Do we know that anything exists unperceived?
Do we know that anything exists when unperceived?
I believe that there are items which exist when neither I nor anyone else is perceiving them. Examples of such items are pieces of paper, seas, mountains and apartment blocks. I believe it, but how could I possibly know it?
To answer this question, we need to be more precise about what is meant by 'know'. I find it helpful to distinguish two senses of 'know'. In one very strong sense, I could only 'know' that P only if I could prove that P to anyone who might doubt it, using premises which any reasonable person would accept. This is the sense of 'know' which goes with the Regress Problem that began with the ancient sceptics. In another sense, I 'know' that P only if there is some reliable method by which I could establish that P. Note that reliability is a de facto concept. A method can be reliable even if I have no way of proving that it is reliable to anyone who doubts it, and even if I couldn't prove it to even a single person. For a method to be reliable is merely for it to be a method which, when used in the right circumstances and in the right way, produces beliefs which are true more often than not. Thus, in this sense, a tarot card readings that give insight into the after life might be reliable even if there is no way to prove that they are. The sense of 'knowledge' is hence considerably weaker than the first sense.
I shall use 'knows' in the second sense, since there is already a thread about the first issue. When I ask how I could possibly know that anything exists unperceived, I mean to ask how I could reliably establish it. Is there any method available to me which is such that it is a reliable means of determining that something exists unperceived? The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I really couldn't know it. Yet, I still hope that I can.
Context: Some time ago I made a thread in which I distinguished a number of forms of scepticism. I asked others whether they could think of any others. I eventually got into a discussion about whether anything exists unperceived with a few others. The discussion was accidentally lead into confusion by me. I failed to distinguish carefully enough between the two senses of 'knows' above. I began insisting that I cannot know, in the weak sense, but when my position was criticized I conveniently shifted to the strong sense. This made my position look stronger, but it was clearly a case of equivocation, and I didn't even realize it.
Best,
PA
I believe that there are items which exist when neither I nor anyone else is perceiving them. Examples of such items are pieces of paper, seas, mountains and apartment blocks. I believe it, but how could I possibly know it?
To answer this question, we need to be more precise about what is meant by 'know'. I find it helpful to distinguish two senses of 'know'. In one very strong sense, I could only 'know' that P only if I could prove that P to anyone who might doubt it, using premises which any reasonable person would accept. This is the sense of 'know' which goes with the Regress Problem that began with the ancient sceptics. In another sense, I 'know' that P only if there is some reliable method by which I could establish that P. Note that reliability is a de facto concept. A method can be reliable even if I have no way of proving that it is reliable to anyone who doubts it, and even if I couldn't prove it to even a single person. For a method to be reliable is merely for it to be a method which, when used in the right circumstances and in the right way, produces beliefs which are true more often than not. Thus, in this sense, a tarot card readings that give insight into the after life might be reliable even if there is no way to prove that they are. The sense of 'knowledge' is hence considerably weaker than the first sense.
I shall use 'knows' in the second sense, since there is already a thread about the first issue. When I ask how I could possibly know that anything exists unperceived, I mean to ask how I could reliably establish it. Is there any method available to me which is such that it is a reliable means of determining that something exists unperceived? The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I really couldn't know it. Yet, I still hope that I can.
Context: Some time ago I made a thread in which I distinguished a number of forms of scepticism. I asked others whether they could think of any others. I eventually got into a discussion about whether anything exists unperceived with a few others. The discussion was accidentally lead into confusion by me. I failed to distinguish carefully enough between the two senses of 'knows' above. I began insisting that I cannot know, in the weak sense, but when my position was criticized I conveniently shifted to the strong sense. This made my position look stronger, but it was clearly a case of equivocation, and I didn't even realize it.
Best,
PA
Comments (198)
If you want to talk hypotheticals, we could know that there's an invisible something in the room if we bounce a ball off it.
Does knowledge require certainty or just (strong) justification? If the former then you might not be able to know. If the latter then that depends on what counts as (strong) justification. Perhaps the fact that things tend to be found where they're left is evidence that you will find it if you look there again, and perhaps it's more reasonable to believe that if things are found where they're left then they were there all along than to believe that they "pop" into and out of existence when you look.
So? Lacking a reason to think that Not-P is not a reliable means of establishing that P. It isn't a reliable method of establishing anything.
Quoting Michael
I explained what I meant by 'knowledge' in the OP.I don't mean to require certainty or justification. I only require that, whatever the method is that we use to determine whether or not things exist unperceived, the method be reliable.
Quoting Michael
Why is it more reasonable to believe that things exist unperceived than that they pop into existence? What is better about the former belief?
Best,
PA
I didn't say it is. I said if it is. I don't know how one would go about showing that one is more reasonable than the other. Perhaps parsimony?
A related question, though, would be would it matter? Or is it just a matter of intellectual interest?
The issue here is the word "exist".
Is there something out there in the fabric of the universe? Probably yes.
But what is it until Mind perceives it? That is the question.
It is like sound waves that are simply waves until the Mind hears it.
From your OP I assumed you accepted that objects that we perceive exist. If that is the case, to give any reason to believe they do not exist when unperceived, don't you need to establish some causal relation between perception on one hand, and existence (or at least persistence) on the other? Otherwise it just looks like an arbitrary speculation.
Maybe. But there is more than one type of parsimony, and it isn't clear that the view that some things exist when unperceived is more parsimonious in every sense than the view that things disappear when we aren't looking.
Its even less clear that a more parsimonious explanation is more likely to be true than a complex one. Although, I'd certainly take a great interest in any detailed statement of this argument from parsimony.
Quoting Michael
Well it matters to me since it is something that I believe, and I don't want to believe anything that I have no reliable means of determining. Ultimately, what matters and what doesn't depends on what we care to discuss.
Quoting Rich
Is there anything at all when the mind isn't perceiving? That is the question I am asking. If your answer is 'probably yes', why do you say that?
Quoting MindForged
But I never attempted to prove that things don't exist unperceived, so I don't need to establish any causal relation between perception and existence. I asked whether there is any way that I can know that things do exist when unperceived. I haven't speculated at all. Simply raised a question.
Best,
PA
Two reasons:
During one's life, one is always perceiving new things as one develops skills in perception.
Other life forms are reacting to things we do not perceive.
Well I can raise a question about any old thing I want. Perhaps mathematical truths are only true when a conscious being considers their truth value. But as with your "simple question", unless there is a reason to motivate considering the question as being true or at least plausible, it seems like idle speculation. And that you seem to accept that objects exist when perceive would entail some kind of relationship between existence and perception if we wish to raise a question about if they exist unperceived.
This is compatible with everything ceasing to exist when no one is perceiving it, so how does this support the view that things exist unperceived?
Quoting Rich
How can this be known? How do you know that there are other life forms when you are not perceiving them?
Quoting MindForged
The first thing to note is that questions aren't true or false, plausible or implausible. Only propositions are, as I've always understood the words 'true' and 'plausible'. Second, the question I raise is hardly ridiculous. Is there any reliable way to tell that things exist when unperceived? If there isn't, then the belief that things exist unperceived is sheer guess work. The question itself isn't the idle speculation. Rather, a failure to answer the question shows that the belief in unperceived existence is idle speculation.
Lastly, yes, I agree that some objects exist when perceived. Hold up a piece of paper in front of your face. There is something that exists at the moment when you are perceiving it. But that doesn't settle the question of whether it exists unperceived.
Quoting Daniel
Agreed.
Quoting Daniel
Consider the paper case again. I hold a piece of paper in front of my face. At this moment, as I am perceiving it, it exists. Now suppose that I put the paper in a drawer and leave the room. Does the paper exist now? Why couldn't the paper cease to exist the very moment that I close the drawer and can no longer see it? You say that this would cause a change in me and what I am currently perceiving. Why would it? When I close the drawer I go into another room and am now looking at a bed. Why would things be any different if the paper ceased to exist when I stopped looking than if it continued to exist in the drawer. It seems that regardless of whether the paper exists or not, I will be perceiving a bed.
Best,
PA
You're being too pedantic. Obviously questions aren't truth-apt, I was referring to the proposition to which your question was about: Objects either existing when unperceived or failing to exist when unperceived.
It isn't guesswork. I'll repeat: Do you think objects exist when perceived? Your next bit indicates you do so I'll continue after quoting it, because I may not have been clear what I've been driving at:
Ok, so you agree objects exist when perceived and your question is if they exist unperceived. The only way this question can be interesting beyond idle speculation is if there is a relation between "perceiving a thing" and "that thing exists". Now why is this the case? Well, if you agree it exists when perceived, we have justification for believing the thing exists. After all, as you said, we perceived the thing in question. If I then ask "But does it exist when I'm not perceiving it?", I have to be making the following assumption:
"There is a relationship (causal presumably) between perception and existence. Perception brings a thing into existence."
Because otherwise what is the connection between not being perceived and not existing? No one says "Oh you weren't considering that maths problem so the conclusion of the problem doesn't exist", because that seems like a non sequitur. What do those 2 things have to do with each other. To just state it plainly: Why should I think objects don't exist when not perceived given that I accept they exist when I do perceive them? Perceiving them gives evidence that the objects at least existed at that time. But does it therefore mean that not perceiving them lends justification to the idea that they don't exist otherwise?
If you say that we need a reason to think they continue to exist, I don't know how we require further justification than that they did exist when we perceived them unless you think perception brings objects into being. Maybe I'm missing something, because this seems like pure speculation.
Quoting MindForged
Yes it does.
Quoting MindForged
No it doesn't, and I would never make this inference. That is, the fact that an object, O, exists when perceived by me does not entail that O does not exist when unperceived. The former does not even make it likely that O does not exist when unperceived. So, I am not assuming that 'perception brings a thing into existence'. I am not assuming the opposite either.
But even given this, there is still a further question about whether O exists unperceived or not. Either it does or it doesn't, and the fact that it exists when perceived doesn't entail that it also exists unperceived. It might be, for all we have said so far, that O exists when I perceive it but the moment I stop perceiving it, it ceases to exist. I am not assuming that this is true, and so I am not 'idly speculating'. What I am saying is that this has not been ruled out by anything we have said so far. You have not suggested any reliable method by which we could determine whether something exists when unperceived. You have suggested that some things exist while they are being perceived, and I have agreed with you on that. You then seem to think that somehow it just follows that they exist when unperceived as well. It does not follow, unless there is some reliable way to establish that these things don't just disappear from the world when unperceived.
Is it 'idle speculation' to insist that we reliably establish the things that we believe? As opposed to simply accepting things with no basis. If so, then I suppose I am an idle speculator.
Best,
PA
You'd have to be assuming that because otherwise there's no reason to suggest they do not exist when not perceived. If we know an object, O, exists when perceived, we know it at least existed. If you question its persistence sans-perception, the only way that can be the case is if perception causes existence. I don't see how you're not assuming that; it's the only possible way for the contrary to be true (unless things just happen randomly, I suppose).
My point is as follows. Take the following statements:
1) X is perceived, so X exists
2) X is no longer perceived
3) X either continues to exist or it fails to continue existing
If perceiving it is grounds for saying it exists, good. Why should one question if it exists otherwise? Even if you're just asking a question, it doesn't matter. Questions can import false assumptions as much as a direct statement can. In this case, why should the notion that it stops existing when unperceived be taken seriously? After all, if perception does not cause existence, and we know the thing exists because we perceived it, there seems to be no grounds from which to raise the idea that the object stops existing when unperceived. We justified believing "O" exists by our perception, we didn't justify the notion that "O" exists only when we perceived it.
I just mean to say, it doesn't see m like we require a reason to answer "they exist independent of perception" unless we are already assuming that perception plays a role in an object existing or persisting in its existence. And many many people would likely dispute that notion (for many objects, anyway).
Quoting MindForged
If 'assuming' means, 'assuming that it is true', then I am not doing that. We know that O exists at the moment, M1, when we are perceiving it because we are perceiving it at M1. But what about a moment, M2, when it is not perceived? Does O exist then? Here is a hypothesis which is completely compatible with what I perceive at M1:
(H) O does not exist at M2.
Nothing about what I perceive at M1 entails that H is false. You insist that I must be assuming that something is true. You say:
Quoting MindForged
I am not assuming that perception causes existence. For all I have said, it might be that when I perceive O, God instantly causes O to exist and when I look away, God destroys O. I am not saying this is true. I am saying it is compatible with everything that I perceive when I perceive O. It might also be that when I perceive O, some how this act of perceiving causes O to exist. I am not saying this is true. I am saying it is compatible with everything that I perceive when I perceive O.
Quoting MindForged
This isn't accurate. By perception, you can establish that O exists at the time at which you are perceiving it. You cannot establish merely by perceiving O at moment M1 that O exists at M2 when you aren't perceiving it. That O exists at M2 when you aren't looking just isn't part of what you can see at M1.
Quoting MindForged
What about the hypothesis that God causes O to exist and when I look away, God destroys O? What about the hypothesis that it is a law of nature that whenever we look in a certain place, O is created, and whenever we look away, O is destroyed? I am not assuming that either of these are true. I am saying that they are compatible with everything you perceive when you perceive O, and you have given no account as to how they can be reliably rejected.
Best,
PA
Here's a passage in Magee's book on Schopenhauer which discusses this point:
Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
Because it's there when you reenter the room and open the desk. If you doubt that, you can set a camera to record a video or snapshots of the paper while you're away. And from there, any scientific experiment for determining the existence of the paper in your absence would show it was still there.
You could set up some indirect domino rube goldberg scenario to trigger a bunch of events if the paper is still there after you've left the room. Which ties into what holds the world you perceive together when you're not perceiving it. If you look up at the sky, is the ground still holding you up? Does your heart still pump blood while you're not aware of it beating? Does the back of your head exist when nobody's looking at it?
How far do you want to take the skepticism? Because it can go all the way to the current perception for me right now, and leave everything else as unknowable.
When you suppose that the paper stops existing when not being perceived, do you mean that the atoms that form the paper disperse so that they are not shaped in the form of paper anymore or do you mean that the atoms stop being atoms and do not exist anymore?
I am assuming that when you say that something stops existing you mean that the atoms that form that something stop existing, they are no more. When you say that someone in India dies, its atoms do not stop existing, they just assume another organization. However, if they stoped existing, everything would necessarily change since you are literally taking something out of existence.
Now, if you mean that the atoms that form something change their organization in space when you are not looking at such something, an action should be causing such change, and such action should be absent when you look at such something again, or the other way around. If this is the case, what do you think is causing such change?. Also, I believe this action should be an action that acts only on that which you do not see but does not act on that which you do see, or the other way around. Therefore, if you were the paper, such action should be acting on what is now your body (from the point of view of the paper) when you are not perceving the paper and should stop acting on your body when you hold the paper. So what I am trying to say is that: if the paper dissapears when you are not perceiving it you should also dissapear relative to the paper, dont you think? However, your shape remains constant.
Now, if you mean that something literally stops existing just because we are not looking at it, I do not believe, and I gave you the reason why this is hardly probable.
With some science and Heidegger thrown in. A big part of the perceived world is the interdependence of all the things we perceive. For example, how is it that I stay warm on a sunny day while I'm not aware of the sun? If the sun's not there because it's not being perceived, then what keeps me warm?
Is it coherent to say that you can have a perception of small part of the world without the rest of it existing to support it, including the body that's doing the perceiving?
Can I have a visual perception while my eyes don't exist (because nobody's perceiving them)? I don't actually see my eyes when I'm looking, unless there's a reflecting surface.
Let's say that when nobody is observing the rest of the universe, all that matter is destroyed. So you get in a car while nobody is doing astronomy, and the driver steps on the brakes. What happens? Do you feel the rest of the universe opposing your change in motion, or just the Earth and Sun and maybe Venus if it's up?
Here's another related way to go about this. Has anyone died from something unperceived? Yes, quite often. One example would be going on a hike and being killed by a falling rock. The hiker may not have seen or heard the rock.
Another would be dying from some disease, particularly in the past or places without access to medical equipment. You get sick and die from something nobody perceives. How does that work if the microbes, cancer, etc. doesn't exist?
What does it even mean to get sick if the cells in your body don't exist? If the organs aren't there, because nobody perceives them? Are you just a shell secreting mucus and blood?
Do you poop with no intestines? Did that food disappear without being digested? Will you really starve if you don't see food ever again? Why would that be?
