities are bound up in what works, nd that's it.
BUT, what are the consequences for this? Dewey has to be a pragmatic phenomenologist. This is the only possibility, for if what I know is all about pragmatics, then knowledge is a synthesis the problem solving agency (not to put any metaphysical significance to this) and what comes in as the "givenness" of things.
This kind of thing makes questions like the brain in a vat into nonsense if applied to actual world, as Wittgenstein told us. It is an error in reasoning to conceive of an "in the brain" and "outside the brain" in this way, to ask what are things without the participation of a pragmatic agency/perceiver. Pure impossible metaphysics. This is the way of Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Rorty, and on and on. Not all pragmatists, exactly, but they agree, this is nonsense.
I say, well, this is one way to get rid of metaphysics: just pretend it is nonsense. Well, it is and it isn't is the only answer to this. No time to go into this, there is alot on this. My principle thought are about ethics and value. Another avenue has to do, not with the out thereness of things, but the "presence" of phenomena. And so on.
Just a follow up: in the natural setting, call it, it is not absurd to note that when a person leaves the room, then s/he takes away all of the pragmatic meaning possibilities, just as when I remove a hammer from the tool box, I remove the possibility of hammering in some setting. Why is it that talk about the hammer is not nonsense but talk about removing perceptual apparatus is? Clearly this latter makes sense: here I go, out of the room, and what is behind me is no longer a room, for the term 'room' is a pragmatic construction, and just left bringing this construction with me.
What happened to the room? Simply, it became metaphysics, something still "there' but unspeakable. There is your division, and I don't think pragmatism is slippery enough to avoid it.
I've mentioned this more than once in this forum, but the philosopher Joseph Margolis supposedly asked Dewey to read Heidegger. He did (I don't know what he read). Margolis asked Dewey what he thought after reading whatever of Heidegger's he read, and claimed that Dewey responded "Heidegger reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me."
Dewey was by all accounts I've read not a man inclined to sarcasm, but usually mild and gentlemanly, so I have my doubts about this, particularly the "Swabian peasant" reference. But the similarity of their views in some respects has been noted.
My problems with H aren't limited to the fact he was an unrepentant Nazi and made some preposterously worshipful claims regarding Hitler. I see him as unduly romantic and something of a mystic. I'm thinking of his The Question Regarding Technology, which I think is sentimental and anachronistic, and of course such things as his rhapsodic statements regarding The Nothing and the unique superiority and destiny of the German language and people.
Dewey was criticized for his emphasis on practical experience as knowledge by such as the aristocratic Santayana, who felt Dewey neglected the higher, better aspects of reality and Nature. Dewey didn't claim that only a certain kind of experience was significant, or that true knowledge was limited in some sense. That seems to have been what his critics felt, in fact.
What is the "perceptual apparatus" you speak of? The person? In what sense is a person similar to a hammer, or an apparatus? Regardless, neither the person nor the hammer is removed from the world nor are they in a different one. Why think they are? They moved to a different location in the world, but how does it necessarily follow that the room disappears or becomes something else unless you think of the room as in a different world than the person?
That Baker understood enough of this thread to ask a question; that Baker reads and writes English; that this is an answer to Baker's question.
Outside/inside certainly is a meaningful distinction, but it is articulated within the unity of phenomenology.
Heidegger didn't sound at all like Dewey. He was working in a vein of thought that moved from the Greeks, to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and many others, but certainly not American pragmatism. To say he tried to sound like Dewey makes, truly, no sense at all. And I mean absolute zero. Heidegger's Being and Time hangs close to Husserl, and there is nothing even remotely Husserlian in Dewey. Hermeneutics is alien to Dewey.
Heidegger was miles ahead of Dewey, but thematically, they can be seen to move along the same lines. Pragmatism, this essential idea that our everydayness is epistemically an instrumentality defined as a temporal sequence of events, this forward lookingness of experience (a Kierkegaardian notion first, nearly a hundred years before Dewey. See his Concept of Anxiety for a thematic summary of existentialism. K started it all, of course, standing on the shoulders of Kant and Hegel. All roads, Dewey's as well, lead back to Kant, not in full content, but in the phenomenological structure of Time). An attempt to deliver back to philosophy the entire experiential reality, the rejection of rationalism, and perhaps more. Heidegger probably baffled Dewey, which happened quite a lot. Analytic philosophers don't read him, nor did Heidegger read them. Their problem is that they are bound to positivism, that call for clarity over meaning, and they end up being monumentally boring.
