Do the basics of logic depend on experience?
Let us assume that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe, but different from ours. It also develops from a simple to a more complex state, sense organs arise and a sort of a central processing system, but again completely different from ours. Let´s assumethat the sensory impressions these beings receive does not at all overlap with how we perceive the enviroment. With one exception: like us these beings differentiate between an outside world theire conception of it.
Now the question: Do we share at least the fundamental logical rules of inference with these beings, who perceive so differently?
If not, that would mean that even most fundamental building blocks of thinking are dependent on experience and experience itselfe would in turn depend on the way sense organs developed.
But if we share the same logic with these beings regardless of the experience we have, the question arises as to where logic comes from?
This could mean that even the most specific factors that determine our thoughts are inherent (so far undiscovered) properties of the matter we are made of.
Both conclusions don`t really get us anywhere. What objections are possible?
Now the question: Do we share at least the fundamental logical rules of inference with these beings, who perceive so differently?
If not, that would mean that even most fundamental building blocks of thinking are dependent on experience and experience itselfe would in turn depend on the way sense organs developed.
But if we share the same logic with these beings regardless of the experience we have, the question arises as to where logic comes from?
This could mean that even the most specific factors that determine our thoughts are inherent (so far undiscovered) properties of the matter we are made of.
Both conclusions don`t really get us anywhere. What objections are possible?
Comments (72)
What's so completely different?
Yes. If these beings acknowledge that every thing is what it is and is not what it is not, they will have the same logic as us. (If they didn't acknowledge this basic fact they would have died out quickly, assuming that their nervous system would even allow them not to acknowledge it, which seems doubtful.)
So they would acknowledge the basic logical principle of identity/non-contradiction. Thus they would identify different objects and their similarities, their different and shared properties, and would be able to group objects based on their shared properties. By communicating with each other, these beings would form propositions affirming or denying that certain objects have certain properties.
I think the questions in your OP lead to the problem of psychologism, this may interest you: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychologism/
Personally, I agree with Kolakowski when he says that this dispute is unsolvable, since the question: “Does logic reflect some given, a priori structure of the world, or does it merely reflect how the brain of us humans works?” is beyond the realm of any possible experience.
A drive-by of Wikipedia indicates there's been an attempt to draw an equivalence between logic and hypotheses and just as the latter is subject to revision based on empirical testing, the former too should be. This would mean logic is dependent on experience (senses to be specific).
Prima facie it seems a reasonable position to hold but dig a little deeper and such a point of view comes apart at the seams. Logic exists precisely because the senses are unreliable; after all it's sole purpose is to test/analyze what our senses report in order that we may distinguish between truths and falsehoods. As a good example :point:
Any insect that relies on its senses is doomed!
This mantis is,
1. To the senses: A harmless flower (falsity)
2. To logic: A deadly predator (truth)
Logic has little to do with experience, sense organs or the external world.
It is the way human mind works from the faculty of mental processing called reason.
An infant's brain learns that, with certain learned movements, it can bring things to its mouth. Later, the logic goes:
"I'm want to eat."
"I can eat what I bring to my mouth."
"I must bring this object to my mouth."
From there, other learning experiences teach the brain about similar situations, and from there are derived empirical formulations about eating. This applies to winning and retaining friends, driving a vehicle, shopping, finding an interesting book to read, passing time when bored, solving riddles, doing crosswords, etc.
The most fun thing about philosophy is the questions that are asked. I want to applaud you for asking such an interesting question.
That said, I think what would make a difference is not a difference in the ability to perceive, but rather a difference in what is perceived. We have a very simple earthly example. The Mongols originated in a very harsh environment where survival very much depends on cooperation with others and hunting. Deadly storms mean locking someone out of your shelter could lead to that person's death, and next time it could be you needing shelter in a storm, so it is important everyone agrees to help each other survive. Stealing and lying can also be serious survival issues, so the punishment for either is death.
Genghis Khan thought city people were very immoral. He saw the difference in wealth and poverty as intolerable and leading to lying and stealing. Cities developed where life is good and with a little effort farms produce an abundance of food. The farming mentality is very different from thehunting mentality. Genghis Khan stopped killing everyone and razing everything to the ground when a man from China taught him to harvest the cities like a farmer.