No. It is there (possibly) only hasn't been conceived by the mind. If course, new stuff is being created all the time.
Quoting PossibleAaran
By observing their actions such as dogs reacting to higher frequency whistles or homing pigeons.
Russell reports that G E Moore once mused 'do the train wheels cease to exist when everyone is inside the train?' And that is exactly the way you're seeing the question.
I think the issue is (and we've been talking about this same question for years now) is this: that you're taking a scientific view of a philosophical question. The scientific naturalist will assume that the world 'exists anyway' - that is precisely what natural philosophy does, it 'assumes nature'. It has stepped away from a metaphysical analysis of the nature of knowledge and experience, and wants to understand (and more importantly measure) the objects of experience and how they are related.
But the whole question of 'hey wait a minute, how do I know what I think I know?' is not actually the kind of question that the natural scientist asks. But because nowadays because of the influence of science on culture, we're immersed in that naturalistic view, so we misunderstand what kind of question we're actually discussing.
Those who are really able to 'deconstruct' or question the nature of experience in such a way have been in some sense 'through the looking glass' (speaking of which, I really think Lewis Carroll was wise to all this.) But for those who haven't been 'through the looking glass', the question can only be dealt with from the perspective of scientific realism. I don't really know what to do to break out of this particular impasse, but strongly suspect it is not something which is amenable to a solution by Forum conversations. :)
You probably won't know, because of the crudity of human sensory organs, but in theory you could, in the same way as we know about a black hole: by its interaction with other things. A paper sheet in another room interacts with the desk drawer containing it, which interacts with the desk, which interacts with the floor and air, which interact with the walls of the closed room, which interact with the air outside the room, which interacts with you,
There would be tiny differences in the patterns of air movement around you if that piece of paper were not in that closed desk in the closed room. Your naked senses may not be enough to measure that but, at least in theory, if you had sensitive enough measuring equipment, you could detect the difference.
This is writ large in Wayfarer's / Russell's / GE Moore's example here (). If the train wheels ceased to exist once nobody was looking at them, the passengers would hear and feel an almighty jolt as the carriages they were in suddenly dropped onto their axles.
This response may not work for astronomical objects outside the observable universe, because of the expansion of the universe. But that's a somewhat different discussion.
I'm asking whether it's coherent to think that only the thing I'm experiencing right now exists given how that thing or part of the world is interdependent with the world in all sorts of ways. This also applies to me. I see, but what about the eyes I see with which I'm not perceiving?
You don't even need to bring science in to the equation. You can just note the interdependence of everything in the world from a phenomenal point of view.
But you’re still speaking from a realist perspective - whether scientific or not.
The whole point of so-called ‘idealist’ arguments is to turn the attention back on the very act by which we know, see, and perceive. From a realist perspective, what happens when we see the proverbial tree or chair or whatever object? You know the story - light is detected by the retina, the brain synthesises that information then interprets it, names it, and so on - ‘it’s a chair’.
The idealist will ask, well what is ‘the object’ apart from that interpretive act? How do you get ‘outside’ the sensory and intellectual system to see what the object ‘really is’? Because what you’re actually reporting on, is an impression, idea, or perception - that is how knowledge is constituted.
The clearest statement of this argument are the opening paragraphs of Schopenhauer’s WWR. But I think it’s a mistake to imagine that Schopenhauer is saying that ‘the world disappears when I’m not looking at it.’ This, again, presupposes a point of view, a perspective from which that non-existence would be seen.
But that is not what ‘the idealist argument’ is really saying at all. It is really an argument about the nature of knowledge, experience and consciousness - how we know what we know. Our knowledge and experience is actually constituted, made up of different facets, all of which come into play when we see ‘the object’. And they are therefore constitutive of whatever we know of reality. That’s the sense in which reality is ‘dependent on perception’. Not that all the planets around unknown suns don’t exist until they’re literally being perceived. What’s important about the argument is that it reminds us that we really are part of the picture - you can’t imagine anything from absolutely no perspective. Whereas science assumes that the universe that it sees and measures exists entirely independently of the scientist. But it doesn’t! (This is what came out of the ‘observer problem’; read this.)
I know how hard this is to get - it’s a basically a gestalt shift. Like, someone once showed me one of those ‘magic eye’ books, where there are two apparently random patterns, and if you hold them a certain distance from your face, you will suddenly see a three-dimensional image. It never worked for me.
Quoting andrewk
That example is verging on facetious, insofar as what it really does is shows that Moore doesn’t understand idealist arguments, or rather that they don’t mean what he takes them to mean.
Read it just now.
The most interesting, informative article I have read in a while.
Well, Berkley had the same sort of perspective in that he didn't saysay the light bouncing off a flower into your eye is an interpretive act. Rather, the omni-observer, God, is around to keep the rest of the world there as we would have perceived it.
By idealism you mean the Kantian variety where what is perceived might be entirely different than what caused the perception.
Quoting Wayfarer
But if you don't want to this to collapse into skepticism, you have to allow that our perceptual facilities do provide some accurate information about how things really are.
Why would we have eyes to see if what is seen isn't what's really there? That doesn't mean our senses gives us a completely accurate view of the world. They don't (and sometimes they mislead us). But you don't have to go all the way to the other extreme and say we can't know anything about the external world, trapping us inside the veil of perception (and interpretation).
Either science can be done on the world despite our perceptual limitations, or the ancients skeptics were right. I think given the huge success of science that the skeptics were premature in doubting so thoroughly.
It’s worth recalling that Kant was a polymath who lectured in science as well as many other subjects, and whose theory of nebular formation is still current science. That was the point I was making about him being an ‘empirical realist’, something which he himself says.
Quoting Marchesk
What the eyes see is only part of the story. That is the point. Obviously science works - we wouldn’t even have this platform to exchange ideas on, if it didn’t. But it too is only part of the story. And you can be sceptical about science without reverting to the Stone Age. The whole problem of ‘scientism’ is that it says that science knows everything that can be known, in principle. That is the point of this debate as far as I’m concerned. (If you have a moment, do have a look at this excellent article on the continuing relevance of Kant. Says in a couple of pages what might take years to study.)
Who says this? Every scientist I've ever spoken to in my career has been of the opinion that science produces those ideas which represent testable theories which require the least new phenomena and clash least with existing theories. I've never heard anyone claiming it 'knows' all there is to except, wishy-washy theists who want to make a straw man out of it.
As far as this topic is concerned, if we restrict ourselves to empirically verifiable evidence, then we can verify the existence of the paper by the means Marchesk has already outlined. We can then discuss the extent to which those means cover all that is possible. Beyond that, there is only an aesthetic purpose to any further speculation because nothing can ever be known with any public utility beyond that.
It does not follow from the fact that the paper is there every time I look, that it is there when I am not looking.
Quoting Marchesk
This demonstrates the existence of the paper when recorded - recording really just being a sort of extension of our perceptual abilities. What about when the paper isn't being recorded? I surely believe that it exists whilst being unrecorded and unperceived. But how can I know it? Hence, the camera suggestion does not really help (I failed to realize this in a previous thread, and the discussion became confused as a result).
Quoting Marchesk
I can feel the ground under my feet so there is no problem here.
Quoting Marchesk
I want to take the scepticism this far and no further: any belief of mine for which there is no reliable method of establishing it, is one I shall doubt. I stress, as I did in the OP, that I am not demanding certainty or that all beliefs be capable of proof to any reasonable person. I am merely requiring that there me some method which is such that, when used correctly, produces beliefs which are more likely than not true. I don't think this is taking scepticism too far at all. To expect anything less is to believe things which are not even probable - guess work.
Quoting Marchesk
I see what you are saying, but I think there are problems. When the driver steps on the breaks, what I observe is the car slowly coming to a stop. I do not feel 'the rest of the universe opposing my change in motion'. Maybe there is no 'rest of the universe' at that moment. I realize that a scientific account of what happens when the driver presses his breaks obviously requires the existence of a significant part of the universe, but does that account prove that things exist unperceived or does it merely assume it? The account would need to be fleshed out further before I could say.
Quoting Marchesk
The example isn't fleshed out in enough detail for a fair assessment. The hiker didn't see the rock, but did any body else see it? If so, then the example is compatible with things only existing when perceived. If nobody saw the rock hit the hiker, not even the hiker (perhaps he was asleep), then how can anybody say with any degree of reliability that the rock actually did hit him? This hasn't been explained.
Quoting Marchesk
What killed me are the microbes, and ex hypothesi, nobody perceived the microbes while they were killing me. Again then, how can anybody say with any degree of reliability that the microbes did kill me? It seems to me that typically this would be explained by a classic kind of causal inference. We perceive the person suffering various symptoms. We perceive the existence of microbes which we did not perceive before they got sick. We also perceive that as the symptoms worsen the number of microbes (for example) increases and their spread throughout the bodies crucial organs grows wider. We might infer that the best explanation is that the microbes do something to cause the symptoms and the eventual death. This can be further supported by other observations of the microbes behaviour on isolated tissue, and so on. In short, the microbes are observed to exist at certain times in conjunction with certain symptoms and in a certain patterns. When the symptoms are perceived on a different occasion, it is inferred that the microbes are again there.
But now return to the paper in my desk. How could this argument be run for that paper? I am hopeful, but not sure. Your further questions about digestion and intestines are the same. Does digestion happen when no one is perceiving it? Perhaps an argument like that I gave for microbes could be given. Although I'm not sure exactly how it would go. I made the thread hoping someone would explain how the argument would go, not simply restate my question with different examples!
Quoting Rich
That is, obviously, when you are observing them, not when you are not observing them.
Quoting Daniel
I don't understand why this has to be the case. Isn't it conceivable that you exist just as you now do exist without the existence of a collection of atoms completely distinct from you? It might be true that scientifically speaking, to remove certain atoms from the world all together would cause a change in everything else (though I am not sure about this), but that presupposes the whole atomic theory and causation, and both of these presuppose that things exist when unperceived.
Quoting andrewk
Thanks for the interesting answer.
Let us use the train example because having it writ large is a little easier. You say that if the wheels ceased to exist when unperceived, the carriages would drop onto the axles and the passengers would feel this. But this answer assumes that gravity continues to operate while unperceived does it not? W.T Stace first pointed this out in connection with a fire. Does a fire continue to burn even when no one is looking? A critic of Stace had said that it must do so, because when you return to the fire after ten minutes, the wood has turned to ash, which is just what happens if you stay and watch the fire burn out. Stace pointed out that this argument assumes that the law of causation operates continuously through time, whether observed or unobserved, and this is obviously part of what needs to be proven. The same can be said, seemingly, of the train example. That the carriages would fall onto their axles if the wheels didn't exist while unobserved assumes that the law of gravity continues to operate when unobserved, and this is part of what has to be proven.
This said, I suspect that there is a mistake in Stace's reasoning here - and so also with my reuse of it, but I don't know what it is.
[B]Thanks to everyone for thorough replies[/b]
I'd also like to thank specifically, because I didn't address any of his/her points directly. This isn't because I don't appreciate the posts. Quite the opposite, I find them very insightful and the links provided equally informative. I do disagree with you Wayfarer, if you think, as it seems you do, that the view that the train wheels stop existing when no one is observing them is a silly view which only someone who misunderstands the issue - like you say Moore does - would discuss. I think this matter is not as clear as that, as I have tried to explain. I recommend W.T Stace's Refutation of Realism. Stace defends the view that 'nothing exists except minds and their perceptions', where this is taken quite literally and has the consequence that the train wheels do not exist when unperceived.
As to your suggestion that Kantian Idealism is about 'how we know what we know', the question depends on the word 'know' which is intolerably vague, and so it is hard to assess how Kantian Idealism is an answer to that question without an explication of 'know'.
Best,
PA
The question I thought was how do we know that there are things out there that we are not overseeing directly. My answer is by observing indirectly - that is overview the actions of other life forms.
Realists are right to point out that subjective idealists are naive if they think that the semantics of physical objects reduce to atomic acts of perception.
Once realists and idealists recognise the semantic holism in our translation of observations into causes and vice versa, they ought to realise they are speaking past one another and making complementary arguments.
Now move your hands away again.
1) Did the paper disappear? 2) Did a goat appear where it was? 3) Do you see the paper again?
(The former two may be evidence of David Copperfield playing tricks.)
Wouldn't it be neat, if, say, a piano was falling down towards you, and you could look away, et voilà, the piano would no longer exist? :)
Bit like that old story of ostriches sticking their heads in the sand when they see something scary.
The most parsimonious line of thinking seems to degenerate into solipsism (or similar idealism), something like that. (N)
The issue might be best understood from a temporal perspective. Consider that the human being is endowed with a very particular temporal perspective. Average reflex time is about a quarter of a second, so let's say that our perspective of what is "present", or "now", is about a quarter of a second. However, we can imagine time periods as short as a Planck time, and as long as billions of years.
Because everything in the world is moving, how things appear to our senses, is determined by our temporal perspective. Things moving very fast like photons only appear as a bright blur, because in that quarter second of perspective time, they cover a great distance of space, and must appear to be in all of those places at the same time (that quarter second which is "now"). Things moving much slower can appear to have a fixed position in that quarter second temporal perspective.
Now imagine different temporal perspectives. Suppose "the now" was a year instead of a quarter second. The earth covers the entire area of one orbit and so it now appears like a ring around the sun from this perspective. If we extend the perspective of "the now" to a longer and longer time period, like billions of years, the moving bodies in the universe occupy the entire space of the universe, and the universe appears like one solid entity, one thing.
So the existence of "things" is really dependent on a subject, an observer who has a particular temporal perspective. Our inclination is to ask, what would the universe look like from the temporal perspective of the subject, if we remove the subject, the observer. Will things still be the same? But this question really doesn't make any sense, because the temporal perspective is the property of the observer, and to remove the observer is to remove that temporal perspective. So to ask what would the universe look like from the temporal perspective of the observer, without the observer, is still to reference the observer. Without referring to the temporal perspective of the subject, we'd have no principle to choose a temporal perspective. Any choice of temporal perspective would be arbitrary, and the way that things appear, since they are all moving is dependent on the temporal perspective.
If we completely remove the observer, then we have no particular temporal reference, only the entire universe for all of time. There is no basis for singling out this particular time or that particular time. We'd be inclined to say that there would still be "the universe", without any subject or observer. But we really do not know what it means to be a universe, so this statement doesn't really make sense either. In the end, we have to face the fact that this question, "does anything exist if unperceived", really doesn't make any sense at all, because "to exist" refers to how we perceive things.
However, careful examination of our existence provides clues.
When we are unconscious, we are not observing. And then we awaken!
How do we know that we were unconscious or asleep? Because there had been some disruption in our memory pattern. Something is different than it normally would be. We surmise that we had been unconscious.
Some memory has changed (or been disrupted). Other patterns remain. This is evidence of a changing universe with patterns.
How would the universe be without an observer? It would be as if we are unconscious. Are there persistent patterns embedded in the universe? Appears so, as they persist through an unconscious state. A holographic model of the universal memory supports these experiences as we perceive them. Memory is in the fabric of the universe. That is what we (our minds) are observing.
Sounds rather like this, doesn’t it?
Quoting Pseudonym
I think this fundamentally confuses how we come to know about the world with the way the world is itself. Just because we can't get outside ourselves to imagine exactly how the world is without us observing it does not entail that the world cannot exist without us perceiving it.
It can simply be a limitation on human imagination. But even then, we do possess powerful abstraction capabilities so that we can model the universe mathematically without any observer. We do have a theory of general relativity that deals with that.
Exactly. If you look away from a falling rock, does it cease to exist until it crushes you, and then goes back to not existing once you die? What if you don't have time to experience the crushing? Does the non-existent heavy object not cause you to cease to exist?
This is a subject dear to my heart, because of my perplexity over whether I will ever do a bungee jump (and whether I 'should'). (I suspect I won't, my excuse being the risk of detaching a retina).
You know that terrible feeling you get in your stomach when you jump off the diving board? I find it terrifying, yet I seek it out, jumping off (low) bridges into water, doing vertiginous waterslides, roller coasters etc.
That feeling is exactly what 'not perceiving gravity' is. It feels like there's a force, but actually it's an absence of force. So astronauts in the International Space Station feel like that all the time. I suppose they must get used to it, so that it no longer feels terrifying.
