Does reality require an observer?
It’s difficult to imagine anything in reality being significant or measurable without some aware entity to go “oooh!”. But if we go by evidence, life wasn’t always around and therefore there must be a cold dead universe that existed before it could be appreciated.
But there’s a few issues I have with fashioning this question. It has a lot of assumptions imbedded in it.
For example an observer is not external to reality. We are intrinsic to it. We are one facet of reality that happens to register itself. So when the question is rehashed as “does reality require reality” the question becomes a bit pointless.
This is also applicable if the concept of observer-ship or awareness is either illusory and doesn’t really exist in any distinct sense from the rest of the interacting physical world or if awareness is fundamental to reality and physics.
I guess what I’m really asking is is there any objective discernible difference between the state of observing and the state of being observed. Are they entirely interchangeable. Is the rest of the universe simultaneously observing us just as we observe it?
Is “living” an actual unique state of the universe or is it simply fancy chemistry that we like to believe - from the inherent bias of being alive - as something special and different?
To others I am a part of their objective observable universe just as a chair or the sky is. I am outside of them. They cannot prove that I’m aware and alive like they feel themselves to be, I could be a hologram or robot for all they really know, we only adapt this trust based on our similarities and capacity to project feeling ie. empathise as well as the culture of classification that we built society on.
But there’s a few issues I have with fashioning this question. It has a lot of assumptions imbedded in it.
For example an observer is not external to reality. We are intrinsic to it. We are one facet of reality that happens to register itself. So when the question is rehashed as “does reality require reality” the question becomes a bit pointless.
This is also applicable if the concept of observer-ship or awareness is either illusory and doesn’t really exist in any distinct sense from the rest of the interacting physical world or if awareness is fundamental to reality and physics.
I guess what I’m really asking is is there any objective discernible difference between the state of observing and the state of being observed. Are they entirely interchangeable. Is the rest of the universe simultaneously observing us just as we observe it?
Is “living” an actual unique state of the universe or is it simply fancy chemistry that we like to believe - from the inherent bias of being alive - as something special and different?
To others I am a part of their objective observable universe just as a chair or the sky is. I am outside of them. They cannot prove that I’m aware and alive like they feel themselves to be, I could be a hologram or robot for all they really know, we only adapt this trust based on our similarities and capacity to project feeling ie. empathise as well as the culture of classification that we built society on.
Comments (354)
From our perspective.
To truly imagine a universe with no observer, then you must imagine it from no point of view. Nothing within it is nearer or further, older or newer, closer or further away. Of course, if you realise what that means, then you will realise its impossibility.
That is exactly what we bring to the picture - a perspective, and perspective itself is fundamental.
(See this discussion.)
We do not know it yet. This a good question and an interesting debate. Liu Cixin, wrote a book about this issue called dark forest theory. This debate is all about if it is or not worhty to be obrserved by "others" in this vast universe. Check it out: The Dark Forest Theory and Paradox. I think you would like it.
Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book called, 'The Sense of Being Stared At', which looks at the role which observation has on the observer. One aspect which may be relevant to your debate is the role of participant observation in the social sciences, with the idea being that one had to become part of some social structure in order to enter into the understanding of it from an outside, distanced point of view.
Yes, and he also wrote a brief essay on the reaction to his book amongst the intelligentsia, called 'the sense of being glared at.'
The scope of that evidence is tiny indeed, compared with the vast expanses of space and time of which we are aware.
A "cold UNDEAD universe" is more like it. Nature is a zombie and h. sapiens is the kind of zombie inhabitant which deludes itself that it is fundamentally not a zombie, or almost always "self-conscious, intentional". More prosaically, and taking the Mediocrity Principle much further than we'd like, h. sapiens is (one of countless?) confabulating maggot-species inhabiting an astronomically huge cadaver we call "universe" that is still in its throes of decomposing and cooling down. We are merely perspectival "observers" in so far as we are wholly immanent aspects, even an inestimable aggregate of micro-agents, of cosmological decay (i.e. increasing entropy). This maggotry is, perhaps, our function and our metacognitive greatness, and so, at least to an absurdist like me, pandeism (re: the cosmological decay of a cold "undead" universe) makes the most sense.
Our bodies belong to (physical) reality. Our brain cannot observe. It can only handle signals --receive them, process them and transmit them. The "observer" is you, a spiritual being, an awareness (consciousness) unit, and therefore not part of reality. Observation requires attention and intention. The brain, which is indeed part of the physical world (universe) cannot do that.
Quoting Benj96
You are aware of the physical world, aren't you? And you are or can be aware that you are or can be aware. Isn't that so? If yes, how can awareness be illusory and not existing? It is you, yourself. And if you think you are an illusion, well, I hope not! :grin:
Quoting Benj96
I am not sure what you mean by "the state of being observed". Me observing and me being observed? And being observed by the physical universe? How can that be? I don't undestand this.
Also, I don't see how this is related to the question of your topic, namely, "Does reality require an observer?". Maybe I miss something. If you could explain it to me, esp. with an example, I could maybe be able to answer this question.
Does reality require an observer? If by observer we mean a human being, and we believe in science that the universe is much older than the human species, then the answer is clearly 'no'. Am I missing something?
Also I think you nailed it by stating that the observer is itself part of reality. Since nothing comes from nothing, then the observer came from something else that is part of reality.
Not necessarily. I cannot say whether humans are the only “aware” or “conscious” agents. I would imagine that many animals and maybe plants and fungi are to varying degrees conscious - dogs, dolphins, elephants primates etc. And perhaps to a lesser extent lower life forms - worms bacteria etc. Reality seems to only acknowledge its own existence through the capacity to be aware. Without any conscious agent one would imagine reality would never know it had even manifested in the first place.
And if nothing is conscious in the universe how would the universe ever be a universe. There’s nothing to realise it exists.
I mean that if “life” is in fact a false distinction from other inanimate chemistry and simply a very complex physical process that gives the impression of “self reference” or emergence of ego, then it stands to reason that awareness is just a product of chemical/energetic reactions. And if that is the case then perhaps all chemical interactions in the universe are to some degree observing the other ones. This is along the lines of Panpsychism where awareness is a fundamental property like space, time, matter etc
It’s interesting that you associate being dead with being passive. Because as I understand life itself is a mix of active and passive roles: for example photosynthesis can be seen as passive in the sense that where there is light there is automatic photosynthesis it’s not like plants can refuse to covert light into usable energy but also it is active in the sense that a plant requires a certain level of self organisation in order to carry out the process.
Also parasitism is passive for the host. They are merely being used as a commodity by the parasite. So I’m the same way perhaps being dead can be active. A star is not considered alive but it certainly has an active role in sustaining it.
I borrowed these perspectives from Yin and yang which focuses on the importance of active and passive couples in the interaction of all things. I do see how being dead is sort of like being on the bottom rung of the ladder of utilisation. When you are dead you are at the mercy of all that wants to use you matter and energy for their own devices
Would this not suggest then that observation and “self- awareness” is a universal property. Which would suppose I guess that at the beginning - the singularity - there was observance. A single entity that is aware of its own singularity. Seems pretty theistic to me.
Then again I don’t think panpsychism is completely out of the realms of possibility. Perhaps awareness is a proportional function of organisation. And us as highly complex self replicating systems of inanimate chemicals are simply a high level of emergence of this fundamental ego
Dying is no sufficient criterion for living, however. Plants are really special as they most often lack perceptible response to their environment. However there are plants seeking sunlight, they reproduce and even carnivore plants. Stars just happen.
In your view, what is the lowest form of being that is conscious? Is a rock conscious? If not, then the point remains: science says that rocks are older than any living being.
Your approach is commendable.
An alternative would be to consider the universe from any point of view. That is, to consider the world in a way such that the particular perspective becomes irrelevant.
This is encapsulated in the Principle of Relativity - the laws of physics are the same for all observers.
It's encoded in talking in the third person.
It's one of the few ways in which talk of being objective makes sense.
Sure, no proof. But you act as if other people are alive and aware, in the way you are. Indeed I would hope that even when you try to convince yourself otherwise, you fail. And were you to succeed, convincing yourself that those around you are mere shells and you are the only conscious being, I suspect you might quickly find yourself confined by those around you.
No proof; but acting otherwise leads quickly to complications.
No proof; but you posted to us, and we replied.
Some things don't get proved, but are nevertheless true.
Daleks are loud. A species that sought to destroy every other species would also seek to be more powerful than any other species so that it can win any battle.
We'd notice.
It seems like you could about build a philosophy on this alone. Interesting you said any and not all. Seeing something two or more ways at once wouldn't be a normal or obtainable way to see things. Could you take it a step further and say see what doesn't change between any perspectives. Or might that be too narrow?
The truth.
:wink:
Any point of view is still a point of view.
It's qualified, the access implies subjugation of the effect.
I don't think it has to be. It simply recognises that whatever we say, think or know of reality, is always informed by a point of view, but that this is not disclosed or obvious. We naively assume that we see what is truly present, which would remain were nobody here to observe it - tree falls in forest - but we don't recognise the role the mind has in even constituting that scene apparently devoid of observers. We don't see it, because it constitutes the act of knowing.
This doesn't deny the empirical reality of the vast universe outside human purview, but it recognises the role of the mind in what is presumed empirical, as per Kant.
Quoting Wayfarer
By considering the world from any point of view, the perspective of any individual observer is incorporated, not dismissed. "I see blue" becomes "Banno sees blue".
...and an infant learns that other folk see things differently, and learns to take this into account. They learn to place themselves in the position of an other - another.
It takes philosophical conniving to convince folk otherwise. And even more to point out the error.
Inter-subjective validation. The ‘view from nowhere’. It’s still a view.
Well, not quite. It's not inter-subjecitve - a useless phrase; if a statement is true from any point of view, then any particular perspective is irrelevant.
The trick is to construct such statements. It requires an extensive, very social process. In some cases it is called "science".
And of course there is always the issue that there might be perspectives that have not been taken into account - the problem of induction. SO the process is open-ended.
But it works; as you can see by the existence of the device on which you are reading this.
The fact that technology works is not relevant to the question at issue. Technology has very little to say about such questions although it obviously provides the medium across which it can be debated.
Of course it can't be, because if it were your position might be untenable...
We have a shared conversation which sets out how things are, allowing us to manipulate the world.
Right. It's aggregated, obtainable. There isn't going to be a case where an anti-omni observation is selectable. So, we describe a sense different than simply a single individual, but not without the unknown error of being one. Pragmatic objectivity.
The other poster seems to think the function of being any perspective is enough to restrict an objective observation. Seems narrow.
I don't think that "reality" is nothing more than the name that observer gives to the "environment" he can perceive.
Quoting Banno
:up:
It's very good that you brought up the element of "chemical reactions". However, I don''t see that you mention the brain at all, which functions basically on them, but instead you attribute them to awareness (as a possibility). I don't know, are you attempting to identify brain with awareness? Anyway, I have already explained their differences. Yet, here's a little more about them:
We --the scientists, actually-- know really a lot about the brain, its structure and its functions. How much, in contrast, we know about awareness? For one thing, Science talks very little, if not at all, about it. All that is known about awarencess comes from Philosophy. So, these two elements seem to belong to two different fields of knowledge.
About Panpsychism: Although I have not studied it, but since you brought it up, it speaks about the mind, not about awareness. (Panpsychism, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/). And I undestand that it represents an effort to "reconcile", if I may say," physicalism with dualism.
Anyway, I don't belong to any "-ism", but if I had to choose a "camp", this would certainly be "dualism", because the distinction between mind and body is very clear to me.
This is a very puzzling thing to say, “They cannot prove that I’m aware and alive like they feel themselves to be” So, base on what is said here, one understands what it means to be “aware and alive” is something that is private and inaccessible to anybody. But if this is the case, anyone partaking in this conversation has no idea what anyone is talking about when we say “aware and alive like they feel”.
We share one world, we react similarly to one world, and we talk about one world.
By the same reason how does one say what is relevant? The default assumption that any observation imposes information that renders the observation invalid is circular and can't be supported by the very foundation which supposes it. Would the world look different in infrared? Sure. Would it change, no.
I didn't contribute to this discussion when it first started. I wasn't sure if it would go anywhere interesting, but it did. Not much got covered in any depth, but it has covered a lot of ground and asked some interesting questions.
Some of the posts here have hovered around the metaphysical concept of reality as described in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. The Tao is the name for the unnameable ground of all being. Lao Tzu was fully aware of the irony. I guess that makes it "reality" as we are discussing it. It is similar to @Wayfarer's universe with no point of view. I'm sure he is aware of that.
In the Tao Te Ching, the Tao is identified with "non-being." The universe where we live on a daily basis is identified with "being," or "the 10,000 things," as Taoists sometimes call it. Being develops out of non-being by the act of naming, which, to me, seems very much like observing, measuring, etc, which are acts of consciousness. Some people do not agree with my interpretation.
As I noted at the beginning, the Tao is a metaphysical concept. There are many out there. I find this one particularly useful.