Rorty understood.
Unduly romantic and the position on technology? Are you referring to his claim that technology turns people into useful objects, and nature becomes a utility reserve. THIS anachronistic? Have you not been paying attention? Heidegger was right. Just a note, this was a time in the early 20th century when Talorism and time management concepts were popular. And Dewey was outraged.
Heidegger was NO metaphysician, though Derrida did accuse him of the very thing he criticized Husserl for: the metaphysics of presence. Interesting discussion on this in Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics and Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (a must read).
Quoting Ciceronianus
Hmmmm You're not really dealing with the previous thoughts, just prior to this. Oh well.
If you can accept the conclusion that communication is impossible, why attempt it?
No conclusions are inevitable if words do not make sense, even to the user of them.
Shrugging off problems is easy enough but it's different from addressing them. The private-language problem is one that confronts the view that all we can know for certain is our own perceptions.
I simply related a claim made by Joseph Margolis, one I tend to doubt myself. There's no need for indignation. I don't think Heidegger sounded like Dewey either. Dewey, though not a good writer, wasn't nearly as opaque as Heidegger.
Quoting Constance
Yes yes yes. Heidegger is great, Phenomenology is great, Pragmatism isn't great, analytic philosophy is most emphatically not great, even bad. You've made your feelings quite clear.
Quoting Constance
It's been some time since I looked at it, but I'm referring to his essay featuring the monstrous hydroelectric plant, cruelly commanding the river to serve our purposes (as if we haven't been "commanding" rivers for thousands of years through irrigation, and harnessing their flow for thousands of years using water wheels), and our evil proclivity to store sources of energy (was it coal?) and use them by destroying them when we see fit (as if we haven't been storing and using sources of energy like peat and wood for thousands of years). All this being hideous compared to the simple peasant who lovingly placed seeds in nature's bosom (not to mention the back-breaking and constant labor that entailed). Only a god can save us from technology (well, that was in Der Spiegel I think). That sort of thing.
And no, I don't pay attention; or perhaps more correctly I try to do so, but am lacking in intelligence. I must constantly ask people, like you, to explain what's taking place.
Quoting Constance
If you keep making gnomic claims and shifting ground, you may begin to confuse even yourself.
Quoting Cuthbert
But did you read "on the other hand"? I wrote:
[i]But there is a big "on the other hand" to this: Obviously there is in my knowledge of my cat something that is not me, but something else entirely, and it is seems to be there, across an expanse of space. But again, one runs against Kant, who may not be altogether right in his details, but space and time are forms of intuition, if not as he explains it exactly (Heidegger complained, and many others). We are stuck with this event of me knowing my cat is on the sofa, occurring as a phenomenon, but this notion of "noumena" takes the stage again: what IS this "out thereness" that is entirely off radar in our brains? Well, many look, not to the out mystery, but the inner; after all, there is a noumenal "direct" access to the unknown X world, and that is the self, for while the "outer" ness of things seems to be altogether impossible, the "inner"ness of things is some core essence of the self. Where, after all, in metaphysics are all things? All things are impossibly grounded in eternity, or better, finitude is "really" eternity, and this applies to our inner self especially. So if one wants get intimate with with this impossible "other", one need look within, deeply, apart from the "totality" of our constructed selves.
This little bit above is part of the religio-apophatic turn in phenomenology.[/i]
The reason why the Vat matter is important is that it tells us something about the world foundationally, which is philosophy's business. It tells us that knowledge relationships cannot be explained by physical/material/causal models. Quantum connections? These will always be problematic as well, for one never can get beyond the "wall of phenomena" and quantum physics is structured by thought in a dense, opaque brain. Philosophically, it is an extraordinary advance in understanding, though philosopher, analytic ones, are out to lunch on this.
And what words do not make sense? Look, words are our interpretative medium, and if something doesn't make sense it is not the words, but their contexts. No one made up this context. It is a genuine philosophical problem. Walk out of a room, take with you all the meaning making apparatus, sensory producing apparatus,, you know, experience itself, can you say there is a room still there absent all this? this is the Brain in Vat issue in its essence.
