"Life is but a dream."
I have very vivid dreams: I think in them, I plan and reason in them and sometimes I have profound insights that I wake up and realize I had never thought about before.
A few nights ago, I had a dream where I remember thinking, "Oh, I've had a dream like this before, but I am 100% sure that this time it is real."
As it happened to be, it was not, and I woke up.
This brought me to think about Descartes' famous assertion "I think, therefore I am."
Later, Kant added to this by stating that be being asserting being in some place and time; therefore, an outside world where time and space exist must exist.
This intrigued me because, as a Psychology major, I learned about dreams and how they can access memories of the past.
The problem wasn't that though!
It was my certainty that I was not dreaming and that what I was experiencing was real. I mean I remember the wrinkles on the man's face, the hardness of the stone staircase, and my interest in a specific girl (one that I do know).
Regardless, what does this say about reality?
I have also had dreams where I have woken up in my room and looked around and then finally woken up back to this reality.
I know this is highly speculative, but I am looking for any answers whatsoever because I consider the matter intriguing.
A few nights ago, I had a dream where I remember thinking, "Oh, I've had a dream like this before, but I am 100% sure that this time it is real."
As it happened to be, it was not, and I woke up.
This brought me to think about Descartes' famous assertion "I think, therefore I am."
Later, Kant added to this by stating that be being asserting being in some place and time; therefore, an outside world where time and space exist must exist.
This intrigued me because, as a Psychology major, I learned about dreams and how they can access memories of the past.
The problem wasn't that though!
It was my certainty that I was not dreaming and that what I was experiencing was real. I mean I remember the wrinkles on the man's face, the hardness of the stone staircase, and my interest in a specific girl (one that I do know).
Regardless, what does this say about reality?
I have also had dreams where I have woken up in my room and looked around and then finally woken up back to this reality.
I know this is highly speculative, but I am looking for any answers whatsoever because I consider the matter intriguing.
Comments (219)
Wild and beautiful thoughts. Yes, life is dreamlike or dreams or lifelike. It's possible (I guess) that we could wake and find ourselves in yet another life --that we dreamed a long, long dream in which we dreamed yet again (Inception stuff). I can't really say I expect that, but I think there's a case to be made for all sorts of wild possibilities --if only for the eeriness and wonder.
You cannot possibly be certain of that. Just because you haven't yet 'woken up' doesn't mean you won't and certainly doesn't mean you can't. Maybe that's exactly what what we perceive as death is; your exit from this dreamworld to become conscious that it was a dream after all (although of course you couldn't be certain that that itself wasn't just another dream from which you may or may not wake!)
I mean fine, for all practical purposes we have to conduct ourselves as though it's all real (well, not a dream anyway) but you cannot state as incontrovertible fact that it is any more than you can prove that we're not all just a figment of God's imagination.
As Ryle's counterfeit argument has pretty much been blown out of the water by any number of critics I can only conclude that you are either attempting to pull the wool over my eyes or that you are too easily impressed.
When I'm in them I certainly feel it to be life and I think of myself as myself. Then I wake up and go about doing the same business only certain that this time it is actually true and the other was illusionary.
Semantically, 'conscious'/'dreaming' rely of each other for meaning, a lot like the states of 'raw'/'cooked'. They only seem to make sense in relation to each other. The differentiation between states 'conscious'/'dreaming" is apparent in our experience, and our logical construction of the world around us.
A dream life has been imagined, but it's world could not cohere logically.
At this juncture, you could either say (1), there are fabloos, but they are optical construcitons, not glass objects as was thought (so the boaters discovered something about fabloos), or (2) that there are not nor were there any fabloos to begin with (though there might be some day if they're made by an independent process). These both seem like reasonable things to say, and the linguistic community could go either way. But no matter which way they go, all of them were counterfeit in that none of them were what anyone purported them to be. And this is regardless of what linguistic distinctions are made. In fact, the people could have had another word, 'habloo,' for illusory fabloos formed as a result of an optical illusion on the water. Could we then say that because habloos are counterfeit fabloos, there must be some genuine fabloos? No, of course not; upon rowing out into the water, we discover all of them had been habloos, and there were no fabloos to begin with, even though these words gained meaning in experience in opposition to each other. There was something to counterfeit in principle, but that real instantiation simply never occurred.
I can relate to this. Sometimes in dreams I write poetry or record what seem to be profound philosophical thoughts, or find myself looking at extraordinary paintings that I know in the dream I have produced ( and of course in a sense I really have produced them, or at least they have been produced 'through me'), and I wake up feeling that divine revelation is surely possible, But sadly, I cannot remember the words of the poems, or the philosophical thoughts, or the exact appearances of the paintings.
Sometimes I dream about the most bizarre and unlikely scenarios, impossible landscapes, fabulous buildings and places, all with extraordinarily complex visuals, a profound feeling of being entirely in my experience and the beautiful feelings it evokes, in ways that I have hardly ever fully experienced in waking life.
I think dreams may be, in a sense, just like waking life; with this one important exception; if waking life is produced by human souls, then it is undoubtedly a co-production; whereas i don't think the same may be said about dreams, I don't think there is any reason to think that dreams are produced in collaboration with others.
What are the 'others' you speak of here?
Other human souls.
No it isn't. The whole of Ryle's argument is predicated on the ability to distinguish between counterfeit and real but that's patently absurd. Counterfeits only work when you do not and preferably cannot know they are counterfeits. If I was to take a new born baby into a Star Trek holodeck, for example, and let it grow up there it would be living an entirely 'counterfeit' existence. Nothing in the child's whole environment would be real though, of course, entirely real to the child.
In any event Ryle's argument need not apply at all in the case of the dreamworld for it is not necessary to even posit that it is a counterfeit of anything. It could be entirely different to the actual existence into which you finally wake (or not). The dreamer could, as I already suggested in the comment about figment's of God's imagination, be a timeless, non-physical being whose dream is complete fantasy.
Neuroscientists have discovered that brain activity is identical (or as near identical as makes no difference) for both conscious and unconscious (ie. dreaming) experiences, If you fall in a dream, for example, body and brain actually 'feel' you falling.
Quoting Barry Etheridge Sure, but that was not asked in this thread. All can't be a dream, for then there would be nothing left to dream of.
There is a theory saying that a dream happends, when your soul is in a different and undone pararell reality. What I mean by that, is reality that doesn't exist physically, that is one of infinitly many possible realities, that goes pararell to our reality. Imagine you have two choices, A and B, you chose B, then there's a pararell undone reality where you chose A. For me it's very hard to explain this, you can read about this theory in a book by Vadim Zeland (who invented the theory), 'Reality Transurfing', I don't remember which tom (because the book has a few toms).
Yea, good counterargument, but I still wonder if this problem does not arise out of how meanings are associate with words My hangup is that knowledge of the difference between being awake & conscious, and being asleep & dreaming, enables the logical argument:
What we know about being awake or asleep, conscious or dreaming is based on our personal experience of these states of being which is then used to demolish what was learned in experience, which yes makes sense logically, but its not how we experience life. I can understand and accept that sun neither rises nor sets, but asserting the same sort of reality to my nightmares, misses something about reality and what it misses, I think, has to do with the language we use.
Stanley Clavell:
“A soldier being instructed in guard duty is asked: ‘Suppose that while you're on guard duty in the middle of a desert you see a battleship approaching your post. What would you do?’ The soldier replies: ‘I'd take my torpedo and sink it.’ The instructor is, we are to imagine, perplexed: ‘Where would you get the torpedo?’ And he is answered: The same place you got the battleship,’” The Claim of Reason, p. 151
As long as the possibility of waking up in a Matrix-like scenario makes sense to you (which presumably it does, since you can watch the movie without getting confused as to what's happening), then it is to that extent how you experience life. That is, you experience life in such a way that you recognize all of your perceptions could be non-veridical. The dreaming argument goes through.
