Is there an external material world ?
Most people would agree that there are objects with a location in space and time and exist independently of conscious beings. This position is commonly called “materialism”. But for some reason, some people commonly called “idealists”, believe that there are no such objects. Instead, they claim that conscious beings and their experiences are the basis on which existence itself lies.
René Descartes’ famous quote: “ I think therefore I am”, expresses an idea that is often used to support the idealists’ position: we cannot doubt our existence. We can doubt anything else, and one of these things is the existence of an objective material world.
This idea seems to many as a powerful argument in favor of idealism and against materialism. If the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, would it not make sense to posit that all is nothing but a result of it ?
It seems to me that although this idea is indeed a powerful argument against materialism, the support it provides to idealism is far lesser than the blow it deals to materialism. The fact that the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness does not imply that all is based on consciousness.
Nor does it imply that there is no material world. Perhaps there is one, but we cannot ever give evidence that would prove its existence with no room for doubt.
It seems instead to me that materialism is an idea which can never be verified, as for it to be verified, it would require proving that there is something existing independently of conscious beings. But do do so, one must step outside of subjective experience. But obviously, that is not possible. You cannot stop being conscious and still experience the world around you. When you stop being conscious, you’re either asleep, knocked out, or dead.
But despite that, I believe that materialism still has value. How could have science developed without materialism? It seems instead that materialism is a useful explanation for patterns in conscious experience.
Imagine that two processes A and B have the same output. Would it not follow, that it is more likely for both of these processes to be identical, or at least very similar? Would it not follow also that their input is most likely identical or at least very similar?
Now imagine that these two processes are different minds and that the output is some sense data. Here again, would it not follow that those two minds are identical, or at least very similar? Would the same not follow for their input ?
The best explanation for such a situation, it seems to me, is that those two minds exist in a shared world, as it would imply identical or at the very least similar input. For that shared world to be comprehensible by those minds, I believe it would be necessary for it to be structured by space and time. So materialism seems to be the best explanation for the patterns shared by different experiences.
What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ?
René Descartes’ famous quote: “ I think therefore I am”, expresses an idea that is often used to support the idealists’ position: we cannot doubt our existence. We can doubt anything else, and one of these things is the existence of an objective material world.
This idea seems to many as a powerful argument in favor of idealism and against materialism. If the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, would it not make sense to posit that all is nothing but a result of it ?
It seems to me that although this idea is indeed a powerful argument against materialism, the support it provides to idealism is far lesser than the blow it deals to materialism. The fact that the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness does not imply that all is based on consciousness.
Nor does it imply that there is no material world. Perhaps there is one, but we cannot ever give evidence that would prove its existence with no room for doubt.
It seems instead to me that materialism is an idea which can never be verified, as for it to be verified, it would require proving that there is something existing independently of conscious beings. But do do so, one must step outside of subjective experience. But obviously, that is not possible. You cannot stop being conscious and still experience the world around you. When you stop being conscious, you’re either asleep, knocked out, or dead.
But despite that, I believe that materialism still has value. How could have science developed without materialism? It seems instead that materialism is a useful explanation for patterns in conscious experience.
Imagine that two processes A and B have the same output. Would it not follow, that it is more likely for both of these processes to be identical, or at least very similar? Would it not follow also that their input is most likely identical or at least very similar?
Now imagine that these two processes are different minds and that the output is some sense data. Here again, would it not follow that those two minds are identical, or at least very similar? Would the same not follow for their input ?
The best explanation for such a situation, it seems to me, is that those two minds exist in a shared world, as it would imply identical or at the very least similar input. For that shared world to be comprehensible by those minds, I believe it would be necessary for it to be structured by space and time. So materialism seems to be the best explanation for the patterns shared by different experiences.
What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ?
Comments (2038)
That's subjectivism, not idealism.
Subjectivism is that the thinker determines what is real. Idealism is actually quite a rare philosophy, which is like Berkeley's claim that the physical world is just a thought in the mind of God.
You are riffing on some classics here. I mean that in a good way. I've put some time in on these questions, so I'll offer my limited current understanding/attitude.
If the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness,
Do we know this empirically or just...'grammatically' ? In other words, we tend use the word 'consciousness' in such a way that a gap between it and 'the world' is built in. Probably this is related to our social situation of making, trusting, and doubting claims. 'From my perspective' is a kind of modesty to mitigates responsibility. Claims about sensation or feelings are generally treated as incorrigible, though even here we might find exceptions. A doctor might doubt the back pains of someone seeking opiates.
Nor does it imply that there is no material world. Perhaps there is one, but we cannot ever give evidence that would prove its existence with no room for doubt.
I agree with you, but I think it's noteworthy that the use of 'we' already implies this point. If there's a 'we' around to discuss this issue with, the issue is already settled. One can argue about exactly what 'material' is supposed to refer to, but one is definitely already beyond the private mind here. (I guess one can have the fear that the others we reason with are hallucinations, but how does the concept of hallucination make sense if there's only one mind? And 'only one mind' doesn't make sense if that mind is understood as responsible for its judgments (as a rational mind.))
Despite most people's intuition on this topic, I don't think the topic is trivial.
In fact, far from it. But the fact the it isn't trivial does not mean that it doesn't have an answer.
This is true. Materialism is a way of looking at things, a point of view. It isn't true or false, it's useful or not useful. The same is true for all the other isms.
Neither principle has anything to do with 'conscious' things, which is why I say 'loosely'.
Consciousness does play a role. A conscious being can only observe a universe with conscious beings in it, or artificially be given a point of view into a universe without such a being.
Quoting Hello HumanFallacious conclusion on several points, and he wasn't pushing idealism, and it doesn't seem to refute materialism in any way. Materialists also suggest that they both think and exist.
As far as I know, materialism suggests that material is objectively fundamental. Everything is made of it in some way or the other. I think quantum field theory has pretty much made a hash of the position because try as them might, they've never found any actual material.
:up:
Quoting noAxioms
That depends on what "they" meant by "material".
[quote=Agent Smith]We can doubt our (physical) existence.[/quote]
Interesting, oui, mon ami?
It makes little practical difference to my life which one is true. Idealism is a big subject with variations and a long history in Western thought, Plato being the most famous of the early exponents - the history of the Christian tradition is famously steeped in Neo-Platonism. Then there's the German idealists. Today there is new support for idealism mainly because versions of materialism or physicalism have been understood to be vulnerable or false. Idealism is where people sometimes end up following speculative interpretations of QM - some have concluded that matter only comes into existence when it is observed (Kastrup).
If idealism is true, it does not mean there are god/s. It might be argued, as per Schopenhauer, that the world or representation is what Will (mind) looks like when seen from a certain point of view. We are all dissociated instantiations of that Will or cosmic consciousness - which is not a metacognitive entity and largely instinctive. It's all pretty fun stuff.
:snicker:
Indeed.
A man gets lost in the mountains and carves his name on some peak before he dies. A thousand years later his inscription is discovered for the first time. The world has a kind of memory it seems, some kind of 'wax' that holds a pattern in the absence of us and, presumably, all lifeforms. It doesn't matter so much to me whether the scientific image is equated with this metaphorical wax. I just think 'anti-materialists' have to explain the possibility of this lonely inscription.
Reductionism is the natural method of scientists and engineers. But becomes a problem when it's applied to the problems of philosophy, because in that context it is essentially de-humanising, treating humans as objects.
Not in the least. Humans are highly sociable, they live in a shared world of concepts, language, culture, and so on. Don't mistake idealism for solipsism, the belief that only MY mind is real. In actuality, your or my mind is just one instance of 'the human mind'. So that doesn't mitigate against idealism in the least.
I'm with you. "Acting as if" is metaphysics. It let's us keep going instead of spending all our time arguing.
The dinosaurs were conscious, but they were not philosophers. By their fossils we can know that they existed, independent of us. Independent of human consciousness ever coming into existence on earth. Because we are not imagining the fossils, they are remnants of a former time in the universe. That of course doesn't mean that the universe cannot be a simulation, or another manifestation of a higher consciousness. But we can clearly rule out that any form of human consciousness is a prerequisite for an external world existing, if that is what we mean with anti-materialism (I do not know whether this would correctly be called solipsism, idealism or subjectivism)?
:100:
Materialism, as you say, is impossible to verify. And it also leads to a very big unanswered question: how can minds arise from mindless matter?
Or, that proposition is false.
We get our concepts of "external", "material", "I", etc. from a kind of instinctive, primitive, not reflective experience: think of the primitive humans, or of a child, to get my idea.
Then we became philosophers and now we pretend to get ultimate ideas about the whole. Non ultimate ideas are managed by science, art, spontaneity. But this is not enough for philosophy: philosophy wants to get the roots, the total, the ultimate, the general, the universal. The problem is that philosophy gets the ultimate by using the primitive instruments I said before. In other words, it is like wanting to describe the ultimate nature of the world by having at our disposal just some specific concepts, let’s say, for example, “banana”, “guitar”, “chair”, “shouting”. The result is that we would define the universe by saying, for example, that it must be necessarily “a shouting banana on a chair”, or a “guitar shouting to a banana”. Why are these example ridiculous? It is because they try to define something extremely wide, great, extended, general, which is the universe, by extremely specific words like the ones I used. We don’t realize how ridiculous is to talk about “material”, “external”, “exists”, and so on, because we think that those concepts are wide, great, general, so that they are appropriate to talk about the universe. Once we realize that those great concepts are actually extremely rough, unclear, local, limited, then we can understand how ridiculous is to talk about “external material world”.
I want to clarify that I am not referring to Hello Human specifically: as I said at the beginning, it is not a mistake made by Hello Human, it is a mistake that I see in philosophy in general, most philosophy, most great and famous philosophers.
As a consequence, I think that trying to understand the “being” in terms of “external material wold”, or “I think, therefore I am”, or “idealism”, is just nonsense, not less than the ridiculous definitions I said before.
Kant tried to be more universal by recognizing that, when we talk about such big things, like “space”, “time” and so on, we are actually moving inside the cage of our mental categories.
After Kant we can realize that even the idea of “categories” falls into the same problem: it is not really a great and wide category, not much more than “banana” or “chair”.
This means that even the very ideas of “ultimate”, “universe”, “universal”, “being”, are ridiculous as well, in their pretence to embrace “the whole”, “all”, “everything”.
As I said, those who don’t have this pretence are science and art. Science doesn’t need to be ridiculously imitated by philosophy.
I think that philosophy can, instead, try to be, modestly, an art of playing ideas. Not “playing with ideas”, as ideas were toys, but “playing ideas”, as they were musical instruments, or musical notes. Philosophy can do this e nothing would be able to do it better than philosophy, while keeping a dialogue with all other fields of human culture.
If we dismiss questions that seem to be grasping at universal truths with inadequate tools then we leave the way open for any old answer to be chosen inside or outside of philosophy. Are there universal human rights? What is it for something to be a person and not a thing? What can we say that may not be doubted? What does it take for a statement to make sense and not nonsense? These questions swirl nebulously around practical debates and they rouse confusion and fury. I think you are right that they are often too big to make sense of. But they are not going to go away easily. Some ways are needed to draw out the points of issue, however ridiculous they sound. Perhaps that's what you mean by 'playing ideas'?
Very well put !
You make a good point, but it's hard to see how a sketching of the limits of philosophical knowledge isn't one more project that tries to get at the roots with finite concepts and violates those same limitations. It's as if early anti-metaphysical thought was Kantian and then later anti-metaphysical thought was (had to be) anti-Kantian. So you are making a Kantian point, and I am making the point that your Kantian point is self-threatening...that theories of knowledge are just as metaphysical in their way as those systems they would forbid or constrain.
I think the position you’d be comfortable with is neo-Kantianism, It asserts that the facts of the world only come to us mediated by our interpretations , but nonetheless a world outside of consciousness does indeed exist.
Quoting Hello Human
This is an interesting subject. But why do you have to bring in "-isms", schools of philosophy, etc.?
Wouldn't it be more interesting to present your own position/view on the subject, based on your personal reality, knowledge, reasoning and experience?
So, I would like to "hear" your own position on your own subject "Is there an external material world?"
Quoting igjugarjuk
Isn’t this where Derrida comes in? That is, the concept of writing as the way that a mark that I produce survives me and my intent? It can be read after my death, but not without an alteration of my originally intended meaning.
And even in writing to myself , the same alteration takes place:
“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)”
So what is left of the sense of ‘materiality’ here?
"Materialism" is not a truth-claim – does not consist of truth-claims. It's a speculative criterion or methodological commitment which works better than many alternatives in many cases and doesn't work as well in other cases. "Verification" does not obtain with regard to philosophical suppositions.
Insofar as "minds" are enactive metacognitive relations (i.e. tangled hierarchies) within their environments, such questions are incoherent. "Minds" (minding) no more "arises from mindless matter" than walking "arises from" legs or digesting "arises from" guts.
It's related. The man relies upon a code to 'escape' his own annihilation in a certain sense. Even as a corpse he can talk. 'Some are born posthumously.'
But in this context what I'm emphasizing is that the message persists when not being perceived (or so common sense might say). Some thinkers talk as if the world only exists through human perception. It's not really 'out there' in some sense. How can they make sense of the state of this inscription between its writing and its initial rediscovery? Is it nonexistent in the interim? Is that plausible? Do coffee tables only exist when we are looking to see if they are still there?
My own take is that we can grant that the world as humanly experience is naturally dependent upon the experiencing human. But I don't see how we can leap from this truism to a denial of the world's independent existence, even if I admit that it's difficult indeed to articulate exact 'how' it is supposed to exist in this sense. There's no practical constraint on such talk to keep it honest. But I do think my mother was here before I was. And that others will be taking their first steps when I am forgotten ashes.
The question is what it is we are doing when we produce science, philosophy and other forms of understanding. For Rouse , enactivist cognitive science , the phenomenologists and postmodern philosophers, discursive practices of science are not about securing epistemological knowledge but of producing forms of interaction with the world. We ‘know’ the world by changing it, reconstructing it not only with our theories but materially. And this changed world speaks back to us, allowing further transformations of our practices, that then reciprocally reshapes our world. This leaves behind the idea of ‘independence’ in favor of constraints and affordances that feedback from the interventions that our empirical inquiries enact in our world. This is why Rouse likens scientific inquiry to niche construction. Just as organisms enact their own niche via their normative functioning , the niche they produce speaks back and shapes the organism’s goals and patterns of functioning.
As inquirers , we have no use for what is ‘independent’ of our schemes. Extremely slow and simple processes of interacting elements in an ancient universe show a great deal of independence from each other, but such is the stuff of useless , meaningless arbitrariness until it is reconfigured by human construction as a pattern of meaning of relevantly interrelated parts. One could think of this progressive sloughing off of material independence and arbitrariness in terms of Hegel’s dialectical world coming to know itself through its own becoming. Or one could ditch the dialectical idealism and just keep the becoming, as Nietzsche did. In that case this is the fate of independent material reality:
“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well?
We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?”
If some are using the cogito for their idealist view, we should let them be. But the cogito is NOT a view of idealism. Descartes is a dualist.
I don't think you can extract the sense in which the world exists apart from our participatory observation in it.
The underlying issue is that the classical attitude of modern science was to assume a stance of complete objectivity, by reducing the objects of analysis to purely quantitative terms. This was supposedly to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' which was understood to be what was truly there. As noted above, this attitude has been undermined, or superseded, by enactivism and the embodied cognition approach that was pioneered by Varela and Thomson. There are also many parallels in physics arising from the well-known 'observer problem' - consider for example Wheeler's 'participatory universe' wherein the act of cognition is intrinsic to the nature of what is observed.
I'm just now reading a very interesting and highly relevant book on this subject, Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics, Charles Pinter. He's a mathematician and emeritus professor with a long history in mathematical modelling especially of problems in neuroscience. His basic contention is that the features and structure of everything we see is transformed into a gestalt (a meaningful whole) by the process of cognition, which occurs in even the most simple of organisms (fairyflies, 0.5mm in length) and this cogntive act is what creates the structure that we perceive as 'the Universe'. He contrasts that with the instinctive view of naive realism, which is also a consequence of the same evolutionary processes that give rise to cognition in the first place (with the caveat that humans are potentially able to 'deconstruct' this instictive, but fallacious, sense of reality.)
I may agree that one cannot extract or capture the sense or meaning of the world apart from that human meaning making. If meaning, as some theorists hold, lives in our inferences and the norms that govern them, then it's only where we are. But can we move from this to insisting that there was nothing here before we were able to talk about it ? Surely my mother was here before I was, and surely early lifeforms, not yet intelligent, preceded our own appearance as a species...as a condition of its possibility, making it harder to deny.
In my view, objectivity is just a synonym of rationality, and 'complete' objectivity sounds like perfect science, or just the goal of (rational) inquiry. I don't object to the notion that some scientists were also metaphysicians who liked to think that the entities in their models were more real than the medium sized dry goods that made such modeling possible, but it seems prudent to insist on the gap between science and a correlated, optional metaphysical 'crust.' Are electrons more real than microscopes or sidewalks? I was thinking of this on my walk earlier. If meaning lives in our inferences and the norms that govern them, then sidewalks and electrons and promises and inferences are all on the same 'plane.' (The only thing that seems to have priority epistemologically or ontologically is the philosophical situation itself, which is to say us and the norms that more our less explicitly govern our discussion. This 'fixes' the Cartesian beginning, which forgets that being rational is a group activity. )
It isnt simply a matter of pointing out that everything has a history. As you know , for Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger we are nothing but history. But there is an important distinction between history as they understand it and what they call historicism. The former understands history as a genealogy. The latter subordinates history to a scheme , whether dialectic or empirical causation within some form
of realism or another. Heidegger and Derrida point out that not only a pre-human history , but the history of what I ate for breakfast yesterday, is not behind us but ahead of us as a reinterpretation of ‘what was’, generated by current concerns.
It sounds like you want to use the history of a thing in a causative way within a realist paradigm. Such does not realize the normative assumptions that secretly guide its notion of history.
I think so. Playing ideas means trying to work with them without pretence of reaching anything fundamental, the same way musicians play their instruments without pretending that what they are producing is “the music”, or “the essence of music”. They know that what they are doing is just an exploration of music from the limited perspective of that instrument, that culture, that personality. I think philosophy should me meant the same way.
I think of that as the 'imagined non-existence' of the world - imagining that the world didn't exist, prior to the mind, and then begins to exist with the awareness of it. But that implicitly relies on a perspective which you can never actually assume - as if you're able to be aware of the Universe from a perspective outside your awareness of the Universe.
From the empirical perspective it is true that the world existed before any particular mind came along. But it is the mind that furnishes the framework within which the whole concept of temporal priority is meaningful in the first place.
You may recall this passage:
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy]'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.[/quote]
So, I think the argument is that philosophical realism assumes that empirical knowledge portrays the world as it truly is. But it can't do that, because it can't get outside the conditions under which objectivity is possible in the first place. Another way of putting it is that it forgets the role of the the mind in arriving at such judgements. This is why there's been an emerging trend in philosophy the last few decades around the rediscovery of the subject. And a lot of that goes back to phenomenology and thence to Kant.
I find it hard to believe that naive realism exists very much among adults. A few philosophers pretend to be, but I think they are playing with words (or indulging linguistic preferences). For context, I wouldn't call a confident atheoretical managing of daily tasks 'naive realism' just because one is not recalling that of course the scene of those tasks is largely the product of my nervous system.
My point about the inscription is from a perspective of indirect realism. The 'raw material' that our nervous system transforms into mountains and messages has a memory that makes such a message possible. That chiseled string of gashes in the granite is like a dormant virus, waiting for a host, for the possibility of its quotation.
I find it exceedingly easy to believe, I encounter it in very many discussions on this forum - not as an articulated or explicit philosophy but as a set of implicit assumptions, questioning of which often results in eye-rolling or exasperation.
I don’t think that my idea falls into the problem of applying it to itself, because I didn’t suggest any alternative system. What I suggested is abandoning philosophy and making art by using the remnants of the abandoned philosophy. How can art be suspected of proposing another metaphysical system?
To be fair, I'll grant that one can sort of escape metaphysics by carefully avoiding any talk that involves norms. One can suggest that we try something else. The wrong way to do this is the pomo cartoon, which presents the impossibility of truth or metaphysics as a supreme metaphysical truth. The more sophisticated way to do this (a Rortian way?) is to avoid the temptation to make grand claims (including grand claims about the nullity of grand claims ) and stick with artsy suggestions. I think art is great, and I can understand a literary shift away from metaphysics...while not being so ready to abandon ship myself.
Oh, but I think a lot has sensibly been said by recent philosophy about a concept of history that is neither Cartesian nor Kantian.
Now that I can relate to. It's those pesky implicit assumptions that wreak the most havoc. We can't criticize what we don't yet recognize as optional.
Call it the human mind and make it a demiurge, and I think I agree. There was stuff here before us from which we emerged, but the world as we know it is largely our creation. Humans take some kind of raw environmental 'stuff' and (as you mention) carve out a lifeworld. We even created among ourselves norms that govern our communication. We understand concepts like lying or fallacious reasoning...and we understand that we understand such things. We are at the level of Hamlet. We are characters who are also playwrights, experiencing ourselves on a stage, accountable for our words and deeds, as potentially and ideally responsible and autonomous selves among other such selves. (This is related to Robert Brandom's stripped down and modernized version of Hegel.)
Don't you exist independently of other conscious beings? Since those conscious beings each have material bodies, then there is something material which exists independently of you: other people. Otherwise, do you assume that we are each free-floating consciousnesses without material bodies?
I agree with this. Both points are valid.
A quibble, but one can believe that there is some kind of 'the way things are outside us' without believing that science ever portrays it correctly or can be sure that it is doing so.)Personally I would go so far as to say 'the way things are outside us.' I largely agree with your point, just to be clear. I'm only saying that an outright denial of some kind of crap 'out there' is metaphysically nontrivial (though probably practically trivial.)
mQuoting igjugarjuk
Unless of course the responsible and autonomous self is just an effect of discursive practices within a community.
My response is...of course it is. But those discursive practices are equally their own product, as are the sense organs their own product, as Nietzsche joked once.
And what is discursive practice? Is it rational ? Is it a group activity? It's hard to see how one monkey body can make a nonviolently binding claim on other monkey body without discursive norms that hold each monkey accountable for assertions as to the way things are. If there are proper ways to use concepts, we have norms, which are hard to make sense of without individuals subject to them before witnesses. Once we are doing philosophy, it's 'too late' to question the framework, for such questioning is part of the game. "Let me prove to you that the responsible and autonomous self is ontologically secondary."
Yes, it's good to be a god.
Indeed. It's almost tautological, as if god is the guy in the ad we're trying to be.
Just? Anyway, this is a dichotomy that often comes up in discussion about the mind or the self. Either or, a very Western binary question. It could be seen or felt - "I" see and feel - that the mind as a concept (and/or as an empirical self-observation) is more like a spectrum. No continuous and stable Cartesian fully autonomous and moral subject but more than an illusion of whatever origin. Something messy in between, something that at times is in some shifting unclear shape there, but then often isn't. Many dualities of Western thought, zeroes and ones, trues and falses are fundamentally quite strange, misleading.
The Trial of God
:snicker:
Agreed, friend. Who wants to be a product of filthy, base matter and energy when one can be a pure shining intellect floating in the void with other pure, shining intellects?
Unfortunately, I think I got one of those defective minds - try as I might, I can't will myself to win the lottery. Or meet Swedish lingerie models.
Can't do that in dreams either. You're fully capable of constructing a world and inhabiting it, following it's rules as you go.
That's what games are, fiction, dreams, possibly real life as well.
What? You mean imagine things? Do tell me more!
I live near one of the recent mass shootings we enjoy here in the great US of A. It's funny how stuff you never imagined or dreamed has a way of intruding on your life.
How do you know you didn't dream it?
:up:
Idealism assumes a kind of theater, that instead of observing a material world we are observing our own minds. All experience of the world is indirect for idealism. But we can watch others directly interact with things, and so need not assume that this is untrue of ourselves.
We directly interact with the world. There is no veil or space between a man and the rest of the world, and therefor no place to project and observe the contents of our minds. So rather then shedding doubt on a material world, experience confirms it. We can directly witness the coming and going of people and confirm that the world is largely unaffected by it, and therefor is independent.
This is a good point, but it seems compatible with indirect realism. We understand that a blind man lacks an aspect of reality of the non-blind. We can then imagine (vaguely!) an extraterrestrial with more sense organs, experiencing an aspect of reality closed to humans. Or our scientists can make a case for objects too tiny or fast for us see. So it's hard to shake the vision of some imperfect mediator between us and 'stuff in itself' (though this dualism is not without problems.)
Im reminded of two opposing reading of the later Wittgenstein. The first has been put forth by Pete Hacker, along with Gordon Baker , who later jumped ship and embraced the second reading. Also in this first camp are many of the Oxford school Wittgensteinians(, Malcolm, Ryle, Strawson and Mounce).
Among adherents of the second reading are Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben.
The first reading is I think broadly consistent with your indirect realism, in that it wants to protect the idea of a material or formal substrate that to some extent can protect itself from contextual change such as to be able to exert a specific influence on the present context from a position in memory, history or the world at least partially independent of the immediate context of the now.
As Phil Hutchinson argues against Hacker:
“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non occasion-sensitive) reference points?”
“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”
I'm sympathetic to those points, and I'm not even terribly attached to indirect realism. But I don't currently see how the vague notion of a substrate is not more plausible, with all its problems, than some of its competitors.
Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns.
As I’m sure you will agree, there are central ethical implications to how we understand the relation between identity and difference. Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world.
What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique.
Please explain what that intimate relationship is and why traditional philosophies do not have that.
I really don't get this point - where does it arise from? Could you maybe clarify a bit? A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity.
I agree. But it's 'tautologically' rational to fear a descent into irrationality. Of course Peterson, for instance, becomes the thing he fears.
Quoting Joshs
It's a reasonable claim. And I understand that to be related to the non-intellectual version of Derrida (watered down to the limitations or cruelty of binary thinking, etc.) I'm not denying that this simple ethical point has force. But your point only has force if it's true. Or accepted as true. Taken to extremes, your point would object to anything at all actually being the case. A determinate reality would itself, in that determinateness, be perceived as violent. And perhaps there is 'violence' in all institution, but it's a necessary violence (ameliorated, we hope, with Progress (John Gray barfs)). A community without norms does not make sense. Someone, in retrospect, after norms have changed, will be portrayable as the victim of those former less developed and less correct norms. And we will have Van Gogh and Nietzsche and other posthumous superstars.
One example of this is the critique of the privileging of phonetic script as ethnocentric, maybe a bit racist. The white man is closer to the breath of God, his own breath, and not lost in a maze of hieroglyphs, cut off from the (invisible) real thing.
The more solid, substantial and permanent you make your irreducible contents, the more polarizing and violent becomes the relations between these contents. This is fine for people who believe in good and evil or a correspondence theory of truth. Their moral thinking is this violent and polarizing sort, moral and empirical truth as the forcing of conformity to an arbitrary content.
But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation.
Think about Hume’s model of associative synthesis. Correct me if I’m wrong , but like the behavioral
models in psychology that borrowed from it, it determines the conditions under which two events become associated with each in our mind in terms of temporal and spatial contiguity , etc. These are external criteria of association. Husserl offered instead an intentional model
of associative synthesis, which is internalistic.
“The old concepts of association and of laws of association, though they too have usually been related to the coherencies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.
It is phenomenologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche".”(Husserl)
For Hume, there is no necessity to association. Objects and events do not have continuity.
I don't know. I guess I will have to remain unconvinced - and I very early rebelled against the modern concept of identity, some weird, arbitrary cage for being. But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power.
The question is , how do things become associated ? What is the ‘glue’ that binds them?
No glue. What gave Kant hysterics.
FWIW, most of the political rants you hear about accusing some entity or other of wielding their power and privilege is not postmodern but Marxist or neo-Marxist. Postmodernists like Foucault dont see groups as having or holding onto power. That is a modernist notion, and the insufferable finger-pointing moralisms go along with this kind of thinking. The postmodern philosophers are not moralists. For them power is not a thing , not anything we can posses. It is more like the differential elements of a value system that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange.
How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.
Convention.
Can you give some examples?
That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne.
I’m a firm believer in two things:
1) Constructive alternativism:
There are an infinite number of ways we can organize our understanding of our world. We discover that some work better than others , but not because they conform to some independent way thing ‘really are’ out there.
2) Over time , by repeatedly trying on differently frameworks of understanding, we will be able to construct systems that allow the social and other events of the world to appear to us in more and more intricately interconnected and harmonious ways. This is not our conforming to the way things ‘really, really’ are in the sense of having to adapt ourselves to some undeniable set of facts.
If ‘reason, logic and empiricism’ mean such conformity of reason to an arbitrary content , then that is a dangerous way of thinking that ends up blaming others for our failure to recognize the prison that ‘reason’ can create when it doesn’t recognize its dependence on a subjective worldview. Calling scientific worldviews ‘subjective’ doesn’t mean we can’t attain that ultimate harmonious understanding of each other. On the contrary, recognizing the intricate interplay between subjective interpretation and the world is the only effective avenue to that goal.
In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views?
It is not situated in it's maker organic; it's non-physical but a physical sensation is present.
The universe has no weight, weight is a feeling.
What's physical is more rhythmic than matter, matter is a logical illusion.
We make our experiences; like a child, we push out of the mother, into the world.
What's external is linked to us directly, not separate, like a continued womb.
Child birth is a process of inauguration into int and ext system, and not a bipartisan int into ext system.
What ties together this sequence of discrete images in my mind such that , for the sake of convenience, I can idealize it as a continuous movement? After all, I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other. Also, it is true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?
Right, an act of the imagination as a "fiction."
Quoting Jackson
I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other.So what about this particular series of images allows me this fiction? Also, is it true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?
[
Seems to me standard physics.
yes, it is standard physics , but it ignores the fact that these images that forms sequence are. or neural bits of data, they appear to us and qualitatively differing unfoldings. Hume is consistent with a standard physical account of the measurement of motion. Phenomenological and postmodern accounts are not, because they see not just quantitative shifts from
image to image but qualitative. Bergson was among the first to recognize this with his concept of lived duration.
I don't see this as an objection to Hume.
I will answer more thoughtfully later. But, no, I'm not really interested how my rational views might be similar to fascism - I'm sure they at least partially are as they are specifically anti-fascist, so to some degree probably mirroring various stuff. I just don't see any ideal situation in history, in our human society with our animal impulses where we would sit around in ironic, sceptical friendship, lions and sheep alike, deconstructing hegemonic power structures, hand in hand. I don't know if you will accept this observation but our human history seems to stubbornly avoid such ideal situations being slaughter and exploitation instead.
Indeed, it doesn’t actually refute materialism. It only makes idealism more intuitive by making the existence of a mind the only 100% sure fact. If the only thing you can be sure of is that there is mind, would it not make more sense to posit that all the world is made of that ? This line of reasoning seems to be about simplicity. A is more probable than A&B. The entire world being made of mind (which is the only sure thing) is more likely than there being mind and matter at the same time. At least according to this argument.
You might object by saying that the entire world being made of matter only too is just as likely. But then again remember that the only sure thing is mind, and so that the existence of matter is less likely than the existence of mind.
I’m gonna hold back from commenting on this for now as I don’t have much quantum physics knowledge.
I 100% agree. But I don’t understand how this defends idealism from the argument I’ve presented.
I can’t help but resist the temptation to play the skeptic’s game and ask: How can we know that certain fossils come from dinosaurs? How can we know that the entire world to have started to exist 5 minutes ago and for those fossils to be objects created with it since the beginning?
It all hinges on the meaning of the word "external" as used in the OP question, doesn't it? External in what sense, external to what? And precisely how is it external to the what?
Is the material world external to consciousness in a space within consciousness created by consciousness, or is the material world external to consciousness in a space outside of consciousness not created by consciousness?
Are both alternatives possible, or only one alternative?
Because you seem to be confusing idealism with solipsism. Idealism isn't saying that the world exists in your personal conscious mind. It's a mental construction in a much deeper sense than that. Your mind is an instance of 'the human mind'.
Plato is exemplar. Ideas are the final reality.
Materialism is the claim that the fundemental constituents of reality are material (even though the concept of matter itself has become somewhat indefinite in 20[sup]th[/sup] century physics.)
The starting point for idealism is the fundamental nature of experience itself - that our knowledge of even the most apparently basic material objects is experiential in nature.
The opening lines of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea state the principle:
I think the difficulty in grasping it is that idealism requires a kind of perceptual shift - something which Schopenhauer has also stated in the Preface to his book. But is often interpreted to mean that in the absence of a mind, everything ceases to exist, which seems an obviously absurd proposition, and rejected on those grounds. (I had just such an exchange here last week.) The problem with that criticism is that it covertly adopts a perspective outside the observing mind, as if it can know what does or doesn't exist in the absence of that mind. But everything we know, including the most incontestable empirical facts and principles, is grounded in the knowing mind.
Philosophical naturalism generally tries to assume a perspective free of anything subjective. It aims to discern the nature of the object of analysis as it would be for any and all observers. From a methodological point of view, that is perfectly sound, but it is easily forgotten that the mind of the detached scientific observer is still, after all, a mind. 'But where is that "mind"?' will come the question. To which the answer is that it is never the object of cognition, nor is it amongst them (which is the basis of the so-called 'hard problem' argument). So to grasp that requires a kind of self-reflection, which your confident empiricist will usually dismiss as navel-gazing. (This is the subject of the OP found on my profile page 'The Blind Spot of Science'.)
That is why a gestalt shift is needed, which is what philosophical idealism has always consisted in and attempted to communicate.
Quoting Wayfarer
- is easy to see but more challenging to understand in the fullness of its implications. Even having read some Evan Thompson, it's a concept I often find slippery.
I'm not the least bit interested in the idealism vs materialism wars. Basically in very few of the famous conflicts that arose from the 17th century philosophy when Christianity collided with history. But often you get a sense of malleability from idealism - that if there is no "independent outside reality", then the world really should be your oyster and be humbler and more obedient in front of the all defining mind (or will). And also of course that natural science should maybe work less nicely and impressively in this ocean of subjectivity.
That last bit somehow reminds me of Dover Beach :)
... is not in any way opposed to...
Quoting Wayfarer
One talks about the constituents of that which causes our mental experiences, the other about how we come to know of it. Two different questions entirely.
Quoting Wayfarer
Is it? Can you provide an example from philosophical naturalism where this is 'forgotten'?
Quoting Wayfarer
Again. The former question is asking about the mind's physical location, the latter about how (and whether) we might ever come to know that. Two different questions. It's perfectly possible (though I don't personally believe so) that the seat of 'the mind' might just be some little cluster of neurons somewhere but we'd never ever be able to know that because we could not ever grasp the evidence showing it to be so. What things are and how we come to know them are two different things.
Quoting Wayfarer
How so? Can you give an example of having 'grasped' it, and explain how it is you come to know they've 'grasped' it? If empirical analysis is apparently shackled by the limits of the mind examining itself, then how is non-empirical analysis any less shackled? Does non-empirical analysis take place somewhere other than the mind?
Ontological and epistemological, respectively - but they're not entirely different. The gist of it is that materialism claims that matter, or matter-energy, or whatever it turns out to be, has a kind of mind-independent or inherent reality which is the source or ground of everything that we see and know, whereas idealism stresses the primacy of mind or experience.
That is the subject of the article I mentioned above - the 'blind spot of science' - which criticizes...
Sorry for the lengthy quote, but it explains it in the most succint terms I'm aware of.
Quoting Isaac
Daniel Dennett's form of 'eliminative materialism', for example:
[quote=Daniel Dennett, Whose on First?; 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 science? 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]
Whereas Dennett's critics claim that there's no way to reproduce the reality of first-person experience in third-person terms. That is the basic argument behind Chalmer's 'Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness'.
Quoting Isaac
It has different standards of evidence. Empiricism only considers what can be objectively validated in a third-person sense. Take for example empirical studies of mindfulness meditation, of which there have been many. Such studies will attempt to validate or measure the relationship between such practices and objective reports of symptoms or effects in subjects, generally with a sufficiently large number of subjects to generate a large data set. But that kind of analysis is different to the first-person practice of mindfulness meditation.
The broader point is that self-awareness of the kind that is the subject of (say) Husserl's epoché is of a different order to any form of objective study.
But there's no 'whereas' there. There's nothing contrary about claiming the 'primacy' of the mind over the 'independence' of the source of what we know. Primacy and dependence are, again, two different properties.
If materialism claims matter has a mind-independent reality, then the opposing claim is that matter has no mind-independent reality. Anything less is simply an additional claim, not an opposing one. One might be a staunch materialist and still believe in the primacy of mind or experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right. But in neither case is it 'forgotten' that the mind of this 'third-person' is a mind. The debate is over whether one mind can adequately describe another. Nothing there forgets minds are involved.
Quoting Wayfarer
It does. But how are you linking standards of evidence to the ability of a mind to comprehend itself? Your objection to Dennett wasn't with his standard of evidence, it was with the impossibility of reproducing the first-person experience from a third party perspective. That impossibility applies to any conclusions Husserl might reach as it does conclusions a neuroscientist might reach, standards of evidence notwithstanding.
But what is dependency dependent upon, if not the primary? They’re defined in relation to each other.
Quoting Isaac
I don't think so. They're contradictory views. 'Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or reducible to them'.
Quoting Isaac
I don't know about that, either. Dennett's eliminative materialism holds that the understanding of the mind as an intentional agent is mistaken. Of course he can't claim that the mind simply doesn't exist, but he does claim it can be wholly understood in terms of unconscious neural processes, something which he calls 'unconscious competence'.
Quoting Isaac
Self-knowledge, having insight into your own mind, is not a matter for empirical research. What are the standards of evidence when you have a cathartic insight into your own behaviour or character? You can't necessarily prove its validity to anyone else, although others might notice a change about you, but that wouldn't make it any less real.
'Primary' as in most fundamental is a different meaning to 'primary' as in most important. We're talking here about the causes of our mental events. Materialism is saying that those causes are material. Unless idealism is saying that those causes are not material, then it is not saying anything incompatible with materialism. One might well be of the opinion that we cannot directly 'know' those causes. One might be of the opinion that those causes are completely irrelevant and that the only subject is our mental representations. Neither of those two positions are about what those causes are, hence neither are incompatible with materialism.
Quoting Wayfarer
How does what they are causally dependant on, or what they reduce to have any bearing on how fundamental or important they are? My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is.
Quoting Wayfarer
Uh huh. So a claim against Dennett would require that the mind cannot ever be understood in terms of neural processes. Again, this seems to be a claim about epistemology, not ontology. What causes mental events is distinct from whether we can ever relate those causes to their effects.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly.
Contrary to the image you may have of me, I have no issue with the limits of empirical research in explaining human mental events. What I take issue with is the idea that some other form of enquiry would do any better.
Not just the magnitude of her importance to you, but the qualitative changes in her importance, how and whether she is relevant or irrelevant to you, is closely tied to the motivational model you understand her behavior through. You don’t just understand her at the reductive level of neural or molecular interaction in causal terms. You also understand her molar behavior in such terms(social and bodily influences). Objectively causal materialist models are rife in current social
psychologically we literature, such as ‘cognitive bias’ and Jonathan Haidt’s empirical analysis of moral thought.
There are of course alternatives to neo-Kantian approaches to motivation that don’t require a return to traditional metaphysics.
For instance , if your wife develops depression do you recommend a cognitive therapist who will help her to change her ‘unrealistic’ thinking, a classic Freudian who would examine her adjustment to the ‘real world’, or would you choose a client-centered therapist who would encourage her potential to create new realities?
Indeed. What I'm trying to unpick is why the claim that the causes of our mental events are material must have any bearing whatsoever on how we treat that causal relationship epistemologically. We could be thoroughgoing materialists about the causes of mental events yet believe anything about their epistemology from a belief in complete one-to-one reductionism to a belief that the whole thing will remain a complete mystery forever.
Personally, I don't think we'll ever have a one-to-one model of how matter causes mental events. I think the relationship is too complex and probably varies between individuals. None of that perennial uncertainty causes me to doubt that material physics directly causes all mental events. It just means we'll just never know the exact nature of that relationship.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure where this line of questioning is going, but for furtherance, I'm a proponent of person-centred therapy, yes.
Idealism, as I interpret it, is definitely saying that. To say that the cause of mental events - the cause of thought or of a chain of reasoned inference - can be understood in molecular terms, undermines the efficacy of reason. Why? When you say you believe something because of some reason, you're not pointing to a physical, causal chain, but to a rational inference based on 'if-then' statements.
To quote an analysis by a current philosopher 'The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts (e.g. by describing them in terms of molecular properties) one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions (or neurophysical activities), however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere.'
Quoting Isaac
I submit your wife (and you, and I, and everyone else) are constituted by intentional acts. Living creatures are intentional from the outset. The problem is, if you say that what the mind is nothing but the activities of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses, then you're excluding intentionality from the picture as a matter of course - which is very much the point at issue in this whole debate.
Quoting Isaac
I don't have an image of you but I notice that your arguments generally assume a kind of positivist attitude. Please don't take that as an ad hominem or a pejorative, this is a philosophy forum, and here we're discussing philosophical ideas. Your attitude, which is generally positivist and presumptively materialist ('presumptively' because you regard other kinds of explanations as speculative and unprovable, as you say in your own words) is characteristic of a lot of people. And I appreciate your line of questioning, as it has really made me think about my arguments, but I stand by them.
I agree. But you've switched again from saying mental events are caused by physical matter to saying mental events can be understood that way. It's perfectly possible to believe that mental events are caused entirely by physical matter and yet also believe that they will never be understood that way. This is, in fact, my personal position.
Quoting Wayfarer
If I were to claim "It is true that my thoughts are just neural states" then I agree with the analysis. I cannot say such a thing without recursion because the means by which I've determined it to be true must itself be nothing but a set of neural states and there's no reason to believe they yield 'truth'. In fact, the very concept of 'truth' would be meaningless since a 'true' state of affairs would just be a state of affairs which elicited a particular neural state (the state of something seeming to be true).
But his recursion affects reason no less. If I say that my thoughts are just logical relations, I must have used a logical relation to arrive at that conclusion and it is the logical relation of facts which lead me to believe it is true. But if 'truth' is just those facts which seem to result from a logical relation, then I've no ground on which to claim that logical relations lead to truth. The argument is no less self-immunised.
Whatever model we have of 'what thoughts really are' it will itself be a thought. Doesn't matter what the model is. Recursion is built in.
When I test perception, I look at the difference between maybe some illusion I've set up and the image the subject reports, but I'm acutely aware that if I'm using an experiment to determine that perception is flawed, then I must accept the inherent problem that I'm using my perception to determine the results. Yet we know perception is flawed. Illusions exist. We can resolve that recursion quite adequately for our needs by coming to a collective decision about what is real (and hence what is an illusion).
Likewise with thought. I cannot use my own thought alone to determine the nature of thought, but collectively we can come to an agreement about what thought is sufficient to identify when something isn't one. That agreement might be 'logical relation', or it might be 'neural state'. It doesn't matter, as long as we agree for our purposes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why? Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else?
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, yes. I've yet to be presented with a meas of proving them that works. It's not that I hold empirical proof as being fundamentally better, there's no metaphysical property that empirical proof possess that makes them better. It's just that they work. When I show you an empirical proof, you take it to be proof, you agree. As does virtually everyone. They work as proofs only because they convince people. No other reason. Non-empirical 'proofs' do not work. You show them to me and I am unconvinced. Others are also unconvinced. They don't work.
So how is a causal explanation that can't be understood anything other than an article of faith? 'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' It's like a Catholic talking about transubstantiation. ;-)
(Although perhaps this view is similar to mysterians, who claim that 'although we know that the conscious mind is nothing more than the brain, it is simply beyond the conceptual apparatus of human beings to understand how this can be the case.')
Quoting Isaac
:up:
Quoting Isaac
But notice the sleight-of-hand. The reason that describing thought as neural states robs it of explanatory power, is because in doing so you are appealing to something other than logic. You're implicitly appealing to a physical (in this case neurophysiological) cause. But the reason this particular appeal is recursive, is because it is attempting to explain the very faculty which is itself the source of explanations, namely, reasoned inference. The theorist has to appeal to reason to establish the axiom that 'thought is a neurological product' - but in so doing she must always be using the very faculty which she is proposing to explain. Hence the circularity. But it doesn't follow that reason itself is subject to the same criticism because reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims.
Quoting Isaac
Using reason.
Quoting Isaac
For the reasons we have been discussing.
Quoting Isaac
Except for all the thousands of issues for which there is a range of different interpretations, huge controversies raging, threatened paradigms, etc etc.
Yes. That's right. It's just a model I find most convincing, that's all. Just like Catholics and God.
Quoting Wayfarer
That sounds to me like it exactly following. Saying that "reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims" is something you have derived by reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't picked up on any. What exactly prevents the feeling we call 'intending' being made from neural activity?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but those are disagreements in science. Science and empirical proofs are not the same thing. Science uses empirical proofs, but it also uses a huge dose of reasoning, metaphysical assumptions, speculation... It's generally those over which people disagree. I very rarely find if I say "the scan shows activity in the left ventral region" someone looking at the same scan will say "no it doesn't". If we disagree, it will be on my theoretical assumptions, not the actual evidence they make use of.
Just wanted to add some clarity to my earlier response to this.
If we were speculating as to the contents of a sealed box, it's right to say that we can't possibly know what's in it. I claim it's a rock "there used to be a rock on the same table this box is on, the box is about the right size...". We still can't know.
If you say "I think the box contains a unicorn", that doesn't become an equally acceptable theory just because we can't know what's in the box.
I think we agree on this much.
So all I'm saying is that the materialist model of mental activity is of the former category of theory. It's a perfectly reasonable theory, it just can't ever be shown to be the case because we must rely on that very mental activity to process any evidence we might produce. We can't escape that particular recursion, so we can't 'look in the box'. But the fact that we can't provide proofs doesn't preclude its reasonableness as a model. Nor, most importantly, does it raise any alternative model to a more reasonable status.
That's a nice piece of writing and reasoning. I sometimes wonder if idealism's great strength is its ineffability and its contrast to the materialist model which has atrophied over time and is rather easily undermined by philosophers.
There’s a certain duplicity here, coming from someone who makes constant appeals to empiricism.
Again, appeals to empiricism are perfectly warranted. It's a very convincing form of evidence. Evidence and theory are, however, two very different things. The materialist model is a theory. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the acceptability or otherwise of certain types of evidence.
If someone says "I can walk through walls" I can guarantee you the first response of 99.99% of the planet will be "show me!". It will not be "does it phenomenologically seem that way to you?"
Proofs are all about convincing, nothing more. Empirical evidence is very convincing.
It seems to me that the most common argument for various forms of idealism goes something like "materialism is flawed, therefore this..."
The flaws in materialism are not, however, evidence in favour of any old alternative.
But you've already agreed in respect of the issue at hand that there can be no evidence for materialist theories of mind:
Quoting Isaac
I don't believe I said anything about a lack of evidence, only a lack of proof, the evidence does not compel us to choose. What we take to be evidence is about what, for us, is convincing. There is empirical evidence for materialism. The failure to yet discover any mechanism other than those of materialism is one.
But that aside, your comment seemed to pertain to empirical claims in general...
Quoting Wayfarer
I answered in kind. Claims to empiricism are entirely appropriate, empirical evidence is good, convincing evidence. It should be appealed to as often as possible. The fact that some questions lack sufficient empirical evidence to answer them does nothing to undermine the usefulness of empirical evidence where it exists.
Isn't materialism what empiricism is defined by?
I don't think so. The SEP gives us...
So experience, not necessarily matter, defines empiricism. That we experience matter (ie all of our experiences thus far are directly attributable to matter) is empirical evidence for materialism. If we had experiences that were unaffected by matter (I experience a nice day out despite having had my brain completely removed and being locked in a windowless box) then we'd have direct empirical evidence against materialism.
We don't experience matter. I do not even know what that means.
