The Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience
"The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience" - an essay by Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics; Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physicist; Evan Thompson professor of philosophy; published in Aeon.
Additional links and resources:
Comment in Scientific American Cosmos, Quantum and Consciousness: Is Science Doomed to Leave Some Questions Unanswered?
Michel Bitbol (paper) It is Never Known but it is the Knower: Consciousness and the Blind Spot of Science
Bitbol was one of the speakers at the workshop that was held to discuss the issues raised in the Aeon article. His Academia profile page is here.
Co-author Evan Thompson was, like Bitbol, also a collaborator of Francisco Varela's, and a scholar of Buddhist abhidharma (amongst other subjects). The cross-over between phenomenology, philosophy of science and Buddhism is prominent in many of these discussions. Quite why this is, is another interesting thing; I think it has to do with the fact that Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) conceives of 'dharmas', the fundamental units of reality, in terms of lived experience, rather than as enduring objects of perception (such as atoms). So it is arguable that Buddhism has had a phenomenological focus from its inception.
And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be?
Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.
This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
Additional links and resources:
Comment in Scientific American Cosmos, Quantum and Consciousness: Is Science Doomed to Leave Some Questions Unanswered?
what happens when we cannot draw a clear line between the observer and the observed? This, according to Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser and some of his colleagues, is a serious problem. And because these cases concern some of the most important unanswered questions in physics, they potentially undermine the idea that science can explain “everything.”
Michel Bitbol (paper) It is Never Known but it is the Knower: Consciousness and the Blind Spot of Science
Bitbol was one of the speakers at the workshop that was held to discuss the issues raised in the Aeon article. His Academia profile page is here.
Co-author Evan Thompson was, like Bitbol, also a collaborator of Francisco Varela's, and a scholar of Buddhist abhidharma (amongst other subjects). The cross-over between phenomenology, philosophy of science and Buddhism is prominent in many of these discussions. Quite why this is, is another interesting thing; I think it has to do with the fact that Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) conceives of 'dharmas', the fundamental units of reality, in terms of lived experience, rather than as enduring objects of perception (such as atoms). So it is arguable that Buddhism has had a phenomenological focus from its inception.
And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be?
Comments (639)
The knot of experiential phenomena seems intractable. Either people have to bite the bullet of pansychism or they have to explain a dualism, hidden or otherwise. Anyone who uses illusion in their theory already has problems in explaining a materialistic monism.
What do Gleiser, Thompson and Frank think gives them the right to tell the world's millions of scientists, plenty of whom hold worldviews that encompass things not covered by science, what they believe?
The game of 'I'm more open-minded and spiritual than you' is as dull, puerile and pointless as the more traditional pastime of competing over the size of reproductive appendages.
This is probably aimed at the popular form of scientism as represented by the usual cadres like Dawkins et al. He makes a point for those who simply dont even acknowledge the hard question or understand it.
So, we have a story, based on fossil evidence and other observations, working hypotheses and an accepted theory of evolution, that tells us what the world was like during the various periods long before the advent of humans. The obvious fact that this story is only ever going to be a story that tells us what we would likely have seen if we had been around in these prehuman period, a story that will only ever be told by us, doesn't seem relevant to how the science is actually done.
I mean, how would acknowledging that what we are dealing with are things what we see, experience, imagine, speculate about and so on,(presuming that that is not already acknowledged: a presumption which would seem to impute rank stupidity to scientists) change how we do paleontology or geology, for example?
The following is quoted form the article: "Scientific materialists will argue that the scientific method enables us to get outside of experience and grasp the world as it is in itself."
Who are these so-called "scientific materialists", and what difference would such a "naive" view, even if it were common (which I find highly questionable) make to the practice of science? Science reveals the way the world appears to us, and this is revealing (at least some aspects of) what it is in itself, since we are part of nature.
This does not mean that the way the world is in itself is exhausted by our perceptions of it, but since we are part of the world, when we observe it impartially and attempt to understand it without presupposition or prejudice then we get closer to seeing, freer from a priori or ad hoc assumptions or reifications of linguistic associations or metaphysical ideas, how the world functions and what its history has been, as far as we can tell.
So, the notion that science has a "Blind Spot" seems to be really quite ludicrous, given firstly that science has no inherent view which could be counted as a blind spot, and secondly that individual scientists in general probably have their own viewpoints ranging from naive realism to anti-realism or idealism, from atheism to theism.
And the salient question is 'what possible changes could we make, in any attempt to somehow include the observer, to the way we practice the natural sciences?'. How would including the human observer change what we say about geology, or climate science? How could we even include the observer in the study of non-human phenomena (apart from QM, where the observer is implicated according to some interpretations, but which nonetheless seems to be a special case)?
I feel I have been deprived: where can I find such fascinating competitions? :razz:
Seriously, though, andrew, I quite agree with what you say there; it is indeed a "dull, peurile and pointless" game to be playing. Seeing the world in facile black and white agin-us-or-for-us terms, it is divisive, unjustifiably elitist and lacks subtlety and insight. It never ceases to amaze me how long it seems to take for some people to realize just how empty, how prejudiced and tendentious, such "philosophy" really is!
Blind spots may also be sore spots. :grin: I found it a very interesting essay and I think it represents an important change in perspective.
Are you familiar with 'the observer problem' in physics? With the decades-long debate between Einstein and Bohr about 'the role of the observer' and whether there is a 'mind-independent reality'? That is what provided a lot of the impetus for these kinds of developments.
It's not coincidental that many of the theorists in this debate are physicists. One of the participants in the workshop was Christian Fuchs, who's 'qbism' is quite an intriguing interpretive framework for philosophy of physics. But Marcelo Gleiser, one of the authors, is also a theoretical physicist. Again, not surprising.
But, hey, what do they know? They ought to sign up here and get schooled ;-)
Did you not read the first of the two posts above where I mention the observer problem in QM?
BUT, in any case, that is the one and only science, natural or human, where the observer may make a difference to what is observed.
It just happens to be the one that was purportedly concerned with 'the fundamental constituents of reality'. And that does have philosophical significance, because of the way in which physics has been seen as paradigmatic for other sciences.
Ask them a little bit else and you can notice that physicalism isn't the trendiest fad in the community.
Quoting Wayfarer
There's a lot of that in the Copenhagen interpretation (which Bohr was a member of), which goes so far away with this that it puts the observer in the middle of things. In the extreme it goes to arguments like if nobody looked at the moon, it might collapse or something like that.
That's the thing, it would be so different that you can't imagine what that would be like while reasoning within the framework of a mind-independent world. You don't see the changes that we could make precisely because you are assuming a mind-independent world.
Now, without assuming a mind-independent world, what is it that has an influence on geology and climate? There are the apparent regularities that we observe in our collective experience (which the natural sciences address), and then there is what we desire. What we desire shapes geology and the climate, it shapes everything we do, which shapes geology and the climate.
And it isn't clear at all that we could ever account for that variable (what we desire) by modeling a human being as an aggregation of elementary particles that behave according to laws of physics, it isn't clear that the behavior of a living being could be predicted from laws of physics, even in principle.
However, in a model of geology or climate, besides the variables of temperature, pressure, wind, solar activity, tectonic plate motion, ..., we could add as a variable the desires of living beings, and work on formulating a model that describes accurately the influence of desires on our environment, and come up with tools to find what people desire (these tools could be speaking with one another, interacting with one another, it doesn't have to be tools in the mere sense of physical object).
And it would put back living beings in an important place, as beings that can shape the world through their will, rather than seeing ourselves and others as meaningless accidents, as heaps of particles that blindly follow physical laws while having the illusion of choice.
That impression doesn't stem from observing their behavior, it stems from the fact that fundamental physics claim to describe the fundamental constituents of the universe, of everything including ourselves, and other scientific fields (chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychiatry, ...) submit to this position of authority that fundamental physics has, they are imbued with the belief of physicalism. There is the widespread belief that in principle everything reduces to and emerges from the constituents described in fundamental physics, that is elementary particles interacting with one another as described in laws of physics.
This is not true, and that's the problem which the op deals with. Science attempts to understand the world, as it appears to us, but it does not reveal the way that the world appears to us because it does not understand human experience. People who think that science is revealing what it is in itself, or even a part of what it is in itself, suffer from that delusion.
Regarding the claims they make in their article - that scientists (without restriction or qualification) believe such and such - they know as close to nothing as makes no odds, since between the three of them they probably have interacted with fewer than 0.1% of the world's scientists, and discussed metaphysics or phenomenology with less than a tenth of those. Being an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist or a philosopher doesn't give you any special insight into what a million plus people you have never met believe.
The article is lazy, arrogant click-bait. Their real target appears to be reductive materialists like Dawkins, Hawking or Krauss, but that wouldn't generate enough interest, so they big up their target by implying that all scientists are like those three.
There are not many people that can be more annoying than proselytising reductive materialists, but attention-seeking clowns that can't tell the difference between science and scientism manage to achieve it. I shudder to think what devoutly religious scientists like Francis Collins, or deeply philosophical ones like David Bohm would make of such tripe.
So what's the issue here? :chin:
No.
Physics doesn't claim anything like that.
That is a philosophical view only and what you are describing is more of reductionism. And this is more of view of the ignorant people in the media that put physics on the pedestal and ask quantum-physicists or cosmologists philosophical questions ...because of their field of topic. As if the physicist would know some root causes. Usually these people simply don't even observe that they are holding a reductionist view towards science.
In truth actual scientists usually stay away from other fields they don't know and acknowledge they amateurs in other fields.
Quoting leo
And this is called reductionism.
Yet a quantum-physicist has no clue based his own field how mammals communicate or what the monetary policy ought to be. The idea that one phenomenon can be reduce to other more fundamental phenomena and in the end "everything would be physics" is just silly as physics has a limited scope to the field of science.
No need to think, you can read what David Bohm said. Turns out he agrees with "such tripe".
http://dbohm.com/david-bohm-science-spirituality-world-crisis.html
It is clear that he considered reductive materialism a widespread view among scientists, and that he too saw it as a problem.
After all why would we be surprised that most scientists hold that view, considering that it is the view taught in schools? Kids are taught in physics classes that they are made of particles, that these particles make up everything that exists, and then some of these kids move on to become scientists. If they don't philosophize on their own, they stick with the default physicalist view. And if you actually conversed with scientists, you would realize that the majority indeed hold that view.
Many have commented that this view exists, and offered their opinion that it is a problem. I have said as much myself, many times. Those who are open to this message have already received and accepted it. Those who really need it are those whose emotional attachments to their personal beliefs are so deep that they cannot even hear discussion like this one. A shame, but there it is.
So where to go from here? :chin:
The most depressing part of this - for me anyway - is that Thompson, one of the authors of the article, has done more than most to show that science does not tell us this. On his own, his writings are supremely senstitive to the fact that the above picture is not just wrong, but decisively so on account of 'what science tells us'. I fear that @andrewk is exactly right that Thompson has sold out his own philosophical sophistication to all the better make a big splash on a widely-read platform like Aeon.
And the truth of course is that woo peddlers like the OP need science to be this reductive boogeyman all the better to leave breathing room for their own two-bit idealisms. Nothing is more terrifying to them than to learn that science itself repudiates these shitty reductive takes on science, least their own space of intellectual manouver is shrunk to nothing. Idealisms live on the transfused blood of reductive science - they sustain and support each other, and it is in the interest of each to nourish the parasitic life of the other. The OP and the article it champions is just another in a long line of dialectical tactics to shore up idealism by pushing the most vulgar of science as the most authoritative. Without doing so, it'd die the ignominious death it deserves.
Attempt to solve the problem? By for instance changing the way physics is taught in schools so that kids don't leave it believing they are nothing more than particles behaving according to laws of physics.
Also I believe many people are potentially open to this message but have never heard it. I desperately needed to hear this message during my scientific studies, but I was surrounded by scientists who boasted that their view is the truth and that anything going against it is essentially religious crackpottery. Took me a while to escape this madness and find some sanity in the words of philosophers such as Feyerabend who, unsurprisingly, was designated by many scientists as an enemy of science, or even the worst enemy of science, while all he was an enemy of was the bullshit that scientists spouted.
And this message definitely hasn't been heard nearly enough, just need to look at some of the reactions in this thread.
Physicists and many scientists do.
Quoting ssu
Can be reduced to particles in the sense that "how mammals communicate" or "what the monetary policy ought to be" would be thoughts held by a human being, and these thoughts would correspond to a specific pattern of electrical activity in a brain, and that electrical activity would correspond to many electrons moving in some specific way. So basically in that view everything you think and you feel and you do is simply particles moving and interacting according to physical laws, and that view is usually called physicalism or materialism.
Quoting StreetlightX
I missed the "woo peddling". I saw only a couple of problems to which science is often applied by the ignorant. These problems are outside the scope of science. Where is the woo, and where are the "two-bit idealisms"?
:up:
Quoting leo
Sounds familiar. :smile:
Quoting leo
Yes. @StreetlightX clearly believes (below) there is a problem here. I wonder what it is? :chin:
Quoting StreetlightX
I can't think of better words to end this post than these:
Quoting Coben
Awareness/consciousness/experience are not taken to be "secondary." They're taken to be real (in the sense of "existent"), physical things, just like everything else. He's using "reduction" with at least a hint of a value judgment there, especially in combination with the "secondary" comment. Saying that consciousness is physical isn't diminishing it in any way or making it any less important.
Re his "intractable problems," the first is no problem. It's simply a fact about perspective. Re the cliched old "never gives us nature as it is in itself," there's no way to know that without knowing that nature in itself is different than our perspective of it, but if we know that, then our perspective provides knowledge of nature in itself.
Re his comment about physicalism, he's simply forwarding a strawman.
In a nutshell, this article seems to be the same old crap mistakes, misunderstandings, misrepresentations, etc. that people, including thousands and thousands of faceless Internet chatters, message board posters, etc. have been making over and over for decades, despite being told otherwise by people whose views are supposedly being criticized. It comes across like sleazy-salesman-like apologetics tactics because of that, or most charitably, as some sort of mental block for understanding the "opposition's" views.
Wouldn't it be more fruitful to have a discussion that proceeds from understanding (where we actually care about understanding) the other side's view, so that we could actually paraphrase the opposing view in a way that the opposition would agree with?
And that utterly fails to answer the actual questions. This kind of reductionism is simply totally and utterly useless.
You see, you don't have to believe in emergentism of the spirit, but simple 'emergentism' emerging from the need to answer specific questions that rise from phenomena that simply cannot be answered by "root causes". Simply put it, physics cannot answer to every question there is in science. Hence the observation that everything is made of particles doesn't take us anywhere in a huge field of scientific topics. Add social sciences into the mix and physics is totally useless in those fields of inquiry.
Quoting StreetlightX
I wouldn't speculate what the intensions are of our fellow site members, but just to give my point of view on things. Yet I can relate to this what you said above, StreetlightX.
Having studied economics in the university, it's very easy to notice the superficial semi-ignorant criticism the field of economics gets with those typically criticizing the present. They typically argue that economics is devoid of anything other than maximization of wealth and Economists are the new priesthood of globalization etc. And in the end they purpose a more humane approach or whatever (and only loosely that is, not actually what it would be) that would make this inherently evil field of humanities better.
Of course economists do very well know the deficiencies of their own field. Once a professor told us the joke of two economists going back home at night and the other one noticing that he has lost his keys. The other one walks back to a lamp post and starts looking for it there. "Do you think that I lost it there?" says the first person. "Not likely, but at least here I can see if they are here" responds the other one.
And that's basically the reason why a lot of study has gone to economic markets with many similar small companies while the study of oligopolies, the actually prevailing economic market situation in the World, hasn't got much study. And the reason it's simply so complex and hard.
So really, the real question is just what are saying to solve the problem one has shown to exist.
It seems to me that if the authors took this seriously they would not argue about whether there is more than physical reality because, by their own admission, we do not understand what physical reality means. The fact that we do not have a physical explanation of consciousness, or any explanation of consciousness for that matter, does not mean that a satisfactory explanation will not be a physical explanation.
While some will stand on the sidelines and kibitz about why a physical explanation is not possible, science continues to make progress in understanding the physical world. "Consciousness of the gaps" has joined and in some cases replaced "god of the gaps". In my opinion, it makes no sense to argue about what we will find when we arrive at somewhere we have never been.
"everything is made of particles" is not an observation, it is a belief.
Sure we can't use the laws of physics to derive how elephants behave in groups or what it's like to watch a sunset, but materialists would claim that in principle, it is possible.
The subject is not about the usefulness of physics, it is about the belief of materialism that permeates the natural sciences, schools, and society, and how it neglects lived experience, which in the words of David Bohm leads "people who want to hold onto spirituality to be incoherent in various aspects of their lives" and to a loss of meaning.
Materialism tells us we are nothing more than a bunch of particles moving according to unchanging laws, which implies that choice and will are an illusion and which leaves no place to spirituality. The problem is that many believe that science shows materialism to be true, including many scientists, while this is not the case, and that's what the article in the OP is about.
And how would it be possible by only looking at physics, the movement of particles to derive how elephants behave in groups?
You are simply dismissing issues like entropy, randomness and quantum mechanics or that not everything in the phenotype is explained with the genotype. And with social sciences it's totally obvious that things simply don't get explained by movements of particles. Nobody would believe such reductionist crap.