Genghis Khan was aware of a sky god who just assume kill pathetic humans. While in the valley where cities first developed people believed in a goddess/god that takes care of them. Genghis Khan thought that was a pretty silly idea, and he continued to prove the Mongols were mightier than their God. If the people refused to pay him tribute he left a message about the will of God. Leading to Christians fearing it was the will of God that sent the Mongols to punish them for their sins and making them even more powerless to defend against the Mongols.
Bottom line, it would be our environment that leads to different logical conclusions, not a difference in the ability to perceive information.
Perhaps completely differnt is the wrong notion. What I mean: Given all nerve cells have developed from first primitive sensory cells, it probably makes a differnce to which stimulus these first cells had to react. Even the structure of the nerve cells of our hypothetical aliens could be different. Then it would be obvious that the rest of the nervous system would also build up differently.
PS: I once heard a lecture on the philosophy of space that mentioned a thought experiment, I believe it was by P.F. Strawson, which was about Hypothetical creatures with only one sense (a type of hearing) and they are living in a world dominated by acustic beacons. The quetion was how such beings would perceive space. Unfortunately never found this essay again.
If Kolakowski is right, the quetion arises as to how (and if at all) progress in the field of epistemology is possible. Because then we would never know when nor why our ideas of the outside world coincide with this outside world.
Quoting Mersi
Kolakowski just says we don't know if psychologism is correct, and cannot ever know, since in order to answer the question we would have to apprehend reality from a non-human perspective in order to judge whether “reality” matches with what we perceive and apprehend intuitively, which is impossible.
So as you say, what we see as “progress” could be merely illusory, it could be that for instance we can't help believing that the Law of Contradiction is true, and yet the Law is in fact false, in which case there wouldn't be any progress.
Quoting Mersi
If our ideas of the outside world coincide with the outside world, that means our logic reflects some given a priori structure of the world, so that logical principles such as Modus Ponens and the Law of Contradiction existed before we humans begun to exist on earth, not being merely a creation of our brains. But the problem, as I said, is that we can't ever tell a scenario in which psychologism is false from one in which it is true, since they both appear identical.
How could we apprehend the world from a non human, non biological perspective? By dying? But then we would not be able to apprehend anything.
If you and I stand a ways apart, and between us there's a red car and a blue car, the red car closer to me and the blue closer to you, from my perspective the blue car is behind the red car and from yours the red car is behind the blue car. Which is true?
Obviously both are true, because "behind" only makes sense given a particular perspective. Insofar as the plain statements, "B is behind R" or "R is behind B" appear to contradict each other, it is only because each statement carries presuppositions that have not been made explicit. Rather than being contradictory, they turn out to be not only equally true but equivalent once you've made those presuppositions explicit. (If from this side B is behind R, then it had better be true that from the other side R is behind B.)
There can be bad angles -- I'm thinking of baseball, for instance, where the umpire at second base may not be able to see from his angle whether the fielder's glove is actually touching the runner's leg. From another angle it will be perfectly clear. But the umpire's might be the only perspective from which you can see whether the runner's foot was touching the bag, so to get the whole story you may have to combine the views from more than one perspective. We have no trouble doing this, because we believe the world was in exactly one state at the moment in question, and each perspective shows us some of that state.
That's all pretty boring, but it's how we usually talk about perspective, and it's how we learn to take it into account when trying to say what state the world is in. I am not a prisoner of my perspective but fairly adept at swapping it for another, imagining another, or even "factoring it out" altogether. This last can't be imagined clearly, because the mind's eye needs a perspective, but I can define and work with whatever relations are invariant over the changing of perspective.
I say all this to ask if you can connect the talk of "human" perspective to this more mundane understanding of perspective.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with all that, but when speaking of non human perspective, I meant rather this: either our logic is merely a product of our brain, so that a different organism, with a different brain structure would translate (so to speak) reality in a different way than we do, to a different logic, or there's one “true” logic, which is an ontologically given a priori structure of the world, such that all beings, no matter what sort of brain structure they have, must be constrained in their thinking by its laws.
Now, supposing that the laws and principles of logic we employ are produced by our brains, then since our brain would always translate everything to the “language” of our logic, we could never apprehend the logic that in fact governs the world, unless it happened to be the same as our logic.
But we have no way of telling if that's the case, just as the brain of another animal which evolved differently could translate everything to a different logic from ours, and we could not tell if that animal would “grasp reality” correctly or not.
This all seems to go back to Kant: since we cannot know or experience the “thing in itself”, we are trapped in the egocentric predicament.
Sure, I know how the argument works. I also know "perspective" and "point-of-view" have been metaphored to mean all sorts of things.