That's a question to discuss for another time I believe.
So, If I understand well, idealism is the view that the nature of reality as we know it is all grounded in the human mind ?
Indeed. And I think it can be supported with reference to science.
According to evolutionary biology, H. Sapiens evolved through tens or hundreds of millions of years. Through this process our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and finally hominid - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the capabilities that we have today.
Cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of millions of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of rational thought (and beyond, although that is beyond the scope of natural science.)
Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is dependent upon the constructive activities of the mind the bulk of which are completely unknown to us (as demonstrated by Kant in his famous Critiques).
When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will recall its name, and know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc. These are gestalts, organised conceptual wholes, which the mind synthesises from sense data through the process of apperception.)
In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them - the fabled 'tabula rasa' or blank slate of the British empiricists. Instead, consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality - partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on. And in the case of h. sapiens, also through the faculty of reason, which exists in only rudimentary form in other species, as well as through intuition, which together provide the unique ability of self-awareness, by which the being can become aware of the way in which the mind creates its world, which is one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism.
This is why I believe that a thoroughly scientifically-aware form of idealism is the philosophy of the future. Materialism in its classical sense - the idea that the Universe consists of inanimate lumps of matter and undirected energy which somehow give rise to life - will be consigned to history.
I think one of the more elusive elements of idealism is dealing with the subject of universal consciousness or Will (as Schopenhauer would have it).
This account implies a relational basis for the basic organizing processes of life, but it doesn’t necessarily support a subject-based and consciousness-based relationality. One could just as easily argue that outside of consciousness and subjectivity are fundamental relational processes that transcend materialism at the same time that they transcend subjective consciousness.
When the family got together and made a Lego model on a cold wet day last week, we constructed it from lego. When I built a small garden out the back, I constructed it from rocks, soil, seeds and cow shit.
When one's mind constructs reality, what is it it constructs it from?
I'm interested in what motivates idealism. Berkely hoped to prove the existence of God via idealism. I think the contemporary idealist wants to prove that they themselves are God.
The idealist sees his or her mind as fundamental to reality. Nothing is greater than their own mind.
The physicalist sees his or her mind as just one of many products of a greater reality. They know that if all human minds cease to exist tomorrow, the Earth will go on circling the Sun.
It's the difference between hubris and humility.
It's just possible that your mind is not the pinnacle of creation. Maybe subjective experience is actually the result of your brain's limitations! Limitations imposed by our faulty means of interfacing with external reality (i.e, the senses), and limitations imposed by our faulty cognitive abilities. Subjective experience is just our brains trying to make sense of it all. On the scale of paramecium to omniscience, we're much closer to the paramecium.
Actually, this seems in keeping with your thoughts :
Quoting Wayfarer
I.e., doing the best it can given it's limitations.
Mature idealism speaks in terms of 'mind'. Not 'my mind' or 'your mind'. Take a look at this blog. The author name is Peter Saas, I know nothing about him except what's on his blog, but he seems to know an awful lot of stuff - far more than myself. He has a panoramic view of the whole subject drawn from ancient, modern, and Eastern sources. A snippet:
---
Quoting Real Gone Cat
We know what a paramecium is, but a paramecium has zero concept of what we are.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
That's the exact opposite of the reality of the situation. The physicalist takes her own meagre sense-knowledge - 'science' - as the gold standard for what can be judged to be real. Because post-Enlightenment science is completely extroverted and 'objectified', it has no comprehension of the role of the observing mind in the constitution of science itself - at least, it didn't, until quantum physics came along and punched it in the nose. That's why a lot of modern physicists since James Jeans and Arthur Eddington have displayed an idealist streak in their popular writings. Everyone knows 'scientific materialism', but there is also such a thing as 'scientific idealism' - see Reality is just a State of Mind, Bernard D'Espagnat.
Sure, all that. Whence the data that the senses are processing? Where does the data originate?
Now all you have to do is dump Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conception of the Will in favor of Nietzsche’s:
“There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object.”(BGE)
It's true that idealism is not solipsism. This was the basis of Kant's critique of Berkeley. Probably a bit too technical to go into.
Sorry but I detest Nietszche. I know I don't understand him well but nothing I've seen makes me want to understand him any better.
N is here agreeing with Kant.
What exactly do you object to?
Pathetic.
You ignore my line of argument that idealism (as you present it) doesn't oppose materialism, then you respond to @Banno making much the same point with a hand-waiving "too technical". It's not 'too technical' at all.
The materialist answer is "material matter". The brain constructs it's reality out of the material universe. Meaning that matter is the cause of all mental events.
Your answer is ....? "it's too technical"?
Quoting Wayfarer
Go on then. Reference a single paper in neuroscience which has sensory neurons triggered by anything other than physical forces.
That's not what I asked. We can identify the following variation in idealism, according to SEP:
Quoting SEP
I'm wondering which you advocate. I gather it is not the first. Is that correct?
I'll have another attempt at answering your question:
Quoting Banno
I understand that humans are sentient beings situated in the world, and that sense data originate with objects (and other subjects) in that world. But to refer back to one of the earlier passages, 'Raw sensations do not yet give us experiences of objects. The sensations have to be ordered by our forms of sensory intuition (space and time) and our forms of conceptual understanding (the categories, prime among which is causality); only then do we experience a single, ordered, integrated reality consisting of interconnected objects.' That is very similar in content to the paragraph following your quoted passages in the SEP article.
So it is that ordering and categorising which creates the life-world which is the world in which we dwell, which is synthesised by the observing mind, comprising sensory data combined with the structures of conceptual understanding (and much else besides, language, culture, and so on).
I think I understand the intuitive objection to that, which is the strong sense we have of the distinction between what is 'inside' and what is 'external' to us, and that what is external is real, while what is internal is 'only' subjective. The question is, where does that division exist? To which I would respond, that is also internal to the observing mind, it is one of the fundamental parameters of being conscious where it appears as the distinction between self and other, and self and world. (That is something that is made much more explicit in some forms of Buddhist philosophy but note also the resemblance to the idea of the 'epistemic cut' which comes up in quite a few of Apokrisis' discussions.
By the way, the topic I said was too complex, was Kant's criticism of Berkeley's idealism which can be found here.)
Hope that is helpful.
:up:
So your idealism is not incompatible with materialism then. You could have just said so right at the beginning.
I engaged in good faith in a perfectly reasonable line of enquiry in our earlier conversation which you ignored. To me, ignoring someone who is engaged in a perfectly reasonable conversation is a far greater insult than a bit of robust language. My colleagues and I often exchange some robust language, yet I wouldn't dream of just walking out of the room and ignoring them. We each have our own notion of civility I suppose...
Quoting Wayfarer
Right. A completely different subject then. You seem to draw in this notion of the mind affecting matter without either reference or forward. We were talking about the cause of mental events (matter affecting minds). If you have an argument for mind affecting matter, I'd be fascinated to hear it.
Does a star weigh X, or, does a star project weight X as sensation?
The vex. An illusion of different centres.
Deleuze argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is a result of thinking Will as representation and illusion.
For Schopenhauer, “ the essence of the will puts us into an unlivable, untenable and deceptive situation.
And this is easily explained: making the will a will to power in the sense of a "desire to dominate", philosophers see this desire as infmite; making power an object of representation they see the unreal character of a thing represented in this way; engaging the will to power in combat they see the contradiction in the will itself.
Schopenhauer does not inaugurate a new philosophy of the will in any of these respects. On the contrary, his genius consists in drawing out the extreme consequ-ences of the old philosophy, in pushing the old philosophy as far as it can go.
By making will the essence of the world Schopenhauer continues to understand the world as an illusion, an appearance, a representation (BGE ) Limiting the will is therefore not going to be enough for Schopenhauer. The will must be denied, it must deny itself.
According to Nietzsche the philosophy of the will must replace the old metaphysics: it destroys and supersedes it. Nietzsche thinks that he produced the first philosophy of the will, that all the others were the final avatars of metaphysics.“
No, in WWR, he pictures Will as the thing-in-itself.
I don't understand that quote from Deleuze.
Quoting Joshs
His Will is what moves everything. Your body is how you represent it.
Quoting Joshs
Schopenhauer was a hard determinist, so there's no denying the Will in that sense.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think you understood Schopenhauer. Go back and get the vibe of it. Then come back and examine N.
Are you saying that Deleuze did not understand Schopenhauer?
Quoting Tate
What assumptions must be made about the nature of the will in order to argue that it must be denied in a Buddhist-like pose of nothingness? How can a hard determinism lead to that conclusion, and does hard determinism not presuppose metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the real?
I’m not quite sure of what to think of the last sentence. The way I see it, the fact that science, which assumes materialism, has itself proved that the world as we experience it is a mental construction, does seem to deal quite a blow to materialism.
But at the same time, I don’t think materialism as you defined it will ever be consigned to history. We can’t perceive the world without or mental processes getting in the way, so we can’t ever truly know what the universe is made of. Best we can do is use sensory data, which is an imperfect source of knowledge, but still the best source of knowledge about the universe. So I think materialism could instead be viewed as the best explanation for the different patterns in the human experience. Not a description of the world, but an explanation based off our experience of it.
I'm saying Deleuze wouldn't know Schopenhauer if he was bitten in the ass by him. Actually, I don't know anything about Deleuze. He may have dwelt profoundly with S the way N did.
Quoting Joshs
Beats me. What do you think?
Quoting Joshs
It's about the ways we're bound to think. Discussions of the real get tossed to Kant.
Don’t confuse science and materialism. Science assumes materialism for practical reasons, it’s when it becomes a philosophical ideology that it is problematical. There are many scientists who don’t hold to it.
That's one line I would follow: that 's comments are true of realism. It does not look to be an account of idealism, which has at its core the notion that mind is intrinsic to reality.
It is apparent that one cannot know about how things are without having a mind. Any idealism worthy of the name goes further, insisting that there cannot even be a way that things are without mind. Mind is somehow intrinsic to reality.
The clearest way to understand this difference is in terms of truth. A realist will claim that there are truths that are not known.
An idealist will claim that there cannot be unknown truths.
So let's take an example. Is there a teapot in orbit around Jupiter (an example from Russell)? We cannot be certain if there is or is not such a teapot. It seems unlikely, but we have not yet inspected every item in orbit around Jupiter.
A realist will say that nevertheless the statement "there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter" is either true, or it is false.
An idealist will say that the statement "there is a teapot in orbit around Jupiter" is neither true nor false until some mind has made a determination.
Effectively, a realist differentiates between belief and truth, claiming that we can believe or disbelieve in a Jovian teapot, but that this is an entirely seperate issue to there being a Jovian teapot. An idealist will say that the very truth or falsity of there being a Jovian teapot is dependent on a mind variously believing, knowing, perceiving or more generally standing in some relation to that teapot.
This way of analysing the distinction came about towards the end of last century when idealists started to call themselves anti-realists. Anti-realism was characterised by Dummett as the view that all truths are knowable, or verifiable. The view falls victim to Fitch's paradox, resulting in anti-realism resorting to paraconsistent logics.
It is worth noting, again, that only a very small minority of professional philosophers call themselves idealists. Realism is overwhelmingly accepted by those who have considered the issue. Put simply, most philosophers hold that there are unknown truths.
An idealist might just as easily say that it's a meaningless statement, a trifling hypothetical that's not worth debating.
Quoting Banno
This is true, and I think it's also why h. sapiens are designated 'beings'. But it's important to grasp that in saying that, you're not necessarily positing mind as an objective constituent of reality, in the sense that atoms or quantum fields might be.
Quoting Banno
That's a novel line of argument, I've never encountered that before.
The fact that not many philosophers currently endorse idealism may be nothing other than an indication of the current stagnation of the subject of philosophy in the academy. Before about the first world war, idealism in various forms was the dominant school of philosophy.
What seems odd to me is that I entirely agree with what you have said above, and yet I would, casually, count myself as a realist.
Quoting Wayfarer
I hope it is clear from our previous discussions that this is not an intuition I share. I've argued for several years that the mooted distinction between an internal and an external world is misguided. This very discussion between us has a long history.
Hence,
Quoting Banno
I don't think idealism is opposed to realism. I think it's opposed to the notion of the 'mind-independent reality of the objects of the physical sciences.' Materialism is just the belief that the objects of the physical sciences have an intrinsic or inherent reality, independent of your or my or anyone else's observation of them, and the corollary that the mind is the product or output of those essentially unconcious and undirected material entities, as expressed by Daniel Dennett thus:
[quote=Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life ]Love it or hate it, phenomena like this [i.e. organic molecules] exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.[/quote]
A humourless realist might concur. We might revert to the ubiquitous cup-in-the-cupboard argument, if you prefer; or the chairs at the end of the universe - remember that? Or whether there were dinosaurs. Or whether Everest was 8,849m tall before it was measured. The point is the characterisation that a realist will say there are things that are true yet not known, while an idealist will deny this. Quoting Wayfarer
I do not think mind is intrinsic to reality. It is obvious that we can posit a possible world without a mind. I think that it is the case that mind is intrinsic to our believing, and hence to our knowing, about reality. But that is not the same. Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, you have. I've made the point before, in threads in which you have participated.
Quoting Wayfarer
And was decimated by the criticisms of Russell and Moore, before the very distinction itself was dismissed by Wittgenstein, only to be reanimated by the interest in alternative logics. Yes, I agree the statistics are not a good argument in themselves, but given that less than 5% of philosophers count themselves as idealist, one might at least conclude that there are reasonable arguments against idealism. I don't think a conspiracy of anti-idealist sentiment will cut it.
And the reason I think it's fundamental is because it is the very condition of individual existence - even of the existence of the very simplest lifeforms. The very most basic thing that any life form has, is a sense of itself in the environment - the ability to avoid harm, seek nourishment, find conditions suitable for growth and so on. These capacities have been observed in even single-celled organisms. And in developmental psychology, one of the primary divisions that is formed in early infanthood is the ability to differentiate the self from the world, a sense which is almost entirely absent in newborns.
The net result of all of this is that the sense of self and other, mine and not mine, what is internal to me and what is in the world, is very deeply rooted in the psyche (or soul). It's a fundamental condition of existence. And my intuition is, that this is also fundamental to the Gordian knot that a transcendental philosophy has to untie. It's a deep and difficult topic and one rarely encountered in today's philosophy.
Quoting Banno
It's not a conspiracy so much as a cultural artefact. I enrolled in formal philosophy, as you know, under David Stove and others - they told me philosophy, as it is now taught and understood, is not what interests me. Which is true! And that's because it's become an academic parlour game, a technical subject of specialists who talk mainly to themselves. I have no time for many of the 20th c analytical philosophers, if I thought that constituted philosophy I'd have no interest in the subject.
I'm with Pierre Hadot and Lloyd Gerson, and the others of that ilk, who say that modern analytic philosophy radically departs from the real concerns of philosophy. I'm gradually getting through Gerson's last, Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy.'Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world, and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism.' And the reason for all this is that philosophy has a spiritual facet - it's not the same as religion, but shares a common border, if you like. And because of secular culture's fear of religion, it can't be tolerated.
The characterisation I presented above is I think fairly standard at present - happy to be show to be wrong. On that characterisation idealism is opposed to realism. The realist holds that there are unknown truths. The idealist denies this.
At stake is the relation between mind and world. Seems to me that you would juxtapose them, in order to defend against the hegemony of science, and so reject physicalist reductionism.
But mind is part of the world. It would be whole surprising if it could be shown that mind does not in some way emerge from the way the world is. @Isaac has on his own account invested much effort in working through this problem; he and his peers have made extraordinary progress. Ignoring their work would be self-defeating.
It would be misguided to deny before the fact that science has much to say about consciousness. More so if the reason for that denial is an attempt to maintain this or that view of spirituality.
Perhaps the divide should be placed not at materialism and idealism, but at direction of fit. Science can tell us how things are, but not how they ought be.
That is an entirely different discussion.
You seem to have:
That argument does not convince me. Allostasis does not imply consciousness. Jellyfish are allostatic but not conscious.
And all that.
I moved from science to philosophy when I found that science does not address and cannot answer the questions in which I was interested. Considerations in analytic philosophy showed me that these questions were either confusions of language or inherently unanswerable. No sooner is that "spiritual facet" introduced than it is diminished in being reduced to language.
Could you find a reference in support of that? I think that signifies a basic misunderstanding on your part although I'm willing to be corrected. (I think that you are mistaking idealism for solipsism in saying that.)
Quoting Banno
That anything is 'part of' something is a judgement, obviously. The mind is never known as an object of cognition, plainly. Otherwise you would never be able to entertain the argument about whether machines are sentient.
I'm currently midway through an interesting current title, Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter. It's not a philosophy text, although it has many philosophical implications (the author is an emeritus professor of mathematics). The subtitle is 'How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things', but it's based on neuroscience and maths, not philosophy per se. Pinter says 'my interest has turned to the specific problems involved in modeling structures arising in neuroscience. I am interested in perceptual mechanisms and especially the process of perceptual learning. I have worked on the theoretical aspects of training neural networks.' His theory is that the world as such has no features or objects as such, but that these are all projected onto it by the mind as a consequence of evolutionary development. All kinds of sentient beings see Gestalts, which are functional wholes, but there are no gestalts anywhere outside of perception:
"For complex objects, their Gestalt unity is a creation of the mind and is not an aspect of the underlying matter: Their global character is the way they appear to observers. Their wholeness rests on a material substrate but is not material—it exists only in perception."
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 123). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
He actually gets near to a form of dualism
'It may be concluded that there are two forms of existence: One is the purely material: Its properties are fully accounted for by the addition of simples. The other form of existence is the one given to observers. They perceive in Gestalt wholes, and see an entirely different world, rich and complex. The realm of compound wholes is just as real as the realm of simples, but it is not physical. It has the same material content as the physical world, but presents itself differently.'
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 125). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
'Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.'
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
(Managed to bring cups into it ;-) )
Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability might be the most accessible account. But I've run several threads on the topic, in which you have participated.
Devitt: Dumett's anti-realism
Realism (and antirealism)
Nothing to do with Dennett's
Yes, I understand that there are others who share your view.
I think they are misguided.
If you care to present their arguments, rather than just their conclusions, we could discuss them.
I think that your concern is that idealism rejects the possibility of uknown actual objects, on the grounds that if they are not being observed, then they can't be said to exist. Berkeley solves this problem by introducing God as the ultimate and eternal knower of things.
But I think the difficulty is based on the 'imagined non-existence' of the world - the belief that idealism is saying that if all observers were not to exist, then the universe also would not exist. It is rather like G E Moore's musing that, once all of the passengers are seated, the train wheels would cease to exist on account of them being invisible from the inside of the train.
It sounds like it follows, but again, the mistake is that all of what is understood as both existence and non-existence are themselves mental constructs. This is the point where Kant, Schopenhauer, and Buddhist philosophy all seems to converge. We can't see what would, or would not, exist, in the absence of a mind to make such judgements. But I think that is all for today, life away from the screen is making demands. Thanks for your challenging comments.
That's a shame, since the logic involved makes very clear the distinction. it might serve to bold any differences between our two positions.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've not that much of an interest in the metaphysical concerns that you hold central. I see the realism/idealism schism as a difference not in how the world is, but in what grammar we should choose to talk about the world. Those metaphysical concerns dissipate when viewed in this way.
By way of an example:
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, no, of course not, since seeing is done with a mind.
But nothing in that statement implies that there are not things outside one's mind. It is entirely possible that there are things unseen; in fact I am certain of it.
This is an example of the sort of overreach that seems to permeate idealist thinking, the false argument that one can't taste the oyster except with one's tongue, and hence one can never really taste the oyster...
It's Stove's Gem, again, this time with a twist of lemon.
It doesn't work.
Quoting Hello Human
"...we can’t ever truly know what the universe is made of."
Yet we do know what the universe is made of.
Right up until we read Zeno or Descartes. :wink:
You should take the time to read Jim Franklin's criticism of Stove's Gem.
The view I have only sounds trite because of the necessity of having to explain it in simple terms. The key term as I tried to explain previously is mind independence.
I have. I suspect I introduced it to you.
Quoting Wayfarer
Then go complex. Perhaps the wall of words will hide its sins better.
I found it through Google. Franklin acknowledges that there are some 'Gems' but pointedly excludes Kant from susceptibility. And he acknowledges that there is a genuine philosophical issue at the bottom of it, which I think he subtly suggest that Stove doesn't see.
Quoting Banno
There’s a mind entering this picture in the very act of positing it. Of course you can imagine a world with no mind in it, but that still relies on a perspective. It's the conceit of naturalism to think otherwise.
Quoting Banno
If there is to be a science of consciousness it has to take into account the first-person nature of the subject - which is exactly what phenomenology set out to do. (Oh that's right, phenomenology's on your no-go list.)
Franklin proposes three "How-to-get-out plans". Earlier in this thread I joined in the first.
Quoting Wayfarer
And the Gem here is that because one cannot imagine a possible world without a mind, without employing a mind, there can not be a possible world without a mind... :razz:
(I recall discussing Franklin's article with Gassendi, of loving memory. Were you involved then? Does this discussion go that far back?)
(I went hunting through my archives and came across:
But what answer do we get when we ask what that "first-person nature of the subject" is?
We are heading back to the beetle again, where phenomenology insists on talking about the ineffable. That's fine, so long as it doesn't claim to say anything about the ineffable.
That is the subject of 'facing up to the hard problem of consciousness'. You may think that insignificant, but it's one of the papers that got the whole modern philosophy of consciousness movement started. Probably not your cup of tea though.
Searle sometimes describes himself as doing phenomenology.
But the word "material", or even "physical", does not matter much, it's a terminological preference. What matters is whether there is an external world or not, this is irrespective of the terms used to describe the stuff of this world.
The external material world could be mind-generated i.e. it's akin to a (mass) hallucination or in other words it's an illusion.
The external material world could be mind-independent i.e. there exists a (material) world with a mind population = 0.
The external material world could be mind-dependent i.e. there doesn't exist a (material) world with a mind population = 0.
:snicker:
Interesting, oui?
That's a great summary, thanks. I was getting mired. What I was trying to draw out is that I could not see a way idealism, as @Wayfarer presented it, was in any way opposed to materialism (other than to sniff at it as somewhat uncouth). As you say, I don't think it's particularly surprising to anyone that we interpret the world with our minds (I contest that it is surprising the extent to which we do this - it surprised me anyway), but it remains that there is a world to interpret and that, most importantly, the activity of interpreting is one going on within that world.
My understanding (which is limited) is that materialism is synonymous with physicalism (since the pure idea that "all is matter" has been long rejected by physics), and that both hold some form of the idea that the physical properties of the world necessitate, cause or simply are, all properties of that world.
So it seems to me that the notion of our minds constructing the objects of reality out of those physical properties is entirely consistent with physicalism. @Wayfarer seemed to disagree, but I couldn't get him to explain why. End of discussion it seems. Unfortunate.
In some respects, I can put the objection down to a distaste of reductionism - a distaste I'd share. Some, it seems want to make the world actually dependent on minds so as to really forcefully lock away any notion that we might ever be able to understand the world solely in terms of atoms and forces. But, of course, understanding how the properties of the world arise from physical properties is not the same as the simple theory that they do.
What still bothers, though, me are things like...
Quoting Wayfarer
At the end of every discussion in which the failure of reductionism is hinted at, there always seems to be an attempt to switch in something even more vague as replacement. Despite my years attempting to do so, I completely agree with "We cannot ever understand the mind fully via neuroscience, or cognitive science". What I disagree with is the inevitable accompanying "...but we can with phenomenology/dualism/bible studies/LSD/...whatever" Such approaches are no less constrained and in many cases, more so.
Anyway. Thanks for the clarity. Seeing it as Realism vs Anti-Realism makes more sense, wherein I see the most interesting discussion as being between direct and indirect forms of Realism, rather than entertaining any kind on Anti-Realism.
Indeed presented what claimed to be an account of idealism, but it was indeed missing the key ingredient, as you spotted. There was nothing in that account that ran contrary to materialism. My questions "When one's mind constructs reality, what is it it constructs it from?" and "Whence the data that the senses are processing?" were intended to draw that out. Tom's Quoting Tom Storm may have been along the same lines, since the obvious source for continuity is a shared world.
Quoting Isaac
Here's I think a hint at an answer to a presumption found in and , the OP, and many others, who talk of an external world as if this were obvious and unproblematic. But as you point out, all that interpreting takes place in the very same world that is described by physics. The difference is not internal and external worlds, but something closer to internal and external accounts of the very same thing. Roughly, neuroscientific accounts and intentional accounts are different ways of saying the same thing. We've discussed this elsewhere.
This approach potentially bypasses reductionism. I've in mind something like Davidson's anomalism of the mental. Again, roughly, metal events described intentionally ("I want to go to the pub") do not have a direct correspondence to brain states. This is, I understand, what one would expect in a neural network.
We are using materialism as roughly synonymous with physicalism, which is misleading. The SEP article on physicalism is pretty clear.
That said, ignoring logical skepticism - that logic is inherently flawed - we could argue using principles such as the novacula Occami. In a video titled was the moon landing a hoax?, Niel deGrasse Tyson argues that it would far easier to land people on the moon than to create the illusion of doing so (can you imagine how many documents would have to be fabricated to prop up the lie not to mention how many stool pigeons Uncle Sam would have to pay to keep their mouths shut).
In short, in a weird and counterintuitive sense, an illusion is more complex than the real McCoy!
Except for this
Quoting Wayfarer
Which you didn’t respond to adequately in my opinion.
And also this:
Quoting Banno
Where in the world do you see a mind? You see beings with minds, or that loose their mind, or whose minds are clear or confused. But mind is not part of the world, As Husserl put it, 'Consciousness is not a thing among things, it is the horizon that contains everything.'
I will try again. The problem that ‘what is physical’ is very much a matter of definition. It is something that constantly changes and evolves. And need I say where definitions originate? Have you heard of Hempel’s dilemma?
As I’ve said a number of times already, I’m not questioning realism, I’m questioning the reality of matter. (I’ll qualify that by saying the intrinsic or inherent reality of matter. I don’t doubt if I get hit by a rock that it will hurt or that one ought not to step in front of buses. As the Muslims say ‘trust in Allah, but tether your camel first’. But that still does not privilege matter with being the fundamental ground of reality.)
The SEP article on idealism says that ‘ the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.’And that’s what I’m arguing. Why? Because I claim that numbers, scientific principles, lexical and logical laws, and much more, are real. Furthermore, that they exist independently of any particular mind, your mind or mine - but that they can only be grasped by a mind. So they’re real, but they’re not material in nature. They are what Augustine described as ‘intelligible objects’. (This is the subject of platonic realism in Mathematics among other things.) So that’s what I’m arguing against materialism. Furthermore that due to the faculty of reason, these elements are just as intrinsic to the world as material objects - or even more so, because it is in virtue of them that we are able to classify, analyse, comprehend and understand the physical world. They are constituents of the human life-world, and they’re neither physical nor derivable from the principles of physicalism, but it is by virtue of our possession of them, that rational thought is possible (which I think is the basic view of classical philosophical rationalism, very much the precursor to philosophical idealism..)
When we say the mind is a ‘product of matter’ presumably we mean by that the ‘product of’ the brain’, and the brain is an evolved organ. But my understanding is that science really has no handle on how the apparently physical brain - and I question whether the embodied brain is really just a physical organ - ‘produces’ or ‘generates’ the mind. It might analogously be better thought of as a receiver than a generator (although who is transmitting what is then a big question.)
The classical philosophical idea of mind was ‘nous’, which is translated as ‘intellect’ but which has a very different meaning to intellect in today’s lexicon. ‘Nous’ was ‘the faculty which comprehends the real.’ And in those times, it was not assumed that everyone knew what is real, by virtue of basic education. It took something more than that.
If matter is just what consciousness looks like when viewed from a particular perspective, then I guess we might need to presuppose the existence of a 'great mind' which holds all together - not a god - but something perhaps more like Schopenhauer's Will - instinctive and not metacognitive. Hypothetically it would take me a lot of work to get to this point but the ideas do interest me.
Yes, that's also my understanding. We might be able to say there's a brain state which temporarily corresponds with your tendency to go to the pub, but not one which corresponds with "I want to go to the pub". Personally, I see the issue as one of function over description. Both the mental event and the statement are functional, not descriptive. Saying "I want to go to the pub" is not a description of anything (brain state or otherwise) it's just a functional statement in conversation. Mistaking it for a description is where many of these confusions arise. Likewise with mental states. The cognitive functions of the brain are processes, not states, they do stuff rather than are stuff. So you have some neural cluster in your brain somewhere which might be specifically associated with your cat (not just any cat), but it's not a 'representation' of you cat, it's process which triggers further 'your cat'-related functions (which themselves trigger further functions...). At no point is the brain in a 'state' which could be said to correlate with "I recognise my cat", at best we could have "I'm recognising my cat", but since we don't talk that way, something seems necessarily anomalous.
I do wish I'd explored Davidson earlier in my career. I can't say that I agree with all he writes, but some of the issues he draws out would have saved me a considerable number of wrong paths and dead ends in my early work.
That's very clear, thank you. I don't agree (obviously) but I think I can now see what it is about materialism and physicalism that you object to.
I think my main objection is that you seem to define what is 'real' as if the category were clear (in terms of its membership criteria) and we could assign certain things to it - numbers, logical laws etc. But I don't see how you've arrived at those membership criteria. The set {all things which are real} doesn't seem to be well defined. Do you have some criteria in mind for determining what belongs in the set {all that is real}?
For example, we might both agree that Unicorns are not real. What is it about Unicorns which denies them membership of {all that is real}?
In the case of state vs function, description vs process, being vs doing , is it basically a matter of a temporally unfolding event ( or series of events ) rather than an instantaneous spatial pattern? And if so, can such a temporal sequence repeat itself more or less such as to be consistently identifiable as the same, and thus allow a something like a neural process to be correlated with a statement?
Yes, I think so. It's recognising that we must 'slice up' what is, in fact, a continuous process involving the mind and the environment. Not only are these 'slices' arbitrary, but the leave threads hanging. Like if we say such-and such a mental snapshot was me "wanting a drink" we would (if we took the fMRI at the right time) see something of me wanting a drink, but all the flow of data beforehand is lost, as is the flow afterwards, and, of course, the drink itself (which is an integral part of the process). Most importantly, nothing in a snapshot can capture the difference between backward acting suppressive neurons and forward acting promotion ones, they're only differentiated by their function over time in the system.
Quoting Joshs
Weakly correlated, I think, yes. There could never be any strong correlation because of the problem of constituting a temporal pattern as a snapshot. The relevant state is not say, axon1 firing, it's the type of flow from axon to axon. One day that might be carried out by axons 1, 2 and 3. The next day it might be axons 5, 6 and 7. There's really no way to tell except by the outcome (which kind of begs the question). The pattern might be the same, but it's not in the same place.
A lot of folks are questioning your ideas, so I've been reluctant to pile on. But there's something I wish to explore.
Quoting Wayfarer
Let us consider an example. When I think of the number 3, is there a pattern of synapses that fire in my brain that correlate to that thought? Is that pattern of firing synapses fairly consistent every time I think of 3? And if a neurosurgeon were to get those synapses to fire while I lay on the examining table, would I think, "3"? If so, then "3" does not exist independent of matter and energy, nor is it the product of matter and energy. It is that firing of synapses in my brain. It's the name I give to that particular synapse pattern.
Now before you dismiss my idea because you think no human brain could contain all possible numbers and scientific principles - they are infinite in number - consider that the typical healthy human brain contains approximately 3.6 x 10^14 synapses. By comparison, there are at most 4 x 10^11 stars in the Milky Way galaxy. That means 1000 Milky Ways could fit in your head (not really - stars are huge).
Saw this after my post. I think it's important to note that the particular synapse pattern associated with "3" that accompanies the 3 apples I see today is not exactly the same as the 3 miles I must drive tomorrow. But some commonality will exist. Not only does our experience of "3" change from situation to situation, but it can also change from our understanding of what "3" means. To change the synapse firing pattern associated with "3" in your own brain, check out Russell's definition of number (that he attributes to Frege, 1884). If you've never studied it before, I'm willing to bet that once you understand it, the synapse pattern in your brain associated with "3" will be altered forever! :razz:
Everywhere. We are embedded in a social world that is utterly dependent on mind. See my recent post to Athena, and my comments concerning Searle's notion of institutions.
Why do you think of the number 3? What is the motivation, the context that frames the thought of 3? Isn’t it always slightly different? If I ask you to continue thinking the number 3, is that not the same as repeating a world over and over? Doesn’t the word begin to lose its initial sense? So my over overall
question is , is the sense of meaning of ‘3’ ever identically repeatable, and if not , would not the pattern of firing of neurons associated with the thinking of ‘3’ also change from in lstance to instance?
I responded with an entire post on this here.
Perhaps you found it inadequate because my response involves the logic at which you baulked.
"Materialism is just the belief that the objects of the physical sciences have an intrinsic or inherent reality, independent of your or my or anyone else's observation of them" is the notion that there can be true statements that are not known or believed. That is the realist position. The cup still has a handle, even when unobserved in the cupboard. There are no teapots in Jovian orbit even though we have not made conclusive observations. There are aspects of reality that are the way they are regardless of their relation to mind.
Idealism is the converse of this view. Idealism holds that statements are true only in some relation to mind. It claims not just that we cannot know that the unobserved cup has a handle, but that there is no truth to the matter; not just that we cannot be certain that there are no teapots in Jovian orbit but that there the notion of truth cannot be applied to what is beyond consciousness.
You apparently wish to be both an idealist and a realist. I can't see, on the logic offered, how you could make these compatible.
Not necessarily. If we are expand the concept of idealism beyond Kant and neo-Kantianism ( and actually we wouldn’t need to do so in order to protect the form of realism that you embrace, since your realism is already a kind of idealism) we can incorporate forms of idealism that argue all of reality are ideas. But ideas dont require humans or mind or consciousness. Deleuze and Nietzsche argue this way. Idea is a creative differential
of forces imminent in all relations , whether animate or inanimate. This avoids the split between mind and matter.
Here we may be getting down to brass tacks. You are advocating some form of Platonism, yes? Numbers and so on have a reality that is not physical and yet not dependent on any individual mind, so it seems we must go along with Plato in arguing for something like a world of forms?
But there is an alternative. Sure, numbers and so on have a reality that is not physical and yet not dependent on any individual mind. That's because they are constructed by communities of minds using language. Numbers are just the sort of pattern that neural networks are particularly adept at recognising. Same goes for triangles and circles and all the paraphernalia of the world of forms. The patterns are reinforced by the part they play in our social world, in sharing out the lollies fairly and making lego model that will roll down a slope, in keeping mum happy by making sure you have both your shoes, and in understanding that the red teddybear is your sister's property and not for you to do what you want with.
I've no way to unpack that; no idea what it might mean.
Is this also true of cups? Are they constructed by communities of minds using language? Is the word ‘physical’ then just one of these social
constructions?
Quoting Banno
Glad that made sense.
Quoting Isaac
"anomalous monism" is a dreadful term. It would put anyone off. But it is interesting, and surly not a coincidence, that it seems now to be so similar to what one would expect from a neural network.
is thinking along similar lines. The point seems to be the one I think Isaac and I agreed on elsewhere, that neural networks follow a rule without representing that rule. explains this very clearly as a process not a state.
Sure, if you like. Communities construct cups out of clay.
And they construct ‘clay’ and ‘chemicals’ and ‘physical’.
"Clay" is a socially constructed word; the stuff we dig up and make pots out of is called "clay".
This is a very important distinction.
Where and how do you draw the line here so as to be able to make the distinction you’re trying to make between what is constructed and what is prior to and independent of construction?
Wherever I like, depending on what I am doing.
Quoting Joshs
Folk generally have little difficulty as to the distinction between clay, the stuff we make pots with, and "clay", the word we use to talk about clay.
Have you a point, or are you just wanting to play Socrates?
I would hope not , because that distinction is presupposed by the way we use language in those situations.
My own suspicion, in line with Davidson, is that both are roughly true. So my favourite quote from the very end of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme:
(by way of cutting to the chase...)
Edit: Or alternately, Philosophical Investigations §201. There is a way of understanding "pot" that is not found in talking about pots, but in throwing clay on a wheel, firing it, eating a meal off it and selling it at the market.
An excellent question, and I think the answer is ‘no’. That is mistaking one level of explanation with another. Let me explain.
For every number there are many different kinds of symbols, and modes of representation. You can represent it in Latin or Arabic numerals, or in binary code. But in each case, the meaning remains exactly the same - it has to, otherwise you violate the law of identity, because in all situations, 3=3, no matter by what symbolic form it is represented. I recently read an article about something called ‘neural drift’ in mice. It concerns studies of how memories of stimuli are encoded in mouse brains. It was found that even for simple stimuli, the traces of the memory shift constantly around the brain ( ref.) So I don’t see how it’s feasible to propose any kind of literal correspondence between meaning statements and neural configurations.
The same can be said for propositions. Say I want to convey a formula to someone in another language. The translation has to be exact, but the language and syntax are completely different. Provided all of the technical terms have equivalent meaning and the translation is accurate, it can be translated without difficulty. Then send it via computer - the whole string has been translated once again, this time into binary. The recipient takes that formula and inscribes it on a metal plate to attach to a factory wall. The same information now exists in several languages, binary code, inscribed on metal. So all of the forms of the information are completely different, but the meaning remains the same. How could the meaning be physical?
Quoting Tom Storm
Reality appears consistent to some extent, because we’re embedded in a culture and language group that identifies things according to conventions. Also don’t underestimate how deep habits of cognition go. (That was the point I tried to make about the distinction between self and other stretching back into the fossil record, although it was completely misunderstood.) We have a certain core functionality that corresponds with a great deal of our affective and intellectual make-up, which is individuated at the top-most level by the experiences unique to each of us as persons while retaining a great deal in common with others on various levels. (Kastrup has a lot to say about all of this in Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics. ) So ‘the mind’ is not just your mind or mine, it is universal.
Why did Wittgenstein say that if a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him? I think it’s because he is so far outside the form of consciousness that is familiar to humans. We could never understand ‘what it is like to be a lion’ (tip of the hat to Thomas Nagel).
Quoting Banno
But they have also lead to the discovery of genuinely novel properties which were not in the possession of any community of minds, which is the subject of Wigner’s essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.
One of my pinned articles is from the Smithsonian Magazine, on the topic What is Math? I provide the following excerpt because I believe it makes a profound point in respect of this debate. It starts with an emeritus Professor who defends Platonism. Then there’s a couple of rejoinders from sceptics. And I think it spells out why there is such controversy and pushback against platonism.
Please try and see the unintended irony of these objections. After all, mathematical physics is the crown jewel of modern science. Many eminent physicists and mathematicians have Platonist leanings (Roger Penrose an eminent example). But you can’t admit that Platonism might be true, on the grounds that it ‘sounds religious’ - you’re admitting the reality of something, i.e., numbers, that you can’t interact with via the senses. And if you don’t concur with the consensus view of physicalism or naturalism or materialism, then it obliges you to admit non-material realities, which is a no-go in secular culture.
Good response to @Real Gone Cat.
I think you have pointed to that magazine article previously.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's as if you were to argue that because a house is constructed, houses could never have "genuinely novel properties". I just do not see how that is supposed to count against houses being constructed.
Notice that the use of mathematics to discover previously unknown facts bears a strong similarity to Kant’s ‘synthetic a priori’.
Time to do the Austin chat about "real" again, it seems.
"Real" gets its meaning by being contrasted to what is not real. It's real money, not counterfeit; it's a real van Gogh, not a print; it's a real lake, not an hallucination.
What is it that you would contrast mathematical elements to? What is it that completes the sentence "mathematical elements are real, not..."?
But there is another point here, the presumption that social constructs are not real. As if money were not real. As if nation-states were not real. As if language were not real.
So I don't see an argument against constructionism here.
When I first noticed the reality of numbers, it was an epiphany. The idea suddenly occurred to me: everything material is composed of parts, and is temporally de-limited. But this doesn’t apply to numbers: numbers do not come into or go out of existence, and they’re not composed of parts (although later I realised that this strictly only appeals to primes, but even then, numbers are only ever composed of other numbers.) So I thought aha! This is why the ancients believed that numbers were of a higher order of reality than sensable objects. (That was the epiphany.)
At the time, I didn’t think much more about it, until I joined philosophy forums and started asking questions about it. Recently fooloso4 pointed to Jacob Klein’s book, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, from which I quote:
That was the exact intuition which I had had in that epiphany. In my view it is central to the tradition of Western philosophy, but it’s been abandoned. I trace that back to the conflict between scholastic realism and nominalism in the later medieval period. The significance of it is, that the ‘intelligible objects’ (universals, numbers, principles, and the like) belong to a higher order than do the objects of empirical discovery - they belong to the ‘intelligible domain’ (which is not some place.) With the loss of that intuition, then there is the loss of the vertical dimension, the qualitative dimension, and a real metaphysics. This is what I’ve been painstakingly researching the last 10-12 years. Hence my (somewhat unwilling) discovery of Augustine, Aquinas and neo-Thomist philosophy.
Yep, I can see how arriving at this conclusion might be problematic. We might end up back in a world similar to scholasticism and its transcendentals of truth, goodness, beauty. Is idealism popular with conservatives? I remember reading Roger Scruton, who argued that an awareness of the transcendentals wasn't necessary in life, unless you wanted a full understanding of reality and of each other. :chin:
I am not sure I understand how one is supposed to access or understand 'pure ideas' such as truth or beauty in order to appreciate them in our reality.
Don't we understand them only in terms of feelings or intuitions we have in respect of real things? A beautiful person, or landscape, a true friend or situation, and so on? How else could we understand truth and beauty? Remember Keat's chiasmus at the end of 'Ode to a Grecian Urn':
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
It seems to me that the underpinnings of ethics are easy enough to comprehend in terms of the understandable desire social animals have for social harmony; a pack, troupe, group, community or society riven with conflict does not benefit the collective.
The idea that beauty in painting or sculpture consists in reflecting an ideal form doesn't seem plausible to me. Take the human form, for example; how, on the basis of what criteria, would an ideal form become established that actual forms might be related to? Or a landscape; what is the ideal form of a mountain? Can we invoke symmetry, or is that not too simplistic?
Unless, that is, you wanted to be a philosopher.
So much could be contained in this one statement.
The only idealist accounts I am familiar with invoke a higher realm of some kind; a realm of absolute goodness, beauty and truth, which is only ever partially reflected in this fallen world of ours. But I don't see how this could have much potential for being an account that anyone who lacked the kinds of intimations this understanding springs from could be persuaded by.
That said, although I think goodness in the ethical sense can be related to social well-being and hence requires no transcendental account to understand its wellsprings; beauty and truth seem to be entirely resistant to accounts in terms of anything more fundamental.
Quoting Tom Storm
Or so little...
For now, I'm not interested in critiques of this or debunking of idealism - I'm hoping for a more enhanced presentation of the ideas in practice. But just a few clues not a thesis....
This is right, an idealist would claim "that there cannot even be a way that things are without mind". But this is easy to understand, and accept. The way that things are, is commonly believed to be perspective dependent. The way things are is different dependent on one's spatial-temporal perspective, and only a mind cam have such a perspective. This is the fundamental principle of relativity theory. And it is why many modern sciences, especially the disciplines which employ physics, are inherently idealist. Look at "model-dependent realism" for example.
Quoting Banno
There is no basic incompatibility between realism and idealism, hence the common position of Platonic realism, which is compatible with idealism. This is because "realism" is very versatile, and used in many different ways. The extreme form of Platonic idealism, Pythagorean idealism, posits a real independent world which is composed of mathematical ideas (God's ideas or whatever), and this is a form of realism. You'll find this also in Berkeley. Wayfarer I believe is a Platonic realist, as most modern mathematicians are (mathematics employs axioms which assume the reality of mathematical objects). So there is no problem for Wayfarer to be both idealist and realist. It seems to me that you believe in the reality of mathematical objects as well, Banno.
I have a rule not to reply to Meta, it's not worth one's while. But it is incumbent on me to point out that this is almost exactly wrong. The Principle of Relativity is that the laws of physics must be the same for every observer.
Google it.
This is the flaw in the notion that physics tries to find the "view from nowhere". It doesn't. It looks for the "view from anywhere".
The "way things are" is the same for all observers.
Anyway, back to ignoring Meta.
You're right, numbers are real. But not for the reason you think. Numbers are not free-floating entities that minds find and interact with. Numbers are particular patterns of synapse firings.
Assume you see 3 apples on a table and a neurologist takes a detailed scan of your brain at the same time. Should that neurologist be able to cause the exact same synapse pattern to fire an hour later, what do you think will happen? "3" is an activity of brains. So yes, numbers are real because active brains are real.
‘Free floating’ is your description. You’re saying that because you think all real things can only be situated in time and space, so there’s no category available to you which maps against transcendentals such as number. But that’s not unique to you as the culture we’re in has a blind spot about it.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
No. Read my argument again, especially the section on representational drift.
I understand your perplexity and, I think, what you’re asking for. I have another of my stock quotes from an essay which I’ve found very valuable in this respect.
The problem is, the West parted ways with this understanding so long ago that we’ve forgotten what it means - as that passage says. But reflect on the commonly held belief that life arose by chance and that we ourselves are the outcome of chance, marooned in a Universe which has no intrinsic reason. It’s difficult to reflect on, because of its taken-for-grantedness. As Buddhologist David Loy says, ‘ The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.’ And that is a consequence of the transition to modernity. Modernity (and post-modernity) has many strengths, and besides it’s an inevitable and unstoppable development, but this is an aspect of it that has to be questioned.
Yes, but it will be a commonality of function, not neural pattern. Each neural cluster involved will tend to fire toward clusters which might help form the word for 'three' in your language, others mights trigger images of generic 'threedom' (like three dots in a row, or a triangle), others might start chains which relate to compare 'three' (is it enough, too much?)... But different neurons might carry out this role at different times. Interestingly, they'd usually be in the same general area of the brain and this has to do with the brain's meta-structure, determined, we think, by the history of long term potentiation, but the point is, they couldn't be identified other than generally.
This seems related to the question I posed @Wayfarer yesterday...
Quoting Isaac
It seems to me that if 'real' is not to mean something like 'made of physical matter' (which I agree would be too restrictive), then the range of coherent alternatives is limited. To my mind something like 'that which has a state which might at some time be unknown' is one such. But as you say, nothing prevents constructed social concepts from entering this category.
Quoting Joshs
If I may...
I don't think one needs to see this as a question of where the line is - I think that's an interesting question - more that the model requires such a line. The very idea of construction requires raw material from which to build, it's in-built in the model.
The moment you accept that data from outside you Markov Blanket affects the nodes within it, that data must be imbued with properties modulating that effect, those properties clearly do not determine the network's hypotheses from within the Markov boundary, but their parameters will affect the nature of any function of their distribution.
So we might have social constructions around pots, clay, even atoms, but the the distributions of those constructs will be bound by the parameters of the data from outside the Markov Blanket.
Within this quote is all that I fear about idealism.
Note how every instantiation of idealism is also a tool of power. It creates, in each instance, a class of people who can 'see' and those who cannot. Usually some barrier is set to 'seeing' (education, religious practice) which can then be used to control (supply of education), or de-humanise (lack of religion).
There's little about idealism not distastefully entangled with the exploitation of unequal power relationships.
I've wondered about this in the past. It certainly provides opportunity for some folk to claim that their appreciation of art or ethics is informed by access to a transcendent and foundational guarantor (a Platonic realm) and therefore they are intrinsically more aware or sensitive to truths.
I certainly see this in the observations of philosophers like Roger Scruton who identifies what is beauty and what is not beauty - generally via a conservative aesthetic lens. But having said all this, just because there are powerplays doesn't make it ipso facto wrong.
This somewhat echoes my earlier suggestion that what motivates idealists is a god complex. Idealism gives the illusion of control and purpose. It takes away scary ideas, like "the universe is bigger than me" and "the universe is random".