I would assume that many (scientists also) see the evident danger of oversimplification and simply losing crucial issues through abstraction in reductionism. What we can say is that reductionism works sometimes and in some occasions it doesn't. That would be the more compelling case.
Quoting leo
Actually what many scientist don't believe is the existence of God and spirits. That's for sure. But that is simply is not what you make then to be: that they have to believe in the most simplistic reductionism and materialism that basically was the scientific paradigm in the era of Newton.
Descartes claimed that non-human animals could be explained reductively as automata; meaning essentially as more mechanically complex version of clock-works, which were the hyped up computers of the time. If you ask present day atheist biologists, I presume that nobody will go with Descarte's view on animals being automata similar to the automata we have built around us.
And I would argue that many scientists understand that we don't know everything about consciousness, yet that doesn't have make them be either a) believe in reductionism or b) be religious. Those aren't the two only views scientist can hold.
Strawman, strawman, strawman.
And can we stop saying "lived experience"? What other sort of experience is there?
Social science is quite accustomed to accommodating the presence of the observer, it's only some areas of 'natural' science that are in question. Any science that claims to look at other living creatures or phenomena is also informed by our prejudices; consider how our knowledge of the ways of the animal kingdom have shifted as our views of how to live within that kingdom have shifted.
I have wondered lately if part of what's at issue is our sense of responsibility for scientific work. I'm not a panpsychist but I feel that every time we talk about atoms, say, we remind, or ought to remind ourselves of atomic bombs. Our curiosity is inseparable from the uses we make of our curiosity's conclusions, but we try artificially to separate them so that the 'discovery' of sub-atomic particles and how they interact, say, is somehow heroic, and somehow separable from the villanous mass destruction that only became possible with its discovery.
There is nothing wrong with complaining about reductive materialism, or about any other metaphysical belief. There is everything wrong with claiming that it is an integral part of science. That sort of nonsense leads to the cancerous anti-science mantra that has taken over politics in the USA and is gradually destroying it.
Science has no metaphysical dogmas. Plenty of scientists do, but for almost any metaphysical position you can think of, you'll be able to find good scientists that hold it. Even if 95% of scientists were reductive materialists - which I very much doubt to be the case - it would say nothing at all about whether reductive materialism was an integral part of science.
The nonsense is particularly easy to see when you look at the social sciences. They're certainly not in the habit of believing what they study doesn't exist at all!
This seems to be the crux of it. By blindspot, they really mean that we can't see the road that we're driving on. Plato's Cave redux. That's a philosophical problem, not a scientific one.
On the contrary, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson, and Michel Bitbol, are dedicated academics, writers, philosophers and scientists, They have many peer-reviewed articles and books to their names, and they are neither hacks nor charlatans.
Quoting leo
Right, well stated. And what’s important about it is that scientists themselves are starting to see that.
Quoting Fooloso4
Nobody who advocates physicalism would admit this, would they? The whole point of physicalism is specifically to deny such a claim.
'On the contrary'?
What does your comment about peer-reviewed journal papers they have written on different subjects have to do with this non-peer-reviewed magazine piece on this subject? Are you seriously suggesting that nobody that ever did diligent, clever work in one part of their life was ever sloppy and lazy in another part of their life?
Well the irony is that one point of this approach is to heal the ‘Cartesian split’ which has given rise to this sense of ‘otherness’. The whole point of emphasizing ‘lived experience’ is to draw attention to the fact that science is a human enterprise, and that perspective is an ineliminable part of it. Whereas the whole gist of Galilean science has been that ‘what can be quantified’ is what most truly exists.
They are credible authors. They’re not hacks or charlatans turning out click bait.
Did you not read my response? What you wrote has nothing to do with what I wrote. You seem to just dodge or ignore the points made against you and then rebut some argument that nobody made.
As regards 'credible authors', Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss have all published serious, academic, peer-reviewed scientific papers that are widely respected. Are you suggesting we should therefore give the same deferential respect to 'The God Delusion', 'A universe from nothing' and 'Brief answers to big questions' - all reductive materialist polemic works - as is given to their peer-reviewed papers?
Or does your preference for treating academics as unimpeachable founts of wisdom on everything only apply to those that are theists or at least are making arguments favourable to theists?
It didn’t warrant comment.
Forgive me for being blunt, but it seems necessary. That magazine article makes claims about science that would be true if you replaced the word 'science' by 'scientism' but, as the authors did not do that, the claims are patently false. It seeks to imply that a metaphysical worldview of scientism - aka reductive materialism - is built into science, an integral part of it. That claim that is palpable nonsense. A disproof of the claim lies in every one of the hundreds of thousands of scientists that are religious, spiritual or just not reductive materialists - scientists whose existence you choose to ignore.
This has been pointed out by numerous people, and you have just ignored it, instead responding with irrelevant inanities like 'these authors are serious academics that have published peer-reviewed papers' - as if that had any relevance to what they have written in this non-peer-reviewed, non-academic context.
If you want to make a thread about why you dislike reductive materialism, go ahead. I'd agree with its sentiments but it'll probably be a little dull, because it's been discussed many times before. But if you make a thread that accuses science of being the same as reductive materialism, it's just dishonest and plays directly into the hands of the Trumps and Tea Parties of the world that would like us to distrust science because it implies that there may be a need to place some constraints around what capitalism can do.
Quoting andrewk
Is a misrepresentation of the argument they present, it's not even a remotely accurate interpretation. They're making a serious point, using the analogy of the blind spot, which you misunderstand, and then rest of your response was blatant ad hominem, how it's crappy writing, click bait, or whatever. So I responded, this is not junk journalism, I believe they are serious and credible authors.
The point of the analogy is that it conceals or occludes 'the role of the observer' which science until recently always believed was entirely irrelevant, as if science really did have an ideal view. But this is what is being criticized by this analogy, and I think it's a valid criticism.
It is indubitably foundational to the scientific-secular attitude. That is the context in which I refer to Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett is not a straw man, right? Living, breathing, publishing academic and 'public intellectual', routinely cited not only in learned journals, but also in the popular media as 'leading philosopher of mind'. And what is his basic tenet? 'Mind doesn't exist, it is unreal. The sense you have of being a person, a free agent, is really the cumulative result of millions of blind cellular automata, going about their routines in the service of the selfish gene'. Now, when you spell it out, it sounds preposterous, but it is still the default position of the secular intelligentsia, those who are conscientiously opposed to the idea of anything spiritual (and 'spiritual' is very lame word here, but our lexicon doesn't provide many alternatives) - as it must be. You might have your beliefs about noble, religious or spiritual ideals but ultimately we're 'apes on a rock', right? That's the bottom line.
Quoting StreetlightX
Exactly. And this is also the case with the scientifically illiterate who are otherwise well-versed in philosophy, they can't philosophize well about science.
The naive view is seeing science as this great enterprise that brings comfort and technology and maybe gives access to truth, so they don't like seeing it be attacked, but they don't realize that what is attacked is not the tools that science provides, it is things that people and scientists say and do in the name of Science, things that have a great negative influence on the lives of many, while these things are not accurate theories of the world that have demonstrated their practical usefulness, they are beliefs that are disguised as scientific and pushed and imposed onto others.
The culture of ignorance is better viewed as human culture. We are what we are :D
The point about Dennett, is that his work most consistently and completely exemplifies the consequences of materialism in philosophy of mind. If you think his work is preposterous - as I do - then you have to come up with a notion of the sense in which 'mind' is *not* something which is amenable to scientific analysis. And I think that's what the article in question does! Not by positing some 'unknowable mind-stuff', but by pointing out the reflexive nature of the question 'what is mind'. Get it?
Sure, but then isn't this like when the hall monitor teacher in school catches a kid running and the kids says 'but I saw other kids running'? IOW why are we treating the issue as a team issue, rather than a criticism issue. If I say Trump is bad for X, the response that Obama was bad about Y, is a confused response. First there are people are critical of both. Trump's policy/statement/action is not defended by poor actions of others. I don't have to choose between people who are illiterate about science and those who are illiterate about philosophy.
And then how powerful is this group of scientifically illiterate philosophy interested people? I do get that religious people who are skeptical about science as a whole, at least in arguments, has a decent amount of power, but these are not people who are interested xin philosophy - for the most part.
But that's a secondary issue. A very important one. My main reaction is 'so what?' if there is a problem as brought up in the OP, then the fact that there are scientifically illierate people who focus on philosophy is not relevant. If there is no problem as presented in the OP, then it is still not relevent. So the issue is: is that problem there?
If elephants are made solely of particles, and the motion of these particles is completely determined by fundamental laws of physics, then in principle knowing the state of these particles at a given time would allow to predict the future behavior of these particles, and so the behavior of these elephants. Now materialists do not claim that the current laws of physics are complete (they might say they are almost complete), but they would claim that complete fundamental laws of physics would allow to do that in principle, and that the only practical obstacle would be that of knowing the state of the particles that make up an elephant at a given time.
Quoting ssu
There are misconceptions there. Entropy is not a fundamental law of physics, well it was two centuries ago, entropy is not a force that causes things to move, it is a high-level description that is a consequence of fundamental laws of physics, the increase in entropy can be explained as a consequence of fundamental laws of physics. Same goes with randomness, the apparent randomness of the motion of a leaf falling down a tree can be explained as a consequence of fundamental laws of physics, with air molecules interacting with the particles that make up the leaf, and predicting the trajectory of the leaf would be a matter of knowing initially the position/velocity of the particles that make up the air and the leaf.
Quantum mechanics has some randomness built-in, but even if you assume that complete fundamental laws of physics include some fundamental randomness, that does not imply that you couldn't predict in principle the behavior of elephants. Because there are regularities in the behavior of elephants, their behavior is not random, and so these regularities could be predicted in principle from a complete fundamental law of physics even if it has some built-in randomness.
You say nobody would believe such crap, but materialists do, and many scientists are materialists, if you accept that fundamental physics describe the behavior of the fundamental constituents that make up everything then you're a materialist, and that's the way fundamental physics is presented in school and in the media, and it has all kinds of depressing implications, and this is why people such as the OP and the individuals cited by the OP and David Bohm and myself and others are critical of this state of affairs.
I thought it was relevant because we are on a philosophy forum, and some of the reactions stem from people who know a lot about philosophy but don't seem to know much about science, and so they don't see the problem presented in the OP, and that's part of the problem presented in the OP, if everyone saw this problem then it wouldn't be such a problem, it would have been addressed long ago.
If we discuss the subject on scientific forums we are met with people who don't see the problem because they are mostly philosophically illiterate, and if we discuss the subject on philosophy forums we are met with people who don't see the problem because they are mostly scientifically illiterate, so it becomes difficult to find a place where this kind of subject can be discussed freely without getting heated reactions from those who don't see the problem, and so it is difficult to address the problem.
There is experience in the sense having knowledge or skill about some subject. "Lived experience" puts the focus on the state of experiencing. I never used that term before but I don't see anything wrong with it, no need to be pedantic about it.
That's an abbreviated way of referring to processes one has gone through which were "lived." It just seems like a stupid term, where we're adding words where there's no need to add words--adding words to make it sound more "intellectual"/theoretical. We can't come up with an example where simply "experience," unmodified by a redundant adjective, wouldn't do just as well.
How about addressing the fact that you're forwarding strawmen?
I don't see the article claiming that materialism is a necessary part of engaging in science.
Note the focus on how we view science, rather than on science itself. It is not a criticism of science, it is a criticism of a widespread view of science.
Quoting andrewk
If you view science as the attempt to find apparent regularities in what we experience and to tentatively make predictions from them, then I agree. But as soon as you see science as being guided by a specific method, or as approaching truth, or as telling us what things are really like beyond what we experience, or as proving or disproving such or such belief or theory, there are metaphysical dogmas involved, and the problem is applying these dogmas while being unwilling or unable to identify them as such.
Yes, I see your point, and acknowledge its validity. But there are some sciencists who really do hold these beliefs, or claim they do in philosophy forums. They are the ones trying to proclaim the death of philosophy, and all forms of structured thought except science. I think the OP opposes this nonsense, doesn't it? :chin:
And there is a distinction between going through a process and referring to a process, between experiencing a feeling and talking about a feeling. In saying "lived experience" we're putting the focus on what it's like to go through that experience, rather than merely referring to it. The "neglect of lived experience" is the neglect of what it's like to experience, rather than the neglect of the experience you listed in your resume when we decide whether to hire you or not. You not seeing the distinction does not mean we're "adding words to make it sound more intellectual/theoretical".
Quoting Terrapin Station
How about describing what you see as strawmen, instead of expecting others to do the work for you?
You completely ignored that referring to experience is referring to something that was necessarily "lived," necessarily processual.
It's like running. You can't refer to running in a way that it's not dynamic and not something done by living things. There's a difference between running at the moment and referring to running that you did previously, but there's no need to qualify running as something that was action-oriented and that was something you needed to be alive to do.
Quoting leo
I already did so in my first post in the thread. You were repeating some of the same strawmen.
For example, no materialist neglects ("lived") experience.
That an experience was necessarily lived does not imply that "the neglect of experience" has only one meaning. Again, if I hire you without looking at the experience you listed in your resume, I neglect experience.
Now if I'm a physicist and I assume I am dealing with a mind-independent world, and I model that world and hypothesize what its fundamental constituents are and how they behave, and I find that I can predict a lot of things that way and call my model a success, and conclude that myself and others are made of these fundamental constituents and nothing else, but I don't pay attention to the fact that all this time I have been experiencing, and that my model cannot hope to predict that any arrangement of these fundamental constituents is going to be experiencing anything at all, then I have neglected experience in a much more profound and different way than by neglecting the experience on your resume.
Usually we use different words to refer to different things, so how do I differentiate the latter neglect of experience from the former? The former was about experience listed on a resume. The latter is about experiencing, living, feeling, being aware, conscious. So it is useful to qualify the latter as action-oriented to differentiate it, and I find that "lived experience" does the job fine. Myself I usually use the verb "to experience" instead of "lived experience", to differentiate it from "an experience".
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think what I just wrote above answers this. They do not neglect that they experience, but they neglect the fact that they experience when they attempt to make a model of everything that exists, and seem to assume that somehow the fact that they experience will emerge from their equations, but it can't if they don't take it into account right from the start.
What? What is the non-lived sense of experience that you'd be referring to there?
Let's just solve that first, because this is going way too many rounds without you clarifying that.
I clarified it in the rest of the post, but I can't clarify it to you if you don't read what I say.
As succinctly as I can, the physicist neglects the fact that he experiences when he builds his models of reality, while the employer neglects the experiences listed on a resume. It wouldn't be accurate to say that the physicist neglects experiences, because he doesn't neglect what he sees, but he does neglect the fact that he sees (when he builds his models).
For the more detailed version, see above.
Why are you talking about neglecting experiences in that section anyway? That part wasn't about that. This quote: "You completely ignored that referring to experience is referring to something that was necessarily 'lived,' necessarily processual" is about whether "lived" is redundant.
You're confusing the second half with the first half. (Hence a reason why the best course of action is to stick to one thing at a time . . . against my better judgment, I addressed more than one thing in a post and you're conflating the two.)
It is precisely because you want to always focus on one thing at a time that you fail to see the connection. Sure an experience was necessarily lived. I claim that this does not imply that "lived experience" is redundant, because "lived experience" can be used to refer to something that "experience" alone cannot.
Do you agree that "neglecting an experience" is not the same as "neglecting the fact that you experience"? If so, how would you call the neglect of "the fact that you experience"? The authors of the article have chosen to call it "lived experience", that's all. Sure, "lived experience" might seem like a pleonasm, but only if you insist on focusing on the fact that an experience was necessarily lived, rather than on the idea that "an experience you have" is not the same as "the fact that you experience".
Of course science is a human enterprise conducted from a human perspective. As I see it, the article itself presents a dualist framing. It repeatedly makes claims with dubious modifiers such as "reality as it is in itself", "a God's eye view of nature", "experiential time", "lived experience", "absolute knowledge" and so on. This all serves to set up the thesis that science neglects experience and the human perspective when, to the contrary, science has always been grounded in experience and observation. That's why it works.
What can it refer to that experience alone can not, if experience is necessarily lived?
Quoting leo
Just in case that's supposed to be part of the answer, no, I don't agree that those are not the same. What is the difference supposed to be?
I explained that in the second paragraph. "Lived experience" can refer to "the fact that you experience", while experience refers to "an experience you have".
How would you say "the neglect of the fact that we experience" more succinctly? "The neglect of lived experience" doesn't sound bad to me, there could be worse choices. What better choices do you have? It would have been clunky to name the article "The blind spot of science is the neglect of the fact that we experience". Or maybe that would have been better, if "lived experience" is so confusing to some.
I really can't type more than one sentence with you, or you'll ignore stuff. At the risk of a second sentence, what's the difference between the fact that you experience and an experience you have?
Here are some things informed physicalists acknowledge we do not yet understand:
Dark matter. Dark energy. Quantum gravity. String theory. Multiverse. Time. Beginning of time. Life. Unity of micro/macroscopic.
On the other hand, those who reject physicalism will point to consciousness as if it is well enough understood to demonstrate that it cannot be explain in physical terms.
I haven't ignored stuff, you just haven't understood how what I said addressed what you believe i ignored.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If you don't see the difference I don't believe I can make you see it, it will just be an endless back and forth with you asking a question and me answering, and you asking another question and so on and so forth, I don't see an end to it so unless you want to say where you're going with it it's probably best we stop here.