I was just wondering if there's anything in the argument that would actually justify using the "perspective" metaphor if it weren't already to hand.
This might serve as an example: objects closer to you appear larger in your visual field than those farther away -- art-class perspective. You could metaphorically extend perspective to include the value people place on things by also metaphorically extending (visual) size to stand in for value -- a bit like the way a word cloud shows words in sizes that (approximately) preserve the proportions of their frequencies within a corpus.
I just can't quite come up with anything like that for, well, all of reality. So we have this "perspective" metaphor, but I don't know what it means.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I mean, when talking about about perspective, I just used that as shorthand for what I said in my previous post, nothing more and nothing less.
Basically, we can't have access to the non human perspective of, say, a bat, because we can't “peer” into its mind while at the same time abandoning our own mind, so we can't be certain that it doesn't have a different logic, and since we can't dissociate ourselves from our brains in order to tell how reality would look or be like when not filtered by our mental apparatus of perception and reasoning, we can never give a satisfactory answer to the question whether psychologism is correct or not.
A philosopher from my country put it like this, when interpreting Kolakowski's The Presence of Myth:
I did think of a way that might do some of what's wanted: if you imagine objects in a grid of however-many dimensions, and each dimension is a way of classifying them, then changing which direction you look at the grid from would change which classifications were visible to you, like a projection, dropping out now this classification, now that. (You can do this kind of silliness with SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets too.)
As for bats and such, we can get pretty far falling back on metaphor, can't we? We can talk about sonar or magnetic field perception as if it's a kind of sight. (I heard an interview with a neuroscientist who learned how to "see" heat by wearing a sensor that stimulated the skin with vibrations to indicate temperatures.)
I suppose the important question is where representational and symbolic thought come into this. Insofar as that's unique to humans, I'm okay with talking about some uniquely human way of thinking we do involuntarily. But maybe symbolic thought is built up out of elements you might find elsewhere. In which case, maybe the "human perspective" is unique only in the way it marshals other forms of thought, forms we might be able to split off and examine at least analytically, if not in fact.
Just babbling, sorry, but I would love to see a little hesitation before each word in a phrase like "human perspective", just in case we don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
There is still a problem for the Kantian view. And that’s the gulf between the roel of the subject and the thing in itself. How can we be in the world if there is an uncrossable chasm between our representations of the world ( the phenomena ) and the noumenal aspect of reality?
Phenomenological philosophy proposed to solve this dualist problem by arguing that there is no noumenal reality. The world as it appears to a subject is all there is, there is nothing hidden behind phenomena. Because it is no longer necessary to assume internal representations or models of a separate outside , it is also not necessary to assume a formal logic as our primary means of access to a world. This removes the issue of whether human ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic to us and not shared by other animals. All living, self-organizing systems function according to the same general normatively oriented principles.
Then I cant see how you avoid solipsism.
If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions.
Took the words out of my mouth.
But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena).
I dont know if this will help. It lays out the anti-noumenal phenomenological argument, claiming that it gives us a more robust realism than the Kantian or neo-Kantian alternatives.
‘As Husserl points out in the lecture course Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme from 1915, nothing might seem more natural than to say that the objects I am aware of are outside my consciousness. When my experiences – be they perceptions or other kinds of intentional acts – present me with objects, one must ask how this could happen, and the answer seems straightforward: By means of some representational mediation. The objects of which I am conscious are outside my consciousness, but inside my consciousness, I find representations (pictures and signs) of these objects, and it is these internal objects that enable me to be conscious of the external ones. However, as Husserl then continues, such a theory is completely nonsensical. It conceives of consciousness as a box containing representations that resemble external objects, but it forgets to ask how we are supposed to know that the (mis)representations are in fact (mis)representations of external objects:
The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones etc. For such a picture observing ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal picture, and so on ad infinitum (Husserl 2003: 106
Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl’s anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn’t merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (Husserl 1982: 111).
This claim is one that resounds throughout Husserl’s oeuvre. As he, years later, would write in Cartesianische Meditationen, it is absurd to conceive of consciousness
and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially
interdependent and united (Husserl 1960: 84). Husserl’s idealism is not a reductive idealism. Husserl is not a phenomenalist that seeks to reduce the world to a complex of sensations. His opponent is not the dualist, but the objectivist, who claims that reality is absolute in the sense of being radically mindindependent. To deny the latter, to deny that the “universe of true being” lies “outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence” (Husserl 1960: 84), is not to say that reality literally exists in the mind, or that it is an intramental construction, but that reality is essentially manifestable, and therefore in principle available and accessible to consciousness.”
https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism
Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by positing a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism.