I'm not claiming that observation is rendered invalid by the requirement that there be an observer. What I'm saying is that the observer brings an indispensable foundation to whatever understanding you have of the Universe, including the idea of 'an empty universe'. The mind provides the order within which any such concept is meaningful. And the reason that is significant is because it undermines the tendency to treat the human as an object, a strong tendency in 20th century thought, the oft-expressed sentiment that humanity is a 'mere blip in a vast sea of time', which, while an objectively valid judgement, also neglects the fact that it is still a judgement, and one which, to our knowledge, only humans are capable of making. This neglect is a product of what has been called 'the blind spot of science', about which see these sources -
The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience, Aeon Magazine
The Blind Spot, William Byers
It is Never Known but is the Knower (Consciousness and the Blind Spot of Science), Michel Bitbol.
From the Aeon essay:
But understanding is something different than the actual happening. If archeologists or geologists tell what must once have happened the conclusion is of course an act of understanding. But how does that the affect the volcano? For itself the volcano does not depend on someone calling it "volcano".
From the Blind Spot Aeon Magazine:
So the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific.
The essay is interesting and certainly undermines scientism. But perhaps a straw man of science as it is increasingly understood these days (eg, Susan Haack). Scientists increasingly don't think of science as 'absolute truth' but tentative models based on the best available information. And yes, it is humans doing the naming and having the phenomenal experience that constitutes what we ambitiously call realty. I think the thesis is that this is the best we can do for now rather than this is truth.
Quoting Wayfarer Doing good here..
Quoting Wayfarer If it is objectively valid, then the objection is that this "neglect" reduces the quality below some standard while being technically within another one.
The article even finds the need to use the term "perfectly" in order to maintain what appears to be a slight of hand. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding or the logic holds better than it appears to? If being a product of human judgement sets us apart from discovering truth then so be it. But, if it doesn't; then where is the concern? We are often wrong and this is probably why; seems to corroborate the experience better than imagining a defect; just because.
Are you familiar with Kant's controversial expression, the 'thing in itself' (ding an sich)? That observation is relevant here. Kant's philosophy is that we know things - volcanoes included - as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. So Kant differentiates between the reality of appearances, and reality as it is in itself. As I said, this distinction of Kant's is controversial, but it is directly relevant to the specific question asked in the OP.
For a very brief recap of Kant's relevance, see The Continuing Relevance Of Immanuel Kant
Quoting Heiko
Does a tree fall in a forest where there is nobody there to see it?
Quoting Tom Storm
If they don't, it's at least in part due to the influence of philosophers of science - Kuhn, Feyerband, Polanyi. I find little awareness of it in the pronouncements of popular scientific intellectuals - Steve Pinker, Neil De Grasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss - many more could be named, all of whom convey exactly the kind of attitude that is the subject of this critique.
And furthermore, the question at issue is not a scientific, but a philosophical one - a question about the influence of science on philosophy, or how philosophy is conceived in a scientific culture. You see already in this thread how widely assumed it is that what is real, is completely separate from us, and it's hard to understand how it could be otherwise. But that, I contend, is characteristic of modern liberalism. It's woven into our worldview. But it has deep implications, and that's what I'm calling out.
Quoting Cheshire
You realise how big a statement you're making there?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I would tend to object to it. But, either truth is obtainable or it isn't. The process of seeing what holds and fails from different points of view implies we aren't limited to our own. The matter that its always a human point of view implies there are unknowns. I think it's reasonable to assume there will be unknowns and not always as a result of second order neglect, but human error in general. Is it problematic?
This is obviously a big question and we’re wading into deep waters here, but consider the origins of Western philosophy, specifically the questions raised about epistemology, how we know what we know, or what we think we know. That is the problematic! The debates in physics about the interpretations of quantum mechanics are an aspect of that. Look at the arguments on the forum about ‘brain in a vat’, global scepticism, parallel worlds and so on. So the question of the reality of what we know is obviously central.
My aim here is to argue that the widespread and taken-for-granted intuition of the separately-existing world is really an inevitable consequence of the modern ‘post-Enlightenment’ worldview. Hence the expression, ‘Cartesian anxiety’:
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
It’s also a chapter title in the book, The Embodied Mind, Thomson, Varela and Rosch - the same Thomson who co-authored the Aeon article.
I would rather say he points out the necessity of the idea "thing in itself". This has nothing to do with reality. It is a model of dialectics. Hegel pointed that out in saying the "thing in itself" is not a mysterious unknown but nothing more than a abstraction. "Empty existence".
Quoting Wayfarer
If it has been standing there before it must have fallen. In general, the tree might have a story to tell.
If I take your argumentative pattern and applied it, you would have a hard time convincing yourself of your own arguments as these words I type do not mean anything. It is just you.
Kant's philosophy has the same problem. He starts from a quite biased point of view, borrows common patterns of understanding and comes to conclusions that would have made those very conclusions impossible if applied in the first place. This, indeed, showcases a problem. But not primarily a problem with the understanding of reality, but in the attempt of coming up with a universal, isolated model of the mind.
Nobody needs to mathematically prove an "objective reality". People on philosophy-forums who, by their own term, cannot recognize themselves in a mirror disqualify themselves in a purely performative manner. Reality has always been a thing to deal with in practice.
I don't have any trouble with that idea. There is no perfect source of knowledge and maybe without religion framing the world in extremes we wouldn't have made the assumption initially. So, we're in agreement, but perhaps for different reasons. If the current view is wrong then what is the correction?
Quoting Wayfarer It's just incorrect to expect truth to manifest itself upon our notice of a thing. As soon as we don't expect to be right all the time there's no issue in my view. How do you reconcile these errors?
It's fine to be in opposition to some perceived standard, but usually it implies another one. Which is what I'm interested in; they're wrong, no problem, what is right?
Reality is a problematic word, as it is rather elastic and can (not must) be empty or honorific at best.
If you have in mind the world we know and love, it must need an observer with - at least - sentience. If you're talking about atoms and the stuff of physics, maybe not. Then again phrases like "all there is once we are gone is atoms and energy" and all that strange quantum stuff are hard to make sense of absent people.
The old well-worn "view from nowhere", eh? It's still a view though, no? It just means not privileging any particular perspective. It just isn't true that "Nothing within it is nearer or further, older or newer, closer or further away." The cosmic microwave background is temporally prior to the present state of the cosmos from any possible point of view; you don't have to be located anywhere in particular in time for that to be the case.
Proxima Centauri is closer to Earth than it is to Deneb, no matter what your position in the Universe, so what you claim is simply not correct.
They certainly do, you're making yourself perfectly clear. You were arguing for the inherent reality of things, independently of any observer. I pointed out that this is just what was called into question by Kant, and you dismiss Kant. I have no wish to take issue with that.
Quoting Cheshire
I would have thought the aspiration to see things as they truly are is important.
It's interesting that I've linked to that article in Aeon magazine a number of times since it was published in 2019, yet it never attracts anything more than dismissal - actually, the first time I linked it, it drew down a fair number of insults - even though it's by three quite well-regarded contemporary philosophers, about what they and I understand to be a central problem of philosophy. But, anyway, I'll throw you another well-worn essay that makes a similar point, about whether the universe exists if we're not looking, and one that even makes explicit reference to distant stellar objects.
I think it's a pretty good article and it summarizes the issues well. Pretty sure I said that last time. I have followed up by looking at some work by Evan Thompson. It's a very interesting issue to explore.
I understand. I'm certainly not up to that original intent. I have an interest, but it is not a passion.
[quote=George Berkeley]Esse est percipi[/quote]
Translartion: To exist is to be perceived.
What about when it all began? Imagine nothing and then, through perception (observation), the universe and all in it came to be. Who did/is doing/will do the perceiving? Suppose X is the perceives the universe. Thus, the universe exists because X perceives it.
What about X itself?
1. X exists (we know that because the universe exists). How did X come to exist? Suppose there's a Y that perceives X. Then, how did Y come to exist? A Z perceives Y, and so on ad nauseum. Infinite regress.
2. X perceives itself. That's how X exists. However, X must fist exist to perceive itself but to perceive itself it must first exist. Infinite loop.
3. X exists because Y perceives X and Y exists because X perceives Y. A loop of causation. However, X exists because Y perceives it implies Y came first. If so, how did Y come into existence (see 1 and 2). If, on the other hand, Y exists because X perceives it, the same problem arises.
Something doesn't add up! I can't quite put my finger on it though.
If perception itself is existence, then it doesn't need the conditions for existing.
I find that hard to make sense of.
I find impossible to make sense of how it could be hard to make sense of. Perception itself is existence, then why does it need another existence to exist or perceived.
In logic, the sentence "x exists" is ill-formed as the existential quantifier is missing qualification. x is defined by predication. If there is a term like "green(House)" this means being green (likely among others) defines/identifies the house. As far as such primarily sensual constructs go it might seem justified to eliminate the object altogether. However speaking of "senses" or preception can be suspected of being a reification: It makes no sense to say one could see if all one can see is "nothing" (sense without object): Just as "x exists" is ill-formed, so is the term "green" if it does not predicate something.
As far as logical judgement goes a green world cannot as well be blue as being green defines it's identity. It cannot even turn blue as then it would be something completely different.
I would settle for a way to see them incrementally better over time. Knowing that what your seeing is true in an absolute sense might not be possible, but it doesn't prevent you from in fact seeing it. It is an understanding that acknowledges access to truth while accounting for unknown errors.
Category error? Perception is something done by that which exists. It's like saying rotation itself is earth. Try again.
Quoting Heiko
God exists = (Ex)(Gx)
Quoting 180 Proof
Excellent observation!
Quoting jkg20
This may appear to have solved the problem but it actually doesn't. If the observer can exist without being perceived, why does reality need to be observed to exist? It never pays to use double standards.
It is not category error at all. Both are abstract concepts. If you think existence in this case is some physical entity, that would be a logical hallucination.
Again, not all of reality does need to be observed to exist for Berkeley, minds and souls are real for Berkeley, and so part of reality. Berkeley has a two tier ontology: minds/souls and, in awful modern parlance, the contents of mental states. In fact, God has a special role for Berkeley, so perhaps it is a three tiered ontology. The dependence of mental contents on minds/souls is what he spends a good deal of time trying to prove, so if your question is "why do the contents of mental states need to be observed to exist, given that minds and souls do not?", then Berkeley has a range of arguments in response, some better than others. Berkeley assumes that everyone is prepared to accept as a minimum the differentiable existence of minds and their contents, and he attempts to argue that the latter's existence is dependent on the former's.
Addendum.
I could perhaps also point out that for Berkeley, minds/souls are substances, and the conception of a substance he had, and shared with his contemporaries, was that substance is simple and incorruptible and cannot be created or destroyed. It is the very nature of substance that it exist, so no questions about its dependence on anything else make sense. So your question to Berkeley may be more along the lines of "Why is there substance?", or "Why are there substances?", but that looks a little like "Why is there something rather than nothing?", which is an entirely different matter than addressing questions about dependencies between tiers of existence.
That is part of the truth, but not the full picture, for there are different "realities" which attend an "observation", one which is utterly independent of the observation and one which is the product of the observation.
Does reality require an observer? If by "reality", you mean "objective reality", then I say no, for whenever there is an observation, there is created a subjective reality which is dependent upon both the objective reality and upon the faults in perception attending the observation. In fact an observer, because of the limitations of it's sensory perception, cannot actually discern objective reality, but is the perciever of a corrupted reality. An observer merely interprets objective reality by means of it's sensory organs. The result of this is inevitably the illusion which we may call "subjective reality", but this is often quite divergent from the (objective) reality itself, as the discoveries and theorizations of scientists have demonstrated. These two realities are intimately and causally related, but they can differ significantly. The difference between them is a result of a deficit of perception on the part of an observer. This deficit of perception means is the means by which the observer creates subjective reality. So, while "subjective reality" is dependent upon an observer, is indeed the product of the observer, "objective reality" remains utterly independent of the observer. Said subjective reality is the universe, which is to say the "world", as we know it, and the experience thereof had been very useful to us as a species, to say the least. All of human experience and endeavor is based upon this subjective reality. Because it is dependent upon objective reality, it cannot but be said to be a type or form of "reality". Even so, an observer can but be said to be the perverter of objective reality through the creation of it's subjective mirror.
That's why Bishop Berkeley argued for an outside Observer, who is always watching what goes on in the world. Of course, his "Observer" was not visiting aliens, but the God of Genesis. :smile:
[i]God in the Quad
There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."
Reply:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."[/i]
Note : Here in our poem a quad is essentially the courtyard of a campus, or a quadrangle thereof.
Actually, as you indicated later, "reality" is an observation. It's an inference from a variety of independent observations, that there is some objective & stable something (ding an sich) which exists even when the subjective observer is not observing. For a weak example, you can close your eyes, and still confirm that a tree is still there by touching it --- or by asking another person to confirm your observation. If you don't believe your own senses, you can always ask someone else : "Is it really there?"
Unfortunately for your dependence on sensory feedback, some philosophers have imagined a "demon" who could cause you to "see" an illusion. Or, as Berkeley postulated, God is always observing, and sustaining H/er creation, even when no human is watching. That possibility supports the notion that physical Reality is actually a metaphysical Idea in the Mind of God. :smile:
Observation :
[i]1. the action or process of observing something or someone carefully or in order to gain information.