All I will give you here is an analogy. "The fact that there is a thing in a box" is not the same as "the thing that is in the box". Maybe you will then ask "why do you think this analogy applies?" or something of the sort, and I will then answer, and you will pick something I said and ask another question, and if I give a well-thought-out reply you will stop reading after the first sentence and ask a question on that while ignoring all the rest, and I don't want to have to deal with that. You have a pattern of focusing on semantics and technicalities and detracting threads from their original subject, to me there is really not much point in debating endlessly on whether "lived experience" is redundant or not.
But if you want to play the game the other way, I can ask the questions and you answer. Why do you think the fact that you experience and an experience you have are the same?
Physicists do not neglect what they experience when they build their models of reality, but they neglect the fact that they experience, and that's a huge omission. They claim to describe the fundamental constituents that make up everything, but because of their initial omission their constituents cannot be used to explain why we experience anything at all. What makes a particular arrangement of particles conscious rather than not conscious? Their equations don't say, they can't say. But then many say that because fundamental physics describe the fundamental constituents that make up reality, then choice is an illusion and we are simply machines behaving according to laws of physics, our feelings and desires do not cause anything and life is an accident. Which are beliefs that do not follow from observation.
Basically, if we want to assume that there is such a thing as a mind-independent world, and we claim to have a model that describe the fundamental constituents of that mind-independent world and how they behave, then that model ought to be able to explain, even in principle, why we experience anything at all, otherwise we haven't built a model of that mind-independent world, we have just built a model of what we experience, which is definitely not the same. And if we acknowledge that we have just built a model of what we experience, then we can't use that model to say what we are made of and what we can or cannot do, because it is not a model of ourselves, it is a model of what we experience.
Are you trying to say "the fact that there is a thing in a box" versus "the thing that is in the box, conceptually abstracted from that situation, so that one is just thinking about the thing on its own, not in relation to the box"?
Indeed! And these are among the reasons for the 'decline of materialism'. However the conundrums about dark matter have only become apparent about 50 years ago - they weren't known in materialism's heyday. But convinced materialists will still insist that all these issues are amenable in principle to physicalist explanations - Karl Popper's 'promissory notes of materialism'. Which is why, maybe, the theory is one of dark matter - 'matter' being the suitable metaphor to stand in for some unknown force.
Quoting Andrew M
ALl due respect, you're not appreciating the point being made. As we have discussed philosophy of physics many times, think about this in relation to the Bohr-Einstein debates. Einstein was a convinced realist who believed exactly that physics should provide a grasp of sub-atomic phenomena 'as they are in themselves'. It was Heisenberg (so, the Copenhagen interpretation) who said that 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Einstein debated Henri Bergson in public forums about exactly the question of 'experiential time'. And the scientific view, by purportedly arriving at a quantitative understanding of the primary qualities of phenomena, does indeed aspire to what Thomas Nagel has described as 'the view from nowhere', which, I contend, amounts to the absolutisation of knowledge. This is why the discovery of uncertainty (which you solve with respect to the belief in 'many worlds') is such a big deal!
Incidentally nobody has taken a shot at an alternative term for 'lived experience'. How about 'being' and the subject of the essay being the 'forgetfulness of being'?
Yes, physics is concerned with the micro-physical, and some of what is observed there seems counter-intuitive, even paradoxical, to our ways of thinking which have evolved in the 'macro' world of daily experience. Should that result surprise us given also the general fact that how we think about things is not the things themselves, but a dualistically oriented reflection of experience?
It's a matter of history. After the European Enlightenment, there was a movement away from religion as an explanatory framework, to the sciences. Obviously a mandatory step, what with the demolition of Ptolmaic cosmology by Galileo and Copernicus, among many other things. So the alternative to the philosophical theology was felt to be Newton's laws as paradigm and Descartes and Galileo's 'new science' as method. So for many of the post-Enlightenment philosophers, it was then natural to assume that atoms were the fundamental reality. Remember Bertrand Russell's essay, Free Man's Worship? Jacques Monod Chance and Necessity? They are canonical statements of 20th century scientific materialism. And they still form at least the backdrop for what many educated people in the secular West believe about the world, even if, when pressed, they won't really know what scientific materialism means. But I'm sure that if you ask the proverbial man in the street what's behind it all, many will answer, 'nothing is behind it, it's Russell's meaningless collocation of atoms'. You see people joining this forum every single day who believe this even if, again, when pressed, many of them are really quite unclear about what they believe.
But what happened in the meanwhile, was that the very idea of 'the atom' as an indivisible material unit vanished into probability waves. So just as the Ptolmaic cosmology was demolished by Copernicus and Newton., Victorian-era materialism has been demolished by quantum physics. But it hasn't really sunk in yet. Hence this critique.
As J B S Haldane put it:
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
The story you tell above is just one tiny thread in the tapestry of history, an interpretation derived from a certain perspective, a particular tendentious story. There are many, many others, and none of them priveleged over all the others.
You are assuming without evidence that those who reject the OP are scientifically illiterate.
I very much doubt that to be the case. I am scientifically literate, having grown up in a a family where both my parents where scientists (and both Christian by the way - somehow defying this dogma that scientists must be reductive materialists), I have a number of friends and relatives that are professional scientists (some of them reductive materialists, some of them not), I solve theoretical physics problems for fun in my spare time and I'm a Science Advisor on physicsforums. I am also philosophically literate, and am not a reductive materialist. It's perfectly possible that plenty of others that point out how the OP is an attention-seeking straw man are similarly literate in both science and philosophy. Simply assuming that anybody that doesn't agree must be scientifically illiterate is nonsense.
How do you know it would be "so different that you can't imagine", if you can't imagine how it would be different?
Quoting leo
Sure what we do affects the climate and may (apart from the immediate effects of, for example, drilling and excavation) over much longer timescales even affect the geology. But the climate and geology prior to the existence of humans would not have been affected by us, would it?
Quoting leo
That we might be thought of as "heaps of particles that blindly follow physical laws while having the illusion of choice" just shows one way of thinking that obviously does not tell the whole story of human, or even animal, beings. Contemporary science is not so reductive as this outmoded Newtonian vision; but that seems to be taking longer to sink in with some of those who like to call themselves philosophers than it should. By reacting against this reductionist model you are actually perpetuating it, because you see only the "either/or" of (necessarily reductively materialist) science versus some kind of idealism. A painfully facile approach!
And why cannot we just accept that we don't know consciousness just as we don't know dark matter etc?
Quoting Janus
As you said above, this doesn't go through at all.
A true blind spot.
That may be true if one has a very narrow view of materialism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Our understanding of what the "stuff" that the universe is made of has changed. That is the way science works. Some prefer the term 'physical' or 'natural' to 'material' since the term is easily misunderstood.
Quoting Wayfarer
It may be that we will never have a complete explanation, but the assumption is that any satisfactory explanation we do have will be a physical explanation. If that turns out not to be the case then science will change in response to the evidence. But without evidence it does not make sense to assume or look for some unknown. The history of science is littered with arguments for why a physical explanation of this or that is insufficient, only to have such explanations emerge. The only 'promissory note' I see is the one that declares that there is some non-physical something that maybe we will find or maybe we won't but that must nevertheless be.
That is my point. We do not understand and so arguments that claim that consciousness cannot be understood in physical terms are unconvincing. We cannot point to something we do not understand as evidence that an explanation of it cannot be a physical explanation.
:point: Yep. Rather than point out and engage with the myriad of places where these concerns are being addressed in science - and not necessarily by means of science - the bullshit dichotomy between bad science and equally shitty spiritualist hot takes is simply perpetuated. It's in Wayfarer's interest that science remain a shitty, reductive undertaking: he feeds off it.
Sounds psychoanalytic to me.
And the notion of a transcendent "realm" being set over against, and being of ultimate value as opposed to, the "mere material world" has been exacerbated by some reductionist views of science. But I think those reductionist views stem predominately from Platonism and Christianity, not from science itself, which is now, and has been for some time, busy ridding itself of those outmoded paradigms.
In any case, it's a complex, nuanced story, not a simplistic "either/ or" scenario as some would like to paint it.
The authors address that exact point, with reference to Hempel's dilemma:
Quoting andrewk
The article in question is not about science, nor hostile to science; it is a criticism of two tendencies, namely, objectivism and physicalism, which, it argues, 'are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones'. It seems to me that many who are so hostile to this article don't actually defend the very beliefs that the article is criticizing. So, why the pique? I just don't understand your hostility, it's just the kind of thing that I would have expected a person with your background and interests to be sympathetic to. As I said, these are not hacks and charlatans, they're interesting academics, writers and philosophers. Why the fury?
Quoting Janus
And the essay is just an example of this fact. The authors note:
Is that 'hysterically anti-science'? Are those who claim such things 'in need of psychoanalysis?' Really, this is verging on the hilarious.
Quoting Janus
The 'scientific revolution' and Enlightenment values based on science are not my invention. It's an historical narrative. The next chapter that is emerging is indeed a holistic and even idealist philosophy that you find in many 'systems scientists', although not all of them are able to imagine the transcendent domain.
Yes, but the fact that science is (fairly obviously) an aspect of human experience; a story told by humans, is not something that any sensible scientist would deny. As I said in my previous post, Christianity and Platonism would seem to be the primary culprits behind the objectification and devaluation of the natural world.
Perhaps the rise of science, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution would not have happened without Platonism and Christianity, which is a question explored in this book book: https://www.amazon.com/Patterning-Instinct-Cultural-History-Humanitys/dp/1633882934/ref=sr_1_1?crid=HQW0U2XUQTMA&keywords=the+patterning+instinct+by+jeremy+lent&qid=1560395176&s=gateway&sprefix=the+patterning+instinct%2Caps%2C447&sr=8-1
But the salient point is that the fault does not lie with science per se, and nor do all scientists, past and present, hold to the kind of reductionist views that the article seems to want to claim are near universal among scientists and lay people alike, and seems to want to claim are solely due to the methods and practices of science itself.
Science can have no truck, by virtue of the way it is practiced, with the transcendent. And just as phenomenology can safely perform its epoché and bracket the question as to whether the objective or external world exists, so science can perform its own epoché, and bracket concerns about the "lived experience" of humans and indeed even the question as to whether the objective or external world exists.
BUT IT DOESN'T CLAIM THAT. It is specifically NOT what is being claimed. And yet, that is the basis of the criticisms here. That's where the actual straw-man arguments are being mounted. It is not anti-science; it is criticizing physicalism and objectivism, right? It's not about science, per se, and neither is that what I'm saying. It is exasperating to be the subject of continuous straw-man, not to mention ad hom, criticisms about this point.
Quoting Janus
Even though we don't know what it is, right?
There's methodological naturalism, which is to set aside or bracket out any causes that can't in principle be understood naturalistically. Then there's metaphysical naturalism which is the extrapolation of the principle to areas where it cannot possibly be applied. That is what is at issue.
This needs a response, even if it will probably be futile.
There was a particularly vitriolic couple of threads, one on Bernard Kastrup, and another on some experiment about the 'observation problem', that lead to particularly hostile, practically hysterical, outbursts along these lines, always involving the issue of the 'observer problem' and whether it has philosophical implications.
One of the topics that came up in those threads was the famous paper by Wheeler on the 'participatory universe'. Originally intended to once again address the 'observer problem', it is, in brief, that:
From the same source:
There are many more such musings in his paper law without law. In a sense, Wheeler was struggling with the implications of what he was saying - he hated anything like paranormal psychology or mysticism, and yet the idea of 'observer-participancy' seemed to suggest it.
This is the point that is at the centre of many of these debates. And the reason they're so bitter, is because they appear to undermine our natural sense of realism, that The Universe exists in just the way that common-sense and science show that it does, and we're simply - what was SLX' expression - 'moderately intelligent apes on a rock in space'.
Now what I argue is that the article we're discussing, and also many other philosophers, point out that the mind, the human intellect, has an ineliminable role in the construction of reality. It doesn't mean that 'the train wheels disappear when the passengers are on board' (one of G E Moore's criticisms of Berkeley, whom, mind you, Wheeler felt obliged to discuss in his paper.) What it means is that everything we know, including everything science knows, has an ineliminably subjective pole or aspect, which itself is never disclosed or seen or accounted for (hence, 'the blind spot'). But science was forced to account for it, by the 'observer problem' among other things.
Note this diagram from the Law without Law paper:
'What we call 'reality' consists of...Construction of the imagination', right? So this undermines both 'physicalism' and 'objectivism' - but it would be ridiculous to say that it 'undermines science'. And it's NOT what I'm saying, so please stop with the ad homs.
It seems to be implicit in the article that physicalism and objectivism are rife in the scientific community and that this is a problem. It also seems to suggest that under the current scientific paradigm physicalism and objectivism are inherent and inevitable. If you don't think this is what the article is about then what do you think it is about?
If all the authors wanted to critique is physicalism and objectivism per se, then why bring science into it at all. It is arguable that objectivism (at least the kind of objectivism which is detrimental to our attitudes to the natural world including humans) has been promulgated by the monetization and propertization of the world, by the twin ideas of using human resources to make profits, and of charging interest on loaned money.
Quoting Wayfarer
How could, and why should, science be expected to deal with something if it can have access to no determinate idea of what the "something' is?
Quoting Wayfarer
Who says methodological naturalism is being universally or even generally extrapolated to areas where it cannot be applied? Does the article say that? I ask that because if the article is not saying that it is, which would be the same as to say (and which is what you are denying it says) that scientists and the public following them generally are metaphysical naturalists and/ or physicalists, then what is the point of the article?
Also, what's your issue with being a moderately intelligent ape on a watery rock? By any measure that's fucking amazing, without the need to invoke any of your woo. But I forget: you hate nature, you devalue and denigrate it, so you need more, always more.
Really? Then why is it entitled:
"The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience"
rather than, for instance "The blind spot of reductive materialism..." or "The blind spot of Scientism....".
The answer of course, is that they would get nowhere near as many clicks with either of those honest titles, so they went for the dishonest one.
I can imagine what it would be like, you were the one who seemed to not be able to imagine how we could include the observer in the natural sciences (besides in quantum mechanics). I presumed that you couldn't imagine it precisely because you were assuming that the world is mind-independent (and how could the observer be relevant in such a world?)
Quoting Janus
There again you're implicitly assuming a mind-independent world. What we think the world was like in a distant past depends on what we assume has an influence on that world. If instead you assume that humans and other living beings do have an influence on the world through what they desire, then you can't easily turn back the clock to infer that there ever was a time when there was no life or minds in any form whatsoever. And even if it is the case that there was a time when there wasn't any mind, it doesn't follow that climate and geology today are not affected by minds.
Quoting Janus
It is certainly valuable that there are some physicists and scientists who are willing to interpret quantum mechanics as showing an influence of the observer on the world. And some interpretations of quantum mechanics do get far away from a Newtonian vision. But I cannot help but see that despite this, the widespread view is still reductive. The standard model of particle physics, which was built on quantum mechanics among other things, refers to the fundamental constituents of reality as being elementary particles, interacting with one another through forces, which is definitely heavily imbued with a Newtonian vision.
The thing is, quantum mechanics the way it is presented is too inintuitive, physics students are told that they cannot understand it, that all they can do is "shut up and calculate". So these future scientists mostly never really adhere to a quantum mechanical view of the world, they retain deep down a Newtonian vision that they can grasp, and only forget about that vision when they manipulate quantum mechanical equations, which again is why the standard model of particle physics that came later is made of particles interacting through forces, just like in a Newtonian vision.
And besides, the observer effect in quantum mechanics doesn't have to be interpreted as the influence of consciousness on reality. Many simply choose to view it as the idea that any measuring apparatus that is introduced changes the setup of the experiment, and so changes the result of the experiment. Contemporary scientific experiments do not force scientists to adhere to such or such view, they are the ones who force their view onto the experiments.
No, I asked how the observer could be included in the observations in, for example, biology, chemistry or geology. If you can imagine how, then explain or describe. The question of the mind-dependence or mind Independence of what is observed is irrelevant to what is observed, as far as i can tell.
Fair point! I have to cop to that. But the article is explicitly aimed at physicalism and objectivism. Do you think these are essential to science? You haven't said anything about that point.
Quoting StreetlightX
That we’re not apes?
Re the Wheeler quote - if that’s taken in the context of the paper in question, it is simply the modest claim that 'what the scientist is thinking' has no outcome on a particular experiment. But the whole point of 'the participatory principle' is, indeed, participatory, as distinct from 'objective' and 'physical'.
And yet we share more DNA with chimpanzees, about 99 % if memory serves, than we do with any other animal. All the available evidence seems to suggest, according to the paleontologists, that we evolved from a common ancestor.
No f***ing kidding?? Remember Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False . Or does that title just make him another science-hating fanatic?
I gave an example for geology, saying how the desires of living beings can have an influence on it. If these desires are shaped in part by what these beings observe, then the observer is involved in the way the world changes. Whereas the current widespread view is to see living beings as passive machines obeying to unchanging laws.
As to chemistry, it could be possible that what is desired has an influence on the way some molecules behave within the body, for instance in the brain. And before you say that would violate 'proven' laws of physics such as the conservation of energy, consider that these laws are mostly tested in passive and basic situations where life has a negligible influence, not within complex organisms.