Coupled with another motivation that I will mention in a moment, it leads to what you have identified as unequal power relationships. The second motivation is exceptionalism. I don't know if any surveys have been conducted but I am sure that idealism is not a widespread belief amongst the general population. So an academic esoterica is created which only a few will ever immerse themselves in.
Absolutely. It does, however, go to a pet interest of mine which is strategies for making decisions in uncertainty (also to answer )...
If we cannot know for sure whether idealism is right or wrong, then we must decide whether to believe it on the basis of something other than the weight of evidence. Such a method is clearly insufficient otherwise our intellectual peers would have already done so.
Thus, factors such as undesirable social consequences become relevant, as actual evidence and rational arguments recede in importance.
It's like choosing between two cars, the most important factor is that they both get you from A to B efficiently. But they wouldn't even be in the car showroom if they didn't do that, so we start to consider the colour, the upholstery, the stereo...
Steelmanning or otherwise, without granting....understood a priori as given.....the intrinsic duality of human nature, no defense of any version of idealism will be acceptable. Or, another way to put it, the only defense of any version of idealism is predicated on an intrinsic duality of human nature.
:up:
Quoting Angelo Cannata
I agree that those concepts are quite unclear, but I do not understand what do you mean by them being rough, local and limited. Also, what does it mean to say that they are wide, great and/or general ?
Quoting Angelo Cannata
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
Sorry I don't know what you mean by duality of human 'nature' or the connection of a 'dualism' to a monist ontology.
Consider them as synonyms of unclear.
Actually, I think I chose the wrong words to express the issue. The word "internal" implies that there is some "external", and vice versa. So perhaps the question should be separated into two distinct questions: "Is there a world existing independently of the mind ?", and if the answer is yes, "Can that world be entirely reduced to matter and energy ?".
Quoting NOS4A2
What do you mean exactly by "directly interact" ?
Quoting L'éléphant
:up:
Quoting Luke
I don't know. I don't think I can know either.
Quoting Luke
I don't assume it, but I don't deny it either.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I have no idea at all. I don't think we can ever know for sure. I think the only way we can compare the different answers is how practical they are for other human activities like science and engineering.
Alright then. But I think it's the concepts being unclear which makes them more universal than other concepts and as such more useful for understanding the universal, which, at least according to you, is the object of study of philosophy.
But at the same time, I think that what those concepts refer to are the only things which can be considered universal. Therefore, perhaps philosophy can best be defined as the study of the relationships between universal concepts and their referents.
I guess it's true what they say, 'rules are meant to be broken'. Maybe that's a new rule we ought to apply more often.
Quoting Banno
So you say, the laws of physics are rules which are not broken. You can express relativity theory in this way, but the outcome is the same as what I expressed. Applying the same laws of physics from different observational perspectives renders "the way things are" as different from each of those perspectives.
The "laws of physics" don't describe the way things are, they describe the way things behave. Notice that in all activities and interactions, there are things which are engaged in those activities. If we adhere to the principle that the laws which apply to those activities must remain unbroken, then the things which are involved in those activities must be different, depending on one's observational perspective. This is shown in concepts such as "length contraction", and "relativistic mass".
Either we can start with the premise, "the way things are is different from different perspectives" as I did, and conclude "the laws of physics are the same for every observer", or we can start with your premise, 'the laws of physics must be the same for every observer", and conclude "the way things are is different from different perspectives".
It's really just a matter of what happens when we uphold your expressed necessity, the laws of physics "must" be the same for every observer. If we maintain this necessity, and apply this principle to empirical observations, we are forced to conclude that "the way things are" is different, depending on the observer's perspective.
What this demonstrates is that if realism assumes that there is a single reality of "the way things are", then the laws of physics are incompatible with realism. This ought not be surprising to you, given the issues with quantum mechanics.
You might find the principle, 'rules are meant to be broken' to be more consistent with reality. Then if you replace your stated necessity, that the laws of physics "must" be the same from every observational perspective, with 'the laws of physics are not applicable in some observational perspectives', you could have something consistent with realism.
Quoting Banno
Clearly this is false as demonstrated above. The laws of physics which are assumed to be the same for all observers, do not describe "the way things are". They describe the physical interactions of things, how things behave, not the way things are.
Quoting Banno
It's always the same. Whenever someone proves you wrong, you resort to ignoring that person, and persist with your evil ways of preaching what has been demonstrated to you as wrong. Maybe you ought to break that habit.
We experience the outer world directly rather than indirectly, like through some subjective Cartesian theater. We don’t experience “consciousness” or “subjective experience”; we experience independent things. If we pick up a rock, for example, there is nothing between us and the rock, and therefor nothing prohibiting us from confirming its independence. It seems to me the idealist has yet to prove what this prohibition is.
Or, perhaps even more to the point, is there a method whereby it is possible to determine if the existence of my consciousness and the existence of the world it experiences are always necessarily codependent and interconnected, or if one can exist independently of and unconnected to the other?
As I said, philosophy wants to go to the roots, to the universal, but in this research philosophy cannot avoid to see that actually it is limited, because it is made by humans. This means that the very concept of universal is stupid: how can we, little microscopic, biased creatures of this universe pretend to get in our mind such a pretentious concept as “universal”? Whenever we think of the concept of universal, we are conditioned by our DNA, time, body, culture, epoch, geography, so, how can we think that what we are thinking is really universal? We humans are ridiculous in this pretence.
Do you mean that it might be that physical universe (external world) would not exist if you or I or the entire human species did not exist?
Quoting Isaac
The split between internal representation and external reality that free energy models depend on amounts to a particular sort of idealism. It seems to fit Kant's own definition of empirical idealism:
“Idealism is the opinion that we immediately experience only our own existence, but can only infer that of outer things (which inference from effect to cause is in fact uncertain)” (Kant 2005: 294).
As Barrett writes “...concepts exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality ...are observable in the brain and body”.
“If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrowsubatomic particles would still be here. But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers.”
“ Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.”
If you like Davidson you might be interested in the work of Joseph Rouse, a rising star in the Pittsburgh school of philosophy. He begins with the Sellarsian distinction between the manifest image ( subjective conceptualization) and the scientific image ( empirical data) , and shows them to be intertwined in a more radical way than seen by Davidson, McDowell and Haugeland. His most recent book is Articulating the World:
“In contrast to traditional efforts to establish the epistemic objectivity of articulated judgments, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others rightly give priority to the objectivity of conceptual content and reasoning. They nevertheless mistakenly attempt to understand conceptual objectivity as accountability to objects understood as external to discursive practice. A more expansive conception of discursive practice, as organismic interaction within our discursively articulated environment, shows how conceptual normativity involves a temporally extended accountability to what is at issue and at stake in that ongoing interaction.”
They're all still gestalts - ordered wholes situated in a conceptual scheme. You never see an actual proton, and the experimental confirmation of their existence retains an element of ambiguity (manifesting as uncertainty or the wave-particle duality). The shattering insight of 20th c physics is that they too do not have absolute (i.e. context-independent) existence. The Copenhagen Interpretation is mainly about learning how to live with that.
Idealism in my interpretation does not undermine objectivity. It situates objectivity in a larger context - but with the understanding that objectivity does not reveal philosophical absolutes. But in practical matters, objectivity is of unquestionable importance - in judges, historians, scientists, and many other occupations. However objectivity is not absolute - there is not some final way that everything is, some ultimate, objective truth (supported again by recent science) . But that doesn't imply a collapse into complete relativism either. It's not an all-or-nothing affair. Scientific and logical laws still hold for all practical purposes. Even if the world is 'appearance only' it does not conform to my subjective whims and requirements.
Especially if that is an example of the style.
Does this make Kant an indirect realist? And does this mean that Kant is not an ontological or metaphysical idealist, but an epistemological idealist? Setting aside the history of idealism elsewhere, seems to me Kant opened the door to epistemological doubts about reality and then others - Schopenhauer, for instance, completed the job.
But you are experiencing the text of this sentence directly.
We contact statements directly? How do you know that?
To have it reported, second or third person?
To read it in a mirror?
Those make some sense. But reading this, here, now, on this screen - how is that "indirect"?
Your argument is that we encounter statements directly because it's nonsense to say it's indirect.
I don't know what it means to say it's direct, so it may be a category error.
You and I contemplate the same statement. We both do so directly.
Are you familiar with Feuerbach? 'I think, therefore I am you'
Yep. You got it.
Now apply that to the rest of the things around you. What can we make of "we immediately experience only our own existence, but can only infer that of outer things"?
As if you sat there ratiocinating that the thing under you is a chair. As if that were a deduction...
This is a kind of idealism: one inhabits a realm of mental objects.
Not sure I follow you. What is an idealism - that one deduces chairs?
No. I don't know what ontology that is. It's not indirect realism.
If you insist that the real world consists of what you're most directly aware of, that is a kind of idealism.
Consider, for a bit, the alternative sentence "the world consists of what you're most directly aware of".
What does the word "real" do? What's an "unreal world"?
The purpose here is to attempt to make clear what is being claimed with
Quoting Joshs
Are you inferring this sentence, or experiencing it, directly or indirectly? Moreover, what could that mean? And finally, perhaps neither is quite right, and what you are doing would best be described as reading it... Reading is far more active than experiencing, and involves a broader cognition than just inferring.
Very perceptive question. His Critique was, after all, the critique of reason, pure and practical, so the concern was primarily with what we can know. (Do note the implied dichotomy or division between 'in the mind' and 'really existing'. It haunts all of these debates.)
Kant has been criticized heavily for the 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) and noumena - the terms are not actually the same although they overlap considerably. I understand the argument about ding an sich to be saying, we can only know things as they appear to us, our knowledge of them is conditional upon that. As Emarys Westacott says, quite rightly in my view, 'a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.' And I think that sense of the unknown, and the corollary of the inherently limited nature of what we know, is fundamental to understanding Kant. It's not exactly scepticism, but it's also not unqualified realism.
I don't see Kant as an indirect realist, because (unlike Locke) he doesn't posit ideas as representations. But his transcendental idealism is very elusive, hardly anyone seems to grasp it - the usual response is nearly always that he (and all idealists) are saying that the world is 'merely' or 'only' 'in the mind'. The whole problem with that analysis, is that it imagines it is seeing the whole panorama from an external viewpoint, or imagining what the world would be, without any perspective or point of view. Whereas that is precisely what can't be done.
I agree. Those categories assume a Cartesian framework which is so embedded in our culture that we forget that it's problematic.
We probably keep returning to it and trying to use it as a foundation because we really want to know what we are and it's all we've got.
Presuppositions! Recommended: Check/review your assumptions. Philosophizing is tough! Keeping track of the multitide of different lines of inquiry isn't easy. Soon, analysis paralysis sets in and then we stall, we get stuck so to speak. Aporia, the Greeks had figured this out 2.5k years ago! Amazing!
Interesting and thanks. I seem to recall a quote pulled from Critique wherein Kant seems to say that the noumenal was a physical, but I may be mistaken.
Quoting Wayfarer
That makes sense. Challenging stuff, especially for a layperson.
I looked into the word 'noumenal' - it is derived from that seminal Greek word, nous, which I often remark, has fallen into disuse, and for which there is really no modern equivalent (outside specialised philosophy departments). So 'noumenal' means literally 'an object of nous', meaning, something that can be understood as a pure concept without reference to a physical instance. It's very close in meaning to the eidos of Platonism. However Kant seems to have overlooked that derivation, which is commented on by Schopenhauer:
I think Schopenhauer is right about that, and that it's an unfortunate oversight or lack in Kant's writings. (It's also easily confused with another philosophical term, 'numinous', which means something like 'the idea of the holy' but has a completely separate etymology.)
(I say this because I'm trying to understand the subtleties of Aquinas' theory of knowledge, in which the intellect, nous, appropriates the forms of things by a process of assimilation as per this blog post. The idea that the soul/psyche/intellect 'becomes one' or is united with the object of knowledge has ancient provenance.)
I'm also led to understand that 'Transcendental' (Idealism) is used idiosyncratically by Kant - not a direct reference to a spiritual realm, but to 'not accessible through direct perception'.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is an aspect of idealism that we don't hear much about but I am assuming this is consistent with notions of enlightenment.
That idea of the union of knower and known is foundational to non-dualism. I have been reading Federico Faggini's biography, Silicon, in which he relates his experience of awakening:
Faggin, Federico . Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness (p. 159). Waterside Productions. Kindle Edition.
That is a contemporary account - Faggin is still with us - but you find similar accounts going back to the Upani?ads. If you google the union of knower and known, the returned pages are all connected to this theme.
I agree. When I look at a mirror I'm looking at a mirror and I'm also looking at my reflection and I'm also looking at myself. The painting might be of a woman but it's also just paint. We can describe things in a number of different ways, all of which can be correct. I think direct and indirect realists are just talking in different ways. There's not necessarily any conflict.
When Kant starts using "noumena" in the CPR, there is extensive footnotes. In the footnotes, he describes the noumena as intelligible objects. If we interpret "noumena" as external, and "intelligible objects" as ideas, then Kant is definitely an idealist, of the same sort as Berkeley. I think it is generally believed that Berkeley had influence on Kant
I really can't see the link you're making here, could you flesh it out a little?
:snicker: Good one!
“....If, by the term noumenon, we understand a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, thus making abstraction of our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the word. But if we understand by it an object of a non-sensuous intuition, we in this case assume a peculiar mode of intuition, an intellectual intuition, to wit, which does not, however, belong to us, of the very possibility of which we have no notion—and this is a noumenon in the positive sense....
.....To be sure, understanding and reason are employed in the cognition of phenomena; but the question is, whether these can be applied when the object is not a phenomenon and in this sense we regard it as if it is cogitated as given to the understanding alone, and not to the senses. The question therefore is whether, over and above the empirical use of the understanding**, a transcendental use is possible***, which applies to the noumenon as an object. This question we have answered in the negative....”
(**....from which an intuitive cognition follows)
(***....from which an abstract cognition follows)
Nahhhh....Kant didn’t entirely overlook the difference, but rather, stated what it is. Arthur couldn’t abide with it, because he needed his notion of will to fill the unknowable void of the ding an sich, which he couldn’t do if there is a thing impossible for a human to know.
————-
“....When therefore we say, the senses represent objects as they appear, the understanding as they are, the latter statement must not be understood in a transcendental, but only in an empirical signification, that is, as they must be represented in the complete connection of phenomena, and not according to what they may be, apart from their relation to possible experience, consequently not as objects of the pure understanding. For this must ever remain unknown to us. Nay, it is also quite unknown to us whether any such transcendental or extraordinary cognition is possible under any circumstances, at least, whether it is possible by means of our categories....”
Kant never intended noumena to represent things-in-themselves, which are real external objects, but merely as objects understanding illegitimately thinks on its own accord. The only connect between them, is the fact they are both unknowable, the first because we only can know the representations of things as phenomena, the second because the categories have no application except to phenomena which objects thought by understanding alone can never be.
Arthur didn’t like that we cannot know a thing, that there is that which is impossible for human knowledge. All he did, was create a philosophy under which the incontestably knowable....the human will.... substitutes for Kant’s incontestably unknowable, the ding an sich, and PRESTO!!! That which is impossible to know disappears. (Sigh)
Still, it is all Kant’s fault, this metaphysical ambiguity, insofar as he stipulates both that the understanding is the faculty of thought, and, we can think anything we want. It follows that understanding can think anything it wants, including its own objects. But this is met with an immediate contradiction, in that the categories are necessary for the cognition of objects and cannot apply to anything not given by sensibility. Objects of understanding...noumena....are not given from sensibility, hence the categories cannot be applied to them, hence they cannot be cognizable as experiences. Whether or not there are any such things as noumena is not claimed as impossible, but nonetheless entirely irrelevant with respect to the human cognitive system as Kant proposes it.
Worth noting, and oft-overlooked, is the fact Kant authorizes the conception of noumena, but never....not once....ever gives an example of an object that represents that conception. (1).
Why, you ask.....and I know you did. Kantian duality writ large: because there is in the faculties of sensibility an unknowable, and because sensibility and logic are mutually inclusive, there must be that which is unknowable arising from the faculty of logic itself. Otherwise there resides an irreconcilable inconsistency in his speculative methodology. Hence, Schopenhaur’s attempt to eliminate both Kantian unknowables.
And now it is clear why Kant says we can think whatever we want.....provided only that we don’t contradict ourselves.
———-
To put a period on it, ending the nonsense regarding impossible empirical knowledge.....
“....The critique of the pure understanding, accordingly, does not permit us to create for ourselves a new field of objects beyond those which are presented to us as phenomena, and to stray into intelligible worlds; nay, it does not even allow us to endeavour to form so much as a conception of them (1). The specious error which leads to this—and which is a perfectly excusable one—lies in the fact that the employment of the understanding, contrary to its proper purpose and destination, is made transcendental, and objects, that is, possible intuitions, are made to regulate themselves according to conceptions, instead of the conceptions arranging themselves according to the intuitions, on which alone their own objective validity rests. Now the reason of this again is that apperception, and with it thought, antecedes all possible determinate arrangement of representations. Accordingly we think something in general and determine it on the one hand sensuously, but, on the other, distinguish the general and in abstracto represent objects from this particular mode of intuiting it. In this case there remains a mode of determining the object by mere thought, which is really but a logical form without content, which, however, seems to us to be a mode of the existence of the object in itself (noumenon), without regard to intuition which is limited to our senses....”
One can’t know whether or not there is something between them and the rock. The only way to know that would be to take a view from nowhere, which is impossible as a view implies subjectivity. The mind could just be constructing an impression of a rock. Even assuming the existence of an objective material world, research had found that there is a lot of processing in the brain between raw sensory data and the world as we experience it. So either way, there is something between one’s experience and a possible objective material world.
The prevalent understanding of consciousness is that it is either identical to or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity. We can perhaps accept that some external world object is in some sense responsible for the experience - and that among the many things in the causal chain it has some kind of primacy - but given that the external world object isn’t in my head, whereas the experience is, what does it even mean for the external world object be a (direct) object of the experience?
Moreover, the initial argument between direct and indirect realists was epistemological. Does experience provide us with information about the nature of the external world? Do external world objects have the red colour that I see things to have, or is a red colour a product of experience itself, a quality of mental phenomena only?
And if a red colour is a quality of mental phenomena, not a property of external world objects, and if the apples we see have a red colour, then the apples we see are mental phenomena, not external world objects.
Only for physicalists.
Another thing: if I wear glasses then I quite literally have something between me and the rock. Am I seeing the rock directly or indirectly? Or what if I use a telescope to see something far away or a microscope to see something very small? Or what if I use a mirror to see something behind me? Or what if I use a TV screen and a feed from a camera in the next room?
Where's the line between direct and indirect? Even the naked eye is a middle-man between the external world object and the brain/mental experience, and even the air is a middle-man between the external world object and the ear.
Which is why it is better to use things like shape and volume for example. Here it's harder to dismiss the experienced as mere qualia. And, then, me and my dog can run through a field filled with holes and nettles and I notice despites our different nervous systems, we choose similar paths and rarely fall down (nor do I get pinced).Color seems to be the go to argument in these kinds of discussion, but that's out balance. And, yes, I realize I have not demonstrated direct sensing. And then on the other side if there was a stone in the middle of our brain, whatever sensing we used would not suddenly be direct. We still be interpreting, or? There'd still be a process with intermediary steps.
What does direct mean?
You were programmed you to think that, Smith.
Pictures in the head. Where would philosophy be without them?
If it's nonsense to say we encounter statements indirectly, then it's also nonsense to say we encounter them directly. We simply encounter them. The same goes for seeing anything; it makes no sense to say we see things directly or indirectly; that dichotomous pair of qualifications is misplaced; we just see things.
Agree.
My point was I found specific references which tend to counterpoint the Schopenhaur quote. But then, I couldn’t find the quote, so context is missing, so...there is that.
Sorry, and no slight on your comprehension abilities, but it’s always best to go to the source, rather than ask somebody who has only his own understandings to go by. Even when questioned and references are included with the responses, best to check the references, so.....why not just start with them.
Thanks, that is a helpful discussion from you. Bear with me here, I want to tease out a point which I only have a hazy grasp of myself.
There is in Greek philosophy a distinction made between phenomenon (what appears) and noumenon (what truly is). The noumenal object is, then, an object of the intellect (nous, noetic), in that it is something - a principle, or a deductive proof - which is understood by the intellect in a manner different to that of sensory knowledge. It comprises the grasping of a concept, not the discerning of a shape or some such (preserved in the saying 'to know with mathematical certainty'.)
This is what I think Schopenhauer was commenting on - he is accusing Kant of ignoring this classical distinction and instead appropriating the term 'noumenal' to serve a different purpose in his own philosophy, without respecting the sense in which 'noumenal' was used in Greek philosophy.
Now, there's a passage in one of Lloyd Gerson's essays which is relevant to this point.
Quoting Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism
Likewise a comment on Aquinas' theory of knowledge which makes the same point (derived from Aristotle):
Now that is plainly a different matter from what Kant intends with reference to the unknowable thing in itself, although there often seems to be a certain equivocation. But the point about the Aristotelian-Platonist attitude is that complete knowledge is only possible for intelligible objects, because in knowing them, there is in some sense a unity with them, which is plainly impractical with the objects of sense, which are all separate by definition. Whereas the introduction of the ding an sich in Kant acts in a different role.
@Tom Storm - the point I got to in the post that dissappeared was the results that come back if you google the term union of knower and known. (Interesting that the first entry on the list is Islamic, also derived from Aristotle.)
Dreaming of pictures in the head? It is kind of odd how much vision is focused on in these kinds of discussions. There are other senses and types of experiences. I do wonder though, what is visualization if it's not "pictures in the head"?
Okay, but what is that we're seeing? The world as it is, the world as we see it, a simulated world?
When you analyze a visual illusion, you use a little deduction to figure out what the picture really looks like.
Deduction is part of sight,and probably all the senses to some extent. Do you agree?
Quoting Marchesk
I don't think it's so odd when you consider that seeing presents us with determinate objects, that can be turned over, examined. moved around and viewed form a multitude of positions and so on. Remember the old adage: "Seeing is believing"?
I think I'd call it more examination and pattern recognition than analysis and deduction.
Magicians make careers out of that saying.
Quoting Janus
Fair enough, but it's not just the things presenting themselves to us, since we're doing a decent chunk of the presenting.
Right, it's a body/world collaboration, which we, in our usual dualistic manner, conceive of as an artificial separation between the two.
That's a cool mat for the cat to be on!
There's a need for nuance.
There's a difference between seeing an illusion and analysing it. The analysis is not part of the seeing, happening after the seeing - we analysis what we see.
Deduction is part of determining what's really there.
Isn't the body/world collaboration a dualism? If we're asking whether there's an external material world, then we have to go beyond just the world as presented to ourselves and ask about the world itself. The world that's presumably much larger and older than we are.
[quote=Federico Faggin] The entire experience lasted perhaps one minute, and it changed me forever. My relationship with the world had always been as a separate observer perceiving the universe as outside myself and disconnected from me. What made this event astonishing was its impossible perspective because I was both the experiencer and the experience. I was simultaneously the observer of the world and the world. I was the world observing itself! I was concurrently knowing that the world is made of a substance that feels like love, and that I am that substance![/quote]
But not part of seeing.
There's a lot here, and I'm not sure what to address.
There is a misguided picture of the mind, such that the eyes and associated neurones create an image using whatever input they find and this is what we see.
What happens is that the eyes and associated neurones build a model, and this is not what we see, but the very act of our seeing.
The first is a variation on the homunculus. The idea is that the brain constructs a model that the homunculus observes, giving rise to the mistaken notion that what we see is the model constructed by the brain.
The second removes the homunculus. The model is our seeing. What we see is the things in the world.
Rather, there is - and there isn't.
I think it's that the brain uses models that enhance the competence of the organism by creating expectations, which is just a theory.
There is such a thing as just focusing on the visual field. Artists do that a lot. I would say that is the act of just seeing.
Add onto that knowledge of [I]what[/I] you're seeing and you have an analysis, probably involving some degree of language, memory, modeling of some kind, and definitely some deduction.
Quoting Banno
We don't know enough about consciousness to rule out some sort of homunculus. As long as we don't end up with an infinite regress of them, there's no good reason not to consider the possibility. We might imagine it as the mind's microprocessor, which is a little computer inside the bigger one.
If I understood him aright, @Isaac uses the notion of homunculi for methodological purposes in working on neural nets. So (doubtless this is a poor example) for the purposes of examining the net of the optic nerve, it may be understood as sending an image to the homunculi further in the brain.
But my understanding is that despite this, for Isaac and other neuroscientists it's neural nets all the way down. The homunculi are only there to simplify the calculation, and are ultimately dispersed.
One alternative is something like @Wayfarer may be proposing; a distinctly spiritual entity haunting the brain.
My senses mean little without interpretation, I would have thought. And it's not often you look and have to ask yourself, what am I looking at?
The idea of main distribution board has been around for a while.
I've been reading about the evolutionary period when that would have first started: the development of the head. The head provides a main control dashboard for an organism, probably first enhancing the performance of predators.
And I think in idealism, the brain is haunting the spiritual entity (consciousness) and what we call matter is a representational icon or a 'product' of mind.
Which brings us back to the point you made earlier, of explaining how it is that you and I seem to see the same stuff as we look out of our little cages. Why should that be?
I think, for @Wayfarer, god is lurking out there somewhere. Or an overmind of some sort.
That's fine, if it is what one likes. Seems to me to be simpler to just say that we are part of the same shared world.
Which is the capacity to discern meaning.
:100: The machine is in the ghost.
The question seems to be, is this a mistake, or a strategic choice of Kant's? Should it matter?
Quoting Wayfarer
I see it. Is this not just a Platonic form or a Jungian archetype at work?
The theory holds that we all see instantiations of those forms in the 'physical realm'. I know I am racing ahead, but is it not argued also that there are some people who are able to apprehend, in some way, those forms/ideas directly?
But we already know there is a multitude of things external to our bodies; we perceive them as such. We can think of everything as being processes which go on, and we refer to the conceived totality of these "goings on" as "the world". We can also conceive of our perceptions of these things as processes going on inside our bodies. and in one sense this is true. But it does not follow that the things perceived are somehow in our bodies, in our heads or minds.Perception is a process involving things both interior and exterior to our bodies. There is no real inner and outer from the "point of view" of the world, there are only relative, localized instantiations of inner and outer.
Quoting Banno
I agree, but I added an important clarifying qualification.
God? Consciousness collapsing the wavefunction? A glitch in the Matrix? Time travel shenanigans? I do agree the world is what makes the same stuff the same. Not sure the world is entirely material.
Seems to me that the primary answer, by way of idealism, is the space no one has entered yet. And that is the idea of a mind-at-large which holds all perception together and allows us to share a coherent world of regularity. As you know, this is posited as 'God' by Berkeley in his version, 'immaterialism'. And I guess Schopenhauer would call this "will" - a striving, instinctive, non-metacognitive consciousness.
I think for many, this is one step too far.
The world is just a thought in the mind of God. And yet, Berkeley was also an empiricist.
I don’t think we’re brains. So I don’t see how it is possible that an experience is in the head, and more, that we can experience such an experience. Our eyes point outwards, away from the brain, therefor what we see is beyond the brain.
The reason eyes, ears, and other senses point outwards is because that’s where the rest of the world is. We are conscious of the world, not of consciousness. We experience the world, not experience. We perceive the world, not perception. All evidence points to there being no such veil between the boundary of the self and the rest of the world. Where the body ends the rest of the world begins. There is nothing between them. The contact is direct.
[quote=Edward Feser] Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.[/quote]
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting![/quote]
Am I alone in being thus programmed or is everyone in the same boat?
Everybody in the matrix is a program except for the real people.
:lol: Indeed, excellent observation. I am an agent...of the system.
That's right. We might borrow the language but not the function (when I say 'we' here, I perhaps ought to clarify that, in this branch research, I'm wearing my cognitive science hat, I worked with neuroscientists, but I did the cognition bit, not the 'cells and chemicals' bit).
One thing that's quite well-accepted now is that we have a hierarchical system in the brain, that data is 'passed' from system to system rather than a continual flow from sense to action. The use of 'model', or 'image' or such is essentially trying to capture the idea that the data leaving, say the V1 region of the occipital cortex is of a different kind to the data leaving a neuron within that region. Mainly it's to do with the degree of feedback mechanisms within and between systems such that it makes sense to call what passes from V1 to V2 an 'output' where it makes less sense to say that of what passes from a cluster within V1 to another cluster within V1. A person with damage to any specific region might have trouble with the sort of processing that region is responsible for, but it's impossible to predict which actual neurons within that region do what because they keep changing.
All this really just to explain the need for some terminology in a model of mental function which accepts hierarchical data processing. You're right to point out it's just a façon de parler.
How so? I mean, this is not even a comparable analysis. Thoughts aren't entities capable of possessing inherent properties, and even if they were, what kind of analysis produced the conclusion that they had inherent meaning?
If I look at an ink mark, it has an effect on me that could be described as a 'meaning', it triggers other thoughts related to my history of interaction with that type of mark.
If any 'analysis' of thought were possible (and I'm not sure I'm ready to allow that in any case), then I don't see how it's 'meaning' would be recognised in any different way. It would similarly elicit a set of other, related thoughts based on my history of interaction with it.
How are you arriving at the notion that the way in which thoughts possess meaning is inherent?
It seems perfectly possible that I might think of the number 4 and it trigger all sorts of memories, relationships and intentions that are completely unlike any that might arise from your thinking of the number 4. So, just like an ink mark, there seems, on the face of it, nothing at all inherent about the meaning of the thought "4".
What did you just ask? Your question has 'inherent meaning' doesn't it? You didn't just blurt out random sounds (and in fact you're asking very good and meaningful questions.)
By ink marks, are you talking about Rorsasch tests? Let's keep it simple. You as a rational sentient being can interpret written words, and also you can interpret situations, life itself - all manner of things. That is something you bring to picture, not something in the picture itself. A string of characters means nothing to someone who doesn't understand the language it's written in - so the meaning isn't inherent in the character string, but in the mind of the observer who reads it. Same, ultimately, with situations, even with life itself.
So I think Ed Feser's point is a perfectly clear one: that neural processes, like marks or shapes or whatever, have no inherent meaning, but that we read meaning into them. We are meaning-creating and meaning-seeking beings. In fact, I aver, that is what it means to be 'a being'.
Quoting Tate
A couple of more snippets from the book I'm currently reading, Mind and the Cosmic Order (I've quoted it a bit the last few days).
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 52) Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition; https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-50083-2] Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.[/quote]
This is, of course, a reference to the hard problem of consciousness, but that is tangential to his main argument, which is that:
[quote=ibid]One of the most important insights of contemporary brain science is that the visual world is a constructed reality. When we look, what we hold in awareness is not an optical array but a mental construct, built from information in the array, which presents us with all that is of value to us in a scene.[/quote]
Pinter makes a similar point in much more detail - that the objects of scientific analysis are mathematical representations of simples, like straight lines, force, weight, and so on. None of them have any inherent meaning, either, until a human observer combines them into a gestalt, a meaningful whole, which is the fundamental element of cognition.
Quoting Banno
Don't forget that in the origins of philosophy, what the philosopher always sought was to see 'what is' - which is the precursor to 'the essence'. Going back to the definition of 'nous' again:
Quoting Wikipedia
(I have to say, the more increase in my scant knowledge of Aristotle, the more impressed I am.)
I maintain that we as a rule don't see 'things as they are' but we see with eyes that are already conditioned by pre-conceptions, inclinations, and all manner of other factors. That Aristotelian principle became in the scholastics the basis of 'the rational soul' which is the element of the being which sees 'things as they truly are' - which we, the hoi polloi, as a rule, do not. So that 'spiritual element' eventually developed as 'the rational soul' of scholastic philosophy (although I'm still in the process of trying to grasp what became of that idea.) But the gist of it is, that nous is the faculty which grasps what truly is. It's one of the main tributaries of science itself.
Then what do you think consciousness is? Some etherial entity that extends beyond the body and somehow "contains" or "touches" the external world object that is said to be the object of perception?
Quoting NOS4A2
This doesn't say anything of relevance. The painting is of a woman, not of paint, but the painting is still paint, not a woman. There's no "direct connection" between the paint and the woman. So even if the experience is of an external world object (and you still haven't explained what it even means for an external world object to be the object of perception) it doesn't then follow that there is a "direct connection" between the experience and the external world object.
Note that I'm not saying that we "experience an experience" or "perceive a perception" (anymore than I'd say that the painting is of paint); I'm saying that experience is a mental phenomena, that there is no direct connection between mental phenomena and external world objects, and that the qualities of mental phenomena are not properties of external world objects.
None of this entails the kind of red-herring grammar ("we experience an experience") that you're trying to argue against. After all, when I dream I don't dream about dreams; I dream about eating an apple - and it's all just mental phenomena with no direct connection to external world objects.
Quoting NOS4A2
See my post here about glasses, microscopes, telescopes, mirrors, and camera feeds.
Using your eyes.
Or preparing to.
Ehhhh....when all is said and done, noumena are best left unlit. They’re an intellectual anomaly, confusing more than enlightening. To classify something as merely not impossible doesn’t help with what we want to know.
—————
Quoting Wayfarer
Well said, and I grant Kant appropriated the meaning of the ancients to suit himself, but with respect to your point here, Kant had already speculated that “complete knowledge” of anything is not even a cognition, but instead, is a feeling, an aesthetic as opposed to a discursive judgement, hence, the separation of reason into its pure theoretical and pure practical domains. Pure practical reason is entirely deductive, thus self-sustaining and necessarily true, insofar as we ourselves are the complete source of its objects......how can we NOT know exactly what we have determined by ourselves alone, which is exactly what “unity with them” indicates......as opposed to speculative reason with respect to the world, which is always contingent because our knowledge depends entirely on that which the world gives us, which can be stated as “unity of them”.
Kant....er....upgraded....a lot of the philosophies of the ancients, but noticeably left logic as it had always been. And ya know....while accused by Schopenhaur of changing the meaning of established conceptions......
“....For this reason, when it happens that there exists only a single word to express a certain conception, and this word, in its usual acceptation, is thoroughly adequate to the conception, the accurate distinction of which from related conceptions is of great importance, we ought not to employ the expression improvidently, or, for the sake of variety and elegance of style, use it as a synonym for other cognate words. It is our duty, on the contrary, carefully to preserve its peculiar signification, as otherwise it easily happens that when the attention of the reader is no longer particularly attracted to the expression, and it is lost amid the multitude of other words of very different import, the thought which it conveyed, and which it alone conveyed, is lost with it...”
.....he apparently didn’t think he did any such thing. It remains, in the text, that he called noumena mundus intelligibilis, so...just how far did he actually go in changing the meaning of the concept?
Still mulling over this. It occurred to me then that Nietzsche greatly disliked Kant's formulation of idealism because he saw it as a form of Christianity disguised as philosophy - a hateful dualistic world of two realms - a 'false' physical world, which is overshadowed by the special, hidden realm, the beyond world that is the legitimate subject of metaphysics... Sounds familiar....
"Why all the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers and teachers--why the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had become possible again. . . . A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the "true world," the concept of morality as the essence of the world (--the two most vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longer refutable... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so far. . . Out of reality there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality. . . . The success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far from steady."
- Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 10
Why? What's the relevant difference between shape and colour? And is that shape as seen or as felt, because they're very different things (see Molyneux's problem for example).
Yeah, I feel ya, bud. But then, ol’ Freddie didn’t like anybody except maybe his sister, so one more rip on his peers doesn’t mean a whole lot.
A change went through German intelligentsia, true enough, but whether for the better or not remained questionable at the time, given from the simple fact no one understood the implications of it well enough. The “old habits die hard” kinda thing.
Note as well, that theology was dying around the French Revolution, but wasn’t as dead as it became in N’s time, close to a century later. The “theological instinct” of Germans in general, in Kant’s time, was alive, even if on it’s last legs, and it remains highly doubtful Kant intended German scholars to apprehend a revival of it within the confines of his critical metaphysics.
I found it quite odd, that N advocated the will to power as determinable by the proverbial ubermensch.....he who frees himself from the absolute restrictions of the world, “...acquired self-mastery....”, yet accuses Kant of an illegitimate method by which he might actually do it. Not to mention, self-mastery in himself over the world presupposes the very “hateful duality” he accuses Kant of bringing to the fore.
Kant thought he provided humanity with a complete and unalterable metaphysics, but humans, being all too human, will inevitably find something wrong with just about anything.
Besides....while it is the more parsimonious supposition that brain states are our thoughts, it remains incontestable that we do not think in terms of brain states. That is to say, that which we consider as our thoughts, in and of themselves, even if they are not, have no purely cognitive connection whatsoever with the lawful physical necessities which make them possible.
Good to see you mulling. Shows interest, which is usually a good thing.
That people who were born blind and recognise an object's shape by touch are not, after becoming able to see, immediately able to recognise an object's shape by sight. This shows that the feel of a sphere isn't like the look of a sphere. So which of the feel of a sphere and the look of a sphere, if either, is a property of the external world object and not just a quale?
Adjectives describe or modify nouns. Though it is certainly unavoidable, I believe turning descriptions or modifications of nouns into nouns only confuses things when it comes to these matters, so I don’t think “consciousness” is the right term. Nonetheless, we can turn the word back into an adjective, see which noun it modifies, and remind ourselves what it is we are actually speaking about here.
Do we not experience mental phenomena then? Because to me it still sounds like you’re saying that instead of a painting you are experiencing mental phenomena, which is an experience. If you’re not experiencing an experience, then how is it you are able to view, observe, see, feel, sense mental phenomena? Upon what do mental phenomena appear and to whom do they appear to?
I don’t know what it means “for an external world object to be the object of perception”. This is one of the issues with turning verbs into nouns, when actions performed by things become things themselves. We start to shift our focus to figments and lose all semblance of reality. All I know is we perceive external world objects. External world objects do not turn into objects of perception.
None of which we experience indirectly.
I'm afraid repeating the assertion with increasing incredulity isn't making it any clearer. What I asked was a question. It has meaning to you, it has meaning to me. It means nothing to anyone who doesn't speak English, or who doesn't know the words. It means something slightly different to you than it does to me. Exactly the same could be said of a tree. It means something to you, something slightly different to me, nothing at all to someone who blind, deaf and unable to reach it.
You're describing how words have meaning, but that's not the issue. I'm questioning what makes them separate from any other object in the world. It's the 'inherent' meaning that your Feser quote requires as a property of thought to separate it from neural activity, but I see nothing inherent about it at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree with that. Where I disagree is with the further claim...
I don't see how our thoughts are any different to the "marks or shapes or whatever" in that they lack 'inherent' meaning. We might find meaning in them on reflection, but I don't see any evidence that the meaning is inherent.
And I notice you only responded to one part of what I wrote.
Do you acknowledge that there is a difference between colors and shapes in modern science? That the former is not seen to actually be a quality of the object, but the latter in science is seen as a quality of the object? That shape can be confirmed in a variety of ways including by fairly simple machines that presumably to not experience qualia, but can nevertheless move around obstacle courses using measurements of shape?
Can you explain how we can run through a field and no fall down despite the incredibly complicated surface say a cattle field presents?
This strongly indicates that it is not merely qualia involved? That there are aspects of the experience that are qualia, fine. But that it is mere qualia, as in the example of colors, seems off the table to me.
So if I see a rock in the next room through a TV screen and a camera feed then I am not seeing that rock indirectly? Then it's not entirely clear to me what you even mean by seeing something either directly or indirectly. Because that seems to me to be a prime example of seeing something indirectly.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, and we paint people and write about history. But it doesn't then follow that there is a direct connection between the painting and the woman or the writing and the war. So it doesn't follow from us perceiving external world objects that there is a direct connection between perception and those external world objects. The grammar of how we describe the intensional object of perception says nothing about the (meta)physics of perception.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm saying what I said above: that experience is a mental phenomena, that there is no direct connection between mental phenomena and external world objects, and that the qualities of mental phenomena are not properties of external world objects.
So how is it different to colour? The structure of some external world object determines what colour we see when we look at it, but it also determines what shape we see when we look at it and what shape we feel when we touch it. Why do you project shape, but not colour, onto the external world object?
Quoting Bylaw
There is a regularity in which experiences are elicited by external stimulation. Given how our brain and eyes work, we see the colour red when stimulated by light of a particular frequency, which in turn is reflected by a surface with a particular arrangement of electrons. And the same principle with shape. Through a combination of instinct and learning we are able to navigate the world using qualia as a guide.
To test that, one would have to take a completely objective point of view, free of subjectivity, and from which one could observe the world and its subjects. But such a point of view is illogical, a point of view implies subjectivity, and subjectivity must be completely absent for the test to be effective, so it is impossible to verify it.
That is, if we assume that logic is relevant in this case. One could make the argument that given that we don’t know to what extent one’s mind constructs one’s experience, it is possible that logic is simply another result of the mind constructing our experience and so logic may actually not dictate the way the world as it truly is if there is such a world. If logic does not dictate the way the world works, then the test of the view from nowhere is possible.
But then again, one cannot know whether logic dictates the way the world as it truly is (if there is such a world) works without taking a view from nowhere. We’ve just come full circle back to the position of uncertainty we were at, and the options are the same as before. It seems then that there is a sort of loop where no matter what position you start with or which way you go, you end up at a place of uncertainty about every single possibility. So even skepticism of skepticism about the existence of an objective world is possible, and it can only be countered with more skepticism, and it goes on and on for infinity.
You can visualize with your eyes closed. The images don't come from your eyes, they come from your imagination.
More comprehensively, I think one would have to take (a) a completely objective point of view, free of all subjectivity, or (b) a completely subjective point of view, free of all objectivity, or (c) a completely integrative point of view combining both the objective and subjective points of view, or (d) a completely transcendent (mystical) point of view that rises above all subjective and objective points of view.
I think each of the great philosophers tried to accomplish, in one way or another, either (a), (b), (c) or (d).
In fact, it would be interesting to give reasons why a specific philosopher's system belongs in one of these categories, rather than in another.
So they are fictional, like characters in a fictional story? They don't literally exist?
Good. But likewise, also, arguably, the so-called images alleged to occur when you are fully (rather than preparing or rehearsing for) using your eyes.
Not everyone can do that. The inability is called aphantasia.
Thoughts just are inherently meaningful. Thinking just is meaning-making.
How can there be anything to discuss, then? You’re not saying anything, you’re just making marks that show up on a screen. I might interpret them to mean anything whatever, and you wouldn’t be able to correct that. You’re sawing off the branch on which you sit.
Good point, well argued.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm lost. Odd for you to be so unclear, Wayfarer,
Here's the error I pointed to yesterday. The brain constructs a model of what is seen. Ok. But then the conclusion that what is seen is a model.
When you look at the apple, your brain constructs a model of the apple. But that model is not what you see; it is you seeing.
What you see is the apple.
I have already corrected you on this; by your own argument what we see is the apple as modeled. So are we seeing a model or not? If our seeing is a modeling then the apple, or whatever, is being modeled. Does it not follow that if something is modeled in the act of seeing, then what is seen is a model? We don't see the apple in its unmodeled state, do we?
No.
No, it does not follow.
The "model" at point here is a distribution of probabilities in a neural net. That is the apple you see?
No, that is your seeing the apple.
Are you serious? Isn't reflection a form of thinking? So if you say that it requires reflection to find meaning in thought, then all you are really saying is that it requires thinking to find meaning in thought. If thinking can find meaning in itself, doesn't that imply that meaning is necessarily inherent in thought?
Cripes, this thread is like standing before one of those distorting fun house mirrors watching reality bend and dissolve. :gasp:
Do you generally follow Searle on this? It fascinates me how many challenges seem to be built into perception/realism and indirect realism models.
I'm new to much of this. Quick questions. I'm assuming when I see and handle an apple, my perceptual apparatus provides matter (the apple) with all its qualities - colour, size and shape, smell, texture, even taste. This is all an elaborate construction work that humans seem to (largely) share. A bat would have a different range of experiences with this fruit, but it would still be of the apple, right?
Are idealists suggesting that matter has no inherent qualities and that these are provided by conscious creatures in the world, therefore reality is generated by mind? Would an indirect realist say there is an apple behind the appearances/qualities (a noumenal fruit, perhaps?), but it has none of the qualities humans apprehend and appreciate. Our conscious experience puts them there.
A metaphysical or ontological idealist presumably would say that both the qualities and matter itself are creations of mind - our own mind, and, presumably some other mind. Otherwise solipsism...
Where have I gone wrong?
Quoting Tom Storm
Rather, in the main, Sense and Sensibilia, by Searle's master, Austin. But the arguments can be traced back to G.E Moore and Russell. When we talk about apples we are not talking about modelled items in our minds, not about collective neural firings, not about transcendental, ineffable noumena, but about the things we grow, chop up, peel, stew, and eat. That we do so using our hands, our brains, our minds, our teeth, our words, our money - none of this renders the apple not an apple.
The act of seeing is precisely the construction of a gestalt - not a model as such, because a model represents something. But the gestalt is the apple - as explained in this post.
Quoting Tom Storm
Splendid question. To a fruit-fly, an apple is host to its eggs. If I throw an apple at an annoying bird, it's a weapon. To fruit bats and primates it is food, whereas it wouldn't necessarily register to a carnivore. Which is 'the real apple'?
Quoting Tom Storm
Materialists say that matter has no inherent qualities - only mass, velocity, position, etc. Qualities are what the mind brings to those raw materials to construct a gestalt which it then designates as apple (or whatever.) But materialism forgets the role of judgement in all that, because it's not present amongst the purported 'primary qualities of objects'.
I would say, reality is not generated by the mind but that everything we experience and know is generated by the mind. But we cannot see that process of construction ('vorstellung' in Schopenhauer, 'vikalpa' in Buddhism) 'from the outside', as it is the act of cognition. That's why it's a not a model as such. That's where representative realism fails, because it implies two entities - the model and the object it represents. But, 'In order to make a comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the model on the one hand and the object on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?' (Cribbed from a textbook quote somewhere in another thread.)
Take a moment to peruse this book - have a look at the abstracts. It's a current title, published 2021, and covers this territory, not from a philosophical, but a more scientific, pov.
:lol:
All of them.
(there's that misleading word, "real", again...)
Berkeley is the most famous and best idealist. And he argued that the external world that our sensations give us some awareness of must itself be made of sensations. He got to this conclusion in the following way. First, he noted that our sensations can only be said to be giving us some awareness of an external world if they in some way resemble it. If our sensations in no way resemble the world they're supposed to be telling us about, how do they give us any awareness of it?
Next, he held that it was self-evident to reason that a sensation can only resemble another sensation. Sounds are like sounds, smells like smells, textures like textures and so on.
From this it follows that the world our sensations give us some awareness of must itself be made of sensations, for it is only such a place that they could possibly tell us about.
Next he held that it was also self-evident that sensations are essentially sensed. That is, they cannot exist unsensed.
Next, sensations are always and everywhere sensed by a mind of some kind. For any sensation, there is a sensor, and the sensor is a mind.
Thus the sensations constitutive of the external world are being sensed and by a mind, for only a mind can sense things.
And as the external world is unified - there's 'the' sensible world - the external sensible world is the sensational activity of a single mind. Not yours or mine, but another.
It is noteworthy that many contemporary critics of Berkeley's idealism also attack straw man versions of it. For instance, many critics seem to think that Berkeley was arguing that the sensible world exists in 'our' minds. That was not his view. The external world is every bit as external on his view as it is on a materialist view. It is not its location that he is disputing, but its composition.
Stewed gestalt with custard...?
Quoting Wayfarer
Full circle, then. As I replied to that post, when one's mind constructs reality, what is it mind constructs it from?
Good. That clarifies things.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, an odd kind of dualism.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is true, but these are all experiences of the one thing as seen by different beings? It's a type of species-perspectivism, perhaps, but the same object is in play. This notions seems more like a phenomenology.
Quoting Banno
I think that's the key question in this matter.
My distinction between direct and indirect pertains to viewing the world. The TV screen, being in the world, is viewed directly, as is anything else in the periphery, like the TV stand. An indirect view would be representationalism, the assumption that we are viewing a representation of a TV.