As to private language, obviously language is a very public affair, for reasons I don't need to go into. this makes all matters public affairs, because such things have their meanings bound to language: institutions that make our economic, ideological, cultural, valuative, and so on even possible. So the whole business of being a person in the world is built out of language, and language is a social phenomenon, but when we look closely, like everything, absolutely everything, this model falls apart; and I am referring to the obvious social nature of language. Philosophy cares about issues like this, not the mundane affairs of exchanging meanings that are well familiar.
So, how does one approach this? The entirety of the social dimension of existence is placed in question.
Why not just read Heidegger and be done with it. Dewey was great, though I don't follow him religiously because I find he is out of touch with post modern thinking, which is amazing.
Quoting Ciceronianus
Well, that only god can save us idea was rather cryptic, and in the same interview he gave Buddhists a thumbs up, which is less cryptic, one might say. But this opens an issue where Dewey and Rorty fall flat on their...ideas. I don't think the argument would be received well by a devotee of Dewey, but it is closer to Wittgenstein: first philosophy exceeds philosophy, because ethics exceeds philosophy, and this is because value, value simpliciter, or, value-qualia, or the pure phenomena of value (there are others) is the essence of ethics, and this issue of "meta ethics" cannot be spoken. A tough issue, which is why Witt. would never speak of it. The Good, he wrote in his journal, is his idea of the divine. Heidegger could have been close, but I'd have to read up.
Heidegger was observing the effects of the industrial revolution and the rise of technology on a scale never witnessed before, and saw, as Kierkegaard did a century earlier, that there was coming out of this a corruption of something very meaningful. I agree. He was influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and shared their distaste for Christian metaphysics and the way it undermined dasein's authenticity. But he did see, one could argue, there was something deeply meaningful about being human, and here is where he is criticized, stepping beyond the boundary of what hermeneutics allows.
Anyway, of course, we've been storing peat for centuries, but things have changed dramatically in the last two centuries, and the worst has come to pass: societies are now little capable of, if you will, romanticizing the world at a primordial way.
I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it's made; it "owes thanks" to it. Modern technology "is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such." And much, much more. He may as well assert that modern technology poisons the purity and essence of our precious bodily fluids when he makes such claims, for all they can be said to mean anything without a friendly, improbable and generous interpretation.
Hold on. I am reading it.
First there's a cat independent of your experience. Then there's no room independent of your experience. Where does the cat live?
Just as shrugging off the private language problem is no answer, so it stirring up dust and contradiction.
Quoting Constance
You speak for philosophy and you know what it cares about. But listen more carefully to philosophy itself. It has on occasion shown concern for the ways in which words carry or fail to carry meanings.
Quoting Constance
By slowing down. Clarifying the questions. Checking each thing you write for absurdities. Listening to objections. Yes, it's the long hard slog.
Had to see where this was coming from, and reading The Question Concerning Technology is an extraordinary engagement. You see, Heidegger takes the matter of philosophy to a more basic foundation of analysis, which is why analytics philosophers don't understand him, for it takes a withdrawal from culture and its familiar interpretations to go where Heidegger goes, and analytic philosophers are bound to the clarity of science, and therefore never taking an analytic of being human to its foundations. Existentialists look at the entire breadth of "experience" as Dewey does, but the difference is that Dewey never takes the matter to its foundations: Pragmatism is a proper characterization of human knowledge (forward looking utility), but not of human meaning.
Having said that, the question turns to meaning, and it is not simply the utility dimension of meaning, but the qualitative distinctness of standing in the world in full openness; only here can one overcome (see Nietzsche's use of this term) alienation. Alienation is a principle theme of this philosophy, and others (Marxian alienation, e.g.), and it comes from Kierkegaard, a "religious writer" Heidegger called him, but then, he owed him a great debt: where Kierkegaard concluded we are alienated from God, Heidegger turned to language, the "house of Being", and essentially secularized Kierkegaard, holding that technology rising to dominate our relation to the world has come to alienate us from some primordial original condition. In this discussion, I think of my cat, sitting in the window, very content and there is no trouble, like some foolish metaphysics telling the cat about sin, about how awful the world is and our need for redemption, There is this enviable, untroubled unity there in which everything is well, an "openness" that simply accepts, that my cat experiences. We "had" this, once, and lost it, and now we are scrounging for redemption.