Death, like an overflowing stream,
Sweeps us away; our life is but a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Cut down and withered in an hour.
usually sung to the hymn tune Amanda
What I hear in the phase is not unreality, but the swift transience of our lives. We are likely to find emptiness of meaning, though, in the swift demise of our child or our young spouse/lover. The 'empty tale' and 'dream' does point towards meaningless existence, but that wouldn't be proper for Christian thought or hymnody. It's more like, "life would be meaningless without God" or Christ's reconciling salvation, or the mandate given to believers, or the action of the Holy Spirit. Or for the pagan, life would be meaningless if it were not for the glory of the world, as the Romans observed, sic transit gloria mundi.
Not another Watts :-O
"So you should view this fleeting world --
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."
The problem with this is that in Matrix-type scenarios there is always a reality that is not part of the dream. So reality is never totally reduced to dream, but rather just relocated at one remove from experience. And experience ( the dream) is always understood to be derivative of, and dependent on, that reality, just as we conceive our own dreams to be.
Second, even in a Matrix scenario, we can imagine Neo awaking yet again. And again.
In The Matrix, a multitude of people are jacked in to the same virtual reality. Who is the dreamer?
What fascinates me about the idea that reality is a dream is that the stuff beyond temporal and spacial boundaries is extrapolated from the content of Now. If we're talking about a multi-dreamer dream, then how would we account for commonality in those extrapolations? In The Matrix, it's the software. I'm not saying this couldn't be sorted out. It's that the further we go in addressing its conceivability, the more thoroughly we're describing the world beyond the dream.
The escape hatch is obviously solipsism. I think accepting that means accepting that I'm secretly alienated from myself. How would that be different from denying solipsism? Too tired to work it through tonight....
I have had similar experiences, when I was a teenager I became fascinated by dreams, I studied dream interpretation, tried to cultivate lucid dreaming etc. I didn't really get very far in learning to understand the process, I think because I was going through adolescence at the time and had a lot of emotional angst. What did happen though was that I began to dream more, at times it felt like living a week in dreams every night and I was getting short of sleep, so stopped and poured all my resources into drinking and partying at college.
In hindsight I can see how what I was dreaming about and the form of the dreams I was having were dictated by what was going through my head at the time and that age in my life, with a strong component of emotional anxiety.
So in reply I would say that although the dream state is experienced as quite real, it is entirely determined by, reflective of, your mental life and state in your body. Also it is entirely reliant on your brain activity for it to happen atall. If it were to be a true alternative reality as you speculate, it would require an equivalent hardware to produce the mental activity.
Although in principle I agree with you, in your speculation, which is partly why I was so fascinated by it myself in my youth.
And as to there being no illusions without veridical perceptions, I've already dealt with this above.
(Also, you aren't at liberty to assume that experiences are of external objects to begin with; nothing about having a certain visual impression implies the metaphysical conclusion that something external is causing this impression).
It's true that from experiencing and finding intelligible the differences between what we call 'reality' and 'dreaming' we can extraplolate to imagine that the reality might itself be a dream in relation to some other unknown reality. And sure there's no logical reason we can't keep extending that thought.
But this kind of imagining is parasitic upon our primary experience of the difference between reality and dream, the difgerence that we actually experience, and it is only in virtue of that experience that such imaginings are even posible and that the primary distinction between reality and dream exists and is intelligible.
What a realist says in claiming that our experiences are sometimes veridical is not that sometimes we have the experience of being awake. What they claim is that we really see objects as we think we do while having this experience. This claim isn't justified by the mere fact that we have two different sorts of experiences, and frpm this take one of them to be evidence for a certain metaphysical thesis. It's a bad argument, it doesn't work. If you want to defend realism, find a better one.
I have not made any claims about independently existing "objects" at all, so I don't know where your objection about a supposed metaphysical claim you apparently think I am making is aimed. That said, it is true that in everyday discourse public objects are taken to be independently existent simply by virtue of the fact that that is the only really coherent way we can think about and account for their being experienced in common. Of course there may be some deep connection of minds that explains the commonalities of experience; but even then the objects that are reliably persistent and available to perception in common would count as being, even if only in a merely logical sense, independently real. And really what other coherent sense is there in which to think about it?
As to the logical possibility that reality taken as a whole might be radically different than we imagine it to be; sure, it's logically possible. the problem is that when we are asked to imagine a possible scenario in which that might be true we cannot but imagine the hidden real reality in exactly the same familiar terms as our familiar reality. So, the idea doesn't have much currency really because we cannot turn it into any coherent story that does not consist in elements taken from the reality we are familiar with. In other words such an idea is really inconsequential; it is as nothing to us, because it must remain a difference that could make no possible difference on account of the fact that we cannot even begin to frame it as a real difference.
What is experienced is the beetle in the box. All we know for sure is that we use the same words to describe what we see and hear and feel and whatnot.
But, of course, this assumes that we're not dreaming; that the reality we experience now and the people in it aren't just figments of our own imagination.
We don't have a problem understanding that our TV screen is just a collection of individual lights that when activated a certain way is seen by us as a scene full of people and things. The individual lights and the things we see are very different. It's not hard to apply this principle to everyday life, where things like atoms stand in for the individual lights.
That the TV screen is either "just a collection of individual lights" or " a scene full of people and things" or anything else we can imagine or come to think it is or might be; none of this is a case of reality being radically different than we imagine it to be. The fact is that we simply cannot genuinely think of reality as being radically different than we imagine it to be, and that is the point that makes the merely logical possibility that it might be radically different than we imagine it to be really quite an empty incoherent idea.
That's an invalid inference. You can't go from "we both say that we see a red car" to "we're both having the same kind of experience". It might be that what I call "red" you call "orange" and what I call "orange" you call "red" (imagine Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis). So we might both see the car differently; we just describe what we see using the same words.
The TV screen being a collection of lights is radically different to there being a bunch of people fighting zombies. The reality of the TV screen is radically different to what we see.
And the reality of our everyday world as described by physicists is radically different to what we see.
It's not only coherent; it's already readily apparent.
Entirely incoherent. If the world is different, my experience aren't illusionary-- I still experience a tree in front of my house-- there's simply more to the world. Not an inaccuracy in what I experience, but a fact there's is something else I haven't realised: a world outside my experiences.
In the difference between "real" and a "dream," it is not the possibility are experiences are mistaken which defines the distinction, but the world outside experience. For us to even have dreams, there must be more of the world, the "real" states, outside our experience.
If you place a hundred people in front of a red car and a green car and ask them to identify each they will reliably do so. The fact that due to physical constitution or whatever people may see things slightly differently doesn't change the fact that things are generally reliably seen in much the same way by most everybody.
If reality were truly radically different, it would be unrecognizable, unintelligible. We cannot even imagine such a scenario, so it is effectively meaningless. The 'real' reality is always 'brains in vats' or 'mad scientists" or "demons" in other words constructed out of familiar elements taken from the reality we do experience. Our imaginations have access to no other material.
You have no evidence of this. All you know is that they use the same words to describe what they see. What they actually see is the beetle in the box.
We don't need to be able to understand what reality is "really" like for reality to be radically different to what we see. So it's not clear what you're trying to say here.
But even then, it's not a given that the "reality" of reality is unintelligible. Perhaps the world as described by quantum mechanics is accurate (and presumably intelligible to physicists). So we know what reality is "really" like and know that it is radically different to our everyday experiences.
We have no proof, and that is what you are really, inappropriately demanding. But we do have good evidence, insofar as we have little reason to doubt, since there simply is not any competing explanation for why people do routinely see the same things. How ofetn have you pointed at a car for example and said 'look at that car' and the other person said' that's not a car, it's a dog'? Or even 'that's not a Maserati, that's a Volkswagen beetle'. ;Let's go into that coffee shop':'that's not a coffee shop that's a swimming pool'. "I'm going to take you to the mountains tomorrow"; "this isn't the mountains: it's the opera".
You're begging the question. We don't know that people routinely see the same things. We only know that people routinely use the same words to describe what they see.
This is a false analogy. I'm saying that we might use the same words to describe different things. It's the beetle in the box example given by Wittgenstein. We both use the words "car" and "opera" and "coffee" in the same public situations but the private what-it-is-like aspect of our experiences might be radically different.
I actually largely agree with your position, but I don't render the unknown reality as unrecognisable, unintelligible, or effectively meaningless. This is principly for two reasons; that it can be considered as an undescribed necessary being, in terms of its necessary roles in our known reality. Also that it is possible for our imaginations to access other material through both creative activity and revelation. Such revelation can be accessed through dreams to which I can testify myself.