2. a remark, statement, or comment based on something one has seen, heard, or noticed.[/i]
Reality doesn't care if you are looking or not.
Yes. And an observer/perceiver must be allowed to have presuppositions as well -- presuppositions which are apart from the object of perception.
Yes. Very cartesian.
It's weird that what seems to be is classified as wishful thinking and "as things aren't," pragmatic.
One can be small without being absolutely doomed.
I think I think so.
Chardin, a Catholic priest said, God, is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals, to know self in man.
We know then that reality is unimpacted by the observer. Do we know whether the observer is impacted by reality?
Are reality and observations parallel universes are is there some interactionism between the two?
Reality yes. Cause it presupposes already an observer. And everytime it's the different "reality" depending on whom that "observer" is. It's just "observer's reality".
On the contrary Existance no. It is independent. "Something" exists that's for sure. How exactly though, that existance is approachable and in what way the "observer" perceives it, that's reality. And it's subjective.
Hmm. Could he not be? First comes "reality" and then follows the "observer". Reality gives birth to the observer.
I really can't see how the observer can escape from the impact of it.
For instance, not until long ago was Pluto considered a planet, before it's downgrade. So there is also a sense in which the universe we experience is shaped by us, which shouldn't be overlooked completely.
A lot of arguments ensue from the fact that empirical philosophy proceeds as if there is no observer to be taken into account. Empiricism purportedly starts with the raw facts of experience as fundamental data, and assumes that objects of experience exist irrespective of the perspective that the observer brings to them. But this is just what is called into question with the 'observer problem' of modern physics.
I think the instinctive belief we have in the Universe that 'exists anyway' is the gist of scientific realism. Scientific realism presumes that the Universe we're aware of through sensory experience transcends our experience of it, as our experience is limited and the universe is vast. As Kant puts it:
[quote=Kant, CPR, A369]I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sense-able forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves.
To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensory abilities). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. [/quote]
I'm guessing most here would correspond to the second description.
I'd say our considerations do (obviously) depend on us, but that which gives rise to the considerations does not.
Put in that way, it is true. The issue is articulating what is that "which gives rise to these considerations".
Sense data? I don't know.
Right, beyond our considerations we have no idea.
Quoting theRiddler
Are you referring to my "A cold Undead universe ..." post? If so, what's wrong with my speculative observation? It's not "contrary to experience and what seems to be" to me – or how nature is, in fact, treated by the 'technocapitalist pan-industrialization' of the Earth (and soon outer space, etc).
Quoting jorndoe
:fire:
I guess, when you go chat with your neighbor, their reactions are to what you see in a mirror, something like that?
There are some ramblings in this old post.
Say, when something relevant/significant differentiates hallucinations and perception, then it's the perceived.
We learn of things extra-self (be they rocks or other people) by interaction, not by becoming them.
But of course you can't escape yourself, that's just nonsense, can't escape the means of learning about things and understanding them, while still wanting to do that — perception, consciousness, ... — those are inherently part of yourself when occurring, part of your (ontological) makeup.
Mere existence (be it of rocks or other people) is different from figuring out what it all is, which is both more involving and interesting.
Or any observer?
Quantum weirdness is more about any interaction than a conscious observer consciously observing.
At least in experiments, minimization of (uncontrolled) variables tends to be desirable.
Schrödinger’s Cat – Still Not Dead (Hossenfelder; Feb 27, 2021)
It sounds like you are treating reality as a conscious being.
[quote=Benj96]Does reality require an observer?[/quote]
With respect to Kant's phenomena, yes but in re noumena, I don't know.
Whatever gives rise to our considerations, insofar as they belong to us, and given the inconsistency among us, must be as much ours as the considerations.
I don’t know either, but I would vote for imagination over sense data, for sensations provide merely that which is to be considered, and even that not necessarily, but say nothing at all about the methodology by which considerations themselves come about.
Yeah......sorta like that thread asking, “how does a fact establish itself as knowledge”.
(Sigh)
:up:
Yep. We can't get out of our bodies to see how things might look like absent our specific perspective. There's always a pragmatic element to enquiry, otherwise we wouldn't bother.
True. That phrase was not accurate enough. It's quite a nuanced process because saying that that which gives rise to our considerations already makes the process seem more intellect or reason-involving than is meant.
I'd say that there is the given, which we then interpret according to our imagination, which we then call a specific so and so "a rock", "a blade of grass", "the sun".
The given is already shaped by us, but I want to say that there is an element there which doesn't depend on us. Otherwise it seems to me that we could will ourselves into thinking anything could be anything else just by thinking about, such as willing to change a cloud to a hill and so forth.
Well that's the thing. If we have to consult someone's philosophy to say what reality is then we are in trouble. Why wouldn't we all just know what it is if it is?
Perhaps reality either is, or is not, or even neither or both. If each of these is unsatisfactory to some people then we all must be wrong. There appears to be a plurality of possible answers that we can't funnel into to just one.
Perhaps reality is just a name, a placeholder, not for the world itself if there is such a thing, but for our intersection with our personal world or with one of the many social and scientific worlds. After all, famine wars epidemics death are surely real to other people if not us at the moment.
Here are some snippets I know of, going way back ...
Personification.
Yep, seems right. That would fill the niche of that which doesn’t depend on us.
Quoting Manuel
I’m going to assume you mean the given is shaped by us, and not that the given is already shaped by us antecedent to its reception in us, as the transcendental realist would maintain.
Thing is, even if the given is already shaped by us, say, by imagination for some other internal use downstream, that in itself doesn’t say what the other use is, nor that such shaping is sufficient for specific so-and-so’s. Even while the grounds for them lay in imagination, the specifics cannot be so lawless. But you knew that.
I kind of can understand why Kant had to postulate Thing-in-Itself.
Whatever is given to creatures like us (which is very difficult to tease out), must be of a nature that it can partly be apprehended by us in perception.
So far as we are able to discern, the given for experience cannot be seen from a neutral perspective, that is, involving no perception at all.
So the given is of the kind which we already shape automatically, we can't help it. We assume that "downstream" something "stands in" for what we perceive, but that's a logical postulate, not an empirically verifiable claim.
I have to leave room for that aspect of giveness that one must assume exists independent of mind.
Of course, the specifics are lawful in so far as we have to deal with them as creatures. That's how we interact with nature.
Pardon any obscurities here, I've begun studying this seriously, so I'm not as fluent as I would like to be.
From a third-person observer perspective, it is true that other observers are part of reality and blend right into reality. But that is not what you are asking. The issue is whether the first-person observer matters as separate from what is being observed as reality. That is crucially important whether including or not including the observer itself as part of reality.
One reason for this is that while there are many third-person observers, there can be only one absolute 'I'. Only I can have my exact perceptions, beliefs, knowledge and values. Reality is unique to my 'I'. From a subjective perspective, when I sleep the world pauses, and when I die the world ends.
More importantly, the physical world is also absolutely centered on the observer, whether that be a person or any instrument, and the world looks different to each and every observation.
Quoting Benj96
The observer, being unique, sets the rules of observation. Be that the time, the place, the 'objects', the perspective, the methodology, the ontology of the logic used, and some arbitrary theoretical filter such as philosophical outlook.
I wouldn’t agree he had to postulate it; it falls out necessarily from a logical/representational cognitive system, under the assumption, of course, that the human system is that.
On the other hand, I grant you might be on to something, if Kant had premised his critical theorizing on things, in which case postulating a thing-in-itself might be merely comparative to the thing. But he didn’t begin with things; he started from Hume’s claim of “lack of philosophical rigor” for, and therefore the rejection of, a priori notions in general, and those with respect to causality in particular.
Not sure what you mean by apprehended here. That something can even be perceived requires that thing to be of such a nature we can perceive it, sure, but that’s bordering on the tautological, isn’t it? But that something is of such a nature to facilitate its perception says absolutely nothing whatsoever with respect to understanding what that thing is.
Quoting Manuel
It is not an assumption: there are no empirical objects of perception in my head. How that downstream something relates to that which it stands in for, is a logical postulate.
Quoting Manuel
Makes two of us.
After posting the present comment, I found out that I have already responded to your topic!
Anyway, you can ignore this second response, but it's quite different from the first one and ypu might find some interesting things in it. :smile:
Quoting Benj96
It would be good if you defined "reality" so that I (we) can fit your description of the topic, as well as your concepts and views, in the right perspective. For example, I agree that the observer is not external to reality, but I don't know if "reality" means the same thing to both of us.
For me, reality is generally what we agree it exists. More specifically, it is a "world" that we are constantly building throughout our whole life, based on everything that we can be aware of, directly (through our perceptions, experiences, thoughts, feelings, etc.) as well as indirectly (information we obtain from external sources), and which we accept as true, actually existing or facts.
So, not only the observer is not external to reality, but reality cannot exist without an observer.
Quoting Benj96
1) Observation is not a state but an action or process. It is also an ability.
2) What is "being observed"? If it is an object, e.g. a tree, we certainly there's no meaning in saying that it can be in a state of being observed, is there?
So, we cannot do any comparison here ...
Quoting Benj96
Do you mean that the others see you as an object, as matter, as body? Does this also apply to me who are "talking" to you remotely, w/o have ever seen your body? Of course not. You are much more than a body!
And then, their "objective observable universe"? Reality, which is formed by observation (among other things) is always subjective! We can both stand in front of a tree and observe two different things! Imagine how much difference exists in non-physical things --personalities, ideas, beliefs, views, etc.-- between two persons!
Indeed, I can see that that you have made quite a few assumptions that I believe need reconsidering ...
It's attempting to elucidate what is given descriptively, maybe it's a bad formulation. I'm assuming that when analyzing something given, what we capture through sense data and then proceed to conceptualize is only part of the totality of what is given.
What is given is the sense data, which, depending on the uses you have in mind for said object, we categorize it as something, in this instance, say, a "pen". For someone else, the same given can be thought of as a "weapon" or a "plastic stick".
Nevertheless, we simplify sense data into something intelligible, in effect taking away "noise" from our interpretation of things. We recognize specific objects such as as pens, but a "pen-desk" is not something we tend to isolate as an object, but it could be so thought as by a different species.
Quoting Mww
Correct. The objects are outside my head. We perceive what our experience picks out from the objects. We postulate that these effects come from the object, this needn't be the case. It could all be a brain in a vat. What's relevant is the sensory impressions we transform, more so than the object itself.
I don't think we reach the actual objects. We approximate them through scientific investigation.
Ehhh, I'm feeling kind of stupid today so, have a bit of mercy...
Yes.
No.
No.
Both.
Philosophically relevant, but try telling Mr. or Mrs. Suburbia that thing just put on the curb isn’t actually a trash can. Even his media-crazed Gen Z offspring isn’t likely to put out the lawnmower when coerced into the minor chore of putting the trash can on the curb. ‘Course, he’d probably put it out too late for pickup, but still......
(Awwww, c’mon, Dad. You should be glad I was late, cuz, look!! We still own a lawnmower!!)
————-
Quoting Manuel
Could be, sure. On the other hand, perhaps we start out as simple as possible with our sense data, and add to the simple. That way, “noise” isn’t even there such that it needs to be filtered out. Perhaps we cognize bottom-up rather than top-down. Doesn’t seem very efficient of Mother Nature, to strap us with a system that assumes everything then removes the useless, rather than starting from a minimum then adding only as much as necessary. We do, after all, wish to know what a thing is moreso than what it isn’t.
It sounds like you’re saying we reduce sensations, but I don’t think we actually do that. Whatever the sensation is, is what we use in determining an object, so it would seem we need the entire sensation, and I’m not even sure how our physiology, that upon which impressions are made, would simplify sensation anyway. Our eyes don’t tell us we didn’t see green when perceiving the blue sky.
Respect? Ok, fine, sure. Why not. Mercy? Not a chance!!! (Grin)
It is a trashcan, but a trashcan is a concept imposed on the thing, it's also a human concept "trashcan", not a natural kind, which exist mind independently.
Quoting Mww
Let's say, we order the given. But there are different ways this sense data can be ordered, it's not necessary that our way of constructing the world is the only way there is, in terms of our common sense understanding of it.
There's a bunch of stimulus "out there" for us, we form it into a certain picture. But not all the sense data is tended to.
I'm a bit better today. Then again, we are arguing over which version of "transcendental philosophy" we prefer version 1.1 or version 1.12. :grimace:
HA!!! Yeah....pretty hard to think of a trash can as a thing-in-itself, n’est ce pas? I mean, we built the damn thing from the ground up, so why would we say we can’t get to it as it is, re: your “I don't think we reach the actual objects.”? ‘Course, that’s not what is meant by invoking the idea.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, I think that fits. The Book says we arrange the matter of the given, but, close enough.
Good post. I’d like to read you when you’re a lot better, rather than a bit. I’m sure I’ll learn something.
It's C.I. Lewis I have in mind, not Kant.