So, in the above, don't get too hung up on the language, which is not German, and Heidegger uses language to construct meaning, not to simply denote and deduct.
Indebtedness? Heidegger is simply giving analysis to the traditional concept of cause, for he wants to move on this toward a clearer idea of technology. Don't see any basis for complaint in this. It is important, no, essential, to see that to understand Heidegger requires one to meet him on his terms. It is a world of original thinking that has as its underpinning, Being and Time. Nothing is as it seems, at all. All hinges on phenomenological ontology, which needs to be taken up as an enterprise, not as a this and that quotation.
As to the "unreasonable demand", the principle term in this is "stored as such". It is a bit like Dewey's complaint against they way the art world puts art on a pedestal and "stores it" in museums. Art thereby becomes restricted to the few, enabled artists, which is a perversion of art which belongs in our lives enriching in the actual making of things. Something primordial has become an estrangement. And just as Dewey is not suggesting all art museums be torn down, Heidegger is not saying all "standing reserve" causes alienation. It is standing reserve comes to dominate our idea of who we are and what the world is that is the danger. Essentially, Heidegger is claiming that the world has lost its original (and this is certainly from Kierkegaard) wonder and awe that we feel when we encounter the world freely, as if, I would argue, a child again. I certainly agree with this.
Let's take a look at what is meaningful for Dewey? It is defined as a "consummatory" experience, that is, a completion whereby something is "wrought out" in problem solving that is successful, and meaning, the aesthetic, the cognitive, all issue from this event. What is counter to this? The rote experience that moves statically, automatically, smooth and clear, free of obstacles.
Note that in Dewey's view, an object made is defined, identified, in terms of a pragmatic compound of experiential aspects, this makes the object's meaning identical to the pragmatic self that produced it. That object's meaning is the agency's consummatory pragmatics. Language is just this as well. All meaning is bound to the consummatory conclusion of some problem solved, from infancy onward, and this is, to me, the great merit of his thought. To "know" is a matter of mingling thought, affect, moods, in short, experience, with the given.
Not how Dewey and Heidegger are closer than one might think, here: Dewey makes the "consummatory" affect of an object made, bound up with cognition, so the thinking is inherently poetic, so to speak; inherently aesthetic, and I think he is right about this. Heidegger in this essay, could be saying, there in this consummatory experience, an abiding sense of well being, of unalienating satisfaction in the world, just being there. In a pragmatic conception, the state of rest is this settled sense of problems solved generating its own foundation of well being. Heidegger doesn't talk like this, but then, he does say our aesthetic (poetical) meanings are not natively apart from cognition, and these must be balanced so the original "presencing" (everything is in the present continuous tense for H because Being is an event). Modern technology presents an imbalance such that what was originally there, say in the hunter/gather's resting world, has been lost, and this resting state is primordial to being human. Treating people like things, the world like "standing reserve" creates this imbalance.
The cat lives in the room, of course. But what is a room? one needs to ask, at the level of basic questions. It is a thing of parts. There is the concept, the perceptual act that, were these to be absent, there would be no room. Is there a ?place" all the same? Well, all "room" meaning is absent. All sensory intuitions absent. Where is the basis for the room still being there?
The only conclusion has to be that the affair of the cat in the room was localized in my head, but strangely, there is the abiding "whatever" that is "there" all the same. To talk about it is impossible. The cat, as with all things, abide in metaphysics. As I type these words, I am sitting at a desk and all familiar things; but I am also, and in finality, "in" metaphysics. No contradictions, just deduction.
Quoting Cuthbert
An idea I have carried to its logical end in this very matter. "Listening" to philosophy? Interesting. The idea would refer to the understanding. So, what is you understanding telling you regarding the cat and that which I wrote in the paragraph just above this one?
Quoting Cuthbert
Quoting Cuthbert
Long hard slogs call for accountability in reasoning. So by all means, reveal yours regarding that cat.
Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Quoting Constance
This shouldn't be required. He's not God, after all (though it sometimes seems some think he is). I'm not obliged to break the "Heidegger Code."
I can understand quite well (I think) what you've written about this essay or article and what you believe it says. If it says what you believe it says, however, he could simply have said it much as you did. The rest is mere mummery--the use of ancient Greek, Aristotle, ascribing human feelings to chalices and wood mills and hydroelectric plants, vaguely suggestive phrases, etc.