The fact that we don't use such different words shows that we experience the same things. If you are going to say things such as that what I experience as having a cup of coffee, someone else might experience as what I would call 'swimming the length of an Olympic pool' then I am just going to say, "don't be silly", and leave the conversation there. I'm really not much interested in these kinds of conversations, and only get sucked in usually because it pains me to see people saying silly stuff.
But that's not what I'm saying. I'm only saying that the way they experience coffee might be nothing like the way you experience coffee.
No, it doesn't. It only shows that we've been taught to use the same words in the same public situations. We were put in front of an apple and told that its colour is "red". Now we use the word "red" to describe whatever colour we see the apple to be; and we might see radically different colours.
Yes, I think that if there is an underlying spiritual reality that manifest as our familiar physical reality, then we must have the intuitive or clairvoyant capacities to see that, or at least the ability to develop them. I haven't been able to do that thus far, but I remain fully open to the idea. And I believe that the way we would see that reality must be in terms familiar enough that they would not be incomprehensible to us, or we would be able to see nothing.
How could we be taught to use the same words in the same situations if we could not recognize them as such?
Sure, but they still experience coffee, not swimming pool.
I don't make that assumption.
Quoting The Great Whatever Whence the assumption that it would be an impression? See, you continuously assume representational perception without noticing it .
Nope. Even if, like you, we assume that all perception is without a representational intermediary, you still have to come up with an explanation for hallucination, claiming that it's a real perception not of sense-data, but of a misleading ocular phenomenon, or something like that. But then we just have the same problem, rewritten without sense data: how do we know that all of our perceptions are not just of these misleading ocular phenomena and not of what we think they are?
No sense data required, and their removal does nothing to help you.
Quoting jkop
Fine – having a visual experience in no way leads to the metaphysical conclusion that something external causes it.
This assumes that people experience the same coffee, just in different ways. It's common knowledge that that happens.
I mistakenly thought you were supporting the Argument from Illusion, but you aren't. That argument begins by pointing out that we are sometimes mistaken (which obviously implies that some of our assertions are true.) You're just arguing that global skepticism can't be defeated. That's true.
Why would that be?
If the initial premise was that we might be mistaken, then no access to truth would be necessary.
If one person tells me that there are two balls in the bag and another person tells me that there are three balls in the bag then I know that at least one of them is wrong even though I don't know which (if either) is correct. And if I first see two balls in the bag and then see three balls in the bag then I know that at least one of my experiences is mistaken even though I don't know which (if either) is correct.
Inconsistency is all that is required to recognize that we are mistaken; we don't need to know/see the truth.
I don't think the argument from illusion even has anything to do with the OP. It's just a mistake I made about what TGW was saying.
Merely because we know some truth, namely that we are mistaken? Or is this the stronger claim that we must perceive real things in some sense to know that we are mistaken at some point (by comparing what is real to what we thought we perceived)? If the latter, this seems not to hold, since we can know we're mistaken, because our claims are internally contradictory or stifled by internal evidence having nothing to do with having any veridical perceptions, yet we might still never have any veridical perceptions (and even possibly know this).
Quoting Mongrel
I think I mistook what was meant by 'argument from illusion.'
I think any argument for indirect realism is going to assume internalism: one can only be said to know P if one has access to some justification for P.
Where P is "The pencil looks bent, but it's not.", the justification is probably an empirical/rational combo. Could there be a purely rational justification for knowing one's fallibility?
I think Hume would say no. No ontological argument can be purely apriori. I think Leibniz would say yes. Old-school rationalism always orbited divinity. I think the contemporary version would be some sort of panpsychism.... so if you believe in purely rational justifications for ontological statements... you probably already think the universe has the character of a dream.
It is not an ocular phenomena that we see in the case of an illusion but the real behaviour of light, as in refraction, or real shaded shapes, as in Mach-bands. In Mach-bands we see grey shapes as they are, but exaggerate the contrasts between the greys. The exaggeration is a use of the greys that we see, a way to organize them, but which is incorrectly passed for something present in our eyes or minds, yet absent somehow. But absent things are not present, neither in your eyes, nor inside your head. A memory of something absent does not possess parts of what it is a memory of.
In the case of hallucinations nothing is seen. The hallucinatory experience is not an impression evoked by, nor referring to, some synaptic screw-up; it is the screw-up that is experienced directly. Like the mind's organization of Mach-bands the mind attempts to make sense of the hallucinatory mess caused by drugs, disease, fatigue etc., by evoking "perceived" things despite their absence, hence 'hallucination'. It is simply incorrect to pass hallucinations for perceptions.
This is a really nice point, well explained, Mongrel. 8-)
If you say you see nothing in a hallucination, then the question is just whether for any case you are really seeing anything or not, since the same experience can be one of seeing something or seeing nothing, and you aren't able in principle to distinguish between the two.
None of these rhetorical moves are ever going to work, because they all have the same structure.
Your question makes no sense, because when we see the object we also see the light it reflects, not either light or the object. We can also see emitted light without seeing an object, e.g. a flashlight, that emits it.
Quoting The Great Whatever Hallucinations are hardly as recalcitrant, continuous, and non-detachable as the objects of veridical cases of perception. The existence of sense-data is not disvovered by having experiences, they're blindly assumed in the representationalist doctrine according to which we never see objects and states of affairs directly.
Quoting The Great Whatever They work when you let go of representational perception. Also direct realists account for dreams, imagination, illusions, hallucinations etc
.
I was only responding to the way you worded your post.
Quoting jkop
The whole point is that you don't know that, because you haven't antecedently figured out that all, or any particular, perception is not an illusion.
Quoting jkop
It doesn't matter. Your arguments will not go through whether sense data are assumed or not, or whether they're real or not. What is blind, if anything, is the realist assumptions you are making.
The point that's being made is that those things that we consider to be veridical experiences might actually be as false or as misleading (or however you want to phrase it) as dreams, illusions, hallucinations, etc.
Look, there is no need to first figure out what a veridical perception should look like; perceptions are not somehow comparable representations from which we'd know whether a current perception isn't an illusion. The real object that you perceive looks as it is, not like something else, and unlike illusions the real object won't suddenly appear or disappear as you move around it etc.. It is not difficult to identify whether something passed for an object of perception is an illusion or a real object that one sees.
Don't Mach bands both strengthen and weaken the case for idealism?
They strengthen it in proving there are perceptual illusions we "can't wake up from". We can't unsee the Mach bands even if we believe (from the neuroscience) they are psychologically constructed. So reality is a perceptual illusion (well, perceptual process) from the get-go.
And we know that from colour perception too. What we experience resembles "nothing" about the stimulus.
On the other hand, Mach bands, colours and other perceptual illusions are utterly reliable in their usefulness. They do tie us to the world in what seems like a pragmatically factual fashion. We wouldn't really want to "wake up" if they are a dream as the evolutionary efficiency of our discriminatory abilities is also something we can believe in.
Dreams and other hallucinatory states are by contrast unreliable states of perception and not useful in any known fashion. It is not hard to see them as dysfunctional (although dreaming causes few problems as it is not remembered and the body is normally paralysed so we can't act on our visions).
So in being fictional - or rather symbolic - the brain's perceptual illusions are desirable precisely because they are idealistic rather than realistic. They begin the business of action-oriented conception from the get-go, right out at the retina or cochlear.
The homuncular "we" who is suppose to be watching the raw data as it eventually makes its way to "display central", the theatre of consciousness, has already been replaced by the mental habit which is a useful interpretation or model baked in as neural wiring. Right out at the eyeballs, the essential business of "not seeing reality" has started. Instead we are already "seeing", or conceiving, of shapes, motions, colours, sounds, scents - the "signs of things".
In short, the whole idealism vs realism debate gets hung up on the presumption that something veridical or representational is going on, when what is really going on is something functional or enactive.
So in this context, thank God for Mach bands. Reality is already unseeable except in terms of conceived signs. And also thank God for waking up. Our system of signs can't be fooled for long. In its functionalism, it has the means to sort its passing confusions out.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I thought the point was that hallucinations and dreams can be judged retrospectively. The long-run can be properly contrasted to the merely intermittent even in a purely internalist perspective.