A nice deflationary answer, if only what motivated it wasn't a claim for human exceptionalism as being beyond or above nature altogether.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quote this supposed context, verbatim. I dare you. Liar.
We're clearly not apes. And furthermore, it's not even the point at issue. The point at issue is 'the role of the mind in the construction of reality'. Read the legend in figure above, which makes exactly this point - how 'what we call reality is a product of the imagination between the "iron posts" of observation' - something I am entirely happy to agree with.
Quoting StreetlightX
This was all gone through here. At the time, I pointed out that immediately prior to Wheeler's statement that "consciousness has nothing to do with the quantum process", he says "Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists "out there" independent of us, this is a view which can no longer be upheld. There's a strange sense in which this is a "participatory universe".' And that is the point at issue in this debate, because it's directly connected with the challenge to the ideas of 'objectivism' and 'physicalism'.
So, what Wheeler is saying about "consciousness" in the narrow and specific sense, is simply that it makes no difference as far as measurement or doing the experiment is concerned. That's the sense in which ' "consciousness" has nothing to do with the process' - in the lab! But the point of the "participatory reality" is that it's *not* a scientific theory, but Wheeler musing about the implications of observer-dependency in a larger, philosophical sense. (See Rosenblum and Kutner, Quantum Enigma, p168. And his Law without Law paper is a speculative extravaganza, it should be said.)
As I said, it is just this kind of discovery which has lead to the 'blind spot' discussion. Christian Fuchs, the developer of Quantum Cubism, was one of the participants in the Workshop, and is also mentioned in the paper.
Correct, these lines preceed Wheeler's unequivocal declaration that "consciousness has nothing to do with the quantum process": that consciousness has no such role qualifies what he says of the participatory universe: it is explicitly a caution he adds so that the participatory universe thesis is not interpreted according to your misreading. Which is to say: this is exactly not what 'is at issue in the debate' because Wheeler explicitly rules it out of the running as a way to understand the thesis. More than that, he rules in exactly what he means: "we are dealing with an event that makes itself known by an irreversible act of amplification, by an indelible record, an act of registration. Does that record subsequently enter into the "consciousness" of some persons? ... That is a desperate part of the story, important but not to be confused with "quantum phenomenon". (my emphasis)
That you take what Wheeler explicitly calls a 'separate part of the story' to be 'the point at issue' speaks to either your utter illiteracy at best, or your wilful attempts at distortion at worst. I think its quite obviously the latter. Having put this rubbish to bed, one can only wonder what any of this has to do with anything other than your propensity to bring up irrelevant nonsense in place of actual argument.
I do not regard them as being essential to science, and they are not part of the way I look at science. I am pretty confident the many religious, spiritual, idealist or other non-materialist, non-physicalist scientists feel the same way.
Then how do you interpret that statement that Wheeler makes, that 'what we think of as reality consists of an elaborate paper-mache construction', under the "R" figure above? As I've had a go at interpreting the quotation you have provided, it would be fair if you tried to do the same.
Are you aware of the philosophical implications of the 'delayed-choice experiment?' This is an elaboration of the original double-slit experiment, which shows that an experimental choice made after the target object has travelled its path, actually determines which path has been travelled. In other words, an observation now affects what happened previously. This is one of the findings that forced Wheeler to adopt the 'participatory universe' idea - which is a shocking idea, from the perspective of earlier science.
'Separate', not 'desperate', although the slip is telling. But, as he says, it is not to be confused with 'quantum phenomenon'. Again, this refers to what is going on in the lab. But 'the act of registration' is still fundamental, and that act is by an observer making a measurement - hence the 'participatory' nature of the model. And, more importantly, still part of the story.
There is some speculation that 'observation' might be extended to include all manner of physical interactions between all kinds of objects, as well as just measurement by a device, but that is by no means settled, and many of the original figures involved in the debate didn't accept it; Schrodinger maintained 'a thermometer’s registration cannot be considered an act of observation, as it contains no meaning in itself. Thus, consciousness is needed to make physical reality meaningful' (Mind and Matter, 1958). So at best it's a vexed point.
I have often heard of that quote from Neils Bohr, 'if you haven't been shocked by quantum physics then you haven't understood it.' I tracked down the source of that quote - he said it at the end of a talk he gave for the Vienna Circle positivists. He talked about the counter-intuitive nature of uncertainty and quantum objects, and at the end they all nodded sagely and applauded politely. Taken aback by their response, that's when he said it - as if he thought that they really didn't 'get' it. Because it is shocking, and it does undermine 'objectivism'. That's why I think you keep lashing out over it.
Quoting andrewk
Of course, I knew that about you. So again, I was perplexed with your reaction, as I think you're basically in agreement with it.
On second perusal I thought it worthwhile to address this. I don't believe scientists generally have a delusion of absolute knowledge. In fact it seems to be generally the case that scientists think knowledge is fallible and subject to potentially endless revision.
A new culture of science is being created, at least in the field of biology, more aligned with systems or information theories. Also we are coming ever more to think of ourselves as "expressions of nature", and not as transcendent beings incarnated in a fallen world. We certainly need science above all if we are to flourish or even survive far into the new millennium; that is we need to understand how nature really works and begin seeing ourselves as an integral part of nature rather than as separate, special, fallen but potentially superior, transcendent beings who are more important than the rest of nature. This is a paradigm shift we need to make in order to be able to bear the radical changes to our thinking and lifestyle that must come with the inevitable collapse of the present economic system in the near future.
This is the moment he departs from reason to hyperbole.
This is not an impediment to science, just a place where other ways of knowing are more useful.
"Life and Mind" are not "GONE", science does not say that. There is no "lifeless matter". Simply enough the lived experience is the place where other means of understanding and knowing come into play. In the same way you cannot hear colour, and you cannot see music, we cannot expect science to unpack and describe everything.
Yes, and the results of the experiment add yet one more piece of evidence that 'observation' at the quantum level is irrevocably determined by the apparatus of experimental set-up, insofar as it is the position of the shutters on the photodetector which erase the which-path information (open or closed), that 'determine' the appearance of the interference pattern or not. 'Consciousness' again has no part to play in any of this, no matter what woo-sayers like to peddle; As some Quantum Eraser experimentalists put it: "In conclusion, our results corroborate Bohr's view that the whole experimental setup determines the possible experimental predictions" (Herzog et. al, cited in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway). Barad herself comments: "the atom is not a separate object but rather an inseparable part of the phenomenon (that includes the micromaser cavities, the photodetector-shutter system, the double slit diffraction grating, and the screen among other elements)".
Wheeler’s ‘papier-mache’ comment is just an elaboration of the consequences of just the ‘decision’ made as to how one sets-up one’s physical experimental apparatus. Hence the line that immediately precedes the papier-mache comment: “By deciding what questions our quantum registering equipment shall put in the present we have an undeniable choice in what we have the right to say about the past”: the ‘choice of question’ of course, is nothing other than how one configures a physical set of measuring equipment. It's worth noting that even your article is in concord with this: "According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device."
Beyond the topic of beating this mutilated, dead, horse however, it's worth noting that just because some tiny corner of physics has no tuck with some fuzzy notion of 'lived experience', this says nothing about the engagement of science with areas in which 'lived experience' is in fact pertinent. The distinguishing mark of the empirical is to follow where the evidence takes one, and not simply play the paranoiac and lament that lived experience has no place in science tout court. QM just happens to be a place where wannabe woo-peddlers like to make their bed because few people understand it, and it's one of the few places they can get away with the bullshit they do. Like in this case.
He says that ‘what we call reality is a construction’. In the same article he says this is the very thing that Einstein could not concede. It’s not dead horse, it’s a live issue, but obviously dead to you.
So, the participatory universe model has an ineluctably subjective pole or aspect, which is real but not apparent. You will only designate this as woo because you can’t accomodate it.
Wheeler says in the section Phenomenon that ‘the dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental apparatus is what made Einstein unhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists ‘out there ‘ independent of all acts of observation.’ And this is exactly the point at issue in the essay.
He goes on to say, a phenomenon is not a phenomenon until it is measured. So, what is it before then? We can’t say. Which again is the general thrust of the Copenhagen interpretation, often misconstrued as positivism.
It isn't because you believe in some bullshit equivocation between observation and consciousness which is pure, pseudoscientific excrement.
But observation does, that is irrefutable.
Because science - as it is practised - includes and embraces physicalism and objectivism?
Philosophy is not competition, it's co-operative learning. So it's not uncritical, but the criticism is just one part of the inquiry process. Philosophy is not for "critiquing", and it does not depend on it, or its lack, for it to be "sense", I don't think.
Science has always been grounded in observation, I admit. But "the human perspective"? Science explicitly rejects the human perspective, and aims to observe impartially, in an unbiased manner. No human perspective there.
Yes, I read the article. The problem, as I see it, is the move from the insufficiency of current explanations to the positing some form of fundamental dualism, as if without, say, consciousness or God, the world as we know it could not exist.
"Experience" works just fine. "Lived experience" doesn't say/tell us anything additional to what simply "experience" would tell us.
There's a belief that humans can be impartial/unbiased, at least in conjunction with each other. That's not rejecting human perspective. It's seen as a feature of the human perspective.
I'm not saying I agree that we can be impartial/unbiased, but the view that we can and should be isn't actually rejecting the human perspective.
I'm positive that StreetlightX explained to you at least once before (I can't recall the thread, but I know I read it not too long ago) that observation/measurement in the sciences does not imply human observation or human actions. It simply refers to interaction with other things.
It may not be the point at issue but let's be correct. We are, unequivocally, apes and there's nothing wrong with that
"A hominoid, commonly called an ape, is a member of the superfamily Hominoidea: extant members are the gibbons (lesser apes, family Hylobatidae) and the hominids. A hominid is a member of the family Hominidae, the great apes: orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae
Unfortunately, to many this suggests that physics must also be metaphysically irreducible to experience - which is nonsensical given that first-person experience is the tribunal upon which all claims of existence are judged.
Quoting Pattern-chaserWe can't reject the human perspective. Our observations for example are time and location bound. IOW they are made from primate bodies who experience time not as another dimension (all at once) but as unfolding. The observations are thought about/interpreted by brains that imagine and model based our sensory and motor systems and metaphors based on the perspective inherent in this. There may well be other ways that we experience that affects fundamental aspects of our observations.
No. The idea is that any interaction functions as an observation or measurement. That's contra the conventional, colloquial connotations of those terms, but that's how those terms are used in a physics context.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Coben
No, we can't, or maybe shouldn't, reject the human perspective, but science does, and it does so actively and intentionally. It is not possible to reduce humans to unbiased/impartial observers without also getting rid of the human perspective: the way humans look at things; the point of view of a human. Adopting a human perspective is to adopt a biased and partial way of looking at things. How could it not be? And why is that wrong, if it is wrong? :chin:
So do you disagree that there's a common belief that humans can be impartial/unbiased, at least in conjunction with each other?
No, I don't. We can (sometimes) act thusly. But when we do, we necessarily set aside our 'human perspective', which is the biased and partial way we (generally and usually) look at the world.
Human bias and partiality is not limited to the limitations of our senses. Bias also stems from our opinions and beliefs. And what else is the 'human perspective' if it isn't (at least in part) our opinions and beliefs? [It's what you said too, but as well not instead.]
I'm not asking if you agree with the belief. I'm asking if you agree that there is such a belief, whether you agree with the belief or not.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Here are a couple examples of a belief that we can eliminate bias:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917255/
https://baselinesupport.campuslabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/204305695-Avoiding-bias-in-qualitative-data-analysis
Do you agree that those are examples of the belief?
Experience, which is "the practical contact with and observation of facts or events (OED)", is implicit in any scientific model. And that "practical contact" can itself be modeled scientifically.
In a general sense, there's the world, and there are separable systems within the world, from particles to human beings to galaxies, that we can seek to describe, explain and interact with. It takes a human (or similarly sentient being) to experience and model that world but there's nothing preventing the modeling of the modeler themselves.
As it happens, some of the interesting work and discussion in QM foundations at the moment is on Wigner's Friend scenarios which investigate the consequences of measuring the measurer.
As I see it, the puzzles of experience are front and center in science rather than neglected.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, these are all philosophical disputes about how to interpret the science. But one can take a realist position while rejecting characterizations such as "phenomena as they are in themselves" or "the view from nowhere".
Quoting Wayfarer
So this seems like a radical call to ... do what we're already doing now!
Or am I missing something?
No, science implicitly depends on the human perspective. A referee in a football match, for example, can be impartial and unbiased but nonetheless has a human perspective.
Things interacting with each other is not observation, by any stretch of the imagination. If it is accepted in philosophy of science, that things interacting with each other qualifies as observation, then I think science, which derives its reliability through strict rules of "observation", if it follows this philosophy, has a serious problem.
Quoting StreetlightX
This might solve the problem if philosophers would recognize that human beings use tools to make measurements, and tools do not make measurements on their own. If philosophers of science continue to assume that instruments make measurements, like some claim that instruments make observations, rather than the fact that human beings make measurements using instruments, then the so-called "two-bit philosophy of science" will continue unabated.
You're thinking of the conventional colloquial definition of the term. Think of it as a sound applied to interaction.
Observation is a noting of information. Interaction is a reciprocal action. It may be the case that all observations are interactions, but not all interactions are observations.
I understand perfectly well that h. sapiens is classified as a primate, and the line descended from a common ancestor of other ape species. However I also believe that when we became a language-using, story-telling, and rational being, then we crossed a threshold that separates us from other species. This separation is precisely what is often occluded in the appeal to Darwinian theory. I am not alone in that belief, it was also the view of the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, as described in his chapter Darwinism Applied to Man. This is also the subject of a current title, The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness, and Free Will , Kenneth Miller.
Furthermore, neo-darwinism as an intellectual outlook or quasi-philosophy is strongly associated with just the kind of scientific materialism that is the subject of the criticism of this essay. It is also the target of the 2012 book by Thomas Nagel that I mentioned previously in this thread, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
So the appeal to humans as simply being apes is biological reductionism, which purports to solve many existential and philosophical conundrums by simply dismissing them. It's one of the intellectually stunting effects of current scientific culture on intellectual life. (See the third way.)
Quoting Andrew M
I think you are. ;-)
Quoting Andrew M
But there is - which is the reflexive problem of 'the eye not being able to see itself'. We can't stand outside ourselves, or outside reason or thought, and see ourselves. We're always the subject of experience, and the subject is never an object of perception. This is the topic of the paper I mentioned by Michel Bitbol, It is never known but it is the knower - the title more or less serves as an abstract!
Quoting Andrew M
You can say that now, but I bet if we had been having this conversation a couple of decades ago, it would have been fiercely contested. And really this whole debate is about making the implicit, explicit.
Quoting Andrew M
Ah, but can you. I suppose you can just shut up and calculate, but the philosophical issue is still fundamental. That's why many of the books about the subject have subtitles referring to 'reality' or 'the soul of science'.
Quoting Andrew M
Agree! Many scientists are indeed already embracing this perspective. But that doesn't obviate the requirement to spell it out.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Humans use instruments to take measurements, and create apparatus to make observations. Neither instruments nor apparatus are self-assembling and self-operating, they are constructed devices by definition.
If a satellite travelled for centuries through space recording data on microprocessors, none of that data would amount to information until it was interpreted by a human. That is the difference between 'data' and 'information'.
I don't remember anyone saying we were "simply apes". And I have no idea what that would mean or why it would be reductive. Is there a claim anywhere we can't speak, think, or do things other apes can't? It just suggests to me you're hung up on a hook of your own making on this.
I'm not saying philosophy is competition. I agree it should be cooperative learning. Cooperative learning necessarily involves critique, because without constructive criticism we would never learn anything in any field of endeavour or discipline. I stick to what I said; which is that philosophy is for critiquing; critiquing what we think we know, what our pre-conceived assumptions are and so on. To me this seems elementary.
Right, if a robot picks up a gun a shoots someone, it's not the robot who committed the murder, but the person who programmed it to do that. Likewise, if a robot picks up a tape measure, and starts extending it beside "reproductive appendages", it is not the robot which is making the measurement. Anyone who thinks that the measurement is somehow more objective because of the involvement of the robot, is extremely naïve.
I think Terra is referring to the very specific and unusual use of the word 'observation' that is employed in quantum mechanics to refer to what is sometimes called 'collapse of the wave function'. Under the 'decoherence' view, which I think is accepted by a majority of physicists, that refers to an extremely rapid interaction between the microscopic quantum system that is the subject of attention and the relatively enormous, macro system that is the scientific equipment used to record information about the micro system. The macro system usually includes a person looking at what is recorded by the equipment, but it doesn't have to.
You are right that that has very little commonality with the everyday use of the word 'observation'. It's a common practice in science, for better or for worse, to take everyday words and assign a special meaning to them in the context of a very specific scientific context.
I should add that not all physicists believe that decoherence fully explains 'wavefunction collapse', and some of those physicists believe that consciousness is involved, which gives an interpretation more similar to the everyday one.
Physics itself is silent on which interpretation is correct, or even preferable.
I'm happy to accept this idea if it is right, but I don't understand it. How could it ever be known that 'it doesn't have to', because even if there is a macro system that performs a measurement without a person, we can't know that the measurement has actually collapsed anything until we look at the macro system, at which point we become part of the system? No doubt I've misunderstood something and am happy to be corrected.