I've no clear idea of how that would pay out.
Sure, all that. But if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument.
Adding "noumenal" doesn't seem to help much.
I prefer to word it this way: reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world.
That doesn't seem to be the same as "there is no noumenal reality".
Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You?
For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. But how the world does this is dependent on what I project forward. The world responses precisely, but in different ways, to different formulations.
Reciprocal dependence between self as world is not the same thing as a noumenal reality. The latter seems to imply a relation of one-way correspondence between representing subject and subject-independent world.
Where you say there is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance, I'll just say there is a wall.
I don't see how such a phenomenological analysis is helpful. But there's folk as seem to like it.
Can I keep the part that sounds like biology and ignore the part that sounds like ontology? Everything after "complex entity composed of" is dandy, or anyhow good enough, but the first part of the sentence is just there to keep the philosophers quiet.
Point is, there are more than just phenomena. There are also complex entities.
Like other people.
Speak for yourself. I'm a pretty simple guy.
Refute it? Anyone who thinks themselves the only thing in existence is mad; I see them.
There's no need for refutation.
There's a distinction between the perception and the cause of the perception. My perception of this wooden, light-brown, medium-sized desk is caused by something external to the system being used to model it. That doesn't mean that the external cause is 'a desk', in fact it's very unlikely to be a wooden, light-brown, medium-sized desk, as we know for a fact that much of that perception was simply made up by my prior expectation of what I would see. Solipsism (if I've understood the position properly) would have there be no self-consistent external cause, that's not the same as simply claiming that whatever it is, it's not directly our perceptions.
Well, yes, provided that one admits there being things which are not perceptions - not phenomena. But if all there is, is phenomena - then those phenomena have no cause.
So then both solipsism and phenomenalism would have "no self-consistent external cause"...
It depends, perhaps, on what one sees as the negation of "there is no noumenal reality".
That's one view; that all that is, is phenomena, and that these phenomena, without cause, have certain limits. The alternate is to suppose that there may well be a cause, but that what that cause is, is unknowable.
Yes, I think it's just unreasonable to assume there's no external cause (by 'external' here I mean external to the system doing the modelling, outside it's Markov Blanket). Phenomenologically, it feels like there are strong parameters restricting the models which work, one would have to have a very good reason for assuming an internal cause of those, and no such reason has been forthcoming - hence the assumption of an external cause seems warranted.
The trouble is with the words 'real' and 'exists'. What we use them for is to generate agreement about perceptions, not their causes. It's the table I call real, not the cause of my perception of the table. So what I seem to mean by 'real' is some perception I expect (or demand, even!) is relatively invariant between me and you, and everyone else. Hence a claim that table's aren't 'real' seems to be the fairly uncontroversial claim that these perceptions are not that invariant after-all, or not as invariant as we thought. I suppose once this (still fairly new) concept of the huge role perception priors pay in the product of those perceptions (the perceptive features), then the word 'real' will be used slightly differently (a wider parameter of invariability) and saying that perceptions aren't 'real' will sound a bit silly. Right now it still has impact though. Or at least, It seems to.
Have you seen the analysis from Austin I've used on this - must've spoken of it in your presence?
"Real " and "exists" get their worth form the things wiht which they are contrasted - it's real, not a forgery. It's real, not a mirage; it exists, it's not fiction.
Probably, but I may have forgotten.
Quoting Banno
I think that's kind of what I was saying...bout an invariance we expect or demand agreement on? A fiction, or a forgery, lack certain invariant properties. A fictional table won't hold my cup up.
The issue, for me, comes when the full list of those properties includes matters which modern cognitive sciences are showing us might not be so invariant after all. A 'real' table holds my cup, but is it's colour also 'real', it's edges, it's structure... these properties seem to (often) get included in the use of 'real', which, if we take your meanings, they should not be. much of you perception of the table is a fiction, you made it up, no less than you might make up a unicorn. In fact you use much the same brain regions to do both.
Not very interesting outside of the realm of cognitive science though perhaps...
Ought to add, this is why I've never got into phenomenology, despite the obvious overlap in views. It doesn't seem to me to be a very fruitful area for philosophy in those terms. I like the impact perceptive uncertainty has on matters like belief, I don't think it has much useful to do when it comes to ontology.