I'm inclined to agree with Carnap when it comes to Heidegger's curious writing. I think it's best classified as an effort at literature or poetry; an effort to evoke some kind of feeling or response. I say "effort" because I think actual artists do this far better than he or any philosopher can, and that philosophers should leave the field to real artists, not pretend to be artists. Clarity of thought and expression isn't a disadvantage for a philosopher, or indeed most others.
I've often wondered what it was like in the pre-Christian West, the world of antiquity. That world was so entirely destroyed I don't think we can do more than guess how it was; and that's a great loss. Christianity like the other Abrahamic religions characterize the world as at our disposal for exploitation. I don't think we can be pagans again, if that was H's desire, and bemoaning the fact that we aren't doesn't seem helpful to me.
By the way, I think you describe Dewey's thinking quite well.
You find this an issue with everyone who has their education, from elementary school onward, grounded in empirical science. Heidegger cannot be accessed through this; one has to begin at least with Kant, who had jargon of his own. Then Hegel, who is ridiculously counter intuitive vis a vis common sense. I mean, all continental philosophy is like this. But if there is one who is both accessible and prerequisite for reading Heidegger, it is Husserl, from whom Heidegger derives a great deal of his basic thinking (certainly not all). Cartesian Meditations, Ideas I open doors.
As to the weird language,, I am told it makes more sense in the original German, but then, German and English are very close languages. He intentionally wants to use new language because he realizes that old usages and contexts reinforces the errors of the past. One must break away, and this has to occur at the level of basic vocabulary, which is always given to us with assumptions built in. the only way to escape the old narratives is to construct new meaning with novel use of language. He finds this in the Greeks.
What can I say, one has to follow through. I looked at Heidegger, Rorty and others with a desire to know, no matter what, and if I had to read Kant first, then so be it. There is a reason Heidegger is considered a giant, the the only thing that stands in the way is oneself, and one's rationalizations for not making the considerable effort.
One hears the same sort of thing from those who explain what supposedly keeps us from accepting Jesus as our Savior.
Why?
Certainly no argument should be determined ad populum. But then, consider that when it comes to Jesus, the standards are quite low, and often ridiculous. Heidegger commands the respect of generations of philosophers, is a seminal thinker which changed the face of philosophical thought. I mean the body of post Heiedggerian thought is staggering.
And btw: you don't think Jesus is our savior? This entirely depends on how this is interpreted.
Because we say inside this and outside that all the time. The matter here turns on whether "inside/outside" talk has any meaning here. It's like a hall of mirrors in which what appears to be the out there, apart from you, is really just a reflection of yourself: Everywhere you turn to establish the "outside" of the cat affair, you are referred back to the phenomenological. No exceptions seem possible, for to even say "cat" you are referred to someone's understanding, and the analysis of this understanding has nothing to do with anything extra-phenomenological; except! for the mysterious "otherness" which stands at the threshold of what is "other". Lots of phenomenological studies on this business, this other that is an inextricable part of phenomena. How is it possible? One cannot reach across the room and put the otherness of the cat in the brain, so how does otherness get there?
Few even see this as a question, let alone THE question on which the most profound insight into human ontology rests.
But then a couple of things come to bear. First, if you are, as I am, committed to the empirical thesis that phenomenal affairs are reducible to brain activity (though, keeping in mind that this in turn may be reducible to something more fundamental), evidenced by many occasions of brain surgery while completely awake for the treatment of epilepsy, etc.), then the brain is going to be the threshold of epistemic events. Period. What do you have that permits exceeding this boundary? The BIV simply presents this impossible issue. Can it be doubted that my thoughts of my cat in the occurrent perceptual moment are enclosed in a context of referentiality that is brain and only brain? One is not here asking how seems to be the case, but what follows from undeniable premises. You have to work this out, otherwise, your dismissal is purely ad hoc.
You can make sense of being a brain in a vat; of course: one simply deploys a thesis that does not insist on this impossible relationship: phenomenology and hermeneutics. the idea that my cat is on the sofa (or that I am not a brain in a vat) is an interpretation of the events before me, and terms like inside and outside the brain are all interpretative, contingent, resting on assumptions about the world that are, well, contingent. There is no solid ground beneath the feet epistemically speaking; only more thinking, ideas, more interpretatively bound language.