In the context, it was a discussion about whether, or in what sense, modern physics tends to support a kind of idealist philosophy (which is suggested by some physicists). That opens up many questions about ontology, mind, matter, and so on. So the remark about us being 'moderately clever apes on a watery rock' was made in response to that, I think to kind of deflate or debunk the suggestion. More broadly, I concur with the traditional philosophical view that there is an ontological distinction between humans and other creatures, which however is derided as being 'human exceptionalism'. It's one of the implications of naturalism that humans must be understood as being part of nature, and so in some sense continuous with their primate forbears. To say otherwise, I am told, is to 'hate nature' or 'denigrate nature'. There are of course many further things to unpack there, but I don't think I will pursue it at this point as it is a separate (but equally vexed) topic.
Each, the micro system and the macro system are constructed so as to interact. So the human involvement in the interaction is not restricted to whether or not there is a person looking, just like the human involvement with the robot who picks up the gun and shots someone is not restricted to whether or not the robot gets found out by the police.
Quoting andrewk
Consciousness is definitely involved, because the conditions of 'wavefunction collapse' are artificial. Human beings are messing around, experimenting in the creation of micro systems. These systems are far from natural, and scientists have little if any means to relate the information gathered from these experiments to anything natural, due to ontological deprivation.
Sure. I know there are other biases. But I am heading for one's that are so built into the body, I think they cannot be denied or avoided. that we happen to experience the universe with time not as a dimension of space but as something unfolding. But certainly all sorts of paradigmatic, cultural and psychological biases enter into scientific research and affect it. One can try to minimize that stuff. One cannot minimize the fact what I mentioned. At least, I don't think one can.
Ok, I'll leave my defence of our apehood at that. It is more or less off-topic.
That's the dualism that I pointed out earlier. Bitbol moves from the unproblematic example of an eye's blindspot to positing a world of appearances:
Quoting Wayfarer
The history goes back further. This is just the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian realism. Plato advocated the God's eye view from nowhere, Aristotle the human-oriented viewpoint, as epitomized by the School of Athens fresco.
The apparatus can record the time of measurement along with the measurement. Decoherence happens extremely rapidly and pervasively so you'll be part of the system shortly after the measurement anyway even if you don't look. The difficult trick is actually to avoid decoherence which is why quantum computers are so difficult to construct.
Yes, I agree they are examples of the belief you describe. But my conception of bias and partiality is a lot broader than this. The links you offer describe ways to avoid making silly mistakes, simple misreadings and the like. The human perspective is much broader and deeper than these trivial examples, and the bias and partiality that result have a correspondingly wider reach.
For example, an American scriptural literalist scientist who is a biologist would be loathe to report that homosexual behaviour is widespread among God's creatures (as a minority behaviour), conflicting as it does with the Bible's perspective. But please don't focus on this one example; there are hundreds of others, referencing the hundreds of strange beliefs and opinions that affect what we humans [don't] say and do. Together, the result is bias and partiality, and the effect is much greater than simple mistakes and misreadings.
I agree with you, but what I'm focusing on is the fact that there is a belief that we can overcome bias, and I gave a couple examples of people with such a belief, examples that you agreed were examples of people having that belief, whatever our criticism of the belief might be.
Yes, there is such a belief, and I believe it to be mistaken and wrong-headed. We humans have beliefs and opinions. Our perspective requires, and is based on, our bias, prejudice and partiality. These give rise to our opinions and beliefs, just as our opinions and beliefs give rise to our bias, prejudice and partiality. It's all mixed up together, and we wouldn't be human if these things weren't an intrinsic and fundamental part of us. These are not things we can just set aside, as if we can become Spock or Data just by deciding to do so. We are human, and humans have a human perspective. This is not right or wrong, it just is.
Sure. Again, the only point I was making was that science (and journalism, and other fields where this is an issue) isn't ignoring human perspective. The whole idea behind overcoming bias, as misconceived as the idea that we can may be, is the belief that it's a feature of human perspective that we can overcome bias.
I'm sorry, I don't even know where to start with stuff like this.
Quoting Terrapin Station
And I contend that it is, and that it cannot help but do so. By aspiring to 'impartial observers' they aspire to non-human observers. The human perspective is all about partiality. The only way that science addresses the human perspective is in its attempts to avoid it.
The idea is that what it is to ignore x is to not think about x at all, or to at least intentionally brush x aside or gloss over it.
If one thinks about x, if one takes it into consideration, one is not ignoring x.
The conventional way of doing science takes the human perspective into consideration. It doesn't ignore x. But the way it typically takes it into consideration is via a belief that it's possible (at least largely) to surmount the bias in human perspectives if we make the right moves--if we require corroborating observations from other experimenters in other circumstances, if we develop ways to avoid cherry-picking data, if we require peer review, and so on.
Whether this approach actually removes bias is a different issue than whether scientists think about this sort of stuff and address it. As long as they think about it and address it--no matter how flawed or wrongheaded it might be--it's not the case that it's being ignored.
There are two ways of thinking about the human perspective embedded in this issue. Of course everything humans do is a manifestation of the human perspective, just as anything any animal does is a manifestation of the perspective of that kind of animal.
Science is blamed for objectifying the world, but in the primary recognition of entities, which makes the world intelligible in the first place, humans and even animals always already use a kind of primordial objectification in order to survive in and understand the world. In other words all organic beings to some degree separate the world into self and other in order to be able to respond to and flourish in an environment teeming with other entities.
The aspiration to impartiality that characterizes the sciences, is not best thought of as an attempt to get outside of the human perspective altogether, to achieve a "God's-eye view" of the world, even though some may think of science this way. It is rather a matter of suspending our preferences, putting aside our partiality, "bracketing" how we would like the world to be in accordance with our desires and fears, in order to see phenomena through clearer eyes, and come to understand how things actually work. But it should be obvious that whatever we observe will always be things as they appear to us. The very idea of getting outside of that to see the world as it does not appear to us, or as it is in itself beyond its appearances to us, is simply incoherent, an impossibility.
So, to understand the world at all, to be able to respond to it at all is always already to see it in terms of individual entities and their interactions, and this is the primordial basis of objectification. In hunter-gatherer societies individual spirits were imputed to all entities. We call this 'animism' and you can see the connection between the name and the idea that individual spirits animated individual entities, made them alive. Of course everything was understood to be interconnected in these cultures, Modern science too is increasingly demonstrating the interconnectedness of all things.
Early modern science was a mechanistic model, though. The Newtonian world was seen as being fundamentally the motion of "dead" material particles. This worldview had its inception with the Platonic idea that the world we experience is not the real world, the spiritual world, but a kind of fallen facsimile which is of no value in itself. Christianity continued and amplified this tendency to see the world dualistically, with this world being mostly seen as a "a vale of tears", a fallen cosmos, and the real importance and meaning of life being understood to reside in some transcendent realm, an afterlife in Heaven.
This kind of worldview is, in significant part at least due to science, coming to be seen as deeply flawed, being based as it is on a detrimental mixture of fear and wishful thinking, on a desire to escape the world, a world which is seen as hard and cold instead of provident. In large part the apparent hardness and coldness of the world is due to capitalism, and the sense of scarcity that comes with the attempt to compete with all others to own, and thus control, as much of the world as possible. There is very little of the world today which is not owned, and despite appearances most of it is really owned, really controlled, by the very few who own and control most of the money. The world is objectified in the most negative sense by money, not by science.
That is not obvious in the least. It is one of the major contentions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, elucidated over hundreds of pages of tortuously complex prose, but nevertheless often misunderstood for that. The Einstein-Bohr debates were very much about this same point; Einstein always maintained that the aim of science was to see 'things as they are in themselves', and he never accepted the fact that quantum theory could be a complete theory, if it didn't do this.
Quoting Janus
So they cruelly and fortuitously went around establishing the hospital system, the university system, freeing slaves, and building the foundations of universal human rights, in the rubble of the collapsed Roman Empire, which was immensely more humane than those wretched Christians, what with their contemptuous notions of universal salvation and love for all beings. Indeed it's a wonder that the Western world got as far as it did, with those backwards, world-denying ascetics in charge of things.
In any case I think Kant would have agreed with Einstein that the moon is still there even when no one is looking at it, since he was, after all, avowedly an empirical realist. What it would mean in the Kantian paradigm to say that the moon is there when no one is looking is that whatever it is that appears to us as the moon is not dependent on us for its existence. Wolves would still bay at the moon, even if there were no humans.
As to your shrill little rant about Christianity's good deeds: it is irrelevant since I haven't claimed that no good works have been done by the religious institutions. In fact it was the Catholic Church that largely sponsored the early rise of the sciences, so it's not as though science and religion have always been at loggerheads.
It's thoroughly documented in books such as Quantum, by Manjit Kumar, and Uncertainty: The Battle for the Soul of Science, by David Lindley. The former, in particular, is an excellent read.
The Copenhagen Interpretation says 'that reality is determined by the experiment the scientist chooses to perform. One kind of experiment will cause light to behave like a particle; another kind will make it act as a wave. There is no underlying truth about what light "really" is.' (Steve Poole, review of Kumar). Whereas Einstein couldn't accept that this amounted to a complete description of reality; he was convinced that there had to be a real entity which existed irrespective of what the observer did (hence, the 'moon' quote). And that is the crux of the whole problem, and why this is one of the main factors behind the very point that is at issue in this thread.
This same point is made in the Wheeler paper, Law without Law - if you look at it, the second heading is called 'Phenomena', and explains why Einstein couldn't accept this. The nub of the earlier disagreement in this thread was whether 'observation' or 'measurement' requires or implies an actual observer; that remains a moot point, but I am of the view that no measuring apparatus would exist had it not been made by an observer. And Wheeler concludes this section with an unequivocal statement: 'we are inescapably involved with bringing about what appears to happen'. That is in line with the Copenhagen interpretation. And this is why he named his idea 'the participatory universe'. That is a reversal of 'objectivism', after all; once you admit a role for the participant, then you're in a fundamentally different paradigm from the Galilean/Cartesian.
Quoting Janus
Einstein dismissed the fundamental axioms of Kant that time and space a 'primary intuitions' - he thought that time and space, too, were objectively real, independently of any contribution from the observer. He didn't say much about Kant, but whatever he said was generally sceptical; but I don't think he 'got' Kant. And saying that, I know that Einstein was a genius and that I will never understand the maths behind relativity. But the point at issue is tangential to this fact. The kind of realism that Einstein advocated can only be changed by a kind of gestalt shift, a radical shift in perspective. Kant, and the later kantian and neo-kantian tradition, had been 'through the looking glass' in a way that Einstein had not. (I am meaning to read up on Ernst Cassirer, who was a neo-Kantian interpreter of physics; Michel Bitbol is another.)
Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger and many of the other quantum pioneers were, at the end of the day, European thinkers, and heir to the European philosophical tradition. In addition to being brilliant scientists, they were philosophically sophisticated. Many of them wrote in later life about the philosophical implications of their life-work. Heisenberg came down firmly on the side of Plato (see here); Bohr believed that his 'principle of complementarity' was of such importance that he literally incorporated the Taoist ying-yang icon into the family coat-of-arms; Schrodinger wrote frequently about Schopenhauer and Vedanta; Wolfgang Pauli had a long and documented relationship with Carl Gustav Jung.
When after WWII, research focus shifted to America, then physics research became increasingly beholden to commercial, military and industrial patronage, and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics were mostly forgotten (see Quantum Mysticism: Gone but not Forgotten). Hugh Everett III, who was by turns brilliant and tragic (died aged 50 an alcoholic and emotionally-remote father, leaving instructions to put his ashes out with the garbage), left academia for a career designing re-entry paths for ICBM missiles in the Cold War after planting the seed for the controversial 'many-worlds interpretation'. Wheeler, who we mentioned, did indeed engage in a lot of speculative philosophy based on his work, but overall I think the generation since have shied away from it, preferring (for some bizarre reason) to believe in multiple splitting universes.
I don't think that mainstream English-speaking philosophy has incorporated these insights from quantum physics at all. That is why it has become a fertile ground for the counter-cultural and alternative mob; click on quantum consciousness in Amazon, and you'll get a strange brew, not all of which is rubbish.
Quoting Janus
I felt one shrill rant deserves another ;-)
As I see it Einstein's spacetime has no bearing on space and time as we experience them and think about them in terms of the "a priori" reasoning based upon analysis of that experience. Einstein's spacetime is postulated as the fundamental fabric of the world that is affected by and affects the movement of objects due to their mass. It is four-dimensional according to Einstein's theory in a way that we cannot even visualize.
That Einstein did not equate spacetime with space and time as we usually conceive them and did not consider time, if not space, to be objectively real, as you claim he did, is shown in this statement;
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
And here is the abstract from a paper to be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/einstein-and-kant/D4B197513E6DE86D10B7686E18615D51
"The paper aims to explain and illustrate why Einstein and Kant, relativity and transcendental idealism, came to be discussed in one breath after the Special theory of relativity had emerged in 1905. There are essentially three points of contact between the theory of relativity and Kant's objective idealism. The Special theory makes contact with Kantian views of time; the General theory requires a non-Kantian view of geometry; but both relativity theories endorse a quasi-Kantian view of the nature of scientific knowledge. The paper shows that Einstein is a Kantian in his insistence on the synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, but not in the details of his physics."
Regarding your claim that your "shrill little rant" was a response to a shrill little rant of my own, I say that the post in question was not any such thing.
Yes, I'm sorry for being obtuse. I was looking for a deeper point that wasn't there. :blush:
There is an implicit assumption in there, the assumption there is such a thing as facts and events existing independently of experience. But how did we arrive at these 'facts' and 'events' if not through our experiences?
Then if you start from these 'facts' and 'events' and attempt to model the modeler through them, you're not actually modeling the modeler, you're modeling your experience of the modeler. Most scientists don't realize that.
So they're not addressing the puzzles of experience that way, they just believe they're addressing them because of poor philosophizing.
Yes that's exactly how we arrive at them. Per the OED definitions, a fact is "a thing that is known or proved to be true" and an event is "a thing that happens or takes place, especially one of importance". Which shows that facts and events have an epistemological and even normative aspect to them (in an age of "alternative" facts) as well as an ontological aspect.
Quoting leo
Consider an ordinary, everyday scenario:
So there are a number of experiences described there, some are Alice's, some are other people's, some are interactions between other people, or between her and others. All within the broad scenario of Alice catching a train to work.
Alice is modeling her experiences, which includes modeling the people she encounters (who, in turn, are doing the same, at least when they're not preoccupied) and she is even modeling herself (e.g., evaluating her morning, reflecting on her pains).
It's not a formal scientific model in the sense of a mathematical hypothesis that has been rigorously tested. But the basic elements are there. That is the human-oriented view with the experiences that ground scientific investigation and enable self-referential modeling.
She isn't modeling herself nor the people she encounters, she is modeling her experiences of herself and of the people she encounters. From her perspective she might say she is directly modeling people and herself, but from anyone else's perspective she is modeling her experiences of people and herself.
If you assume she is actually modeling other people, you quickly encounter the problem that these people exist and do not exist at the same time. They exist to Alice, but they do not exist to those who have never met them. Isn't it more coherent to say that she is modeling her experiences of them?
That's precisely in that sense that physicists neglect the human perspective. They equate their perspective with "how the world really is outside of their perspective". And so they end up building models that omit the human perspective, these models describe how what they see behaves, and so they cannot explain how is it that they see.
It is impossible to derive from their models that photons of wavelength 460nm stimulating an eye will give rise to an experience of the color blue. It is impossible because they have neglected the human perspective. They are not modeling the world, they are modeling their perspective while believing they are modeling the world, that's a crucial distinction to understand.
When we spend time listening to and conversing with other people, we realize that they sometimes have very different perspectives, and it is when we realize that that we really stop neglecting the human experience. On the other hand, when we call our perspective "observations of the objective world" is when we are neglecting the human experience.
Seeing of colour is not exclusively reliant on "the human perspective". Animals see colour too, although in different ways depending on their (in some cases very) different optical setups. All this is physiologically well understood. The following passage is quoted from the site which came up on the top of the list of a search "how the eye responds to colour".
".... cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception. This curve peaks at 555 nanometers, which means that under normal lighting conditions, the eye is most sensitive to a yellowish-green color. When the light levels drop to near total darkness, the response of the eye changes significantly as shown by the scotopic response curve on the left. At this level of light, the rods are most active and the human eye is more sensitive to the light present, and less sensitive to the range of color. Rods are highly sensitive to light but are comprised of a single photo pigment, which accounts for the loss in ability to discriminate color. At this very low light level, sensitivity to blue, violet, and ultraviolet is increased, but sensitivity to yellow and red is reduced. The heavier curve in the middle represents the eye's response at the ambient light level found in a typical inspection booth. This curve peaks at 550 nanometers, which means the eye is most sensitive to yellowish-green color at this light level. Fluorescent penetrant inspection materials are designed to fluoresce at around 550 nanometers to produce optimal sensitivity under dim lighting conditions."
From here: https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/PenetrantTest/Introduction/lightresponse.htm
That's all fine and dandy, but where in there is it explained how photons of a given wavelength give rise to the perception of a color at all? Saying that "cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception" does not explain by what mechanism these give rise to color perception. What they do is they measure how some parameters of the eye change as a function of the wavelength of incoming light, there is no explanation as to how this gives rise to any experience of color. They're not explaining the very fact of experience, they're explaining it away.