Forgive the long diversion. There is a relevance to the topic, which is that a sudden disappearance of gravity would be obvious and traumatic, filling people with terror. So it would not be a good topic for contemplation of the unperceived.
I'm trying to think of an example. Perhaps this. Imagine the train is travelling across a bridge. All the windows are tightly shuttered so the occupants cannot see outside. The bridge is supported only at either end by bolts that can be simultaneously withdrawn at the press of a button. When the train is in the middle of the bridge, Lex Luthor presses the button and, without a sound (initially. After about a second the wind noise will become significant), the train, track and bridge goes into free fall, Under Einstein's principle of equivalence (crudely: acceleration is equivalent to gravity) gravity disappears for the occupants of the train.
Although there are no immediate visual or audible cues as to gravity's disappearance, the occupants will nevertheless be instantly filled with alarm, as they are suddenly struck by that stomach-in-throat, I just jumped off the diving platform, feeling. They will perceive the disappearance viscerally.
Fortunately, Superman turns up just in time and, supporting it from underneath, brings the bridge, track and train to a gradual, safe halt before transferring it to a nice stretch of flat land to let out the terrified passengers.
No humans were harmed in the conduction of this thought experiment.
I suggest you go and look up the meaning of the word 'if'.
If you found a flattened hiker who had camped out next to rock face, then it's possible they didn't see or hear the falling rock. If it crushed them quickly enough, they may not have felt it either.
In that case, how could a non-existent rock do that? Or to put it into idealist terms:
How do we connect a rock we perceive to have crushed a human being with the cause of that human's death?
We can do it with realist language quite easily. But the idealist can't reference unperceived objects. We can't even reference the sleeping human here, because they might be unconsious, and without another perceiver, non-existent.
So you end up with the silliness that a non-existent rock crushed a non-existent human resulting in a perceived corpse and rock. That is, if things go out of existence when not perceived, and pop back into existence when perceived.
To go full subjective idealist mode, you just have a crushed corpse for no reason at all, where friends and family who identify the corpse with someone previously known will no longer experience interacting with that person as a living human. You get to avoid the stuff going in and out of existence, but then experience has these gaps to it and experiences happen without cause.
IOW, you ditch inference, and with it, explanations of any sort that aren't strictly deductive. You just have one experience following another for no rhyme or reason.
Let's say you're shut in a vacuum sealed room with a fire. Both you and the fire are consuming the limited oxygen in the room.
Then a partition is put between you and the fire that blocks your from seeing, hearing or smelling the fire. It ceases to exist as a perception. Furthermore, there is a timer that will let you out before your run out of air, but only if the fire on the other side of the partition is no longer consuming air.
What happens? Do you survive or does your air run out? How would Stace answer that?
And there's many alternatives to this like introducing a poisonous gas you can't perceive or emptying the oxygen from the room, all setup to be automated with nobody else around.
And really, why would the question of needing air come up at all? Why would you die of needing something (oxygen) you can't perceive?
I like to picture reality as a slideshow. Each moment that passes then, I consider it to be one slide in an infinite amount of different ones. If you take one of these slides and examine it, you will be able to notice that it depicts every single thing that exists at a particular point in time. If you examine each one of the objects on this slide, you will also notice that each of them is defined by a particular limit that defines its shape. Now, let's say that among these objects there is a paper sheet. If you were to erase what is outside the limit that defines the paper sheet and left nothing but blackness around it, this blackness would still have a limit, for the existence of the limit that defines the paper sheet would necessarily define the boundaries of the blackness around it. Now then, if instead of erasing what is outside the limit that defines the paper sheet you erased what is actually inside it, you would notice that that which was not the paper sheet is still bounded by the limits of that which was the paper sheet. What I want you to notice is that even though you erased the paper sheet, you did not take it out of existence, for its limit seems to be, in reality, defined not by the paper sheet itself but by that which co-exists with it, and the same can be applied to every object on that or any other slide. Now, coming back to the paper sheet on the slide, I believe (all I have been saying is just a product of educated guesses, just to be clear) that in order to delete the limit that defines the paper sheet (that is, take it out of existence) you would necessarily have to alter the limit of the things that surround the paper sheet, for if you did not, the things that are not the paper sheet would still define the limit of the paper sheet itself.
perceptual psychology. The interesting question would be not whether some thing exists outside of a perception of it but what does it means in a pragmatic sense to be an object of a perception for a given person at a given time. . Let's take that piece of paper in front of you for instance. Let's see the myriad troubles we can get into by trying to maintain the assumption that the very idea of a piece of paper as a self-persisting 'thing' is coherent in the first place.
So we're talking perception here, and the implied modality is visual. I could of course be blind and then would have to determine the existence of the paper via another sense.
So I see the paper, right? But it's not that simple. What if I glance in the direction of the paper but don't process it as a piece of paper. We do that all the time. Our minds are preoccupied with other thoughts and we look right through something, not identifying it conceptually as 'this object'. And the act of identifying the paper as a thing is a protracted process. At first our visual system will process edges and then move on to a more encompassing recognition of the object. And our intentions and presuppositions enter into the perception in complex ways. Is why we're looking at the paper, in what context, really irrelevant to the meaning for us of what exactly the paper is?
Classical logic would say these are peripheral and irrelevant issues to defining the paper as physical entity, but classical logic is content tomsubstitute an impoverished abstraction for the more fundamental interactively determined meanings of how we interact with a world.
What is actually 'out there' and what our memory adds to what is out there interact inseparably. Now, if instead of a human perceiving thepaper, we take a snake, the perceptual mapping of the works will look quite different, since perception is about interacting with an environment adaptively in relation to one's needs, rather than representing, mirroring or copying something. The idea of object would be, to say the least , wry different for a snake, if in fact a sense of persisting thing was necessary at all for it.
We could demonstrate how different the perceptual mapping of a world would be if we used a human infant, also, one who had not yet established object permanency, and for whom a piece of paper would likely not exist as a coherent object yet.
So the upshot here is that, based on the current research understanding of perception as a a construction and an indissociable interaction between subject and object, what exactly would be appearing and disappearing in our world as our attentive processing shifted from moment to moment would not only be relative person to person, or creature to creature, or developmental stage to developmental stage, but also moment to moment.
It would seem that , in a real sense, the world of 'objects'as old fashioned metaphysical dualists define them in logical terms, never existed in the first place, and in fact the world of perceptually processed experience really does consists of particular meanings(objects of sense) that disappear as what they were the instant out attention wanders from them, and then have to be constantly reconstructed in relation to our purposes and intentional ends.
So, all the 'machinery' that we believe gives rise to perception, and that is never itself perceived during acts of perception, does not exist?
I would think that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would be still considered amongst the most significant philosophical texts on that question. Not that Kant is the be-all and end-all but it does still provide an indispensable framework for discussion of this question in my opinion.
Apparently your eyes and brain don't exist when nobody's perceiving them, but you can still have a visual perception.
LOL, what absurdities some metaphysical standpoints commit adherents to! :s
Indeed. There were huge disputes over some of these absurd commitments back on the old site.
Something just occurred to me. Can you classify a visual experience as a perception if your perceptual system doesn't exist since nobody's perceiving it?
Well, mostly we take it on trust, on the word of others - friends, family, journalists - or of experts. That's a loose, everyday sense of knowing. Mostly we are confident about this mass of information, but we still retain some caution at the back of our minds, because doubt is always possible, and if we do doubt we can move on to the next stage.
If we're more curious, we'll look into the reasoning and arguments provided by our informants, and such demonstrations will ultimately boil down to there being some causal chain connecting present experience to the unperceived object, such that if the object didn't exist, our present experience wouldn't be the way it is. Or: the hypothesis that the unperceived object exists, is a reasonable explanation for present experience's being the way it is. (This would be so even if you're using your informants' experience as an intermediary step.) That would be your second type of knowledge - reliable inference. Doubt is still possible, but we have an overall picture that we can reasonably be confident in.
As to the general question, "How could we possibly know that things in general exist unperceived?" - that is self-evident if one is seriously using the term "we." (IOW, you're already admitting there's a "we" so you're already admitting that there are at least some objects outside of your present perception.) That's the first type of knowing, although here the demonstration is only possible by virtue of the logical implications of the terms used - or rather, by virtue of what's necessarily implicitly affirmed if the terms are being used seriously, non-frivolously. (There is no option for the question to be "free floating," spoken by no-one to nobody nowhere at no time - gradually take all that context away, and the question itself gradually becomes more and more meaningless.)
On the other hand, if I am asking the question of my own experience (methodological solipsism) - "How can I alone, out of my own resources, know that things exist unperceived?" - then there is no answer, and I am led inevitably to solipsism.
Old-fashioned i.e pre-Cartesian dualists didn’t think in terms of ‘objects’; that really came about because of Newton and Galileo. But I agree with the rest of your analysis which clearly comes out of phenomenology and therefore, ultimately, Kant.
That's interesting, do you have any names I could look into?
But this feeling that the diver has is one which he has as a result of falling. The idea of falling obviously assumes that there is somewhere to fall to, and that would assume that there is somewhere that exists while unperceived by the train passengers.
Quoting Marchesk
Indeed. Is there something wrong with that theory. What is it?
Quoting Marchesk
Presumably he would say: First there is me and the experience of the room and the fire. Then there is just me and the experience of the room. The fire no longer exists since it is no longer perceived. After some time I cease having experiences and die. If I were told that there is this timer in the room which will let me free only if the fire doesn't exist, and I observe until the point where it is pretty clear that the timer is not going to let me out, perhaps I could infer that the fire still exists while unperceived. But I am not sure of the point of this thought experiment, because it is so contrived. If the experiment had been performed in reality, which it hasn't, that might prove the existence of the fire in those contrived circumstances, but the existence of regular objects in regular circumstances would remain unproven.
Quoting Marchesk
I can feel the oxygen as I inhale it, can I not? If you say "no. You cannot tell from inhaling that what you inhale is oxygen molecules", then fair enough, but the existence of the molecules can be securely inferred from the perceptible properties of air.
You are being misled by your slideshow treatment of the world. It would indeed be strange if, when the paper ceased to exist, there were just this weird black space, as though the universe is literally a canvas and the piece of paper was literally rubbed out leaving a gap in the line work. But that wouldn't be what the Idealist imagines to happen. When he says that the paper ceases to exist when no one perceives it, what he imagines to happen is that the space where the paper was is replaced with empty space - not some strange erased nothingness, just ordinary empty space. Except, this wouldn't be quite right, since the Idealist holds that nothing exists when unperceived, and so he would have to maintain that the empty space inside the drawer doesn't exist either. But again, he need not be committed to this strange picture of the inside of the drawer being literally erased. He can maintain that the limits of existence are the limits of perception. Where perception stops, there is nothing. No empty space. No strange erased spaces with borders. Nothing.
Quoting Joshs
Great point.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
It should be stressed that these two facts are about perception construed very differently. Animals perceive the world differently to humans in the sense that what they literally see - what is given to their conscious awareness - is different because they have different sense organs. Humans don't see the world differently in that sense. What humans literally see is for the most part the same or incredibly similar. What is different is their interpretation of what they see, in accord with their beliefs desires and needs. It is true that infants don't interpret what they see as a 'piece of paper' which exists permanently. But it isn't true that the infants don't literally see the paper. If they didn't see it, there would be nothing for them to later interpret when they pick up the relevant concepts. Its also true that usually I don't pay attention to every object which is part of my visual field. There is a television in the background of my visual field right now which has gone unnoticed by me for about half an hour. But what is all of this supposed to show?
Quoting Joshs
This seems to me a fallacious inference. As I said, it is true that people interpret the world differently, but it doesn't follow from this that what exists is person relative. This mistake is perhaps masked by your conflation between the given and interpretation of the given. If there really were nothing given at all, it would seem to follow that humans could only know about their own interpretations of the world, and never about an independent world. And from that one might conclude, ala Richard Rorty, that the idea of 'the word' independent of interpretation is a useless fiction. But as I pointed out, this would rest on confusing the given and the interpretation of the given.
Some difficulties are raised by the fact that different things are given for different creatures. That might put pressure on the idea that humans can know what the world is like in itself, and not just as it is for humans. But this is the point of a scientific account of things. In a scientific account, one is supposed to move beyond the features of a thing which are merely relative to human modes of perception, and seek a more objective characterization of the thing which explains why it appears a certain way to humans. Whether this really works seems to fall outside of the scope of what I wanted to discuss in the thread.
I suppose you would object to the idea of the given on the grounds that it is an 'impoverished abstraction':
Quoting Joshs
As I see it, the idea of the given is that it is supposed to be an abstraction. In framing the notion of the given, we are trying to characterize perceptual experience solely by reference to the element which is common across all of us. We abstract away all of the person relative elements and call them the 'interpretation of' the given. What we are left with is the common element of experience, which is to serve as a reliable guide to the nature of the objective world.
Thanks for this, it got me thinking in an interesting direction.
I agree with you. I am only suggesting that the word 'know' needs further explication before the question is well-defined enough for a rigorous answer. Otherwise, the question admits of too many different interpretations. I think Kant failed to see this, but as did many before and after him.
Quoting gurugeorge
There is no reliable way for me to know that things exist unperceived at all? But I thought you said:
Quoting gurugeorge
This argument sounds like an argument I could make using my own resources, doesn't it? And what about what other people tell me? Why can't what other people tell me count as part of my resources?
I suppose you might think that this would require that I first know, out of my own resources, that other people exist. That would be right, but couldn't I know this out of my own resources? If I couldn't, what sense does it make for me to enjoy the company of anyone else, given that it is mere guess work whether or not there is anyone else? This last paragraph is only speculation on what you might be thinking. Forgive me if I have gone off on the wrong tracks.
, you employ the same tactic sometimes employed by Marchesk. That is, to answer my question by asking other questions in the hope that my original question then sounds ridiculous. But your raising these questions does not answer my original question, so far as I can tell. It doesn't follow from the facts that (a) the paper is there when I look at T1 and (b) it is there when I look at T3, that it was there when I wasn't looking at T2.
Thanks again for the replies,
PA
I don't think the claim is that it follows. I think the claim is either that it being there when you weren't looking (best) explains why you see it when you look at T3 or that it is more parsimonious for it to still have been there.
However, I think both misunderstand the idealist position. There seems to be this implicit interpretation of it materially popping into and out of existence, which would be a misplaced interpretation. Rather compare it with our experiences when dreaming; I see a tree, I turn around, I no longer see a tree. Is it right to think of the tree as still being in the dream, albeit unseen? No. Is it right to think of the tree "popping" out of existence until you turn back, when it "pops" back in? No. It is just the case that either there is the experience or there isn't, and talk of the tree existing or not existing (as something else) is a category error.
Well, it is ridiculous when taken to it's logical conclusion. If the paper in your drawer no longer exists unperceived, then the piano falling toward you no longer exists when you look away.
Because how can the unperceived world be of any threat?
Thought experiments are used in philosophy. And this one can be performed in the real world. But you can change it to an actual situation where there was a fire but nobody was aware of it, because they were asleep or it was in another part of the building, and they suffocated.
There's a thousand different variants of this. Someone slips an odorless, tasteless poison into your drink when nobody else is looking. They leave the room.
Now the poison should cease to exist just like the paper, right? You drink from the chalice and next thing you know you're vomiting blood and being rushed to the emergency room where the doctor figures out what poison was used and counters it to save your life. So somehow that unperceived poison came back into existence.
Now if you can do away with experiences being causally connected to one another, and say that you there was no reason you went to the emergency room, then you can maintain your doubt.
I can't do that. I find it to be a reductio. Of course the poison, the paper, the piano, the train wheels, etc. all exist unperceived. That makes sense of why our experiences do seem to be causally connected in a way that papers remain in drawers when nobody's looking.
No, the idea that the existence of some unperceived object is a reasonable explanation for present experience's being the way it is depends on a prior acceptance of the world being pretty much as we think it is, with people who give you information, etc. At that level (the level of reliable knowledge) we're not asking about the possibility of objects outside perception in general, but of this or that object that's outside present perception, given that objects exist outside perception in general.