I don’t understand. The only direct connection I am speaking of is the viewing of the painting (along with everything else in the periphery), not that there is any connection between a painting of a woman and a woman. The connections and contacts are real, not figurative, for instance light hitting the eyes.
To me, the phenomena of the brain are the biological movements of the brain. These are observable with certain scans, and therefor phenomena in the sense that they can be witnessed to occur, but I suspect more evasive means could provide more detail. I’m not sure what mental phenomena are, to be honest.
I think the Kantian answer is that the purported one thing is not known to us and that positing 'the real apple' is what Kant calls 'transcendental realism', i.e. that there's a real object beyond our perception of it.
[quote=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 sensible 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 sensiblity). 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]
Quoting Banno
I thought I'd answered. The bare data of experience are unintelligible until they're synthesized in the act of perception into the panorama of mental life. Whereas you think that there's a real world, out there, and an idea, in here, not seeing that this is itself a mental construction.
Quoting Michael
In that case, you have no reason to expect that mathematics would make accurate predictions.
Here is the abstract for Mind and Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter:
Sure, for the idealist these would just be demonstrating the regularities inherent in an experience produced though mentation - matter being what mind looks like when seen from a certain perspective. I suppose the argument would be that these are examples of mistaking the map for the territory.
Again and again and again, that is not what I think. The notion that there is an "out there" and an "in here" is the source of the confusion in the OP.
That's not what was claimed...
Quoting Wayfarer
Philosophical errors.
That is what I thought you meant, when you said
Quoting Banno
If thinking is meaning-making, then meaning is the product of thought not the property. In the same way as building is just house-making. The product of building is a house. We wouldn't say that because building just is house-making building is inherently a house.
Do you deny that "I'm cold" (unspoken) is a thought? I'll assume not. When you think "I'm cold", it has a different meaning to you than it does when I think "I'm cold". As such the meaning of "I'm cold" (the thought) cannot be inherent to the thought, can it? It must be something we construct.
Quoting Wayfarer
I really don't see what the maintained agreement over the meaning of words has to do with this but regardless, it was your own quote which said...
Quoting Wayfarer
So the marks and shapes on the screen have no inherent meaning, you started out agreeing with that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Throwing cliches isn't an argument.
Quoting Banno
Exactly, otherwise we end up having to define the mechanism which is 'seeing' the model.
So @Wayfarer, in the process of perception from the retinal stimuli to say, a specialised object-recognition cell in the anterior hippocampus - where are you suggesting the 'seeing' takes place and where is the 'model' it's seeing?
I don't see how that follows at all. If metal-detecting can find metal in a metal-detector, does that imply that metal is inherent in metal-detecting (or detectors)? No we can make plastic metal detectors and some metal-detecting is completely without metal.
What we call 'a thought' might be things like "I'm cold" or "That's a bus". What we call a meaning might be what emotion something causes in you, what value you assign it, or what you can do with it.
Since the same thought "I'm cold" can have different meanings (to you it might be unpleasant, to me it might be desirable), those meanings cannot be inherent to the thought.
Just like an actual apple has a different meaning (values, emotions, utility) to you as it does to me, so the meaning cannot inhere in the apple.
If you want to say that some apples (those unobserved by humans, for example) have no meaning at all and thus are different from thoughts, then you'd have to demonstrate that there existed no thoughts which were unobserved by humans (thoughts which we're not aware of). Since we're not aware of them, by definition, that's going to be a hard task.
Yep. Homunculus Fallacy.
Talk of "meaning" is not going to get very far. There's to much baggage, too much variation in the meaning of "meaning"...
The same holds for "thoughts"; so put them together in
Quoting Isaac
And the way forward will be far from clear.
In 's quote we can see one of the ideas that underpins idealism. It's the notion that thought is an utterly different thing to the other stuff of our world. The quote takes this as granted, not arguing for it. You and I have both pointed this out, but that seems lost on Way farer.
There may be an interesting digression here following Wittgenstein. Rather than looking to the meaning, we might look to the use. What do we get if we paraphrase the Feser quote in terms of use?
The cracks are obvious.
There is also in the quote an equation of meaning and intentionality, something that ought not go unremarked. But that is a whole new barrel of herrings, red or otherwise.
As that was a passage from one of Edward Feser's blog posts, I think I should include a link to the original. Incidentally it was posted as an argument for dualism, not idealism as such.
Indeed. In my opinion, a classic example of expressions whose meaning is not found in an analysis of the words. "Thoughts are inherently meaningful" here seems to mean absolutely nothing about either 'thoughts' or 'meaning' (since neither are defined), but acts as a general badge, a token, that the speaker is of a certain mind about the issue. I think much of the actual expressions used hereabouts just stand in for a general declaration of distaste for scientistic reductionism.
Quoting Banno
Nice. It does indeed show the cracks.
Quoting Banno
Yes. I find it such an odd phrasing of Feser's that he would carry out this general equivalence. That a thought might 'have' a meaning or intentionality in the same way an apple has the property of being spherical. It seems such a messy way of analysing the distinctions.
Still seems to me that Feser phrases the issue in such a way that dualism is assumed.
But if you don't understand an argument, then you can't be said to have refuted it.
This exchange started with:
Quoting Isaac
to which I responded:
Quoting Wayfarer
And then again, you responded
Quoting Isaac
In which case, how can you argue that you are asking a meaningful question? Because if you say that thoughts don't have any inherent meaning then neither does your asking of this question. That is what I mean by 'sawing off the branch you're sitting on'. It's not a cliché but an analogy.
As things stand at present, it doesn't seem to me obvious that a neural network could not have intentionality. At least, a neural network with some task would seem to have a directionality of the sort seen in the aboutness of an intentional act.
I'll note again that I do agree with @Wayfarer that physics is not capable of explaining everything. I'm no keener on scientism than he is.
Yes. I've already agreed that my asking of that question doesn't have any inherent meaning. I can, however, have a very high degree of confidence that the meaning you give it will be similar enough to the meaning I give it to make our exchange worthwhile. I can make this guess because you and I both grew up in a culture similar enough to have trained us both to give such a question roughly the same meaning.
And where does that originate? What is the medium through which that is transmitted? I say that meaning, as such - the basis of rational inference, 'if this is the case then that must be' is internal to thought. You will not observe it anywhere in the objective domain - which is the point at issue.
I agree, but if one accepts (for the sake of argument) Feser's distinction of thought from neural networks, then thought is left seeming like the sort of thing which determines properties. For it to then have properties of its own seems unwarranted.
Of course, if one accepts that 'thoughts' and 'neural networks' are the same thing from different perspectives, the problem disappears.
Quoting Banno
Me too, but possibly not for the same reasons.
Culture.
Neural nets have nothing to do with what we are discussing. This is about the way we would normally speak about things. If my seeing an apple is a modeling of an apple then I see a model of an apple, just as if my carving is a modeling of an apple then my carving is a model of an apple.
Of course I can say I see an apple, just as I can say I carve an apple but in the case of claiming that my seeing is a modeling, then what is it that is modeled in your view?
Quoting Isaac
Building is not inherently house-making, though, but structure-making, And structure is inherent to building, just as meaning is inherent to thought.
I didn't say that a particular meaning is inherent to thoughts. If I think "I'm cold" that thought is inherently meaningful to me, just as (presumably) when you think "I'm cold" the thought is inherently meaningful to you.
Maybe philosophers need to be taught some math especially how to calculate probabilites which is, to my reckoning, the mathematics of possibility. We could, to some extent, silence the skeptics if you know what I mean. :snicker:
I'm asking if I'm seeing the rock directly if I see it through a TV screen, or if I see it in the reflection of a mirror, or if I see it through a telescope, or if I see it through a pair of glasses.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm saying that it doesn't follow from "the painting is of a woman" that there is a direct connection between the painting and the woman, and similarly that it doesn't follow from "the experience is of an external world object" that there is a direct connection between the experience and the external world object.
You need to do more than just say "we experience external world objects" to make a case for direct realism. If I see a rock through a TV screen then I'm seeing a rock, but I'm seeing it indirectly. So it can be that we experience external world objects and that indirect realism is the case.
If a metal detector finds metal in itself, then unless the metal detector is wrong, metal is inherent in the detector.
Quoting Isaac
Sure, but metal inheres within the detector in which it is found. So by analogy, meaning inheres within the thinking in which it is found. If some other thinking does not practise introspection (detecting itself for meaning), this does not produce the conclusion that there is no meaning inherent within that thinking.
Quoting Isaac
I think you are using "inherent" or "meaning", or both, in a way which I am unfamiliar with. Generally, "inherent" means to exist within. If meaning inheres within thought, this does not mean that the same meaning ought to inhere within your thought, as the meaning which inheres within my thought. How would that even be possible, since we are two distinct thinking beings.
Quoting Isaac
But I am saying that the meaning inheres in the thought, not in the apple. It's possible that meaning inheres in the thing itself as well, but I haven't said anything about that yet.
Quoting Isaac
Do you recognize the difference between a sentence written on a page, as a material object, or arrangement of objects, or part of an overall page, or collection of pages, and the existence of thought, or some thinking, which that material arrangement is supposed to be a representation of?
If so, then you can apprehend your act of "asking of that question", as a third thing, the action which caused the existence of that material object which is supposed to be a representation of some thinking or thought.
Quoting Isaac
I believe, the issue is the activity which is involved here. When we describe the activity of thinking, and when we describe the activity of neural networks, we produce completely different descriptions. The question comes down to "what is the causal agent?". Is it the self, me, thinking, or is it a bunch of electrical impulses. If the latter, what produces (creates or causes) coherency in this bunch of impulses. The former takes coherency as "the self", for granted.
So it is impossible to accept that thoughts and neural networks are the same thing, because one perspective assumes natural, inherent coherency (I'll use "coherency" instead of "meaning"), and the other perspective provides no indication as to how coherency is possible. Coherency and lack of coherency makes the two descriptions worlds apart, and not the same thing at all.
I don't see how this relates to the matter of where meaning inheres? Physics is a practice of our culture, sure. I don't see what you could mean by 'parameter' other than perhaps that what we can culturally choose to believe is constrained by the physical (we can't fly, for example). I don't find anything there to disagree with, just nothing which seems to bear on materialism (the OP), or how meaning is carried (this little section of the OP).
Quoting Janus
I'm just going to flag in here because it's a similar issue.
I think we're getting crossed wires over the meaning of 'inherent' here. The argument Feser gives is that thoughts cannot be just neural patterns because they have a property (inherent meaning) which neural patterns lack. So whatever your personal understandings of what 'inherent' means here, fro the argument, it has to mean something which neural networks cannot have as a property.
So it's insufficient (for Feser's argument) for 'inhere' to simply mean that we find meaning in it. We can find meaning in a painting, and no doubt a neural network (for some), so this cannot be Feser's intended use. It's also insufficient to argue that, say, meaning is inherent to thought the way structures are inherent to the activity of building. Again, Feser's argument requires that thoughts have a property neural networks cannot have, not simply one which they may or may not have.
The use of 'inherent' in Feser's argument seems, to me, to require it either point to something non-interpretable (it has that meaning independent of any observer - something objects don't have), or that he uses 'inherent' to mean something like 'cannot exist without...' (again, something external object lack as they can exist without having meanings assigned to them).
I dismissed the latter as there would be no possible way of knowing if thoughts could exist without meaning as we would be unaware of them. The argument then begs the question.
So we're left (by my reckoning) with the former. That 'inherent' means that the thought has meaning regardless of the interpreter (inherent), as opposed to meaning assigned by an interpreter as external objects like ink marks, trees, structures etc.
Hence the counterargument to Feser shows that thoughts do not have inherent meaning in this particular sense. Whether thoughts have inherent meaning in any other sense of 'inherent' is irrelevant to the argument at hand.
It does follow that we experience the world directly and that there is a connection between oneself and the object for the same reasons I stated earlier. Real, physical connections, for instance light touching the eyes, hands touching the object etc. occur in these interactions.
You’ll need to figure out a better argument because you’re still viewing the TV screen directly.
That shows only that we contact the world directly. To show that we 'experience' the world directly, using that argument, you'd have to also show that what we call 'experience' is the sum total of all processes from the sensory receptors onward.
I detest the taste of Lima beans, and if you like the taste....how can the exact same matter have one quality for me and a completely different quality for you?
When you see and handle the matter provided by your perceptual apparatus, and I see and handle the matter provided by my perceptual apparatus.....why should, and what determines whether or not, we agree about what’s been provided to us?
If matter with all its qualities is provided by perceptual apparatus......why should anything need to be constructed?
How did “matter”, a general term, get to “apple”, a particular term? By what rights do matter and (the apple) belong together as stated in the assertion of that which perceptual apparatus provides?
So if the construction work humans share is how matter gets to “apple”, then it must be the case the qualities of the matter are not contained in it, but are provided by the construction. Otherwise, there would be no justification for the change from the general to the particular, and the questions above obtain only insufficient answers.
————-
To say a bat has different experiences, then to ask if it would still experience “apple”, is a categorical error of relations. Given different experiences, that which is given from one kind of experience is necessarily incompatible with any other kind, which makes explicit the bat cannot experience “apple”. We know this to be apodeitically certain because it is absolutely impossible for us to echo-locate flying bugs. All that can be supposed is that the bat experiences, and that only insofar as bats are known to have integrated sensory systems, and it is at least a non-contradictory presupposition that any sensory system is sufficient ground for experiences compatible with it. And THAT....only insofar as humans have determined it to be so, in relation to themselves, in the resolution of the error.
Matter has only been “apple” since some human said so, which makes explicit the perceptual apparatus does not provide matter (the apple), but provides matter alone, the common human construction, whether brain machinations or speculative metaphysics, is that which determines that matter to be apple. Apple, then, is provided post hoc by common human constructions, or, that which we all know as.......waaaiiiitttt fooor ittttt......experience.
I submit that you’ve conjoined matter (the apple) as a given singular only because you already know what an apple is, you’ve met with that experience. But there was a time when you didn’t, you haven’t, so.....what happened?
You haven’t gone wrong. Just haven’t gone far enough.
I’m not sure I understand. When I observe people interacting with the world, I assume they are experiencing it. Do you mean to say that only a part of them are experiencing?
No, nothing of the sort. Your argument is that we are in direct connection with the outside world therefore we directly experience the outside world.
You've not shown that that with which we are in direct connection is that which we experience.
I mean to say we can only experience that with which we are in direct connection, not that that which with we are in direct connection is that which we experience, if that makes any sense.
I don’t think I need to show it because it is observable. If someone is to experience a doorknob he must see it, touch it, turn it, etc.
...
Quoting NOS4A2
What the latter shows is that direct connection is necessary to experience a thing. It does not then follow that all things we experience are external world objects, nor that we experience all external world objects.
For your argument to hold it is necessary to show that the causes of our sensations match the objects we experience since the 'direct connection' you theorise is between an external world and a sensory receptor. But I do not experience 200,000 firing neurons when I lift my tea cup. I experience the lifting of my teacup. So the object of my experience is the teacup. You've yet to show that this teacup is also the thing in contact with my nerve endings.
I followed a little this recent exchange of yours with @NOS4A2. I'm not sure what tou both mean by or undestand with "direct connection". Is it a physical connection, involving perception via our senses? From your answer I undestand that we can also experience other things thn external objects, e.g. feelings/emotions/sensations, is that right?
What I didn't understand was "nor that we experience all external world objects". Do you maybe mean "nor that we can experience all external world objects"?
Quoting Isaac
Is this what "direct connection" implies or requires?
I'm not asking about the TV. I'm asking about the rock. When I see a rock on a TV screen, am I seeing the rock directly?
Quoting NOS4A2
That doesn't make it direct. There are real, physical connections when a rock is seen in the reflection of a mirror, but I'm not seeing the rock directly. There are real, physical connections when a rock is seen on TV, but I'm not seeing the rock directly.
Yes. Some physical stimulus from the external system perturbs the first nodes (the sensory nerves, in this case) of the internal one. I'm using 'internal' and 'external' here for clarity, it's to do with systems, not necessarily bodies of brains.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
External to one system, yes. Internal to another. It depends on what system is doing the inferring. Any systems can only sense the outputs from those nodes to which it is directly connected, it must infer the state of those nodes to which those circumferential nodes are themselves connected.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Lots of eternal world objects (external to the bodily system) are not perceived (in the broadest sense) despite being in contact with internal systems. my nerve endings are detecting all the movements of my clothes right now, but I don't experience those sensations, they're filtered out by the thalamus before I'm even aware of them.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Yes. I think so.
OK, thanks. I think that you have both complicated unnecessarily the subject of experience (experiencing) and perception (perceiving). But this is my viewpoint and reality! :smile:
Not everyone can distinguish fact from fiction. But that inability is quite normal. In perception, it manifests as the mental image myth. (Leading to the binding problem.)
Quoting Michael
The trouble is, 'indirect' is too suggestive of two or more 'directs'. Would it help to say 'non-direct'?
Someone contesting indirect realism doesn't necessarily want to claim that knowledge about the rock flows specifically from the rock to the person. It might result rather from the vast network of interactions and interpretations in the background.
Someone contesting direct realism doesn't necessarily want to claim that knowledge about the rock flows specifically from rock to TV screen to person. It might result rather from the vast network of interactions and interpretations in the background.
Didn't they have a hit with "John Wayne is big leggy"?
OK, I didn't read the Feser piece. My point was only that thinking necessarily has meaning in a semantic sense otherwise we could not count it as thinking. We can determine the meaning of our thoughts by reflection on them, by writing them down if necessary, basically by expressing them linguistically. Any coherent linguistic expression has meaning, even if not just one literal meaning; linguistic expressions are meaningful in a symbolic way that physical objects like trees. mountains and neural nets are not.
So, I disagree with your conclusion: I think we can know that thoughts, even pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic ones, cannot exist, i.e. would not be thoughts but would be something else, without meaning. The idea of a meaningless thought is nonsense in other words; and yet even that nonsense idea itself has meaning.
But if Feser claims that a thought can have only one inherent meaning, then I agree with you that that is mistaken.
From J.L. Austin:
@Banno and @Tate get to the crux of it here:
Quoting Tate
So how do we avoid returning to it? @Michael shows how.
Quoting Michael
Note that there are no contentious adjectives in his comment. Everyone immediately understands what he is saying. There's no confusion or dilemma.
Quoting Michael
Maybe not. But the distinction is artificial, so talking in those ways isn't useful.
Compare a direct flight to an indirect flight from New York to London. That's a naturally-arising and useful distinction that doesn't cause any confusion or disagreement once one understands the context. Cartesian (and much other philosophical) language is parasitical on that kind of ordinary distinction. But it doesn't provide a similarly useful payoff. Instead, it's a kind of noise or pollution that needs to be cleared away before any progress can be made.
Quoting Wayfarer
Isn't it clear by now that this is a muddled question?
If you are going to talk about something's being fundamental, you have to be clear about what it is you are doing. What is fundamental when designing bridges is not what is fundamental when planning birthday parties, nor to what is fundamental to doing paraconsistent logic.
This is the same error you made here:
Quoting Wayfarer
They are all real.
No, it's not a muddled question, it is crystal clear to me. Just because you don't think in such terms, doesn't mean that it's a muddled question. I was going to say yesterday, the neat summations of all these plain-language philosophers are really designed philosophy lecture rooms, seminars and publications. They don't address existential questions.
Quoting Banno
What really matters, what counts, what is real. In a philosophical context, not a quotidian context of designing bridges and stowing cups.
Yes, they do, just not in a way that you find comfortable.
What counts as fundamental, as simple, what is taken as granted, depends on the task at hand.
Asking what is fundamentally fundamental, asking what is really real - that's the stuff of philosophy lecture rooms, seminars and publications.
And that's not where life is lived.
in philosophy lecture rooms, seminars and publications? Sure. You can show the philosopher the way out, but some philosophers are more comfortable in the fly-bottle.
Seems to me you have made your position very clear, too. For you, mind is a different substance to the other things around us. That leaves wide open the problem of how mind interacts with those other substances - the basic problem for dualism.
The alternative is that mind is not a substance, but something that substance does.
Just bear in mind, again, the difference between 'substance' in philosophy, translated from 'ousia', 'being' or 'subject', and 'substance' in normal speech, 'a material with uniform properties'. Post-Descartes, these two meanings became confused, so that when 'substance' is spoken of, it's thought to be an actual substance. That's where the problem lies.
That problem was solved long ago by Plato. Moderners who like to try and reintroduce it simply haven't studied enough to understand the resolution.
Perhaps this thread is nearly spent. Send in the clowns.
It's the single most important problem in philosophy as far as I'm concerned. It addresses the very question that you and everyone else puts about the 'interaction problem', but it seems to go right by most people.
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
Meaning as use and all that. It's what one does.
Isn't it bliss?
Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around
One who can't move
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns
I would disagree with the assertion that mind is a different substance to the other things around us. I would agree with the assertion that the way the other things appear via the mind is not how they are - substance-wise. They appear as solid, physical, material objects, but that is just how they are modeled. The model is not solid, physical or material. It is informational.
They're here
That's a juicy morsel and I think it's true. The physicalist atheist and the dedicated Jesuit often share first principles about how we should treat others. I think this is why I have avoided philosophy in the past as I am temperamentally inclined towards action over contemplation (which comes with its own problems).
Do you have a view about why this situation arises?
Oh, and Sondheim is one of my favorite thinkers.
We overwhelmingly agree about the bits and pieces of the world around us. We just spend much more time discussing our disagreements than our agreements. Perhaps the level of disagreement increase with the level of abstraction.
That would imply that our actions are not as abstract as our metaphysics.
I find myself in the unnaccustomed position of agreeing with you. :yikes: That's the gist of the book I'm reading at this moment.
(Also note the distinction I made earlier about the difference between the philosophical and everyday use of the term 'substance' i.e. it means something very different in philosophy than in ordinary language.)
What are those first principles shared by physicalists and Jesuits?
It seems to me that you and @Banno are unable to start this 'debate' from the same place. Is this just a matter of holding different presuppositions rather than a question of language?
When Banno says:
Quoting Banno
You see this as being a separate matter and that it is not addressing the question of what is fundamental about the nature of reality - is that it? Are you able to summarize what you think the apple of discord is, or are you tired of it? I ask as someone interested in more fully understanding both positions. Can the difference in approaches be distilled down to one key question?
Human rights; refugee policy; social justice; welfare reform; drug law reform; justice for Aboriginal Australians; economic reform; housing policy reform - that kind of stuff.
Why would a physicalist have a policy on refugees?
Because, surprisingly, physicalists are human.
wow
Quoting Banno
We agree on that much at least. From my side, Banno's main influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Austin et al, who are influential in analytical philosophy. You could say they're the mainstream. My influences are more counter-cultural and (I think) more existential. I did two years of undergraduate philosophy but ended up with an Hons in Comparative Religion (on the New England Transcendentalists.) I'm generally more small-t theosophical than most people here.
On the positive side, having to respond to others for whom my views seem fundamentally mistaken is clarifying. On the negative, trying to share what strikes me as an important insight (like from the Charles Pinter book I've been talking about) to be met with :brow: is frustrating ('but', says a voice, 'serves you right for hanging around in front of your computer so much.')
It's a social justice issue. Hence how we treat others. Here in Australia, we put people into detention centers for seeking asylum. Hence @Banno is correct around why this matters.
I'm aware of all that, my question is more of a technical one - the nub of the problem seems to hinge on specific formulations of epistemology. And this part of the dispute is edifying. What I was asking is where is the initial point where your respective approaches separate from each other? I reread the arguments above and it seems you are both talking about separate matters. Perhaps I'm not making sense to both of you... :razz:
Why? We are what we are and the world is what it is no matter how we might think about what constitutes us or the world in any imagined metaphysical sense. Such a metaphysical or ontological question has no necessary bearing on our ethical sensibilities. Sure, the answer they arrive at to this question might have a bearing for some individuals, but not for others, which means that it has no essential bearing.
It's impossible to generalize. And the fact is that we don't know, anyway, and it is impossible to discursively determine an answer that any unbiased person would be compelled to accept.It may well be, as Andrew M suggests, that the question itself is malformed and mal-informed.
As I keep saying, I'm questioning the culturally-normative sense of scientific realism. As one of the authors I like writes, 'The main problem with our usual understanding of secularity is that it is taken-for-granted, so we are not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in. Most of us assume that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed.' So it's a real basic disagreement about what is real. And they don't come a lot more basic than that.
But the underlined is not what you've written above it at all. What you write as precursor is that you're dissatisfied with the way in which people have a arrived at their world view (by simply accepting the one they're told about). This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether that worldview is right, useful, ethical... It may be all of those things and still be just blindly accepted by most people.
You're talking here to people with a deep layman, if not, in some cases, an actual professional, interest in philosophy. It's condescending to assume they haven't thought about it just because they haven't arrived at the same conclusions as you.
We can have a disagreement about what is real, but to have that disagreement you need to present arguments in favour of what you think is real - you've not even answered my very simple question from pages back about what criteria you're using to judge when something is real. Very basic stuff in any discussion about what is real.
For me, at least in part, deciding this question is a the core of this ongoing... at least ten years... of discussion. In the process i've been able to better articulate my own position, thanks to the critique @Wayfarer offers.
Where I think the technical difference must be placed, on my present understanding, is in the point made earlier, that for me there are things that are true, yet not known, believed, or otherwise in some positive relation to our minds. I think idealism must deny this, since it insists that mind is somehow indispensable.
The practical difference here is negligible.
@Wayfarer would discuss a spiritual aspect of the world, which seems to me an impossible task. It's not that I deny this sublime aspect of reality, but taking seriously that it is ineffable, and hence beyond discussion. Hence it becomes a place of disagreement.
But we are in agreement that scientific explanations are inadequate to many tasks. While @Wayfarer bases this on a metaphysical difference, there being a material and a mental/spiritual world, I see it as distinctly different tasks within the world. It's about direction of fit, about the difference between how things are and how we want them to be, rather than metaphysics.
That isn't a simple question. I don't recall the exchange, and I don't want to go back digging for it.
Quoting Banno
'In Special Relativity, neither objects nor time have the same length for all observers. Here’s an example of how the length of the same object can be a different for two different observers. Let’s say that you’re flying in a rocket ship to Mars at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Traveling at this clip, you pass the Little Prince sitting on his little planet. Let’s say that you measure the length of your rocket ship as you fly by the Little Prince, and he does, too. You might measure it at 40 feet long. But, due to the fact that he is sitting still, the Little Prince would measure it as much longer, maybe 60 feet long.
Special Relativity tells us that the rocket ship can be both 40 feet long to you and 60 feet long to the Little Prince. This is not a visual effect; the same object has two different physical lengths to observers who have two different speeds.'
So what length is it really?
The answer can only be, 'it depends'.
That's helpful, thanks.
Quoting Banno
I see your perspective and I think I intuitively privilege this 'direction of fit' myself to some extent. It sounds a little like pragmatism - 'Well we don't know or have access to ultimate metaphysics (whatever that may be), so let's get on with what we can say and what we do know works.' Is that unfair?
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to be the central theme, the potential depths of 'it depends'. Are we back at Banno's multi-functional apple?
So how can we have a discussion about what is real when you've no criteria for membership of that set?
But that is only part of the story. You, on your rocket to Mars, will be able to measure your space ship and then calculate the length that the Little Prince will see, using he equations Einstein developed. And he will be able to calculate the length you see. You will agree on the rest length of the ship.
Quoting Wayfarer
Both.
Such facts are not relative to the observer. Truth, more generally, is not always relative.
You and the prince agree as to what each of you will see.
If I may jump in, the differences in observations are a product of how reality works, not some property of the observers. It is a priori mind.
And you know that, how? What unobserved reality can science tell us of, pray?
Quoting Banno
Odd then that it's called the 'Theory of Relativity'. Perhaps the name could be improved?
It's not pragmatism, but that's yet another story.
Um, Einstein predicted it based on science. Confirming observations were made after the predictions.
Which part? "Theory" or "relativity"? Before answering, you might want to check what each means.
It is based on the converse view, that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. That reality is the same for all observers.
Someone really smart comes along and explains the exact cause of that difference, explains the factors of the real world which cause it to be 10 and 40 feet respectively (and not 3 inches, 6 miles, or anything else), and instead of putting the matter to rest, his work gets held up as proof of the original error being right, rather than the resolution of that error.
Of course. But Einstein was compelled to ask the question 'Doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' There are very deep questions about the nature of scientific realism brought up by modern physics, many of which seem to implicate the requirement for an observer, thereby undercutting the idea that reality is 'just so' independently of any act of observation.
Quoting Banno
It is true that relativity explains the apparent discrepancy of the measurement of objects moving in different reference frames, but notice that it must include reference to the observer - which is related to what disturbed Einstein about later developments in quantum physics.
[quote=John Wheeler, Law without Law] The dependence of what is observed on the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there" independent of all acts of observation. In contrast, Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it gives us. In struggling to make clear to Einstein the central point as he saw it, Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word "phenomenon". In today's words, Bohr's point - and the central point of quantum theory - can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon." ...In broader terms, we find that nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead what answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to happen.[/quote]
But nobody knew that such a difference could be observed prior to Einstein's theory.
Not sure what you mean. What was the original error?
It was a hypothetical. I'm just saying that it has always been the case that two observers would measure objects at different lengths depending on their relative speed. We might hypothetically have put this down to the idea that the ship's length is a feature of the observer, until Einstein showed how that was not the case, but rather actual physics could cause that phenomena.
I just find it odd that rather then being seen as a resolution of a potential error (seeing the ship's length as a feature of the observer), Einstein's work is so often held up as proof that this is the case.
But not Relativity. It's effects are NOT dependent on the mind of the observer. Differences in observations are due to the position and speed of the observers.
And I am uninterested in pop-science descriptions of QM.
Special relativity and quantum mechanics are quite distinct. Care must be take not to confuse the two.
Neither of us are, I believe, physicists - I only studied it at undergrad level. A good rule of thumb is that when non physicists start to talk about physics, it is time to leave. The physics is in the equations, not in the pop-science.
And perhaps finally, physicists are just as bad at doing philosophy as philosophers at doing physics.
I'm sorry, still lost. What's the difference between "resolution" and "proof" in this case?
Yes. Still surprised at how much gets lost in this medium of communication. It seems I'm understood less often than than I am misunderstood. I never have this trouble at work.
... Or maybe I do and no one ever dared say... now there's a thought.
The idea doesn't deserve this amount of scrutiny. It's simply that Einstein solved what might have otherwise been put down to mind-dependence. It's ironic that he's now used to defend mind-dependence. He showed that there was an observer independent reason for the difference in measurement, that it was not all in the mind of the observer, that it was, in fact, caused by the external state of the universe (the speed of the objects and the location of the observers).
It doesn't seem that way because no-one ever made such measurements to be confused about.
I thought it would clarify if presented a hypothetical world in which the odd measurement came first and the explanation after.
It clearly didn't.
When purported knowledge mates with skepticism, faith is born!
Oh, I didn't know Relativity was used to support idealism. My bad.
I know anti-realists like to trot out QM as support, without really understanding it. Using science to put down science.
And a very convenient one. The Enlightenment philosophes had no hesitation in blaring about LaPlace's Daemon when they felt it supported their lumpen materialism. But when Heisenberg and Bohr come along, oh let's keep shtum, we know nothing.
I think a realistic layman's grasp of the philosophical issues suggested by quantum physics is not 'pop science'. There are quite a few worthwhile popular science books on the subject.
Along those same lines, someone on TPF once raised the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment with reference to the half dead cat. I wryly asked if the cat knew. My comment went unnoticed.
...especially for those who would use it for nefarious purposes. It's a tad more complex now than in LaPlace's day.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
If meaning is use, then physicists ought shut up and calculate...
The "whatever that turns out to be" makes the very question "is the Universe material in nature?" a meaningless question. See Hempel's dilemma.
All the very best comments go unnoticed, see it as a badge of honour.
Commentary on my article “Quantum Wittgenstein” in Aeon Magazine
An approach for which I have much sympathy.
Fantastic articles both. Thanks for linking them.
The latter particularly said 'narrative' a lot, so it gets my vote. I shall have to up my game if I want to win (genuinely playing 'lifetime use of the word 'narrative'' with some colleagues - apparently I say it a lot! Personally I think that just happens to fit their narrative)
They were a very good read. Thanks.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/711348
(Physicist, 1983)
“...approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose....”
(Philosopher, 1787)
The more things change, the more they stay the same, for both genius and clown.
I don't understand how that citation supports your interpretation. The authors (of the paper) state...
...and...
I'm also interested in how you square your belief earlier that...
Quoting Wayfarer
...with the author's prescription that...
If you believe the laws of logic are real and yet also believe that res potentia are real then it seems you believe two contradictory things.
Also, you've argued the primacy of the interpretation of the observer. I wonder how you square that with the corollary of the res potentia concept that...
You have your priorities reversed, and this is probably why you perceive an interaction problem with dualism. You place your own desire to act, "what to do" as higher in priority to "how things are". But in reality, many things are impossible for any of us to do, because of the state of "how things are". We must therefore give priority to "how things are", in order to determine "what to do".
Without any respect for the priority of 'what actually is', "how things are", and the force of necessity which this bears upon us, any determination of "what to do" is unjustifiable. In other words, "what to do" can only be justified by the logically prior, and necessary, "how things are". Your refusal to accept the reality, and priority, of necessity, leads you to believe that 'the necessary' cannot interact with the real world.
Quoting Banno
Here it is, your rejection of 'the necessary', disguised as "a spiritual aspect of the world", which you cast off as "ineffable". Reasonable philosophies commonly refer to "the necessary" by means of the term "God".
Quoting Banno
Here, you try to sneak 'the necessary' in through the back door. There is, it seems, something necessary after all, "the laws of physics". The problem with this proposed backdoor necessity has been well documented by physicists such as Lee Smolin. All the laws of physics have limitations to their applicability, and break down, fail, when approaching the extremes of their applicability. Therefore it is not true that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, and your proposed backdoor necessity, "the laws of physics are the same for all observers" is an unacceptable proposition.
Furthermore, your claim to reject scientism is hypocrisy, as you replace "God" as your means of referencing "the necessary" with "the laws of physics" in your actions. And actions speak louder than words.
My view of Descartes, as I've said, is the error of making 'res cogitans' a thing - which is an implication of the term 'res'. I agree with the essential argument of Descartes regarding the indubitability of being, but not that being can be conceptualised as an objective reality. (This is in line with Husserl's appraisal of Descartes).
So I'd ask this question:
What is it, then, that creates 'res actual' from 'res potentia' if not 'res cogitans'?
The point I agree with is:
That coheres with the Platonist idea that number is real - not real as an object or 'something in the world' but as what Augustine calls 'an intelligible object'. Whereas there's no provision in materialist ontology for those kinds of realities. That's why I cited that Smithsonian essay on the nature of maths before, which says 'The idea of something existing “outside of space and time” makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago.'
As to the sense quantum objects don't obey the 'law of the excluded middle', this doesn't make logical principles any less real in their domain of application - but shows that logic is not all-encompassing or omniscient, that it has limits. But I also note Chris Fuchs Qbism:
Which brings us back to Kant.....
‘Tis a lonely journey, methinks.
It’s like....why even think of owning a Model T when there is an e-Ferrari. Doesn’t matter you can’t afford to buy one, couldn’t maintain it, can’t fit the family in it, and you’re afraid to take it out on bumpy roads and rainy days......
You’re seeing everything in your periphery directly. A picture or video of a rock is a rock seen indirectly.
I wouldn’t say you’re seeing the rock directly.
The direct connection I theorize, and can observe, is the skin touching the tea cup, the hand grasping it, the arm lifting the hand, the light hitting the eye, and so on.
For me, the object we experience and the cause of our sensations is the same thing. This can be observed. So I think it is you who needs to show that there are in fact two different objects, because it isn’t immediately apparent that this is so.
Here you are only explaining how things are - that how things are is subservient to the question of what to do. Meaning as use and all that and it's what one does is explaining how things are.
It seems that it's the other way around - that what one does is subservient to how things are. How things are can place limits on what you can do or say. Try "flying" out of a 10 story window.
It also seems to me that there was a how things are for billions of years before there was anyone that did anything, unless you're arguing for the existence of God.
You can only explain how things are - that is what one does (with language). And that is how things are. What we are all doing here is trying to explain how things are. Even in saying, "it's what one does" is explaining how things are. What is "It's" in the sentence, "It's what one does" if not "How things are is" what one does.
I think most of our disagreements were the result of talking past each other.
Quoting Wayfarer
We can use both meanings without any contradiction. We just have to make sure we're not talking past each other when using the term. So we can dispense with the term, "substance" and simply talk about subjects, being and material with uniform properties. Does a subject or being have uniform properties?
To interject, imagine that you have tetrachromacy and 40/20 vision and I don't have tetrachromacy and have 20/40 vision. If you and I look at the same external world object (e.g. an apple) then in one sense you and I are seeing the same thing (the apple) but in another sense you and I aren't seeing the same thing (you see different colours and more detail for example). The what we see in the second sense is different to the external world object. It is this second sense of what we see that the indirect realist will say is a "representation" of the apple.
And regarding the epistemological problem that gave rise to the disagreement between the direct and indirect realists, does the what we see in the second sense show us the mind-independent nature of the external world? Does that apple have the colour we see it to have even when we don't see it? And if so, is it the colour that you see it to have or the colour that I see it to have, as we each see the colour differently?
Given that direct realists argued that external world objects are as we see them to be (in the second sense) if perception is "direct" (and that perception is "direct") then it follows that whatever they meant by "direct", if external world objects aren't as we see them to be (in the second sense) then perception isn't direct. And I think that the modern scientific understanding of the world and perception shows that external world objects aren't as we seem to be (in the second sense), and so direct realism fails, regardless of the grammar we use to describe the object of perception.
It depends on how Wittgenstein and Austin are read. Banno shies away from more ‘countercultural’ interpretations of these authors. Compare his readings, for instance , to that of Anthony Nickles. I would say that your existentialism is of a conservative religious variety , as opposed to the later Wittgenstein’s or Sartre’s
existentialism.
One can think of how things are in terms of dead physicalistic nature independent our interaction with it and interpretation of it , or how things are in terms of the way that we interpret things in relation to current context, the particular pragmatic sense and relevance a meaning has for us in relation to our present goals and circumstances. This second, pragmatic notion of how things are is dependent on what we do with things. How things are is a human constructive , productive, creative process, an activity , a doing, an interaction. Science from this vantage is forward looking production via discursive practice rather than backward looking knowledge and epistemology, a becoming rather than a mirroring and representation of pre-existing nature.
don't care what banno says about anything. later.
is the myth, the internal picture that doesn't happen.
What happens is a readiness to order and classify and predict, along any number of respects or dimensions.
Quoting Michael
Does it belong where we are inclined to place it in our colour scheme?
Sure, that's not a reasonable (direct) question, but neither is (the indirect one), does that apple belong on the same rung of our colour scheme as our sensation of the apple?
Are you saying that we don't have qualitative experiences? That brain activity doesn't produce sensations?
Fair enough. But perhaps then that the universal is not really some objective world. Perhaps it is the shared patterns in human experience then.
Einstein’s work should neither be held up as the resolution of an error nor as proof of an error. Rather, it should be seen as an invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices.
Yes if that means having pictures (or qualities) inside as well as outside.
No if it means experiencing changes in perceptual readiness, i.e. learning.
Quoting Michael
Yes. What's wrong with: brain activity is sensations?
Nothing. Whether you want to say that brain activity is sensations or that sensations are some emergent phenomena from brain activity, it is the case that sensations are not directly connected to external world objects, and that they are, in a sense, "representations" of external world objects, with the qualities of those sensations (e.g colour), not being properties of external world objects.
Ah but then your usage of "sensations" implies picture-type qualities inside. Mine didn't.
I meant, brain activity is acts of perception.
But still yes: brain activity isn't and doesn't produce sensations in your sense.
The ‘is’ seems a little problematic to me, as if we were talking about absolutely equivalent senses of meaning. How do we know we are dealing with a brain? Brain implies a biological substance that we can experience together as a third person entity, and activity furthers specifies a functional, as opposed to anatomical, study of it though third peso. techniques of measurement. Sensation, on the other hand , is a first person experience of consciousness. We could try and correlate the third and first personal such as to come up with some sort of monism, but that ends up eliminating aspects of one or the other of the two vantages. If we were to say that the brain is a third personal concept that is generated within first person experience we could arrive at a way of keeping what is implied both by sensation and biological brain. Going in Dennett’s direction, on the other hand, and reducing sensation to third person brain process leaves out the situated perspectival basis of third person concepts like ‘brain’.
How about:
Sensation, physiologically, involves nervous system function.
Sensation, as the content of awareness, has properties that are absent from the physiological description.
Quoting Tate
Or:
Via intersubjective discourse, we construct concepts like physiological, biological, physical. Even though we treat them as though all traces of our conscious experience could be removed and they would remain as independent facts, they are inextricable from first personal experience.
Meanwhile , we treat concepts like the consciousness of sensation as though they were purely inner and ineffable substances or properties, the purely inner and subjective complement to the purely outer and objective physiological facts, a special seasoning added to objects.
Since according to idealism the world is a product of Big MInd, not your mind or mine, then on that position there may indeed be truths that are not known. Have you read Berkeley at all, or are you at least familiar with his philosophy via secondary sources?
You're saying that in this, our Age of Mechanism, we give precedence to the physiological, and treat first person data like some sort of foam on top?
When the two are actually bound by their relationship in the opposition?
Physicists agree that the calculations work. So they are happy.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, what you call the "genuine conundrum" is metaphysical, not physics.
You article is called "Quantum mysteries dissolve if possibilities are realities".
...If...
It's speculation. The calculations are not.
The idea of Will, mind-at-large and cosmic consciousness - whatever it is called, from Schopenhauer to Kastrup, seems to be central to many forms of idealism. From here it is argued we derive an objective world and regularities in what we call nature. It's why the moon doesn't vanish when you stop looking at it, etc. It interest me that in this discussion we get bogged down in parsing notions of realism and rarely explore the idea of mind-at-large, which seems to me to be unavoidable and a god surrogate. And when I say unavoidable, I am not referring to its reality but to it's explanatory power in idealism. Any thoughts on this?
Do you find it at all satisfactory, this rejection of an "external world" in favour of an "over mind" that does pretty much the very same thing?
We can both see the table. Do we both see the over mind? Which is a better explanation of our agreement?
I hear you. To be perfectly honest, I don't look for explanations. I generally just get on with it and I have rarely been disappointed. My interest in metaphysical suppositions has come late in life.
If all of reality is consciousness 'emanating' from some big cosmic mind and we are all dissociated alters of this mind, then that is kind of cool. However, I have no idea what that means, how it would be demonstrated to be true and if it makes any difference to us in practice.
Certainly it does. Do you see that your questions assume the very antithesis at issue? To give a familiar example from Ryle, is a university "Nothing But" its buildings? Or is it "Something Else As Well"?
The Reductionist ignores the context - the purpose of the buildings and their use. Whereas the Duplicationist supplements the context with an invisible extra thing.
--
Quoting Thinking and Saying - Gilbert Ryle
The GPS on my iPhone uses the equations of special relativity. Is that just a "linguistic convention and set of shared practices"?
That is the conceit of idealism: that all there is are such conventions. It disengages our narratives from the world. But it is only in their engagement with the world that these narratives are true or false.
Then why bother with it?
The point is that in either model, materialist or idealist. there is no problem that there should be truths unknown to us; which tells against your apparent claim that there could be no such truths under the idealist model, no? Or were you objecting because there could not be truths unknown to the Big Mind? :roll:
Quoting Tom Storm
I agree with you; the idea of idealist reality without a Big Mind or a completely unconscious linking of all minds, is incoherent. There would be no way to explain how it could be that we all see the same things.
Although what I just said above may not be right, thinking further on that, if we imagined it to be the case that all minds are unconsciously linked, and no big conscious mind at all, then there could be truths unknown to all minds, some to be discovered and others not.
No, I'd say that here, in the context of this discussion, with you it's more about Red's Herring.
Fair comment, with the caveat that I don't self-identify as Christian (although sympathetic towards Christian Platonism). But I share (often unwillingly) with many of the perennialists a deep suspicion of modernity. (I think there's a streak of that in Heidegger isn't there?)
Quoting Banno
So out-of-bounds according to you. But the reality is, metaphysics has a way of forcing itself on us. Heisenberg is quite an astute philosopher concerning the metaphysics of physics, a lifelong student of Plato.
:chin:
Quoting Andrew M
Again I refer to the problem implied in the 'reification of the subject'. To reify is to 'make into a thing', from the Latin 'res' (same term as used in 'res cogitans'). When you look for such a thing, there is nothing to be found, no 'invisible extra thing' - but at the same time, the reality of the subject is implicit in every act and utterance. (That is a topic much more discussed and debated in European philosophy than English-speaking, see this article).
Quoting Harry Hindu
That is also a question that tends to reify the subject.
Quoting Tom Storm
Related to the above, a difficulty is imposed on this question by 'the objective stance'. The objective stance, which basic to the natural sciences, seeks always to understand in objective terms - it is not concerned with reflective questions about the nature of the observing mind, for example (the extreme form being eliminativism). From within that perspective there's no such thing as 'mind at large' which also sounds suspiciously like a reification. But again, this doesn't consider the sense in which (as Schopenhauer said) that 'objects exist only in relation to subjects'. But to consider that properly means stepping outside the objective stance, which I think is actually quite a difficult thing to do.
Regardless, I'm interested the idea of 'life as the creation of mind'. On the one hand, I don't mean a design engineer deity who painstakingly creates the mechanisms of living things (e.g. Richard Dawkins' God). Maybe it is better understood, perhaps metaphorically, as an inchoate tendency in the universe at large towards self-awareness (although that will generally be rejected as orthogenetic).
On the other hand, the sense in which 'life is the creation of mind' refers to the way the mind/brain receives, organises and synthesises all of the data it receives into a meaningful gestalt. That is the constructive activity which comprises our life-world (lebenswelt or umwelt - compare Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung' or Buddhism's 'vijnana'). That's the approach I've been elaborating in this thread. If you really think it through, there is nothing outside of that, insofar as anything we consider will have been incorporated into it by the very act of considering it!
I’m saying what we call third personal , like physiological concepts, and ‘inner’ concepts like sensation, are the same ‘stuff’, and by stuff I don’t mean substances , either objective or mental. What I mean is that all experiences are interactions that are neither purely subjective nor objective They are inextricably both perspectival and about something. Every experience is a performance or act that is personally situated as relevant to me in some way , and the introduction of an outside element.
True and false only make sense within a particular convention, that of truth as correctness and adequation with respect to a fixed external referent.
The concept of fixed external referent isnt a fact, it is a foregone conclusion and thus a starting point for most approaches to empiricism.
In other words, there is a hidden circularity at work here. It is the engagement of narratives with a world already articulated via such narratives that produces instances of truth and falsity. For alternative accounts of science practice, the aim of empirical investigation isnt truth as adequation but pragmatic usefulness in relation to the accomplishment of specified goals.
An airplane is designed to fly on the basis of specific aerodynamic engineering principles. Does this mean that only these principles will allow the plane to fly? If we were to imagine a history of flying machines extending indefinitely into the future and studied the evolution of their underlying engineering principles over the course of that history, what kind of pattern of change would we find? Would it be cumulative , with the earliest knowledge base being conserved and carried over into the subsequent modifications and improvements? Or would the evolution of the knowledge of flight be more like the periodic global realignment of an intricate tapestry or network of relations, maintaining a relative dynamic self-consistency in its overall form even as it undergoes continual mutations and transformations escaping any formula or algorithm?
No. But it does mean that not just any principles will allow the plane to fly.
So again, the idealist narrative is disengaged.
Sure, truth only makes sense with regard to a particular convention. After all it is statements that are true or false, and statements are conventions of language. You can say whatever you like, but only some of what you might say is of use.
Your suggest was :
Quoting Joshs
My reply is that the "convention" is what allows you to find your location with your iPhone. It's more than just a convention.