The problem is not why the wavelength 460nm corresponds to the color blue rather than some other one, but why it gives rise to any experience at all.
Again, if we build a model that describes what we see, that model can never explain why we see, because at no point we are modeling the modeler, we're just modeling our view of the modeler. We're just finding correlations within our experiences, how could they tell us why we experience? If we find correlations within a movie, how could they tell us how the TV works?
To conclude from this that subjective experience is something that cannot merely be an emergent property of physical systems is unwarranted. The problem may lie with the simple fact that, due to the way things are physically consituted, a subjective experience of the subjective experience of seeing colour just cannot be had, on the contrary all we have is the subjective experience of seeing colour.
Actually, even to say the latter is to perform a kind of reification: it would be better to simply say that all we have is seeing colour. So colour itself can be objectified and measured by spectrometers, but the seeing of colour cannot be objectified or measured at all. Why should we expect to have a physicalist explanation of something that cannot be objectified or measured?
:up:
Quoting Andrew M
What I think this demonstrates is a kind of 'presumptive naturalism', i.e. it arises from the very 'blind spot' at issue. And please don't take this as a pejorative because it's actually a very subtle and important point, and it's not by any means obvious.
What I mean is this: that most forms of realism presume or take for granted the reality of the domain of sensory experience - that the world of people moving about on trains and living their lives possesses a reality independently of anything we ourselves experience or perceive.
But if that is questioned, then the response would probably be, "are you saying that this whole world of other people and the vast universe exists in the (or my) mind?' And this is often how people respond to what they understand as 'idealism'.
But what I think is being argued for, is that the process of perception also implies apperception ('the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it') and interpretation ('what does this mean'), which is an activity that the mind is continually engaged in, at a level which is beneath the level of conscious attention. That is the sense in which the mind 'constructs' reality (and is the basis of the various forms of philosophy known as 'constructivism'.)
There's a seminal concept from Kant here, which is that of transcendental apperception. As the wiki description is so brief, I include it here verbatim:
Now, I personally am dubious about (4) as the self, I maintain, is not an object of experience, but the ground of experience. But other than that, I think this is an important principle, especially point (5) - that this 'synthesis' (which is the assimilation and binding together of all of the elements of experience with judgement) is fundamental to experience, but is not itself revealed by or in experience - at least, not without a great deal of reflection or analysis. That is the meaning of 'transcendental' in both Kant and Husserl: a constituent of experience which is itself not disclosed by experience.
But to return to Alice on the train - the train, and Alice, were you there, occur to you as 'phenomena' - as a stream of sensory experiences which you assimilate and judge, moment by moment. But we don't see ourselves doing that - which for most purposes, is not a problem, as most of the time we're simply going about our lives and don't need to dwell on such things. But this conversation is bringing the apparent solidity and reality of common experience into question. I think the point of the article is to show that science incorporates this kind of unreflective awareness of the 'subject-object' relationship into its reckonings. In some ways, it's fundamental to naturalism; I like to say 'naturalism assumes nature', which sounds trite, but we don't notice that we're doing it. Whereas phenomenology (and also Buddhist meditative practice, which the article refers to) deconstructs that taken-for-granted sense of the solidity of the everyday experience of things.
So, even though it seems relatively simple in some ways, the implications are profound, because it does call into question the reality of the sensory domain[sup] 1 [/sup]. But it also undermines the notion that physical objects are intrinsically real - which is why it is a challenge to scientific materialism.
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1. For Buddhist philosophy, that is not such a challenge, because one of the basic principles of Buddhism is the understanding of ??nyat?, that individual particulars are empty of intrinsic reality or own-being (svabhava). Whereas materialism is precisely the claim that material objects possess intrinsic reality.
This is a great issue. 'Correlations within our experiences' along with metaphorical enframing seem roughly to be what we have.
What is the deeper 'why' that you mention? What is the 'why' that can't be answered with some useful or comforting pattern in or metaphorical framing of experience? Is this 'why ?' just a lyrical expression of wonder? Is it a perception of the limit of explanation as it is usually conceived? It's as if the question pretends to want an explanation and yet demands something beyond any conceivable explanation. This same idea can be expressed by denying that so-called explanations really explain with any depth.
Since explain is such a common and useful word, I like the first way of framing it. 'Why is there something?' or 'why experience?' points out the darkness that borders the light of our little campfire. Because it is useless and maybe difficult to grasp, it's easy to shrug off. Addressing the OP, the [s]question[/s] I have in mind 'must' be a 'blind spot' of science (and maybe philosophy). It's hard to imagine a theory of any content that isn't finding connections between entities or reframing our situation metaphorically. Is the blind spot an infinitesimal hole poked in our cognition/world?
Exactly, and what kind of "depth" should we expect over and above our usual physical explanations? Do we have any actual intellectual justification for asking for such "explanations"? If we want to say they are not "deep" enough, and that "deeper" explanations are possible, then we should at least be able to point to some of those, or if we cannot do that then explain what a "deeper" explanation would look like. If we can't do either of those things, then it seems we are just "whistling in the wind" with our demands.
Personally I prefer to entertain what is deeper in the way of feeling without making incoherent demands for rational explanations of it (given that documented attempts to do that never seem to stand up to scrutiny). To me it is like asking for a rational account of what determinate quantifiable knowledge there is in poetry and the arts in general; it's wrongheaded.
No, again this would be like watching a movie, and concluding from correlations found within the movie that the physical processes involved in bringing about colors in the movie are well understood. That's the category error. What we experience with our usual senses is always the movie, we don't have access to the TV with these senses.
Quoting Janus
Indeed, so then the problem is when physicalists claim that their models take into account the whole of reality, while their models cannot explain the very fact that we experience. They view the world as made of entities that behave according to laws, but they cannot explain how anything in that world can experience anything at all, why a human being has experiences but not a rock. This to me points to the idea that physicalism is a fundamentally flawed paradigm. But for some reason they usually don't seem to see this as an issue, in their view the motion of stars in a galaxy is something that requires an explanation, but not the fact that a human being has experiences.
It is just a how, how is it that physical entities that make up our body can give rise to experiences. It is not a why in the sense why is there something rather than nothing. If we claim that we are made of physical entities, then we ought to explain how these give rise to experiences, and if we can't then there is something missing in the idea that we are made of physical entities, as it isn't an idea that fits the very fact that we experience.
Otherwise we could just claim that the Sun is made of angels, and say that we can't explain it, but it's ok because it doesn't require an explanation!
What kind of "access" do you expect? How could we have any kind of access that wouldn't be dismissed by you as not being "real" access insofar as being "merely experiential"?
Quoting leo
Some physicalists may believe that some day we will be able to explain in physical terms the fact that we experience. I can't see how it would ever be possible, since any such explanation would have to objectify the very aspect of experience which cannot be objectified. But I allow that this may (although I highly doubt it) be merely a limitation due to our current level of understanding the nature of the physical.
The problem doesn't exist only in relation to the human. Animal behavior and biological evolution, for example, cannot be explained in terms of physics; physics is simply a different level of explanation than anything beyond chemistry, and even there, the emergent properties of elements and compounds and how they interact with other elements and compounds is not exhaustively explainable in a purely physics context.
If we stop assuming that our senses give us access to some reality "out there" independent of us then we don't have to deal with this conundrum. All would be experience, but we wouldn't claim that these experiences give us access to some objective reality, rather they would represent our subjective reality, and we could attempt to discuss it with others and find commonalities and differences between our subjective realities. Instead of forcing our different subjective realities to fit into one believed objective reality. And then maybe we would come to realizations that we couldn't hope to have in a physicalist paradigm.
The Blind Spot arises when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality. But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, for example; the Bohr model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus with electrons circling around it in quantised orbits like planets around a sun; evolutionary models of isolated populations – all of these exist in the scientist’s mind, not in nature. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers. [/quote]
I'm glad that you also see the issue. I must say, though, that for me it felt natural to come upon this [s]question.[/s] It's like climbing the causal nexus for more general principles to (one hopes) some kind of first principle that truly satisfies and then realizing that there 'cannot' be such a first principle.
So the 'why' is a 'cry,' a kind of birdsong. Is it our glory to unveil this pseudo-question? In some ways it allows us to see the whole as a whole from the inside, and yet we have to grasp the whole as a whole in order to see the futility of the 'question.'
Quoting Janus
I can relate to this. The rose is without reason. Yet we depend on careful reasoning to maintain our garden. Depth of feeling is 'why' we bother, what we strive toward.
Anyway, I think we agree that the demand for a certain kind of explanation is incoherent. I do think it's a high altitude thought that only comes perhaps from trying to articulate it as a genuine question.
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Quoting leo
Just to clarify my position, I'm a skeptic when it comes to the metaphysical interpretation of 'physical entities.' I just posted some quotes from On Certainty in another thread that pretty much capture and indeed influenced my attitude.
Quoting leo
Are the issues not related though? How does gravity work? If you name some particles, then how do they work? In some cases we have intuitive pictures. I see that. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff suggests our embodiment as the source of the literal as opposed to the metaphorical. If 'control is up,' then what is up? It has a bodily meaning for us. We move our heads in a certain direction.
As far as how someone could explain how experience/mind is related to the physical, would it not be some vaguely intuitive analogy and a function relationship? Between words and readings on measuring devices? My current thinking on the matter largely evolved from trying to think what kind of an answer could possibly satisfy me. Beyond a kind of bodily intuitive understanding, we seem to have analogy and quantitative functional relationships.
A separate issue is whether an everyday distinction between mind and matter can ever be stretched into some stable, detailed theory.
gOd of many faces, right? ;-)
The demand to know what you are doing is not.
But then we cannot explain how it is that we all experience the same world of things, given that our experience tells us that our minds are not directly connected at all.
Quoting g0d
I'm not too sure about this; I mean firstly I'm not too sure we even can "grasp the whole". Certainly not if you mean rationally or discursively grasp it, and what other kind of grasping is there? We can 'get a feel' for the whole, but that is, per what I said before, a matter of feeling, not intellect. I guess it depends on what you mean by "the whole", though!
I think we become convinced that the question cannot be answered once we grasp the difference between the "space of reasons" and the "space of causes" to invoke Wilfrid Sellars. Explanations in terms of reasons, which are ultimately explications (not explanations, mind!) of motivations or volitions, and hence functions of feeling, are appropriate in one domain, and explanations in terms of causes are appropriate in the other. To ask for explanations of natural phenomena in terms of reasons is a category error, just as to ask for explanations of human (and even animal) volitions and behavior in terms of causes is also a category error. Perhaps grasping that is what you mean by "grasping the whole", and if so, then we would seem to be in agreement.
I understand your hesitation. All I meant was something mundane. I simply mean considering all of reality as one thing. Sometimes people use 'the world' this way. Of course we can never know everything about the world, but we can think of it 'as' a world.
From this point of view explanations are IMV relationships between intraworldly entities. The world itself is just there. Any god or principle that would explain the world is part of that same world as I intend it.
Grasping this (at least for me) only sharpens the world as a sort of closed system brute fact. But it's wildly open 'on the inside.' I realize this may just be my idiosyncratic perspective. I have found things in certain philosophers that were along these lines, but it's hard to be sure on such a slippery issue.
Quoting Janus
OK, that's helpful. I'd say that theme is a big part of my view but (just to clarify) maybe not the center. For me the question was revealed as I wrestled with religious issues long, long ago and discovered or came to believe that theology was a kind of mechanics.
God has a face. God speaks. God gives reasons. For this reason people are often satisfied with the idea of a human-like creator. But I wanted to know then (when I still believed enough to care) why God made the world as he did (and condemned most people to eternal torment.) I wanted to understand the nature of God. If this was obscure to me, then I was left with brute fact. If I could understand the nature of god, then I'd 'be' god, except trapped in this little dog without the omnipotence. But even God can't explain why there is a world, if he is imagined to be human-like. (I'm not a believer. This is just how the situation was first framed for me back then.)
Attaching a face to a first principle puts questioning to sleep. Our familiarity with human reason-giving obscures that the personality of the first principle is now the brute fact. It wins us over in an animal way. But the question isn't answered. Nor is it revealed as a pseudo-question, since it is paired with a pseudo-answer. It's when a person imagines the structure of any possible answer ...and sees that that structure is incapable of scratching the itch...that the [s]question[/s] is finally revealed as a lyrical cry.
This is a great description of philosophy. To me it sounds like a lot of fun. I don't get why some people get so hostile and uptight about it, speaking extemporaneously of course.
We don't experience the same world, there are a lot of similarities and a lot of differences. There are obvious differences in the way we feel, in what we think, what we imagine, what we dream, what we want, what we believe, but there are also differences in the way we perceive the so-called objective things (there are blind people, deaf people, people who perceive things that others don't), there are so-called optical illusions that appear differently to different people, we might say we're looking at the same 'thing' and yet what we see is different (such as what we see when we look at a cloud). We tend to assume that we're all experiencing the same world, but when we don't assume that and instead share and discuss what we experience we find a lot of differences.
Depending on what we want what we perceive appears differently too, a tree may be seen as a source of life, you may focus on its shape and colors and see it as a living being, feel its leaves, see the life that lives on it, or you may see it as a tool, as wood to cut to build a house or sell to someone. We experience such a different world that I find it hard to stick to the idea that we can somehow describe an objective world from which stems all that. What we call the objective world is a very limited description of some of the perceptions that people seem to share.
And then we don't really allow others to express what they experience. We teach kids in school that the world is objective, we tell them how the world is, we force them to interpret their experiences in terms of that objective reality. If some of what they experience doesn't fit that objective reality that they are forced to accept, they dismiss these experiences, or they make them fit clunkily, or if they refuse to accept the reality they are taught then they are labeled as delusional, what they experience is not valid if it doesn't fit a widespread belief of what the world really is. We force one another to believe that there is one objective reality, we are involved in constructing that objective reality.
There is the fact that we can shape the realities of others, through speech, through what we do, we can shape the beliefs of one another, and beliefs shape the world we experience, so our minds are connected in some way.
Hi. Yes it is fun. For me it was at first the result of some anguished, serious thinking about God and the justice (or injustice) of human existence. But eventually it became a beautiful kind of thinking that went for the depths.
In the other thread I was dismissive of a certain kind of philosophy, but I do that 'in the name of' moving on to this kind of issue. I think we already know how to speak and listen. The 'problem' is usually one of 'will' or character. We fail to understand X because we are emotionally closed off and/or haven't had a similar experience and not because we lack a theory of language.
I guess others might hate on philosophy because it's just difficult or insufficiently directly practical?
Just for context, I'm pro-philosophy and anti-scientism.
My point is particular. I've tried to sketch why I think it is impossible on principle to explain the world as a whole. This is not at all to say that particular metaphors or myths aren't extremely valuable. It matters very much how we frame the world or existence.
'Life is about creating yourself' (Bob Dylan). That's one nice frame. Existence is a character building exercise. That's another. Existence is a roller coster ride. As I see it, these are explanations of the world or existence but cognitive approaches. Why is life about creating yourself? Or transcending your small self? Or collecting gold coins? Or becoming famous?
Hi, I've always wanted to talk to g0d. :cheer:
Quoting g0d
I think that hit the nail on the head. It seems, any difficult task we humans perform tends to be for the purpose of obtaining some sufficient result, the more direct and practical the better.
The fact that philosophy is very difficult, in a very peculiar way, might give the impression that it yields some very sufficient and directly practical results. Yet, this isn't necessarily the case with most philosophy, as was one of the main criticisms by philosophers like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard: that the "famous wise ones" were constructing these towering edifices, which however astoundingly breathtaking, had no application to life. One analogy: it's like building an enormous skyscraper for all to marvel at, yet which cannot be entered, all the while, living in a shack next door.
Nevertheless for me, it is like you say, it is a beautiful type of thinking that goes for depths. In other words, I like to look at the skyscrapers from my shack, and talk about them with philosophically talented individuals.
There is a great contrast between systems philosophy, and philosophy of life. The former depends much more upon scientific understanding, a coupling of hard evidence with hard logic. While the latter is quasi-religious, refocusing all importance directly upon the individual's existence.
Naturalism is very much focussed on finding natural explanations for causal relationships - causes, effects, and causal patterns or laws. So, any form of transcendentalism, be that Christian, Platonist, or another variety, will always insist that such explanations must be limited or incomplete, by their very nature. (A way of glossing it, is that naturalism presumes the Universe contains its own ground or explanation, whereas transcendentalism does not.) Of course, the response to that is generally along the lines, 'oh well, you mean "God did it" ' - which means that theism, as an explanatory framework, terminates all search for explanations in acceptance of dogma, 'I believe'.
My view is that this dichotomy or dilemma between 'science and religion' is very much a construct of modern European history; that it's possible to arrive at an understanding of the transcendent that is not simply a matter of reciting a creedal statement. That's what my reading of philosophy is aimed at.