However, that idea (the general idea) isn't something that you could logically derive from present perception without any additional ideas, truths, or auxiliary hypotheses that you've already accepted that you're taking in from a world outside present perception. Even calling present experience "perception" already takes too much for granted if you're strictly going on present experience. Really, the most you can get is the non-dual mystical position, which is somewhat similar to the radical empiricist position of Mach - e.g. consider Mach's "self-portrait." https://binged.it/2nBJUOZ (Obviously we're meant to include the whole panoply of things you can find in present experience in this - ghostly "thoughts" and images, vague bodily sensations, etc.)
Here you have something like "experience" as a thing-in-itself with which we have direct, immediate contact, floating in a palpable void (as it were). There's depth to the thing (it's not 2-d) but the depth is only within the experience itself, there's no necessary connection between that perceived 3-dimensionality and "a world outside the experience." Also, there's no subject "perceiving" this thing - that too is a hypothesis that has no justification - this experience-thing just sheerly exists in its own palapable void (by which I mean the absence-of-it that surrounds and envelops it).
No, the point I made is that the way that the world is, is completely dependent on one's temporal perspective. Without a subject, an observer, there is no temporal perspective. Without a temporal perspective there is no such thing as the way that the world is. That's why it's a senseless question to ask about the way that the world would be without an observer. Without an observer there is no such thing as the way that the world is.
Your argument is that if Idealism were true and I saw a car coming towards me, I could stop myself getting hit just by looking away, since the car only exists when perceived. Idealism need not have that consequence.
It could be that it is just a brute fact that usually the experience of a car hurtling towards you is followed by the experience of a car striking you in the back if you look away. The Idealist can posit the two items experienced - the car that you see and the car that hits you- and say that usually seeing one is followed by feeling the other. He need not posit the existence of a car that exists in between these two states, nor need he say that all three are "the same" car.
The same with the piano. The Idealist says that there is the piano that you see falling towards you, and there is the piano that strikes you in the head, but he need not postulate another piano which exists when you aren't perceiving it, nor that all three are "the same" piano. Moreover, he will say, there is no reliable means at all, to tell that there is a car or piano which existed when unperceived.
Quoting Marchesk
I know that they are, and for the most part I think they shouldn't be.
Quoting Marchesk
These examples can be explained as above.
Quoting Marchesk
I can perceive the drink. Am I perceiving the poison when I perceive the drink? The poison is part of the liquid isn't it? So surely I am. So why would the poison cease to exist according to Idealism? It wouldn't. I'm not perceiving the poisonous chemical constitution of the drink, but I can infer that chemical constitution from the effects that the drink has on me. I still don't see the issue. I am not saying that you can only know about things that you can see. I am saying that you can only know what you have a reliable ground to believe. I allow that you could know something by inference.
Quoting gurugeorge
Why can't I argue like does above, pointing out that if the car didn't exist when unperceived, I could save myself by simply looking away? Since I can't, we might conclude that the car must exist unperceived. As I pointed out to him/her, the Idealist can modify his view to accommodate these consequences. But could Marchesk not criticize the Idealist view then for being ad hoc, less explanatory and (in some sense which would need explication) less parsimonious? A number of people have hinted at this argument. I am trying to get someone to state it more fully. In what sense is Idealism less explanatory? In what sense less ad hoc? In what sense less parsimonious? I think these questions will prove difficult to answer, but if they could be answered, I don't see why doing so would assume anything like "the world being pretty much as we think". It depends what exactly I would have to assume, and why it is that I can't assume it. But you haven't said on either front.
Best,
PA
The idealist can make this move, but there is also the possibility that experience just ceases. Other people will infer that the falling piano or oncoming car killed you. The examiner might say poor sap didn't even feel it.
So the idealist has to include the possibility that not looking will result in no longer experiencing, for no reason at all, since there is no unperceived death event.
There is something to be said against views which we can't disprove but are absurd. Let's say that instead not existing, the piano turns into a pink elephant that squashes you, but then turns back into a piano when people find your body. Can you disprove that possibility? No, but it's silly and absurd on the face of it.
The possibility of 'not experiencing' doesn't make any sense to the subjective idealist. For the subjective idealist semantically reduces the meaning of what is meant by a cause to the collection of observations that are said to verify it. Hence the idealist cannot make sense of the postulation of a cause that he cannot consciously verify.
In conclusion the subjective idealist is a solipsist who cannot make sense of the statement "I am mortal". Yet why should this be absurd by your criteria? After all, the solipsist is not only against holding views that he cannot disprove, he is even against attributing meaning to such views.
I don't know how you've come to that conclusion. One doesn't need to believe that one's experiences are eternal to believe that one's experiences are all that exist, just as one doesn't need to believe that matter is eternal to believe that matter is all that exists.
The solipsist thinks they are eternal and their experience will never end? How is that not completely unfounded?
All i mean to say is that if subjective idealists are understood to be verificationists in the strongest possible sense, then it makes no sense for them to speak of an absence of experience when it comes to their own experience.
Would such verificationism also commit one to not being able to speak of past experiences except as memories now, or future experiences except as anticipation now?
IOW, all that could be known to exist is the solipsist's perception right now.
Quoting Marchesk
Verificationism and presentism go hand in hand. For according to the verificationist, to speak of the past or the future is to refer to their criteria of verification, a verification that consists of temporal signification within the present.
But even if you reject verificationism, say because you are metaphysical realist concerning the past, suppose that a living brain which from your perspective is most definitely mortal, says of itself "I am mortal". What is the brain asserting of itself here? Does it make sense to think that a brain can represent to itself the criteria of its own existence?
Sure, why not? The brain recognizes that it has a limited lifespan. It sees that it's made of the same biological stuff that everything else is, which means it will die.
We already agreed that the Idealist can posit (a) a car hurtling towards him when he sees it, and (b) a car hitting him in the back when he feels it. He need not postulate a car which exists in the interim, when he is not seeing or feeling a car at all, nor need he postulate that these three are 'the same' car. But, if he holds that (a) is usually followed by (b) - even if you look away - then why can't he hold (c) being hit in the back by a car will probably kill me? Would he be holding (c) for no reason at all? Surely not, unless for some reason the Idealist isn't allowed to think that bodily damage can kill him.
Best
PA
Clearly if you believe that then there's some kind of method you're already accepting as a path to knowledge of what exists. What constitutes that method?
That is the common belief, but it is a misconception. It is actually the feeling of the absence of gravity. The diver's accelerated motion - in the reference frame of the diving board - exactly cancels out the impact of gravity. What a diver feels the instant after leaving the platform is exactly what is felt by a person in what is considered a 'gravity-free' environment such as a space station, or even just a 'motionless' space ship in deep space.
The point is that we feel gravity all the time, in our innards as well as on the soles of our feet. We are so used to it that it feels normal, and it feels weird and scary when gravity disappears.
The more general point is that there are many things that we continuously perceive without realising it, by which I mean that we would notice and pay attention if they were to suddenly cease. Other examples are a faint drone of an electric motor, which we only notice when it suddenly stops. Or one of the many instruments in a thick 'wall of sound' musical arrangement of a song, which one doesn't notice until the instrument stops, and thereby subtly alters the texture of the music.
This really weird thought occurs to me often, and seems completely divorced from any philosophical discussion of materialism vs idealism.
When I was first told about the forgetting drug Midazolam, which is used in uncomfortable but not super-painful procedures like endoscopies, I tied my brain in knots trying to 'understand' it. Apparently you are conscious, though drowsy, during the procedure, but have absolutely no memory of it, so after the event it's absolutely indistinguishable from it never having happened - you feel the same as if you'd had a general anaesthetic (but without the nausea). I still can't quite get the idea of it straight in my head.
Sometimes when I'm in a dangerous situation that could kill me, I think: If I were to be killed, there would be no more consciousness, so any brain activity shortly before the death will be as if it never happened (we could say that for all my brain activity ever, but leave that aside for now - I'm just describing my train of thought). But here I am alert and conscious of what's happening, so it seems as though that means that I won't end up dead in the next minute or so.
I'm just saying that one doesn't need philosophy and theories like idealism and materialism to get tied up in absurd-seeming but inescapable knots, over the notion of consciousness.
And I explained how I disagree with that, given that we can depict the world mathematically without a perspective, and given that our lack of a ability to picture a perspectiveless world does not necessitate the world can't be that way.
But he might not feel anything as well. Experience just ends.
That's not true though. We cannot produce a mathematical model of the universe which is independent from perspective. This is one of the key things that special relativity demonstrates to us. And, my explanation demonstrates that to speak of things existing in a perspectiveless world is completely nonsensical.
Pretty sure you're wrong about this.
No.
The boiling soup is in front of you. You close your eyes, and it vanishes. Has it ceased to exist? You still hear it boiling. Does it still exist? Maybe something else is making that noise. But you can smell it? Maybe something else is producing that smell?
You're deaf and blind. You have no sense of smell. Does the soup still exist? You reach out and touch the boiling soup. Ouch. What if you have no sense of touch? Or if you can't reach the soup? Does it exist?
Well, at this point you're nothing but consciousness. Do you exist? Descartes says you do because you are conscious of yourself. But what is it that you are conscious of? Only your own consciousness.
Your consciousness is axiomatic. You can't contemplate your own consciousness without reference to it. So you know that for sure. It's the only sure thing.
But that ain't too satisfying, is it?
Does existence exist? Well, that's axiomatic, too. How can you contemplate existence without existing?
If you exist--and you do--do you exist alone? Perhaps.
That's all very cute, and very obvious. But what about that boiling soup? You regain your senses and the soup reappears in all its smelly, noisy glory. You perceive it again. But what does that mean? Maybe your view of the soup is totally subjective and it doesn't exist for the other perceiving consciousness sitting at the table opposite you. Maybe you're imagining the soup. You go to serve it to the other but they can't receive it since for them it doesn't exist. Is it getting a little nutty?
At some point, everything is axiomatic since you can't interact with it unless you reference it in the interaction. And others can't interact with it unless they too perceive it in about the same way you do. You could say that objectivity--that entities exist independent of your consciousness--is the degree to which subjectivity doesn't obtain; the degree to which axiomatic-ness is common.
You're living in the Matrix. And that matrix is called reality. Yes, the boiling soup exists.
For sure there is an obvious distinction between the identity of what is being understood and the difference between individual acts of understanding.
Well Idealism obviously ad hoc because it's inventing a whole different understanding of reality from the ordinary one. That's the less parsimonious bit.
That would take us back to the line of thought about doubt requiring reason to doubt. Is there a reason to doubt the ordinary story? If not, then it's more parsimonious to go with it. Now of course Idealism pretends to have reason to doubt the ordinary story - but most of it's bogus, based on variants of the argument from illusion, etc.
But what is the significance of this for our topic?
Quoting Marchesk
Why is that a problematic account?
Quoting gurugeorge
Is any theory which isn't the story which you already accept "ad hoc"? If so, is the mere fact that a theory is not the theory which you already accept a reliable means of determining that the theory is false?
Quoting gurugeorge
Here is the simple reason to doubt the ordinary story which I have stressed already. The ordinary story includes the proposition that some things exist unperceived. There is no reliable method at all, for determining whether the paper in the drawer exists unperceived, and this same problem occurs for the vast majority of objects we perceive. In that way, the belief that things exist unperceived is sheer speculation. This doesn't depend on the argument from illusion.
You have conflated the problem I raised with the Cartesian evil demon/ Brain-in-a-vat/matrix problem. The problems are not the same at all, which is clear in the OP, or so I thought. The Cartesian problem requires one of two things. Either, you have to use a stronger definition of knowledge than mere de facto reliability or you can keep the reliabilist conception of knowledge and then have to assume that we are trapped behind a veil of perception. But I am not trying to discuss that problem, and my OP contained neither of those assumptions.
PA
Ah, I remember now, haven't we been through all this before? :D
In that case, IIRC my counter-argument was that while you can't perceive things that are unperceived, you can perceive things that prove beyond reasonable doubt that things presently unperceived exist unperceived by you. Remember my camera arguments? Well - camera in the drawer ;)
You're not familiar with cosmology, are you?
I'm familiar with the speed of light being a constant against which measurements of length and time are made across different inertial frames. Note the taking into account different observers making measurements.
I'm also aware that GR accounts for gravity across the cosmos and throughout time.
Mathematical equations are meaningless symbolics until observations are substituted for variables.
Symbolics are meaningless. I could write this if I wanted:. %*&6&_*"+6. So what?
Symbols are tools that are invented by the Mind. They are used by the Mind to solve practical problems. The Mind invents new symbols when needed to help solve new problems (mathematics is an invention to represent patterns). The Mind makes observations and uses the tools it invented to solve problems. There is always some Mind (perspective) involved when observing and trying to understand or predict behavior(habits) in the universe.
What I should have said about your camera argument is this. It is true that I can put the camera in the drawer and take a picture and then view the picture. And you are right to think that this is a reliable method of figuring out whether the paper exists in the drawer when I am not looking. But what does it really show? It shows that the paper exists when photographed. Well alright. Lets grant that we can reliably establish that the paper exists when perceived and when photographed. What about when the paper is unperceived and unphotographed? After taking the picture I take the camera out of the drawer and sit on the couch to view the photo. I can see that the paper existed when the camera took its picture, but does the paper exist now? The camera is nothing more than an extension of the times at which I can view the paper; it cannot show that the paper exists unviewed tout court
What I should have realized before was that the spirit of Idealism as it was expressed by W T Stace isn't merely that when I am not literally looking at the paper, there is no way to tell whether it exists. Rather, when I normally suppose that the paper exists when unperceived, I suppose that it exists in such a way that its existence outstrips any mode of observation. Stace's Idealism springs from the claim that there is no way to reliably determine that this supposition is true.
There is another issue which springs to mind as well, but I'd like to proceed somewhat slowly if you are willing, and see what you make of these reflections first.
PA
What if you had a camera take a picture of the paper every nanosecond while it's in the drawer, and send that image to be processed by some software elsewhere. If the software sees that the image is a paper, it wires a cent to your bank account.
You step out of the room and check your account a minute later and notice that it's gone up by millions of dollars. The paper, drawer, camera and software doing paper detection and money wiring are all unperceived, but your bank account gains a lot of money very quickly, which if you calculated the time it took for the image to be taken, sent, processed and your count accredited would come out to having a picture taken every nanosecond by that camera with that software on the server it runs on at that time with your internet connection (the images would be buffered as they arrived, waiting for the software to check them).
Would that not establish the existence of the unperceived paper, at least every nanosecond (or however many nanoseconds got turned into cents)?
The point is that the perceived world is influenced by the unperceived world. You can't just say the rest of the world only exists when perceived given the way the world hangs together. The reason being that the perceived part of the world is being influenced by the unperceived world in countless ways.
That's why I said the world could be depicted by math. E=MC^2 means that the amount of energy in certain amount of mass is equal to that mass times the speed of light squared. That applies to any matter/energy conversion across space and time.
Quoting Rich
Yes, but you're conflating how we know and represent things with the world itself. Are stars and galaxies dependent on telescopes and the software that processes those images? Of course not. That's just how modern astronomy gathers astronomical data.
Epistemology is not ontology.
Know gets a bit complex here.
But it was suggested that I ask what reasons you have to doubt such things?
What reason is there to doubt that the coffee I just made is still on the kitchen bench where I left it? I can't see it, and there is no one else out there...
Doubt needs reasons, too.
Are you claiming though, for example, that the principles of aeronautical engineering are actually different in each aeronautical engineer's understanding, or merely that each engineer's understanding is different in having its own individual ways of representing and comprehending the principles, and also in being more or less comprehensive?
That's true, but the salient question, given that objects always seem to remain reliably where we last encountered or put them is whether, in light of that obvious fact, it is more plausible to think that they persist regardless of whether we are perceiving them, or to think that they do not. For sure there can be no absolute proof, no absolute certainty; but why does that matter to you?
Yes it would establish that the paper exists every nano second that it is photographed. But this wouldn't exhaust the content of what I believe about the paper. I don't just believe that if you took a picture of the paper every nanosecond it would be there, or that if I took the picture and the paper was there then a cent would transfer into my bank account. I believe further that even if you remove the camera and never take another picture of the paper again, the paper still exists in the drawer, unperceived and unphotographed. And this has yet to be established.