I suppose that's what you mean by "shared practices"?
Use is not necessarily the same thing as true. If a statement is a convention of language , then truth is a particular kind of conventional statement, which may differ from what is merely useful. A statement can be considered useful because it is true in the sense of corresponding with a state of affairs, or corresponding with facts supposedly external to the statement. Or it can be useful because it provides a way of organizing experience that is amenable to prediction and control. The predictive success of the statement, thanks to its underlying machinery of assumptions, need not be assumed to correspond to a state of affairs entirely external to it. Any particular statement and associated underlying paradigm may be assumed to be one of a potentially indefinite array of predictive vehicles, each of which may be ‘true’ of the same given event, that is , predictive, but in different ways. The different ways that a statement can be true would be a matter of HOW it organizes a set of events rather than a simple matter of correspondence between statement and event.
quote="Banno;711733"]the "convention" is what allows you to find your location with your iPhone. It's more than just a convention.[/quote]
The Einsteinian convention allows you to find your phone in a particular way. It works , not simply as true , but as true in its particular way of working. One could come up with a different way for a gps to work. This way wouldn’t be more true than the Einsteinian way, it would be a different way of being true.
Sure.
Quoting Joshs
Again, that might be so, but not just any convention will do.
Only some of what one might say actually works. There is a way in which reality does not care what you say about it. Believe what you will, you cannot walk through walls.
I suspect you do not disagree with this.
I think the authors answer that when they say...
Since they're not arguing that the two 'substances' (Aristotelian substances) are not causally connected in any way (only in a classical sense) then nothing prevents a purely physical effect of res actual effecting res potential.
Even if some as yet unspecified factor were required, it's bizarre to suggest this factor simply must be res cogita, as if it were the only remaining option, and it certainly doesn't "support" your position without this.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. If absolutely doesn't. The argument is that our classification of what is real needs to include possibility. It does not, in any way mean we now have free reign to just chuck in anything else we feel like into the category. The need to expand the set hasn't, mentioned at all whether number should be included in that newly expanded set.
It comes back to the question you still haven't answered. What criteria does a thing have to meet to be counted as 'real'?
Quoting Wayfarer
But your only proof offered so far that number is real is its universality. If universality isn't one of the criteria for being in the set {real things} then what's to stop just anything from being a member of that set? Are Unicorns real? If not why not?
Says nothing about the non-physical nature of this thought though.
Just begs the question. we're asking about the directness of the data stream from the cause of you thinking "That's a cup" to your thought "That's a cup".
The argument is that the object of your experience 'the cup' is produced indirectly from causes external to the Markov Blanket of the system constituting your experience of the cup. If you then simply declare those external hidden states to be unhidden you are declaring that the cup on the table actually forms a direct connection (no intervening nodes) to the system whose function you'd describe as 'experiencing the cup'.
You'd basically be denying everything neuroscience has discovered over the last decades which demonstrably shows that there is no such direct connection, that several data nodes lie between the cause of a sensation and the conscious experience of that sensation.
I can even prove it to you from afar, if you're willing to undertake a little experiment?
Look straight ahead at something about 3m away (a door knob or light switch works well). Shut one eye. Look up, then back down to the object. Nothing ought to move (if it does, have your eyes tested!), your experience is of a static room which you just briefly examined the ceiling of. Now look back at the same object. Shut one eye. Gently place your finger on the lower part of your eye (over the eyelid, not directly on the eyeball) and gently press. The object you're looking at will appear to move. Your experience is now of a moving object.
You just replicated with your finger the exact same process you initiated with your eye muscles the first time. The only difference is the means by which the eye moved, not the sensation it received from the external world. Your brain adjusted the information in the first to give you a static picture because it knows that eye muscle movements cause this 'wobble' and so it filters it out. In the second, it's not used to you moving your eye with your finger so it doesn't filter out the wobble. It makes a prior guess that the wobble is what's actually happening in the world.
If you were to do this experiment every day for several weeks your brain would start to filter out this wobble, it would improve its guess to better fit the prediction that the external room is generally static.
What this shows is that there is, without doubt, at least one process (a data node) between what you refer to as your experience of the cup and the cause of that experience (which we refer to as 'the cup').
The problem is then what's left to be described as 'the resolution of an error'? Surely everything we'd previously described that way falls into the same camp, no? Which means we've just defined away the term 'error'. No longer in use. Seems a daft way to go about things, since we all quite happily use the word.
Far better to say that an "invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices" is just what "resolving an error" is, it's what it means when we use the term.
The trouble is, as ever, that you want to declare all that to be the actual state of affairs. You're claiming that the world is such that we only ever have differing models of what is the case, true or not, relative only to the internal assumptions of that model.
But "the world is such that we only ever have differing models of what is the case, true or not, relative only to the internal assumptions of that model" is itself a claim about the way the world is, and so suffers from the same problem. It's only true relative to it's own internal assumptions.
This means that - relative to it's own internal assumptions - it's also true that the world is such that our theories directly correspond to the external state of affairs and some are just right and others just wrong.
You're trying to have your cake and eat it, presenting, as true, a theory about how the world is which within it claims that there are no absolutely true theories about how the world is.
Would that be something that we are unable to describe using ordinary or specialized language? We describe human beings and their activities in terms of purpose, agency, sentience, and so on. Those qualities don't presuppose a Cartesian framework.
Quoting Wayfarer
Restating without the subject/object terms, aren't you just saying that a human being is implicit in a human being's actions and utterances?
They add:
And even though a measurement is a physical act it’s also a cognitive one.
Quoting Isaac
‘Quick! What *is* the aim of all science and all philosophy? Your time starts…..now.’
More seriously - consider something like the principles of logic, or Pythagoras’ theorem. We would generally agree that they are real, I hope - that they’re not simply ‘social constructs’ (as some here would say). In that sense, I’m realist. But they’re not material entities, in that they can only be grasped by a rational mind. Ergo - real but not material. That is all I’m claiming, and it’s not that radical a claim.
Quoting Isaac
Right. But I think the question needs to be asked, in what sense do possibilities exist? If you’re referring to an actual existent, then it’s not a possibility. If you’re referring to something that might happen, then it’s not something that exists. So the ‘realm of possibility’ is somewhere between existent and non-existent. There are things that are outside the realm of possibility altogether, but there’s a range of things within that realm, but some of which will never materialise. So the interesting question is, in what sense are those existent? I think Heisenberg’s answer is interesting - as he says, sub-atomic particles -and let’s not forget, they are the purported fundamental units of existence - are on the boundary between existent and non-existent. When a measurement is taken, then you have a definite answer - “yes, there it is, it exists”. That is the reason why the ‘act of measurement’ is portentous in modern physics.
Quoting Andrew M
Implicit, and easily overlooked. Or even eliminated.
Not sure how Fitch's paradox is relevant. Idealism doesn't entail that there are no unknown truths. There can be unknown mathematical or logical truths, for example, and these do not require an external material world.
Quoting Banno
Idealism can allow for the mental stuff that exists to behave in a regulated way such that we can't will ourselves to experience whatever we want. We'll never experience ourselves walking through walls.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
I'm not sure of the relation between advantage and truth. It might very well be that there's no practical difference between idealism and materialism, but also that idealism is true.
And as for why one might think that idealism is more likely than materialism, perhaps it's something like an application of Occam's razor. Rather than there being both material and mental stuff, and the hard problem of consciousness, and with the existence of material stuff being inferred to explain the regularity of experience, there's just the mental stuff that is immediately apparent.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that the possibility of some 'spooky' action of res cogita is closed off as an explanation for QM 'spookiness'. I'm just saying this article neither advances it either. Basically the metaphysical question behind measurement remains entirely untouched. What they do say is that there exists an explanation of QM 'spookiness' which does not require something like res cogita. Measurement can be just a physical process and that can be enough to actualise probabilities from their res potentia.
As so often the case, the evidence underdetermines the theories and so we have to look to other reasons to choose one over another - elegance, simplicity, personal preference...
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I'd agree they're real, but only in the same way unicorns are real. It's a thing in our world we talk about and make use of. The point is what kind of thing they are - unicorns are a real mythical invention: the kind of thing they are is 'mythical invention'. Logic is a real mode of thinking, that doesn't mean it would still be the same absent of humans to think that way.
In other words, a ...
Quoting Wayfarer
...is perfectly real.
Hence the 'radicalness' of your claim, to the extent there is is any, is that social constructs and the laws of logic are two different kinds of thing. Whether we distinguish them by calling one real and the other not, or whether we distinguish them by saying they're both real but of different kinds, is semantic. what matters is the role they thereby have in our behaviour.
Fictional creatures and mathematical principles are both things that can only be grasped by a mind, but mathematics possesses a kind of reality which I’m sure you will agree doesn’t pertain to fairy tales.
Mathematics serves a different function to unicorns (the concept of), but I don't know if that makes it possess a different "kind of reality". Again, I think that would depend on the baggage that came along with that. How does something which possesses a "different kind of reality" differ from something which is merely different?
Say, a dog is different from a cat. Does a dog possess a different kind of reality from a cat, or are they too similar to qualify? What kind of work is this classification doing - essentially is what I'm asking.
:up:
Do you apply that to mathematical and logical statements as well?
At last you see the question I'm asking.
I think that classical philosophy understood there are different levels or modes of being - an hierarchy of being, expressed in The Republic through the analogy of the divided line. And I'm not saying that just out of nostalgia or sentiment - my belief is that this represents a real set of distinctions which has been lost in the transition to modernity. It corresponds with the loss of the 'realm of value' which is the vertical dimension, as distinct from the horizontal dimension assumed by the natural sciences.
Quoting Isaac
This is still visible in early modern philosophy, in which the reality of things is judged in terms of their proximity to the source of being. So the aim of the understanding of that is the 'philosophical ascent' to the ground of being. If it sounds religious, that's because Christian theology absorbed a great deal of it from Platonist philosophy, but it's not religious in the dogmatic sense.
Quoting IEP
So, the connection I see with Heisenberg's physics, is that it represents the re-discovery of the idea of 'degrees of reality' - which has what had been lost. There is no conceptual scale in modern philosophy, of greater or lesser degrees of reality. Things either exist or they do not. And the loss of that goes back centuries to long-forgotten scholastic debates about the univocity of being (and also the loss of formal and final causation.)
Quoting Andrew M
The Galilean/Cartesian/Newtonian science that underwrote the scientific revolution concentrated exclusively on the quantitative aspects of bodies - just those attributes which can be represented in Monsieur Descartes' wonderful algebraic geometry. The qualitative aspects were relegated to the subjective consciousness of the observer (as per the last quote on my profile page.) This is the origin of the 'absence of the subject' - the subject was at best a tacit presence, the detached scientific eye, practicing a kind of detachment that was actually inherited from the more religiously-focussed detachment of the mystics, but in this context concentrated wholly on the 'domain of quantity'. But none of that undermines the ability of the rational mind to plumb the depths of reality through mathematical reasoning. It just puts it in a social context.
It's as if the West took all the parts of Plato that were useful for engineering and science, but left behind the entire ethical content of the search for 'the Good'.
Third person data is is things like "The moon orbits the earth." Would you agree that this statement is true from any perspective?
When you can, take a look at the SEP article on Fitch's paradox. "...the proof does the interesting work in collapsing moderate anti-realism into naive idealism."
Do you believe that there are unknowable mathematical truths? If so, why would this only be the case if there is an external material world? I don't see why the existence of mind-independent atoms determines the provability of Goldbach's conjecture, for example.
Or what about counterfactuals or claims about the future? They can be unknowable if there's an external material world but are necessarily knowable if there isn't? I don't see how that follows.
This seems to be the crux of our disagreement, and I seem to recall reaching it before (not that it's a bad thing to do so again, clarity is always useful). You use "understand" here in a way which I think is unjustified. Classical philosophy said there are different levels or modes of being. They only understood there are different levels or modes of being if you already agree with the conclusion. Otherwise it begs the question.
We're asking if there actually are different levels or modes of being, and you're offering, by way of evidence, that somebody once said that there were.
I understand that such a philosophical position existed. I'm passing familiar with the historical changes by which it fell out of favour. Nothing in either the fact that it once existed, nor in the fact that sociopolitical factors caused its decline stand as arguments in favour of the model.
We've agreed (I think) that the evidence we have (of any sort, empirical or otherwise) under determines the theories. So why choose this one? What are its merits?
The answer to this question depends on how one understands the nature of time. Obviously, the future consists of possibilities, that's why we deliberate before acting, because we can decide which possibilities to actualize. The future consists of possibility, and this is known as that which is between existent and non-existent, because we assign "existence" to material things, and future things have not yet materialized.
There is however, a trend in modern culture, to deny the reality of "the present" in time. This denial is to ignore the distinction between past and future, rendering the principles by which we understand "possibility" as unintelligible. Of course this denial of "the present" as a real division between two completely distinct aspects of reality, the past and the future, is completely opposed to the way that all of us live our lives. So this is the ultimate in extreme forms of hypocrisy. We all live, act, and think, in complete acceptance of a real difference between things of the past and things of the future, in all of our mundane activities, so to deny the reality of the present, as the necessary division between these two completely different aspects of reality, is an extreme form of hypocrisy.
Quoting Isaac
What exactly does this mean, "to actualize probabilities"? If possible things have no material existence, and actual things are material things, then what does it mean to give materiality to a thing?
This is the question of "the present". At "the present", which is arguably the time of our experience, and observations, future things have no material existence, being possibilities, and past things are things which have materialized with actual existence. At "the present", something happens whereby immaterial things (possibilities) are "actualized" into real material existents. What could be this process where immaterial possibilities are actualized into real material things, other than some form of "being chosen"?
That choice of words, "being chosen", was made to demonstrate the traditional understanding, that the actualization of possibilities, at the moment of the present, is caused by "the Will of God".
I've absolutely no interest in a God-of-the-gaps argument. Even if there were an uncertainty to resolve around the means by which potential states become actual states it would a) be best resolved by experts in that field, and b) have absolutely nothing to do with a character from some 2000 year old folk story.
Correct.Quoting Isaac
Apart from the many other arguments which you here disregard.
Quoting Isaac
It is what philosophy is about. And I completely understand that mine is a minority view.
When you speak of 'evidence', surely you grasp that in this case, empirical evidence is not a question at issue, but that the relevance of it to this issue is one of the claims at stake.
The word that comes to mind most readily in respect of your line of questioning is 'eristic'.
I don't think any have been presented. They always, on interrogation, seem to come down to "Plato said so". I've responded to everything you've written and you to me likewise. We've had a fairly exhaustive discussion. I don't recall anything being left by the wayside, but if I've missed an argument I'm all ears...
Quoting Wayfarer
It reads like an an answer, not a question. Are you saying that, for you, philosophy is about the fact that there are different levels or modes of being? What are the merits of seeing philosophy as having such a narrow remit?
Quoting Wayfarer
I do, yes. That's why I put in the caveat "...or otherwise".
When observing another's brain activity, how can you tell if the visual sensation you experience of another's brain activity is your own brain activity or theirs?
The issue is that other people's brain activity can only be observed via your sensations. If the sensations are an illusion then so is your understanding of brain activity. You don't experience brain activity when observing your own sensations. You only experience sensations of which your observations of other people's brain activity is composed of. When observing others' sensations you experience brain activity. So there is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. It seems to me that brain activity is secondary to sensations as my own sensations are not composed of brain activity. It's the other way around.
But it's not. It is your own use of language that reifies subject and being. Are subject and being simply scribbles you've put on this screen, or do the scribbles refer to something that isn't scribbles? If the latter, then what is it the scribbles refer to? Or are you saying that there is no distinction between subject and non-subject? If that is what you're saying then you haven't actually said anything useful. It seems more like how Christians explain that their God is undefinable and not a thing that can be accessed by science in an effort to protect the idea of God from being falsified. You're doing the same thing here in regards to subject and being.
You say this extra thing cannot be found and then say it is implicit in every act and utterance. Then subject and being are the acts of humans?
Conservatives in the U.S. like to say that the facts of nature dont care about our feelings. All I would add to this is that this logic extends to feelings themselves, and to what we say about things. Put differently, our feelings dont care about our feelings, and what we say about things doesn’t care about what we say about things. Let me parse this seeming gibberish. ‘Not caring about’ refers to a certain independence. In a very general
sense, objective empirical models of the world don’t allow us to posit absolute independence of natural objects form each other. On the contrary, a causal interdependence reigns at all levels, from the quantum to the cultural. But alongside this interrelationality, empiricism posits facts internal to objects or forces, properties or attributes that survive the changing relationships among objects and forces. These inhering properties must be assumed to survive such interactions, because they determine the nature of the relationships , what kinds of patterns are possible. For an empiricist, this is as true in human psychology as in physics. Thus, ‘my feelings don’t care about my feelings’ means that empirical models of neuro-psychological function that rely on concepts of internal computation and representation believe that feeling and linguistic conceptualization are constrained and determined by intrinsic features of the brain that do not themselves change along with ( don’t care about) minute to minute changes in feeling or discursive understanding.
They may be context-sensitive but also are fundamentally context-independent. The underlying neurological principles of language and feeling don’t care about the contextual changes in feeling and linguistic expression.
This assumption of the context-independence of the facts of empirical psychology has important ethical implications. It justifies the politics of blame( irrationality, madness, bias, cognitive dissonance, sociopathology, brainwashing).
In differently ways, writers like Wittgenstein , Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault focus on the empirical assumption of intrinsic properties that survive contextual changes in relationships.
What they propose is that every contextual relationship changes the ‘inherent’ properties of the elements that enter into the interaction. So
in a sense there are no inherences, no properties, only differences that make a difference, both to other elements and to themselves.
My aim in the following paragraphs is not to get you to agree with this , but to try and see if we can avoid the common objections to this ‘radical relativism’.
The first objection is that it is an attempt to deny or undermine science and its claims to effectiveness. Planes dont fall out of the sky , so science works, is one response.
The postmodern claim that intrinsic facts deconstruct themselves is not a critique of science in any traditional
sense of critique. It is not contradicting, denying , refuting, disproving or invalidating the assumption of internal properties , laws, forms. What is it doing is saying that our sciences already take into account the instability and movement at the heart of its intrinsic facts without knowing that it does so. If i point out a rock to you and tell you to stare at it for a while, you may tell me that it remained a rock for the whole time you were staring at it. What you don’t pay attention to is your changing eye movements, posture , attention, etc. Your behavior evinces the effects of an experience that is constantly changing, but in ways that are so subtle that they dont disturb the concept of ‘this same rock’.
Postmodernists argue that scientists are absolutely right when they say that there is a way that reality doesn’t care about how you model it, that reality is composed of
rocks , or forces, or laws with an intrinsic content that survives the contextual changes they enter into.
Postmodernists are just saying that ‘intrinsic’ , context-transcending content continues to be what it is the same way that the rock I stare at continues to be what it is, by changing continuously but very subtly.
So postmodernists are not really touching the results of the natural sciences, their predictions and laws. What they are doing is suggesting that the way of scientific progress is not via the fixing of laws and intrinsic properties bit of arranging and rearranging patterns of human relationship with the world in more and more
intricate ways. Yes, some of our attempts will work better relative to our goals than others, but the attempts that fail also contribute to this progress. The tendency of empiricism to nail down an arbitrary , intrinsic, irreducible, context-independent basis for natural objects and forces, those facts which dont care about the changes taking place around them ( or because of them), are the least interesting and least valuable aspect of science. This is what always threatens to turn science into dogma. Its most valuable quality is its ability to see process and relation within the arbitrary, the intrinsic , the lawful and the fixed.
The second objection to postmodern approaches to
science is that they destroy the usefulness of prediction by trying to rid the world of its stable foundations. But in the example I gave of staring at the rock, the subtle but continual shifts in the experience of something that we categorize linguistically as ‘this rock’ likely aren’t threatening to most scientists, except as a metaphysical curiosity. So what if every physicist who makes use of Einstein’s equations interprets their sense in a subtly different manner. As long as it doesnt affect their math, who cares? The language of physics handles this insignificant ambiguity in interpersonal understanding more than adequately. ( Of course , some within physics are pointing to new directions for the field that takes this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug).
The point isn’t just that the kind of instability postmodernists are pointing to within the founding facts and laws of the natural sciences doesn’t prevent science from working. It is that postmodern ways of thinking reveal what would be called the natural world to be less arbitrary and more intricately ordered than is seen within empirical approaches. This interrelational order was always the case, but science alters it to make it increasing more intricate. Planes don’t stay up in the air because of fixed facts of nature that were always the case before humans entered the picture. They stay up in the air because nature , which was always already finely ordered ( but not in a mathematically causal way) , continues to become more intricately relational because of the way humans change it with their science. Science is a human construction that achieves its effect by conceptually and physically altering the environment. We don’t simply find the order in nature, we manufacture it, in increasingly powerful and intricate ways. There are absolutely no fixed facts within or before the history of nature to make this possible , other than the recursive self-differentiating nature of nature.
When you observe another human being - call it their "brain activity" or behavior - what do you think is going on? Your notion seems to verge on solipsism.
Your act of observing is, of course, your own subjective experience. But where do the things you observe originate from? Your own mind? An uber-mind? Or do you just refuse to think about it?
If your brain/body is an illusion, why that particular illusion? Why is it universally shared?
I think a great deal of your position hinges on whether you think other humans exist, what they are, and how you know.
The old anti-postmodernist , anti-relativist chestnut rears its head:
‘How can the radical relativist claim that there is no objective truth, when their own claim is a truth claim?’
As a postmodernist , I am not saying forms of realism and naturalism are not ‘true’. They of course are true. That is , they discern intrinsic, context-independent objects , forces or forms. The world as they see it does indeed correspond or cohere with this model. Their model is true, correct , adequate to the terrain. As long as there is such a thing as a terrain , an intrinsic content, form , law, one has the chance of being true to it. But what if one believes, as do postmodernists like Deleuze, that the terrain is what it is by being the same differently? That when we utter the word ‘true’ and mean ‘correct’ , ‘adequate’, we are riding down a river, looking at the changing scenery and seeing this flow only as a fixed object? A simple correspondence between map and territory is revealed to be the product of a synthetic activity that ties together a multitude of changing differences and calls it ‘this fact’ over and over again even as ‘this fact’ continues to be the same differently.
It turns out that the territory is itself an endless series of maps.
At any rate, the question for the postmodernist who believes this insane idea is, what does it mean for you to believe it? Is it ‘true’? If truth needs a territory , a ground, an intrinsic , context-independent fact of the matter, then what does the postmodernist need?
The postmodernist doesn’t state a proposition about the world, they don’t mirror or represent. They perform a bit of theater, they enact, produce , transform. They utter words from within the interstices of assemblies of differentiating differences, rather than representing or observing from some vantage outside the multiplicity of differences. A conscious experience is shaped by, participates in and changes a multiplicity which is at the same time linguistic , unconscious, biological , social, political , physical and many other things.
The question the postmodern is asks is not ‘what is true’, but ‘what remains and what changes moment to moment’? The answer has to be repeated every moment as a performance. The answer for Deleuze , Heidegger and others is that the present is a an intersection of past and present such that the past appears as already changed by the present it enters into. My world from
moment to moment is foreign and familiar at the same time , familiar because it is a cobbling of my remembered history and the way the present changes it. It is also foreign in that it never reproduces a past.
Why can’t I say that I affirm this relation between memory and change as a metaphysical truth? The traditional concept of truth would seem to run afoul of an affirmation of the world that locates no fixed content of any sort , only a continually changing structure of past-present-future. Nothing remains settled , but must be reaffirmed , and reaffirmed differently, every moment. In one sense, the only thing that is true is the formal structure of past-present. In another sense, every content , every moment , is true in that a new ‘fact’ is produced, o my lasting for the moment of tis appearance as a new difference.
The postmodernist doesn’t tell the modernist their truths are untrue , they invite them to turn truths into theater, performance, to see the flow underneath the facts. The world is indeed as ordered as the empirical truths declare it to be , but it can be seen as even more intricately ordered than this. Belief in arbitrary intrinsically fixed facts hide that richer , more intimate order from us.
OK. So, on your view, a human being is also implicit in mathematical and logical statements?
From a previous discussion, in which you participated.
Quoting Banno
We went to Devitt at "Devitt:Dummett's Anti-Realism", ending in a discussion of Davidson.
The part I bolded above goes to your present question. How should we now proceed?
Interesting question!
Think about what the 'mathematization of nature' that was the basis of the scientific revolution enabled. It was the ability to arrive at constant, mathematically-sound frameworks and descriptions that were universally valid. Newton's laws of motion were paradigmatic. Combine that with the Galilean/Lockean division of the world into the primary and secondary attributes, along with the discovery of Cartesian algebraic geometry. Then introduce Cartesian dualism and you have fundamental elements of the framework of the early modern worldview which was thought to be theoretically infinite and potentially all-knowing. But the problem with it is, there's no actual place in it for humans, as the observing mind has already been tacitly excluded from consideration. So in that context, the idea of the human observer was not even a consideration. In this framework, and after the discovery of the principles of biological evolution, the human is dealt with simply as another object of scientific analysis. That is still very much the view of modern scientific materialism or physicalism.
The role of the subject is was rediscovered in late modernity and the early 20th Century. You in particular would appreciate how that reared its head in respect of the 'observer problem' in quantum physics, which had to consider the observing subject in its reckonings. More generally there has been what's called a 'rediscovery of the subject' through phenomenology and existentialism. But my remark that started this particular digression was about the human 'being eliminated' - which is of course a reference to eliminative materialism. In that view the quantitative, objective framework is the sole grounds of valid knowledge. Even if that's an extreme form, the objectivist framework is still highly influential in modern culture. And in that framework, the role of the subject is always bracketed out or neglected. That is the subject of the essay The Blind Spot of Science in the Neglect of Lived Experience.
Is your first point that post modernism does not address science? I'll go along with that.
Is your second point that post modernism does not undermine science? I'll go along with that, too.
Is your point that we can talk abut things in diverse ways? I don't disagree.
Again, we can say whatever we like, yet not just anything we say will do. The world places strictures on our narratives.
And again, I don't think you disagree with this.
So what is it you want here?
There is a place for the mind in Cartesian models , but as outside agent, for Descartes the divinely directed rational organizer of data, and for Kant the divinely directed organizer of ideas. If we bring the subject into more intimate relation with science, we run the risk of not going far enough , by retaining the divine origin of the contribution of consciousness to the nature of the world.
This keeps subjectivity at a distance from natural objects and thus remains a dualism.
To truly transcend dualism, we need to see perspectival relationality and valuative difference as inherent in nature at all levels, not just as emanating from ‘mind’.
'The meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind.'
'The external universe, outside the scope of observation by any living being, is the residue after all sensable qualities have been taken away. What remain are only formal entities which have no concrete interpretation. Thus, the universe uncoupled from observation is an abstract system in search of an interpretation. ...The material universe, of course, has an independent existence quite apart from observers. But the important lesson for us is that this external universe is very different from the way we imagine it to be. The mind of living beings projects all manner of sensable features onto material objects, hence we perceive the world with all the properties we have projected onto it—but objectively the unobserved universe is formless and featureless.'
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 85). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Things we say or theorize, and actions we perform that ‘won’t do’ change our circumstances in ways that make it possible for the theories that ‘will do’. This was an important point of Nietzsche , Heidegger, Deleuze and others. Negation and contradiction are treated as failure, lack, accident by the philosophical tradition up to Hegel and Marx. Dialectical progress is supposed to transcend lack and contradiction.
But this implies that the right way corresponds to what is true and the wrong way is simply error and mistake.
Postmodernists argue that what is important about scientific and philosophical progress is not that we get on track with what ‘will do’ and discard as a waste what
won’t do’ , but that all change in thinking
‘ does it’ in some sense. That is, contributes to moving us into new realms of scientific and philosophical practice.
It’s not that the world places strictures on our narratives, it’s that our incipient ventures into new
territories of interchange with our world necessarily have the character of vagueness and confusion. We initially don’t seem to be able to make our way around in the new world we create for ourself because we haven’t yet found a way to articulate its larger dimensions in concrete terms, even if we can generate what seem to be clear propositional statements. We call this ‘error’ and discount its value.
If we point to Einstein’s formulas as an example
of ‘getting it right’ we picture a world external
to us that is shaped in a very precise way that the theory fits perfectly like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
But if I were to suggest that Einstein’s formulas are just elaborations and translations of Kant, then the metaphor of puzzle piece becomes less powerful.
If you might accept this idea just for the sake of argument, then the question is , can we view the move from Descartes to Kant to Hegel as threading the needle just so, crafting a puzzle piece that fits ever more tightly onto the puzzle of nature? In my view , every outlook by every human being on the planet correlates with some
figure or other on the developmental trajectory of philosophy. There are no outliers, no individual
with a ‘wrong’ worldview , an outlook that ‘won’t do’. All outlooks are valid in their own way , are useful in their own context, and belong to the larger developmental history. Nature doesn’t produce strictures , only opportunities for personal change that at some points is muddled, confused , incoherent and at others crystallizes into clarified notions. The development of ideas feeds on itself, is self-reflexive, complexifies and diversifies itself at the same time as it becomes more intimate with itself. The world is self-reflexive, not correlational. Strictures and sayings that ‘won’t do’ are not wrong paths , only phases of the right’ path, the only path , the historical path toward increasing integration and intricacy of intersubjectively produced experience.
OK, but I still didn't get a clear "yes" or "no". :smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. It's the case that human beings construct the experiments, observe the results, theorize, and draw logical conclusions from their theories. Thus the human being is implicit in every aspect of the endeavour. That theorizing can also be about human beings, such as with the Wigner's Friend thought experiment (i.e., what happens when one observes an observer).
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems to me that the way forward is to reject the Cartesian framework in its entirety, not emphasize the subject horn of its spurious subject/object antithesis. Otherwise one is still in the Cartesian thrall (as are the objectivists).
Again, not all accounts are the same. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is of little use in iPhone design. Sure, some engineer might find it enlightening in such a way that they are able to produce a smaller antenna, or some such; but the Book of the Dead will not replace Maxwell's equations in antenna design.
But now we might also add the classic critique of Feyerabend - if anything goes then everything stays. If all narratives are to be treated the same, then the conservatives in the U.S. liking to say that the facts of nature don't care about our feelings is as valid as your own account of feelings. PoMo suits the right as well as it suits the left. You will be aware of the discussion as to the extent that PoMo underpins some of the intellectual defences of Trump's lies.
Your blade does not have a grip. It cuts the hand wielding it.
The Tibetan book of the dead is of little use in iPhone design for the same reason that it is of little use in the design of Cartesian or Kantian philosophy, because it belongs to a discursive space of reasons that does not produce the kind of intelligibility that makes iPhone design possible. On the other hand , the space of reasons that frames iphone design includes not only Maxwell’s equations , but the fundamental philosophical architectures that make Maxwell’s applied work , and digital technologies in general intelligible. This takes us back to the rationalistic era of Leibnitz. No rationalism, no digital revolution and no iPhone.
The iphone has nothing in it of Hegel or post-Hegelian thinking. Look to the next technological revolution for those kinds of devices (already envisioned by Dennett and other post-Hegelians) followed by Nietzschean and postmodern devices. There’s always a long lag time between the laying of the philosophical foundations and the final instantiation of those ideas in the form of machines, so it will be a while before we see them on the market.
Quoting Banno
All narratives are valid in the sense that they mark a necessary moment in the development of culture and science. This is different than saying all narratives should be treated the same, and that we should have no preference for one over the other. One won’t have an adequate understanding of any narrative if one doesnt know how to place it within the context of an overarching historical development. This means seeing it as subsuming a more traditional narrative and being subsumed by a more complex and intricate narrative. We will always prefer what we consider to be the narrative that subsumes all others, because it allows us to see the older narratives as valid while being able to transcend their limitations. Trump’s thinking harks back to early 20th century politics in the U.S. Thus it is valid in that historical context, laying the groundwork for the more progressive thinking that followed and depended on it , and would have perhaps been considered progressive by the standards of that era . It has since been subsumed and superseded by more complex thinking, in the opinion of many of us , so now we demonize it. We can attempt to coax Trumpists to progress beyond the limits of that moldy narrative , but there are limits to how far any of us can move within and beyond a worldview that we inhabit. Best to politically separate Trumpists and post-Trumpists rather than trying to punish, threaten , cajole , bribe or harangue them into moving in our direction
I've been building the second of four new above-ground garden beds. Progress has ben slow because of the unusual cold. I already have cauliflower, spinach and Brussel sprouts growing in the first bed. I've put in three tubs to hold about 120l of water in the base of each, with a fill of volcanic rock, mostly recycled from old mulch. This has ben covered in straw from the chook's bedding, which needed replacing. I keep them in deep litter to avoid bumble foot in the wet. Then more old soil, to be toped off with the contents of a previous above-ground garden, refreshed with clean soil and cow shit.
I've a mesclun salad mix in punnets ready to plant, and garlic on order that should be here soon. I also plan to grow carrots in rotation. The bed is quite large - a few square metres.
Whatever the point is with regard to the thread or to my posts remains obscure. I don't see anything here I haven't already addressed.
Quoting Banno
now I’m hungry
It's the kind of question to which an answer can only take the form 'it depends on what you mean'.
Let me re-iterate - the argument from mathematical Platonism is based on the straightforward observation that numbers are real, but not in the same sense that objects are. They're real in the sense that they're the same for any rational intelligence, but they don't exist as material objects, because they can only be grasped by the mind.
Empiricism rejects the reality of number on the basis that numbers don't exist within the time-space framework. But to me, that simply signifies a basic deficiency in their philosophy. (That is the subject of the articles under 'Philosophy of Maths and Universals' on my profile, especially the last.)
But the criticism of the quantification of nature by modern science is a different matter again. That is the subject of a lot of commentary in philosophy of science. Even though Platonism is involved in both cases, they're separate arguments. The former argument is a rationalist philosophical argument for the reality of intelligible objects, the latter is a critique of scientific materialism.
Quoting Andrew M
No, don't agree with that, it's a matter of interpreting it correctly. I agree that there are many implicit problems in 'post-Cartesian' discourse. As I said, my view is that many misinterpret Descartes by depicting 'res cogitans' is a kind of spooky substance or actual ghostly thing, and then wondering how 'it' can 'react' with 'physical matter' (which is a problem that was also inherent in Descartes himself, as observed by Husserl). Once you adopt that framework, Cartesian dualism seems clearly absurd - but the problem is one of interpretation. There really are subjects of experience, and objects of experience, you can't simply turn a blind eye to it because it's too hard to figure out.
Again, this is where the book I am referring to, Mind and the Cosmic Order, brings a lot of clarity. See the quotation in the post above. (It doesn't have anything to say on Platonism as such, although it does mention both Descartes and Kant, but it makes a great deal of sense in terms of mind and world.)
The non-existence of an external material world doesn't entail that all counterfactuals are knowable and that all mathematical theories are provable. Taking an extreme form of idealism as an example, even if only my mind and my experiences exist, I don't know what I'm going to experience tomorrow.
Well, you seem to be ill-informed. Theologians and metaphysicians are the "experts in that field" of "the means by which potential states become actual states". So, from your reply, I conclude that you have no interest in this question, and you just want to take for granted that such a thing happens. That's fine, it's the assumption made by most.
Your example falls flat. Of course the future is unknowable. But that is the case for both the realist and the idealist. The question is, does p exist as true before it is experienced? If not, then I don't see how you avoid the charge of solipsism. If so, then you are just giving another name (i.e., mind stuff) to what makes up the external world.
Does p come into being at the moment it is experienced? Or is it lurking in some uber-mind?
That’s the point. Banno is arguing that if idealism is the case then everything is known (even referring to us as being omniscient). I’m explaining that this isn’t the case. Even if idealism is true I still don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Idealism argues that only minds and mental phenomena exist. It doesn’t argue that only my mind and mental phenomena exist.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
That depends on the specific form of idealism. Some argue the former, others the latter.
The idealists I know argue that the world is objectively the case, it just isn't made of matter. It is mind when seen from a particular perspective. What holds reality together is consciousness at large - not your consciousness, or mine.
There are idealists who argue that materialism is incoherent because matter is just what can be measured, it has no qualities - taste, touch, colour, smell, etc. These are provided by us through our brains. So in a strange way they say is materialists who are solipsists, or prisoners of the brain in their skulls.
So we're all Borg. Got it.
Ah, the Hive Mind.
Quoting Michael
The former is called solipsism. The latter is a form of materialism that just calls matter by another name.
No, that isn't implied at all.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
No it isn't. There can be multiple minds, each with individual experiences.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
I could say that materialism is a form of idealism that just calls mental phenomena by another name.
It seems that mental phenomena belong to minds. If not my mind, then a Hive Mind.
If p comes into existence at the moment of being experienced, it is only part of the mind experiencing it. I.e.,solipsism.
Existence a priori subjective experience is what realists believe. So the uber-mind is indistinguishable from the material world.
You just don't want to admit that your pristine mind is the product of base, filthy matter and energy. In an earlier post I identified this as hubris. Or a god complex.
It's not solipsism because there are multiple minds, and it's not a hive mind because they're separate.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
Presumably the materialist doesn't claim that the material world is the experience of an uber-mind? They're clearly distinguishable.
Your claims treat experience as a thing that exists somewhere within the human body, with other things (“nodes”) between it and the tea cup. Yet the only two objects in your scenario are the person and the tea cup. This poses a problem for me that I cannot get past. No amount of neuroscience can force these objects into existence, put distance between them, and pretend other objects interfere in their interacting.
If there is multiple minds, then isn't it necessary that there is something which separates one mind from another? Isn't this what matter is?
Then you're arguments are missing an important detail. Why? If it's not that the way you see the world is true, then why would I want to see it that way, what's in it for me?
That might be the case. If postmodernism is presented as just skepticism, there would be no reason to have standards of truth.
No. Just a thing that exists. It doesn't matter where it is. the network analysis is the same, it's based on data flows, not location. The estimation of hidden states by nodes inside a Markov Blanket excluding those states is just a mathematical expression. It's irrelevant where anything is in the physical world.
Quoting Isaac
To be fair to various postmodernists, it is not all conceptions of truth that are suspect, but truth as a human relation to context-independent , intrinsic facts.
For instance, Derrida is famous for asserting that there is nothing outside the rest, by which he means nothing outside some context or other. Yet he holds onto a purely context-dependent notion of truth.
“For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.
Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”
Right. So the question would be why that relation, and not another possible relation?
Quoting Joshs
This is all very well, but Derrida here invokes 'stability' as the measure of an interpretive context within which he would advocate these 'rules'. Why is 'stability' the criteria? Does he provide an argument for this? (I've not read Derrida). Why would an unstable (perhaps new, vibrant, but immature) interpretative context not be a better one to invoke the rules of?
Skepticism says there’s a real world external to our conceptions but we have no way of verifying the fidelity of our conceptions with that reality.
Postmodern authors say that we are always directly in touch with reality in the form of changing contextual webs of relations in which we participate. Within these webs there can be relative stability of intelligibility and ‘truth’.
I don't find "postmodern" to be one thing. Too vague.
Because by its nature an unstable interpretive context has no consistent ‘ rules’. A new , immature context is internally inconsistent, shifting, confused. It offers no discernible pattern. One could argue that personal experiences of emotional crisis exemplify the slide from a stable to an unstable interpretive context. Fear, anxiety and anger are crises of intelligibility, a poorly structured territory of experience where our anticipations fail us.
OK, so what about the inconsistent, ever changing ones. Why not apply those?
Quoting Joshs
Uh huh. What would be the problem with applying rules from such a system (as and when they arise)?
Once these rules arise the context would no long be new and immature. It would have morphed into the sort of discursive system that Derrida is talking about
where norms of discourse are intelligible.
So the moment there's a discernable rule it's wise to apply it?
For A and B to be separate there must be some C that makes them separate? Why? What then separates C from A and B? Some D? And so on ad infinitum. Seems an unreasonable requirement.
Quoting Isaac
We do t first have rules that just sit there waiting for
us to apply them. As Wittgenstein argued , a rule only exists in the moment of its application. The sense of a rule is its immediate, contextual use. To apply it is to create its sense. Before we choose to apply rules, we already find ourselves ‘thrown into’ a particular discursive world, as Heidegger put it.
Been out all day - it's my son's (real world) graduation.
Solipsism is not refuted by your undefended claim that there are multiple minds. There are two possibilities : either p exists before being experienced or p exists after (at the moment of) being experienced. If after (i.e., the experiencing mind must be present for existence), then solipsism. If before, then idealism amounts to a renaming of the external world because you don't like icky matter.
But assuming the second possibility, the problem is compounded for the idealist : if the external world is just mind-stuff, then one must posit an uber-mind (or god). This adds an unnecessary level of complexity.
That doesn’t follow. If there are multiple minds then solipsism isn’t the case.
If it exists it has a position. We ought to be able to point to it.
I’m afraid I’m terrible at math. What would the Markov blanket be in biological terms?
Then I will say again that your PoMo blade does not have a grip, that it cuts the hand the wields it as much as that against which it is wielded.
It protects all wielding hands, by inviting coordination among indefinite multiplicities of would-be sword wielders . Let me rearrange your thought a bit with the help of Ken Gergen:
“Poatmodernist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)
That's not right, of course.
Neither you nor any mooted empiricists think that you will bump into a "5" around the next bend, or that they have a seven in a jar int he cupboard.
And again the question arises, what is it you mean when you say that numbers are real? Real as opposed to what?
Quoting Banno
Didnt have a chance to finish the edit.
Quoting Joshs
Yet idealism holds as a minimal position that reality is mind-dependent. Reality is of course what is said by true sentences. Hence idealism must hold that the truth of a sentence true is dependent on mind.
Not just that a sentence is a mental construct, with which a realist would agree. A realist can say that there are innumerable true sentences that are not in any way related to any mind. An idealist cannot agree. For an idealist it is nonsense to talk about reality, and hence about truth, apart from mind.
For idealism, there can be no states of affairs beyond true beliefs. This is not true for realists.
Quoting Michael
Your extreme idealist must conclude that because it is not part of experience, what you will do tomorrow does not (yet) exist. It is not either true nor false.
Quoting What is Math?
Quoting Banno
Real as opposed to useful conventions.
Quoting The Indispensability Argument in Philosophy of Mathematics
Quoting Banno
You're interpreting that too literally. It doesn't mean the existence of the summit of Mt Everest doesn't exist because you yourself have never seen it. In this context, 'mind' is not 'the contents of your conscious or discursive thought'. Idealism refers to the process by which the mind generates or constructs the totality of your understanding, including the subconscious, unconscious and parasympathetic processes that give rise to your conscious awareness. There are any number of facts that one may be completely unaware of and this remain true.
I gather you want to defend some sort of inter-subjective (a terrible term) agreement as a defence against relativism.
Do you really wish to argue that there are other minds, but not tables and chairs and trees and rocks? How are you to know about other minds, if not via your experience of their bodies?
How do you know that there are other minds?
Despite the length of some of your posts, you haven't said enough for me to make sense of your position.
But money is real, as are mortgages and property. Yet all are conventions.
And we are back to the still unanswered question: constructed from what?
Physicists arrive at the same question. What are strings constructed from? Apparently at some point you're supposed to stop asking.
That's pretty much it - at some stage the questions must end so we can get on with it. See, again, Quantum Wittgenstein.
Of course! Many items of the furniture of our minds are real.
Quoting Banno
Atoms? The fundamental particles - or is it fields now? - of physics? What do you think?
I think you are now saying that there is what @Hello Human called an "external material world".
In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant included a 'critique of problematical idealism' to distance his work from Berkeley's. (This is the item I had said was 'too technical' in a previous discussion. A summary can be found here.)
So Kant doesn't deny the existence of the material world but I think he rightfully denies what we would call the 'mind-independent reality' of the material world. That is the gist of his 'copernican revolution in philosophy'. So he acknowledges the existence of the world but denies that it has intrinsic or inherent reality.
That is why it is possible for Kant to be at once an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. He doesn't deny the facts of empirical science - Kant was extremely diligent in attempting to accomodate them. It should be recalled Kant's theory of nebular formation (modified by LaPlace) is still part of current science, and that he lectured in scientific subjects (then known as natural philosophy).
I've just now found Bernardo Kastrup's doctoral dissertation on analytical idealism. It was supervised and critiqued by Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, Daniel Stoljar, and many others. Kastrup is, I think, a credible exponent of idealism in the modern context (if you're interested.)
(I should note that I'm in agreement with many aspects of Josh's criticisms but not all. My orientation in philosophy has always been shaped by the acceptance of the tenets, or the idea of, a perennial philosophy, and you won't as a rule find that in post-modernism.)
It's a reductio. If idealism is true then we know everything. We do not know everything. Hence idealism is false.
(This is a joke version of Fitch's Paradox... sad that I feel the need to point this out.)
You keep your idealism by watering it down until it becomes realism. Hence:
Quoting Wayfarer
And on the other side we have @Michael apparently arguing that idealists do not hold truth to be mind-dependent.
So over to you to explain what "mind-independent reality" might be. I think there are things that are the case and yet are not believed (held to be true) by any mind. In this way there are truths that are not dependent on any mind. I think this a mere grammar, a way of talking that leaves open various unknowns that are closed off to those who think otherwise. What do you think?
Is there a point of difference between us?
Like I said, YOU already reified THE subject by giving it a name, "subject". I'm merely asking what you mean by YOUR use of the scribble, "subject". What do you intend for me to understand by your use of the scribble?
Surely - as a surmise. But by definition, you will never know that, because if you did know it, then it would be beheld by a mind.
Quoting Banno
Scientific realism is the view that the physical universe is an objective reality that exists independentl of any cognitive or intellectual act on our part. It exists independently of anything going on in our minds. Realism often includes the idea that it is a pre-existing reality, that is to say, pre-existing our observation of it. Einstein captured this last idea by saying, “I like to think the moon is there even if I’m not looking at it.”
In contrast, idealism is the view that the physical universe exists within the mind - a mind, or the minds of all beings, or some variety of that. Regardless of which conception of mind, the key idea of idealism is that mind is fundamental and does not derive from matter or from physical universe energy.
The 'great debate' between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, which continued for decades after the 1920's, revolved around this question. It was Einstein's scientific realism, the assumption of a world existing independently of any mind, that was called into question by quantum physics. (See Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality.)
But of course it goes without saying that as soon as reference is made to physics, you'll duck the conversation because 'we're not physicists'. Note that if you try and discuss these questions on Physics Forum the thread will be locked immediately 'because they're not philosophers'. It's a very convenient way of avoiding one of the fundamental philosophical questions of the modern age.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schoenhauer's Philosophy]We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices. [/quote]
Quoting Harry Hindu
By subject, I refer to the subject of experience. Conventionally, the person, the being, to whom experiences occur.
Quoting Banno
Minds, tables , bodies , quarks and chairs are all contestable realities, conceptual abstractions that we make use of in various ways , which differ in ways subtle or profound from occasion to occasion , from culture to culture and from era to era. What is not contestable is that reality appears in terms of relational patterns that allow for some form of relatively stable anticipations of events. These patterns can be articulated in terms of objects like minds, brains, chairs and bodies. Other minds don’t have any more grounding than trees and rocks. But there is something other at every moment of expereince. I am other to
myself every moment in that self -reflection introduces novelty. I am already an other ‘mind’ with respect to myself. ‘Mind’ harbors no intrinsic content or features.
Quoting Wayfarer
So, which is it to be - that there are things outside of our minds, or not?
All excellent questions.
I'm certainly not advocating solipsism. If the external world is an illusion, then how and why this particular illusion and how does a solipstic mind come to even imagine such a thing as an external world?
The objects that visually appear in conscious originate from the causal interaction of light, the object and my sensory system. The relationship between cause and effect is information. The mind is the effect of these prior causes as well as the cause of subsequent effects, like learning. Information exists wherever causes leave effects and its information all the way down.
Neither mind nor matter are fundamental. Information is.