Quoting Mww
Sounds fair. :up:
So reality is an objective simulation we live in? That makes you are a simulation too. Fine with me, as long you don't consider me one too. Well, if you want to consider it like that... This is a simulation responding to your claim, another simulation.
Oh. The qualia guy. Might be interesting.
:up: :up:
Not sure if thing-in-itself was from a logical cognitive system at all, because when you say "logical", it implies a system dealing with / related to truth and falsity.
It seems hard to imagine, Thing-in-Itself can have anything to do with truth or falsity at all. It is not a logical system, nor something fell out of logical cognitive system, but rather - something that is, mystical and unknowable in nature.
If something is unknowable, how could it fall out from logical system, and what significance representational cognitive system has for understanding what it is?
Tell this to those who refute its existence/ desire not to believe or be aware so much that they choose to be dead
I would argue that we create knowledge. Information, physical, chemical and biological processes all pre-date us. But knowledge is a construction of relationships. It’s not simply enough to observe water to “know it” - at most you have a superficial knowledge of “identification” of water by the senses and basic impulse to drink, use it to bathe etc.
However, without understanding it’s extended relationship with life, with ice and gas, with other chemistry, with the environment, ecosystem and landscape etc one doesn’t “know” water to any great length.
Knowledge is something that can only be possessed by a reasonable advanced cognitive agent. If knowledge pre-dates us then either a rock can obtain knowledge or knowledge without sentience is completely pointless
Don’t let the language mislead; “discover” can also apply to a state/ condition or substance that we have “created”. Ie. I “discovered how to manifest” discovered and invented are very similar
Well I think our views of reality are similar. You cited that it is the “collective agreement” more or less. The totality of everything we can possibly be aware of. In a sense I agree with you.
But here comes an analogy. The U.S airforce decided to create a seat that would be most comfortable for all their pilots. They imagined that the average of the measurements of all their pilots buttcheeks would be the best fit. They soon found out that no single pilot fitted the seat and that all still had issues with it. No one fit the average ie there is no normal.
I like to think of reality as the same. The true reality - the one in which all our personal bias and prejudices and falsities in belief as well as our individual idiosyncracies in the five senses are removed from - doesn’t fit anyone’s explanation or experience exactly.
No single individual can know for sure the true reality only their own rendering of it. That’s not to say we don’t collective make a great effort to describe truths about it through scientific method.
Observer's are not required, as said, some worlds are barren - it wouldn't be reality if I observed. Reality is a composite within observers, where realities subserve. Doesn't require me, it happens together.
There are no un-realities out there waiting for reality-propagates, the process is the mind over matter.
I guess the issue I have is the demand for worlds to be populated for the means of supporting a reality, it's not that way, we populate worlds for life-quality scales.
A child is born - why - reality.
A child is born - why - it's quality of life would be good.
In any case you're original statement is faceless.
Not so much dealing with, or related to, but determination of.
Quoting Corvus
It doesn’t, truth being nothing but a human epistemological cognition a priori, whereas the thing as it is in itself, is merely a necessary ontological condition of that thing, a posteriori.
Quoting Corvus
That which is unknowable falls out of the system by which things are known, merely because it doesn’t meet the criteria mandated by the system.
Not that difficult, really: for any representation of a thing met with in experience, there is that very same thing-in-itself that isn’t. If not, then representation itself is sufficient empirical causality for things, which is catastrophically absurd.
In the face of other realities I don't show mine. I let people live in their reality. I'm rather faceless about it. Who am I to judge their reality? It can be as mad a one as my own. I don't take all these realities too serious either. If showing a face it,'s a laughing one. Though I'm not sure what you mean by faceless. You want me to show my face?
Quoting Varde
How can the reality of a child being born the cause of birth? How can quality of life be an answer to the why? Birth is a quality of life indeed, but is that the cause?
No. Simple. You haven't refuted anything.
What should I refute? Is refuting showing my face? You wanna be refuted?
So, we create knowldege? :chin: Hmmmm...
Quoting Mww
I was under impression that the Neo Kantians and Phenomenologists had rejected TII (Thing-in-Itself) and the necessary ontological condition saying, we don't need all that abstract shells. When I see the monitor in front of me, it is a monitor itself, and that is all I need to know nothing more or less. Everything perceived is the reality itself. There is no need adding for TII or ontological condition etc in reality.
If you put it on a metaphysical context, there are as many answers as metaphysical definitions of "reality" and "observer". You can get a lot of demagogical fun but, net, you get nowhere beyond your personal satisfaction that will depend on your speech-skills. (Wittgenstein's pragmatics, etc, etc....)
If you put it in an analytical context, the answer is NO, reality doesn't need an observer.
Reality is a simulation as [I]processed by[/I] qualitative and quantitative experience(-r)(though I'd prefer the term 'spirit', I will use this desc.; Consciousness is a facet of something more).
Simulations do not await qualitative and quantitative analysis. Dead simulations are dead simulations without life.
I would agree with your impression, in that WE....humanity in general....have no conscious need of TII. It is only metaphysics, and that only under certain theoretical conditions, that finds it needful, and from that need, finds it necessary.
Quoting Corvus
That’s experience talking, reason...conscious thought..... taking the backseat. Your eyes do not have the capacity to inform of a thing, but only that there is a thing to be informed about. Eyes don’t think, plain and simple. It follows that reason quietly informs that the thing you are seeing now doesn’t conflict with what you know that thing to be. In effect, Nature doesn’t waste time repeating itself. This explains why we don’t have to learn what a thing is at each and every instance of its perception. Neurobiology aside, which is something of which WE REALLY don’t have any conscious need.
All you’re logically entitled to say, in this particular case, is....the thing in front of you is a monitor. Anything else is superfluous, or wrong. Wrong here meaning claims for which the justifications are suspect.
I feel what Kant wanted was to draw limitation on our capacity of knowing. What we see and know is perfectly doable for our daily life. But to go deeper asking what is behind in the external world, we hit the walls of TII.
Exactly. This is how our reality is created. It is created and carried by our consciousness.
Quoting Benj96
Right.
Quoting Corvus
We don’t really know the limits on our capacity of knowing, for to grant that we even have a limit, we may then question the irrefutably certain, and if we do that, we lose the warrant for any knowledge at all. While we know empirical knowledge is always contingent, we also possess knowledge that is universal, re: mathematics, and necessarily true, re: pure formal logic. From that, the limitations become referenced more to contradictions, and less to the innate capacity for knowing.
Having a limitation on our capacity for knowing is given from the kind of system by which we know anything. But that kind of limitation is not addressed by Kantian epistemological metaphysics. He is concerned with the limits on reason itself, and from that, limits on permissible knowledge claims.
————
Quoting Corvus
In a way, I suppose. That which is external to this world is unknowable, as is the TII. But the TII is ontologically real in this world, whereas that cannot be said for that which is external to this world. Hell....there might not even be an “external to this world” to contain things, which makes the TII immediately disappear.
The TII is not external to this world, they are each and all right here in it. The only difference between the thing and the thing in itself, is us.
:scream:
Sorry.....what???
Never mind, poor attempt at mock surprise
Great. Now I get to wonder about it.
Welcome to my world. :naughty: :halo:
Thanks. Not bad so far.
So tell me.....are there folks here that bother with reality requiring observers?
There's all kinds of traditions, views and personal quirks. So I assume there are some who think so.
Like solipsism, it's not a question that can be refuted by arguments.
Ahhhh. Exercise in futility?
We can't say what aspects of our own thought are futile. Maybe we realize that thinking about X was a waste of time or, one becomes aware that what one thought was misleading turns out to be correct.
What's more likely still is that we were wrong all the time and never found out. Might be the case given the history of thought.
What's a waste of time for one person, is the lifeblood for another.
And, we all die in the end. So futility is kind of built-in anyway. So... who knows?
Does observer need reality?
If not we may as well still believe in flat earth. :smile:
Yeah, pretty much. So...pick battles that can be won rather than wars that can’t.
:up:
[quote=SEP, Immanuel Kant]Kant argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system.[/quote]
Likewise the arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo and other sources in Plato.
Nowadays such ideas are dismissed as antiquated or archaic, but I wonder if they're really understood. What we don't notice is that we're unconsciously treating human beings as objects or as phenomena, as part of the natural order, whilst overlooking the very faculty of the psyche which discerns reason.
It's "built in" to the way we experience the world. We just can't enter into the head of another person, we can only see bodies.
The closest analogy of getting inside someone else's head is to read a high-quality novel, which may give a rough impression of what you are pointing out. But even in this case it's only a distant approximation of actual experience.
Or so it seems to me.
Note also subjectivity; we each bring to the table a certain point of view, a particular perspective, a one-of-a-kind take on the observed. I guess what I'm saying is [math]Reality = Observed + Observer[/math].
If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Think of how knowledge is defined: Justified, true belief. Belief is a notion that's predicated on beings that can believe (an observer). Reality too is defined in a way that has observers baked into it.
Right. Otherwise it could not exist now.
:ok:
Unless these features are observer independent.
'Mind-independent' is a methodological assumption, not a metaphysical principle. Crucial to see that distinction.
I'm against any method. They can be useful, but there is no such thing as The Method. What has this assumption to do with a method? I just think they exist outside of us, independently of what I think about them? Don't you agree the space you walk in is real? Why shouldn't it exist if there are no observers? There would be no perception of it, but space would still be there. As we perceive it.
What I'm drawing attention to is that what we presume is real independently of any observers, is still very much a construction of the mind. Any judgement about what exists, whether space or anything else, is a judgement, and the mind is inextricably part of that. Helps to know the fundamentals of Kant in this respect.
For instance, traditional theories of causality identify the causal order with the temporal order. And yet methodologically speaking, I usually observe effects before their causes.
Agreed. But does that mean they don't exist independently of us? Different people have different things they think to exist observer independently. You claim there is actually one observer independent reality that we can't know. I think the observer independent reality depends on the observer (which sounds self contradictory but actually isn't).
Heisenberg was right to a certain extent. I think he refers to the scientific method and scientific questions asked. If we ask mathematical questions nature will reply in that language. Or else we force her to fit the math as is done in experiment surrounded by measuring devices. We expect that what we think to exist, be it an object under scientific investigation (in which, to a certain degree, we create the object and its surrounding), the god talking to us, or the ghosts in the forrest.
Consider when you point towards any object, be that a rock, an apple, a distant star, or whatever as an example of an object external to yourself. What you know of that object is due to the sensory information that you receive from it. That is combined - synthesised - with what you already know, to judge it as a rock, apple, star, whatever. (Infants, for example, are not able to do this, as their minds are not yet sufficiently mature.) But this is an action on the part of the conscious mind - it's not as if the mind is a passive recipient upon which data is impressed, even though impression is part of it. The mind puts all of the impressions together along with judgement. That is fundamental to the nature of experience and therefore it is what 'reality' means for us. In that sense, knowledge of anything is a product of the observing mind, not something which the mind, like an empty vessel, simply receives.
There's massive misunderstanding of philosophical idealism in my view. It's about having insight into how the mind works. Most people start from some form of uncritical realism, that the external domain, the world of sensory experience, is the real world and that our experience of it is just in our own minds. From that perspective 'idealism' seems like a fantasy - but it's not what idealism really means. Idealism is the understanding of how the mind structures experience and so reality itself. But that is not an easy thing to understand, it takes a shift in perspective. See this interview.
I the way he put this. If more philosophy could be written with clarity I'd be pleased.
Kant in the Western tradition was the first one to point out that space and time are not the objective scaffolding of the world but cognitive categories – our own way of taking things apart so we can comprehend them more easily.
In this discussion and so many others here, we keep coming back to such simple building blocks of understanding, namely can we know reality and how so?
Richard Rorty doesn't come up here much and I know many people disparage his work (he seems to be the wrong kind of postmodernist). However on this subject of reality I have always had a view that the following idea has legs and then I saw Rorty addresses it in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.
For me the problem with the philosophical onion is that you can peel away layers of accepted beliefs to reveal something new underneath, but there are always more layers to peel away and then finally you are left with nothing. :wink:
Why would you say that idealism understood as reality requires an observer is anthropomorphism? Are you saying consciousness is exclusively human? Somehow I don't buy that. However, given epistemological limitations, it's provisionally true.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yup! In what we (think we) know, there's a little bit of us in it. I say "there that's an apple" and though there really is an apple, that apple has me in it. The reflection of a mirror depends on the qualities of the mirror (JWST vs. HST).
Quoting Wayfarer
I prefer the original idealism (the mind creates & sustains reality). In the weakest sense, without an observer we can say goodbye to imaginary entities and dreams (a part of reality wouldn't exist).
Because requirement implies someone who requires something. I'm not saying that consciousness is exclusively human.
Quoting Agent Smith
Any examples in mind?
Quoting Tom Storm
That does away with all the spooky implications of metaphysics, doesn't it? I really don't buy it. What is, is not dependent on our say-so.
Quoting Tom Storm
I would annoy materialists. Donald Hoffman is an academic advisor to the organisation he’s set up, the Essentia Foundation. I think Kastrup is pretty good, he’s putting together a solid portfolio of books and articles.