So naturalism, and natural sciences, are concerned with what can be explained. (Notice the reflexive hostility of such an attitude to what can't be explained. In other words, anything that seems outside the bounds of the scientifically-informed worldview, it's like, 'well that's just woo'. 'Woo' is a modern descriptor for practically all of what used to be considered the subject matter of metaphysics. You can use it like one of those handy kitchen fire-blankets.) But anyway, the polemical point I am working towards is that while naturalism is concerned with what can be explained, metaphysics is concerned with what explains us. It is 'upstream', prior, anterior, or something like that. Which of course is just the kind of thing it seems to me that the Lakoff and Johnston account of if wishes to deflate, as in the naturalist landscape, there is no 'up', there's nothing corresponding to the vertical axis along which something can be judged 'higher' in that sense. That seems to me to be what has dropped out of the modern discourse. Actually I have been tracing a pretty exact and compelling historical narrative for how, when, and why this occurred.
(Next three days, I am delivering a training course out of town, participation here will be sporadic.)
I have experience reality and I have made observations of this reality. When we engage in discussions about this reality we can point to objects and understand such concepts. However, in the quote above, have we not used the word “outside” and stretched its meaning beyond recognition?
Son, “Daddy I went into the woods and this animal that had big claws....”
Dad, “Son, you had encountered a wolf”
Son “Dad, like me clarify what you said, I observed a wolf like object, but I never encountered the actual wolf”
Language goes on a Holiday.
I encountered things in this world, I learned the word “encounter” by interacting with things in this world. I learned how to use this word “outside” in this world, by observing things in this world.
Try to leave out the language learned from the “observable” world and see if “un-observable” world can be articulated. This language game may have a very different feel.
This can also be framed in the context of the qualitative-quantitative dichotomy. The modern approach has married itself to quantitative understanding, only operating along the horizontal line. One might say such an approach is very one dimensional. But I'm sure everything I've said here will be refuted by calling it "woo".
Word on the street was that my return was still expected by a few here and there.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Right. And in a way it has, through its 'child' science anyway. And with science there was a shift from anthropomorphic explanation toward quantitative description ---from 'why' an object fell (it 'wants' the ground, etc.) to how it fell (its position as a function of time.)
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
From my point of view the towers were given false foundations. Their actual foundations were in the blood of the culture. Proofs of god are like 'mechanical' supports of a metaphorical framing that don't bear the weight of the structure. Kierkegaard liked to pick on Hegel, and some of Hegel is indeed exhausting. Yet the spirit of Hegel's system is pretty clear (a grandiose humanism and/or 'religion' of progress). Perhaps he offered a certain kind of personality the illusion of a proof that their gut-level attitudes. So while I relate to what you say, I think the central metaphors are applied (in the great wise ones who still had a vision of the world) and it's just that some of their justifications for their attitudes/metaphors were bogus.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
That makes sense to me. I guess I've mostly looked into the classic 'vision of existence' philosophers. Where do you put Popper in this scheme?
I'm not sure what you have in mind, but my initial prejudice is that your 'systems philosophy' sounds more like science than philosophy. I can imagine, however, that making sense of QM would be a good example of what I'm understanding by 'systems philosophy.'
You have always been in my heart, even when I sinned. :pray:
I hear you, but I'm not sure that you are addressing my particular concern. Can the world as whole (which would include any god or principle) be explained? How do we avoid either infinite regress or brute fact at the apex ?
I'm not anti-religious. It is true that I understand religion in terms of myth and metaphor, but I also understand myth and metaphor to be central to human cognition and feeling. I did believe in God in the traditional way in my youth, and I vague remember the world and the secretes of my mind being watched by their creator. Now I'm grimmer and freer. I can forgive mortality largely by identifying with those who will replace me and those that I replaced. The same secrets (myths, metaphors, concepts, images, music) are revealed again and again. We are born in confusion and (if we're lucky) learn to stand free and tall. For a little while. And this 'for a little while' chases us away from our pettiness and vanity.
I understand that some will not be satisfied with this, because it means that the whole drama happens 'within' humanity --that our deities are forged in our own imaginations to fulfill our hearts' desires. Maybe our experiences as individuals are just that different.
Thank you, son of Adam. I only invented sin to urge my mini-me creations to think as I do (to feel less lonely up here.) I can't remember why I created this world, but I don't regret it.
I like Popper. He seems like an honest philosopher. From my general acquaintance to him, I would call him a systems philosopher.
By "systems philosophy", I mean anything that tries to make sense of the world independent of my existence. The world is the focus, and I am only incidental. What I have to say has little importance, what matters is what can be said that can pass through an immense amount of scrutiny unharmed, and again, it does not matter one lick whether I can actually say it or not.
Naturalism is focused on finding natural explanations for natural phenomena, Can you provide even one example of a supernatural explanation for any natural phenomenon that stand up to reasonable scrutiny, that we would have any reason at all to accept as true? Can anyone else on here think of any?
Thanks. I like Popper too. I like his character and style.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
OK. I can totally relate to this. Yes! My mere opinion is...who cares? Serious thinking is aimed at what is good for us. Or what is true. So 'the world sucks' or 'the world is golden' may be informative about the speaker but that's about it. Any child can say how things should be. I'm interested in how things are. [To be real, we also like to project our choices as the right choice. 'One ought to be like me' is sewed into our lining it seems.]
I'm very much in agreement with 'what I have to say is of little importance.' That's my gripe about sloppy relativism. People who aren't just goofing around are trying to reveal reality, what is the case. It's the deep structure of communication, this revelation of what is the case. Philosophers are to truth candidates as health nuts like me are to their diet. I don't want to believe everything I hear or eat whatever is put in front of me. I am serious about my mental/physical health. So, yeah, things should pass through intense scrutiny.
But this scrutiny takes different forms. Monkey see, monkey sometimes do. The system in question is not necessarily proved or refuted within language (logically). I suggest that we sometimes adopt what we see as a option, give it a try, and then keep, abandon, or transform it. Agreeing with Popper, I'd say that creativity is at the heart of science and philosophy. So the result is a fire-tested poetry, and that fire can be life as much as logic.
This is a nice prescription for how philosophy should be practiced. One reason I also like Popper is that his system doesn't seem to elbow out the individual as incidental.
Quoting g0d
Systems philosophy loses the individual in its vast speculation.
This is where we can see the contrast with the philosophy of life. Life philosophy doesn't care about whether or not the speaker's opinions have any relevance to the world. It cares about the speaker himself, and what importance such opinions as: 'the world sucks' or 'the world is golden', have for the speaker himself.
For example you write:
Quoting g0d
This has very little relevance to the physical or logical structure of the world, or any philosophical explanation. But for you, in your life, it has great importance.
Life philosophy essentially turns you back upon yourself, and forces you to examine and reflect upon your own life/existence. I might argue that the more exposure one has to the traditions of philosophy, the better the self examination.
I hear you, but I think there is an entanglement.
I've noticed that depressed/anguished people tend to be self-obsessed or at least not that interested in anything impersonal. A 'true' philosopher takes the impersonal personally.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
That's a good point. But why is that irrelevance relevant to you? From my POV we both share a similar interest in something that is bigger than us, the structure of the world, the way things are.
We are doing a kind of psychology. So what I take seriously is important information for me as I try to understand the world. In understanding the world, I need to understand why I take understanding the world seriously. (Nietzsche's will to truth, etc.)
I must register and consider my standpoint as part of the inquiry (to avoid bias if possible, etc.). Having no standpoint perhaps only means that one has been careless/oblivious in this regard. We have to work through our standpoint perhaps.
And what if 'seeing the world aright' is as much a matter of character as it is of logic? How does one prove that it is good to feel free and stand tall? Prove that self-possession is virtuous? What virtue do we target as we take understanding the world seriously? Where does practical utility shade off into 'spiritual' passion?
This is true. But I personally find that turning back into my own depths just led me back out to the wide world. 'I' am only a vessel. The 'I' is the candle and not the flame. This isn't science but a metaphorical framework, a 'spiritual' statement. So it's not I but [s]Christ[/s] science, art, and philosophy thru me that matters.
My prejudice is that the cool people meet 'in' science, art, philosophy, and religion. Our higher selves intersect there. (For me religion these days is just blended with the others I mentioned, but I respect those who get their kicks in traditional ways if they respect my unorthodox approach.)
A true philosopher see the usefulness of the useless. I think one thing that makes philosophers special is that they are so paradoxical.
Quoting g0d
Even if the system cannot be effectively put into practice in life, the individual can theoretically relate himself to it, and this kind of groundwork is indeed a kind of psychology. And if we consider psychology to be intermediate between science and life of the subject, then this is probably where systems philosophy and philosophy of life overlap.
And I think seeing the world aright' is as much a matter of character as it is of logic. But logic pertains much more to a scientific understanding, whereas good character, although it might have corollary benefits and be scientifically explicable, it is infinitely important to me and my life, regardless of any honor, repute, or flattering narrative I may receive.
Nice. I agree.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
I like this too. Nietzsche is a great one to consider. Is he a great 'folk' psychologist? I think so. I don't see how thoughtful people can avoid some kind of unofficial and slippery psychology as they try to make sense of the world. At the very least we have to wrestle with ourselves and be on the lookout for rationalization. And we have to model others in order to predict them, make them happy, destroy them if way breaks out. Folk psychology looks central to human life. Status play, etc.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
I agree here too, I think. A physicists can be an asshole and his discoveries don't lose value. But some philosophical discoveries seem to be made possible by this or that character.
Perhaps we often start with intuitions that something is the right or wrong way to go and then find reasons and make a case. Or, as Popper would have it, we get an idea of the way things are first and only then can put it to the test. At some point our identity becomes entangled in being brave enough to expose our views/identities to the fire. The philosopher is different from the prophet in this way. The philosopher prides himself or herself on continuing to listen to reality (and other people.)
This has the sound of a life philosopher. I imagine that the one concerned only with systems, would ignore, reject, or ridicule you for writing this. But something like this, which expresses the importance of your own experience in life, may speak volumes for one interestested in self (perhaps in the betterment of character).
Good point. I think Nietzsche was making the point that folk psychology is historically/geologically embedded in human understanding and natural language, and we all inherit it by birthright. The whole thing with the Ubermensch was to overcome the dominant illusion of folk psychology, and to create your own.
Quoting g0d
I would say if a discovery is valid in itself, it will stand regardless of the character of the physicist or philosopher. Furthermore, I think that many discoveries in both philosophy and physics required a particular character to stumble upon it. I believe Galileo, Newton, and Einstein were known to be quite unique characters.
That's a good point. Yeah, I guess even the physicists needed a certain character to see the world in a new way.
And I agree a philosophical discovery can stand even if the philosopher loses respect as a person (Heidegger is an obvious example).
I think I know what you mean here and agree.
The superman is fascinating. I think of 'Him' as a twisted Christ image. What I take away from Nietzsche is ultimately the presentation /celebration / defense of some classic 'masculine' virtues. Now I love Nietzsche, but I am skeptical about creating one's own values. How do we decide which values to create or keep if not by the values we already have?
If Alice thinks that she and the people she encounters are real (actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed (OED)), then she will model them as being real. Similarly, if others accept that her reported observations and experiences are real (not as imagined or supposed), then they will also model those people as being real.
Quoting leo
That Carol hasn't met or heard about Bob doesn't imply he doesn't exist. It simply means that Carol has no internal representation for him. If Alice talks to Carol about Bob, then she can model him as well. That's simply knowledge-acquisition, not the creation of Bob for her.
Quoting leo
From the earlier scenario, "Alice ... finds the nearest seat, choosing to ignore the peeling blue paint that reveals the grey metal underneath." That is an account of Alice's experience in the world from her perspective. The ordinary use of the color term "blue" has its referent in things like the paint on the seat which is what Alice is observing and interacting with.
So I don't think you can say that the human perspective is being neglected above unless you're using "experience" in a private sense (how things seem to you) rather than in its usual public sense (practical contact with things).
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. But of course I think the blind spot is the assumption that the subject is not themselves an object, which is dualism. Of relevance to that, I'm curious where you stand on Wittgenstein's private language argument and its implication for private experience.
I very much respect this. The good stuff is 'beyond' externals (recognition.) Or at least I am tuned in to the image of a 'superman' who has this kind of purity and independence. When I occasionally chastise myself, it's usually for descending into some kind of pettiness or vanity. It's hard to find the right words for. I don't think the perfect words exist. But we have truly noble characters in our stories.
Returning to the 'monkey see, monkey sometimes do' theme, I suggest that the mere presentation of a noble character is more than half the work. Our philosophical heroes are new possible identities for anyone they come into contact with. And we don't have to adopt them wholesale. We just expose ourselves to lots of noble/lovable personalities and they rub off on us. We synthesize something for our little lives. And our adjustments to our time (if we succeed) might then rub off on others.
From this point of view, literature /TV is a central source of life philosophy. Most if not all of the vital ideas appear there.
For me the issue is bigger than naturalism. It involves the structure of human cognition. The blind spot of science is the blind spot of religion is the blind spot of philosophy. Then grasping the contingency of the world is also 'the mystical' for some people. Or it's not mystical but just good philosophy.
How is 'what explains us' going to avoid being itself a brute fact? Will we then get 'what explains what explains us' and so on? The usual device is to give the explaining object some kind of weird properties like being prior to time or transconceptual or works-in-mysterious-ways. Now people can take these things as they like, but I find it hard to call such a thing an explanation. I tempted to talk of metaphor or myth as a plush rug under which we can sweep the brute fact.
That's too easy a solution. The blind spot is a literal cognitive function, exactly comparable to the optical blind spot, which is caused by where the optical nerve joins the retina. The metaphorical blind spot is a much harder thing to communicate, but it's certainly understood in at least some philosophies much more clearly than in others; specifically, in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, there is an aphorism along the lines that 'the eye can see another, but cannot see itself', often elaborated to further cognitive and physical acts - hands, swords, and so on. So it's the basic insight of non-dualism. But it's also close to somethat Kant identified - see that post linked to my reply below about transcendental apperception.
But this insight has now been incorporated in phenomenology, mainly due to Varela and Maturana's pioneering work in The Embodied Mind. That drew on both Husserl and elements of Buddhist abhidharma to elucidate this point - that's the context in which Michel Bitbol explains it. in fact the whole reason I created this OP, is because here at last something is being commented on which I've been talking about on these forums for ten years.
Anyway- there is an end the implied infinite regress that you hint at. But it's not something that can be grasped discursively, as it were - that's one of the points of non-dualism. Not that I'm by any means an adept of it, but enough to see how it resolves the issue of the 'circularity of reference'. Metaphysics requires metanoia, and metanoia requires 'piercing the veil of thought', or realising the limitations of discursive knowledge as a cognitive mode. It's an aspect of philosophy that I believe has been forgotten or neglected.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Exactly so. Ever heard of a book called 'The Reign of Quantity?' by Rene Guenon? That's what the title is referring to. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it but it's one of those books that is worth knowing about.
Quoting Janus
I don't believe in trying to prove ghosts exist, if that's what you mean. I had in mind something more along the lines of Husserl's criticism of naturalism, which I think is close to what is expressed in this post. Have you got the Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran, by any chance? There's a very good couple of pages on Husserl's critique of naturalism in it. If I had more time I would copy some in.
I have no objection to this. You yourself use 'metaphorical' here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's say you are right. In any case, your end of the infinite regress is indeed transconceptual and/or metaphorical. I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with that. I'm just saying that 'explanation' no longer feels right. It's a lurch into the esoteric and into the Mystery. That's fine. But doesn't this exit the game of reason ? I'm not saying that people ought not exit the game of reason. Not at all.
I guess I resist the attempt to have it both ways. Sometimes it's as if you are blaming science for not being mysticism. Yet the whole point of science is perhaps precisely to keep everything exoteric, testable, as clear as possible. The mathematical models are difficult, but (as Conway and Kant said) math is the stuff that we do understand.
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/103758/pythagorean-theorem-proof-without-words-request-for-words
For what it's worth, I do think accepting science changes a culture. Politics replaces religion. The vertical dimension is still there, but it is reframed. In a godless, scientific world the 'religion' is moral progress and/or the preservation of the good old ways. And I think with you perhaps that educated people are largely godless these days. We have cultural Christians, etc., but we are mostly of this world, the one we can touch and see. It's this worldliness that I find more important than the 'isms' of a few intellectuals.
I may have it somewhere, I'll take a look. I''l just say now, though, that I don't believe Husserl had any interest in the supernatural, and I will not be surprised to find that this critique of naturalism is along the lines of emphasizing its irrelevance to a phenomenology of human experience, which I would actually agree with. I mean as I understand it that is precisely what his epoché is all about; avoiding getting tangled up in questions about the existence of an "external" world, or the mind independent reality of phenomena, so as to be able to focus on inquiring into just what phenomena are for us.
Edit: I found what I thought might have been this book, but it is The Phenomenology Reader edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney. It has selections from Husserl; is the section you are referring to text written by Husserl or by Moran? If the latter then it probably won't be in the reader.
I only noticed this now. I think, if you look at history, much of the impetus behind modern cosmology has been to arrive at a complete explanation in terms of mathematical physics. I'm only a casual reader of such topics, but it must require absolutely enormous skills and intellect to try and do that. And at this time, as is often discussed, mathematical cosmology is beset by a number of enormous conceptual problems which I know I can't even understand.
I think the 'intuition of being' is rather a different thing, however. I mean, I know you know Heidegger, probably much more than do I, but earlier in this thread I googled his 'forgetfulness of being' and found a very nice reflection on a philosophical website which included this paragraph:
I think it's in this sort of key, if you like, that philosophy, as distinct from science, considers 'the nature of being' - not as an attempt to arrive at a putative first cause in the sense that science would demand or require, through an analysis of the mass and scope of the Cosmos, but more of an intuitive insight. (That article, by the way, made much of Heidegger's indebtedness to taoism.)