Of course if what is at stake is whether reality can ever truly be known - even merely as a recalcitrant fact - then of course doubt is always possible about anything, if simply only because that is how intelligibility must work. To fully believe, there must be doubt to demonstrably dismiss.
Although here again pragamatism steers us back to the embodied view. Verbal doubt - claiming a formal possibility - is one thing. But real doubt is a real reluctance to act.
Again, the functional is what matters, the veridical is not a true concern here.
I don't think an idealist ontology is required for this, there could just as well be "real" structures in our existence which are a mechanism for this to happen. For example a mechanism for the process of the transmigration of souls, enabling our "self" to be reborn in a newborn after our death. Or the mechanisms employed by enlightened beings to inhabit more than one place at a time, or walk between worlds, times.
You're not addressing what's being said. You understand the conceptual difference between perception of real things and dreams/illusions/hallucinations/etc. The point being made is that we might not be having the former right now; only the latter. We might be trapped in the Matrix, we might be brains in a vat, we might be dreaming, etc.
I think your understanding is more aligned with the 'embodied cognition' approach of Maturana and Varela - that we're embedded in the 'umwelt', and we're actually continuous with it, in that brain/mind/body/environment, is a whole, whereas representative realism depicts 'the world' as something separate to 'mind', which somehow sunders reality at a non-existent joint. That is said by them to manifest as 'Cartesian anxiety' (also here.)
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It's interesting to reflect on the notion of delusion as 'attributing wrong significance to what is seen', in contrast to illusion, which is 'seeing something which is not there'. This is a typical illusion:
Whereas a delusion is more deep-seated and harder to represent. (Think, for instance, of Trump's delusion of competence, and the delusion of those who also believe in his delusion.) Delusion is not something that can be easily represented, in the same way that an illusion can - in fact if you wanted to represent a delusion pictorially, you would have to couch it in some kind of symbolic or abstract form, rather than depicting an illusion per se.
I think, perhaps, those philosophies that depict worldly life as illusory, actually mean 'delusive'. For instance Hindu philosophy depicts worldly life as 'maya', which has the connotation of 'illusion' but which I think really means something more like 'a magic show' - like a drama in which the actors have forgotten that they are actually actors and so are mistaking the stage for reality.
Quoting The Great Whatever Then, despite your denials, it is obviously assumed that his experience represents either something or nothing, and that the object of his hallucinatory experience would be some element of the experience itself, i.e. sense-data, generated by synaptic screw-ups.
Direct realists don't make those assumptions about the nature of perceptions or experiences, so the epistemological problem is not the same.
In the illusion of a white triangle in Wayfarer's post above we see black shapes on a white background as they really are, and make use of what we see, perhaps by entrenched habits of how to organize what we see. We don't see the white triangle as it is not there, but we evoke an experience by organizing the things we do see, and confuse the evoked experience with an experience of seeing a triangle.
Not at all. You merely must rather see something or nothing, which you have already admitted.
I think what you are failing to see is that realist assumptions are not made on the basis of a belief that one possesses any knowledge of the "ultimate nature of things" or anything like that, but simply on the basis that when something is available to perception in common, that is when something is publicly available, then it is classed as real, in the sense of being concrete, and is understood to be logically independent of any particular percipient.
This is not to deny that I cannot know things like "I am thinking now" or "I am seeing X right now" without any body else being able to know that. The fact that I am thinking right now is undoubtedly the most concrete of experiences. But if I question whether I am really thinking, but am not instead merely dreaming that I am thinking; the distinction has no logical purchase because if I dream I am thinking then I must be thinking. But on the other hand if I question whether I am really seeing, but may not merely be dreaming that I am seeing, the distinction does, in accordance with the most fundamental qualities of our experience of dreaming and waking, have logical purchase.
So, we cannot genuinely escape the experience of seeing, and of knowing that we are seeing, things external to us, things that are not produced within our body/minds. Without that fundamental experience, our experience would not be experience at all, but would be unintelligible. The fact that it is possible in an attenuated, merely 'in principle' logical sense that I could be mistaken is irrelevant because if I am asked to give an account of how such an experience could be mistaken, any account I might be able to give always relies on the assumption of the reality of the external world, or at least of some external reality.
Yes, the reason this debate is the hardiest of all perennials is that many simply do want to make absolutist claims. Or at least, have the strong desire to get as close as possible to that position
Then you are putting the middle-ground case for a pragmatic or epistemic realism, as against an ontic or naive realism. That is, all we can know in the end is that we seem to be talking about (and reacting to) the same things in the same ways.
And this is also a pragmatic or epistemic idealism in that it likewise rejects solipsism as credible belief. Instead we start already at the level of building belief based on the presumption of the existence of other like-minded minds. :)
Yes, I agree, in fact I don't think the very notion of 'ideas' can be intelligible without the assumption of things about which to have 'ideas', the natures of which are independent, not of thinking itself, but of any and all particular thoughts.
Also, i think naive realism does not consist in any absolutist claims, for the simple reason that I doubt that many naive realists would have thought their position through to such claims, and if they have then they would have realized that such claims are impossible to ground. So a considered naive realism is simply based on the fundamental logic of the experienced differences between waking and dreaming, veridical perception and hallucination.
The things we perceive publicly and reliably every day are 'really there' simply by virtue of the self-evident fact that they are reliably available for anybody to perceive. That's all it means to say something is really there with all its reliably perceptible qualities. Further metaphysical claims about structure or constitution do not contradict this naive realism, because whatever might be the final explanation for why and/or how things are really there for us, it cannot change the fact that they are.
A considered naive realism sounds oxymoronic. Do you simply want to avoid tagging yourself a pragmatist here?
That's fine, but pragmatism does come with its more specific commitments and the question is whether there is something in that which you dispute.
Also Wayfarer's phantom triangle seems still a good test of what folk actually believe. In what sense does it really exist - either as reality or idea?
All neurotypical humans would be expected to see a glowing bounded triangle that is "not really there".
So the naive realist has no problem counting cows in a field, or sitting on chairs that are physically present. But then they also have no problem thinking the cows are actually coloured, or the chairs are actually "solid stuff". This is why their realism is naive. It ignores a division by flip-flopping from objective to subjective ontic commitments without even realising it.
Gestalt illusions like Kanizsa's Triangle are nicely poised right at that critical divide. And so it becomes revealing exactly what answer the realist can give. Everyone sees the triangle. Everyone can have the neurological trickery explained. How should this combination of definite experience and inescapable trickery be resolved as a model of epistemology, a putative theory of truth?
This is where naive realists change the subject. But idealists also fail to do it justice on the whole.
A considered naive realism does sound somewhat contradictory, granted. Of course a considered realism cannot be a truly naive realism, because in being considered it is no longer naive; but it might posit just the same as naive realism does; you know that there are objects that exist with all their qualities, independently of our individual minds. Of course their qualities, understood as perceptions, cannot be independent of perception, to say that would be to say something oxymoron; if not outright moronic.
I really can't see the issue with the triangle illusion apo, it exists as an image on a screen or on paper or as something, whatever doesn't really matter, that reliably gives us the impression of a triangle,but is not seen as a fully delineated triangle. In the same way an oak exists as an oak or as a cellular structure or as a molecular or atomic structure that is reliably seen as an oak.
What sort of pragmatist commitments do you have in mind that you think I might want to argue with?
Yet you see an edge that is not physically there to complete the impression of a triangle. So there is now delineation that is a real visual difference and a delineation that is only a visual idea.
Whatever your epistemology, it must account for such a contrasting state of affairs within the one general point of view.
Naive realism is now to pretend there is no fact of the matter. So what does considered realism want to say?
The difference between real delineation and the visual suggestion is that the first produces an actual image of a triangle, and the second produces a mere impression, that is the second does not produce an actual image; so the fact that the two different situations produce two different visual phenomena seems to be what you would expect and does not seem to me to indicate any problem or paradox that needs addressing.
So in the first case, the self actually sees a representation, in the second, the self merely imagines that it sees this? Hmm....