This is not true: Proxima Centauri is further away from Earth than the moon is from all possible perspectives.
I've said it before but I think it is spelled out with exceptional clarity in the opening paragraphs of Schopenhauer:
Modern naturalism on the contrary starts with the assumption that what is known by the senses and scientific instruments is inherently real - that is, I believe, what you mean when you use the term 'immanent'. What is 'transcendent' is rejected on account of it's putative association with metaphysics and religious ideas (as we see all of the time in debates on this Forum. 'Transcendental' in the sense implied in Kant and later philosophy is held to describe what is necessary for experience but not revealed in experience i.e. it indicates an inherent shortcoming in the ideology of empiricism precisely insofar as it fails to accomodate the contribution of the observing mind.)
My view is that the elimination of the subjective in naturalism is a methodological step so as to arrive at an analysis which is true for any and all observers. But that is a methodological step, not a metaphysical axiom. It's the inability to understand that distinction that results in 'scientism'.
I anticipate from previous experience that none of my attempts to explain these points will be successful, that instead I will be accused of 'being evasive' or 'not answering the question' or 'living in the past', so I will provide this as one last (if vain) attempt to make what I consider a fundamental point of philosophy as distinct from science.
Worse than that, I suspect: Re: Plato, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel ...
That is a trivially true and irrelevant. Of course what I say is being said and what I think is being thought. The point is that your statement that a perspective, that is a view from a particular location, is required for one thing to be further away from something than another is simply incorrect.
What you fail to realize it seems is that I completely understand Schopenhauer's argument having read both volumes of his magnum opus and McGee's exegesis. I understand Schopenhauer, but do not agree with his conclusions; which seems to be something which you simply cannot comprehend, when it pertains to something you personally believe.
Quoting Wayfarer
What is known by the senses and their augmentations is that from which the very notion of reality is derived. What is known by the feeling of being is life, and is immanent and ineffable. It is a matter of phenomenology, not metaphysics, and has nothing to do with empirical concerns. But you seem to fail to understand that and see science, particularly science of the mind, as the enemy.
I see no evidence of that.
You see only what you want to see it seems. Saying that I don't understand those arguments is pretty rich coming from you, given that when I first started posting on forums I used to present the very arguments you continue to, and you used to agree, approve and applaud vociferously. But you couldn't handle it when I changed my mind, and began to see large holes in the very arguments you are so enamoured of.
This isn't an attack or anything, but, since I'm roughly a Schopenhauerian, can you tell me or if not, share a post in which you say why you think he's wrong or in what parts?
I'd be interested.
These are metaphysical questions, and I cannot see how there could ever be any demonstrably correct answer to them. Schopenhauer's strategy is to mount what I see as a facile argument, more or less following Kant, that because we are encountering and imagining objects they cannot be independent of us. This simply does not logically follow.
In any case I don't think such questions are really important to us, except insofar as they reveal what possibilities are imaginable to us. I cannot help myself weighing in though, when I see others rehearsing Schopenhauer's specious argument; an argument which amounts to fallaciously claiming that anyone thinking that objects could have a mind-independent existence is indulging in a performative contradiction just because they are thinking it.
It also seems to me that those who mount arguments akin to Schopenhauer's very often do so for religious reasons, which indicates to me that they comprehensively misunderstand the relationship between logic, science and religion. The atheists also, ironically, misunderstand the relation between science, the empirical, and religion. Rightly understood religion (if it is not fundamentalism) is not a matter of believing any empirical propositions; it is purely affective, and responsive to the felt sense of life and being.
Yeah, the problem would be in knowing how much mind-dependence to attribute to different aspects of the world, as in, obviously other animals would exist and have to be so "minded", but when we get to lower organisms or rocks, there are significant problems here in terms of what sense it makes to say that such things have an independent existence. I'm not saying they don't, I'm agnostic here, I think there's something there, but it's nature is unknown.
I see your point about performative contradiction. It's an extremely obscure territory to me.
In any case, thanks for sharing, interesting thoughts.
More contemporary idealists like Kastrup additionally make the point that materialism or physicalism is false (using a particular understanding of QM) therefore all which exists must be consciousness - ergo idealism.
What do you consider to be the best defeater/s for idealism?
Yep. Nietzsche argues that even the great philosophers are propelled by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy boils down to a post-hoc rationalisation for their values - the ones they wish to inflict on us all. Doesn't let anyone off the hook that one.
A third possibility: the things we encounter are dependent on human contact to take the form we perceive or imagine them to take.
The things we encounter may be independent of human contact for their existence but dependent on human contact for their particular form.
I think this is closer to what Wayfarer is aiming at. I could be wrong.
:ok: Just so.
As for Schopenhauer and religion, there's an interesting MA thesis, Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion and his Critique of German Idealism, Nicholas Linares, from which:
I don't believe idealism or realism can be defeated; they just represent the two imaginable metaphysical possibilities. I do think it is pretty disingenuous when idealists cherry pick ideas from an empirical discipline to support their beliefs, as if the implications of the observer problem, or just what constitutes an "observer" in QM is known and perfectly well understood.
So, I have more time for phenomenology; which brackets the question of the mind-independent existence of things, and focuses on what things and our experience of them and ourselves is for us, rather than worrying about, and taking stances on, questions which are not ultimately decidable.
@Wayfarer says that physicalism is corrosive. I think that's bullshit, it is the physicalist/ idealist polemic which is corrosive. Obviously I would not agree with atheists who think idealism is corrosive either. That said, inasmuch as any philosophical or theological position supports attitudes which contribute to any undervaluing of earthly life, then I would say it is corrosive
But as I have acknowledged ad nauseum, I have no argument with what seems to me to be the obvious fact that the way we are constituted affects the way we view things, in the very most basic perceptual or cognitive sense. That, however, says nothing whatsoever about the independence or otherwise of the things we perceive.
I have acknowledged this countless times to @Wayfarer, and if that is all he is arguing, then I can only say that he is anything but a close reader. I don't believe for a minute that is all he is arguing, but of course I could be wrong.
I would tend to agree, idealism or physicalism, to me, are essentially a terminological quibble in terms of the actual state of affairs.
A whole different can of worms would be, say, realism (of any kind) vs. eliminitavism, I think that much has substance.
I see your point, and acknowledge that the question is not decidable (that of the mind-independence of things), but I'm obsessed with it, particularly the variant of "things in themselves", but the onus would be on me to show why this matters or should matter.
I agree that phenomenology can be very useful. And although Husserl is frequently referred to (likely correctly) here, I think Sellar's distinction between "Manifest" and "Scientific" images is actually quite important.
But I see your point, I'm not arguing against it, I guess its related to temperament.
:up: :up:
:100:
Mind is only nonmind dependent insofar as we don't know what mind is. However, it is intriguingly becoming more and more plausible that the essence of mind generates from a parental view of "mind", i.e father and son, (higher and lower mind). This is mostly backed by near death experiences where people undergone brain death achieve in fact a higher understanding of reality, a sacrifice of low mind for high mind so to speak.
It's also 4 am in the morning, and I've had 7 glasses of red wine.
Edit: ok, maybe a little bit more than 7.
The fact that you think it 'says nothing' shows why you're not understanding the point that is being made. It is precisely the point. I'll say it again: that 'the world' is in one sense independent of your or my or anyone else's knowledge of it. But in another and more important sense, our knowledge of it is dependent on our mind and on the capacities of the human cognitive apparatus and the categories of the understanding. Insofar as we know the world, that world - the world as it appears to us - is all that we ever know. That I take to be the salient point of Kant's philosophy.
The fact that there's two senses of 'dependency' here is reflected in Kant by his acknowledgment that he is at once an empirical realist and also a transcendental idealist. But as I've already reproduced the passages where he declares this, and you've completely failed to see the point, while at the same time declaring that it is 'trivially true', then I won't go to the trouble of repeating it. And it's not that I 'can't handle' what you're saying, but that it's pointless to argue about it.
That should be uncontroversial.
I mean, what other option is there? Unless we attribute actual cognition to the world.
I don't think it's surprising, Given the shifting notions of religion and metaphysics. It's Schopenhauer the metaphysician whose arguments I see as facile and specious. His conclusions do not follow from his premise. As I already said, that it is our constitutions, whether that be considered in some "transcendental" or merely physical sense, which contribute to the ways we perceive things, does not entail that things are mind-dependent.
Similarly, that Kant was a transcendental idealist indicates only that he thinks we cannot be realist about the imagined "ultimate" nature of things because we cannot apprehend any ultimate nature; it does not follow that he was an idealist, rather than a realist, when it comes to the question about whether the things we perceive have their own existence, they are fro him "things in themselves", after all. He actually says they must exist since it would be illogical to propose that there could be appearances without there being something which appears.
Do you have in mind ordinary objects (tables and chairs) or scientific objects (atoms and electrons)?
I think there's a case for mind dependence on both, it just so happens that in the latter case, there is a chance convergence between out mental constitutions and the external world.
But I would not understand what you would mean to say that something like tables and chairs are in any way mind independent.
I can see a case for mind dependence and mind independence.
Is there room for us to step out the arguments in a more direct point form approach and identify precisely where things get stuck? Seems to be it boils down to presuppositions.
It's supposed to get stuck and we're supposed to go silent.
Good to know - that's been my approach for the past 40 years.
Affects the way we perceive things AND the way we imagine things to be in the absence of a perceiver?
I think the implicit claim of modern realism is that we see the world as it truly is, not as it appears to us, and that awareness of that distinction is lost. Scientific realism is like that - the scientific picture of the world is the 'real world', the stage within which we all appear as actors. But that doesn't see that even the scientific picture is also a construction (vorstellung, vijñ?na). Which is not to say that it's false or untrue but that its limitations need to be recognised.
Further from the passage in Magee's book on Schopenhauer's Philosophy
I do think that a lot of what is said in this regard arises from just that 'inborn realism', and there's a lot of indignance when it's questioned.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, apropos of the last phrase in the above quote, check out this blog post about one of my all-time favourite Zen teachers. The point about Zen is 'actualising realisation'. That's where it diverges from philosophy (although I think genuine philosophers in the Western tradition, a la Pierre Hadot, also endeavour to do that.) Click here for a deeper dive into Nishijima's Three Philosophies and One Reality.
Worse than that? Hmmm.
I cannot be grateful enough to Magee, he set me forth into philosophy, without him, I wouldn't have been were I am.
He points out that the problem with empiricism or "transcendental realism", is that it "mistakes an epistemology for an ontology". He's right.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seem probable that science is the intersection between our cognitive faculties (a science forming faculty) and some aspects of the mind independent world: it's interesting to note that the most direct avenue we have for our best science, physics, is mathematics.
And you know of Russell's quote here.
It's easier, cognitively, less taxing - to say those things I see, are out there, in a way not too dissimilar to what they appear to us. It's less confusing. The alternative, that these things are overwhelmingly (but in my opinion, not exclusively) a product of us, is really hard to grasp, I think.
Right, nothing, of course.
I'm just fascinated by how a dream (world) requires a dreamer (observer). Idealism is very close to making that claim about the real world, yes?
Quoting Wayfarer
What example? Reality is a dream (as per idealism).
I think there's some merit to idealism if we only compare it to dreams. The dream world is existentially dependent on an observer doing the dreaming; no dreamer, no dreamscape.
Is the universe a collective dream? How do we distinguish dreams from real world? That we can't (even if we wake up) is the heart of skepticism.
Perhaps the idea of "universe" is "collective" ... like language.
One dreams alone. One, however, shares the real world with others.
... solipsism.
A kind of mass hallucination.
Quoting 180 Proof
Mass hallucination; more realistically, mass delusion.
Quoting 180 Proof
Solopsism? Deus deceptor (Descartes) & Brain-in-a-vat (Harman).
:grin:
On that assumption what remains to be explained is how it is that we all see the same things in the same locations.
Say humanity was instantly and totally wiped out somehow; you don't think all the buildings, roads, furniture, cars and so on would remain?
Movie theaters?
All theatrical. One thing that puzzles me is why the universe is more a nightmare than a wet dream?
It's an empty question. There'd be no-one around to answer yes or no.
Life is like a movie, but with real blood.
:up: Suffering makes it real. Why?
That, incidentally, is the 'First Noble Truth' of Buddhism.
Suffering can't be denied! :chin: Why I wonder? What makes suffering some kind of marker for reality? Bitter truth! Sweet little lies. Hard facts, convenient fiction. Does this mean hell is realer than heaven?
Good question. If reality needs an observer then reality and observation are one and the same. If this is the case then where is the observer in relation to reality/observation? This idea that reality needs an observer ends up defining the observer and observation out of existence and what remains is only reality - wirhout an observer.
Something would remain, yes. That's the belief in the external world.
But what would remain would not be "buildings", "roads", "furniture" nor "cars". They would be "things", or some other very general, abstract term.
I very much doubt another creature has these concepts, nor knows what these things are.
I don't see any reason to think that buildings, roads and so on would not remain if all humans were gone. What about remains of previous cultures which have been buried and then unearthed? Such items had been not been perceived for centuries, even millennia, and yet are recognizable as buildings, pottery and so on.