Illusions are misinterpretations of sensory data. Mirages do not disappear once we realize that they are not pools of water but an interaction between light and heat. What we experience when seeing a mirage is what one would expect given the way light behaves. What we experience is real and it is the interpretation of what we see that makes the difference between reality and illusion. The mind as information is fundamental and the solid, physical properties that objects seem to take are the result of the way light and the objects behave and interpreted by the mind.
The rate at which the working memory if our minds process the external information is relative to the rate, or frequency, at which the events in the world change. Slow change relative the processing rate of the mind makes these other processes appear as static, solid, unchanging objects. Faster processes appear as a blur of action in our visual working memory. So the relative rate of change between or mental processing and other processes will skew our view of the world in interpreting the world as full of non-changing objects that perform actions and behaviors. It's all causal relations (information) or process, or relations, all the way down, not physical objects all the way down. That is the illusion.
Where, precisely, is the boundary?
That's why I made the point, x pages back, about the emergence of consciousness as being marked by the boundary between self and non-self. That awareness is one of the fundamental constituents of consciousness, it is also something that exists within mind.
All philosophy is about sentences to you. It's just language-games.
Quoting Joshs
In Charles Pinter's book these are all gestalts. They are the way the mind organises inputs into wholes - all minds, not just human minds, but even insect and reptile minds. In this view, the physical world really does exist outside that but in a manner which is by definition unknowable as it contains no features, structure, or objects. In this sense, creatures being order and meaning to the physical universe, but that order and meaning is wholly the function of the mind,
Then the subject is an object, like a person.
What is an experience? Would it be fair to define experience as the information of the subject/object/person relative to the world? For instance, the visual experience of the world for a person appears as if the world is located relative to the person's eyes.
Well, my position is that there isn't one, or at best that it is arbitrary. But you, Wayfarer, need to draw a boundary in order to break the material from the spiritual.
Quoting Wayfarer
Pretty much. Unlike life.
Quoting Joshs
Would that one might pull Pinter's conceptually abstracted chair out from under him, so he lands on his conceptually abstracted arse.
Quoting Wayfarer
Another book telling us all about the stuff about which we can know nothing? Philosophy is indeed all about sentences.
The thing is, you and I know a lot about the physical world. It's just that in the philosophy forum, you forget this.
I think that’s an oversimplification. Does physicalism entail that mathematical truths are physics-dependant? Does dualism entail that mathematical truths are either physics- or mind-dependent? Must one be an eternalist to believe that claims about the future have a truth value? Must one believe in the existence of all possible worlds to believe that counterfactuals have a truth value?
I think it’s more appropriate to say that idealism is the position that only minds and mental phenomena exist. It is quiet on truth. Truth might not depend on the existence of some entity that makes it true (e.g in the case of mathematics, counterfactuals, and statements about the future).
Or perhaps you don't think that this is idealism "proper"? Then how would you name a position that argues that 1) there is no external material world, 2) every entity that exists is a mind or mental phenomena, and 3) logical/mathematical/counterfactual/future truths are mind-independent?
Quoting Banno
This is where you appear to equivocate. In saying that "we know everything" it's implied that we know the future. But Fitch's paradox is only that every truth is known. If claims about the future have no truth value then the future isn't known. If the future isn't known then can we really be said to know everything? There appears to be a meaningful difference between "we know everything" and "we know every truth".
And as an aside, it should also be noted that Fitch's paradox concludes that "every truth is known", not that "I know every truth". These aren't the same thing, so be cautious not to assert the latter. Your wording is ambiguous here so I thought I'd point it out.
This is the case for every metaphysics (physicalist, dualist, other) that isn't eternalist, correct?
I think you misunderstand. It's obviously not "some C" which separates A from B. What is the case is that A is different from, or other than B. C could not make A other than B, because C is of the same type as both A and B, and this is why the infinite regress appears, you have not grasped the need for something of a different type. What makes A different from B, must be something categorically distinct from both A and B, as well as C, D, E, F, or anything else of that category, because these are all of the same type, and cannot account for the difference within the type. Another thing of the same type cannot account for the differences between things of the same type.
This is why there is a need for dualism, rather than pure idealism, or solipsism. If A and B represent distinct minds, then there must be something which makes A other than, or different from B. This must be something categorically distinct, like "matter" is supposed to be distinct from mind, not another bit of the same substance, C. Or else we would have one continuity of mind, A, B, C, D... with nothing really separating one from the other.
You're right, I don't understand. I think it's entirely possible (in principle) that two apples exist, and are the only things to exist. There doesn't need to be some third thing to "separate" them.
There could not be two distinct things without separation between them, otherwise they'd be only one thing. And, if there is separation between them, that separation must consist of something. If it's not something real, then we're back to there really being only one thing.
This makes no sense at all. You’re saying that some third thing is required for the two apples to be separated. Then what separates the two apples from this third thing?
Of course. One might be a realist with regard to mathematics and yet antirealist in regard to a physical world or to ethics. Nuance, everywhere. Hence analysis.
Quoting Michael
I don't see how this can be maintained. If idealism is the position that only minds and mental phenomena exist, then idealism is the position that only statements concerning minds and mental phenomena can be true.
Statements about anything else must just stand in for statements about minds and mental phenomena.
Quoting Michael
A rabbit hole. At the least, we must agree that "P" is true iff P. If idealism is true, P must be about minds and mental phenomena.
Quoting Michael
Physical antirealism combined with mathematical realism.
Not at all. Isn't the idealist you mooted is committed to the future not existing, since everything that exists is perceived, and the future is not yet perceived?
Quoting Michael...yes. As I said, it was a joke.
I don’t think that truth depends on the existence of some corresponding entity. Claims about the future can be true even if the future doesn’t exist. Counterfactuals can be true even if other possible worlds don’t exist.
Quoting Banno
Then assuming that Fitch’s paradox applies to idealism, can you give an example of something that isn’t known?
Not sure what that means.
Seems we agree it is better to avoid correspondence theories of truth.
Try this: if idealism is the position that only minds and mental phenomena exist, then any truth about things that exist must be a truth about minds and mental phenomena.
Do you agree?
That a statement is about a mind isn’t that it’s truth depends on someone knowing it to be true. This is where there appears to be some equivocation. The truth of “tomorrow Michael will dream about going on holiday” is mind-dependent in the sense that it’s about someone’s mind but is mind-independent in the sense that it can be true even if nobody believes it. And that’s the case whether idealist or not.
if idealism is the position that only minds and mental phenomena exist, then any truth about things that exist must be a truth about minds and mental phenomena.
Yes.
I’m saying that the truth of “if X had happened then Y would have happened” does not depend on the existence of a parallel world where X and then Y happened (or indeed on the existence of anything).
Can one be conscious of something and yet not know that one is conscious of it?
So if some statement about things that exist is true, someone must be conscious that it is true? To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that there are truths about things that exist that are not mental phenomena, wouldn't it?
So, on the idealist account, for some statement about things that exist to be true, it must be apparent to some conscious mind, mustn't it?
Yes
So here is what I take to be the impulse of the objection to idealism from Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability.
We agree that on the idealist account, for some statement about things that exist to be true, it must be apparent to some conscious mind. When some truth is apparent to a conscious mind, we might say that mind knows that truth.
And so we get the premiss, that for an idealist account and for things that exist,
And from the proof of the paradox, we can conclude that
Less formally the impulse is that if idealism is true, and hence only minds and mental phenomena exist, then all that can be true must be apparent to a conscious mind.
Now I understand that you think this conclusion wrong, but I would be reassured to know that you can see how the argument is supposed to work.
(Edit: of all the threads in this thread, this is the one I find most difficult, and perhaps most promising.)
Not quite. It's more that facts exist for a mind, which picks out something specific or particular which is designated a fact or an object. 'If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of this subject's representations' says Kant. But I think this 'vanishing' also has to be interpreted carefully: it's not that the world suddently ceases to exist, but the nature of existence is within the conception that the mind has of it. The sense in which the world exists outside of that is by definition unknown to us (Kant's (in)famous 'things in themselves'.)
Numbers and other objective facts are uniform and invariant structures in the mind. In this, they, along with many other artifacts of language, science and culture, are held in common with other like minds. (However, 'if lions could speak' .....)
The subject is third-person when referred to in the third person.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't know if it can be defined as that, but certainly experience implies the subject for whom, or to whom, it occurs.
To a chemist a chair is a conglomeration of molecules, to a furniture maker it is an assemblage of materials, to a historian it is a cultural object , to a cat it is a scratching post, to an actor it is a prop. Is there some common essence of chair underlying all these accounts, or is Nelson Goodman correct in saying “Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous.”
According to Goodman’s irrealism, none of the above accounts of a chair can claim to be “the way things are independent of experience”. There is no one uniquely true description of reality.
Sure. He contemplates such stuff while sitting on the chair. The chair is still a chair.
These categories are not as exclusive as you seem to suppose. It's not that we must choose between the chair and the conglomeration of molecules.
Sure, there are multiple true descriptions of reality.
They need not contradict one another.
But most importantly, they are of reality.
I'm still puzzled by your idealism that is apparently the same as realism. Sure, mind constructs what we see round us. But you have agreed that it is constructed from non-mind.
Edit: I am having difficulty locating our disagreement, apart from your insistence on separating a material and spiritual world.
That's because you're still criticizing a strawman version of idealism. What I believe idealism argues is that the fundamental constituents of reality are experiential. Not inanimate material entities, and not objects - there are no fundamental objects, as such. Whereas the mainstream view of neo-darwinian materialism is that objectively-existent material entities are fundamental and that the mind is a product of that, which has evolved through a fundamentally physical process. Hope that is clear.
Because the thing that our experiences are constructed from also has a claim to being fundamental.
And that thing seems to be not too dissimilar to what @Hello Human called the "external material world".
But that is not an explanatory principle.
Ask almost anyone, and they will say, 'from atoms'. That is the view of the proverbial man in the street isn't it? So I suppose to really get down to tin tacks, that's where the question starts, isn't it?
Likewise, evolutionary theory. I'm not pushing any kind of ID barrow, just finished reading Cro Magnon by Brian Fagan (recommended!) But again - what does evolution mean? Is it really just the output of dumb stuff that became combined under certain circumstances, like a kind of runaway chemical reaction. That's what Daniel Dennett says. The contrary to that is not necessarily creationism.
So the question 'what from?' has to take all of those kinds of sub-questions into account.
Of course there is a very significant difference between you: @Wayfarer, if I am not mistaken believes there is an afterlife and I think that is why he doesn't like materialism, because if it were true then the conclusion would be that there is no afterlife. Whether or not one seriously believes there is an afterlife constitutes perhaps the greatest difference imaginable concerning how one would be inclined to live their lives.
More importantly, even if @Wayfarer's beliefs are based on a desire for an afterlife, that does not render his arguments wrong.
And his arguments are entertaining, often novel and demonstrate a mastery both broad and deep.
So much better than most folk hereabouts.
Positing a world, independent of our perceptions, beliefs and attitudes, explains a fair bit that is otherwise concealed. Like how it is that you and I are able to agree on so much: we share the same world. And what it is to be wrong: to believe something that is not true of the world.
You are welcome. You are also wrong. :wink:
Quoting Banno
"Comparisons are odious".
Quoting Banno
This warrants a reply. I can't imagine anyone who genuinely and committedly believed in a transcendental reality "refusing to countenance" it. And I can't imagine anyone who saw no reason to believe in such a thing needing to refuse to countenance it; it is usually not even under consideration. My experience has has shown me that of all those I've met who espouse such transcendental beliefs, the vast majority don't practice in accordance with what they claim to believe anyway.
I don't think I've ever used that as a premise in an argument. But I also don't believe that the human is simply a physical body - I suppose that means, and I will acknowledge, that soul has an actual referent. But then, I'm also coming around to the understanding that nothing whatever is 'purely physical'.
As for materialism, I reject it on these grounds:
[quote=Peter Sas, Critique of Pure Interest (Blog)] The debate between Idealism and Materialism may seem abstract and academic, far removed from everyday life, but on closer inspection the opposite is true. From the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries onward, Materialism has steadily grown into the dominant worldview of Western civilization. As such, Materialism has exerted an enormous – and very harmful – influence in our culture. It is not for nothing that the word “materialism” is synonymous with greed and the exclusive focus on material possessions. The most important cultural consequence of scientific Materialism has undoubtedly been modern individualism, an extreme form of the dualistic belief in the reality of the separate ego.
The seemingly separate ego experiences itself as detached from – and at odds with – an indifferent outside world, in which it must struggle to maintain itself. Materialism naturally leads to belief in separation because this philosophy sees Consciousness as a by-product of the brain. In that case, Consciousness is by definition tied to an individual and mortal body, and thus different from individual to individual. In this way, Materialism is in large part responsible for the suffering that the dualistic belief in separation entails: egoism, greed, exploitation, feelings of inferiority, hatred, abuse, violence… These are all thoughts, feelings and behavioral patterns that originate in the conviction that I – as this person, with this body and this mind – am nothing more than this individual being, separate from the other people around me, separate from nature, separate from the Universe, separate from the Divine...[/quote]
I'm going to spend a bit of time reading Kastrup's thesis.
But isn't that why you object to materialism, why you think it is demeaning of human life; because it seems to you to rule out soteriology?
(Actually in the following paragraph, he says had he not grown up in an academic household, he'd probably have been an engineer. Now, there's a man who's obviously missed his calling!)
Quoting Noble Dust
I'm glad we are providing you with some love in this often harsh world,,,or is it merely entertainment?
Both? I feel familial love for the both of you, but I can't help but grab the metaphorical popcorn anytime I see the giants collide. :sweat:
Quoting Janus
The only reason you say that is because both you and Dennett have the residue of Christian faith.
:rofl:
:yikes: Thank you.
Quoting Janus
I'm not sure that is right. Plenty of people who believe in an afterlife manage to be shit heels and treat others abominably. Just as those who are atheists may be entirely about self-sacrifice and compassion. I am doubtful that this idea of afterlife necessarily inspires different behaviour in people but it does in some instances.
Maybe, but that doesn't answer the question. Derrida appears to be saying that there are rules of interpretation that apply to his work. I could make up a different rule of interpretation "All works mean exactly what the author says they mean and nothing else". As a rule, it couldn't be clearer. So why do we not apply that?
Or worse "All works should be read backwards and the sense of them taken from whatever meaning remains in the reversed text". Again, crystal clear as a rule, no one would be in any doubt as to how to follow it, yet it's a rule which apparently Derrida thinks is wrong. So on what ground are some rules right and others wrong?
Note I said "seriously believe"; belief serious enough to count preparing for the life to come as the most important matter in life. It's pretty rare, at least as far as my experience goes. Anyway I agree with you; all one needs is compassion and a conscience to be an ethical person.
Yep. Got ya.
So your experience doesn't exist? Or are you saying it does have a position?
Quoting NOS4A2
Here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519319304588?via%3Dihub
These aren't grounds.
...is just an historical fact.
...is wildly speculative, and flat out unsupported.
...no grounds here either, just again, wildly speculative and unsupported opinion.
...is just completely and demonstrably wrong. Without a shadow of a doubt these psychological traits are prevalent no less in the deeply religious than they are in the deeply secular.
Utter, utter bullshit. You cannot expect anyone to take seriously the idea that "greed, exploitation, feelings of inferiority, hatred, abuse, violence" are eliminated by a worldview that accepts a non-physical dimension to existence. Have you come across the Catholic Church at all?
In what way does materialism deny this possibility?
I think it more accurate to say that if idealism is true then all true statements of the form "p exists" are apparent to a conscious mind, which doesn't require Fitch's paradox to show as it seems to be quite explicit in the idealist's position.
The problem with the more ambiguous conclusion that all true statements are apparent to a conscious mind is that without clarification it would appear to cover such statements as statements about the future, counterfactuals, mathematics, and so on, which personally I believe can be true even if they do not correspond to some entity that exists (e.g. a counterfactual can be true even without actual parallel worlds, predictions can be true even if eternalism isn't the case, mathematics can be true even if mathematical anti-realism is correct, and so on).
Quoting Michael
Actually, thinking on it more, even this might not be correct. Consider the statement "there exists more than one mind" (or even the more specific "there exist n minds"). Such a statement is about minds and mental phenomena, unproblematically has a truth value (unlike counterfactuals, predictions, and mathematics), but can be true even if it isn't apparent to a conscious mind.
You don't seem to have apprehended what I said in the other post Michael. The apples are things. What separates them is not a thing. The point I am making is that it cannot be a thing. You've simply assumed again, that it is a thing. It's not a thing, and it cannot be a thing or else there would be three things, not two, and then more things to separate those things, and the infinite regress you mentioned. The logic of mathematics would be rendered useless if that which separates two things from each other was a third thing.
However, something must separate the two things from each other, or else they would be only one thing. And, the logic of mathematics would be rendered useless in that way, as well. As I explained above, that which separates them cannot be a third thing. Therefore we need to employ a dualism to understand the existence of independent things. Aristotle resolved this type of logical dilemma with hylomorphism, a type of dualism.
Quoting Banno
Such a separation (dualism) is necessary for the reasons I explained to Michael, above. Without such a separation (and the ensuing law of identity, which requires that each of the two aspects is real), logic is left impotent.
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe that a proper representation of idealism places the ideal as prior to the material. Most forms of idealism do not deny the reality of matter, they simply affirm that matter is logically dependent on mind. This is the real issue of modern metaphysics. The laity tend to place matter as first, assuming that mind evolved through some form of emergence. But this illogical position renders the entire universe as unintelligible (cosmological argument being the ultimate demonstration), so the higher educated tend to adopt some form of idealism. You'll see idealism as the most common perspective of physicists, placing the wave function (ideal) as prior to the material object (particle).
Quoting Banno
Why the fear? The logical necessity is that we must accept the reality of that second aspect of reality. It is a "logical necessity" not because it is demonstrated as a logical conclusion, but a necessity because it is required for logic to be applicable. If logic is rendered impotent, then what are we left with as the means to understand reality? So we must accept that which you fear, the reality of dualism, and get on with the enterprise of understanding reality. Why live in a veiled world of self-deception, simply because you fear reality? Release your fear of God, and accept Him into your heart. Denying Him out of fear is nothing but self-deception.
I don't understand what this is saying at all.
....
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ridiculous. Even if we are forced to accept dualism (which we're not), what the hell has the protagonist of a traditional folk story got to with it?
Is this an alternative to Derrida’s thinking, or does it presuppose it? Yes, all works mean exactly what an author says they mean and nothing else. But what does intention, as meaning to say, ‘do’?
"Through the possibility of repeating every mark as the same, [iterability] makes way for an idealization that seems to deliver the full presence of ideal objects..., but this repeatability itself ensures that the full presence of a singularity thus repeated comports in itself the reference to something else, thus rending the full presence that it nevertheless announces"(LI29)). ...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)." "The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)."
According to the above , we can rightly assert that what we write means exactly what we say it means and nothing else, We can absolutely believe this. And yet , this assertion does not clash with the underlying deconstructive ‘mechanics’ that make the assertion possible and give it its meaning. In making such an assertion we are implicitly but not explicitly deconstructing our intention.
And what about this alternative?
Quoting Isaac
The same situation applies. One is offering a crystal clear rule. And Derrida does not deny this. He is simply trying to show that when we look closely enough within the terms’ of an intended meaning that is ‘crystal clear’ we may notice that it’s crystal clarity continues to be the same differently , not just in terms of how it is interpreted by those other than the creator of the rule , but also by the rule-creator. To mean a rule is to mean something slightly other, more, different than what we meant to legislate, in the very act of intending it. This doesn’t destroy the rule. It is its condition of possibility.
There is no counter example you can think of that cannot be submitted to such a deconstruction, which of course does not make any of your examples ‘untrue’
or Derrida’s deconstruction more true.
Derrida is pointing to what it is that makes intention, meaning , rules both operate and not operate at the same time.
I’m saying if it exists it has a position. You told me it exists but where it is doesn’t matter.
The epidermis, then. The epidermis is in direct contact with the tea cup.
And it stands to reason that the subject is first-person when referred to in the first person (you and I). The point being that a subject is an object - a person. The perspective from which one refers to a subject does not matter at all. I just don't understand your issue of reification of the subject when you are the one that has defined a subject as an object, or a thing.
Other people are only known via our "first-person" experiences - which is typically visual, auditory, tactile information. Our own self is known via our attention looping back on itself in attending itself, or in attending the information as information and not attending what the information is about like other people or the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, you are the one that linked the subject (an object as a person) with experience. I thought you had an idea of what you were talking about when using the term, "experience". If you don't know what it is then how can you say that it implies the subject for whom it occurs?
I grant that, but stability and consistency of contexts is hardly the 'hard and fast' judgement is it?
Quoting Joshs
If intention as meaning to say does something, then it becomes an empirical matter, no? We should be able to sense the effects of this action on the world.
Quoting Joshs
This sounds just like Ellis on intention. We're talking about the way people make rules and intend them. He's saying that the world is such that rules cannot be made without meaning something slightly other than we meant to rule on. A fact about the way the world is. I'm quite content with Derrida's claim here, but it is clearly a claim about the way the world is. a normal everyday factual claim.
I didn't think I'd have to tell you your experience exists. Do you think it doesn't?
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes. But your experienced tea cup (the one you act on, talk about, point to, describe, remember, locate, plan about, name, reach for... The one you just referred to with the words "tea cup") does not cause the responses in your epidermis. Something else does. If this weren't the case it would be impossible to be wrong. It's not impossible to be wrong, therefore your construction (no matter how generally accurate) cannot actually be one and the same as the causes of the data from which it is constructed.
Therefore there are, by necessity, at least two nodes to consider. The tea cup of your experience (and mine, and the rest of the world - we construct these things together), and the hidden states which such a construction is an attempt to model, predict and modify.
Of course. I think it is quite evident. My experence with dozens of discussions I have had related to the the material/physical vs immaterial/non-physical world, as well as a poll and a couple of discussions I have launched in this medium, show that "materialism" wins by 5:1 (80%)! And, consider that this occurs in the philosophical community (taken as a whole). One has to also add the almost 99% materialistic scientific community in the equation ...
Is this a kind of preaching?
This is a philosophical medium, not a religious one. And the above statement does not sound at all like a philosophical one or belonging to any kind of philosophy, including Philosophy of Religion, i.e. Theology.
[quote="Isaac;712654] He's saying that the world is such that rules cannot be made without meaning something slightly other than we meant to rule on. A fact about the way the world is. I'm quite content with Derrida's claim here, but it is clearly a claim about the way the world is. a normal everyday factual claim.[/quote]
Whether it’s a normal everyday factual claim depends on how you are understanding it. The way I understand it , it doesnt function the way that claims about things normally function. For one thing , it is not a propositional statement. Heidegger spent a whole career introducing a new way to think about the word ‘is’, such as S is P. So I would say what Derrida, in following Heidegger, is doing isnt a claim about the world but an investigation into what has traditionally been ignored by normal everyday factual forms of assertion. I could easily demonstrate this by having you elaborate on what you understand normal everyday factual claims to have in common.
I exist. I experience. But it doesn’t follow that something called “experience” exists.
I don’t think it would be impossible to be wrong. There are other things in the environment, including ourselves, that can prohibit or impede our understanding, like narcotics or physical disabilities. We can experience those in tandem with the tea cup. It raises a good point, though, that we do not just experience isolated objects like teacups, but the environment in general.
I don’t yet see the necessity in evoking construction or representation until a construction or representation can be found. Construction implies something is constructed, that this something is visible, and that there is something or someone to view it. Maybe they have some sort of explanatory power, but don’t you think it would be better to eliminate these figments in favor of trying to understand the extant features of the world?
I exist. I dream. Do dreams exist?
It follows from the idea that people are attempting to communicate sonething when they use words. If what you are talking about doesn't exist then what are you talking about?
Does a walk exist? Does a cartwheel exist? Does a backflip exist?
Our language no doubt attempts to abstract actions from the extant being that performs them. But at no point should we take this to mean there is an actual, existing distinction between doer and deed. They are like the morning and evening star, one and the same.
I never said that. Plainly from the perspective of a subject, myself, other beings appear in some sense as objects, but we do not regard other beings as objects, which is why we refer to them with personal pronouns rather than as ‘it’ or ‘thing’. (For that matter, reflect on why humans and some of the higher animals are called ‘beings’.) Philosophy has long been aware of the paradox that we ourselves are subjects of experience, but are also objects in the eyes of other subjects.
The basic principle is found in Indian philosophy, in the Upani?ads, where it is stated that ‘the hand cannot grasp itself, the eye cannot see itself ’ ( Source). It’s also been articulated in phenomenology. Here’s a reading on it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agree. I don’t know if it’s the most common, but it’s certainly strongly represented amongst them.
See this
In case you didn't notice, it was a response to Banno's expressed fear of having to face the reality of the spiritual world. Banno will not read an argument which gives validity to any theological ideas, because of this fear.
Quoting Banno
Interesting. Does idealism in your view necessitate the reality of a spiritual world (as opposed to a reality where mentation is everything)? I can see how it might support some forms of spiritual belief, with suppositions and additional work - what kind of spiritual world does idealism establish as real?
That's why I keep a copy of Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, on my profile page. It really is worth reading. (Nagel is a professed atheist.)
[quote=Thomas Nagel]The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.[/quote]
I do not think that idealism establishes any specific type of spiritual world as real, per se. What it does though is give us the principles required to understand the priority of the spiritual over the material.
I don't see why the idea that the relation between mind and world is something fundamental would presuppose religion. I have no idea what the connection might be.
It seems obvious that the ways that things uniquely appear to humans is a function of both the things themselves and human physiology, which means that the relation between (body/)mind and world is fundamental.
Things don't appear the same to other animals, but it is the same things that don't appear the same to different species, and this would not change whether the things were ideas in the mind of God or mind-independent existents, as far as I can see.
On the other hand, is there any logical contradiction in the idea that God might have created a world of mind independent existents and many species of percipients with the faculties to perceive those existents? Perhaps He would do that so He doesn't have to keep everything in mind all the time. the lazy prick! :wink:
I hear you. But I guess it is saying there is no 'material', so there is only ideas or mind. In such a reality, is there a difference in how we develop a priority of ideas and how would we go about determining what is important for human beings?
Such an idealism, one which says that there is no matter, is an extreme form of idealism which is very difficult to understand. I can only understand it under the terms of process philosophy. We must remove the idea of a static, passive, inert matter, and assume that there is absolutely nothing which remains the same, from one moment to the next. That which persists through a change is said to be the "matter", so no matter would mean that everything has changed from one moment to the next.
In this type of philosophy, it is difficult to establish a temporal coherency, or a continuity of existence from one moment to the next in time. So process philosophers end up positing some sort of spiritual element which produces a relationship between one moment of time and the next, to account for the observed temporal continuity and apparent consistency of being as time passes.
I really haven't studied this philosophy enough to know how they would develop an ethics, i.e. how they would determine what is good.
Goodness. Sounds messy and almost unachievable. But thanks for that.
At the risk of taking this thread back on topic, there is an article on SEP directly addressing the titular issue.
Challenges to Metaphysical Realism
Five counter-arguments to realism are listed:
Each would be a source of further discussion.
Even given a consistent idealist ontology, that the fundamental constituents of knowledge are not objects but ideas and sensations, this doesn't mean that pain is not real, because it is experienced as real, and that experience is apodictic (cannot plausibly denied).
Also note that Berkeley, who is the textbook idealist, does not deny that matter exists, but that it exists apart from or independently of sensations and ideas.
More on 'fear of idealism':
Quoting Bernardo Kastrup, The Physicalist Worldview as a Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism
Compare Michel Henri 'Barbarism'
Curiously, I favour realism about numbers, in other words, mathematical platonism, even though my other views are closer to what is described as anti-realism in this article.
Actually, I think it should be noted that 'realism' in pre-modern (or medieval) philosophy referred to realism concerning universals, whilst realism today is generally synonymous with scientific realism, that being the commitment to the mind-independent reality of objects of scientific analysis. They're practically opposite in some ways. I don't know if the article talks about that.
It is an interesting source. I will try and take some time to take it in.
I got that much already from Mr Kastrup. :wink:
Ah, @Banno ... No, I didn't noitice, sorry. Well, nevertheless ...
'Doctor', to us. (Actually, he has two doctorates.)
Quoting Banno
Idealism vs materialism is not actually the same debate as realism vs non-realism. Idealism is not non-realist, but claims that the external material world has no intrinsic or inherent reality outside the experience of it. So it may be opposed to what you think is 'realist' but to declare that it is non-realist actually begs the question, that is, assumes what needs to be proven (that the external material world is inherently real and that the denial of this constitutes non-realism.)
I think the assumed version of realism behind that article is scientific realism.
OK, so then we're back to "why?". I don't see a way out of this. Before diving into Heidegger, I'd rather just make sure we've got the frame of investigation right. If a claim is about the way the world is, it is a factual claim. If a claim is about some way we could look at the way the world is, then it's a normative or aesthetic claim and it needs a 'why' - why ought I look at thing that way, as opposed to any other.
That 'why' must itself be a factual claim "it will make you happier", "it will work better", "it's more useful"...etc. A claim which takes a position on the way the world is.
If all we have is a series of 'ways of looking at things' which never terminate in a claim about the way the world is (such as to advise I look at things that way) then I'm not sure I see the point.
And you think @Hello Human's "external material world" isn't? You should ask.
There's you doing a cartwheel, right?
There's you experiencing a tea cup, yes?
The latter is clearly not the same thing as a teacup.
You experiencing a teacup is not itself a teacup. We're talking about aspects of you experiencing a teacup. The particular aspect we're talking about is the model of a teacup your brain creates. It's an aspect of you experiencing a teacup, and as such is very obviously not a teacup.
Of course.
Doctor! Doctor! Can't you see I'm burning, burning
Oh, Doctor! Doctor! Is this love I'm feeling?
Sorry...
But that is the performer's lot; same show every night.
What a lovely string of words, it deftly encapsulates the sorts of wonderful discussions we have here. :pray:
And yet no one seems bothered by a discussion about reality which fails to even address the question of what criteria we're using to declare something 'real'. The play being staged seems more a farce than a drama...
Am I wrong in thinking that this was only something taken seriously by those defending physicalism? Is it possible an idealist position actually depends on a failure to define criteria fro 'real' such that there can be equivocation on what does and does not belong in that category?
There's the general term 'real' which is clearly used in a number of different contexts. "Santa isn't real" means something different to the claim "mathematics isn't real", or "morality isn't real". The former meaning simply that no physical person fitting that description can be found, whereas to treat the latter claims that way would be to trivialise them (as you said earlier, no one expects to bump into a number 5).
But this second sense seems nebulous at best. The closest I've got from this discussion is something like 'universally applies' (but then @Wayfarer denied that of logical rules, which he still maintains are 'real'), something like 'exists outside of individual minds', but then idealism is in hot water requiring God already (usually reserved for the end of a conversation!). The latest is the oddest meaning of them all, something like 'is important'....? Well, what can we possibly do with that?
It's interesting. Under idealism something needs to hold all thought or 'reality' together for us to have regularities and be able to share our modest intersubjective experiences. The thesis seems to be that reality is fundamentally mental - not only in your mind alone, or my mind alone, but also (and here's the thing) in a transpersonal, spatially extended form of mind.
This seems to be an analogue to Plato's Realm of the Forms or Jung's collective unconscious - a repository full of content which transcends space and time. It's where maths lives, alongside the rules of logic and I'll guess, many idealists would argue without this realm and its contents there would be no order and human communication would be incoherent. It all sounds like transcendental arguments for god developed (via Kant) by Cornelius Van Til who argued that god is the precondition for logic, reason and morality. Anyway I think this is where the arrows point.
Yes, that's certainly how I see it. The matter of importance, however, is not the status of this realm in reality, but the origin of its constituent parts.
The important question is over whether a proposition such as "x is y" within that realm has a truth value such that it might be true but no one knows it to be true.
Is ¬(p ? ¬p) true by virtue of all humans thinking that way (thus creating a sort of intersubjective realm of facts within which we can determine what is the case and what is not the case), or is ¬(p ? ¬p) true even if nobody thought it?
The latter seems to be what idealists want to claim but the evidence brought forward to support that claim seems only to support the former, much weaker version.
Does it? On the opposite view, what is needed to hold all material things together for them to have regularities?
I think that is a fair depiction but I never tire of pointing out that whatever this form of mind might be, it's not an object of experience. That is always a major stumbling-block. I think because we are so instinctively oriented towards the objective domain (object oriented?) then the insuperable difficulty is, well what kind of thing are we talking about? As I have said, that is the subject of an essay by the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, with the title 'It is never known but is the knower'. It's also the subject of that essay I often mention, 'the blind spot of science'. I think the challenge is that to grasp it requires a kind of cognitive shift - like a gestalt shift, a different perspective. Instead of being focussed exclusively on objective matters (empiricism) or symbolic logic it requires a kind of self-awareness, an awareness of the structure of thought in oneself. (This is why it is sometimes remarked that Kantian types of philosophies converge with meditative disciplines, indeed I first learned of Kant through a book called Central Philosophy of Buddhism.)
The second point that's becoming gradually clear to me, is the basically Kantian point that causality itself is a relationship in ideas. I think the 'natural attitude' is that there is the real world 'out there', the vast universe, plainly external to us, and objective, and our mind, 'in here', the subjective domain. Whereas, I am starting to see that formal logical structures, like mathematical operations and logical laws, are structures in the experience-of-the-world. They're neither private or subjective, nor external and objective - they transcend or at least straddle the subject-object distinction. So causality is neither in the world, nor in the mind, but in the experience-of-the-world. (This is the meaning of Quantum Baynsienism.)
The book I'm reading at the moment, Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order, points out that the world described by quantitative science has no intrinsic features or structure. The mind brings all of those to experience by way of gestalts, structured wholes. Animal cognition operates the same way, but in h. sapiens, due to abstract logic, representation and language, we are able to apply logic to the structure of experiences. So those structures are internal to the mind, but not your mind or my mind - they are how THE mind operates. So numbers, principles, laws, and the like, are uniform structures in experience. They don't exist in the sense that the objects of scientific analysis exist, but on the other hand, you wouldn't have science without them. That's also the sense in which the mind is 'one' - it's not numerically one, there's not a single instance, but it's the same in all sentient beings (individuated as Kastrup's 'dissociated alters'.)
Living beings, and humans in particular, are the window through which meaning enters the Universe. That is why we're called 'beings'.
This is particularly interesting:
Quoting Wayfarer
Maybe there needs to be a separate thread on speculative models of idealism. This is controversial material. Would you also place Jung's collective unconscious here? There seems to be soft and hard ways to describe this, some of which sound like Platonism to me.
[quote]The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.[quote]
- C.G. Jung The Structure of the Psyche Collected Works 8
I wasn't trying to separate dream from dreamer. I was pointing out that if you can talk about it must exist. The manner in which it exists is irrelevant. You, as the doer, are dependent upon other things for your existence just as your dreams' existence are dependent upon your existence. The Earth is the doer and you are the deed.
Your body and mind are just as much a deed as a doer. One might even say that the deed of living and the doer (your body/mind) are one and the same.
Language habits left over from when humans thought of themselves as special and separate from nature.
Quoting Wayfarer
When did we start calling chimps and dolphins "beings"? Who have you heard say that? I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm just wondering about the evolution of the word, "being".
Quoting Wayfarer
What makes something both a subject and object and not just an object? Which came first? Are subjects dependent upon their accompanying objects existence? Is a subject a part, or a fraction, of their accompanying object or does the subject exhaust what it is to be the object?
Good! Do that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Recall Descartes. You may doubt the existence of anything, but not that you are doubting.
The manner in which it exists is wholly relevant. It doesn’t exist at all. You cannot take a string attached to the word “dream” and attach the other end to its referent. Philosophy ought to avoid these figments if we are to ever understand what it really is we are talking about.
Yes, in every case it’s me that exists. No cartwheel, no backflip, and no model of a tea cup. We need not insert other, invisible things into the formula in order to understand what I am doing when I perceive another thing.
You've not addressed the point. Is you experiencing a cup the same thing as the cup?
Perhaps the most difficult exposition to fathom in transcendental metaphysics,....a speculative idealism if there ever was one.....is how I, as thinking subject, can at the same time be the object I think about.
Quoting Isaac
There are very different ways that philosophy can understand the relationship between series of ways of looking. at things. Descartes was among the first Western thinkers to assert that we are in such an indirect relationship to the world that we only have ‘ways’ of looking at it. But he needed a divine capacity of reason to explain how we know the ‘correct’ way of assembling its parts in our heads. Kant agreed with Descartes that there are more or less correct ways of looking at things , but these ways are organized by indirectly by pre-given categories of perception rather than directly by causal relations between material things.
For Hegel, the series of ways of looking at things has a teleological , dialectical structure. The world is no longer a fixed scheme or gestalt , whose determined
structure we approximate more and more
closely. Instead , it is a becoming in which each scientific-cultural gestalt, scheme , paradigm, worldview, way of looking at things belongs to an evolving series on which the ‘parts’ of the world continuously change form, meaning and sense. For Hegel , the objective reality is not to be found in any of the contingent particulars of nature (physical laws, constants, properties) , but in the structure of dialectical progress itself. All local facts are in themselves irrational.
Postmodernism follows upon Hegel in focusing for the structure of historical change ( the way the world ‘is’ consists of its continual becoming according to a certain
nature’) rather than in empirical facts, which they also believe to be irrational.
But postmodernists jettison Hegel’s dialectical method. There is no grand overarching logic tying together the evolving historical series of ways of looking at things, no final overcoming of contradiction through unity, no Popperian asymptotic approach of truth through falsification.
This isnt to say that there isnt an ethic to be found in the postmodern notion of becoming. Even though experience is at every moment , for every thing animate and inanimate, in continual transformation , based on no preset rule, formula or scheme , and with no human cultural directionality toward ‘truth’, there is still a better and worse to be found. Cultural-scientific-personal beliefs can become ‘relatively’ stagnant and dogmatic. This stuckness is associated with a certain pathology.
For postmodern social theorists, psychologists and ethicists, the choosing of one of an endlessly changing historical series of ways of looking at things leads to violence, conformity , despair, nihilism and skepticism. Why would this be? Because such a slowing down of experiential change is a kind of fragmentation and self-alienation. In a world of naive realism , physical objects are dead things alienated from each other and from us.
In empirical representational accounts of social science, the experimenter is alienated from the subject , who is vulnerable to ‘biases’ that the third personal stand detects from a position outside of the subject.
Shifting from a modernist to a postmodern ‘stance’ amounts to setting into accelerated motion a becoming that is always already in process, but plodding for the modernist. Or can take us from alienated , fragmented experience to an ongoing relevance and intimacy in our relations with each other.
What happens when one of my hands touches the other? I can be aware of myself as a subjectivity who senses, or as a body being sensed. But I can’t do both at the same time. I shift back and forth between awareness of myself
as a body and awareness of myself as a mind.
I would say there is no ‘thinking subject’ to be found before or outside the relation to an object. Subjective awareness is nothing other than relation to an object. Subjectivity is an activity in the world not an inner thing or substance.
Are you sympathetic to Putnam’s anti-realism, and if not , what are your objections?
Yes. The phenomenological argument.
Not where I’m coming from, but ok.
Where do you think it goes wrong?
(After all, the article lists three main objections, with each having various variations. Pick the one you think strongest.)
A yes or no would be a helpful starting point. Do you identify with Putnam’s position on realism in large part or do you have significant reservations?
My overall position is that the realism/antirealism schism is, like most philosophical arguments, ill-founded.
I'm happy to pick over Putnam’s arguments with you. Except, perhaps, vat-brains, which have been picked to death.
The body is an object as far as our personal cognition is concerned. I suppose you could say this dual aspect is represented symbolically by the 'descent' into the realm of matter in Platonist philosophy and religious lore. Coming to think of it, it is where, in dualist philosophies, the rubber really meets the road. :-) See what Schopenhauer has to say about it. Kastrup says something similar. From the 'outside', there's a body and brain; from the 'inside' there's a unified being. Two aspects of the one reality.
Philosophy can’t be said to go wrong, but to answer the question......by Brentano, 1874,1889, turning it into a psychological doctrine describing different kinds of phenomena as intentionally directed toward consciousness, rather than being the merely empirical content of it. This expands phenomena into any form of content for consciousness, instead of representations of sensibility alone. In turn, objects of judgement, imagination, volition, and so on, including cognition and even (gasp) experience itself, then assume the guise of phenomena, at the expense of the notion of sensory “appearance” from which the term originated.
Does that sound fun? What would be your comeback?
In the first scenario the objects are independent of your or my mind and indeed all human minds; that is the objects could exist for Big Mind regardless of the existence of any small minds. In the second case the objects can only exist insofar as there is a collective of small minds or perhaps even one small mind would be enough; that would have to be unpacked further.
Sorry Mww, I'm not a philosopher (and probably shouldn't be here), but is this a critique of phenomenology?
I’m one thing, the cup is another.
But the principle of perception is better explained by a Cartesian framework: what matters is what the subject reacts to, now what's happening in the so called external world.
But Idealism got a bad start by being usually associated with Berkeley, in denying the existence of a mind independent world. It need not be that at all.
Sure, Kastrup may argue differently, but, he's not convincing, I don't think.
Descartes thought the world plucks the little strings that are attached to the brain (nerves, discovered by dissection of cadavers).
Wouldn't he say we're reacting to the plucking?
Sorta like that, I guess. I only brought up myself, or any self of like kind, because to treat these as both subject and object, is demonstrably impossible.
Sure. But the plucking can happen by something "external", say, seeing a stone, or a hallucination of a stone.
The actual object need not be in the world, for us to react to it the way we do.
Cool. Neither am I.
Quoting Tom Storm
No, just a restriction on the concept of phenomena itself. A limitation on their function, if you will. Which reduces to mere opinion on my part, of course.
What is this kind of idealism called?
This takes the perspective of scientific realism for granted, and rather casually at that. He acknowledges those who question it, whom he presumably dismisses as 'radical skeptics and extreme postmodernists'.
But note the assumed inherent - that is, unconditional - reality of such objects of experience - and for these purposes, it makes no difference whether the subject is a remote planet or a pen on the desk in front of you. By imbuing objects with that supposed inherent reality, you're overlooking the grounding of that judgement in your own implicit cognitive system. In one sense - the empirical sense - it is of course true that there is a vast world external to and prior to any act of observation of it, with pens and planets and much else besides. But this overlooks the sense in which the world exists as a panoramic construct in the mind of the observer making that judgement (and again consider the etymology of 'world'.)
Consider the proposition 'X exists'. It might sound like an uncontroversial proposition, until you ask the question 'what is X'? Take Pluto, which was previously classified as a planet but no longer. So the answer to the proposition 'Does the planet named Pluto exist?' used to be positive, but is now negative. I'm only saying that to draw attention to the conditional nature of such statements. They're dependent on definitions, naming conventions, and so on. For the purposes of astronomy and natural sciences generally, it is of no particular importance, but when it comes to the question of the nature of being, then it's a different matter. And the human has a role to play in all such judgements even though from an objective point of view, we're but ephemeral instances on a speck of dust in an infinite cosmos.
[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. [Physicist] 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 loses 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 sub-systems: 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]
This is on of the reasons for my preferring to set out realism in terms of there being truths that are not related to minds. It replaces the analysis of reality with truth and mind.
So speaking roughly, realism holds that there are things we can't know. Antirealism, including idealism, holds that whatever is true is somehow related to mind.
Fitch's paradox is not a problem for realism taken in this way. But antirealism must address it.
The core problems for idealism are explaining consistency in the world around us, explaining error and explaining the existence of others. All three are dissipated by supposing that truth is not dependent on mind.
It's a good question.
It doesn't really have a label per se, recognized as such by most of the historians of philosophy, save for Arthur O. Lovejoy, nevertheless, Chomsky, who knows about the classics of this period (17-19th century phil.) referred to it as "rationalistic idealism."
He has in mind Descartes and the Cambridge Neo-Platonists, Henry More and particularly, Ralph Cudworth.
Virtually unknown today, but, quite persuasive, IMO.
Interesting, thanks.
Not all irrealisms, anti-realisms, idealisms and relativisms assume that truth is related to the human mind. Deleuze begins from the ‘idea’, but this is not the functioning of a human mind, it is a property of all things animate and inanimate. It can be considered a form of pan-psychism, but it does not assume a notion of psyche as an inner , spiritual substance. Rather, it refers to information transfer involved in self-organization at the level of inorganic processes . “There is information transfer and self-organization in autocatalytic loops, and this fits the cybernetic definition of mind offered by Gregory Bateson when he identifies mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—the relevant total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit.”( John Protevi)
Pan-psychism brings with it all the problems of any supernatural entity.
Information transfer. That brings with it much the same issue as my original question to @Wayfarer - When one's mind constructs reality, what is it it constructs it from? When information is transferred, what is it transferred in? Information is pattern; patterns are in something.
Moreover, if there is a something, independent of mind, then in what sense does the theory remain a version of idealism?
So I'm not impressed, nor persuaded.
I've answered numerous times already.
Quoting Wayfarer
This resembles Kant's distinction between phenomena, what appears to us, and what the universe is in itself.
Quoting Banno
Transcendental idealism does not propose that the physical world exists in the individual mind. The analysis takes place on a different level to that - what are the conditions by which the subject knows any object whatever. But you are clinging to a straw-man version of idealism.
Buddhist philosophy denies the existence of substance in the philosophical sense, and also of the transcendental subject (?tman). But it still has an idealist school.
[quote=Encylopedia Brittanica;https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yogachara]Vijnanavada [says that] that the reality a human being perceives does not exist, any more than do the images called up by a monk in meditation. Only the consciousness that one has of the momentary interconnected events (dharmas) that make up the cosmic flux can be said to exist. Consciousness, however, also clearly discerns in these so-called unreal events consistent patterns of continuity and regularity; in order to explain this order in which only chaos really could prevail, the school developed the tenet of the ?laya-vijñ?na or “storehouse consciousness [sup]1[/sup].” Sense perceptions are ordered as coherent and regular by the store consciousness, of which one is consciously unaware. Sense impressions produce certain configurations (samskaras) in this unconscious that “perfume” later impressions so that they appear consistent and regular. Each being possesses (instantiates) this store consciousness, which thus becomes a kind of collective consciousness that orders human perceptions of the world, though this world does not exist (in its own right). [/quote]
-----
1. @Tom Storm - the ?laya-vijñ?na has been compared with Jung's 'collective unconscious'.
And I've pointed out that these variations on noumena, because they are ineffable, can't serve as explanations. They are as nothing.
As opposed to there being stuff around us that we see.
You might be happy with that, but I find it wanting.
You forget that Kant lectured in science, and that his nebular theory (modified by LaPlace) is still part of current science. Bishop Berkeley wrote a treatise on optics. Schopenhauer was intensely interested in science. But I know this a pointless discussion, so I'll desist.
I should've stopped there. :wink:
No, I didn't. Science has developed somewhat since Kant's time.
Probably.
Hopefully this clears up the position I'm arguing. If not... sorry.
We have an idea that there is a cup in front of me. Something emits the data which I use to decide to reach for the word "cup", to decide where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on. There is a cause of this data, and we assume that cause is external to us (no solipsism).
We know we make errors about, and there are differences of opinion about, the objects which make up the world, such as the cup. So we need a model of how we perceive objects which accounts for those errors and differences.
We could argue, in direct sense, that those errors are merely equipment failures. That something goes wrong in some of the neural pathways (or whatever model we're going to use of how we perceive) such that they do not deliver the 'right' data from the cup.
But this entails two major problems.
Firstly, our errors are not random. We make mistakes almost exclusively in the direction of our expectations. I saw a great example of this on a Christmas Lecture once. Two jugglers performed in front of an audience. The audience are asked to count the number of passes. Unbeknownst to them, a man in a Gorilla costume crosses the stage right behind the jugglers. Only a fraction of the audience even noticed the 'Gorilla'. Everyone saw it when played back. Obviously, proper experiments have also been done on this - but this one was a great demonstration.