I am still not quite sure what you are getting at. When I look at the 'illusion' shown in Wayfarer's last post it is almost as though I can see the edges of the white triangle on the white background. I say "almost", though because when I look closely there are no edges there, which of course there couldn't be since it is just white on the same shade (presumably) of white.
It's no secret that the mind can sort of 'fill in' details where they 'normally' would be to produce a kind of impression. But you're not actually seeing the edges of the triangle except where there is black and white contrast. This is another example of an independently real phenomenon produced reliably by the action of visual data on human perceptual systems; and as such it supports the idea that something real independently of our individual perceptions, thoughts and minds is going on, something we do not fully understand and have no conscious control over. To admit this is not to admit idealism though, because idealism claims that percepts are not merely mediated and added to, but entirely constituted by, ideas.
Epistemological idealists and other anti-realists can accept this, too. Their claim, though, is that the categories and kinds that we are familiar with and talk about are not categories and kinds that apply to these independently real things but to things as perceived, and which we then, as a matter of pragmatism (and often ontological naivety) project onto the independently real things as part of our world picture (as if things have a look even if they're not being looked at).
These independently real things are the noumena of Kant, the causally independent things of Putnam's internal realism, and so on.
I don't think 'constituted by ideas' is quite it. Recall that Kant always claimed to be an empirical realist, i.e. if you asked him what something was constituted from, he would regard that as a question for physical chemistry. But he could still be idealist, insofar as claiming that our knowledge of physical chemistry, whilst sound in its domain of application, was still constituted in some basic way by our own cognitive apparatus, the categories of understanding, and so on. So I take his claims to be about the nature of knowledge and experience, not about the nature of things, as it is only by those means that we encounter things at all.
So I think to say that idealism says that everything is 'constituted' by ideas, is also a kind of naturalistic error, because you're still thinking about it in terms of what constitutes objects, rather than thinking about it in terms of 'what is the nature of knowledge'. When you see the visual ilusion I mentioned, or anything else, that 'seeing' is itself a perceptual operation; so you want to ask 'what is the object apart from the perception of it', but by asking that, you're trying to get outside the very act of knowing.
But where you see a white edge, there is only just unedged whiteness. So you are seeing a triangle when you really shouldn't - even if this is the kind of foundational trick upon which the whole business of "perceiving reality" depends.
Dreams and hallucinations sort of fill in for reality in a big way. But the point is it is all "fill in" down to the finest grain of perceptual processing. Your epistemology has to be able to deal with that frankly.
Quoting John
Well in a way they are. Or I would say signs, as in Peircean sign relations.
I would say that "categories and kinds" are not merely projections of the mind, but reflect the reality of the things being seen as kinds and placed in categories. Otherwise it would all be merely arbitrary and could never become systematic.
It is only the naive realist who thinks that things are there in the incoherent sense of "having a look when they are not being looked at". Things are, however, visible or invisible even when they are not being seen. And things may be said to be this or that colour when not being seen, although of course they do not appear to be this or that colour when not being seen. In the same way something can be round when not being seen or felt, on account of the fact that when it is seen or felt it will reliably be seen and felt to be round.
I find Kant's independently real noumena are really unintelligible, the in itself can only ever be in itself for us, so I prefer to think of things as being just as we see them to be. The things themselves can only be what we think, or come to think about them. What else could they be? But from this it certainly does not follow that they are mental projections. They, just like we, are manifestations of the Real, and they are brought into being just as we are, by our ideas. However they are nonetheless material for all that and are not constituted by ideas, which seems a ridiculous notion. For me this is logical realism, pure and simple.
I didn't say that they're projections. I said they we project them onto the independently real things. They're perhaps "inherent" (to some extent) in things as perceived.
What does it mean to be visible or invisible even when not being seen? Do you just mean capable or incapable of being seen by the typical human?
What does it mean to be red and round even when not being seen? Do you just mean that it will be seen as red and round by the typical human?
Yes, I agree that Kant was no idealist of the kind I am targeting. I am thinking more of Berkeleyan idealism. Phenomena are, I agree, entirely constituted by experience and thought, but they are materially, not ideally, constituted. We conceive things as being constructed from bits of matter, not from bits of thought; the idea really makes no sense at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, that is precisely what I think it makes no sense to ask, at least if you are asking it in terms of 'what is the object considered entirely outside of perception', Of course in the ordinary sense as with science it makes sense to ask the question, because there is much that may be learned about things by modeling them in terms of mathematics and physics, understanding them in terms of causality, and so on. These are the kinds of things which are never given directly to perception, only percepts are given directly to perception. But those things not given directly to perception may be given to thought; so it is thought that tells us what things are like apart form perception in this sense, but nothing can tell us what things are like entirely outside the whole context of perceptual experience, because that idea can really have absolutely no meaning for us.
No, I mean, for example, say you are looking at a field and there is a rabbit perfectly visible in the field, and yet you do not see it.
That doesn't explain what it means to be visible. I understand it as just meaning "capable of being seen".
Yes, something like that.
I can't see why it doesn't. Don't you know what it means for something which you are not seeing in a field to be visible nonetheless. Perhaps in the next moment you spot it, and yet it hasn't moved.
The epistemological idealist and anti-realist will accept that account of being red even when not being seen. But that's not the naive realist view. The naive realist won't define "is red even when not seen" as "will be seen as red by the typical person" but will use the former to explain why the latter is true.
I understand "visible" to mean "capable of being seen", as I said. I don't know what you mean by it, and simply saying "it's visible but you can't see it" doesn't help me understand what you mean.
Thanks Wayfarer, I have read Kant's refutation of idealism in the past.
Yes 'visible' means "able to be seen".
I can't see where I said "no" to it. Perhaps you could quote the actual passage where I purportedly said it.
Me: "Do you just mean capable or incapable of being seen by the typical human?"
You: "No, I mean..."
But, aren't you just cavilling over language here? In any case, how sure are you that most or even all naive realists will respond this way? Have you polled all or even most of them? I can't see why they wouldn't agree with that. What else could 'being red' mean, than 'will ordinarily be seen as red"?
Oh, I see where the misunderstanding lies, I was proposing a broader definition, where for instance something might be visible or not visible to a hawk, or a fox or any animal that can see, and I did not want to define it in a way that restricts it to your anthropocentric "typical human".
Presumably that things have a red appearance even when not being seen. The traditional naive view is that things have a look even if they're not being looked at. They say that we see a thing as red "because it really is red" – where this is an actual explanation rather than just a tautology. They say that if one person sees a thing as red and most other people see that thing as orange then it's not just that the former has an atypical perception but that she fails to see what colour the thing "really" is. And, of course, it's nonsense, which is why naive realism is wrong.
It's how naive realism is ordinarily defined; as the view that things have the properties we perceive them to have even when they're not being perceived.
Well, I don't agree with your characterization of naive realism, and I don't see how you could possibly know that is what most of them think. You must think they are all morons, I mean it just doesn't make sense to say that things have an appearance when they are not appearing. Being visible when not being seen is not the same idea; it makes perfect sense. Naive realist that have not thought through their 'position' might vaguely imagine a world of objects 'out there' appearing the same as they do when seen, but anyone of even just average intelligence I believe could see that this doesn't really make sense when you think about it.
You say it is how it is ordinarily defined, but I think you are leaving out the part that says it is how it is ordinarily defined by its detractors.
Everything with a reflective surface and some light shining on it I guess. But really it only makes sense to speak about anything being visible from some perspective or other. Because if something is behind a mountain it is invisible from this side and visible (perhaps) from the other side. Something microscopic is visible only through a microscope, and so on. Maybe quarks will never be visible.
Well, since probably most people are, at least prior to reflection, naive realists I don't see how it could possibly claim to be characteristic of the way they would all understand it. Probably just another example of stupid philosophers defining terms to suit their own nefarious purposes.
For example, the other morning the phone rang, waking me up from a deep sleep. The experience was a blur, and for a moment I couldn't tell whether I was answering the phone or dreaming.
But it was not the blur of my own experience that I experienced, so the question whether the blur is what I think it is does not apply.
I had yet to wake up, but when I was awake the "problem" of whether I was answering the phone or dreaming was quickly resolved (unlike your alleged problem which is basically insurmountable).