Why would there have to be creatures with "these concepts" in order for physical structures in various forms to exist? I don't think such structures are dependent for their continuing existence on our conceptions of them, even if they had been dependent on such conceptions for their creation.
Whether life is more suffering than joy is up to you. In any case it is impossible to quantify, so such a judgement is down to disposition.
Well, if a previous culture was gone, and we recover it, we reconstruct (or attempt to) what we think their symbols meant, that's granting the point that the culture we retrieve is human (like-us), otherwise, I'd be skeptical that we could make much sense of what it left.
Quoting Janus
No, I don't doubt that some kind of structure remains. But I think a structure can only make sense to a creature that makes sense of it. I can't well say that a physical structure makes sense to itself.
It very likely exists it some manner, I don't doubt that, but what can be said of this existence, absent people is very little.
For instance, I don't think a feline creature or an insect, would make sense of a building, and if the only creatures that remained after a nuclear holocaust were insects, then there'd be very little world to speak of, it would be something like an undifferentiated mass, with places to go to and maybe some food.
That is what is called into question by the 'observer problem' in physics. It is the exact reason why Einstein felt compelled to ask 'does the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking?' It seems that at a fundamental level the supposition of 'mind-independence' no longer holds. That is the most philosophically challenging discovery of 20th c physics. It's why there's the many-worlds intepretation.
At risk of further flogging a dead horse, all judgements about what exists, what is real, and so on, are taken within the framework of the understanding. You think that this means that if you were to die or become unconscious then all these things will cease to exist, which is why you think it's an absurd idea, but I'm not saying that. The manner of the existence of the universe absent any consciousness is unknowable by definition.
There's a key term that has come out of the embodied cognition/enactivist school of thought. It is the idea of the 'co-arising of self and world'. This originated with Buddhism, but Varela and Thompson also tie it to phenomenology. Anyone interested in an academic paper on that see The Co-arising of Self and Object, World, and Society: Buddhist and Scientific Approaches, William Waldron.
:up:
I agree that the function of such things as buildings, roads and so on would be lost if there were no sentient beings capable of grasping it. But that says nothing about whether the actual structures would remain; and that is all I've been claiming.
Judgements about what exists are not, to my way of thinking, what exists. You say "the manner of the existence of the universe absent any consciousness is unknowable by definition"; I see this as a trivial truism, which simply says that we cannot know something without being there to know it. We can imagine the manner of the existence of the universe without us, though. We can look back some 13 billion light years and see how the universe was long before we existed. We thus know that it existed long before we did. From that we can conclude that it would continue to exist if we were totally wiped out.
So, from an ontic perspective the world is prior to the self, whereas from a phenomenological perspective the self is prior to the world. I don't see this as a contradiction; the two paradigms are incommensurable.
:lol:
I enjoy arguing with you and @Mww, because, so far, it's always been pleasant we may agree to disagree without feeling mad or anything.
I don't think I've disputed that structures remain. We agree here.
What do you gain by saying "actual" structure? I ask because, I could imagine another intelligent being, conceptualizing the same thing, in a way we would not. For example what we call a "pond", could be bed to that creature.
The same structure causes us to see a pond, causes an alien to see a bed.
[quote=Kaccanagotta Sutta]Kacc?na, this world mostly relies on the dual notions of existence and non-existence. But when you truly see the origin of the world with right understanding, you won’t have the notion of non-existence regarding the world. And when you truly see the cessation of the world with right understanding, you won’t have the notion of existence regarding the world. The world is for the most part shackled by attraction, grasping, and insisting. But if—when it comes to this attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendency—you don’t get attracted, grasp, and commit to the notion ‘my self’, you’ll have no doubt or uncertainty that what arises is just suffering arising, and what ceases is just suffering ceasing. Your knowledge about this is independent of others.
This is how right view is defined. ‘All exists’: this is one extreme. ‘All doesn’t exist’: this is the second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Realized One teaches by the middle way: ‘Ignorance is a condition for choices. Choices are a condition for consciousness. … [the rest of the 12 elements of dependent origination follow][/quote]
https://suttacentral.net/sn12.15/en/bodhi
I think that, in this view, arguments about 'what exists in the absence of an observer' would be categorised amongst the 'undecided' (avy?k?ta) questions - questions that are not answered, or put aside, as not germane to the task of understanding the cause and cessation of suffering.
The appropriate attitude that arises from this is suspension of judgement. That is the sense that Buddhism ties in with Pyrrhonian scepticism and Husserl's epoché or 'bracketing'.
(About which see Epoché and ??nyat?, Jay Garfield, and also Pyrrho and India, Everard Flintoff.)
Quoting Manuel
What we take to be real is dependent on the kind of being that we are.
Quoting Manuel
Probably I should have said "bare structures", because of course the kinds of structures we are considering are actual, not imaginary. I was just trying to indicate the thing without its human- conceived function(s).
So, yes I agree that the same thing could have very different functions for differently constituted creatures.
Sure, I agree, but I must grant "powers" (to use Locke's vocabulary) to the objects, such that they cause in us experience so and so, repeatedly. These "powers" are only considered as such, for creatures with experience, of course.
Thus the same structure causes two different (or many) "realities" to different creatures. But if I don't postulate a structure behind the experience, I'm forced to say that I'm causing my own experiences of objects.
I have no doubt that other animals see the same things we do. They recognize the same things as food, water, trees, and so on. You don't see birds trying to eat stones; they eat fruit just as we do , for example.
Maybe in terms of emphasising a word or putting a bit more weight to one thing vs. another, but nothing big.
I get you. These actual things are really weird, what some abstract fields are at the bottom of everything, how the heck do we tell differences apart based on what physics says?
Of course having no doubt and being absolutely certain are not the same in my book.
I'd have to do away with qualia as well as manifest, "ordinary", human concepts. Scientific concepts, if they are "on the right track", attempts to show some aspects of mind-independent reality, but how to make sense of this, absent ordinary concepts and qualia, is impossible to understand.
I have to read much more of him to be able to say much, but I suspect Whitehead was onto something when he described the world as being one of processes not things, so some activity, some happenings occur absent us.
Why nature would bother with differentiation is very strange. It seems to me that nature, on all levels, tries to be as "lazy" as possible, so I don't know why it would bother to take different forms... perhaps it is more expedient to do so.
Alas, realism is ultimately a philosophical position that itself has no empirical basis. All we can tell for sure is whether a certain hypothesis is any good at describing what we observe. Yet whether that description is about something that is independent and external to us, the observer, is a question we cannot ourselves ever answer.
This, needless to say, is not a new conundrum, but one that philosophers have discussed for as long as there’ve been philosophers. But it is alive and kicking in the debate about interpretations of quantum mechanics today, as Jim Baggott reminds us in his new book Quantum Reality: The Quest for the Real Meaning of Quantum Mechanics. [/quote]
You can also find a video presentation of Baggott's launch of this book here. It has a particularly lucid explanation of the Bell experiments starting around 39:00.
I don't think there are settled questions in metaphysics - it belongs to the field. I'm essentially a Neo-Kantian or a Rationalistic Idealist like Cudworth or Chomsky.
Which means I accept most of what you say and argue for, though I have a different emphasis and concerns.
What I'm saying is that there is something external to me, which is the cause of my representation. Everything I access to, including physics, are appearances, but I add to it that there must be grounds which are non-representational "real", independent of me, which feeds into my ideal image of the world.
If I don't postulate a cause external to my ideas, then I have essentially a modified Berkelyianism, which I don't think is true.
There may be nothing real. That not were my intuitions take me.
Quoting Manuel
That is the argument that Kant elaborated in his 'refutation of idealism', which he added to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, after some of his critics compared his ideas to Berkeley's. So again I don't believe Kant's variety of idealism holds to anything like that 'the world is all in the mind', but that is how it seems often to be interpreted.
I certainly don't agree there is nothing real - that is nihilism, which actually has taken quite a strong hold in today's culture. Bu I don't believe anything like that. I believe that reality is of greater depth and extent than the objective sciences can grasp but I'm definitely not nihilist.
Yes, there's an excellent discussion of this topic by whom I consider to be the best Kant interpretation (who incidentally Strawson recommended to me) Manifest Reality by Lucy Allais. She not only clearly establishes that Kant was a transcendental idealist, but also an empirical realist.
Cudworth says something very similar.
Quoting Wayfarer
I didn't have in mind nihilism at all actually, more like irrealism of the kind Goodman defends, that there are only "versions", various descriptions of the world.
I think I'm the opposite, as in, yes the sciences can grasp important and interesting and useful aspects of the world, but the richness is in our nature, not so much the world.
It's an interesting topic, that can become a bit technical.
In simple terms if there is no conscious being to conceive of differences then ‘reality’ has no meaning.
Of course, of course. We wouldn't want the whole world to find out the truth. Imagine what would happen? Some people can't be unplugged from The Matrix (they die instantly).
All that interpretations owe their lives to a preferred interpretation: the Copenhagen interpretation. It was decided there that nature is intrinsically probabilistic. There were no objective reasons to justify this. It were some physics hotshots who settled the matter. Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Ehrenfest,etc. Einstein wasn't even paid attention to. Well, he was of course, but the Copenhagen view got hold, and it's taught at universities. I remember asking about this, and the reply was not even to think about this. That settled the matter! But why should indeterminism rule? Look at all the interpretations it entailed. The only interpretation that sounds reasonable to me are hidden variables. Had that one become the standard, all other ones had been superfluous. The MWI would not have been there because collapse would have been an objective collapse. And the status of hidden variables wouldn't have been interpretative but ontological.
The Copenhagen Interpretation has always appealed to me, granted mine is only a lay understanding and that I don't understand the mathematical formalisms. But Kumar's book is really good on all of that, and I think it's pretty well regarded.
What benefit can there possibly be, in claiming to establish what has already been stated in the record?
Different interpreters tend to downplay certain aspects of his philosophy. Some don't particularly care for his idealism, others don't like to consider his metaphysical claims, some say he is a phenomenalist, or think things in themselves are merely a limiting notion, etc.
It's an interpretation based, at least in part, on arguing against why others have misread him in some aspects, such as Allison or Langton or Guyer, etc.
Same thing happened to Hume with regard to causality or to Descartes with innate ideas. If you read them, you see that a good deal of the commentary is very mistaken.
So the benefit is to show why idealism is necessary to Kant, as well as realism and things in themselves.
Ahhh....so she’s showing the non-believers how foolish they are. I can dig that.
Sometimes I’m too literal for my own good. Comes from being a virgoyankeebabyboomer, ‘nuff said.
I touched on this earlier; I think Kant's idea makes sense if we consider it from the human point of view. So from that perspective empirical objects insofar as they are intersubjectively shared in a public world are real, and certainly not merely in anyone's mind. And from that standpoint transcendental "objects" are ideal insofar as they can only be thought about, but never encountered (except as empirical objects of course :wink:).
From a more "absolute objective" standpoint, the situation is reversed: empirical objects, as such, are mind dependent identities and so ideal, and transcendental "objects" are whatever is ultimately real.
It's something like this, yes, the exact details in minutiae may vary from person to person, Mww would likely bust out a sophisticated vocabulary here, but it's a very good formulation.
As I see it, the objects we encounter in everyday life are both ideal and real, they're ideal in so far as they become manifest to creatures like us, they're real in so far as everybody can see and interact with them and will be similarly affected by the objects.
I think that "things in themselves" ground objects - they can't be relational "all the way down". Substitute "things in themselves" for "structures", as you said the other day, and we essentially agree.
I think there is something non-relational to objects, that is not revealed in the physics we do. If we all suddenly vanish, and that tree out there remains, it hard to think that all that remains are a "bundle of particles".
I agree, and I think there certainly seem to be real "levels" of being and interaction. There is the atomic level, below that the "quark" level, and above it the molecular and cellular. At each successive level, there seem to be emergent processes and interactions which cannot be explained in terms of the levels below.
So we identify all these cellular processes going on in the tree: photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration, micorrhizal symbiosis and so on. Plant cells appear to similar to our own except they also have cellulose cell walls which animals cells don't. Plant cells do have mitochondria, just as animal cells do, so there would seem to be a real commonality there.
In any case the point is that I think it is a mistake to think of any level as being "more real" than any other, because of the reality of emergent properties that cannot be explained in terms of the lower "levels".
In his chapter on time, Kant says that 'Time is not something which subsists of itself, or which inheres in things as an objective determination, and therefore remains, when abstraction is made of the subjective conditions of the intuition of things. ....Time is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensuous, that is, so far as we are affected by objects), and in itself, independently of the mind or subject, is nothing.'
Likewise, 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other; in other words, space does not represent to us any determination of objects such as attaches to the objects themselves, and would remain, even though all subjective conditions of the intuition were abstracted.'
This mitigates against the claim that the planets, for example, retain an objective position independently of observation in any absolute sense. In other words, it challenges the 'there anyway' attitude typical of common-sense realism.