Now we know it's not a failure at the sensory organs (it's impossible for the retina to block out or fail to capture such specific information). We can also rule out early sensory processing areas - occipital cortex, auditory cortex etc, as we can see the activity relating to specific stimuli on fMRI and EEG.
Secondly, we don't seem to be able to resolve some differences by going back and checking. Some people simply see things slightly differently to us (more complex objects usually) and no amount of checking and double-checking seems to resolve this difference. What's more, these differences too are not random. Things that are of higher valence will be perceived differently and the valence we give to sensory data is related in some way to our experiences of life thus far.
So we have to conclude that the error/difference is a) not random, and b) related directly to an prior expectation or experience.
Back to the cup. If I make an error in - where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on - I need a model of how I perceive cups which explains, not only the error, but why the nature of the error is so consistently related to what I expect to see or have a high valence for seeing. Something has to be happening at some stage in the perception process, past the sensory organs, past the initial sensory processing, which changes all those responses (listed above) from being related directly to the data coming from the cup, to being related instead to some kind of fusion of {data from cup} and {expectation of cup}. It's pretty much an absolute necessity that such a stage exists, without it we simply cannot explain what we know about perception errors.
As such we've invoked, out of necessity, the idea of {model of cup} as an entity. It's a stage in the event 'experiencing a cup'.
Bu it's a model of a cup, so there must be a cup for it to be a model of, it is not this actual cup which directs our behaviour, it's the model (it must be, otherwise we couldn't account for those errors). So when I say "pass me the cup" I'm referring to the actual cup, but I'm using my model of the cup to do so.
Some other conclusions fall out of this.
The actual cup cannot be some ineffable noumena. I'm referring directly to the actual cup when I say "pass me the cup". I don't want you to pass me my model of the cup. We cannot (yet) know for sure if our model of the cup is correct (we've no way of bypassing the modelling system), but we know definitionally that it is of the cup, not of some ineffable noumena.
[hide="To explain some of the terms I use"]In technical terms (in cognitive sciences) we call the actual cup 'hidden states' and we call the modelled cup an 'active inference' (inferring what the hidden states are) and the boundary between the two is a Markov Boundary (or the inside/outside of a Markov Blanket)[/hide]
Again, if all that seems totally unrelated to what all/any of you are arguing, then my apologies. It seemed like it needed clearing up.
One can be a scientific realist but an anti-realist/idealist about everyday objects of perception. Electrons and protons and photons explain why we see what we do, but they are not the what we see. The what we see is an emergent phenomena, brought about by a causal chain involving a multitude of these subatomic particles.
Or perhaps Kant would be, like Hawkings was, a scientific instrumentalist.
Hawking, if I recall correctly, also expressed quite a firm belief in model-dependent realism... If the views of our great scientists are anything to go by...
Yes, which despite the term "realism" is instrumentalist (much like Putnam's "internal realism" is anti-realist).
[quote=Hawkings]I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple-minded or naïve, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations… Beyond that it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of theory.
...
According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation, like the goldfish's picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another[/quote]
[quote=Hawkings]According to the idea of model-dependent realism introduced in Chapter 3, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality.[/quote]
I see, thanks. So how does 'instrumentalist' (not a term I'm familiar with) relate to realism?
So a scientific realist will say that the Standard Model corresponds to the way the world is, whereas a scientific instrumentalist will just say that the Standard Models works.
OK. So does an instrumentalist have a model of the world which explains why their model of part of it works?
Not that I know of.
Interesting. Turtles all the way down, perhaps?
But again, this is a different kind of analysis to the philosophical issue of 'the nature of the external world' and the way it might be constituted. That operates on a different level. (And I don't want to come off as some self-described expert in saying that. I don't consider myself expert, but as a self-directed student who is following a thread of insight, which in my view has generally been neglected in much modern philosophy.)
There's a comment on teacups on the book I keep referring to, Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order. As I've said, this too is not a philosophy book as such, although it has many philosophical implications. But the point that he makes is that:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3).]Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.[/quote]
This is in line with his overall thesis that the identity of things is generated by perceptual gestalts in the mind of the observing subject - that the object in itself is not inherently 'a teacup'.
But I'm not saying that Pinter has it right, and you have it wrong. Your analysis is sound on the level at which it is made, but his analysis is from a different perspective.
As a general remark, the awareness that the Universe as it is in itself really is an ineffable mystery, but one that our evolved cognitive systems interpret in a particular way for our own purposes, strikes me as being a salutory and modest philosophical attitude. The alternative seems to be an unwarranted confidence in our taken-for-granted realism. It is closer to what philosophical scepticism really is - more so than scientific realism, in most cases.
No he wouldn’t, because science hasn’t, nor will any science done by humans, ever have the means for it.
Nahhhh.....crotchety ol’ Prussian would more likely be pissed at being intellectually bushwhacked.
Tasty bait. Thanks.
Not only is it a "dead universe", but if we assume a universe, independent of observers, then proceed to introduce an observer to this model, we must assign to the observer a temporal perspective. We have assumed an independent universe, and this includes the entirety of the temporal duration of the universe, from beginning to end, and then we want to assign a moment of observation, a "now".
If the proposed "now" is a static point in time, when nothing is moving, such that we can describe 'the way things are' at that point in time, then this is completely inconsistent with experience, therefore an empirically false observational perspective. If the proposed "now" is a duration of time (including some degree of temporal extension), then we must decide how long that "now" is to be. The choice will be completely arbitrary, with possibilities ranging between the tiniest imaginable amount of time (infinitely less than a Planck length), to the longest imaginable time (infinite, forever).
The conclusion therefore, is that if we start with the assumption of an independent universe, and try to introduce an observer to this universe, the observer's temporal perspective, hence what the observer observes from that perspective, will be completely dependent on the choice of perspectives, which will be completely arbitrary.
Quoting Isaac
You ought to recognize here, the distinction between raw data, simple information, and what is produced, or created from the data. There may be a cause of existence of the data, but that "cause" is completely inaccessible to us except through the means of interpreting the data itself. And, the data needs to be interpreted according to some 'principles'. If we are trying to determine something about the cause of the data, how do we derive such 'principles'?
So, any "model" created will be produced from these principles of interpretation. The true cause of the model therefore, are the principles of interpretation, not the data. So the data is nothing more than raw material (material cause), and the model produced is guided by the intention from which the principles are derived (final cause). What is important to notice, is that the model still cannot tell us anything about the cause of the data (material cause), unless the principles applied are somehow consistent with that cause.
You speak of errors in the perception, and modeling process. The biggest, most common, and most influential error, is the assumption that the principles applied in creating (causing) the percept, or model, are consistent with the cause of the data. This produces the conclusion that the percept, or model is fundamentally consistent with, or representative of, the cause of the data received. This is the error which leads to naive realism, the external world is just how it appears to us. In reality, how the world appears to a person, is a creation of that person's own internal processes, which interpret data according to whatever "principles' are employed by that being, and these 'principles' are likely not at all representative of the cause of the data because they are derived teleologically. What we have is a huge gap between material cause and final cause.
It wasn't very filling, though, was it?
Nope, but then, no need to floss, so.....
:razz:
I can see why you'd get this impression, but I wouldn't say necessarily 'rational' means. Rational thinking is a mode of thinking we use on concepts, plans, counterfactuals etc, I don't think it applies to perception so much. Most of the modelling work in perception is done by cortices in the brain which are sub-conscious, or at least without the capacity to engage in rational thinking. It's more just Bayesian inference at this level. Having said that, I certainly think that the conclusions we arrive at using rational thinking strategies effect the expectations we have and so thereby affect the models. Maybe "corrected partly by various rational means"?
Quoting Wayfarer
As I think @Banno may have already alluded to, I think this is intrinsic to us talking about it. To have a model of a cup necessarily implies there's a cup. Otherwise it's a model of what? It can't be a model of noumena - I've no idea what noumena even are, so I couldn't attempt a model of them.
Quoting Wayfarer
They seem an inordinately popular recourse as examples. Do you think that says something about philosophers and their lay congregation? Always within reach of tea?
I think in some discourses this makes sense. For a physicist (being a physicist at the time) she'd talk of atoms and within that discourse find nothing to determine them to be 'a cup'. But in our shared world, we do have reason to believe those atoms are constituted that way intrinsically. That reason being that that arrangement (and no other) seems to serve the function of a cup. It's true that we've determined that function to be important and in doing so filtered out all the other possible patterns those atoms (and those around them) could have made, but the existence of other possible congregations does not mean that the congregation we find important is not intrinsic to that part of the external world. It just means that other congregations we do not find important are also intrinsic to that part of the world.
I see it like constellations. The stars of Orion seem organised so as to form the shape of a hunter with his bow. That shape is obviously significant to us, so we pick it out. the same stars also form a myriad other shapes of no relevance to us so we filter them out. But... they still do genuinely form the shape of a hunter with his bow. We haven't made up that they form that shape, we've just ignored that they form all the other shapes too.
I'm using stars as an analogy for hidden states of various sorts. If we infer hidden states are in some configuration (a teacup) and our inference is good (something we can't know, but that's an epistemological question, not an ontological one), then it is reasonable to assume the hidden states are actually in that configuration. It's just that they are also in a myriad other possible configurations that we're ignoring because they're not relevant to our form of life.
So it's reasonable to assume that, if we model a teacup well, there is actually a teacup outside of our Markov Blanket. It's just that the same data could be a dozen other things too.
The points you just made show a confusion concerning what postmodern models are aiming at.
First of all , God requires a stable notion of the good. If good and evil are relative to context and have no ground beyond this , then the idea of god becomes incoherent. The model I sketched is Nietschean, beyond good and evil and thus beyond god. The model is not supernatural, it is immanent.
You say pattens are in something. Why? Where did you get the idea that we have to begin with a something, an object, a thing or force or wave or law with properties and attributes? You got it from a long-standing tradition in philosophy and empirical science. Deleuze doesnt begin with things or facts that change. He begins with difference and shows how we derive things from change. He begins from multiplicities of differential singularities. The singularities are only what they are in reciprocal interaction with other singularites. And most importantly, the singularities are not things, objects, facts, entities, they are differential changes that only occur as what they are once and never repeat exactly the same. Construction constructs from prior constructions. Transfer transfers from prior transfers. Pattern changes prior pattern. What we call stable, predictable empirical reality is the result of only relatively stable pattens which are ‘composed’ of the above internally differential and differentiating changes, which never produce ( or originate in) fixed facts , properties or substances. One could say that each singular is its own world, its own god.
The theory is an idealism in that it is grounded in ideas, not things or material causes. Singularities, in their differential structure within themselves and within the multiplicities that they belong to, are ideas. An idea does not have to be the product of a human mind, it can be located in the differential structure
of any event, as the temporal system of past-present-future that reveals the relations between elements
of the world not in terms of fixed causes external to entities but in terms of an anticipatory trajectory intrinsic to each element of relation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, postmodern social constructionist Ken Gergen mentions some of the affinities he sees between buddhism and his model of relational being.
“ Resonating with the thesis of co-action, Buddhists propose that as we remove ourselves from daily cares we come to realize the artifi ciality of the distinctions or categories on which they are based. In effect, our linguistic distinctions are responsible for both our desires and disappointments. We see that in conceptualizing wealth, love, status, or progeny as desirable, we establish the grounds for disappointment and distress. Further, we come to see that the division between self and non-self is not only misleading, but contributes to the character of our suffering. (Consider the common anguish resulting from the sense of personal failure.)
Over time one becomes conscious (Bhodi) that there are no independent objects or events in the world. These are all human constructions. When we suspend the constructions, as in meditation, we enter a consciousness of the whole or a unity. More formally, one enters consciousness of what Buddhists call codependent origination, or the sense of pure relatedness of all. Nothing we recognize as separate exists independent of all else. As the Vietamese master Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we come to an appreciation of inter-being, that “everything is in everything else.”
Sounds like the instrumentalist is similar to a pragmatist - 'it works'. Isn't a scientific realist a philosophical naturalist and an instrumentalist a methodological naturalist? I struggle to see how a scientist can do much more than propose they have tentative or defeasible models based on the best available evidence right now. Can they really make immutable claims about reality?
In this discussion of what humans/science cannot directly access, we seem to be haunted by variations of Kant's noumena - the effing ineffable!
That said, we can also say that they see a model of me picking up the cup. Just two different ways of talking as I see it, neither of which get to the heart of the question as to what the cup is "in itself".
Of course, that question can also be rejected as being incoherent given that there is no possible answer to it, other than that it is "something" which along with the "somethings" that we are,gives rise to our seeing, and being able to feel, tap to hear the sound it emits, pick up and so on, a cup.
It should be recalled that here 'the cup' is a token for 'the object of perception'. It is supposed to represent a generic 'thing', anything that can be an object of perception. But we're not really talking about any such things as the proverbial cup. The subject of the discussion is the processes of cognition and comprehension, taking 'the cup' as an example. When you're modelling a specific process of cognition, then it helps to narrow it down to a token item such as the proverbial cup. But that is not strictly the case here; the 'modelling' we're discussing is not of a specific thing but the general process of cognition and comprehension.
So I don't think you have made the case that:
Quoting Isaac
or
Quoting Isaac
These are basically assumptions - but that is the very point at issue! Do constructed artifacts have an intrinstic or inherent nature - or is that imposed on them by their makers, in line with a specific purpose?
(What I find interesting about Pinter's book is his proposal that the 'bare bones' of material or physically-measurable objects don't have any intrinsic identity, but that identity is imposed upon them in the form of gestalts, meaningful wholes, which are the basic primitives of animal and human cognition.)
Quoting Joshs
Buddhist Abhidharma and 'mindfulness' was a major influence on The Embodied Mind, and has generally become part of the enactivist/embodied cognition milieu.
This blog post on the Zen Koan 'First there is a Mountain' has some interesting things to say about imputed identity.
To be clear, it is not that you are still using god, but that you hav replaced god in the argument with a something that takes on the same roll. My objection is not to the content but the structure of that argument. The "supernatural" element, even if "immanent", is introduced using a fraught transcendental argument*. It is the transcendental argument that is objectionable.
If information is not a pattern, what is it? But if instead you are using difference, then the argument continues: a differencein what? You make the same error, repeatedly: "He begins with difference and shows how we derive things from change" - change in what? if "singularities are only what they are in reciprocal interaction with other singularites" then there are other singularities. Each account you give remains dependent on a something "external" to mind.
I maintain that all this theoretical stuff can be removed via the simple expedient of proposing realism. There is a world in which we are embedded, and which includes things we do not know.
Your arguments appear sophistic. Reality is a simpler option.
*and I mean argument of the form:
It's valid, but only true if the second premiss can be demonstrated.
In previous discussions along these lines. the end point is where the account the antirealists present begins to look so much like realism that it is difficult to see the distinction. Let's see that happens here.
Indeed, thy might. My response would be along the lines of's post, following Austin. What we see is not the "emergent phenomena", but the cup...
Quoting Isaac
And I think this a very strong argument.
:up:
Commonality of experience shows that the gestalts or meaningful wholes do not arise arbitrarily, not merely on account of the individual perceiver, taken in isolation. So the possibilities are that either real existents, including the objects perceived, the environmental conditions and the constitutions of the perceives all work together to determine the forms of perceptions. or else there is a universal or collective mind which determines the perceptions and their commonality.
How could we possibly know the answer to that question? Which seems more plausible? How do we choose between them? Does it not come down to personal presupposition and/ or preference? If so, then what could be the point in arguing over the question?
Neither. There is an external reality, according to Pinter, but the way (or the sense) in which it exists is incomprehensible to us. It can be modelled scientifically, because scientific measurement only takes into account the measurable attributes. But the modelling of all those measurable attributes still does not comprise an object - it's not an object until it is designated as such by the observer. And you can see how that has an exact parallel in physics - that prior to the act of measurement the object has no real existence other than as a distribution of possibilities. This is why Pinter mentions QBism, which I've already mentioned several times.
The point of Pinter's analysis is that objects do not exist as such outside the gestalts of perceivers. When we look at the world, what we are seeing is the product of the evolved brain which is like a fantastically sophisticated VR display superimposed over a domain that otherwise lacks inherent features or structure.
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 52). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
So they think "It looks like a cup, so I will defeasibly assume that it is a cup, until proven otherwise".
Two replies: first, this is only done after attending philosophy 101 - it is a learned response; our first position is simply that there is indeed a cup, and when not doing philosophy that is how we treat of cups and the various other things that make our world interesting. That is, it's not how we actually are in the world.
Secondly, as @Isaac points out, the process of recognising the cup is a Bayesian weighing of signal strengths, not a rational process of deduction.
The instrumentalist take is post-hoc.
But I don't use tea cups, I use coffee cups. :wink:
You see! This is why eliminativism claims that consciousness can't be real. Capiche? Those 'sensations and inner experiences' actually comprise the world of perception - but they can't be detected by scientific instruments.
I was presenting those as the coherently imaginable possibilities. For all we know one of those might be imagining "the way things really are" or something like it, or it might be the case that nothing we imagine could be anything like the real. But assuming the latter possibility to be true, then the question would be of no significance to us at all.
Coffee cups are no good; it has to be mugs.
This might be like saying "I'm not reading about words, I'm reading about wizards" in response to someone arguing that there's nothing more to stories about wizards than words.
Quoting Banno
What am I referring to when I say "pass me the cup" when dreaming?
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 81). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
What do you want to refer to? The dream-cup, perhaps, or the real cup that you are now dreaming of... there need be no "one right answer".
I find dream arguments strained. We are able to differentiate dreaming from being awake.
For a short black?
Does a painting of a unicorn necessarily imply that there's a unicorn?
Taboo!
Dream-cups are to dreams as real-cups are to waking experiences: objects found only within the mental phenomena. Dream-cups aren't whatever physical stuff is responsible for the dream and real-cups aren't whatever physical stuff is responsible for the waking experience.
Neat.
A painting of a unicorn is not a model of a unicorn. The "models" here are weightings in neural networks.
Is that so? If you dream of driving your car, you are not really driving your car, anymore than when you imagine driving your car.
But in each case, it's still your car.
And nothing in this says that my car is to be understand as being the mass of subatomic particles that is causally responsible for my experiences.
Quoting Michael
To borrow the way you like to argue, I don't drive subatomic particles, I drive a car.
yep. You're getting it!
Neither idealism nor anti-realism deny this. It's a mistake to equate "real" with "part of an external material world."
So I don't understand what relevance this has to the discussion.
Absolutely. It comes down to personal preference, just like ethics. Each perspective is as rationally coherent as the other, making "consequence" the best criteria for choosing one over the other. What is the longterm result for a race which directly apprehends reality, versus a race that filters raw existence into reality as it appears?
That, I couldn't say.
I can't either. Its a difficult question.
I agree*. Folk keep pointing this out, as if it were a problem for me. I don't see it.
Again, I suspect the realism/idealism, realism/antirealism discourse is a mistake. This thread is for m an exploration of the various possibilities. That's why I keep going back to the distinction based on truth, and maintaining that there are unknown truths. I suspect @Wayfarer and @Joshs would have to deny this, if they would address it. Then we would have a clear difference of opinion with which to work. But the argument has not gone that way.
*Edit: Historically, they have denied this. But that's moot.
This actually makes sense out of dualism. The constructive activities of the brain are invisible to science itself, as science only deals in what can be measured and quantified. But the things that we see are generated by the brain on the basis of those bare-bones objects. So the reality we actually inhabit is not what physically exists.
Quoting Banno
The assertion that there are 'unknown truths' is obviously only a surmise, because by definition you can never verify that until they're known. It's rather like the barber fallacy or any of those other set fallacies from Russell etc.
You know this a priori?
'cause it don't seem right to me.
No, aposteriori. It's an informed opinion. So make an argument for either position, and I almost guarantee there is some way to refute it.
And yet the alternative is that you know all there is to know.
Are you willing to claim omniscience?
Quoting Banno
Two excerpts from earlier posts in this thread where I have shown that the existence of unknown truths is not a problem for ( at least some prominent forms of) idealism, so not sure why you are still banging that drum.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
"Big mind" strikes me as a joke. The reality you have when you don't have a reality. It's a replacement for God, and so subject to the same problems as Joshs reply. Quoting Banno
Sure, but your personal feelings are irrelevant as to whether the imagined models (universal mind, God, collective mind or whatever) logically preclude the possibility of unknown truths; they don't and hence your objection is misplaced.
But I do see the cup - "physical" or not; always with the qualifications.
Indeed, I pick it up, fill it with tea (sometimes, instead of coffee), drink from it, wash it and put back on the shelf. And it is still there when I close the door. Too much focus on the "seeing" and not the whole interaction give sone a false picture.
You do not put the VR-generated forebrain fantasy back in the cupboard.
And we are re-hashing arguments made previously in this very thread, as well as in innumerable other threads. And my fingers are too cold to type. Minus seven last night, and the house just won't get warm.
Jesus, where do you live? I had thought you were in Sydney.
They are relevant to whether I bother to reply.
But you haven't presented a cogent argument in favour of "Big Mind" that is worth addressing, and I've addressed similar notions n th past, so there's no novelty in working it out for you. So silence.
There was a bloody open window out the back of the house. Fixed now, and the heater is finally catching up. Fingers defrosting. I will try to be a bit more civil.
Big mind awoke in caveman. Caveman mind evolve to glorious man of present day. Voila, indirect evidence of immanent Big Mind.
Cheers. Keep warm.
It was an allegory. Arguments come in many forms, you should open your mind to meaning beyond the obvious.
What else is there to fill it with? The Big Mind ensures that only the recyclable materials are passed into the future, all else is relinquished to the "slaughter bench" of history.
I don’t deny that Deleuze’s immanent panpsychism requires a transcendental framework. In fact he calls his approach an immanent transcendentalism. But there is no getting around a transcendental element. There is no brand of realism that does not depend on a transcendental , that is, metaphysical ground. So it isn’t a question of avoiding metaphysics but of how one’s discourse relates to it. Realist empiricisms naively depend on a metaphysical method, whereas Deleuze and other relativists make explicit the preconceptions orienting empiricism.
Quoting Banno
Q can be an externality in relation to mind only to the extent that it have its own internality, a subsistence , a being into itself that can be clearly separated from what causes or influences it. Realism depends on a determinably fixed distinction between inner and outer, and these tens depend on a notion of time as allowing for absolute self-identical repetition. A thing can persist as itself , and external to another thing, for so many milliseconds, for instance. This notion of how things exist in time rests on a particular kind of metaphysical thinking.
No fantasy involved. And the cupboard is just the same.
I noticed you mentioned that the notion of time is generally overlooked. The best solution Ive seen to this is the peripatetic idea of instantiation. There is the possibility of a cup in many things, but a possible a cup only becomes an actual cup when it become necessary for it to be a cup. It is only in these instances of necessity that it is possible to percieve a cup. Outside of the actuality (which relates to perception) it is possibility (independent of knowledge) which keeps the form of the cup alive. Raw existence is wrought with myriad possibilities (independent of mind) capable of interpenetrating all configurations of existence, ultimately becoming actual instances of whatever when they are perceived. I know I just said nothing, but it was fun.
Add: some things are harder to percieve, like justice. Until you see a horse thief hanged. :monkey:
I've dicked around with that notion myself
:lol: :up:
Yes, I agree. Here is an example:
Compare:
The Matrix will surely allow it
True, but even if it is the brain that generates the VR it still works. Of course our perception of brains would then VRs generated by what we perceive as the brain. Perhaps a bit confusing but not incoherent.
But for that second sense, I can't see what process you'd be using. Modelling the cup is part of the process of seeing, so to see the model, do you model the model?
Is that what I'm doing if I look at a fMRI of someone looking at a cup? Modelling the model?
Quoting Wayfarer
Then you come across @Tom Storm's problem of explaining the consistency between us. If there's no intrinsic property which causes us to treat an object a certain way, then why do we so consistently do so?
As @Janus puts it...
Quoting Janus
I accept that all of this is possible, I'm not trying to deny it, but for the second option we're having to invoke a whole load of speculated realms and mechanisms, just to avoid there being intrinsic properties and I can't see why.
Quoting Banno
Cheers, I wasn't sure if it even got us anywhere so, good to know it at least made sense.
Quoting Banno
Yep. Here we go...
Quoting Wayfarer
So there are attributes...
Quoting Michael
I don't think you're referring to anything. Referring is a social activity, when dreaming you're just rehearsing words. This is why I brought up Wittgenstein's ideas on private rules and rule following earlier. I think there's no sense in the whole idea of 'referring' without another person around, and in that case it's the cup, not the model of it, we're trying to collectively act upon. That's why we put so much effort into keeping your model of it so closely similar to my model of it, so that we can collaborate in acting on it.
Quoting Michael
Yes, in a sense. It comes down to what 'real' is. To paint a Unicorn (if we're to take a painting as a kind of model) there has to be a Unicorn for you to paint (model). The question is then what kind of thing that Unicorn is. In this case, it's a figment of our collective imaginations. If you painted it with three horns, you'd have modelled it wrong.
Or simply...
Quoting Banno
...works too. We could limit the discussion to models of reality, not models of models.
A third possibility. Yes, it might not refer to anything. I'd just ask what do you want it to refer to? Reference appears alarmingly flexible - inscrutable, as Quine and Davidson put it. There simply might not be any fact of the matter.
But this is a side issue, I'm just flagging it because it might become relevant is someone ( ?) wanted to follow through on Putnam's model- theoretical argument for anti-realism, mentioned previously.
This is gold.
Because we’re all part of the same species/culture/language group etc. - as Janus put it. But you can find many counter-examples. One of those I remember from undergrad years was the anecdote of a African forest tribesman taken to a mountain lookout by anthropologists. There were clear views across a sweeping plain in the distance with herds of animals on them. He knelt down and started reaching in front of him and after some conversation with the translator, it was established he was trying to pick up these animals, as he had no sense of this kind of scale, having always dwelt in thickly forested areas.
If you think about it, there are countless examples of this - different people interpreting the same scenario differently due to their background beliefs. Which is the ‘one right way’?
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 14). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Although here is where I detect a shortcoming in Pinter's argument - which is that h. sapiens, being a rationally-aware sentient being, is able to become reflexively aware of the sense in which existence is a mental construct - as we're doing. In fact, arguably, this is what philosophy comprises. Although in his defense, he doesn't claim his book is philosophy as such.
Quoting Isaac
Of course. I'm not saying that ‘the world is all in the mind’ - that the physical world is literally in your or my head.
Pinter again:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 17). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
We're not dreaming it up, but the sense in which it exists 'outside of' or 'apart from' that constructed reality is unknown to us. We can't 'compare' the proverbial 'cup' with 'the real cup' because the real cup is just an temporary collection of atoms.
Quoting Isaac
Because we're talking philosophy. Despite Banno's best efforts, not crockery.
There is an intuition in philosophy that there is a lack, absence or deficiency in normal perception - the sense that things are not what they seem, or that the reality which most of us take for granted is not the whole story.
Then the question becomes, is the intuition right? Or is it misleading, as Wittgenstein suggested? "Philosophy simply puts everything before us," as recounted, undoing our conceptual confusions - such as that mind and matter are so incommensurate that we need to posit anitrealism.
Then it's not clear what you mean by saying that if there is a model of a cup then there must be a cup. Are you saying that if there is a model of a cup then there must be an external material world and something in that world that "corresponds" to the model? Because that certainly doesn't follow.
There may indeed be a conceptual or semantic distinction between perception and the objects of perception, just as there is a conceptual or semantic distinction between ink on paper and the story being told, but nothing further follows from this. You need to do more than just play word games to argue for a more substantial distinction.
No, I'm not saying we model the model. The point is that the perception itself is understood as a model, or more accurately a process of modelling, and the end result is seeing what has been modeled. Now we can say that what has been modeled is the cup, or we can equally, from a different perspective, say that what is being modeled is "something" that results in seeing a cup which is a model of that "something". Either way we are stipulating what the thing being modeled is from a certain perspective; so it reduces to two different ways of talking, neither of which is "the one true perspective".
I agree. Do you have an idea of what that different perspective might be?
This is not true at all. The model could be completely fictious. Architects make models of things which are only in their minds. There is no need at all, that the model represents a thing which is being modeled. The model may be a complete fabrication. To have a model of a cup, does not imply that there is a cup, other than to the degree that the model itself is a cup.
Quoting Wayfarer
We cannot even justify a claim of "the real cup". So to say 'the cup is just a temporary collection of atoms' is begging the question, by assuming there is 'the cup'. Contrary to what Isaac says above, the existence of the model does not logically imply the existence of the thing modeled.
These ways of 'modeling the real world' are inherently misguided because they start with the assumption that what is in the mind represent what is outside the mind. The only true way is to completely reject this assumption, and start with the premise that the mind is constructing the world from nothing. Then we proceed to inquiry as to why the mind constructs the world in the way that it does. The first principle must be intention, (Plato's "the good") or else we have nowhere to start. This is why Plato insists that the true reality must be apprehended as within the mind.
I blame John Locke. :grimace:
T(x) ? x is true
T("p") ? p
T("p") ? ?"p"
p ? ?"p"
¬?"p" ? ¬p
Kantianism?
It's indigestible without some secret sauce.
The proposition "it is raining" is true if and only if it is raining
If the proposition "it is raining" is true then the proposition "it is raining" exists
If it is raining then the proposition "it is raining" exists
If the proposition "it is raining" does not exist then it is not raining
All I was looking for was your idea of why we can say we are modeling a cup, or from different perspective, we can say we are modeling “something”.
If it's not raining, the proposition "it is raining" exists. It's just false.
Quoting Tate
Your response has no bearing on the sentence you're responding to.
Of course it does.
1. T("p") ? p (premise)
2. T("p") ? ?"p" (inference, existential introduction)
3. p ? ?"p" (inference, hypothetical syllogism)
4. ¬?"p" ? ¬p (inference, modus tollens)
Do you disagree with the premise, or with one or more of the inferences?
It's a valid inference from step 3. It's called modus tollens.
p ? q
¬q ? ¬p
In this case, q is ?"p".
The argument is ignoring this:
If it is not raining, then the proposition "it is raining" exists.
I think that this is certainly questionable. What is a proposition? Is it a sentence, e.g. an utterance?
So, if it is raining then the phrase "it is raining" is spoken?
Or is a proposition something else?
"The term ‘proposition’ has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truth-value, the objects of belief and other “propositional attitudes” (i.e., what is believed, doubted, etc.[1]), the referents of that-clauses, and the meanings of sentences.". SEP
Quoting Michael
Not necessarily.
So which of them are you saying exist(s) when it is not raining?
Truth bearer.
And what's a truth-bearer? A sentence, e.g. an utterance?
A proposition.
It's usually thought of as an abstract object, which just means a proposition is "beyond" any particular person. I can be wrong about the status of a proposition, so it's not just a resident of my noggin. Mathematical entities are also abstract, so you can compare propositions to things like numbers.
Propositions are the things people assert or agree to. If you adopt an ontology that rules them out, you're headed for some type of behaviorism.
Philosophers don't usually feel required to give an ontology to them.
I'm not ruling out propositions, I'm questioning what it means for a proposition to exist. Do propositions exist when nothing is said? Do propositions exist when nothing is thought? If they do then it strikes me as Platonic realism. Is that what you're arguing for?
They exist as abstract objects. The set of all non-penguins exists whether anybody ever refers to it or not. I guess it's part of a logical landscape. They don't exist in time, in other words. They don't age.
I personally wouldn't argue for something Platonic. I would say they're residents of human thought. They're part of the way we interact with our environment.
This sounds like Platonic realism.
Quoting Tate
But then if they're "residents of human thought" then presumably they don't exist when not thought?
I guess you could take it that way. You don't have to.
Quoting Michael
Things that only exist when thought are called mental objects. The taste of your breakfast was a mental object. It doesn't exist when you aren't thinking about it.
You and I can't agree on mental objects because yours aren't available to me. This points to what's at stake if you reject propositions as abstract.
It's like so many avenues in philosophy: pick your poison.
:scream:
We could borrow from philosophy of math because it's the same issue. Here is an SEP article about math ontology.
Quoting Michael
Platonic realism isn't obviously absurd. It's just not fashionable.
The same could be said of idealism/anti-realism.
True.
What does it mean for a proposition to exist "beyond" any particular person? Where, in relation to a person, does a proposition exist?
You being wrong is a relationship between your idea of a thing and the real thing. Propositions can be true or false. A wrong (false) proposition can only exist in your head. True propositions only exist in your head as well because the proposition and what the proposition is about are two separate things. Propositions do not exist anywhere except within a mind as a relation between some scribbles and what the scribbles refer to.
Quoting Michael
Propositions are a causal relation just like everything else in the universe. Any particular thing does not exist independent of the causes that led to its existence.
OK, but do propositions exist when nothing is said? Do propositions exist when nothing is thought? Does the existence of a proposition depend in some sense on us?
Did propositions exist prior to humans existing? If the answer is no, then propositions depend on our existence. If the answer is yes, then I'd have to pause and ask exactly what we are proposing when we use the term, "proposition".
Then we run into this issue:
T(x) ? x is true (definition)
1. ?p: T("p") ? p (premise)
2. ?p: T("p") ? ?"p" (from 1, by existential introduction)
3. ?p: p ? ?"p" (from 1 and 2, by hypothetical syllogism)
4. ?p: ¬?"p" ? ¬p (from 3, by modus tollens)
Or using a specific example in ordinary language:
1. The proposition "it is raining" is true if and only if it is raining
2. If the proposition "it is raining" is true then the proposition "it is raining" exists
3. If it is raining then the proposition "it is raining" exists
4. If the proposition "it is raining" does not exist then it is not raining
1. is fine.
I take issue with 2 and 4.
2 and 3 seem to be saying the same thing.
As I pointed out to Tate propsitions can be true or false. A true or false propsition is not synonymous with an existing or non-existing proposition. A false proposition is just as real as a true one. The difference is that a true propsition accurately represents something while a false one does not.
Can propsitions exist independently of some string of scribbles or utterances? Is a proposition a string of scribbles or utterances? If so propositions exist everywhere scribbles are drawn and utterances are made.
2 is an application of existential introduction. 4 is modus tollens. They're valid rules of inference.
Quoting Harry Hindu
2 is saying that if the proposition "it is raining" is true then the proposition "it is raining" exists.
3 is saying that if it is raining then the proposition "it is raining" exists.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not saying otherwise. You appear to be denying the antecedent when looking at 2.
That's nice, but every rule of inference is either uttered or scribbled. Where do these rules of inference exist?
If you can't tell me where rules of inference are, then how can you say that they even exist? Are the scribbles you made in your posts the rules of inference, or do the scribbles refer to rules of inference that are not just more scribbles? If the latter then where do the rules of inference exist relative to your scribbles?
Quoting Tate
Except for Heidegger , Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nietzsche, and a host of other phenomenologists and postmodernist philosophers.
“But because discourse is always talking about beings, although not primarily and predominantly in the sense of theoretical statements, our analysis of the temporal constitution of discourse and the explication of the temporal characteristics of language pattems can be tackled only if the problem of the fundamental connection between being and truth has been unfolded in terms of the problematic of temporality. Then the ontological meaning of the "is" can be defined, which a superficial theory of propositions and judgments has distorted into the "copula”.( Heidegger, Being and Time)
Great. What are their assessments of the ontology of propositions?
For Heidegger. S is P is derived from the ‘as’ structure.
Heidegger's analysis of the derivation of propositional logic from a pragmatic ‘as' structure illustrates the immediately transformative nature of intentional aboutness. Heidegger explains that in taking something to be the case in a propositional judgement (for instance, S is P) , we are taking something as something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance. Making sense of something is an act that always has the ‘as' structure, as Heidegger tells us, but this structure of relevanting is covered over and flattened down in causal models.
“What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something...In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together.”
“The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.”
Continental philosophy. It may have something to do with the water in Europe.
It probably doesn't have lead in it. That's our special ingredient. With a sprinkle of asbestos.
Quoting Isaac
Or we could argue that discursive practices that neither originate entirely within the individual nor the community, but in a complex dance between them, establish and contest rules and techniques of reciprocal interaction with a world that we end up talking about as the experience of ‘real intrinsic objects’.
By substituting for the concept of intrinsic content the notion of reciprocal interaction we keep what intrinsic realness gives us , but gain much more.
But this requires a shift in our conceptualizations of empiricism from backward-looking notions like knowledge and epistemology to forward-looking terms like practice, production, contextual use and niche construction. I think this is the direction philosophy of science is headed( See the work of Joseph Rouse).
Quoting Tate
And a smidgeon of Viagra to elevate the level of philosophical intercourse.
The latter, but not magic... more like money.
Logic is licence to print (utter) valid tokens.
And to invalidate/falsify/exclude/delete/negate their negations.
Time again. There were dinosaurs and it was raining, but there were no (propositional) utterances there and then.
I just finished re-reading Putnam’s collection ‘Realism with a Human Face’. He leans a lot here on the later Wittgenstein and the American Pragmatists. His realism with a small ‘r’ , as he calls it, is a relativism almost all the way down. I say almost because although he calls analytic philosophy a dead end, he stops short of the value relativism of Rorty and the French Postmodernists.
On the one hand , he argues that “Logical positivism maintained that nothing can have cognitive significance unless it contributes, however indirectly, to predicting the sensory stimulations that are our ultimate epistemological starting point (in empiricist philosophy). I say that that statement itself does not contribute, even indirectly, to improving our capacity to predict anything. Not even when conjoined to boundary conditions, or to scientific laws, or to appropriate mathematics, or to all of these at once, does positivist philosophy or any other philosophy imply an observation sentence. In short, positivism is self-refuting. Moreover, I see the idea that the only purpose or function of reason itself is prediction (or prediction plus "simplicity") as a prejudice-a prejudice whose unreasonableness is exposed by the very fact that arguing for it presupposes intellectual interests unrelated to prediction as such.”
“…the success of science cannot be anything but a puzzle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts."
“So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathemati-cal objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.”
“…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”
On the other hand, “…intelligence, in the sense of the ability to use language, manipulate tools, and so on, is not enough to enable a species to do science. It also has to have the right set of prejudices…” “…plausible reasoning that is often subjective, often controversial, but that, nevertheless, comes up with truths and approximate truths far more often than any trial-and-error procedure could be expected to do.”
“If coherence and simplicity are values, and if we cannot deny without falling into total self-refuting subjectivism that they are objective (notwithstanding their "softness," the lack of well-defined "criteria," and so forthright), then the classic argument against the objectivity of ethical values is totally undercut.”
Are the two paragraphs saying essentially the same thing? And if not, what could possibly be the practical significance for our daily lives of the difference between them?
So let’s cut to the chase. First off, notice that cups and tables are value objects , whose meaning is established from their cultural use. Cups and tables don’t exist in physics , which deals with a different set of conventions. And they don’t exist for certain abstract artists , and they don’t exist for any of us when our attention is elsewhere. We see them but see right though them. So cups and table appear for us with the sense that you are intending here within certain contexts but not others.
But Instead of the value objects of cups and tables , let’s
choose a knife held by one person piecing the body of another. What is taking place here? A murder? Self defense? Justified punishment? Accounts of the motives involved will differ , but so may accounts of the basic facts of the matter, once we get past the superficial aspects. After all , even the world from the vantage
of physics can no longer be considered deterministic.
As Hilary Putnam writes:
“Elizabeth Anscombe, in her powerful inaugural address, recognizes both the importance of the determinism issue and the importance of the fact that the scientific evidence no longer supports determinism, if it ever did. One way of scoffing at the significance of indeterminism is to pretend that it makes no difference to "ordinary macroscopic events" such as the motions of human bodies. This is an outright mistake, and Anscombe disposes of it with great elegance.”
Could be. I was responding to the Daedalian poetry of the language in the second account which led me to quite forget what the content was intended to be. :wink:
OK, I'll take a stab. We can say we are modeling a cup because others also see a cup and have their own perceptions (models) of it. We can say we are modeling "something" because no one knows, apart from their models, what the cup is, or what produces the perception of the cup, and the very idea of a cup is meaningless outside the context of our perceptions and ideas.
I said "Kantianism" because it seems analogous to his idea that all we perceive are representations (models).
Cool. Nothing there to seriously jeopardize my initial agreement.
Thanks.
Again, this looks problematic. "p" is an individual variable, so ?"p" is like ?(a). You would have to move to a free logic and use ?!"p"; but that something exists cannot be the conclusion of an argument in free logic. You have to assume that p is true and that there is a sentence "p".
This is now spread over two threads. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13170/an-analysis-of-truth-and-metaphysics
Thy are not symbolic; they are not referential. They are not paintings or sentences.
I’m assuming you agree with Putnam’s value objectivism , but what do you object to in the quotes I included concerning his conceptual relativism?
That's just theoretic, so don't put too much weight on your weightings.
Quoting Isaac
The discussion of 'the real cup' - that, if the perception of the cup is neural activity, then what is the 'real cup'? - is premissed on a misunderstanding. When you turn your attention to the 'nature of consciousness' then it's a qualitatively different type of act to 'turning your attention to the cup'. Why? Because the cup is by definition an object ('cup' being a token for any external object).
But understanding the sense in which the mind constructs reality, as idealism posits, requires a different kind of attention to examination of 'the cup', because that is not an objective process, it's not concerned with objects, but with the actual process of knowing. It requires a kind of stopping (epoché) or 'cessation' which is more characteristic of contemplative than discursive reasoning.
All the machinery of modern science is basically geared towards the object as an external phenomenon - you see this very clearly in the attempts to model consciousness scientifically. (There, you're trying to 'objectify' the process of knowing by understanding the mind or brain as another objective process.) The endeavour of objective understanding has no limits - I was just reading yesterday that it is now thought that there are literally trillions of galaxies, and at the other end of the scale that the Large Hadron Collider is getting started up again (New! Improved!) But understanding the nature of knowing is not necessarily amenable to that extraordinary scientific power that we now have access to.
The cardinal difficulty is that this requires a shift in perspective, or a different mode of understanding.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhaur's Philosophy]Common to Schopenhauer on the one hand and Buddhism on the other is the notion that the world of experience is something in the construction of which the observer is actively involved; that it is of its nature permanently shifting and, this being so, evanescent and insubstantial, a world of appearances only.[/quote]
You can see that also in Platonist philosophies with their focus on universals or ideas as the sub-structure of judgement; whilst the individual cup is an ephemeral instance, the idea of the cup is a universal, and so not something that can be broken or lost. Furthermore 'the idea of the cup' is neither objective nor subjective, but straddles the object-subject divide.
From Spirituality and Philosophy in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:
That, I claim, is precisely what has been lost in analytic philosophy, although still alive in contintental and perhaps phenomenological philosophy.
Could you say a little more about your position concerning what Putnam calls conceptual relativity, his belief that the mind-dependence of facts means that there is no fact of the matter that our language about objects like cups and tables refers to, only a plurality conventional accounts with no external real referent to justify them?
What about if it is not raining? Again the idea of temporality seems to be missing in the above. I could agree with the idea that if it were the case that it never rained; if there were no such thing as rain then the proposition "it is raining" would not exist, and it would follow from that that if the said proposition did not exist then it could not be raining. Beyond that I'm not getting the sense.
The main reason I would see is that intrinsic properties are conceptual and there is a difficulty involved in trying to understand how something brutely physical, as that seems to be commonly understood, could possess conceptual attributes. McDowell and Brandom and perhaps Davidson get around this by saying that reality is always already conceptually shaped in some sense. The issue here is that if the effects on the senses were initially completely non-conceptual then nothing we say about anything could be justified by them because all justification is in conceptual form and there seems to be no way to create a logical relation of entailment between something pre-conceptually physical and any deductive or inductive inference.
which seems a good approach and one I would agree with (although I note on page 3 a ref to 'the philosopher Richard Dawkins' :rage: )
As far as Platonism is concerned as I've often said, I find platonic realism persuasive. I've now come around to the point of view that the 'objects' of platonic realism, such as universals and natural numbers, are real and invariant structures of reason. And as 'the world' is actually 'our experience of the world', then these are not simply 'in the mind' as conceptualism argues. They're as real as tools or utensils or anything else we use, but they're not physical.
//have to say, reading that essay, I'm an instant Putnam fan.//
What you seem to be missing is the advancements which Aristotle and Aquinas have made, the division between the non-physical Forms which are independent from the human mind, and the non-physical forms which are dependent on the human mind. It is necessary to uphold a separation between these two, to allow for the reality of human failures in knowledge, the deficiencies of human knowledge.
The human being has extreme difficulty in its attempt to understand the divine (independent) Forms because of this separation, which is actually matter itself. And the material aspect of the human being, its body, provides the means by which we gather information about the independent Forms, through sensation. This is why Aquinas says we cannot properly understand God, a divine Form, while being united with a body. Our knowledge, existing as a unity of human minds, is tainted by this medium, matter, which separates human minds.
What I think, is that the only true way to the independent Forms is through one's own internal being. I think we do have a direct point of contact with non-physical, independent Forms, through the internal being of oneself. And this is why mathematicians who practise what is called pure mathematics, can produce principles which are purely a priori, and completely independent from any dependence on empirical verification.
We cannot ever get to an adequate understanding of the internal aspects of a physical object through the approach of empirical science. This is because the observations required for the scientific method will always be an act of looking at the object from the direction of from the outside of the object, inward, so there will always be the medium of matter in between. The only way that a human being can truly access the inner aspects of a physical object is from within oneself, where one truly has access to the inside, from the inside, thereby avoiding the medium of matter. So this is the only way that we'll produce true knowledge of the inner aspects of a physical object.
Ehhhh....suffice it to say there are differences in modeling perspectives. One perspective is mere convention....we model a cup because we already know what that thing is; the other perspective is ignorance....we model “something” because we don’t know what that thing is.
The perspective is, then, experience; the difference is whether or not there is any.
Ahhhh....but the technicalities. That’s where the fun is, ne c’est pas? When does “something” become cup? Somewhere in that theoretical exposition, will reside the possible misgivings.
We've discussed that a lot, and no, I haven't missed it. As I just said, which you seem to have missed, I am quite persuaded by platonic realism - by which I also mean Aristotelian's take on it. We discussed this blog post on it a long time ago. I also frequently refer to Maritain's criticism of empiricism.
Why don't we go back and see if we can define proposition. What forms do propositions take? If I were to look for a proposition where would I look? What would I see or hear?
I don't think there is any difference when it comes to our day to day experience. Might it make a difference as to what we allow ourselves to experience beyond that? Could be; I think it's quite possible to truncate our imaginations. Any theoretical exposition is just going to be a conjecture based on certain starting assumptions. The scientific account of perception, if not taken as an absolute, at least has the advantage of being based on observable processes...up to a point,,,I guess it depends on what we are aiming to do.
Truncate our imaginations. Cool turn of a phrase.
Not so much.
Davidson seems to me to have the upper hand in the infamous debates on truth, as I take it Rorty agreed. It's not just a conversation that we are having. The world impinges on what we can do, and so on what we can sensibly say.
Whatever point you were attempting to make with those quotes remains obscure.
Davidson showed how the philosopher's schism between conceptual scheme and world is fraught, ( I take him here to be following on Wittgenstein's meaning as use) and with that came tumbling down "the only true and correct description of the world".
SO I don't see that Putnam’s views hold much value.
Quoting Banno
I can’t imagine that Rorty would choose Davidson’s position over Putnam’s on too many issues.
Quoting Banno
I didn’t think you would. Just for the bell of it , I thought I’d include Putnam’s rebuttal to Davidson’s critique of the conceptual scheme, which you have mentioned a number of times.
“Davidson has famously argued against Whorf that the very fact that Whorf could translate Shawnee into English at all shows that there is no difference in "conceptual scheme" between the two languages, and the same argument is commonplace today in papers and courses on psycho- linguistics." However, this argument assumes that English already had that notion of a "fork-shaped pattern" (or "fork- tree") before Whorf wrote his paper. In fact, the whole argument of Davidson's "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" assumes that translation leaves the language into which we translate unaffected. I deny both of these premises. I think Shawnee has an "ontology" of patterns that (normal) English lacks, although we could, of course, add it to English; and I think that the conceptual scheme of English is constantly being enriched by interactions with other languages,as well as by scientific, artistic, etc., creations.”