I never asked whether you can have 'an experience of your own experience.' Read the question again.
Quoting jkop
It doesn't matter. You were unable to decide, on the basis of an experience you had, whether you heard what you thought you heard. Whether you can 'experince your own experience,' or anything to that effect, is beside the point.
Quoting jkop
Again, you don't know this, because you don't antecedently know whether for any given experience, you are perceiving (seeing, hearing, etc.) what you claim to be or think you are.
You are continually trying to attribute to me the position that you must assume some notion of representation or sense data; but you are simply wrong about this. Your problems persist regardless of whether this intermediary layer does, and so the issues with perception and the dreaming argument are independent of the type of realism you adopt. It is a realist problem, not an indirect realist problem, and direct realism does not help you in principle in resolving it. This is so as long as you admit the possibility of ever being perceptually mistaken about anything.
Quoting The Great Whatever No, you assume too much. I was waking up, recall: I was unconscious when my brain's reticular activation system identified the sound of the phone, and thus activated sufficient conscious attention towards the phone for waking me up, but I was hardly conscious enough to be able to think about what I heard, nor contemplate on whether it is what I think I heard. It's ridiculous to assume that someone who is brutally woken up from a deep sleep would suddenly possess the conscious attention of some armchair phenomenalist who is awake and trained in thought about thoughts.
Quoting The Great Whatever Now you're just repeating a false mantra, you're on your own with that.
That's an interesting question.
A. I see a banana.
B. The banana I see is real.
Even in a dream, A could be true while B is only true for all practical purposes. Even under the influence of a true hallucinogenic like Datura, there's no question that one is seeing something. It's just that the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction is off-line.
The very possibility that you could be seeing something other than what you think you see presupposes that there is a truth about, that is a reality in regard to. what you are seeing.
What about reality as a dream though, you didn't express that. Also, it isn't impossible to live without dreams... just ask anyone who is on benzos or smoking MJ constantly. REM sleep isn't essential, only beneficial.
Good point. Why should we not think there is some reality giving us sensory data? Any good reasons? No? Ok then...
Perhaps the impossibility of taking the castle of skepticism, as well as its failure to send out any marauding troops is due to the fact it is a mirage.
How can skepticism be a mirage? Do you mean that there is nothing to warrant skepticism as it is empty or futile in this case?
More that there is no genuine skepticism because terms of reference parasitic upon what is purportedly being doubted are always necessarily taken for granted.
Doubt is like Jello. There's always room for it. :)
If I can rephrase that to make sure I understand, i think you are missing a THE and an AN somewhere there:
The terms of reference of the subject doubted are always being taken for granted because they are parasitic on the subject being doubted?
Even for cogito ergo sum?
We are talking about global skepticism here; not about skepticism regarding ordinary claims.
True with regard to all but global skepticism :P
I understood that originally. Can you clarify what you said though? you just ignored it.
Yes but you can't prove light or air humidity or smog has an objective existence, you can only prove you can perceive it subjectively. Even if you use instruments to detect it, they only convey information to you subjectively and it is YOU who infers that 'because my instruments tell me objective phenomena exists, then it therefor does'.
Terms of reference that are dependent upon the reality purportedly being doubted, and which are absolutely indispensable to the coherency of the doubt itself, are always, inconsistently with the claim that the doubter is being globally skeptical, being taken for granted in the act of purportedly doubting reality itself.
What does it mean for something to have an objective existence?
That's indubitable. But it's apriori.
Why so? It doesn't seem that it could have any logical flaws because it's not asserting anything.
The paradox of our existence is that metaphysical extremes are always excluded because a context without any content or vice versa is impossible and all lesser truths will always transform into their complimentary-opposites. Dreams become reality and realities become dreams as our path shapes our feet and our feet the way. It also means Occam's Razor is paradoxical like everything else and, thanks to pattern matching or yin-yang dynamics ruling the universe the simplest explanation is either more useful or counterproductive because it is more often the most attractive. A simple analog systems logic that can describe both poetry in motion and crap rolling downhill becomes applicable to anything.
It's not so much that anything is being asserted that contains logical flaws (apart from the assertion that global skepticism is being practiced I suppose), but I am not convinced that global skepticism is ever a coherently formulated question or standpoint. When it comes to giving accounts of skepticism in everyday matters, the accounts are given as questions about the implausibility of something having been the case in terms of something else being more plausible.
Of course the terms of reference of any alternative scenarios are always the same; they are always our ordinary 'real world' terms of reference. When it comes to global skepticism, no 'alternative' position can be framed that isn't framed in those same 'real world' terms of reference. For me, this means that no genuine alternative has been framed at all. In 'Matrix' style skeptical scenarios, for example, the real world in relation to which the experienced world in question is being considered to be a dream or simulation is not eliminated, it is just displaced.
Of course, the reality of that world could then be questioned and 'real' reality pushed up another level again. You could do this endlessly, and produce an infinite regress, but the scenario you are characterizing as a simulation can only ever be understood to be such in contrast to some 'real' reality, and that reality can only ever be given account of in the 'real world' terms of reference we are familiar with. The whole idea of dream versus reality is derived form our own fundamental experience of waking and dreaming. It seems to me, we cannot be 'globally' skeptical about that fundamental experience (as opposed to being 'locally' skeptical merely about aspects of it) or we would undermine the sense of the very conceptual resources we need to frame any question about 'dream versus reality'.
GS isn't required to frame an alternative. It's just based on the possibility that none (or most of) the statements you make about the world are false.
Quoting John
Yea.. I think Descartes used the Dream Argument to give the flavor of skepticism. It's good for that because a lot of people know what it's like to have full confidence in a dream world only discover upon waking that it wasn't real. It shows something about confidence.
I once had a dream in which my torso was a giant potato. It seemed perfectly normal to me in the dream. All my friends were like that. The customs of the potato-body people were part of the dream. And now it doesn't seem weird to me that I have a mammal torso.
Maybe the Evil Demon would seem like a more solid argument, but as I mentioned earlier, GS doesn't really need any argument.
Yeah, I know what it is like to dream absurdities that seem to make perfect sense.
I guess another way of putting the point would be that we know what it is to wake to reality from a dream, but we have no idea what it could be to wake from our reality to some other reality that wasn't either a displacement/ and or extension of our reality or something so incomprehensible that we could not even make sense of it let alone alone deem it to be a reality that would make our ordinary experience a dream.
I am perfectly willing to admit that reality might be greater than we think and that what we think reality is might be just a part of a greater reality. This is precisely what is proposed by some religions. But 'our reality' would still be a genuine part of that greater reality and could only be intelligible in some kind of terms we are familiar with just as dreaming is a genuine and mostly intelligible part of 'our reality'.
That isn't true, if it was true then any objective world could be called subjective. As you say, If there was no objective world that I was perceiving, then my "subjectivity" would now become an objective world. Therefore, how could I know that the objective world isn't just a completely subjective world?
Nor is it true that if subjectivity was there was it would imply I was a solipsist. I could be a panpsychist too as if everything was conscious then everything would be a subjective world.
Then you contradicted yourself. You said doubt is like jello, there is always room for it... but apparently not for cogito ergo sum according to you.
And do you mean to say it is apriori because we arrive at by thinking about the fact that "I am thinking therefor I exist". Is it not possible to arrive at that conclusion without reason alone?
Great question, you had me puzzled there to find an answer. Now that I think about it, there really is no way to find a distinction between the objective and the subjective BECAUSE we are confined to only one point of view. I can imagine what it might be like to be a hyperdimensional entity that is able to see where my self-awareness exists within a multifaceted objective world but nevertheless I am constrained to existing in a small compartment of a much larger reality.
Perhaps my inference of an objective world based on sensory impressions is undeniably false. Perhaps neutral monism or panpsychism has it correct in that everything is either one in the same or part of one consciousness in a subjective world ONLY... and that there are different slices of this subjectivity that are exclusive from one another (our single self-awareness included as one of these slices)... and even more, perhaps ONE single subjectivity unites them all together (God consciousness) that passively observes multiple subjectivities.
Metaphysical extremes are not always without content or context... they just have less and depending on how much validates its worth.