The question then goes to what is there in the world that is not a contingently bound idea that gives rise to all this talk about things outside me. The answer appears to be that there is inherent in the world of our existence this "sense" of the Other. It is IN the phenomenal reality of our affairs, but in the most basic analysis, it is not to be found there in it finality.
An odd business, this world we are IN.
I am not committed to the view that phenomenal states are reducible to physical brain activity although I hold it tentatively. I also agree that the brain, under this tentative view, will be the threshold of all epistemic events (true beliefs, false beliefs, believed propositions, etc...). I don't have anything that permits moving across this boundary and I am not aware that I argued that epistemic events can be extended beyond the brain? If I did imply this then I state now that I do not argue this. My point was that if I am a brain in a vat, then I am the only mind in existence. Therefore, there is no other mind for me to share the sematic content of my language with or to form a benchmark of following the rules of attributing meaning to the terms "brain" and "vat" correctly. I'm not quite sure what you are trying to argue here.
In order to state, even mentally, the proposition that you are not a brain in a vat, you first need to hold a consistent meaning of the world "brain" and "vat". The meaning needs to be stable from the moment the ideas first form to when the proposition is stated and from that point onwards. If you are a brain in a vat (the only mind in existence), then this cannot be done. You would have no way to know that what you meant by "brain" and "vat" 10 seconds ago is the same as what you mean by the terms now. Without external minds anchoring the meaning through agreed rule following systems (Kripke, 1982) the proposition you state of not being a brain in a vat cannot even be made sense of for you to know its truth or falsehood.
As I said before, I am not well read on the literature on the brain in a vat arguments; your knowledge is no doubt more extensive than mine. I've tried to restate my argument more clearly as to be honest I was lost with most of what you were trying to argue, especially in your first paragraph about my dismissal of the proposition "I am a brain in a vat" as ad hoc.
When I say committed I mean the same kind of regard we have for any other fact of the world, and "facts" are doxastically binding . Mind/brain correlation very binding at this level of discussion because there is so much evidence for it. But then, ALL facts are tentatively posited, we just don't think of it like this because we are too busy. That is simply the nature of the world. Another way of putting this is to make one move to a deeper order of thinking, which is phenomenology, something I read and try to encourage in others. In this method of understanding affairs, what you call tentative is called hermeneutics. I am committed to believing many things, like the direction of gravitational pull or that the stars are not gods, but when the very act of knowledge itself comes under review, I find such things open to inquiry, not closed as in the usual way of getting along in the world.
The only mind? Two ways to look at it: In the actual scenario, there is your brain, the brains of the scientists, those who built the vat, those who clean their streets, and so on. But this is not how this spells out philosophically at all. We are being called to question our epistemic relation to the world as a relation, all other details being incidental. So now we can observe this relation freely. There is me, my cat on the sofa and I know this to be the case, e.g.
As to semantic content, this is where the whole thing gets interesting, spooky, really. There is no doubt that there are others, and that we have the various sematic exchanges with them, and all that happens in the first order world actually happens. This is not being doubted here. What is being acknowledged is that all this is "happening" somehow in a brain. The question is how, and the answer to this must lie beyond the simply naturalistic attitude, for by this account, I should know my cat any more than my dented car fenders "knows" the offending guard rail.
Quoting Ghost Light
Brains and vats are pretty stable, aren't they? Like any other common nouns. External minds do indeed anchor affairs through agreement and nothing changes this fact as it is all laid out clearly as ever. The only difference is that we have entered another order of analysis, coerced, really, to do this by the inexplicable epistemic connection between a mind and the observable world. As to time and knowing, I am not clear on you point. But it does open a very interesting question of the structure of time, with its past, present and future. Can sense be made of this at all?
Quoting Ghost Light
Ad hoc because when the question is raised about this relation between the knower and the known, it is often disregarded (Gettier problems are like this) because his is the way of analytic philosophy which along with Wittgenstein simply puts the matter in the bin of impossible questions and disregards it. This is ad hoc, dismissing something with a singular justification just to dismiss it.
Jesus has been thought rather significant himself, you know, and has been esteemed and worshipped since long before Heidegger lived to inspire us with such statements as "The Fuhrer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law" and "The Nothing itself nothings."
And my little comment wasn't about Jesus, but about what is said of him by his acolytes and its similarity to what you said of H.