Of course, from a practical point of view a solipsist would be insane (and has anybody ever really been a solipsist?), but there's no way to refute solipsism logically, you can't prove to a hypothetical solipsist that you aren't just a figment of their imagination or part of their dream, and so you can't prove to them that you see them.
...well, yes; these are its real colours, not the colours it might have under funny lights. That's it's real edge, not the edge of the glass tabletop. That's it's real structure; it looks like wood but it is plastic.
Quoting Isaac
I don't quite agree with this inference - that because it is madeup it is not real... That's a real unicorn; it doesn't have wings!
Well no. How to compare human logic with something else's logic? Since that "else" would be totally different? For me it's like trying to compare apples with oranges.
Logic of course depends on our experiences and our environment.It's the "data" used by logic. And sure played crucial role as human mind to learn to practice that "analyzing method". The ability to seek the truth with the most appropriate way in all kind of circumstances. For me is kind of simple:different creatures, different way of experiences, different logic.
The point is that these are all assumptions we make, we don't (usually) actually check them out. Our models (in this case the visual cortex) will give us these data points not as a result of incoming sensations, but as a result of assumptions about what they're likely to be. They're guesses, acts of imagination, just like your unicorn. The only difference is they're good guesses, based on prior experience.
Quoting Banno
But this is just the word 'real' doing what all words do, changing it's meaning in context. We might ask "are unicorns real?", if someone said "no, they're made up" we wouldn't have the least trouble understanding them, would we? Surely we oughtn't get ourselves tied up in what words 'really' mean.
The important thing about what we discover is it's implications for our thinking. The discovery that much of our perception is actually 'made up' (as opposed to being directly caused by sensation, in real-time) gives a new insight into what other factors (other than sensations in real-time) might be influencing those guesses. A framework of naive direct realism does not allow for such investigation, so seems somewhat impoverished.
Do these creatures see the whole world different? Or is a circle still a circle even for them?
Oh, yes, you're right. Problems arise when this is take to be how things are; the error, for example, of thinking that there is no table, only a perception-of-table. That's the sort of trick words can play; thinking that phenomenology is physics.
But saying the opposite "there is a table" is what's mistaking phenomenology for physics, surely? Physics doesn't have anything answering to 'table' in it's models. A 'table' is human construct, a label we put on some particular collection of atoms (which itself is just model borrowed from physics). We phenomenologically experience a 'table', but the physics (or in my case the neuroscience) doesn't support the idea that therefore there is such a thing, external to our mental models.
There's something. That seems like a very reasonable assumption, consistent with the science on the matter. But it's simply not true to say that there is a table because you see a table. I'd go as far as to say that we flat out know that to be false. Your world (that of tables, cups etc) is 90% made up, at any given time, entirely phenomena, no substance.
Of course you can, at any time, corroborate your perception. You can touch the edge, watch what happens when you put a cup on it, see what happens when a friend puts a cup on it...build up your evidence. But...
a) most of the time you simply don't bother, which leaves, unrefuted, the notion that most of your world is phenomena, most of the time.
and
b) your checking is biased. You check with the assumption that it is a table, you're looking to confirm your prior, not update it. That's simply the least energy expended (which is what this system is all about)
Obviously though, since declaring something 'real' and 'exists' are themselves human social endeavours, I think there's perfectly good uses of both terms which refer to that other joint social endeavour - categorising stuff. I don't object, therefore, to the use of direct realism, only to its reach. Cognitive science is also a human social endeavour.
Of course it does. A 'table' is human construct, a label we put on some particular collection of atoms. Hence it is as real as those atoms.
And those atoms are, if we take you seriously, themselves a label we put on some particular collection.
Have you Philosophical Investigations §48 at hand? It's were he criticises the notion of simples he had developed in the Tractatus. What is to count as a simple depends on the activity in which one is engaged; tables and atoms are equally valid starting points, with the choice dependent on avoiding misunderstandings in a particular case.
What is real, what exists, is what serves to allay misunderstanding. Tables when you are having coffee, wood when you are doing carpentry, atoms when you are doing chemistry. What has primacy is dependent on what one is doing.
So avoiding insanity is not logical?
No, both logic and sanity are to do with consistency and coherence.
Can you prove your mind (and thoughts) isn't the only thing that exists? How?
What do you think proof is? What does it consist in? Something that forces agreement?