Quoting Banno
The reason for the doubt is the one I stated in the OP. That is, the existence of the coffee when unperceived is something that nobody has any reliable means of determining to be true. No reliable means at all. The belief is (apparently) akin to the belief that there is a unicorn on mars. There is just no reliable way to tell. Is that not reason enough for doubt? (Incidentally, I am hoping that the belief about the coffee is not like the unicorn on mars belief, and that it can be reliably determined, but I've yet to see how it could be).
Quoting Janus
Certainty doesn't matter to me at all. Any reliable means of determining that things exist unperceived is fine with me. It doesn't have to be a perfect method or a guaranteeing method or what have you. Just a plain old trustworthy method that gets things right more often than not.
The question is, what do you mean by "plausible"? If you mean, is it more psychologically convincing, yes it is. But what is that worth? Or what else could be meant by 'plausible'?
Best,
PA
When you use the word mean, that brings the mind into it, and that brings perspective. To you it means one thing. To someone else it means something else.
Basically, so what?
Is the argument that we don't have any reason to think it true, and therefore it is false? But that's obviously invalid.
The coffee was particularly pleasant. If I had decided to doubt it's existence, it would probably have gone cold before I re-discovered it.
Again, since I had no reason to doubt that it was still on the bench, things turned out well.
Now if i had gone out and not found it on the bench, then I would have had reason for further enquiry. But it remains irrational to doubt without reason.
So, the belief that the coffee exists unperceived isn't one that can be reliably established by any method at all. It is like the belief that there is a unicorn on mars. Even despite this, you don't see the problem. Unless someone can give you an argument that the coffee doesn't exist unperceived then, regardless of the fact that the view that it does so exist is pure speculation, you continue to hold that belief. I am not sure how to respond to this. I suppose we have a difference in values. You are happy with speculation as long as there is no evidence against the speculation in question. I insist on having a reliable method of determining that the belief is true.
I don't know how I could get you to see things my way. One thought which comes to mind is that if you are happy with speculation in the absence of counter evidence, then any and every speculation no matter how wild is acceptable. I am beyond criticism in holding that there is a unicorn on mars; beyond criticism in holding that great warriors go to Valhalla upon death; beyond criticism in holding that a meteor will strike the earth tomorrow and obliterate the entire of the UK. After all, there will be no difference in evidence between these beliefs and the belief that the coffee exists unperceived. Obviously this won't suffice as a proof that you are wrong, since if you have the strength of your conviction, you will just accept these consequences. Still, I think they are odd consequences.
Best,
PA
It isn't like a belief in a unicorn on mars at all. We do have good reasons for thinking objects exist unperceived:
1. They're still around when we do perceive them again.
2. They can undergo change in our absence.
3. They can influence things we do perceive.
4. The perceived world is dependant on the unperceived for being the way it is.
5. We have no reason to suppose that things stop existing when we're not around.
A unicorn on mars doesn't fit any of that. It's like saying we have no reason to think unperceived paper doesn't turn into a unicorn or teleport itself to Mars. Why must it not exist? Why not anything fanciful? We're not perceiving the paper, so it could be anything or anywhere in addition to not existing, logically speaking.
Why is your doubt fixated on non-existence instead of any of an infinite number of unperceived scenarios?
Well, 1 doesn't entail that things exist unperceived. So what is the inference from 1 to the view that things exist unperceived? You haven't said, and I keep trying to get you to tell me. I suspect you want to give an inference to the best explanation, but you shy away from doing this in any degree of detail, which is what is problematic.
2 blatantly presupposes that things exist unperceived. I observe a fire burning. I go away and come back later. I observe a burnt out fire. These events are only connected as 1 fire undergoing change on the assumption that the fire exists unperceived and the law of causation operates unperceived, and this is what has to be proven.
3 equally presupposes the view that things exist unperceived. I don't at present perceive the sun, but it is partially responsible for the present temperature in this room, so the story goes. But that story obviously is not a proof of, but assumes, that the sun exists unperceived and, again, that causation operates unperceived, and these need to be proven. Now, I don't suppose that there is no way at all of making something like 2 and 3 into an argument, but what you have suggested won't do. We need to start with a non-question begging account of the observations which make us think that 2 and 3 are true, and perhaps we can infer that they are true from those observations. But 2 and 3 can hardly be the argument, since they presuppose the view in question.
5 doesn't entail the view that things exist unperceived either. So what is the inference from 5 to the view that things exist unperceived? You haven't said.
Best,
PA
That everything is connected to everything else, so all the examples given here of things that are unperceived, followed by the question 'do they then exist?' are not unperceived. They are perceived, so the question is moot.
Well, no. If there is reason to think the speculation wild, there is reason to doubt it.
Thankfully speculation about my coffee not existing was subsequently shown to be false.
The fact that things are generally where we expect them to be is as reliable a means as you can get. What more reliable kind of means can you imagine might be available?
You must either act as if the paper will still be there when you re-open the drawer or not. If you have an important document which will lose you your job should it be lost, do you keep it in vision at all time, set a camera up next to it to photograph it every nanosecond to ensure it remains in existence? No, you simply act as if it will continue to exist unperceived, and this works. You cannot not act, there is no 'wait and see' option, so scepticism doesn't help us here, you must choose one behaviour or another.
The important job having been done, you can tell whatever story you like to yourself about why the paper turned out to still be in the drawer when you came back to it, so long as that story provides you with useful predictions about how to act in future. If you choose to believe that the paper simply carries on as it were even whilst you're not looking, that works, because it provides the useful prediction that if we were to go to that drawer at any point in time, the paper would be there. If you want to tell yourself that an absolutely reliable and 100% consistent demon puts the paper back every time anyone or any thing tries to perceive it, then that's fine too as it provides you with the same useful predicting power.
What's not fine is if you tell the story that a real evil demon, a capricious wilful demon, puts the paper back whenever you look at it. That provides you with the very unhelpful prediction that its re-existence when you come to look at it again can't be trusted, that valuable objects must be constantly observed lest they fail to re-exist when we need them. It leads to the very unhelpful prediction that we cannot chart a rocket to the moon simply on the basis of our mathematical assumptions about where it is, because it might well have simply dropped out of existence since we last observed it.
Hume's problem of induction aside, this is the difficulty with your approach, it becomes an entirely semantic, story-telling exercise. There is no utility to the result. Whatever the reason, we experience that the paper does indeed, reliably re-exist when we open the drawer. Whatever the reason for this, it is entirely consistent and reliable. So tell yourself whatever story about it you like, so long as it does not contradict the evidence we have. If you think you have a story that will provide predictions that are different from the standard model then think of a way of testing it, but I'm not sure what value you're seeing in pointing out that we could use different words to describe the phenomenon we experience.
Again, I'd go back to the deeper sorts of arguments I put forth in our previous discussions. If you're accepting that what you're doing when you've got object x in view truly is that thing we normally call "perception" or "observation", whether mediate (camera, videocamara) or immediate (MK-1 eyeball), then plumping for calling what you're doing "perceiving object x" in the immediate case carries with it your implicit acceptance of whole backstory about physical objects in causal concatenation, such that they can't just pop into and out of existence.
In that case, the camera/video evidence ought to be good enough to prove the object's existence outside your present eyeballing. If you then want to check the video, that too is subject to doubt and the possibility of error (perhaps a mischievous friend is interjecting a false feed), but then in the same sense, so was your initial eyeballing perception (subject to errors of illusion, etc.).
On the other hand, if you want to strip away all presuppositions and go the non-dual/Ernst Mach route, as above, and you're contemplating present experience as a you-know-not-what, then the thing that's happening right now in and as present experience has no name, and it's not perception or observation either. It's not even experience, the blandest possible thing you could normally call it. The seeming of an "object x" in it, carries no connotation of existence or nonexistence outside of just being part of that "subjective" (again, problematic, because normally working in tandem with "objective") kaleidoscope hanging in the void, it doesn't even carry any connotation of existence outside perception (external existence) while you're perceiving it, far less while it's not in view.
You get out what you put in, GIGO. Strip away all presuppositions, then you can easily get the universal doubt, but at the cost of not being able to call the thing you departed from in your investigations "perception." The stripping away of presuppositions works hand and hand with the degree of universality of doubt, they're just two sides of the same coin.
Again, this is the core problem with Idealism and phenomenalism as I see it: they want to keep their cake and eat it. They want to call what's happening in the present moment "experience", "perception", "observation", etc., etc., but they want to retain universal doubt. But if you're universally doubting, then you can't call what's happening right now "perception", "experience", "observation" etc in the first place. But then as soon as you accept those terms, you implicitly accept the physical backstory, so there's no place for universal doubt any more.
To me, what no contributor to this thread sees is the foundational role of the observing mind in ascertaining what the term ‘existence’ means, for any object whatever. We have a native sense of the reality of the perceived universe, in fact for most of us the reality of the perceived universe is the very definition of what is real. But that forgets why the question is asked in the first place. The question can only arise on the basis of a deep sense that the perceptual domain, the common-sense world that we all take for granted, is not what it seems to be. That is the original motivation for scepticism and it is actually a deeply unsettling realisation.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2009-06-quantum-mysticism-forgotten.html#jCp
The act whereby any judgement is made about what exists - whether a piece of paper or anything else - is part of that process of ‘making physical reality meaningful’. That’s the sense in which we live in a meaning-world, not a world of objects as such. There are objects, but the nature of their reality is imputed by the observing mind on the basis of perception, sensation, judgement, and the rest. But, as I think has become clear through physics itself, objects have no absolute or intrinsic reality, as to all intents they are endlessly divisible. What they ultimately are, if anything, is still the subject of a vexed debate in physics over the nature of matter (which is the subject of the investigation by the most expensive, largest and most complex apparatus in history.)
So the reason idealism is significant, is to remind us that knowledge is always conditional, dependent, and in some sense subjective. Not in the sense of there being simply no objective truth, but that there is no ultimately objective truth.
That's a really excellent critique. It undermines much of the bite of the hardcore idealist means of arguing where it's just one experience followed by another and nothing can be said of what happens in between.
But this conflates epistemology with ontology. Just because there is a process by which we come to know about the world doesn't mean the world is constituted of that process.
We can analogize this to modern astronomy where sophisticated telescopes feed data to software that produces results for astronomers to analyze. There is a process in constructing knowledge of the cosmos.
But that doesn't mean the cosmos is therefore constructed by telescopes and software! It's a fallacious move to make. This is where Stove's worst argument gets it right.
This view, that "everything is connected" blatantly assumes that things exist unperceived. Take the drone of an electric motor example. When I hear the noise, if I come to believe that anything more than the noise exists at that time I will have to assume that the cause of the noise exists unperceived, since the noise and the motor are not the same thing. By what argument can I move from the noise to the motor?
Even if this difficulty can be worked out, it is of no use in coming to know that the paper in the drawer exists unperceived, since none of the paper's effects are perceived either.
Quoting Banno
How was it shown to be false? You went and looked at the coffee? This establishes that the coffee exists when you looked the first time, and that it exists when you look the second time. It doesn't establish that the coffee existed in between, when you weren't looking. I have been pointing this out since the very beginning.
Quoting Janus
As I have said to Banno, perceive the piece of paper as many times as you like, this is never sufficient to show that it exists unperceived. Perception is only a reliable guide to things that are actually perceived, and obviously nothing is ever perceived while unperceived. So in answer to your question, any actually reliable method would be what I imagine available - not a method for which it is contradictory to suppose it could reveal the alleged fact.
Quoting Pseudonym
They aren't 'merely different words', since there is an obvious difference between something existing at a time, T and something not existing at that time. Thus, there is an obvious difference between something existing at some time, T, when unperceived, and that things not existing at T, when unperceived. That you think that the two hypotheses have no difference in meaning because they have no difference in empirical predications is the result of your Verificationism, but there is no reason to think that Verificationism is the correct account of meaning, and in fact many reasons to think that it isn't, which by now are very well known. One of these is the one which the Verificationists themselves raised, which is that Verificationism has no conditions of verification and thus is, by its own lights, meaningless. But I'm sure you have heard this before.
Quoting gurugeorge
Quoting gurugeorge
Are you saying that there is no understanding of 'perception' which doesn't entail that the thing perceived exists unperceived? If so, some of the modern theories of physics are literally incoherent. Does Schrodinger's cat exist when unobserved? Well, you would have to say, it follows from the meaning of the word "observed" that it must exist unobserved, and any attempt to doubt this means that you can't meaningfully say that you ever "observed" the cat.
Moreover, if it were so, then there would never be a need for me to check whether something I saw earlier is still there now. It would make no sense, for example, to see a sand castle at T1 and then wonder later about whether it exists when you are in the coffee shop, or whether it has blown away in the wind. I can just say "well, it follows from the meaning of the word 'perceived' that the sand castle I perceived earlier must still exist". It is plain as day to me that my own ordinary understanding of the word 'perceived' entails only that the thing perceived must exist at the moment I am perceiving it. It says nothing about any other moment.
Another point to make is that your view about the ordinary meaning of "perceived" is an empirical hypothesis. It says that ordinary members of the population use the word "perceived" such that perceiving X entails that X exists unperceived. Recent experimental philosophy has made it clear that ordinary language users don't always agree with philosophers about what a word means and made even more clear that the best way to figure out what ordinary words mean isn't just to take a guess from the armchair, or even to talk with other philosophers about what it is 'intuitive to say'. The best way to find out is to actually go out and ask questions to ordinary folk which indicate the meanings of their words (you could see, for example, any study by Stich, Machery or Weinberg). Hence, my suggestion is that we cannot really tell whether the ordinary meaning of 'perceived' is what you say it is, or even that there is a ordinary meaning.
Even if the ordinary meaning of 'perceived' were as odd as you suppose it to be, I don't think that is of any importance at all. I would simply reformulate in new terms. I held previously that humans have two reliable sources of belief about the present and future (memory has to be included for the past, but this can be omitted for now): perception and inference from sense perception. If perceiving X entails that X exists unperceived then I shall reformulate my view. Instead, I say that humans have two reliable sources of belief, Schmerception and inference from schmerception. Schmerception is what is happening when various properties and/or objects are brought before your conscious awareness. We could say that Schmerception 'gives' items to you in awareness. Schmerception doesn't entail that what is schmercieved exists when unschmercieved, since being consciously aware of some object or property at T does not entail that the object exists at any time T1, when it is not something you are consciously aware of. Perception is not, although I thought it was, a reliable way to learn about the world, since "perception" turns out to mean this odd and mysterious thing where perceiving something at one time entails that it must exist at other times. Perception, so understood, has nothing to do with my conscious awareness of the world, since that conscious awareness doesn't entail that the things I am aware of exist unperceived. I am not really sure that perception is, if that's what it means. Perhaps perception is just Schmerception of things which also exist when unschmercieved. Perhaps, but then the fundamental method of finding out about the world is schmerception, and perception is a thing I can do only if there are things which exist unschmercieved.
I understand the attempt which you are trying to make. You are trying the ever popular method of building our ordinary worldview into the meaning of our ordinary words. Doing this is supposed to make us feel better about those views. It is supposed to somehow prevent sceptical challenges to those views, since the sceptic will be unable to meaningfully state any challenge to those views using ordinary language. Thus, I can't meaningfully ask whether there is any reliable way to determine that things exist unperceived while using the ordinary notion of 'perceived'. The problem is, if I am really sceptical about ordinary views because those views don't meet a standard which I deem important (reliability), I won't be impressed by the thought that those views are built into my language. So what if they are built into my language? Other cultures use other languages and their language might not be such as to have my ordinary views build into it. If so, how can we reliably establish which culture is right? The appeal to language obviously won't do. This was made very clear in a paper by Stich entitled Reflective Equilibrium, Analytic Epistemology and The Problem of Cognitive Diversity.
Best,
PA
Sorry for skipping over you Moliere!
The method I am accepting is quite straight forward. When I look at the piece of paper its existence is something of which I am immediately aware. It is there right before me in conscious view. When this is so, I have reliably established that the paper exists. I am tempted by the thought that this is more than reliability, and more like certainty, but I feel like that might be problematic and so I hesitate. Let's just say that when the paper is right before my conscious view, it is more likely than not that the paper exists.
No, there is no difference to us, the observer. In order for your position to be tenable, the paper's lack of existence has to make no difference at all because if it made a difference we would know it was still there by the difference it makes.
There are plenty of good counters to the argument against verificationism, but that would be completely off topic. What would be on topic would be if you could provide a quick outline of what it means to you. What would it mean to you if you had it proven either way?