Now listen to the first five or six minutes of this CTT interview with Andrei Linde. (Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse.) Robert Lawrence Kuhn is asking Linde why it is that he believed it was necessary to consider the role of the observer when applying the Schrodinger equation to the Universe as a whole. I won't try and paraphrase his answer - it is very clearly given in the interview - but it seems to me to provide support for Kant's philosophy of the nature of space and time. (Linde also discusses the issue of the existence of the Universe prior to any observers around 6:30.)
Yes, exactly. I speculate that, a being with more acute senses and intellect than us could perceive how physics leads to biology "up" to qualia.
We don't.
I'm guessing there could be possible sciences, say, in between physics and chemistry, and between chemistry and biology that we can't engage in. It's kind of a freak accident of nature that we should be able to do any science at all, not to mention rational enquiry into other areas of life.
Something essential to survival probably had the hidden benefit of being able to do science, as a by-product of a mutation, like maybe language leads to math, which leads to physics.
I guess it's possible. Although I have to say I am skeptical because to my way of thinking the idea of qualia is just the notion of how things "feel", how experience feels, to us, and I don't see any way that subjective feeling could be directly accessed by scientific observation. We all access our own subjective feelings constantly, at least when we pay attention; they constitute our very life, and I think the best way to "explain" them (I think 'express' or 'evoke' is a better term since the feeling itself, as opposed to the conditions that allow for the feeling, cannot really be explained in any scientific sense) is via the arts, and most discursively, poetry and imaginative literature.
That's true and my speculation may be totally wrong, things could simply emerge. Granting that, I must point to how counter intuitive this is, which says nothing about its being true or false. I doubt most rational people would deny that animals have qualia too, there own way of interacting with and dealing with the world. They obviously lack the capacity for science.
So somehow, we develop a system which tells us some things about the mind-independent world, yet it tells us almost nothing about what we directly are most acquainted with. Yet it's been through our experimental engagement with light that we've made remarkable discoveries.
I think we should now say that spacetime is what exists, and is what is given to us by virtue of being cognitive creatures.
Sure, location depends on a human being, this is kind of like the whole paradox of asking where's "up" and "down" in space, there is no up and down. But bring in a human being, then they immediately understand where up and down are.
I don't have a problem with that. I would have to grant other living creatures with experience too, at least those creatures that seem conscious to us, say, a dog or a dolphin. Once you have that, you have a world, properly speaking.
Sure, what Lindei says in that interview is interesting, and obviously speaks to my rationalistic idealist tendencies. But all I'm claiming is that there is something there, independent of us.
Sure, you can reply (if you would, which I don't think you would, or am not clear) that how can we say there is something independent of us, if we are the ones postulating it? I can only say that I can't render metaphysics intelligible if I don't postulate something external to me, that has powers.
But as for location, or universes and all that, I don't have a problem with what you're saying.
I don't think anything in Darwinian theory provides a necessary explanation for mathematics. A general explanation, yes, in the sense that h. sapiens evolved to be able to count and abstract, but the only rationale Darwin provides for it beyond that is in terms of adaptation, 'what works' from a survival p-o-v.
A Fabulous Evolutionary Defense of Dualism Clay Farris Naff
Quoting Janus
He makes the case for the role of the observer.
Absolutely. We don't even know why certain things were selected. We can say retroactively, that X thing helped for survival, but that may be false. In terms of cognitive faculties, we don't really know why we have the ones we do.
It's only that now, we could say that something adjacent to the capacity for mathematics was selected, for some reason, which led to our capacity to do theoretical science.
Needless to say most life by far, consists bacteria, with no need for much of anything by way of mental processes.
This essay by Richard Lewontin, is most interesting:
The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer
https://langev.com/pdf/lewontin98theEvolution.pdf
Could you explain why?
If I don't postulate something in the objects that is not created by me and my cognitive capacities, then the only option I have left is that everything depends on my mind. This would mean that before we as human beings arose, there was literally nothing at all.
Secondly, if everything were dependent on mind, I don't see what prevents me from simply introspecting any object in perception and know all the truths about it. As in, I think of a stone and merely by thinking about it, I'd know what minerals made it up, I'd know that it's made of atoms, etc.
I could also introspect and know everything about human psychology, etc. But if I say, I think there is something in the world which does not depend on my mind, then I can say, that there was something here before me, that I do not know what that stone is made of, I do not know much about human psychology by introspecting, etc.
Isn't it possible that you're eternal and you just forgot?
Quoting Manuel
Again, maybe you can do that, but you don't remember how.
Well, if you have in mind anything like certainty, then all rules are off. I mean, it seems as if the only consistent "hard nosed" attitude is to be a hardcore solipsist, as in I know I exist now, in the "specious present", and that's it, anything before or after, like, 3 seconds, could come out of anywhere, and then anything is possible.
But if we go on to try and be a bit more systematic with our impressions and experiences, we begin to form a picture of the world, such that yesterday at this time I was doing so and so and tomorrow I'll be doing so and so in the morning. It's a story, surely very misleading in some respects, but something we just do.
I just meant that solipsism is conceivable. Maybe the concept of self would break down if there's nothing else. Why call it "my mind" if there are no others? And what is "mind" if there's nothing mindless to compare it to? But isn't that the same problem any kind of monism faces?
It is. But that's the thing, almost anything is conceivable (if not everything), but that leads to stuff like the simulation hypothesis, which makes no sense at all. It is conceivable, of course, but other intelligent beings would have to be really, really bored to do such an experiment.
Well, we speak in terms of "my mind" and "my body", but one should be careful in thinking that "my" and "mind", in the phrase "my mind" refers to two different entities an "I" and a "mind", it's one thing.
As for monism, yes, metaphysical monism has the problem. We have experience and we have non-experience (rocks, tables, wood, particles), but they all belong to the same world. So far as I know, I can't think of something that's better than dual-aspect monism, meaning same world.
Or, if you are an eliminitavist, you can say consciousness is an illusion and try to argue that really, there is only non-experiential stuff, but that's irrational in the extreme, to me.
:up:
I think one way to approach this difficult question is to understand mind in a transpersonal sense - not as 'your mind' or 'my mind' or the mind of any particular individual. (This *does not* imply panpsychism i.e. mind as being like something magically inherent in atoms that coagulates to form organic life.)
It is more that the mind provides the cognitive framework within which judgements are made - and we individuals are instantiations of that. The mind is in one sense biological - as biological organisms the mind must not only regulate all of the biological processes necessary for health and reproduction, but also be environmentally adaptive for the purposes of survival. On another level, the mind is also cultural - humans go through a long period of extra-somatic learning after birth during which much of that content is integrated (far longer than other creatures).
That also accounts for many of the similarities and differences that we experience with and between others people, and other cultures. For example, there's a strong cultural consensus in favour of certain underlying myths and metaphors; these used to be provided by religion and mythology, now they are more likely to be scientific, although today's culture is a real melting-pot. But that is the domain of things that 'everyone knows', the common wisdom, and so on. That is why we tend to see the same world in the same way - up to a point, anyway. We can obviously select very different and sometimes antagonistic myths and metaphors. And then there's the entire domain of language and culture, which carries enormous weight in terms of meaning and interpretation - the 'lebenswelt' of Husserl and the phenomenologists. This is also an aspect of mind.
When we encounter a radically different cultural view, we might have moments when we understand that we and they really are living 'in a different world', and in a sense that is more than simply metaphorical. And that not only applies to different cultures, but different periods of history. ('The past is a foreign country', says the famous aphorism. 'They do things differently there'.)
Mind (or consciousness) in this sense is the ubiquitous bedrock of all experience - but it's not the object of cognition, it's not 'out there' anywhere. And I think the constant problem in this discussion is the tendency to try and treat mind (or consciousness) as something objectively existent, because the emphasis in scientific objectivity is always on what is 'out there somewhere' - what is objectively existent. The fact that it's not, is the entire basis for 'eliminativism' - it's a worldview that literally cannot accomodate anything that can't be accounted for objectively. It is as you say an irrational view but the fact that it so fiercely defended by apparently intelligent people says something, in my view.
So, understanding mind (or consciousness) in that way requires something like a gestalt shift or change in perspective. It's difficult, but not impossible.
It's subjective, "in here", but not it's a thing, it's more of a process. It's only an object in so far as other people see me as an object - here I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's philosophy, of us being subject and object in a a sense.
The thing is to say that it exists, and we are most acquainted with it than anything else, it's real. I want to say "objective" in the sense of reality, not in the sense of an object.
The self, the I, is a "fiction", in Hume's phrase. Don't shoot. I'm not an empiricist. By fiction, he means a construction of the mind by the imagination, but in this sense, a nation and even the individuation of objects are "fictitious".
As I understood it he refers to it as a possibility that ought to be explored. The problem is that no indication of how it could be explored is forthcoming.
Quoting Wayfarer
You haven't said what you think the understanding of the mind you seem to be trying to refer to is. You say it's not any individual mind, you say it's not panpsychic mind, so what is it? Vague references to "gestalt shifts" don't tell us anything.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn opens the interview by saying he's 'fascinated' that Linde, a physicist, is compelled to introduce 'consciousness' into the field of quantum cosmology, and then asks him to explain why. Linde answers that, even though he's a physicist and 'not in the business of consciousness', he has to include it. That is when he explains that, without the observer, the equations that describe the total state of the Universe come out at zero. This is also explained by Paul Davies:
[quote=Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271]The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.
Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe.
So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.[/quote]
So the key passage there that relates to Kant's philosophy is that 'the passage of time is not absolute', that time relies on there being an observer.
Have you read The Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE)? There's a Wikipedia entry if you're interested. It's basically The Observer Effect (OE) in the quantum world. The long and short of it: Processes slow down when observed. Oddly it doesn't seem to work when I scoodlypoop. :grin: I'm always being watched.
Some phenomena on earth are really, really slow (re geological and cosmic time scales). Why? What's retarding them? God? God as an observer, via QZE or some version of it, is causing stuff like tectonic plate movement, erosion (hydrological, chemical, wind) to occur at extremely low rates of speed (theodicy)
People who live long are considered blessed! God's observing them or guardian angels watch over them! :smile:
It seems circular to me; there is only a problem of the equations "coming out at zero" because there is already an observer to produce the equations.
In other words it is a problem for our equations, and says nothing about the mind-independent existence of the universe or of spacetime.
The facts (as they stand):
When only God's observing the double slit & we're not, electrons behave as waves.
When God's observing us observing the double slit: electrons behave as particles.
Unsurpassable!
Imagine the confusion when Schrödinger's cat is observed by Wigner's friend who doesn't know that Heisenberg, being measured by Pauli, is secretly looking. It is in this spooky realm we have to look for the quartet paradox.
I think we should be skeptical of drawing too much massive conclusions about QM. It's true that the particle-wave phenomena is strange and utterly unintelligible to us - to the extent that some even postulate other universes to make sense of it.
But the manifest world we live in, that is, the world of everyday experience, does not appear to follow QM at the level of large objects, for that Newton and to a somewhat lesser extent, Einstein suffices.
We are still left with puzzles about a tree falling in the forest, and what ontological status it has if no one is around to hear it, but it's a stretch to tie this to QM.
It's obvious to state, but easy to forget, but QM focuses on extremely, extremely small stuff. There are experiments now with supposedly visible objects following this strange behavior, but it drops off eventually.
Well, it it's modern form, correct. However, Berkeley pointed it out in a forceful manner. As did Schopenhauer and Kant, to name a few. Without us, reality is extremely nebulous.
I'm not downplaying QM at all, though we should keep in mind the many layers of the world and how explanation in one domain need not translate into another.
The problem of observation remains intact on all domains, I think.
Ultimately, I would say, "Yes, reality does require an observer."
Reality is that which can be perceived (observed) from every possible frame-of-reference.
Since human beings cannot do this, they only perceive (observe) appearances.
:point: :fire:
I suggest dropping that framework and thinking instead in terms of individual-indepedent reality. How is science applied? That's a clue, I think. We want technology that does not depend on its user. We want technology that does not depend on the faith of its user in its utility for that utility (so we aren't satisfied with a placebo effect. )
Note that this approach dodges all the metaphysical (or just grammatical) complexities that try to unthink the so-called subject altogether, expecting to find either the Real or the Void. Asking about the pure object or the pure subject might be like asking about the left without the right.
I say let's drink the whole glass of acid. How they know that they are trapped in the box with windows that might just be dreamscreens? How do they know that their interior monologue is interior ? How do they know that 'they' are indeed a singular they ? How do they know that their interior monologue is a monologue ? It's as if all these boxed up unified voices still got the word somehow that methodological solipsism was the modest, careful, default position.
This is like an absurd radicalization of something healthy, namely that my perception could be wrong, my reasoning biased...but in wrong/biased in relation to a tribe I share the world with, so that the noisesmarks 'bias' and 'wrong' serve a purpose.
Well put. This is implicit in our appeals to 'logic' and 'rationality.' This is also implicit in (1) our strong desire to have our thoughts recognized by the tribe and (2) our radical dependence on an 'ingested' inheritance of tribal memory for being able to bring something to that tribe that deserves recognition in the first place. Feuerbach took something like this paraphrase from Hegel: 'Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual.' Of course in practical affairs it's helpful to say 'Joe thought the pipe was leaking.' Even in philosophy it's good to know whether Nietzsche or Plato is being quoted, since meaning depends on context. But ideally the 'rational' communal subject has the unity of a system of concepts or a language.