You asked me a question; therefore you believe I am here. QED.
Quoting Banno
No, in fact I can't even prove to you that I exist.
Quoting Banno
I'm talking about a logical proof.
My claim is simply that there's nothing logically self-contradictory about solipsism.
Quoting Banno
I believe it, yes, I'm not a solipsist.
But a solipsist doesn't need to assume that you exist (if that's what you imply by “being here”), they may say that when talking to you, they are talking to a figment of their imagination, and that you being here implies “here, in my mind/imagination/dream”.
Remind me, Banno, did you ever address mereological nihilism or process metaphysics? I can't recall if you think "thingness" is necessarily object based and so noumenon and phenomenon abstract onto nouns and verbs or if you permit for phenomenon to be the ontic primitive.
Look at that sentence. What is the word "my" doing there? Isn't it differentiating between your claims and those of other folk?
A solipsist making that statement would be making that differentiation while simultaneously maintaining that such a differentiation could not be made.
Isn't that a contradiction?
Quoting Amalac
Why would you need to? I'm answering your question. Doesn't that imply that I think you are there?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#HowSubsDistThinOtheCate
What? Again, your wordcraft renders your text incomprehensible.
My hope is that the quote and linked article provides some context.
Quoting Banno
My question relates to these quotes. You use the word "phenomena" in much the way that I thought I was using the word.
And I didn't think that invoking mereological nihilism in response to this quote was such a stretch.
Quoting Banno
From another random chat:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/#Eli
You know much and I little, so it is hard for me to know when I need to elaborate. Without a thousand contextualizing words, how do I ask you for your views on whether you are making a positive claim with respect to metaphysics (e.g. that something exists) and what sorts of "things" are eligible for existence on your view? I see your reference to the idea that primacy is contextual, but context hardly feels like the sort of grounding alluded to in metaphysical claims.
Quoting Banno
If "phenomena" is descriptive of our experience and there is "more", I am trying to understand the limits, on your view, of what that more might be.
Quoting Banno
When I use it, yes, not when a solipsist does (if that implies other people exist outside their mind). When a solipsist used it, it would be to differentiate between their claims and the claims of their figments of imagination (which are also in a sense their own claims according to their belief, in which case though it's odd to talk to oneself like that, it's not logically selfcontradictory, it happens in dreams all the time).
Quoting Banno
You answered my question with a question ( “Can you prove to me that you are in pain?”) I answered that not only could I not prove that to you, but also that I couldn't prove to you that I exist, and only what exists can feel pain.
I can prove to myself that I (or at least thoughts) exist through “I think, therefore I am”, but you are not logically compelled to accept that I think, unless I first prove to you that I exist, and so no argument I can give you could convince you that I exist, if you were thorough enough with your doubts.
Are you asking a question or calling me names?
All those quotes and big words already assume so much. Can you ask your question with them?
And if not, what does that say about your question?
...then the solipsist must be using the words differently - playing a different game.
So have they shown that they alone exist, or just redefined "self" to include us?
Why not just conclude that the solipsist has misused the language of self and other?
What is it to have a proof here? In what way are you compelled by logic? There are those - myself amongst them - who deny that this is a cogent argument. Why are you compelled, but not others?
Probably calling you names. Ordinary language philosophy is amusing when it is and not when it isn’t.
But really, philosophy is a conversation with jargon that hopefully facilitates more efficient communication. I can’t possibly ask you a 15 word question devoid of “big words” that would elicit the types of answers I am hoping for. Even with the big words, it is easy enough for us to understand them differently. And even if I hand wave at various contextualizing paragraphs, it is easy to be distracted by the limiting particulars and miss the larger idea I am trying to point to.
So you tell me how your game goes. I try to share information in reasonably sized exchanges limited to a few themes, find some commonality in language, and take some intellectual satisfaction. Either I am super bad at that or we are playing a different game.
Working out what the question is, is doing philosophy.
Or maybe the name is about a particular sense of “boredom” that is more about the lack of joie de vivre brought on by existential angst than momentary lack of amusement and “speaking” that is more about explaining why it is gone rather than description of a mode of communication.
Besides, I was concerned that anomie aardvark was taken.
Quoting Banno
Of course they are not going to play a game that just assumes without proof that solipsism is false.
Quoting Banno
People can use words however they like, so long as they can clarify what they mean, if they are using the word (s) in an unusual way.