Do you consider the scientific method to be "reliable" in the sense you describe above? If yes, then it seems you could stake a claim to "knowing" that objects exist unperceived on the basis that it is assumed by the models of classical physics.
Wayfarer is quite right here, which is why the following statement misses the point about idealism:
Quoting gurugeorge
Idealists do not dispute the existence of objects, they simply give a unique answer to the question of what objects are. Instead of being a collection of mind-independent bits of physical matter, the idealist will say that objects of experience depend upon the mind for their content (an epistemological claim) or that they are ideas in the mind, whether my mind, other people's, or God's (an ontological claim). The idealist, in other words, is not committed to the notion that our knowledge of objects is illusory, i.e. unreal. They are real, but their reality is in some sense dependent on the mental or composed of the mental.
Yes, they are real in the sense they are vibrating waves that are forming patterns probably similar to a holographic pattern. But that is all they are. The mind forms shape and qualia as it senses the patterns. What I might sense actually may be quite different from what someone else might sense, but the underlying pattern we are both sensing is the same. As an example, the holographic pattern formed by the interference pattern is nothing like the image that is seen once a reconstructive wave is passed through it. Our brain is creating these reconstructive waves?
Three holographic model of the universe is being embraced by many physicists:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2824/subjective-realism-in-a-holographic-universe#Item_1
Previously you said this:
Quoting PossibleAaran
There is no knowledge of the world apart from perception. How could there be? So, if perception, in the cumulative, rather than in the immediate, sense, doesn't tell us that objects exist apart from perception; what else could? So, perception and the understandings that develop naturally from perception constitute the only possible "plain, old trustworthy method" when it comes to the kinds of questions you are asking. To be blunt, I think this line of enquiry is a complete waste of time.
Even perceiving the piece of paper is insufficient to convince some folk that it exists - they suggest brain vats and daemons and such.
What you are convinced by, and what you believe, are up to you. If you refuse to believe that the cup was still in the kitchen that's entirely up to you.
Be aware of what your rejection of such obvious stuff tells us about you. You are one step away from Bedlam. Given your opinion on such arguments as this, we should take care with whatever else you say.
You are following a classic philosophical garden path. It leads to much more poor thinking.
So why should we pay you any attention?
The problem is that if objects exist in God; then that is a mind-independent existence, and objects do exist when we are not perceiving them, just as surely as they would if they were merely brute physically existent objects. In fact, under that view, to be a physically existent objects just is to be an idea in God. God thinks the world, including us, into existence according to Berkeley.
How is that any different from saying that when you see a table in front of you, you 'blatantly' assume that the table exists - that you assume that there is a cause of the visual sensation that you have of a certain shape, because the visual sensation and the table are not the same thing? By what argument can you move from the visual sensation to the table?
Taking that approach, one has to conclude that every non-mental thing is unperceived, because we only ever perceive the phenomenon, not the noumenon 'behind' it.
(Y)
Quoting Marchesk
Fair comment, but ‘whatever it is constituted of’ remains something observed. You’re still instinctively perceiving the question from the realist perspective but that perspective is also a mind-map, a representation, within which there are ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’.
Quoting Janus
Inference from sense perception.
Quoting Banno
I know some folk say "well but what if we are brains in a vat", and this possibility is supposed to be an obstacle to my knowledge that there is a piece of paper at the very moment when I am looking at it. Those arguments always assume either (a) a very high standard of knowledge - either absolute certainty or proof from no assumptions, or (b) the veil of perception doctrine. Assuming that we aren't adopting a very high standard, but are sticking to simple de facto reliability, I say that brain-in-a-vat arguments will always presuppose the veil of perception doctrine, and that doctrine is false. Once that is put aside, there is no issue with knowing that there is a piece of paper. The piece of paper is immediately there before my consciousness. When I can see the paper so plainly and clearly in good light at a reasonable distance, I can reliably determine that it is there. I am aware that there are sceptics who question the reliability of sense perception, but I don't do so in this thread. I grant the reliability of sense perception with respect to things perceived, and I say even still there is a difficulty - which I have tried to bring out.
Quoting Banno
Take care what PossibleAaran says - he's a real crackpot! Anyway, it isn't 'obvious stuff' at all, except in the weak sense that you and I both believe it with conviction. I asked what reliable method there was for determining it to be true. I still haven't been told what that method is.
Quoting Banno
I never called you a dullard, nor even implied it, and I never maintained that we can't prove anything.
No one is forcing you into this thread Banno. If you don't think the topic is worthy of discussion, you don't have to discuss it. If you think people who discuss it are poor thinkers on their way to bedlam; or crackpots whom you should pay no mind; or worse still, neophytes who aren't as wise as you; there are plenty of other interesting threads.
Quoting andrewk
Thanks for this Andrewk. I think this is an important topic.
You are assuming the veil of perception in these remarks. When the table is in front of me, it is given to my conscious awareness, or more plainly, [I]I see it[/I]. I don't merely assume it to be so. Assuming that sense perception is reliable, I can reliably tell that it is there. My point in the OP is that, [i]even assuming[/I] that all of our usual methods are reliable, there is still no way to tell that anything exists unperceived. So that's the difference.
That you have assumed a veil of perception is shown by your thought that the table is the "cause of my visual sensation of a certain shape". I don't see a visual sensation of a certain shape. I see a table and the mental process I undergo in seeing it is called a visual experience. And again in your last sentence, "every non-mental thing is unperceived, because we only ever perceive the phenomenon, not the noumenon behind it". But the whole sentence is a mistake, because I can perceive tables and tables aren't mental. There is no noumenon 'behind' the thing which I see, because the thing I see isn't just a picture on a mental screen behind which may or may not be the 'real' table. The veil of perception doctrine - a fascinating doctrine held by many great philosophers. I think it was Austin who said in another context, "it is a very great mistake, and it took a very great philosopher to make it". I apologize if these remarks come across as only cursory. I am happy to have a more lengthy discussion of the veil of perception if you want to defend it, or if you think you haven't presupposed it in the above remarks. For now I am just pointing out what I take to be the difference between scepticism about the objects of sense perception in general and scepticism about things which exist unperceived. The former requires the veil of perception doctrine. The latter doesn't.
Best,
PA
I italicised your error.
What you are doing is asking for a justification for your belief, and following each suggestion with "But I am still not convinced".
Your failure to be convinced is not our problem.
So, what difference does that qualification make?
I am not assuming anything. I'm asking whether you regard seeing something as perceiving it, but do not regard hearing something as perceiving it. That seems to be implied by your statement (at the top of this post: ) that we do not perceive a motor that we hear, but that we do perceive a table that we see.
If that is your position, do you think it stands up to scrutiny? I wonder what a blind person would think about the suggestion that they don't perceive anything.
If that is not your position then which side would you alter? Would you agree that we do perceive things that we hear, or that we don't perceive things that we see. I can see no other way out of the difficulty, than one of those two options, although I am open to suggestions.
In the philosophy which has nowadays been designated ‘hylomorphic dualism’, particular beings are the union of form (which is intelligible) and matter (which is accidental). So to truly know something is to understand its form, which is what makes it real (the ‘esse’ of the being). That act of intellectual apprehension is to understand its ideal nature.
However Kant’s use of the term ‘noumenon’ was inconsistent, and whether ‘the thing in itself’ and ‘the ideal form’ are the same or different is a bit unclear. And also, the word is not at all related to ‘numinous’, with which it is often confused, but which is derived from a different root altogether.
@AndrewK - the question I have for you is, is ‘the real table’ the cause of ‘the perception of the table’? If that is so, how do you distinguish them? How can you demonstrate what ‘the real table’ is, as distinct from the perception of the table which you and I have, when we look at it?
No it's not. They exist outside of my mind, true (which is why Berkeleyanism isn't solipsism), but they still exist in a mind, namely, the mind of God.
But is immediacy really important for determining the existence of things reliably?
Perhaps for you it is... still, it seems to me that doubting the existence of the paper I put in my desk vs. the paper I have in my hand isn't really much different. That is, the likelihood of one isn't more likely than the other. The paper in my hand could very well be a dream paper, after all, which doesn't exist. But it can seem very real. The possibility of error -- the probability -- is close enough to the same (I'm not sure how we could even come up with an actual number here, but just by judgment on my part) that there isn't a difference.
If it is certainty though, wouldn't the persistence of objects without perception be just as certain too? Depends on how you go about thinking of certainty, of course. But if certainty differs from probability, at least, as it would seem to when you're making a distinction, what kind of certainty would actually make the existence of the perceived any more certain that the existence of objects after they have been perceived?
Not sure how you can accept chemistry as scientifically valid without conceding the existence of the atomic world which makes the periodic table what it is. Same with the germ theory of disease, cell biology or neuroscience.
Sure, we have equipment that can make those things perceivable to us, but most of the time atoms, microbes and cells are unperceived. The molecules science says you are made might never have been perceived by anyone.
In one sense the question is meaningless in that we can't prove existence without perception. Look at ALL claims of existence we make of the world. They all require proof through perception/senses and their extensions, instruments. So, to remove perception from the meaning of existence seems to cut off the branch you're sitting on.
From another point of view the question is asking whether existence itself depends on perception. Do things cease to exist when we don't observe them? This is impossible to determine because, existence of an x requires perception of x. We haven't taken a single step from where we started.
This question is an unanswerable the way I see it.
Let me turn the tables and ask this ''can nonexistent things be perceived?'' This question exposes the limits of perception itself. Is perception a, as you put it, reliable method for judging existence? It isn't right? Radio waves can't be perceived through the senses. It takes instruments to detect them. Go a step further and we can raise doubts about the most complex instruments we've invented. So, no, our senses or instruments aren't very reliable methods for determining the existence of things.
So, your question looses some of its oomph in a manner of speaking. Why question existence based on perception, an unreliable method?
Oh yes, I agree, but the question is whether they can actually do that - whether a) they have good reason to doubt the usual backstory for objects, and/or b) whether it's even possible for them to coherently make the claim they think they're making.
Is there a distinction between something existing in God and existing in God's mind? Is God a mind or does he have a mind.
In any case the salient point of the idea of mind independence is independence from the human mind.
I think I would distinguish the table from my perception of it, but I don't think I would necessarily distinguish it from all perceptions of it. Maybe references to the table are to the set of all perceptions that ever occur of it, past, present and future, by anybody that ever perceives it.
I don't think one can sensibly talk about anything that is not mental, since the mental is all we can know, and all we can refer to. I don't go all the way with Berkeley in his proclamation that there is nothing non-mental, because to even state that proclamation requires that the notion of something mental mean something and I cannot see a way of making it mean something, whether to affirm it or deny it.
I like the idea that the table is a player in God's dreams. In most dreams it does not appear. In some dreams it is a bit player that is constructed, sat at and eaten upon, and finally broken up for firewood. But in one of the dreams it is the lead role - the first person experiencer.
But wait, you asked for a reliable method regardless of whether it could be proven to anyone or not. Now that one's been provided you're backpedalling!
Yes, the idealist can always find a way to make the evidence consistent with his/her position. That's an easy thing to do, as any conspiracy theorist well knows. It's certainly possible that objects pop in and out of existence in just such a way as to be consistent with the predictions of classical physics. Or maybe, just maybe, classical physics works so well precisely because its assumptions about macroscopic objects are accurate!
There's no strictly logical way to decide the matter, and reasonable people can disagree. We can start wheeling out concepts like "parsimony", "simplicity", "explanatory power" to argue our respective cases, but at the end of the day it really just comes down to aesthetics and choice. You seem to be haunted by the the prospect that you might be wrong. Get used to it. Such is life!
Invoking God to make idealism work because of epistemological concerns over unperceived objects is hugely inconsistent.
Berkeley, for one, does not do that, though. He provides arguments.
What sort of arguments does he provide for God's existence? That God is necessary for the tree to remain in the quad unperceived by us? How is that fundamentally different from saying the unperceived tree must exist?
Fine, enlighten me. What was Berkeley's argument for God's existence?
I agree that it would be more parsimonious simply to assume the independent existence of objects...unless you had other reasons to believe in God's existence.
I don't think that there can ever be reasons to believe in God's existence that are amenable to intersubjective corroboration, reasons, that is, that could persuade an impartial subject. On the other hand the same is probably true of the materialist thesis.
God is absolutely indispensable to Berkeley's idealism.
This is a discussion forum. You can't expect others to go read material in the middle of a discussion.
So, you're appealing to authority now? (Not that I think Schopenhauer is much of an authority!) In any case, what does "more or less" mean in this context?
Yes, but I in turn can expect that philosophers one hasn't read won't be rejected.
No God, no tree in the quad!
You can dispense with God, but subjective idealism loses the world when we're not looking, which Berkeley was concerned about.
I'm familiar with Berkeley's main arguments and what people have said about his using God, which is similar to what Descartes did. I guess you could claim that Descartes had some other reason than needing to be saved from his skeptical exercise.
Or you could just give me a brief summary of Berkeley's arguments for God.
I think Schopenhauer was a second-rate thinker because his philosophy is basically a rehash of Kant, coupled with a poor set of arguments that we know what the noumemon is; that it must be undifferentiated; that it must be Will, must be unknowing, and so on. I think he read the Upanishads too much, and read too much into them.
I just got done telling you I don't have one to give and don't have the time to go and do that properly. I mean, you could try Google and find something like this: http://faculty.bsc.edu/bmyers/BerkeleyGod.htm. But I'm not in a position to assess those presentations' accuracy. The second argument in the link might be what you and John have in mind, but not the first, at least.
[quote=Bishop Berkeley]1) All ideas must be perceived.
2) Sensible objects are collections of ideas.
3) Objects continue to exist even when they are not perceived by any finite minds. 4) Therefore, there is a nonfinite spirit or mind which perceives objects.[/quote]
Materialists would agree with the bolded part. It's interesting because subjective idealists tend to disagree that objects continue to exist outside human/animal perception.
Now why would Berkeley be convinced that objects continue to exist, given that he was a subjective idealist?
They would, but Berkeley naturally wouldn't hold that they exist as matter. There is a reason why Berkeley called his position "immaterialism" not "idealism," though I think he's clearly an idealist of some kind.
[quote=Bishop Berkeley]a) Our ideas of sense must have a cause[/quote]
Because Berkeley ignores Hume's point, but many idealist love to use Hume's skepticism to undermine materialist arguments for causation.
Materialists would agree with this premise as well!
Question for anyone: how does Berkeley distinguish between other experiences and perception? Is my dream tree not an idea? Must ideas be public/intersubjective?
Anyway, from reading those two arguments, I think Berkeley would side with materialists over atheist subjective idealists if he was forced to choose between the two.
He seems to fundamentally agree that objects persist and have causes, both of which subjective idealists tend to deny.
It's more that some thinkers have greater originality, which means being less derivative, than others. But it's always going to come down to affinities. For example I find Hegel a far more interesting and penetrating thinker than Schopenhauer. He obviously drew upon Kant also, but redirected the sage of Konigsberg's philosophy onto much richer and more fruitful paths than Schopenhauer did, in my opinion.
In what way do you think " the ontological relationship between intellect and will he proposes is unique in the history of philosophy", and what are "the other doctrines and positions he advances" you refer to?
Hume said the intellect is slave to the passions; so the idea is hardly original. Schopenhaurer's aesthetics draws heavily on Kant. About the most interesting idea he had, in my view, is that (great) art reflects the forms, rather than merely imitating the sensory world (as Plato apparently thought). It's true he was greatly influenced by Eastern ideas, and his soteriology is not substantially different than Buddhist or Brahmanic soteriologies.
Anyway I'm not really interested in arguing over the respective greatness of philosophers; I acknowledge that it is a matter of taste, just as it is with artworks; so I was only expressing my own opinion of Schopenhauer's place in and importance to, the pantheon.
Oh come on, they were hardly positing the same thing.
Quoting Janus
Alright, as was I.
Why not? Just because Schopenhauer reified the passions as Will; whereas Hume did not? Schopenhauer also drew upon Spinoza's idea of conatus, I believe. And the idea of the striving of all against all, and nature as red in tooth and claw can also be found in Hobbes.
No, you can have specialized senses of "perception" but e.g. something like Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment based on possibilities opened up by scientific understanding (and anyway, it's not settled science yet, there are interpretations of the science that don't have any weird implications like the SC thought experiment does).