Quoting wuliheron
That's just a fancy way of saying that there is no difference between the dreamworld and waking life. They are bound together and influence one another. However I was talking about REM sleep dreams and dreams in the sense of aspirations wouldn't make sense with what you said so you must be talking about a "dream world" as per say in order for your statement to make sense. It is not logical to say that the visions encountered in REM sleep ACTUALLY become part of your waking reality activities.
Quoting wuliheron
Funny you say that, I find that the simplest answer for something often still requires an IMMENSE amount of understanding in order to understand what it is even despite it's simplicity. For example, E=mc2 is very simple indeed but it requires us to first know what energy, mass and the speed of light is. So I agree that Occams razor can be more useful or counterprodudctive although I don't see what that has to do with your quoting me or dreams?
Quoting wuliheron
I very much doubt analog systems logic can describe poetry in motion? Doesn't it need highly complex and abstracted structures like the human brain to be able to perceive beauty, meaning and emotion?
All analog systems to do is fart out computations like a blind man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimethyltryptamine
Not only religions but physics as well. Such as the hypothesised 11-dimensions of string theory/m-theory etc.
I would say mistaken, or deluded, rather than false, because your body is undeniably present within that objective world.
Perhaps neutral monism or panpsychism has it correct in that everything is either one in the same or part of one consciousness in a subjective world ONLY... and that there are different slices of this subjectivity that are exclusive from one another (our single self-awareness included as one of these slices)... and even more, perhaps ONE single subjectivity unites them all together (God consciousness) that passively observes multiple subjectivities. [/quote]Perhaps, but it would mean that we interact with this subjective world chemically as well as experientially.
I just assumed that everybody in the discussion would agree that necessary truths are exempt from global skepticism. Although, one could argue that this isn't so, I wouldn't.
Uh.... what?
E=MC2 is simple due to the recursive nature of the logic involved and it should be possible to reformulate Relativity and quantum mechanics as a systems logic that reconciles the two. Poetry in motion and crap rolling downhill can be considered the analog and digital perspectives or wave and particle. Poetry in motion is the lowest possible energy state of the system with a car in idyll being a good example because the lowest energy state can leap faster into any higher one.
I think perhaps we are thinking about different aspects of the problem of objectivity. I was alluding to what sometimes seems to be taken as the 'ultimate' or absolute nature of objectivity, that 'objectivity' signifies the idea that things simply (materially or physically) exist 'in themselves'. This idea is often taken for granted, perhaps it is a kind of fundamental intuition, but we don't really know what it means.
I wasn't trying to suggest that there is any significant degree of difficulty in making a distinction between subjective and objective in the ordinary sense of everyday usage.
I can't really see what DMT has to do with this discussion. What is experienced, according to my own experience at least, under the influence of DMT is strange, for sure, but not incomprehensible. If an experience were really incomprehensible to you, then it would be as nothing, and you could not remember anything about it at all; it would not even count as an experience that is.
I'm not too sure what you mean by "two parallel evolutions" Punshhh, are you thinking of something like cultural vs natural evolution?
OK, but the 'greater reality' I had in mind would be a greater dimension of possible experience. And I don't think String theory qualifies; it is nothing more than a mathematical theory. Really the same goes for QM and Relativity. We cannot directly experience, or even visualize, the warping of three-dimensional space-time, for example.
I would say our experience of (what we call) gravity just is our experience of space-time curvature under General Relativity. Similarly, if we live in a quantum world and not a classical Newtonian world then the quantum world is what we always experience. We may have trouble making sense of our experience sometimes (for example, with the double-slit experiment) but that is really an issue of our knowledge not our experience.
I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, we don't experience space-time as being curved; we experience the 'weight' of gravity, and the curvature of space-time is just an explanation for our experience of that 'weight' (amongst other things). Likewise we don't experience the world as Quantum mechanics tells us it 'really is'.
Secondly, the advents of those theories have not, in themselves, (as opposed to technological advances that may be associated with them) expanded our realm of experience.
We can't experience each and every part of it, only those that an organism can detect, such as the presence of photons and the objects which emit or reflect photons into the visual field and system of the organism. But we can identify other parts dervivatively, and deduce that without this structure there would be neither objects and states of affairs, nor visual experiences of them.
.
Most of the time we would just say that Alice fell off the cliff rather than invoke scientific terms like "gravity" or "space-time curvature". But on the view that our experience is of the world as it really is, a scientific description is simply a description of our experience at a more complex level of abstraction. That's the hierarchical structure that jkop mentions above.
So I guess I'm curious whether you are intending to make some kind of experiential/real distinction here or else would agree with the above.
Quoting John
What would our experience be like if we were to experience the world as Quantum Mechanic describes it?
Quoting John
True, those theories have simply expanded our understanding of our experience.
You are conflating what it might be thought that what we experience 'really' is, with what we experience it (whatever it might be) as.
Put another way, in Sellarsian terms, you are dissolving the distinction between the scientific and the manifest images.
Right, I reject Sellar's distinction and representational realism generally.
Anyway thanks - that clarifies for me the view you hold now.
Though I'm not sure how your claim that "we experience the 'weight' of gravity" works on this distinction. Is that a manifest image claim (but then why the scientific term "gravity")?
To me it seems to be simply an undeniable phenomenological fact that we cannot understand our own behavior in terms of causes, but instead we understand it in terms of reasons; a fact which is attached to no particular metaphysics but is despite all of them. The response: "because of neuronal activity in my brain" is never going to be a satisfying, or even really an intelligible, answer to the question "why did you go to the shop?".
I think we do experience a force that acts on our bodies that we call 'gravity'. This is so whatever we might think, or come to think, the explanatory mechanism of gravity is. The Greeks of antiquity, the Aboriginals of Australia and the ancient Chaldeans all felt it just as surely as we do. Of course they would not have called it 'gravity'; they would have had other names for that bodily feeling of being acted upon by some force or power.
I agree. But I think that Sellar's distinction assumes and reinforces a particular (Humean) idea of science and causality that leads to just the kinds of concerns you raise. Whereas something like the Aristotelian idea of causality can better capture the notion of reasons and explanations that are relevant to human life as it is lived. On this view, the sciences are a natural extension of what we do every day rather than something that is a distinctly separate kind of activity with different objects of interest.
Quoting John
Would you similarly say that you experience a force that pushes you back in your seat when you are in a car that suddenly accelerates?
It seems to me that we can feel like we are being pushed back in our seats (or are being pulled towards the ground) without also supposing that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies.
Quoting Andrew M
You've raised a tricky point. Are the push-back of acceleration and the push-down of gravity experienced, or merely conceived, as external forces? You say we need not suppose "that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies". On immediate impulse I want to say 'actual' in this context just means 'acting upon', so the phenomenological question becomes 'do we feel acted upon?'. I would say we do insofar as we experience something that is not volitional; the pushing is not experienced as something we are doing, but something which is done to us by 'something else'.
That's my cursory take on it, anyway, but it is very much based only on preliminary consideration; so I am certainly open to other thoughts that may move in different directions.
Is it possible to arrive at to the conclusion "I think therefor I am" without using reason alone.
It has everything to do with the discussion, perhaps you just haven't read enough trip reports yet.
You said:
"but we have no idea what it could be to wake from our reality to some other reality that wasn't either a displacement/ and or extension of our reality or something so incomprehensible that we could not even make sense of it let alone alone deem it to be a reality that would make our ordinary experience a dream."
It would be true of an experiencer to say something like this which is nearly identical to what you just wrote:
"Via dmt we can wake from our reality to some other reality that is a displacement and or extension of our reality. It is something so incomprehensible that we can not even make sense of it let alone alone deem it to be a reality that would make our ordinary experience seem like a dream."
How you can't see the parallels is beyond me. Maybe you have no faith in it's use or feel that because it is outlawed that it is worthless in this discussion.
Nothing more than a mathematical theory? Is that people who take DMT all report seeing visuals that are akin to the visual computation models of this mathematical theory (see video) as well as report travelling to an extra dimensions.