What matters in this context is that this way of defining terms would be useful in order for them to convey their solipsist philosophy (assuming there were some hypothetical solipsist out there, which is of course unlikely). What matters, then, is the content of what they say, not the labels they use.
Perhaps you believe that definitions are “essential” rather than stipulative? (By stipulative I mean that they are useful to achieve some more or less definite goals)
Quoting Banno
It's just what Descartes said: though we can doubt things like the existence of the outside world and perhaps even mathematics through sceptical scenarios like the Evil Demon, we cannot doubt the truth of the proposition “I think therefore I am”, or as Russell changed it: “there are thoughts”, since in all such sceptical scenarios there obviously must be thoughts, since it's utterly inconceivable for that blindingly clear and distinct idea to not be the case. Those thoughts imply something or someone who produces them, and even if that were doubted one could not doubt the existence of those thoughts.
Now, we could go down the complete sceptic's path (I don't mind if we do, by the way. I assumed for the sake of discussion that the bar for knowledge wasn't set this high), and claim that to say that to think it inconceivable or impossible for the proposition “there are thoughts” to be false, is not a sufficient ground for that to be the case, since it may just be due to our fallible and limited cognitive apparatus. This would also apply to things like the Law of Contradiction. One could argue like this for instance:
[quote= Kolakowski] Some theologians and philosophers were not as convinced as Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas that conceiving of God as incapable of doing what is logically impossible was not imposing limitations on him. Some later nominalists argued that not only physical laws, but also mathematics and ethics had been established by God through free decisions whose reasons are unknown to us and that those decisions could have been different from what they were; omnipotence, they thought, is not "omnipotence to some degree," since that concept is, in fact, absurd.
God simply decreed that two contradictory statements could not both be true and that two and two were four and that fornication was bad. But he could have decided to decree otherwise, and if he had, the Law of Contradiction, mathematical truths, and moral norms would have been different than they are.
We cannot imagine such a world, of course, but we cannot affirm, merely due to the poverty of our minds, that this would have been impossible for God; We must not measure the power of God with the standards of our weak and finite intelligence.[/quote]
Now, if we go down that path, then supposing an omnipotent God like the one described by Kolakowski exists, there's absolutely nothing about which He could not deceive us (not even Descartes's cogito, in my opinion), and even if we suppose he hasn't yet done that, there's no reason why he could not change the laws of logic or mathematics in the future.
Leibniz and Hume summarized this nicely:
[quote= Leibniz] (...) if this doubt (Descartes's) could once be justly raised, it would be straightway insuperable, it would always confront Descartes himself and anyone else, however evident the assertions presented by them[/quote]
[quote= Hume]This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cur’d, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it” [/quote]
Of course, this could all just be a wild fabrication of our minds, but we have no way to tell between a scenario in which that's true, and one in which God constantly deceives us about everything, including his own existence.
But since you are not a complete sceptic, surely you will at least grant that the proposition: “there are thoughts” is absolutely certain, right?
"The a prior structure of the world" includes "how the brain works" so this question seems to me premised on a false (Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian) dichotomy.
Quoting Amalac
Quoting Mersi
"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." ~Ibn Sina, d. 1037 CE
Quoting Banno
:up:
I’ve never understood you two with your seeming commitment to practicality while at the same time being committed to the law of non-contradiction. Some dialethia may be true and some may be useful (especially as an epistemological stance when evidence supports two contrary positions). Why reject them out of hand just because some long since dead people insisted it must be so? (See paraconsistent logics. SEP on Paraconsistent Logics)
Yes, I think that's what I was saying (at least that was the intention). Physics has nothing to say about 'tables', the boundary between an atom of 'table' and the atom of air next to it is no more relevant than the boundary between an atom of 'table' and the next atom of 'table'. To the waitress, however, that boundary is all important.
But you're right to say that there's no primacy in any of this.
Quoting Banno
I think sometimes there's some confusion between certainty and realness (a confusion I'm definitely guilty of myself). a lack of certainty is not the same as a lack of realness. The table is real, despite uncertainty about it's properties, because the table (as a consequence of hidden states) is part of our socially constructed world, so yes table/atoms/quantum foam..."Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?"
The issue, for me, still arises from the alternate primacy. The table is real as opposed to... denying the simples of edge, shadow, light, that I might want to talk about in the context of cognitive science. The table is real as a social construct is quite a different proposition form the table is real immutably and in perpetuity. Maybe I'm jumping at shadows, my hackles are up every time I log on at the moment.