Quoting PossibleAaran
Those kinds of changes aren't related to perception but to the existence of objects already considered as part of the causal backstory to perception (e.g. things decay and get washed away, etc., but they don't pop out of existence when unperceived).
Quoting PossibleAaran
No, it's the perception that exists only while perceived. But the perception is not the thing perceived, the thing perceived is the thing perceived, and things perceived are such things as exist also while unperceived (and that can be checked by the numerous ordinary means).
Quoting PossibleAaran
I'm not sure what fallacy this is precisely, but it reminds me of the Continuum Fallacy, so I'll call it that :) No language (with the possible exceptions of French and made-up languages like Dothraki) has that kind of clear delineation, living languages are a resultant or precipitate, the result of human action but not of human design, and there are always individual and local variations, misunderstandings, outliers, edge cases, idiosyncratic usages (just as there are idiosyncratic pronunciations), but that doesn't mean there aren't relatively stable meanings everyone understands. If it weren't so it would be impossible to understand each other. As it is, it's only a problem now and then, when we might have to clarify some particular point, or define terms in a complicated discussion.
Quoting PossibleAaran
Again, this falls under the thing I was saying of painting yourself into a corner of your own making. Schmerception is a viable concept (it's actually the same as non-dual or "mystical" understanding or perhaps the radical empiricist view, that I mentioned in an earlier post), but Schmerception can't help itself to talk of "objects" and "properties" in the same way as perception would. For example: how do you know you can legitimately draw inferences from Schmerception? The game of drawing inferences from perception depends on the causal backstory of a world that exists unperceived, but if you've taken away that presupposition to give you Schmerception, then you've also left open to question the idea that you can "reliably" draw infererences from it. So paradoxically, your effort to get better reliability has led to greater doubt!
Quoting PossibleAaran
No, it's not that, it's not that you can't challenge the view, it's that you're not giving any good reason to doubt the view. You're not actually presenting a sceptical challenge. The idea that things might pop out of existence when unperceived is just an imaginary notion, there's no reason whatsoever to take it seriously, and all the reasons we do have mitigate against it.
Quoting PossibleAaran
What are you talking about? Perception is the very standard of reliability, there is no other, better standard; you certainly don't know whether Schmerception would be any better!
If you're not sure whether something exists unperceived by you, then (with increasing degrees of rigour) ask a friend, or do the camera test, or a video test, or if you're really doubtful (perhaps you suspect someone's jockeyed with the video feed) you can do a more sophisticated sort of scientific test. That's precisely the sort of area where "reliable" lives.
Quoting PossibleAaran
All languages are guaranteed to have some basic ideas built in, because human beings have evolved from creatures that had to embody an answer to the basic features of the world, and that just gets carried over to language. Language isn't all that relative - it's the same as the argument above, yes there are differences and idiosyncracies, and different ways different languages handle things, but any language that didn't have the basic causal backstory would lead to the humans using it not surviving to reproduce.
I didn't ask for a justification, if that means some proof from premises which I accept. I asked for someone to tell me a story such that, if true, the belief that things exist unperceived was produced by a reliable method or process - a method or process which makes it objectively likely that things exist unperceived. Any story will do, so long as you can convince yourself that it is actually true. You can postulate a special magical faculty deep in your brain that allows you insight into the unobservable, if you can convince yourself that you have such a faculty.
I didn't say I'm not convinced that things exist unperceived either. As it happens I am convinced of it.
Quoting Janus
Induction, deduction and inference to the best explanation vastly increase our knowledge beyond mere perception.
Quoting andrewk
I see your point. Previously I maintained that hearing the motor was not sufficient for reliably detecting its existence. I should not have maintained that. Still, that I hear the motor only establishes that it exists when heard. The paper in my drawer is not heard.
Quoting Moliere
What is the difference between a merely dreamt tree and a real tree? I think the answer is two-fold. First, a real tree is a tree which can be perceived by other people, and second, a real tree is a tree which exists even when I am not aware of it. The tree that I see when dreaming cannot be seen by other people and exists only when I am seeing it. When I wake up, the dream tree no longer exists. Now your other question:
Quoting Moliere
While an object is being perceived I am directly aware of it. When I am directly aware of P I am - to say the very least - in a good position to tell that P exists. When I am no longer perceiving P, how can I reliably tell that P is still there?
Quoting Marchesk
Didn't we already go over this Marchesk? The existence of atoms can be inferred from things which can be perceived. This suffices to establish that atoms exist whenever we observe ordinary objects like trees, tables and the like. Do the atoms exist when we don't perceive the tree? If they did, the tree would also exist unperceived, since the atoms compose the tree. But my question all along has been how this can be known, even assuming all of our usual methods of confirming things.
Quoting Aaron R
Perhaps. That sounds like quite a strong argument to me. One issue which I am thinking of is this. Classical Physics can be interpreted in an Idealist fashion, so as not to posit anything which exists unperceived. Doing so would not conflict with any of the available evidence. Presumably then, the Idealist interpretation of classical physics would work just as well as the Realist one would. It is just a contingent truth that we happen to use the Realist interpretation. But then, couldn't this argument of yours be made in favour of Idealism? The fact that the Idealist interpretation works so well is best explained by the hypothesis that it is correct - that things do not exist unperceived. That sounds like just as strong an argument to me. Unless, in some sense, the Realist interpretation [I]works better[/I] than the Idealist one. I can't see what sense of 'works better' would be involved though.
Quoting Aaron R
Not at all.
I think our discussion has spun off in too many different directions to be useful. I'll try to simplify, if you will follow me in this. Imagine a dialogue between you and I:
PA: What reliable method is there for determining that things exist unperceived?
GG: If you want to know whether a piece of paper in the drawer exists when you aren't perceiving it, put a camera in the drawer and take a picture.
PA: A camera is an extension of perception. Your camera procedure shows that the paper exists when photographed. Does the paper exist when unperceived and un-photographed? How can [I]that[/I] be reliably determined?
[B] I am not sure what you would say at this juncture. Here are some of the things you have said (Or I have interpreted you as saying). I don't know which, if any, fits at this point[/b]:
GG1: It is part of the meaning of "perceived" that things perceived always exist unperceived.
GG2: Things perceived do exist when unperceived (and that can be checked by the camera test).
GG3: Perception is the very standard of reliability. Perception and other ordinary procedures like the camera test are "where reliability lives".
GG4: The idea that things might not exist when unperceived is just an imaginary notion. There is no reason to think that it is true, and all the reasons we do have (the camera test) militate against it.
Which of these would you insert in our dialogue, if any? Would you insert something different, or some combination of them?
On your other point about language. I agree that language in ordinary use does not usually have very precise meanings. I also agree that there are relatively stable meanings of words, at least, if we confine ourselves to specific groups of people or cultures. Remember, it is you that insists on the empirical hypothesis that the ordinary meaning of "perceive" entails that things perceived also exist unperceived. It is you that thinks ordinary language is very clear on at least that one point. I am simply pointing out that this is an empirical hypothesis which you have given no evidence for. You have simply assumed that this is part of the ordinary meaning of "perceived" as most people use it, perhaps because that is how you use the word.
To all I am thinking at this point that it is not as clear as I had hoped what the question is that I am asking. I am thinking that perhaps putting the point in terms of "reliability" is not as helpful as I thought it would be. I will try to think of another way to frame the issue. I am open to suggestions.[/b]
Best,
PA
It is though, as I explained in this post (which was on page 2 of 9, so it's understandable that it has been forgotten).
The resonance of your footsteps on the floor, and even the micro-audible vibration of the desk as air moves over it, will differ according to how many pieces of paper are in the desk drawer.
In order to talk about things that may have no effect at all on your sensory organs, you need to at the minimum change the focus to objects outside your past light cone, which means objects in distant outer space. There are difficulties there as well, but they are different difficulties.
There are certainly differences, but I think that misses the point of the dream scenario. The point of the dream scenario, here, is to show that we can believe that what we percieve is real when, in fact, it is not.
So the dream-tree does not exist, even when I am seeing it. It is a dream. It doesn't pop in and out of existence. It never existed ever. Yet, upon my perception of it, I certainly believed it to be real.
So our perception of things is not infallible, at least, when it comes to determining if something exists or does not exist.
If you insist on the dream being real, then consider hallucinations, mirages, delusions, and so forth. Our perceptions are surely not infallible when it comes to determining if something is real or not.
This isn't to claim the part of a skeptic, but to point out that what you already accept as reliable is basically just as reliable as having seen something.
I'd say that if you have seen something you are aware of it. When I park a car in a garage and close the door I am aware that my car is in the garage. Something may have happened in the meantime. And I may have been dreaming. But because I have seen where I put my car I am in a good position to tell that it exists because I am aware of its existence.
The difference is that the idealist accepts beliefs that prima facie contradict the assumptions made in the model itself. The realist will argue that the simplest meta-level hypothesis is that the model works because the assumptions are really true. The idealist has a number of interesting responses that they can give to this. As we've discussed, I'm not suggesting that the realist can wield the scientific method to disprove idealism because strictly speaking the scientific method does not "prove" or "disprove" anything at all. If you are looking for a reliable method that can be used to draw conclusions that only the realist can accept, then I believe you are indeed out of luck. The idealist can add meta-level hypotheses to any theory in order to make it consistent with idealism.
That's true, but all are founded on perception. I think the problem you are having in seeing this is that you are thinking of perception in its singular immediate sense, rather than its multiple, cumulative sense.
Ah yes, I remember you saying this before. I find that an interesting idea, but there are some issues. Stick with the paper example. Let's agree that the resonance of my footsteps on the floor will differ depending on whether or not there is a paper in the drawer. Well, then I could use specialized equipment to measure the resonance of my footsteps on the floor, and I could infer from observations about the resonance that there must be a paper in the drawer (this argument would be quite complicated I take it, but let's assume for now that it could be worked out cogently). Well that would certainly establish that the paper exists when I am observing those resonances, but clearly I am not always observing them. I am not observing them now, for example. My sensory faculties just aren't refined enough to detect them. Does the paper exist when I'm not observing the resonances? A further inference still seems to be needed.
Quoting Moliere
I am not sure about this, but it is interesting to think about.
Take the dream tree, does it exist? Well, if it doesn't exist then what is it that you are aware of when dreaming? Nothing? But it sure seems like you are aware of something doesn't it? Some qualities are there before your consciousness are they not? If I were to ask you about the dream tree, couldn't you tell me about it? You could tell me "it had a trunk 500 metres high and purple leaves", for example. If you told me that, you would be describing what you were aware of when you dreamt, and you couldn't do that if there were [I]nothing you were aware of[/I] when you dreamt, could you? This is what leads me to insist that the dream tree does exist and that the only difference between it and a real tree is that a real tree can be perceived by others and exists unperceived also. In fact, I would go as far as to say that what I mean by "real tree" is " a tree that can be perceived by others and which exists even when no one is perceiving it".
Our perceptions aren't infallible. I can make mistakes in perception, as when I think that a tree is 'real' but it isn't. But what this mistake amounts to is that I thought the tree was such that it could be seen by others and existed even unperceived, and I was wrong on both counts. But, even when I was hallucinating, I couldn't be mistaken that I was seeing a tree - even if it turned out to be a mere hallucination tree. This is essentially Descartes' view that he cannot be mistaken that he seems to see a fire, even though an evil demon might trick him into thinking that there 'really is' a fire. I have just tried to explicate what I mean by 'real' and used this concept instead of Descartes' terminology, because I think his terminology encourages the veil of perception doctrine (I do not think that he actually espoused that doctrine, but his phrasing in an English translation makes it very tempting). Whether you mean the same thing by 'real' I am not sure. It would be interesting to find out what you do mean by 'real' if not my explication, and equally interesting to determine whether dream trees or ordinary trees are 'real' in your sense, and what bearing this would have on our present subject matter.
Thanks for the reply. It seems that you are of the view that I cannot really get what I am asking for. You might be right.
PA
My eardrums will be vibrating in a slightly different way from how they would if the paper were not there. And maybe even the electrical signals sent along nerves from my ear to my brain are slightly different. But I do not notice these differences. Would we then say that I do not perceive them, even though the difference in information is reaching my brain?
The famous psychology experiment about the gorilla on the basketball court provides a super example to focus on this question. The people's sensory organs detected the gorilla, and the signals about that reached the watchers' brains, but the watchers did not notice the gorilla. Would we then say that they did not 'detect' or 'perceive' the gorilla.
What if the gorilla and all the basketball players were robots (so that none of them can be conscious of the gorilla) and the only animals in the room were watchers, none of whom noticed the gorilla. Would we say the gorilla was 'unperceived' and if so would the question about whether the gorilla existed be essentially the same as for the paper in the drawer?
Well, honestly I'm not sure if I really know what you are asking for. You asked for a reliable method that yields realist beliefs about macroscopic objects, where "reliable" just means "likely to produce true beliefs when used under the right circumstances". But this is all very vague.
Suppose that I come to hold realist beliefs about macroscopic objects on the basis that my parents told me so. My parents tell me the truth far more often than not and so this satisfies your criteria, but something tells me this won't satisfy you. Why or why not?
It depends on what you mean by "extension of perception." The photograph could be taken and it might never be seen by anyone. Would it still be an extension of perception then? So obviously the camera's being an extension of perception isn't an intrinsic feature of the camera, it's a corollary of the camera's being used as an extension of perception.
But if it isn't an intrinsic feature of the camera, then surely taking a picture can function as an independent test of the existence of the object, while the object is unperceived. Whether the photograph is in its turn unperceived or perceived, it independently "testifies" to the existence of the object via causal chains (light, etc.). The material, causal processes that result in the photograph of the paper in the drawer are not themselves perceptions, and you can't magically make them such simply by calling the camera "an extension of perception."
All this bizarrerie can be gotten rid of by understanding that we punt essences, natures and characters for the objects we perceive, and by extension for the wider context of the perceptual process (the world in general). We just throw possible natures, possible essences out there and see what sticks - and by this, I mean that we can devise tests on the hypothesis that the object has the nature we project for it, and if those tests pan out then we can say (with whatever degree of confidence, depending on the rigour of the tests) that the object has that nature. And howsoever rickety and lacking in absolute certainty that process is, well we're stuck with it, we have nothing better, and the standards of the process are the standards of the only process we've got, there are no other standards to fish around for.
What's not the case is that we are given the nature of the object in perception.
What one might call the "bare kaleidoscope" given in present perception has no implications of it, or any portion of it existing outside the present apprehension of the kaleidoscope. That much is true.
But that just means that everything above imputing "bare kaleidoscopiness" to the kaleidoscope is itself a punt of some kind, a projection - even calling the kaleidoscope, or a portion of it, a "perception." Because calling the kaleidoscope (or a portion of it) a "perception" actually carries with it the normal backstory implications (of unperceived objects existing while unperceived). But at that point, since you've already started punting, you can't then help yourself to the previous lack of implication that any portion of the kaleidoscope exists outside of present apprehension - you gave up that right as soon as you started calling a portion of the present kaleidoscope "a perception."
Or to put it another way, the lack of necessary implication that any portion of the kaleidoscope of present experience exists outside its present existence as part of the kaleidoscope, lives and dies with one withholding judgement that the present kaleidoscope is anything more than the present kaleidoscope of experience, without any further qualification. As soon as you go beyond that, to giving the kaleidoscope any character that might refer to anything outside it (even if you were to go the Berkeley route of it being "in a mind, any mind"), then you've lost the right to say "this might not exist outside perception," because you've already started punting beyond the present apprehension, you're already starting to impute nature, character, etc., that goes beyond sheer momentary, present apprehension.
Not sure why that exchange you had with PA is attributed to me.
You know by now that what I mean by perceieved is what is given to conscious awareness, and you understand that notion perfectly well since you talk about it extensively in your last post. So I don't see the point of going over this ordinary meaning stuff again. Let's go back to calling it "schmerception".
Does the paper exist when unschmerceived and unphotographed? How can you tell?
Quoting gurugeorge
It isn't merely that we can't be absolutely certain. It's worse than that. There is no means at all, even a fallible or merely probabalistic one, of establishing that the paper exists when unschmerceived and unphotographed. At least, that's the case if your above quote is a correct account of our situation. If that account is right, the best we can say about the paper is that it exists when schmercieved. It exists when photographed. Maybe it exists when neither of those things is going on. There is no evidence against that hypothesis, but no evidence for it either.