I agree that you can find some thinkers like that, but on the other side we have people who take folk psychology entirely for granted (not saying you, because we seem to agree that mind is social, which doesn't seem terribly normcore of us.) Anyway, I can relate to criticisms of the qualia concept which tend to be understood as denials, so I'm open to aspects of eliminativism. For instance:
The 'not directly observed' especially interests me, because it's pre-philosophically in the grammar-logic of such states that we can't be wrong about them. They are unspeakably proximate, luminous in their ineffable plenitude. Or the ghost in the machine just 'is' a bundle of this slippery stuff, dreaming (if that makes sense) its own unity. Perhaps this is where the pure-and-exact language-independent meanings of 'being' and 'real' and 'meaning' hide. But if 'mind' is delocalized and the individual qua individual can't be rational (isn't the speaker in this 'higher' sense), then the 'meaning' of these master words is also delocalized, liquidly implicit and ambiguous in the 'structure' of our social doings.
Is objectivity just another word for Lasègue–Falret syndrome and/or mass hallucinations?
Math to the rescue? How? Impossible!
I'm not sure it's utterly unintelligible. Our intelligence is god-given and they were pretty confident and intelligent enough to cook up the basics of the universe.
The universe doesn't need an observer to be realized but it surely needs them to become aware of it.
See what I mean? I was scrolling and a text rolled up. I couldn't see the poster yet. But already after one sentence (about liquidity) it became clear!
The more I read here, the more that seems to be the case! Reality seems to be touched upon sporadically, like a fly probing the steamy pile. The pile itself just steams on, giving us the fine odors of ñature we all secretly long for. Only by submerging ourselves, we can only hope to arrive at the essence.
An optical illusion might be the better analogy.
Thinking you observe an objective reality is a persistent, seemingly inherited habit of thought. It takes careful observation and experimentation to see the illusion.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw9832
It's a habit that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Sensory data has to seem different enough from imagination, prediction, and other mental processes to make you take the immediate actions you need to take to survive and reproduce. So it makes sense that types of information more immediately salient to threats or opportunities to aquire necessary resources should aquire a unique flavor that causes us to prioritize them.
Cooperative species like humans also need to keep in synch enough to cooperate, and an inclination towards positing an objective world helps here too.
This appears endemic. After all, realism didn't appear when we started getting evidence of the brain/behavior/experience link, it shows up in the earliest records of culture. The recognition of subjectivity as such seems to be the latter development, something hidden by a cognitive blind spot.
If our intelligence were God given, as you say, this would have to be treated as an empirical fact about the world, but I don't see any evidence as to why this should be believed.
I think we have to assume there are things absent us, otherwise we take up radical solipsism. Nevertheless, it's still a very difficult problem to think about clearly.
Maybe the very empirical fact that we intelligently investigate and assess the world is evidence. In a dream the reasons and existence of gods can be revealed. Would such a revelation count as evidence?
No actually, revelation and empirical investigation are often at odds. One issue here is that the word "revelation" can be used in several ways, I have in mind two of them.
One meaning of the word is tied with religion, which is what I think you are hinting at. If used in this way, then we would still be using Aristotelean physics.
The other would be more ordinary usage of the word, in such a manner that you have a sudden insight into a problem you previously struggled with. How or why this happens is not at all clear, but, it doesn't signal the existence of divinity in any way.
You'd have to provide some criteria which could be applied to God alone (and not something else) which could be investigated.
I'm surprised you find it so offensive. It's connected to 'folk science,' I'd think, along with 'folk art' and 'folk music.' I'm pretty sure you think that progress in philosophy requires time and seriousness, and I think the same is true for psychology, hence the contrast with what everybody already 'knows' (like the folk metaphysics of man-on-the-street realism.)
Is it not the case that spiritual traditions violate the expectations of 'common sense' ? Is the self not an illusion ? The world not an illusion ? I think you're being biased here.
@lll just suds their with cheers born fume is ice. Or there sad @lll with jeers porn out a size.
Pour pour @lll just soot there with far in a sighs.
Lick wet he did wither !
A mouth a mouth for river you are...
The point about the eliminativists generally, is that they're falling into exactly the trap that Schopenhauer describes: “Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” Eliminativism forgets the very faculty which makes philosophy possible in the first place, viz, critical reflection on the nature of lived experience - not on what constitutes experience as a theoretical construct or system or so-called 'objective science'. That is why D B Hart says that Dennett's conjectures are 'so preposterous as to verge on the deranged'.
The 'spiritual traditions' may indeed surpass common sense, but eliminativism falls well short of it, and there's a big difference!
It's a great line, isn't it?
Schopenhauer also says:
"Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."
The World as Will and Representation, I, §7
Even in translation he is such a charming and pellucid writer.
You neglect, though, that the 'metaphysical subject' is itself a mere invention/convention, just as is the 'physical' that's simultaneously invented as its mediated blindspot. Or it seems just as knee-jerk to me to take one as an absolute starting point as the other, especially after so much great philosophy has taught us alternatives.
Materialism is also too complex for such reductions. Ludwig 'You Are What You Eat' Feuerbach emphasized sensation and emotion.
Folks are sensitive about 'conch is this' and very much attached to 'the heard problem,' perhaps as a last hiding place from the demystifying astonished-at-nothing fingers of an analysis that wants to get somewhere and not just fetishize the mystery (which is fun sometimes, no doubt.) Maybe Dennett indulges himself, downplays what he doesn't explain, but I found that pointing out the epistemological uselessness of qualia is generally met with the same man-in-the-street 'obviousness' of a congealed grammatical habit mistaken for sempiternal necessity.
Apparently very hard to understand, though. :wink:
He's first rate, still one of my faves.
Quoting Tom Storm
Ah, but my dear Schopenhauer, you tell me the brain is an illusion or representation...thrown up by the brain ? Note that space and time themselves are part of the dream, so it's not so naughty of me to think that he's got no reason to trust this image of [s]his[/s] a body as 'his' or even as single-souled or as the focal point of 'conch this is.' Idealism proves parasitic on a common sense it pretends to transcend. Or, alternatively, it's a half-hearted conspiracy theory that forgets to doubt its fantasized singular subject and so-called 'interior' 'monologue.' How you know you a you, sir?
Too easy to understand, the identity of world and my fantasy of it, a baby's dream...regurgitated capitalist egoism perhaps (with the good stuff too, to be fair!) And yet I love Schopenhauer and love idealism as a dialectical stepping stone. The journey of self-consciousness ( [s]self[/s]-[s]consciousness[/s] ) seems to need a visit to the skull.
[quote=Daniel Dennett; https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf]What, then, is the relation between the standard ‘third-person’ objective methodologies for studying meteors or magnets (or human metabolism or bone density), and the methodologies for studying human consciousness? Can the standard methods be extended in such a way as to do justice to the phenomena of human consciousness? Or do we have to find some quite radical or revolutionary alternative sci-ence? I have defended the hypothesis that there is a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely covers the ground — all the ground — of human consciousness, doing justice to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental method that have worked so well in the rest of science. [/quote]
All of his critics maintain that this hypothesis is not only indefensible, but mistaken in principle - absurd, even (according to Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, John Searle, and others). But as Dennett's is 'the philosophy of the subject that forgets himself', then he suffers from the very blind spot which he can never (by definition!) see. Which makes it a very 'hard problem' indeed. So hard, you might as well walk away from it.
I think you meant mind in one of the places where you wrote brain. No. Mr S proposes that our physical selves, the brain and it's chemicals are what consciousness looks like when experienced from a dissociated perspective of Will (better translation perhaps, Energy).
But that's just my (and probably basically his) criticism of qualia. Why is a square not a circle? That's the hurt problem of conch-is-this ! Riddle me this, scientism, how does this so-radically-elusive-and-private-stuff-that-we-can't-even-talk-about-it connect with your fancy scientific understanding of the world? Tell me, pretender to wisdom, what the meaning of my 'private experience' of C-sharp means in the grand scheme of things. Fit a model to data which is invisible by definition which I nevertheless believe in just the way green ideas sleep which is furiously.
I was thinking of this.
I should emphasize that 'of course' I think our nervous system is necessary for 'consciousness.' But the 'physical' is not so easily thrown away. The dream-weaver is part of the dream. 'Consciousness' loses sense without its other. The world (whatever its ineffable essence or true and final nature ) was apparently here before we arrived (hopefully during our conception). We seem to have a möbius strip on our hands.
It might, for example, influence what observations you consider important, what experiments you decide to conduct, what you may or may not regard as valid questions for research. None of those influences may be amenable themselves to explication, and none of them obviously visible in the results that you obtain - becuase they're unconscious, or because they're suggested by some cultural affinity you have, or even some traumatic memory. Beneath the surface, so to speak - lurking underneath all of the objective science, in the place you can't see, because it's what you're looking with.
I'll grant you that background assumptions and attitudes probably play a role in what is researched.
But hopefully you can see that there's a rational concern about the utility of 'qualia' in a scientific or rational context. That which is ineffably individual (if it makes sense to talk about such a thing) is 'by definition' invisible or non-existent for any unbiased or individual-independent inquiry. I say this with what I can only assume is a familiarity with the typical 'consciousness' of noises and smells. [Wittgenstein on toothaches and beetles is of course relevant.]
The problem here, again, is 'objectification'. There is no 'that' in the sense you're gesturing towards. The subject is not 'some mysterious entity', but just what the word says: the subject of experience.
The 'scientistic' approach is simply that objective knowledge is the only valid kind: that what is subjective is merely personal, your or my business, certainly not of interest to science, although of course only science is able to say what, preciselty, it, or anything, is.
I'm not particularly interested in Wittgenstein, but I did notice this remark from his biographer, Ray Monk:
[quote=Ray Monk, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson;https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ray-monk-wittgenstein]His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.
Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.[/quote]
In light of that, what do you think Wittgenstein would have said about 'eliminative materialism'?
You are telling me exactly what I've been saying, that the metaphysical subject is a fiction or a convention. I criticize the idealist for only doubting the 'external' world and taking an inherited Cartesian cliché as the one undoubtable starting point. Check about and read my direct challenge of the so-called 'interior' 'monologue' which takes its own unity of voice entirely for granted, nevermind the intelligibility of a language that strangely comes with apparently contingent phonemes. (Why does a worldless ghost use the soundmark cogito ergo sum and not some impossibly pure tongue of the angels or slabs of silent concept ? )
The meaning of our master words is no small issue. 'Just what the word says' seems to refer to something like the average intelligibility of a decontextualized phrase.
To me this passage ages well.
[quote=Hegel]
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
It seems influenced by his work, which IMO points in many directions, given its fragmented and exploratory form. There's a strong behaviorist streak in him, but he's too complex to wrap up in an 'ism,' which is probably why he endures. He loved spiritual/literary works, no doubt. Sometimes he seems to be trying to reveal the wonderful and strange in the ordinary.
[quote=W]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
...
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? ...What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
...
The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.
...
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him.—And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
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no kidding. This is why the self is unknowable - not because it's some mysterious metaphysical object.
And accordingly, wish to eliminate it.
If the self is 'too familiar,' then we have a 'pre-ontological' grip on it already, and presumably we'd try to develop a knowledge of what functions as a master concept, sometimes as the source or root of existence.
So far no one seems to have explained the unity or the interiority of the 'interior monologue.' I do not question in this context the singularity of the brain. The issue is the conception of the subject singular that haunts or inhabits that brain. Why not 'we think, therefore we are' ? Why not 20 subjects who take turns ? Or no subject ? ('twenty gods or no gods') Why do 'we' (why does our inherited softwhere) distribute exactly one soul to one body, one toe tag per corpse? 'One is one around here, old chap.' 'Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. ' Do qualia all stream in through different pipes to splash against the same 'non-mysterious' entity? Is this an empirical question ? Does 'one' check one's 'intuition' ?
It seems even wily Kant took for this granted. Distinguishing between an empirical self-image and a 'pure witness' is not what I'm on about. The 'pure witness' itself is what I'm contesting as a superstition or at least an unsupported and yet ferociously habitual assumption.
'The soul is the prison of the body.' Now that's a horsefly of a thesis.
And ? We've got 'scientism' and 'woo woo,' a couple of cartoons mostly. This seems like a digression, unless I fit into 'scientism' somehow (which'd surprise me, since I think 'matter' or 'the physical' often functions with the same unnoticed emptiness or ambiguity as 'mind.')
Quoting Wayfarer
Probably won't be able to sway you, but in my philosophical journey the semantic issue has bubbled up dialectically. What is the meaning of 'being'? 'real'? of 'meaning' itself ? I think what's hidden from us is the ineradicable ambiguity of our words, including of course our master words. An overstatement of my suspicion would be that we don't know what we are talking about and we don't know that we don't know. But we do know well enough to have kept up the game for thousands of years. Wittgenstein among others persuades me toward a this kind of semantic pragmatism, which is not something that I'd expect to be as popular as icecream.