Personally, I am fact-based. So if something in front of me looks like a table, feels like a table, and can be used like a table, then it is true that there is a table. You can argue that it's an illusion but you would have the burden of proof.
And yes, the table is 100% phenomenal for me, as everything else. I don't see that as a problem, more as a law of perception.
Of course the table is composed of smaller elements. How could it NOT be? But there is absolutely no reason to see the elements as more "real" than the whole. Truth is not small. Reality is not hiding in atoms.
180 Proof
I do not deny that the axiom of cintradiction is a very useful tool.
But given human logic depends on experience, it means that it depends on the functionality and range of our senses. This range is limited, but can be extended using tools like glasses, telescops or radiation detectors. Using such tools made it possible to prove Einsteins theories of relativety of space and time.
After all two pillars of Kants "transzendentaler Idealität". I`m sure he considered rather solid parts of what he thought he knew.
What if physics succeed in shifting not only subatomic parts into a superposition state? Maybe a whole atom once? That will not affect the way we make decisions in everyday life, but how justified is it to approach this part of reality, in which certain logical axioms no longer correspond to experience, with a logic that still presupposes these axioms?
Why assume (commit a category mistake) that anyone would try to use a logic which regulates making "decisions in everyday life" for domains which "no longer correspond to experience"?
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I have not rejected or implied rejecting anything; I've only pointed out that the LNC ineluctably corresponds with first-order facts of the matter. Systems of logic which eliminate the LNC are only useful for contrary (or not) higher-order interpretations of the facts of the matters. In other words, dialethia is derived from – supervenes on, or presupposes – alethia. The topic at issue, Ennui, concerns 'the relation of logic to experience' and not the relation of logic to "contrary interpretations" of experience.
For proof see...well almost every paper on the neuroscience of perception since the late nineties.
Quoting Olivier5
The table is joint social object. You seeing the 'reality' of it as entirely and correctly whatever it appears to you to be is very much a problem, probably one of the most significant problems in the world today when extended to more complex concepts that 'table'. That things are just exactly how they seem to you has probably caused more wars than any other misconception.
Quoting Olivier5
The elements of which it's composed are not at issue, those being yet more models. It's about the functional relationship in the network. Some data originates from outside your network of causal nodes, which means, by definition, you can only infer it's origin once you are past one layer of nodes inside that network. Elements don't matter, the state outside of that network could me made of massive distinct composites, it wouldn't have any effect on the fact that your second layer of nodes can only infer their properties from your first layer because the signal from them originates outside of the Markov Blanket.
No offense, but I seriously doubt that neuroscience can prove that tables are illusions.
Quoting Isaac
This is a platitude but everything, including neuroscience, is a "joint social object". Tables are not the exceptions here, they are like everything else.
You are confusing empiricism with naive realism. Empiricism is a principle without which there would be no science, including no neuroscience, so you are professionally bound to respect it. And confusing empiricism with illusion is a road to nowhere.
Quoting Isaac
In English, please. Also you may wish to connect this neuronal talk to the issue at hand, i.e. the reality of tables.
If these beings live in this universe, or for that matter any universe, then they'll have experiences similar to ours, i.e., some kind of sensory experiences. I'm assuming of course that in your thought experiment that such beings have the ability to reason, i.e., minds or brains that are at least as advanced as our own. Given this assumption, then it follows that they have developed some kind of language, and assuming that they're not at the beginning of stages of linguistic development, it would follow that their language of logic would at the very least include the principle of non-contradiction. Any ability to reason would have to necessarily have this basic principle. I don't think we could even imagine a universe with other reasoning beings where this wouldn't be true. Reasoning presupposes some kind of rational thought, which by definition means the very basic principles of logic.
I'll just add this (which addresses other things that have been mentioned in this thread), that logic is parasitic, once a language of logic is formed, it extends what we already know as a result of sensory observation or linguistic training for example. So, formal logic is something that came later in human development.
The aliens of our thought experiment could well be ahead of us as logic is concerned. That could mean that some basic parts of theire logic is similar to ours, but that theire logic is far more extensive.
In analogy to mathematics, it could be that we are at a level, like the romans at which we are missing a notion and sign for zero and the negative numbers. Okay the range of the positive intergers remains the same. But as positive integers could be seen as a special case of complex numbers (with i = 0); our logic could represent only a special case of an otherwise far more complex reality. A reality where theire may never be complete accordance or non accordance and bivalence therefore makes no sense