I don't think this is so. Davidson's description is of an ongoing and growing conversation.
So do you have an argument for this?
I don't think that Aristotle's metaphysics is consistent with what is today referred to as platonic realism. It is commonly said that Aristotle refuted this form of idealism, Pythagoreanism. What Aristotle argued in his metaphysics is that if geometrical constructs existed before being discovered by the mind of a geometer, their existence would be purely potential. The mind discovering the idea actualizes that idea, allowing it actual existence. Then he showed how anything which is eternal must be actual. So he effectively shows that the theory of eternal ideas, independent from human minds, is an impossibility.
By the terms of that post, Aristotle would be a nominalist, not a realist, because ideas would only potentially exist, prior to being actualized by the human mind. The common use of "real" is to refer to what is actual.
Furthermore, Aristotle, in his law of identity, definitely gives priority to the particular, as having a form which is proper to itself, and unique to itself. That is hylomorphism, every object consists of matter and form The mind grasps universals, and the form of the particular is not a universal, so the perfection of the form, as the ideal and independent form, the form of the particular, is not grasped by the human mind, not being the form of a universal.
Therefore the Neo-Platonist "One", as a particular cannot be grasped by the human mind. And Neo-Platonist metaphysics is rendered impotent in this way, because its first principle, the "One", fundamentally cannot be grasped by the human intellect, leaving it as a useless first principle for human minds. "The One" must refer to a particular, not a universal, and therefore cannot be grasped by human beings. Even though we can understand "the One" as a universal, this would constitute a misunderstanding of the true nature of "one".
I don't know, as I previously said.
I've seen a few main approaches:
1. Propositions are abstract entities like universals. They are mind independent in the same way that spheres and squares don't require a mind to be defined or to have properties that are true or false of them.
2. Propositions are linguistic constructs and not mind independent. (This is somewhat less popular because it seems to entail statements like "the moon exists" aren't true or false outside the context of communications or beliefs).
3. Propositions are the main ontological primitive of reality, i.e., all of reality can be compressed and encoded into true/false statements. Essentially this is just #1, except that this goes a step further in saying that other abstract objects end up being derived from propositions. The case for this is that you could encode everything that's going on in a physical event, say when one pool ball hits another, in binary.
I've noticed a tension between 1 and 2 in that often the people who want to deny that abstract objects are mind-indendent tend to also be the people who want to claim that the truth or falsity of propositions is, in at least some cases, mind-indendent. I do not know of a good way to resolve this myself. Perhaps propositions can be merely metalinguistic constructs, but the truth of a thing is a property the thing itself, or a property emerging from a thing and its interactions with another thing (i.e. information transfer). I'd like a theory like that but I don't know of one that holds up.
For some reason, propositions existing as abstract objects independent of minds never bothered me as much as universals doing the same.
Quoting Banno
I’m going to cheat and use Putnam again:
“The word "meaning" and its relatives may be used in a sense closely connected with linguistics (counting lexi- cography as part linguistics). of Using the notion in this way, we ask what a word means, and expect to be given, if not a synonym, at least a paraphrase of a kind that any native speaker of the relevant language might give, or if the para- phrase is in a different language, one that counts as a reason-able translation. This is the notion of meaning that concerns Donald Davidson, my predecessor in the Hermes Lectures. In this sense of "meaning," the criterion as to whether two expressions have the same meaning is translation practice. But there is another, perhaps looser, notion of meaning made famous by Wittgenstein, in which to ask for the mean- ing of a word is to ask how it is used, and explanations of how a word is used may often involve technical knowledge of a kind ordinary speakers do not possess, and may be of a kind that would never appear in a lexicon or be offered as translations. In short, there is a difference between elucidat- ing the meaning of an expression by describing how it is used, and giving its meaning in the Davidsonian, or narrow linguistic, sense.”
“Conceptual relativity, as I already in-dicated, holds that the question as to which of these ways of using "exist" (and "individual" "object," etc.) is right is one that the meanings of the words in the natural language, that is, the language that we all speak and cannot avoid speaking every day, simply leaves open.”
It's not a rhetorical question.
And again, you seem to hint at some great point you have in mind, but which you are unable to articulate.
Logic since Frege has been able to set out much of the subtle variation in our use of existential words such as "is". But it is not apparent how you might use this in support of antirealism.
Quoting Banno
And the non-rhetorical answer is that truth conditions play only a minor role in determining the rightness of meaning , due to the fact that rightness is predominately a matter of fit between habit and what appears. Fit is relative to purpose, and there are no things in the world that are external to all purposes.
As Nelson Goodman puts it:
“Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He is unconcerned with the trivial truths he could grind out endlessly; and he looks to the multifaceted and irregular results of observations for little more than suggestions of overall structures and significant generalizations. He seeks system, simplicity, scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors truth to fit. He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates. Truth, moreover, pertains solely to what is said, and literal truth solely to what is said literally. We have seen, though, that worlds are made not only by what is said literally but also by what is said metaphorically, and not only by what is said either literally or metaphorically but also by what is exemplified and expressed-by what is shown as well as by what is said.”
"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" would thus be a perverse and paralyzing policy for any world- maker. The whole truth would be too much; it is too vast, variable, and clogged with trivia. The truth alone would be too little, for some right versions are not true-being either false or neither true nor false-and even for true versions rightness may matter more.
What I have been saying bears on the nature of knowledge. On these terms, knowing cannot be exclusively or even primarily a matter of determining what is true. Discovery often amounts, as when I place a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, not to arrival at a proposition for declaration or defense, but to finding a fit. Much of knowing aims at something other than true, or any, belief.
An increase in acuity of insight or in range of comprehension, rather than a change in belief, occurs when we find in a pictured forest a face we already knew was there, or learn to distinguish stylistic ditterences among works already classified by artist or composer or writer, or study a picture or a concerto or a treatise until we see or hear or grasp features and structures we could not discern before. Such growth in knowledge is not by formation or fixation or belief, but by the advancement of understanding. Furthermore, if worlds are as much made as found, so also knowing is as much remaking as reporting.”
“ Briefly, then, truth of statements and rightness of descriptions, representations, exemplifications, expressions-of design, drawing, diction, rhythm--is primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization. The differences between fitting a version to a world, a world to a version, and a version together or to other versions fade when the role of versions in making the worlds they fit is recognized.”
To me this is the key point. We gain nothing by assuming a set of facts about the world supposedly existing independently of all versions, purposes and uses. Such an assumption is completely vacuous. It has no work to do.
That was your answer to my question about where the rules of inference were. You seemed to be shocked that I might question the existence of rules of inference, but you can't even show them to me or even know what they are either. It's like asking for proof of your God that you insists exists and you don't know how show proof.
You can't even prove propositions exist yet you used the term in your attempt to use rules of inference. If you can't show me what you're talking about when talking about propositions and rules of inference then it appears you don't know what your taking about when using those terms.
You should work that out before trying to make arguments using propositions and rules of inference.
I'm not interested in proving that propositions exists. I am simply, for the sake of argument, taking as a premise that "p" is true iff p, or to use a specific example, that "the cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat. I then show what follows from assuming this premise. You're welcome to reject the premise if you like, and then my argument just isn't directed at you anymore.
But you were interested in how they exist, which is what I've been asking you:
Quoting Michael
For us to continue, I need to know how you are using the term, "proposition", so that I'm not wasting my time or yours in talking past each other.
Quoting Michael
Which I agreed with (go back and look). The relationship between the scribbles, "the cat is on the mat", and the cat and the mat is true IF it is the case that the cat is on the mat. If the cat is not on the mat, then the relationship between the scribbles and the cat and the mat is false.
...and yet it plays a role....
Truth is where the world and language meet. Some of our beliefs are true, some not. Not just anything will do.
And this makes sense only if we say that there are truths that are independent of our attitude towards them, or even of our having articulated them at all.
Quoting Joshs
We gain the capacity to distinguish truth from mere belief.
There are numerous issues with Goodman's turn of phrase. I expect you would agree that the notion of meaning having a "rightness" is fraught.
Elsewhere, you wrote:
Quoting Joshs
But that is twaddle. What allows agreement is that we share the same world. "Discursive conventions" are our agreeing, they are what our agreeing consists in. PoMo remains hopelessly muddled.
Quoting Banno
Then I guess Trump supporters and liberals
in the U.S live in different worlds, as Goodman says, given that they disagree profoundly on ethical, political and scientific issues. No pointing to the true facts , while castigating our foes for their laziness, stupidity or malevolent motives, will change this situation.
Quoting Banno
No, rightness is where the world and language meet, and rightness is not about truth and falsity but coherence of fit. What fits and what does not , and in what way, depends on lour purposes. We can ignore the particularities of our participation in social activities on some occasions , such as when we create broadly general categories of purpose that abstract
away all of these particularities. Technology and physics are examples of this abstractive generalizing of discursive meaning, allowing liberals and conservatives to agree on why planes stay up in the air even as they cannot agree on much else. Only because we can construct such broad generalities can what seem like the ‘same true world’ appear as shared by an entire community.
So, where do we find truth then?
This is too abstract: I think it would be far better to say that it is in actuality and significance that the world and language meet. Some of our ideas are workable, some not. Some of our ideas are insightful and inspiring, others not. Who gives a shit if the cat is on the mat or the cup is in the cupboard?
Quoting Joshs
:up: I see you are making a similar point.
Yes, dualistic thinking is unhelpful and I can see the merit of this view. Is deescalation of culture war possible and how do we find our way to a less disruptive, violent world in the light of this?
But language is part of the world. We perceive and have beliefs about how certain scribbles and utterances can be used just as we have perceptions and beliefs about anything else.
Quoting Banno
If there are truths that are independent of our attitudes towards them, or even of our having articulated them at all, then truth is not where the world and language meet. Truth would simply be what is the case and what is the case is independent of our having articulated what is or isn't the case.
Quoting Joshs
Most people are not in these extremist political camps. People with open minds must play a part in this relationship with the world.
It's not that they live in different worlds. It's that they have different perceptions of the world, which includes language.
Quoting Joshs
Then maybe you and Banno need to iron out the distinction between rightness and truth. I think both of you are making the antiquated mistake of separating language from the world. We can disagree on the use of language as much as we can disagree about the usefulness of the Democrat and Republican parties.
Quoting Janus
Language is not separate from the world. What makes language so special as to have a special meeting with the world while everything else in the world lacks this kind of meeting with the world? I have to learn to understand language just like I have to learn to ride a bike, or how babies are made. The world and our perceptions of it precedes any use of language as language must be perceived in the world to make any use of it.
And is this your belief about the nature of truth? Do you agree with Hilary Putnam that “while there is an aspect of
conventionality and an aspect of fact in everything we say that is true, we fall into hopeless philosophical error if we commit a "fallacy of division" and conclude that there must be a part of the truth that is the "conventional part" and a part that is the "factual part””, and that "this dichotomy between what the world is like independent of any local perspective and what is projected by us seems to me utterly indefensible."?
Or do you prefer David Lewis , Donald Davidson or San Dennett’s attempts to hold on some form of separation between fact and convention?
No. I was explaining the implications of Banno's belief about the nature of truth. If "there are truths that are independent of our attitude towards them" then truth is not a meeting of the world and language, rather truth is "simply what is the case in the world" independent of what we articulate (how we use language).
I'm more interested in what we mean by terms like "truth", "fact" "right/wrong", not really the terms themselves as they seem interchangeable. If you mean different things when using these terms, then I want to know what that distinction is.
Quoting Joshs
I don't like putting myself in a camp designated by some philosopher's name. So I probably don't fall neatly into any camp. I want to know what you mean by "fact" and "convention". Is a convention a fact, or a state of affairs, or what is the case? How humans use scribbles and utterances are themselves a state of affairs, or what is the case.
Language is about the world, and I would include mathematical and visual representation in that characterization. So, it is via language that a kind of separation appears between the world and what is about it. Of course from one perspective that which is about the world is within the world, but from another perspective the world appears only within that which is about the world. Remember the nature of the dialectic; every idea holds within it its own negation.
I agree that how humans use language is a state of affairs, but is there an ultimate arbiter of the truth of certain statements about the world, for example about the truth of empirical propositions? Are there objective
truths about physical nature, or are these truths relative to contingent and conventional linguistic states of affairs?
Is the claim that dinosaurs existed before anybody talked about them incoherent? What if we instead say that SOMETHING existed before language-using communities named and defined them, but we can’t say that they were dinosaurs , since that is a conceptual convention?
Or would you agree with Nelson Goodman?
“Is it a consequence of Goodman's philosophy that we made the stars?” Goodman answered that while there is a sense in which we did not make the stars (we don't make stars in the way in which a brickmaker makes a brick), there is indeed a sense in which we did make the stars. Goodman illustrated this by asking us to consider a constellation, say the Big Dipper. Did we make the Big Dipper? There is an obvious sense in which the answer is no. All right, we didn't make it in the way in which a carpenter makes a table, but did we make it a constellation?
Did we make it the Big Dipper? At this point, perhaps many of us might say yes, there is a sense in which we made “it” the Big Dipper. After all, it is hard to think of the fact that a group of stars is a “dipper” as one which is mind independent or language independent. Perhaps we should give Goodman this much, that we didn't “make” the Big Dipper as a carpenter makes a table, but we did make it by constructing a version in which that group
of stars is seen as exhibiting a dipper shape, and by giving it a name, thus, as it were, institutionalizing the fact that that group of stars is metaphorically a big dipper.
Nowadays, there is a Big Dipper up there in the sky, and we, so to speak, “put” a Big Dipper up there in the sky by constructing that version. But—and Goodman is, of course, waiting for this objection—we didn't make the stars of which that constellation consists. Stars are a “natural kind”, whereas constellations are an “artificial kind”.
But let us take a look at this so-called natural kind. Natural kinds, when we examine them, almost always turn out to have boundaries which are to some degree arbitrary, even if the degree of arbitrariness is much less than in the case of a completely conventional kind
like “constellation”. Stars are clouds of glowing gas,glowing because of thermonuclear reactions which are caused by the gravitational field of the star itself, but not every cloud of glowing gas is considered a star; some such clouds fall into other astronomical categories, and some stars do not glow at all. Is it not we who group together all these different objects into a single category “star” with our inclusions and exclusions? It is true that we did not make the stars as a carpenter makes a table, but didn't we, after all, make them stars?
Now Goodman makes a daring extrapolation. He proposes that in the sense illustrated by these examples, the sense in which we “make” certain things the Big Dipper and make certain things stars, there is nothing that we did not make to be what it is. (Theologically, one might say that Goodman makes man the Creator.) If, for example, you say that we didn't make the elementary particles, Goodman can point to the present situation in
quantum mechanics and ask whether you really want to view elementary particles as a mind-independent reality. It is clear that if we try to beat Goodman at his own game, by trying to name some “mind-independent stuff”, we shall be in deep trouble.”
We find truth all around us, whenever we participate in forming broad abstractions that mask the interpersonal differences in purpose and perspective that accompany our social engagements. These broad abstractions can take the form of propositional truth statements producing the picture of objects existing independently of human conceptualization, and are true facts for all of us.
This works well when our generalizations produce such things as physical objects and laws, but when we attempt to apply such broad abstractions to more complex phenomena, like human relationships and behavior, it can be disastrous. We end up wielding truth as a weapon of conformity.
In dealing with human behavior ( ethics, politics, etc) what we need isn't the notion of an objectively true world, but ways of relating to each other in more and more intimate ways. Abandoning talk of a single real world doesn’t mean anything goes, it means becoming sensitive to the contexts of persons’ ways of understanding their world and opening ourselves up to multiple ways of being.
No They are what we in trade call "wrong". Some of their beliefs are what we call "false". One of the interesting things about truth is that it allows us to point out when this or that "Discursive convention" does not match what is the case.
SO for examples drinking bleach will not cure COVID, regardless of the convention one espouses. Even if you believe it as part of a large, coherent body of discourse, drinking bleach will not cure COVID. That's because belief and truth are different things.
Overwhelmingly, we agree as to how things are. What disagreement there is, tends to how we want things to be. Your notion of denying agreement as to the facts leaves open precisely the sort of radical disagreement you wish to avoid. Your Trumpian friends can reply to you with the very argument you wish to use: they to will pretend that there are no facts of the matter. If all you have is coherence, you've already lost.
One of the tools you will have used in your counselling is some variation on the "reality rub", where one gently points to beliefs that are incompatible with the facts.
The United States is doing something similar at a national level.
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes.
Did you think there is something here with which i would disagree?
Well Joshs, I don't understand this post at all. I don't see how truth could be a masking. I think it is more the opposite, an unmasking. So I think your explanation is a movement away from truth, toward deception, rather than toward truth.
Truth as correspondence with what is out there independent of us is one sort of attempt to discover ordered relationships. When I say this way masks something, I mean that it treats a complex series of intricate relations as one single sort of relation. Why does it do this? Because these more intimate dynamics within the abstraction that we call a fact of the matter are too subtle to be noticed. The generalizations that truth produces reflect what seems obvious to us: there are real objects out there in a real world, whose features are subject to conceptual interpretation but whose existence does not dependent on our concepts. What I am arguing is not that the real world is actually fake or imagined. I am arguing that this real world is not a conglomeration of objects, laws and forces that are what they are independent of us. We and the world form a single integrated web, and each human perspective contributes to the evolution of that web. Knowledge doesn’t passively represent, it changes, builds and creates within this web. The notion of objective truth assumes parts of the web of reality just sit there waiting for us to capture what they are and do. But no aspect of the web of reality remains unchanged by what changes in any other aspect of it. The world is a moving target for our scientific inquiries, and our participation in its transformation through our investigations of it change its rules, laws and facts in subtle ways. But this reciprocal
dance between us and world we call science gradually makes the world more intelligible, and thus more ‘true’ , by allowing us to build more intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other. The world becomes more anticipatable in its behavior over time this way. This is a deeper notion of truth than that of simple correspondence between concept and object.
You’re referring to the old Cognitive therapy and rational emotive therapy programs , which were reality-based forms of psychotherapy. There have been modifications to this objectivist way of thinking within psychotherapy that replaces the notion of inaccurate or false beliefs with unadaptive beliefs , and an emphasis on useful narratives rather than factually true conceptions.
I’ve heard this many times. Where on earth do you get the idea that it is the far right in the U.S. that believes truth is something made up? I mean, it’s one thing to claim that they ignore or distort facts , it is quite another to assert that they have taken radical relativists to heart and think that there are no correct facts. I’ve heard it said the right is living in a post-truth world. My response is that one could not a find a group of people more wedded to a doctrinaire and almost fundamentalist concept of truth.Talk about facts of the matter. The Trumpian right fetishizes and reifies facts with a religious zeal. Unfortunately they reduce scientific facts to simple causal relations. It is this Ayn Randian mentality toward rationality that makes them unable to appreciate ambiguities and complexities of the sort that crop up in climate change and covid science. The continual
on-the -fly adjustments in medical recommendations in response to new study results over the course of the pandemic do not fit the simplistic image many Trump conservatives have of how science was supposed to operate. As a result , they lost faith faith in the veracity of what they were being told.
Quoting Banno
Agreement on how things are , in the way that you mean it , deals primarily with the sorts of broad abstractions that we use in the natural sciences and technology , or in talking about everyday objects in certain very general ways. I think you would agree that this agreement has to do with anticipating how another will behave in response to our using scientific or everyday concepts. We know we have agreement if they respond as we anticipate they should if their conception is the same as ours. We ask for the chair and when they give it to us , we have verification of our assumption that we agree.
But there are other kinds of anticipations that I would argue are much more central to our lives than what can be articulated as true-false propositions.
I am among those who believe that the central core of our emotions is cognitive assessment, and that this assessment is , as free energy neuroscientists argue, a predictive endeavor. That is, we feel anxiety , guilt , anger when our predictions concerning the way we anticipate others ( or ourselves) to act is disappointed, surprised , violated. One could say that whenever we feel a negative emotion , there is disagreement between ourselves and another, or between ourself and ourself. Our prediction does not agree with the situation at hand with regard to the other’s behavior, attitude, ideation. We have been let down, or let ourselves down , with a violation of expectation.
So do we overwhelmingly agree as to how things are in our interpersonal relationships? Given the fact that for most of us emotional stability, much less happiness, is a tentative achievement at best, I would say that based on the very sensitive measure of our emotions , rather than the very broad and generic measure of propositional truth statements, we struggle all the time to find agreement between our expectations concerning the behavior of others and their actual behavior. We struggle with low self-esteem, we wonder what others think of us, we become terrified of embarrassment in speaking before a group, we need to keep secrets , even from those closest to us, we are kept up at night with gnawing guilt over something we didn’t say or should have said, we are consumed with anger over the disregard a colleague or former friend shows us. These are all failures of agreement , expressions of the gaps which separate us from others.
You might be tempted to argue that human behavior is fundamentally arbitrary, and so we cannot expect to achieve the sort of predictability in interpersonal relations that we can in modeling other aspects of the natural world. In other words, we can agree that human emotions and motives are capricious , irrational or arbitrary whereas other aspects of the world are predictable and thus subject to agreement. This we are i. overwhelming agreement. concerning what it is possible to agree on, given the facts of nature.
But are our failures to anticipate the behavior of others the fault of human capriciousness or our beliefs that humans. behavior is capricious? That is , the inadequacy of our models of human behavior rather than bedrock facts about human behavior? I think the kind of model that simply labels scientific , ethical or political attitudes as simply correct or incorrect is part of the problem rather than the solution. What you are doing is blaming the other’s ‘irrationality’ for your failure to understand the basis of their thinking. This does not at all mean that you cannot prefer your understanding or behavior to theirs. It is possible to see the rationality and validity in their actions at the same time that you find your approach superior. Rationality can evolve.
We can subsume the other’s simplistic thinking within our own, allowing us to understand why they did what they did without invalidating it ,while allowing us to determine ways of moving them closer to our direction. That way we dont up with a schizoid dualism between ‘overwhelming agreement on the way things are’ and hopeless resignation when it comes to anticipating each other’s actions. Unfortunately. the first sort of ‘overwhelming agreement’ isnt worth a damn when it comes to 90% of what makes our lives worth living, relating intimately , empathetically and insightfully with others. Do we really want to write off possibilities of achieving more of the second kind of agreement by claiming that we already see the world the same way and simply want different things from it?
I take this to be saying that there is no such thing as "objective truth".
Quoting Joshs
So how are you using "true" and "truth" here? You've denied any objective truth as correspondence, but now you say there is some sense of real truth, a "deeper notion of truth", but you haven't given any indication of what it is. Is it a subjective truth? If truth is simply "intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other", then the way I understand my relationship with you and the world is completely different from the way that you understand this relationship, and truth, it appears, would be completely subjective. Or do you propose some objectivity to these relations? In which case, I think we're back to what you denied above.
Kellyanne Conway denies Trump press secretary lied: 'He offered alternative facts'
It's the other way around. Every negation holds within it its own assertion. You have to know the truth to lie. You don't need to know how to lie to tell the truth. We often give unconscious signals to others about our mental state but it takes conscious effort to lie. Telling the truth (unconsciously) is prior to the act of deceiving.
Is your mind about the world? Is your visual experience of colors and shapes the world, or about the world? Are colors about wavelengths of light? The world only appears in such a way via a mind and language is like everything else in the world that we visually and audibly experience and learn to use via the mind.
It makes no sense to say that language is in the world but separate from the world. We learn and use language in the world and thinking of it as separate stems from the antiquated religious idea that humans and what they do are special or separate from nature.
What does it mean to be about something? Aboutness is a causal relationship. The crime scene is about the crime. Your current beliefs are about the way in which you were raised and your life experiences. So words are not the only thing that have an aboutness to them.
I think you're being too literal in your reading. They're just saying that the utterance "the cat is on the mat" is not the cat being on the mat. What is said is not what is being talked about.
Do you need words to tell the difference between an elephant and a giraffe? Or can you do that by just looking at them? Can you tell the difference between the letters A and B? If so, then how are you distinguishing them - visually, audibly, etc.?
What about similarities? Are there not things in the world that share characteristics and some share more than others? It is these similarities that we are pointing at with our use of words. When some things are similar to some things and different than other things then it seems like it would be useful to use a common symbol to communicate those similarities and differences. Nothing is identical, sure. There is a difference between this elephant and that one, but the similarities and differences are what we talk about and what similarity and difference we are focused on or communicating at any moment is dependent upon the goal. When talking about elephants, we aren't focusing on the differences between each organism with a trunk and big ears. We are talking about all organisms with a similar trunk and big ears.
Quoting Joshs
If boundaries are arbitrary then the boundary between fact and convention is arbitrary. The boundary between letters, words, and sentences on this screen are arbitrary.
Quoting Joshs
You're focusing too much on the boundaries as if they are more important than what is within those boundaries. Does the fact that the boundaries are blurry mean that everything else that isn't at the boundaries are arbitrary? There are many objects that fit neatly into the category, "star", while there are a few that lie on the boundary of that category because they share some visual characteristics with stars and also share some visual characteristics with planets. Not every object that we call, "star" lies on the boundary. When we talk about "stars" we are not talking about what is on the boundary, but what lies easily within it. The fact that similarities exist and that some objects share more similarities than differences with other objects is not something humans created. It is what allows us to categorize and use words as representations in the first place. If everything had an equal number of similarities and differences in relation to everything else then I could see language, and categories in general, being much less useful than they are now.
Quoting Joshs
There's a difference between making the stars and making the scribble that refers to stars as a means of communicating. Is a star a word or scribble or utterance, or is a star a thermonuclear globe of hydrogen and helium gas?
And neither is a table on the rug the cat being on the mat. Words are not cats. Cats are not dogs. Mats are not tables. Saying a cat is not a word is no different than saying a cat is not a mat. Words, mats, cats, tables and dogs all exist in the world and are distinguished visually and audibly. There is nothing special about words in this regard that would make one think that they are separate from the world.
And again, you're just being too literal in your reading. When others talk about a distinction between language and the world understand it as your oft-quoted distinction between a map and the territory.
As I pointed out before, the map is part of the territory, not separate. If the ones that are using the term, "separate" don't mean it literally, then they don't really mean that language is separate from the world, then what is it they do mean? Why use the term, "separate" if that isn't what they mean? Seems to me that there would be a different term that they could use - like what they actually do mean, if not separate.
Well, I have a map of the United States which is definitely not a part of the United States.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Exactly what I said before; the utterance "the cat is on the mat" is separate to the cat being on the mat.
I’m proposing an idea of truth as intersubjective , not simply subjective. Yes, each of us enters into relations of communication with others bringing with us our own personal perspective , but the ever evolving ‘intricate and intimate interconnections in the way we interact with the world and each other’ I described allows for a gradual convergence among personal perspectives , but not the complete disappearance of subjective perspective. Think of this subjectivity within intersubjectivity as variations on a common theme. They would be no basis for communication with anyone else if our inner perspectives were all at all times completely different from each other.
Intersubjectivity is different than objectivity. The former is a dynamic pattern of interconnective relationality that cannot be captured by a formula or rule capturing the whole. The latter looks for a rule, law , fixed description applying to some aspect of nature. Objectivity tries to ground fluid self-organization on some content external to it which is not fluid.
In this instance "not part" means not in the U.S. which is a spatial relationship and "seperate" in this sense is the literal sense. I already pointed out words are not special in this regard.
Quoting Michael
This doesn't address what I said. If you dont mean "separate" in the same way you mean "not part", then what do you mean? If you don't literally mean what you say, then what do you mean literally? The relationship between the scribbles and the cat and the mat is one of representation, not seperate. If you want to say that the scribbles are not the cat on the mat, that is trivial and useless to the conversation. Representation is what joins the scribbles and the cat and the mat, not separates them.
Philosophers create problems by misusing language.
Then your posts are objective because your posts are fixed descriptions about sone aspect of nature or reality, like the relations between writers, readers, words and what they represent.
:up: Well said!
We certainly and absolutely need to read more often such general comments about philosophy!
The above applies very also to the discussions carried out in this and other philosophical fora and communities.
Quoting Michael
Do you honestly think Kellyanne Conway is a postmodernist? What she said is what is called ‘spinning the truth’. Lies, half truths and manipulations are perennial elements of political discourse on both sides of the aisle. We do this to mislead the other side when we know they will not agree with our views or actions. I can assure you both Conway and Trump have very fixed core beliefs about the world very, very far removed from postmodernist thinking. But they’ll say whatever they need tot to fool you and keep you off the track. It may be better from their vantage if you buy into the idea that they are radical relativists, and you seem to be taking the bait.
Not when you're arguing against certain brands of anti-realism which deny the "trivial" distinction that realists take for granted.
Another variation on the ‘ postmodernists are self-refuting because they make truth claims against objective truth’ meme.
Here’s the difference between an objective truth claim and a postmodern assertion. The former invokes a picture of the way things are. This picture consists of a specific, arbitrary content. The postmodernist is not offering a picture containing an arbitrary content. They argue that we are constant moving from one picture, one value content to another. It is not the particular claims, schemes, worldviews , objective definitions that the postmodernist is interested in describing , but the movement. And saying that they are ‘describing’ something is not quite accurate, as if they stood outside of this flow. Rather, the postmodernist is enacting change and movement in talking about it. Their assertions are self-reflexive, already caught up in and changed by the flow.
If there is anything a priori in what the postmodern is offering ( other than transformative movement
itself) it is that this flow can be faster or slower. We can become relatively stuck within a theoretical value system , and this is associated with alienation. fragmentation and unintelligibility. Or we can find ourselves in the midst of more fluid transformation in which new options and directions can become available to us. A postmodern philosopher is more of a salesman than a theoretician. They’re not presenting a contentful doctrine they are inviting us to enter into accelerated movement and see if we like it.
I really wonder and cannot believe how could such a trivial and without real value or use --for me, of course-- question, the answer to which is more than obvious,, could arise such a huge interest and create such a huge discussion!
I know of course that threads use to deviate a lot from the subject of the topic and that a lot of "personal" discussions are going on, and that kind of things, but ... Really, this topic?
All you doing is stating the obvious that a negation is also an assertion; nothing to do with the point re dialectics that every idea contains (the seeds of) its own negation.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You are thinking too literally. Of course language use occurs within the world; but language allows for a conceptual separation between the world and ideas about the world. All we are doing here is exploring different possible ways of thinking about things.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, aboutness is a logical relation of reference. Attempting to parse everything in terms of causation just doesn't work. That path leads to scientism, to the idea that we are nothing but chemical robots. It's an impoverished, pointless and indeed self-refuting, view of life, and especially of human life.
Quoting Joshs
Rather, I had in mind Frankfurt' analysis of bullshit. My point, which seems to need reiterating, is that they might dismiss truth in much the way you do, and hence your view is useless here; and regardless, drinking bleach will not cure COVID. That's all.
For the rest of your post, there's little there with which I would disagree. And little that addresses the topic. Your comment is a bit of lost diatribe.
:wink:
And this is the most recent of dozens of such threads.
Habit? My posts here are in the main written while drinking my morning coffee.
This looks more like justification than truth, to me, demonstrating that my perspective is compatible with yours. How does truth enter this picture?
It seems to me that even an anti realist can't deny the distinction between a visual of a cat and a visual of scribbles.
Objectivity is not limited to static pictures. You can describe an event objectively as well. Objectivity is simply a description of how things are and is independent of other people's agreement or disagreement with you. Are you not telling us how things are for everyone even if we don't agree with you?
Subjectivity is a category error where you confuse some aspect of the world with some aspect of yourself.
If truths were subjective then what reason would you have to share your subjective knowledge with someone else? After all we would subjectivity interpret your scribbles on the screen so there is no true or false way of reading the scribbles. No one can ever be wrong if truths are subjective, which is one reason some people find solace in believing in subjective truths - so they can avoid the stress of being wrong.
I think most of it hasn't been to discuss whether or not an external material world exists, but what everyone means by, "external", "material" and "world". Threads like this tend to go on forever because we are all talking past each other and misusing terms. Some are artfully (not literally) using terms in playing word games and don't seem to have the intention of saying much of anything useful.
Very good point and nicely put. :up:
(You are maybe the only one who has thought about that. Well, maybe the poster too. :smile:)
I appreciate that there are differing definitions of objectivity. My notion of objectivity, consistent with writers like Putnam, is not just the way things are independent of social consensus. It must assume intrinsic properties, substance , attributes associated with an object.To be an intrinsic property, it need not be permanent but only measurable, which means it must endure as self-identical for some period of time. Of course , properties of natural objects tend to be relational ( mass, spatial dimensions , energy, etc). Here we can say that the properties of objects are intrinsic to the system of relations producing them, which are therefore objective.
But if we were to say that the nature of objects is not only relative to human subjects before whom they appear, or relative to systems of relations with other objects, but that neither these objects nor their systems of relations have any intrinsic properties or attributes that can be measured, then these objects are no longer ‘objective’. They are events that only appear once as what they are and then change into new objects which only appear once ( and an object is itself only an instantaneous differential change). As Putnam says , “the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between "intrinsic" properties of things and "relational" properties of things makes no sense.”
Objectivity then becomes a human conceptual process attributing intrinsic self-identical properties to events that never reproduce any aspect of what they are identically from one moment to the next. It is we who create the abstractions of intrinsically and reparable self-identity that we then attribute to an ‘objective’ world.
Natural events are changes in relations of change. When we interact with the empirical world in order to represent it , we are further changing this web of changes. As I said, even if we could
talk about what something ‘is’ in itself , independent of our interaction with it, we still cannot locate any object , process, system of relations in the world that simply ‘is’ what it is as a repeatable set of intrinsic properties, attributes, laws.
Quoting Harry Hindu
As with objectivity , there are differing ways of understanding subjectivity. You seem to be thinking of it in the traditional sense of a kind of object , an inner substance with its own intrinsic properties partially insulated from the objective world. This inner substance is divided from , and places itself opposite objects of an outer world, It can represent this ‘objective’ world accurately or falsely, rationally or irrationally , subjectively or objectively.
My understanding of subjectivity comes from phenomenology, which dispense with this divide between inner and outer, subject and object. Subjectivity for them is not processes inside the head, locked away from
the world. Subjectivity is the zero point of an interactive process in which who and what I am , what I think and how I perceive the world, is remade every moment in some small fashion in the act of perception. Body, mind and environment make up one inseparable unity of continual reciprocal interchange and feedback. As subjectivity , I am this interactive environmental
system. To separate off an inner subject from its environment misses the point. There really is no such thing as a subject in this sense.
You say no one can ever be wrong if truths are subjective, but if subjectivity is a system of interactions between miind, body and world , it is a also a normative system. Think of an organism that is embedded within an environmental niche. The organism’s own behavior produces that niche by having certain aims and goals that define. what matters to it. The niche for an ant is irrelevant to that of a jaybird. Within the niche that an organism produces with its behavior, there are eight and wrong ways of functioning. There must be a continual effort at adjusting and adapting between organism
and niche for it to continue to survive, that is , to maintain it’s way of functioning.
The human cultural world is differentiated into many niches and subniches. Your subjective functioning and my subjective functioning represent interacting and overlapping subniches within larger cultural niches. So the way you interpret meaning will not duplicate
mine but they can and usually do interact closely enough for us to be able to form agreements and mutual
understandings. Science represent a widely shared niche within which we can come to agreement on practices of behavior. The essence of truth is in the relative stability and pragmatic usefulness of agreed upon conventions of practice , rather than in conformity of our representations with ‘intrinsic’ objective features of a world. Put differently, we cannot say that truth is conformity with intrinsic feature of an objective world when that world only exists for us as a niche that is co-defined by our own normatively organized interactions with it. The niche , like truth , is neither objective nor subjective in the traditional sense, but a dynamic interaction between the two poles.
I've often used a passage from Bryan Magee's book on Schopenhauer to argue this very point, based on Kant's claim 'if I were to take away the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world would have to disappear.' That leads to the interminable wrangle about trees in forests, railway cars with no wheels, and so on - the apparently preposterous idea that should I stop observing something, that it vanishes or ceases to exist.
After many debates about it, I express it like this: that the word 'exist' or anything that we designated as 'an existing thing' carries a concealed premise. The mind - not your or my mind in particular, but the mind - provides the setting, the stage, the point-of-view, within which anything we designate as 'existing' is meaningful. The sense in which anything exists 'outside' or 'apart from' that is a meaningless question.
It doesn't literally mean that nothing exists outside of the mind, but that the manner or sense in which it exists is unintelligible as a matter of definition. It's easy to imagine a world without any observer. But there's still a point of view implicit in that image, because it is ordered. There's an image of the planets, stars, the earth, sun, and so on. It might be a scientifically-precise image, informed by recent cosmology. But if you completely remove any point of view or perspective then there can be no image at all, nor any discrete objects or relationships - or even space and time, which depend on a sense of scale in order to be meaningful. All discussion of any subject - what happened just now, or at the beginning of the cosmos - is set against that implicit understanding, which is (as you say) the ineliminable 'subjective pole' of existence. The mistake of naturalism (articulated in Husserl's criticism) is to forget that (and isn't this the 'forgetfulness of being', of later phenomenology?)
Quoting Joshs
:up: I agree, but it's worth noting that in Greek philosophy, it was still held that true knowledge - knowledge of what truly is - is the ultimate end. In Buddhist philosophy it is the quality of sagacity (possessed by the Buddha) of yath?bh?ta?, 'seeing it like it is', or of vidya 'true knowledge', or in Latin 'veritas' - there are various terms in different traditions. But that is not something contemplated by modern philosophy on the whole, due to the fragmentation of the various fields of knowledge.
Incidentally you may be interested in this article about the convergenges between Buddhism and phenomenology.
Let's imagine for some time that there is a world with observers in it. That world is made up of a ridiculously high amount of extremely small particles. The observers of that world themselves are composed of a bunch of extremely small particles, and when taken as a whole, one observer is far larger than the smallest possible particle. Yet, the observers perceive this external world as made up of a bunch of objects, all approximately their scale, with some being larger than them, but not too large, and some being smaller than them, but not too small.
Their perception of their world then is quite different from the reality of it being a bunch of small particles. But strangely enough, even with this very inaccurate perception, they still manage to predict the behavior of the world around them with extreme precision. Are they aware of their world, despite it not being like their perception at all, or are they unaware of it ?
It seems that the argument you are presenting comes back quite often to the notion of a sensation resembling something. What does it mean exactly to say that a sensation resembles another ?
Quoting Bartricks
(Don't take this part as a serious objection, just consider it like a fun philosophical and maybe intellectual exercise, or else it will just complicate the whole issue even more by bringing in another issue):
Unless you're a Platonist. A Platonic response to this would be that the Form of sensation exists independently of sensations and their sensors and is a sensation by itself. Therefore, there is at least one sensation (the Form of sensation) that exists independently of a sensor. Unless you're one of those Platonists that think that the Forms are just ideas in the mind of God. But then again, Platonism is also idealism.
Or perhaps a better example might be a pilot. Pilots do not have to look out the window to fly the plane and navigate the landscape, as they have enough information from their instruments. But when the pilot is looking at the instruments they are not perceiving the landscape (unlike when they look through the window at it).
There is clearly a difference then between acquiring one's awareness via means that in no way resemble what one is becoming aware of and via means that do. And it is in the latter case that we can be said to be 'perceiving'. Or at least, that a necessary condition for perception has been met (resemblance isn't sufficient).
That's all Berkeley needs, for he is concluding that the world we perceive is made of sensations. There are, however, other features of reality that we do not perceive but are nevertheless aware of, such as minds.
Re Platonism. I am not sure what to say about that. I suppose that a version of Platonism according to which the Forms are archetypes in the mind of God is entirely compatible with Berkeley's view.
Insofar as I understand Plato, the realm of the Forms does not resemble the sensible world. Rather, the sensible world 'reminds' us of the Forms. That's a different relation entirely.
So, if we are talking about what it takes for our sensations to be perceptions of a world, then there needs to be a world that resembles those sensations in order for them to constitute perceptual awareness of it. And that world would have itself to be made of sensations.
But perhaps understanding the world requires possession of a fund of concepts acquired from elsewhere. I think that's compatible with Berkeley's view.
You can't model a figment of your imagination because there's no hidden states to infer the cause of. With your own (untrammelled) imagination there's only known states, the entire processes is within your Markov Blanket. To have a modelling process we need a hidden state, some element outside of our Markov Blanket to infer the cause of. The process of modelling entails a Markov Blanket which entails an internal/external divide in model network nodes.
This itself doesn't then entail an external material world, it only need be data-external to the modelling network, it needn't be physically external to that which houses the modelling network. That some things are indeed physically external is part of the model of the causes of our sensations of those things. The best explanation for the consistency of my expectations and your expectations about the cup is that there's an external cup. Such consistency is not present in Unicorns so a better explanation for my internal (but seemingly data-external) image of a Unicorn is that there's no such external object, but there is a shared cultural artefact from which the data originates (via spoken descriptions, paintings etc).
Quoting Janus
Yes, we seem to be on the same page. What I'm arguing (just to, hopefully, clarify further) is that we cannot 'see' the model if the process of seeing involves making a model (but is not exhausted by making a model). It's like saying we digest chyme. We don't We digest food. Making chyme is part of the process of digestion, but it is not that which we digest. Making a model of the external world is part of the process of perception, it is not that which we perceive.
If one wants to argue (as some do) that there's no external world, then one would have to take issue with the meta-model (the Bayesian policy) that the causes of our sensations originate from an external world at all. Accepting that policy, however, 'seeing' is the process of inferring the external-world causes of the retinal sensations - ie the cup.
(Also in answer to @Joshs and @Wayfarer).The point about indirect realism (a point which seems to keep getting lost), is not to question this meta-policy (the assumption of an external world source of sensory stimuli), but to accept the influence of the stages in the process of perceiving these external world causes. The direct realist would have it that the process involves the data from the external-world cup entering our dat-processing system and our responding to it accordingly. Errors are non-systemic. The indirect realist holds that (among other components) there are two (or three) important steps in the process which have a material effect on how we can talk about the reality they model...
1) a Bayesian predictive modelling stage where the cause is inferred based on prior expectations (and, importantly) data is filtered according to those prior expectation as means of noise-reduction)
2) an active interaction with the inferred source of the data aimed at either gathering salient information to confirm/disconfirm the current hypothesis or at changing the external sources to better match the current hypothesis. (as @Joshs is wont to point out, this is a collaborative interaction, not a one way process). @Banno's 'Direction of fit' goes here.
3) a social activity aimed at ensuring your model of the external world is similar enough to my model of the external that your response to it is going to be more predictable for me (ie I reduce my surprise at your responses by unifying our models)
It seems as if I'm permanently caught between those ultra-realists who dispute the significance of (1) and those idealists who (off the back of my trying to defend (1)) think I'm opposed to the significance of (2) and (3). All three are part of the process of perception. The object of perception is the external world hidden state, the process involves sufficient interactive, predictive, and social stages to accommodate the various features of perception that idealists like to point out as evidence against realism.
Are you familiar with quantum bayesianism?
It aligns near enough to all practical purposes, but they're still subjective, to some degree.
1. Identity of Indiscernibles
Law of equivalence
2. Equivalence of indiscernibles
It's obvious that the OP's question can't be answered either way (mind-created "external" worlds & true external worlds are indiscernible). However, they ain't identical! How do we tell the difference between A and B when there is no difference between the two, knowing full well that A [math]\neq[/math] B. Capgras delusion and related illnesses might provide vital clues, I dunno.
[math]\frac{1}{2} = \frac{1}{2}[/math] but [math]\frac{1}{2}[/math] [math]\equiv[/math] [math]\frac{33}{66}[/math].
Paradox!? Contradiction?!
Only very recently exposed to it. A colleague of mine knows I follow the work of Karl Friston and he forwarded me this preprint
https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.15242
It sounds like a really interesting approach, but my knowledge of Physics is too poor to judge how well it stacks up against the evidence from that quarter.
Quoting Isaac
It's not so much that there's no external world, but that the perception of what is external is itself a neural activity. That book I keep mentioning, Mind and the Natural Order, shows how we see everything in terms of a neurally-generated matrix of gestalts - meaningful wholes.
I don't know if 'idealism' is the right term for it. It might be closer to 'critical realism' because it doesn't question the existence of an external world, but says that how it occurs or appears to us, is a product of the brain - so in that sense internal to thought.
//ps// no, it's not 'critical realism'. My view is close to idealism but I don't understand that to mean that objects don't exist, but that they are lacking inherent or intrinsic reality.//
I don't think that follows at all. Electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of ~650nm consistently triggers the experience of the colour red. The experience is nothing like the cause and it would be wrong to say that electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of ~650nm is "an external red".
I don't see why the same principle doesn't apply to the experience of a cup and whatever causes the experience. I would say that our current understanding of physics, e.g. the Standard Model, would show that it is a mistake to reduce the objects of perception to the external world causes of experience.
The external world is just a mess of wave-particles. The macroscopic world is a product of consciousness. It's naive to then project this macroscopic world onto the external world.
Things are not so simple. We see the object as red, we do not see the radiation as red. The object interacts with radiation which is everywhere around it, and emits 650nm, and this allows us to see it as red. I believe this is important to acknowledge, it is not really the radiation which triggers the experience, just like it is not the hammer which drives the nail. The radiation is a medium, and whatever it is, which is going on within the object, that is what is seen, just like the hammer is a medium, and the person swinging it is actually driving the nail.
Stand near a warm stove for example, and feel the radiant heat. What you are feeling, is the stove directly interacting with your body, despite the fact that this interaction is modeled by science as occurring through the means of some mysterious substance called "radiation". The problem is that we model the two distinct objects as distant from each other, separated by "space", and it is very counter-intuitive to think that these two objects could be directly interacting with each other, because there appears to be "space" between them. But in reality, we know that objects which appear to be separated by "space" actually do interact with each other directly, through gravity.
So the objects actually overlap each other, in space, and occupy the very same space as each other. Therefore we ought to recognize that this whole way of modeling objects as separated from each other by "space", and assuming a mysterious medium between them, "radiation", and saying that the radiation is what we sense, rather than sensing the object itself, directly, is fundamentally faulty.
And that's precisely why it is wrong to reduce the object of perception to the external world causes of the experience.
In terms of the external world there is just a bunch of photons and electrons and quarks and so on which interact in a variety of ways, and when electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 650nm interacts with certain other particles it elicits the experience of seeing a red cup.
The red cup isn't any of that external world stuff. We might naively project the red cup we see onto the external world but that's a mistake.
OK. I'm still unclear on what you mean by 'inherent or intrinsic reality'. Can you give an example of something which isn't inherently/intrinsically real and say what features deny it that status?
I asked thst way round because I'm already aware of things you think are inherently/intrinsically real (numbers, lass of logic) but I still can't see from those examples alone where you're drawing the line between real and not-real.
How so? Our current understanding of physics doesn't seem to be incompatible with the notion that some particular collection of those wave-particles are arranged in a stable, mind-independant manner to which we can apply the label 'red cup'.
You seem to be thinking that the fact that they could also be interpreted as some other arrangement means the arrangement we've chosen isn't real (in a mind-independant manner), but I don't see how that follows.
If I choose to see the duck-rabbit as a duck, the possibility of seeing it as a rabbit doesn't render the 'duck' arrangement of pixels unreal. The pixels are genuinely still arranged in the shape of a duck. They're just also arranged in the shape of a rabbit.
I think that it would be like saying that there's a person on the TV, when really it's just a bunch of pixels on the screen being lit up a certain way. It might be a useful fiction to talk that way, but in terms of the underlying (meta-)physics it would be wrong.
Well no, because 'a person' is a label we have for an object which has properties like being made of cells, being autonomous etc. Properties which the pixels on the screen clearly lack.
This is not true of the wave particle arrangement which is our 'red cup'. Those wave particles have exactly the properties we expect of red cups. They reflect the right wavelengths, they hold liquids (other wave particles we call 'liquids'). There's no made up properties.
Wave-particles holding wave-particles? That's a category error and is the exact kind of naive projection that I mentioned earlier.
The external world is just a mass of wave-particles all interacting with each other. This then causes us to see a red cup filled with water.