Now, If there was no correlation between the molecule and higher dimensions or even mathematical models... (as I know you want to say there isn't) then what would be the case is that people would be seeing all sorts of weird, mutated, distorted objects that are not discreetly defined, have no intelligible pattern and bare no resemblance to a highly ordered mathematical theory about multi-dimensionality... errr which is the exact opposite.
What is even more curious is that it is a naturally occurring alkaloid in your brain and among many other animals and trees of which we don't know it's function or purpose in them.
You say that "We cannot directly experience, or even visualize, the warping of three-dimensional space-time, for example." but you forget to take in to account you are working with an operating system within your mind. This is a default state coupled with many years of conditioning via education. Psychedelic substance change the way the brain operates to an extensive and intense degree (multiple areas of the brain disabled and activated coupled with firing rates changed like alpha delta beta etc.) to the point where majority of people are reporting being able to visualize the warping of three-dimensional space-time among many other things. The problem is once their brain returns to baseline function, they can't integrate what they experienced and have no ability to think about it anymore. Similar to how if you install a new operating system you can run programs on it but if you revert the operating system to the old one those programs won't function on it anymore.
I have never seen it when I have ingested DMT. And even if I had I don't see how it would prove String Theory to be anything more than a mathematical model. Other than that, I don't know what point you are trying to make.
This is all nonsense, I'm sorry to say. I have taken DMT numerous time, and I've read DMT: the Spirit Molecule, and I've read quite a few "trip reports". If an experience is utterly incomprehensible to us, then it is worthless, and cannot prove anything about anything at all.
It's almost like if a child complains his teeth hurt, there is no evidence but a child's own testimony. Yet we have theories about how at this age a child's teeth hurts because of tooth rot or a double set of teeth or something (hypothetical). Now, you are saying that the child's testimony isn't worth even considering, that it doesn't help us in our quest to scientifically identify the cause of teeth pain in children of that age. Actually, if there were no testimonies we wouldn't have clues to it's importance. And likewise with DMT, if we didn't have so many congruent testimonies about the experience of dimensions and the visualisations of the CGI of these mathematical constructs while under it's influence then we wouldn't have clues to the likelihood of string theory being relevant and more likely to be true.
"If an experience is utterly incomprehensible to us, then it is worthless, and cannot prove anything about anything at all." <- that is not true. The experience is incomprehensible and therefor causes dramatic shifts in perception which in turn causes dramatic changes in a persons life. There is a plethora of people reporting DMT healing their lives after would in ceremonies in south america drinking it in a brew called ayahuasca. Lindsay Lohan being one of them. I hope this shows you the incomprehnsible can change our lives because you are dependent on an incomprehensible system to begin with (the unconscious mind) which is making the decision you think you are making and which is being effected by these drug experiences which you are labelling as "useless" all because you think you aren't effected by the incomprehensible.
After reading what you wrote, I doubt we mean the same thing by "incomprehensible". So, we'll just be talking past each other if we continue.
Why is it inconsistent? Just because the terms use the context of an assumed reality that can be doubted?
Einstein once said "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
But keep going until it is simple enough for my simple mind to understand ;)
It's really not; it's a polite way of saying that I don't have any interest in pursuing this any further. I know what I mean, and I know what I think, and whether you don't understand it, or do understand it and don't agree with it; either way it's just fine with me.
I mean the evolutions of the spirit(soul) and the body(world).
I think those are really philosophical issues rather than statements about science itself. In its most basic form, science is methodological naturalism, which can be effectively practiced regardless of the philosophical views that the scientist (or the consumer of science) brings to it.
So, in that sense, there is no undermining of lived experience from science, but there may well be from philosophy.
Quoting John
Yes, so the question then is what is the 'something else'? In the case of the car's acceleration, it isn't an invisible force that is pushing us back into the seat, it is the seat (attached to the car) that is pushing us from behind. Similarly our experience of gravity isn't as an invisible force pushing us down (per Newton), it is the ground that is pushing us from below (due to space-time curvature caused by the earth's mass).
I agree it is not science per se that leads to devaluation and attenuation of lived experience it is scientism; which as you rightly point out is philosophy, not science.But, the problem is that the rise of science has inexorably led to the rise of scientism; and scientism has permeated the thinking of the woman or man in the street.
It seems kind of ironic that practitioners of science are called scientists, because a scientist is an adherent of scientism. So practitioners of science would better be called 'sciencers', perhaps. This would relegate science to an activity; instead of framing it as an overarching bestower of correct world views, which it has become in the popular, as well as arguably, the academic imagination.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't see how this account can be right. If I am in a vehicle that accelerates powerfully and if I am leaning forward with my body out of contact with the seat, I am pushed back into the seat.
Likewise if I jump off a cliff I will as though I am being inexorably pulled down, although I am not in contact with the Earth at all.
I know that a dream is illogical, surreal and we wake from it. But it is not proposed that a dream is equivalent to our world, only that it is an illustration of our being experiencing a different realm, which seems entirely real during that experience. This being the case, it is quite natural to consider that upon death, or attaining enlightenment, we would experience a change in the orientation of our being equivalent to switching channels into another real world, heaven, or a newly born baby, for example. That this real world we know, is just one channel, or frequency and our being, as a receiver could simply be tuned in to another channel, if one could find and operate the switch.
If that were true then wouldn't we have a theory of everything?
There are a lot of unsolved problems in physics.
Your body is actually at rest and it is the seat that accelerates forward towards you. Imagine that you are in a motionless rocket in space with you also floating motionless in the middle of the rocket. If the rocket suddenly accelerates forward, you might report that you fell or were pushed to the floor. But it is the rocket floor that caught up with you, not a force pushing you towards the floor. That's why it's called a fictitious force.
This is also true if you jump off a cliff. If you were wearing an accelerometer, it would measure zero. Nothing is pushing or pulling you down. Whereas an accelerometer on the ground would measure an upward acceleration of 9.8m/s/s. So gravity, understood as a force, is also fictitious. The ground's acceleration is explained by spacetime curvature.
But you are making my original point for me very well, which is that there is a disjunct between the phenomenological, 'lived' experience of feeling your body pushed back into the seat and the scientific explanation which relegates the lived experience to the status of being "fictitious". The point is that we experience our body being pushed back and we do not, and cannot, experience the seat accelerating forward to meet our bodies.
The scientific explanation does not relegate our lived experience to the status of "fictitious" (how could it?) It relegates a particular scientific explanation (a reversed effective force) to the status of "fictitious".
Since nothing pushes us back in the accelerating car scenario, it cannot be the case that we experience being pushed back. Our lived experience is real and happens in the world (whatever the correct explanations turn out to be) but our report or explanation of our experience may be mistaken in any given instance.
This is an account in ordinary language terms. There is no need to invoke a manifest/scientific distinction nor to necessarily privilege scientific explanations over any other kind of explanation.
But the fact remains that we feel something pushing us back, and that is the experience we have; it is certainly not a scientific theory, fictitious or otherwise.
We don't. That's a mistake. Though we may think we feel something pushing us back.
There may be, per scientific theory, no force pushing us back. Nonetheless we feel pushed back.That feeling of being pushed back is the lived experience. The explanation is irrelevant to the character of the lived experience.
The difference the distinction is based uoon is between whatever (fallible) theory we may hold to explain the experience and the lived experience itself. You apparently want to dissolve that distinction. That would be to the impoverishment of our experience, in my view, so I cannot recommend it.
Then you're really talking about how your experience seems to you which I agree doesn't commit you to any particular explanation. It does feel like we're being pushed back in the seat and that is consistent with the explanation that the seat is actually accelerating us forward.
My point is that lived experience happens in the world. It is not limited to what it feels like but also includes its physical instantiation (whether recognized by us or not).
:)
That latter may well sum up philosophy. :-)
OK, so to connect this back to an earlier point: Our experience of feeling like we're being pushed back in the seat just is our experience of the car's forward acceleration. The only issue is one of knowledge (or awareness) of the correct explanation. We might instead explain our experience in terms of an invisible force pushing us backward, which would be incorrect. (Although we may choose to model it as a fictitious force for instrumental purposes.)
Similarly with gravity. We feel like we are being pushed (or pulled) down by something. That just is our experience of the ground's upward acceleration. Which, in turn, just is our experience of spacetime curvature.