Forgive me for now. I will reply to you tomorrow, since I am out for the day and your post raises some difficult issues.
PA
There can be no "paper" for schmerception, nor does "photograph" make any sense either. You might be able to single out some portion of the schmerceptual field (my "present kaleidoscope" idea) in some way (perhaps by awareness of shifting boundaries or something like that), but you can't help yourself to the idea that the "paper" portion of the shcmerceptual field has any physical qualities at all, far less the possible absence or presence of the possibility of existing unperceived. Therefore the question of whether "it" "exists unperceived" doesn't even make any sense UNTIL you bring in the normal physical backstory - but then if you do, then you're talking about perception as normally understood, the normal meaning of "exists unperceived" applies, and the normal tests are sufficient.
This is what I mean by the Chinese Finger Puzzle idea - the criteria grow or shrink with your presuppositions, if you shrink the criteria to being criteria for schmerception qua schmerception, then you've imprisoned yourself in a fly bottle of your own making, that you can't get out of until you relax the presuppositions back to the normal backstory.
Another way of saying this might be that the more you chase absolute certainty, the thinner the possible content about which you can be certain. (Which is something we already learned from Descartes' meditations - the cogito is a dead end, or as Schopenhauer said, solipsism is an impregnable castle, but we can easily bypass it because nobody sallies forth from it, or words to that effect).
Quoting PossibleAaran
Not really, because at that level of presupposition, at the level of punting a nature or character, we're already taking it for granted that there's some "outsideness" quality to be discovered, about which we're punting some possible nature or character, meaning that we've already left the narrow, presuppositionless realm of schmerception, we're already positing that there's more to the world than just schmerception, just the present kaleidoscope.
Of course I can say that the thing which I am aware of is a piece of paper. I am aware of something, and that thing is what I call a "paper". If you don't like my calling it "paper" because you think the ordinary meaning of "paper" presupposes the whole physical backstory, then call it schmaper. I will continue to use the word "paper" and stipulate that I mean the thing that I am aware of, without any physical presuppositions. (I do grow tired of these ordinary language arguments).
Of course I can say that the paper has qualities. It has the qualities I am aware of it having. Squareness, whiteness, thinness, for example.
Quoting gurugeorge
I really don't see why not.
Quoting gurugeorge
I was always using "exists unperceived" in the normal way". My whole case has been that the ordinary tests are not sufficient to determine that the paper exists unschmerceived and unphotographed. They show only that it exists schmerceived and photographed. Just as looking at the paper cannot establish that it is made of atoms, because merely looking at the paper does not reveal to you the atoms, so too being aware of and photographing the paper does not reveal to you that it exists when you are neither aware nor photographing it.
Quoting gurugeorge
I am not chasing certainty. I am saying that the ordinary test you propose isn't any reason at all, not even a probabalistic one, for thinking that the paper exists unschmercieved and unphotographed.
Quoting gurugeorge
I don't really know what "punting" is, but I don't think that is what I do when I say that I am aware of a thing which is white, thin and square. When I say that I simply report what I am aware of, and then I ask whether the thing I am aware of exists when I am not aware of it.
But if it's those, then it's also "schmexisting un-shcmercevied" as well - i.e. by reducing the way you conceptualize what's happening right now to shcmerception, you have automatically forbidden yourself from ever having heard of the possibility that anything COULD POSSIBLY EXIST OUTSIDE your present schmerception, so therefore, not having heard of the possibility (so to speak - i.e. without already preconceiving what's happening for you right now as perception with the normal backstory) you have no criterion that you can use to test the possibility; so whatever sense you think you're attaching to "exists unperceived", you're actually borrowing from the higher, more presupposition-laden level of perception, while at the same time believing you're applying it to the presuppositionless level of shcmerception.
IOW, you can only get to a place where you can doubt the existence of unperceived things by narrowing down the way you conceptualize your experience to it being schmerception, but if you're conceiving what exists for you as bare shcmerception, then the words you are using in that context can't possibly have the same meanings as they do if you're conceiving of your experience in the ordinary way (as perception of a stable physical world that exists whether you're perceiving it or not, which therefore contains objects that also exist whether you're perceiving them or not; a world that also has other people who use language in stable ways with shared meanings - like "white", "thin", "perception" - that you were inducted into from a young age).
So in that case, you literally don't know what you're talking about, i.e. you don't know what the object of perception is, you're simply labelling portions of schmerception with tracking labels. (And then you get to Wittgenstein's point - you can't be sure you're using the same tracking label in the same way now as you did 5 minutes ago, in fact you can't even help yourself to any normal notion of time.)
This is why, in fact, the philosophical reduction to schmerception is kind of a half-baked mysticism. In effect you are doing in an incompetent, flickering way (flickering like a candle in the wind) what people who train for years in meditation do in a highly focussed way. It's incompetent because your mind isn't trained enough to not unconsciously flicker back and forth between a sense of "what is" that helps itself to ordinary language terms, and a sense of "what is" that really does just take bare shcmerception as bare schmerception without any presuppositions.
A "punt" is a colloquial term for a bet, a wager.
Yes a dream seems like we are aware of something. I can tell you about my dream. I think that neither of these things make something real, though. This sort of reminds me of On What There Is, although we are talking more about awareness and seemings here than statements. The only thing I'd contend is that even though I am aware of dreams and I would even say I am justified in believing they are real because they seem real to me, that they are not real.
The difference between the dream-tree and the tree isn't that others can perceive it. I'd say that this mistakes the how for the what -- how we come to be justified in believing something exists differs from what that something is. Or, in this case, that it is at all. We come to believe something is real based upon what others say and do, and come to doubt something is real if others do not perceive what we perceive. These are the methods. But the methods don't define what it means to be real, only what it means for us to determine if something is real or no -- how we come to reasonably believe it to be so, not whether it is so.
Hrmm... I think you're coming close to contradicting yourself here. Either our perceptions are infallible, in which case I cannot be mistaken when I see a fire, or they are fallible, and I can be mistaken when I see a fire.
I wouldn't define "real" in terms of perception, whether it be mine or others. I'd say that perception handily fits into our notions of rational justification, rather than what it takes for something to be real. So in the case of a dream or a hallucination I am not seeing what is real, but I believe that I am seeing what is real. That being the case it is equally reasonable to believe that, though I may be mistaken, the car I parked in the garage is still there. That's more or less the angle I'm going at -- that it is just as reasonable to believe that things continue to exist unperceived, because there is nothing special about perception when it comes to whether something is real or not, and if we have perceived something, at least, then we are just as justified in believing in its reality as if we are perceiving something.
I tend to think of the real as given. It is beyond belief. It contradicts desire and perception. In some ways it seems like it can't be countenanced -- that there isn't such a thing as a theory of the real which would tell us what it means to be. I like Quine's answer as well, but it seems a little too bound up in the language of propositions to me. It doesn't seem to me that reality is bound to propositions as much as it outstrips them (even though they remain true).
But beyond this notional metaphor of reality I could not honestly give you a hard philosophical answer to your question. I could only say what it is not, and why that fails, and hope that there is some common ground in there.
Quoting gurugeorge
What's wrong with doing this? Why can't I do it? Perhaps:
Quoting gurugeorge
The reason I can't do it is because my memory might deceive me. I think I'm using "white" to track a particular feature, but, unbeknownst to me, I was using the label a different way just a moment ago.
Note, this doesn't stop me from using words as labels for parts of my conscious awareness. Rather, if I am a sceptic about memory then I am not [i]entitled[/I] to the claim that my words at the moment mean what they did a moment ago, until I have a non-circular justification of memory. While this is an interesting point to make about radical scepticism, it has no bite here. It is possible to doubt whether things exist when I am not aware of them without doubting the reliability of memory. The considerations I put forward (that noone has ever... schmerceived... the property of unschmerceived existence) do not apply to memory. We can simply take memory forgranted and focus on the problem that arises for unschmerceived existence specifically. Here it is again. Say that a thing has the property of independent existence only if it is such that it exists even when noone is perceieving it.
(1) I can know that X has some property P only if I am/was aware of that property at some time (or I have testimony tracing to someone who was aware of if).
(2) I cannot be aware of the property of independent existence.
C. I cannot know that any X has the property of independent existence.
Notice that I can raise this argument without worrying at all about memory.
Hi again
Quoting Moliere
There is no contradiction. Is Descartes contradicting himself in holding that although he might be mistaken about whether there is really a tree because he might be dreaming, but he cannot be mistaken about whether it seems that there is a tree? I hold the same view but put it differently. His 'seeming tree' is my 'tree'. I cannot be mistaken about whether there is a tree, since, even when I am dreaming, I am directly aware of a tree. I could be mistaken about whether the tree I am aware of is a dream tree or a real tree. I then have an explication of the difference between 'real' and 'dream'.
You say you can't give any definition of "real". That isn't necessarily a problem, but tell me this. Supoose in your dreams last night you saw a dream tree (or seemed to see a tree, if you prefer). It was 200ft tall and had large purple leaves with different animals on every branch. You wake up and go to see some friends. To your surprise, one of them starts telling you about this dream they had. They dreampt about a tree 200ft tall with large purple leaves! Another friend pipes up and begins to describe animals that were in the tree, exactly as you remember it. A last friend, getting very excited, explains that he dreampt the tree too, and he describes faithfully the buildings that surrounded the tree.
Over the next several days each of you dreams about the same tree again, each time sharing the same story with one another. If this happened, would you still insist that the tree which all of you keep dreaming about isn't a "real" tree? What would be the meaning of that?
Best,
PA
If not a contradiction then at least some linguistic cleaning would be nice from my perspective.
Descartes cannot be mistaken whether it seems like he is seeing a tree. Precisely because "seems" modifies the statement: You cannot be mistaken about whether it seems there is a tree, but you can be mistaken about whether there is a tree -- even when you a dreaming.
I think that it's a little sloppy to split "tree" into types -- it's not like "dream tree" and "real tree" are species of the genus "tree". "Real" does not work exactly in that way. Even when it comes to a logical display of these terms it's not a matter of kinds and categories, but is an operator which ranges over a domain -- some set.
Just curious -- have you read Quine's On What there Is?
Probably not. It wouldn't quite fit into my conception of dream anymore, though, either. I'd be uncertain exactly how to classify it, but if such phenomena were common -- or if I even experienced it just once -- I'd probably hesitate to use dreams as a contrast class to reality.
No, the problem is deeper than that, it's that you can't tell whether your memory is deceiving you or not, in fact you don't even know what memory is because, again, the concept of memory, like perception, like colour concepts and shape concepts, only makes sense in a public world where one person's memory can be checked by someone or something else, by something that's understood and accepted as existing outside the private individual's experience.
How did you come to learn that this thing popping into your private experience is a memory, as opposed to some fresh, sui generis experience? How did you learn the use of the concept of memory? Is there Russian doll array of homunculi inside you, each checking the memory of the previous?
And doesn't memory itself often involve the past existence of the presently unperceived? My earliest memory is of playing with a toy train at Christmas. Neither the train nor the room exist now; I'd have as much difficulty knowing about those things' non-existence outside my present experience as I supposedly have re. knowing about the existence of something outside my present experience.
IOW both the existence AND the non-existence of things outside my present experience are as problematic as each other - which is to say, not problematic at all.
Quoting PossibleAaran
False, you can know by inference. That's what happens with things like the camera test. You might have never seen the piece of paper in question, but be shown a photograph of it that demonstrates its existence.
But that's just a matter of words, isn't it? I am not particularly bothered whether it is not a "normal" use of the word tree to suppose that something I am aware of in a dream is a tree. I am defining "tree" as "thing which looks a certain way". Both things that I am aware of when asleep and things I am aware of when awake look that way, hence they are trees. I do not really care if the words are being used unusually. You can express the point in Descartes' way if you prefer, by saying that I cannot ever be mistaken that it seems to me that there is a tree, but I could be mistaken about whether there really is a tree or whether I am dreaming. I myself have no objection to his way of putting it either.
It still seems to me that we need to ask what the difference is supposed to be between "really seeing a tree" and "dreaming". My own explication is in terms of "reality" existing even when unperceived and capable of being perceived by other people, whilst dreams satisfy neither requirement. Again I'm not really bothered if that is an ordinary definition. It seems to me that if I could show that a tree exists even when unperceived by me and can be perceived by others, I will not be too bothered whether or not that tree is described as "a dream" or "real". If you think there is still some further question about whether I am dreaming which is important, I'd be interested to hear what it is.
Quoting Moliere
This is my point exactly. Showing that something exists unperceived and such that others can perceive it settles the interesting issue. If a philosopher continues to ask "ah but am I dreaming it?", I don't really know what he wants.
Yes, I have read Quine. Why do you mention that?
I am not assuming that we mustinfer ourselves out of the present moment of experience, or what isnsometines called "solipsism of the present moment".
I make one assumption:
(A) To know whether something which you are presently aware of has a particular property, you must either be aware of that property or able to infer it from what you are aware of.
I add one premise. Say that the property "permenance" is the property something has if and only if it exists when noone is aware of it:
(B) I have never been aware of the property of permenance.
(A) and (B) entail that if I am to know that something has the property of permenance, I must infer it from what I am aware of.
I stress again that this problem doesn't arise for memory, since (A) is not an assumption about memory and the problem only begins given that assumption. I agree that you can raise all sorts of sceptical doubts about memory, but I'm not raising them here. I am only raising the local problem which begins with (A), and I can accept (A) and discuss problems that result from it without raising doubts about everything that I believe.
Quoting gurugeorge
You tell me. How do you know that those items don't exist? I didn't raise that problem. There is likely an answer to that question, but I'm not presently discussing it. I have tried to constrain the discussion to the problem which springs from (A). I don't want to drag in all of these other issues because they are separate issues.
Quoting gurugeorge
That X and Y are both as bad as each other does not entail that neither of them are bad! That Tom and Jones are both less than five feet doesn't entail that neither of them are less than five feet! Isn't this obvious?
Quoting gurugeorge
I agree you can know by inference. What is the inference? Is it inductive, dedective, inference to the best explanation, what? I've been trying to get you to spell out this inference for me for some time, but you never say what kind of inference it is. It is hard to evaluate the strength of an inference when one doesn't know what the inference is.
Best
PA
I think I did in our previous long conversation. It's deductive inference. This goes back to my point that we posit (punt, bet, conjecture) identities (natures, essences, etc.) for things, then we deduce what ought to eventuate for experience if we have identified the thing correctly (i.e. if the thing has the identity, nature or essence that we think it has) and then we check experience to see if things pan out as we'd expect them to if the thing has the identity we're positing for it.
So for example, if it's a piece of paper, which like all material things, is defined as having the property of existing while we're not perceiving it, then (we deduce that) a camera ought to inform us of the fact that it exists while we don't perceive it.
As I said in previous conversations, it might not - the camera might reveal nothing, in which case we look for confounding factors (e.g. someone's playing a trick) or we adjust our posit (it's not a piece of paper but something else, perhaps a new kind of object that doesn't exist when we're not perceiving it).
You see, there's no mystery about the thing having the property of unperceived existence or permanence, because pieces of paper, material things, are such things as have that property. The question is only whether the thing is a piece of paper, a material thing, or not.
This reminds me of Falsificationism. Make a hypothesis, deduce certain predictions. See if the predictions obtain by appeal to experience. If they do, retain the hypothesis. If they don't, the hypothesis is refuted.
Apply this to the view that things exist unperceived (unschmerceived if you like), and unphotographed. The thought would be that we have never experienced anything which refutes that hypothesis, although there is nothing by way of positive reason to support it. Is that your idea?
Well what if I park the car in the garage, and then ask you to go check to see if it is there. I'll give you a walkee talkee. I don't perceive the car in the garage, but you tell me that it's there. Isn't that just as good in that case?
It just struck me that some of what you were saying sounded like what he called Plato's beard. But maybe I'm off here.
Yes, more or less. The burden of proof is on "not existing unperceived" as a positive, competing hypothesis with "existing unperceived". The latter has (things like) camera evidence, what can you give me for the former? If you can't give me anything, then there's no reason not to work on the latter hypothesis, bearing in mind that both hypotheses are conjectural.
Will respond to your other post later.