Quoting g0d
I think the task of philosophy, or one of them, is to point out the limits of knowledge. To take you to the border, as it were. That doesn't mean 'the limit to what can be known', as there is an endless procession of things that could be discovered. But it's to point to the limitations of knowledge. Maybe it is mystical, but mainly as a corrective to hubris. 'Mystical' is usually a pejorative in modern discourse,
If you look at the context in which I was distinguishing the limitations of 'natural', the point I had in mind, was much nearer in terms of meaning, purpose and reason than to 'supernatural' per se. Many of these concepts were suspended or bracketed out of modern science, specifically because of the discovery of the new sciences based on 'primary qualities', and the expulsion of Aristotelian or scholastic notions of final and formal causes. So it's more metaphysical than supernatural, although strictly speaking the words are synonyms. The article touches on that; in post Galilean science, meaning, reason, etc, are assigned to the mind, which is essentially subjective or personal in nature. There's no meaning 'out there anywhere'. But that understanding is itself based around a 'construction' or worldview in which meaning becomes subjective or social, and what is real is energy and matter. And mind is itself a product of those forces. That is what modern materialism says (for which the reference case is Dennett but only in the sense that he consistently argues for the full implications of materialism).
So I wasn't talking about 'supernatural explanations' in the sense of appealing to empirical science to prove something beyond science. But I think philosophy should reflect on the inherent limitations of empirical science, as it is conceived nowadays, as it does tend to engendering a certain attitude or worldview. But the philosophical argument that interests me, is that the very notion of reason and meaning itself overflows the empirical. That is why I keep going back to the reality of numbers, laws, conventions, and so on - all of these kinds of things signify that the mind sees an order behind and beyond the simply empirical; that is why this domain gives rise to the 'a priori' (which is trivialised in analytic philosophy as mere tautology). But modern science tends to think it has a naturalistic explanation for these capacities, namely, that provided by neo-darwinism. That's what my criticism of naturalism is about.
Anyway you forgot to tell me where the passage you referred to is.
If you would consider a supernatural explanatoin had stood up to reasonable scrutiny then you would consider it a natural explanation. What I mean is that we stand here at this particular point in history where certain phenomena are considered natural and validated and others are not. If we go back in time a ways, one could have said that elephants were psychic. Natives and finally one Western scientists noticed patterns in the way they moved, even when separated, as if they could communicate over long, long distances. This was considered not real by most scientists and that the people in question were seeing patterns that were not there. Later it was discovered that they communicated via infrasound.
The word supernatural is misleading and a poor term, I think.
There are phenomena, which perhaps people are correct about or perhaps not. Should they be confirmed within science, then they are natural phenomena. If they remain undemonstrated, then they often get the label supernatural (by both sides) but they are simply undemonstrated, and obviously someone with no experience of the phenomenon or good reasons to think it is likely something other than what the beleive thinks, has no good reason to believe it is real. However this does not mean that others may not have excellent reasons for believing in the phenomenon and their interpretation of it.
What the causes are of this phenomenon are something that might come much later than confirmation that it is real.
If there are ghosts or psychic phenomena or deities or things that continue beyond death or whatever, then these are natural phenomena. Not something beyond nature - unless one means by nature some subset of the real, for some reason.
I think this word 'supernatural' just leads to more confusion.
Heading is Critique of Naturalism p142 (Routledge Intro to Phenomenology Ed. Dermot Moran).
It's basically about how Husserl rejects the idea of treating consciousness as part of the natural world. Also in the Crisis of European Sciences, he both praises and criticises Descartes, first for the discovery of the 'cogito', but then for 'objectifying' (my word) the discovery, as if res cogitans were itself an object of cognition. So this is once again the link to the 'unknown knower, unseen seer' - consciousness as ground of reality, but never disclosed as an object of cognition.
'Naturalism as a theory involves a certain ‘philosophical absolutising’ of
the scientific view of the world (Ideas I § 55); “it is a bad theory regarding
a good procedure”' .
Many other such statements there.
So that's the sense in which I mean 'limits of naturalism' - not in defense of some putative 'super-natural' but because of the unknown nature of the mind which defines 'naturalism' ;-)
or limited in its explanation of the world, it is in fact self-refuting, because
it has collapsed all value and normativity into merely physical or psychical
occurrences, precisely the same kind of error made by psychologism when it
sought to explain the normativity of logic in terms of actual, occurrent
psychological states and the empirical laws governing them. The whole
picture is absurd or ‘counter-sensical’ (ein Widersinn) in that it denies the
reality of consciousness and yet is based on assuming the existence of
consciousness to give rise to the picture in the first place (Ideas I § 55). (which is the 'blind spot'!) Or as Husserl says in the 1911 essay: “It is the absurdity of naturalizing
something whose essence excludes the kind of being that nature has” (PRS
107; Hua XXV 29).
I think it's in a way ironical that this idea of a transcendent reality is actually a kind of objective realism, although it is not an object for Plato it was the most real, beyond the "doxa" or ordinary opinions which impute reality to the shadows on the wall of the cave.
Never heard of it. Thanks for the lead. And that last line was funny. :lol:
Objective idealism, thank you. Ideas are real, material objects their poor simulacra. (Furthermore I'm sure without this understanding, mass production would never have occurred.)
I learned that Steve Bannon likes it, which bothers me.
Quoting TheArchitectOfTheGods
Poor fellow! A wonder he could tie his shoelaces.
I thought I had made clear that we don't perceive the same objects. That when we refer to an object, we don't actually refer to the same perception/experience. You perceive something that you call a cloud, and you perceive someone else that points to it and call it a cloud, so you think that you two perceive the same object. And yet if you spend time discussing with that person you may find out that you two are actually perceiving something quite different. Some people might have a very similar perception to yours, and some others might have a quite different perception.
So what does it mean to say that you are perceiving the same object if you are not perceiving the same thing? All you can really say is that there are many similarities between your experiences and what you infer to be the experiences of others, but if you don't only focus on the similarities you would see that there are also many differences. You may assume that the similarities stem from the existence of mind-independent objects, but you may also assume that the similarities stem from minds being connected in some way, as you mentioned.
But then through your experiences you can actually notice that minds are connected in some way. Because you can influence what others experience, what they perceive, their beliefs, shape their world view, through speech, through what you do. Whereas earlier you were saying that our experiences tell us our minds are not connected, which I don't agree with. And sure this can be accounted for in both frameworks, both the framework of a world of objects existing independently from minds, and the framework where everything is mind-dependent. If our minds are connected in some way, it could be that as we are born and grow up we receive what others experience, which explains the similarities. And then we participate in shaping and creating our own world, and in making it experienced by others.
But the mind-independent framework has a lot of intractable and unsettling problems. In that framework we cannot explain how we can experience anything. We never see things as they are. Free will is very limited or inexistent. Why do these things bother us so much? Maybe because they are not an accurate representation of existence. These problems go away if we stop assuming a mind-independent reality.
Sure, and then when others model these people as they experience them, and they find that their model doesn't match that of Alice, then they have a problem: these people are real but they do not appear the same to different people, why is that? So they attempt to find the similarities between their model and that of Alice, and they say that the similarities is what is really real, and the differences are subjective interpretations. And then some time later someone else comes and models these people, but that model doesn't have the same similarities as the other models did. But Alice and some others already agreed on what was real, so this new person is wrong, he is delusional, he ought to accept what is real! And if he doesn't we'll lock him up and attempt to make him see the right way, 'cause we can't have him running around not seeing reality as it really is, y'know.
Quoting JanusYes, it is an objective realism, oddly reached as a conclusion deductively, at least by Plato.
I think the call for the pitchforks might have more to do with a certain kind of temperament than whether one subscribes to realism or not.
The more natural response for an intellectually curious realist would be to investigate why the new person thinks differently to the others given that they're all interacting in the same world.
Indeed. Personally I have mostly encountered intellectually incurious realists, who believe they are right and everyone else is wrong, who ridicule and dismiss those who believe differently as cranks, adepts of pseudoscience, believers of supernatural bullshit, brain diseased, delusional, too stupid to see why they are wrong.
I think the math is what we can understand and yet the relation of the math to ordinary consciousness is maybe especially difficult these days. I haven't given QM much thought since I looked into it years ago, but I remember it being strange. We seem to be reduced the 'silence of algorithm.' As I hinted at with @leo, some of our explanations are metaphorically incoherent. A wave and particular? But they still work as functional relationships between measurements.
So I don't deny the conceptual problems. Indeed I think we get conceptual problems in philosophy by trying to work in the subject-object paradigm as if in a quasi-mathematical 'ideal' language. In short, we know how to use 'I' and 'physical' and 'mental' and so on in everyday life. But we can't pin them down and do armchair 'math'/metaphysics with them. For me the great newer philosophers have pointed out the artificiality of various theories that we take for granted, like the water we swim in. We are trapped in metaphors and/or paradigms until we're exposed to the creative revelation of an alternative. (Which might just be a remembering.)
Heidgenstein make/makes a strong case against that approach. (I think Wittgenstein and Heidegger powerfully reveal one another at their best, something I learned from Lee Braver.)
I like this. While some philosophy has sought first causes, etc., for me some of the best has just brought what we 'already know' into focus.
And I agree about Heidegger and Taoism. There's nothing new under the sun. That's an exaggeration, but the more I read the more I discover the continuity and repetition. I found Heidegger's basic thought in an early version (the first) of Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy. It was a one paragraph summary that set up his life's work. It was freaky. Since I've never seen it quoted, I'm guessing it just slid by many of the pros. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Lectures-History-Philosophy-Hegel/dp/0198249918
This is one reason I'm against intellectual hero worship. It's aboutthe ideas. I care what X 'really' meant to the degree that I believe that X was on to something real and important.
[quote=Wittgenstein]
How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another.
[/quote]
To me that's a beautiful attitude, and that's one reason gods have many faces. Anonymity like TPF's returns us to an quasi-oral culture in which ideas can dominate.
[quote=W]
If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head.—Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task.—May others come and do it better.
[/quote]
Of course we don't experience the world in exactly the same way. My point is that, for example, we all see objects in the environment in the same locations. Like we all see doorways where they are and so don't usually bump into walls. Even animals do. The possible examples of this are endless.
The only explanation for this other than that doorways etc. really are where we perceive them to be is that our minds, inckuding animal minds, are all connected in some indiscernible and unimaginable way. If the latter explanation is what you want to go for then I think you need to posit God or a universal mind or something along those lines. But then you also need to provide some reason why we should think that to be a more plausible explanation than the idea that things simply exist in their own right.
I think you are forgetting how familiar we all are with wishful thinking and its dangers. While it is sometimes geniuses who are thinking differently, perhaps that's the exception.
And then an impatience with solipsism or a denial of one shared reality might be driven by a curiosity about the real. Maybe certain positions just don't cohere, but some people need them emotionally and refuse to see this.
Quoting leo
Is this even true of realists who like philosophy? Of course there are rude people around.
Quoting leo
The problems as I see them are largely about awkward language. I don't think we can solve them. So maybe a sharp metaphysics of mind-independent reality (as opposed to noticing the structure of communication) will always be difficult.
We only never see things as they are if we insist that reality is hidden. You claim there is an apple in the cabinet. We both check and it's gone. Then we theorize about what happened. What can't we call that apple real? Must we call its molecules real instead? Why aren't those molecules just another aspect of the same apple?
With free will it's tricky. I don't even know what people mean by the term. I do think we are somewhat predictable.
For me the issue is that you imply that the theory of mind-independent reality could be wrong. Wrong in relation to what? If statements like that are or are not the case, then thats the slippery reality we should be thinking about.
Earnest philosophy presupposes a reality about which the philosophers can be right or wrong. Or am I wrong? And if I'm wrong, what am I wrong about if not reality?
Philosophy as a blood sport. However there are plenty of considered realists around. In QM foundations, for example, the interpretations are almost exclusively realist, though they take on very different forms (see the table on p2).
Quoting g0d
Yes, certainly there's that. But I also think differences are often due to underlying assumptions that are difficult to recognize and appreciate the consequences of. That's Wayfarer's claim of naturalism's blind spot (in support of the article) and my claim of dualism (in criticism of the article), for example. And, whatever anyone's motives are, there remains the issue of the merit of the arguments.
I do want to address this, not by way of challenging you or saying that I think you're mistaken about it, but to entertain a possible perspective. As I have argued, I believe that the subject, or the mind, is one element of every perceived experience, in other words, that reality invariably has a subjective pole, aspect or element, which is not generally apparent; as Michel Bitbol says 'it knows but it is not known'. This is where I differ from realism which attributes to the objects of perception intrinsic reality presumably anchored by physics.
A Buddhist would say that 'subject and object' or 'mind and world' are co-arising; that these exist in dependence on one another, so, no world without mind, but conversely no mind without world (which is where Buddhism departs radically from European idealism). Whereas the realist invariably recoils at this notion, because we know that we are finite, temporal beings, while the world is of vast duration and size that extends far beyond us in both space and time. But again, I would counter that the notions of 'duration' and 'scale' both imply or require a mind, as they too have no intrinsic reality. I mean, even though it is empirically true that the world is much vaster than myself, the sense of scale which enables us to judge what is larger or smaller, sooner or later, nearer or further, seems to me to be not findable in the physical world. That is dependent upon a perspective.
Mystical, I suppose, but then Neils Bohr did say 'a scientist is just an atom's way of looking at itself'.
But we have to consider that the human mind in a biological sense, and also in terms of the kind of minds we have due to a common culture and language, means we do indeed perceive the same objects and in some sense the same world, even though 'the act of perception' is something that requires the mind. So this is how idealism defeats the argument of solipsism, that the idealist only knows his own mind. It is that we don't - we are social and cultural and linguistic beings, who share a set of definitions, associations - indeed this is a large part of what 'culture' means. So consciousness is in that sense a collective. It's obviously differentiated at the individual level, but much of that is due to the consequences of our individualist culture. ( I think this is where Wittgenstein's private language argument applies.)
But note that this also allows for the efficacy of science. As our conscious doings are indeed embedded in cultural and scientific and linguistic conventions, then it's not as if they're private or unique to us; they are 'intersubjectively validated'. But they can be that, without being intrinsically real or possessing inherent reality. Science is still perfectly sound, but it is not underwritten with reference to some purported 'absolute existent'. That's the crucial qualification.
Quoting g0d
Agree with that, but the "realist' picture is that the reality that we're right or wrong about is an objective matter. I mean, on the one hand, science continually tests its hypotheses and predictions against reality, by experiment and observation, and then changes its hypotheses when the facts don't fit (unlike politicians ;-) )
Aninteresting point to consider, again from Buddhist philosophy, although by no means unique to it. This is that amongst the many attributes of a Buddha is Yathabhutam, 'seeing things as they truly are'. I think there is a parallel concept in Stoic philosophy. Anyway, in traditional philosophy, this requires the attributes of sagacity and detachment, of being able to view things detached from any sense of self-interest, desire or aversion. Now, modern scientific method was also aiming at this, with the crucial distinction that the means by which it chose to arrive at this judgement were purely quantitative ( there's 'the reign of quantity'). And that's because of Galileo's emphasis on the superiority of dianoia (mathematical knowledge) which he derived from Plato (not forgetting that one of the key figures of the Italian renaissance was Ficino, who first translated Plato into Latin.) From thence comes the 'book of nature is written in mathematics'. Which is true as far as it goes - but what does it leave out? How to arrive at detached and sagacious judgements regarding anything that *can't* be described in terms of quantitative analysis?
Heidegger is probably the best example. Diogenes is another, and it was intentional in his case, because it was essential to his philosophy.
Sorry for the delay, but I try to respond to all thoughtful points.
Quoting g0d
That would be a great topic, and very incendiary: "Masculine virtues contrasted with feminine virtues". I propose g0d or @Janus make the OP. :smirk:
Creating your own values? Your interpretation is very reasonable, and imo, that's the best we can do with Nietzsche. Just for interest, I believe Leopold and Loeb interpreted Nietzsche this way, and tragically integrated it into their own lives.
My interpretation is a little different, but by no means is it better. You brought up the notion of inproving one's own character by 'seeing the world aright'. And in the context of life philosophy, in which objective truth is irrelevant and my life is preeminent, the creation of my own values (in the context of improving my character) is of the utmost priority.
Now, we both know that character (which categorically belongs to the ethical) is not something that can be quantified into scientific understanding, nor into objective knowledge. Character is something that is judged by others (society), yet, individual is where true character exists (or can be found), regardless of the opinion of others (see Diogenes). Only I know my true character in its totality, for everyone else they only possess snapshots of my character. . . I could go on.
Sticking to the point, I interpret Nietzsche as saying (in his own peculiar fashion): that each individual must discover/create the values in his own life and apply them in his living of life. Yet, there is no basis for prescribing correct character, neither through consensus nor scientific knowledge - that is called ideology, and it is a very frightening proposition.
I cannot rely on any ideological formula for correct character, and if I do, I am not determining my own character, I am mimicking what is prescribed by another. If I am to improve my own character, I must take hold of it and adopt the necessary values that will contribute to my personal betterment. The paradox is that I attempt all this as a blind man, with no clue as to what constitutes correctness of character or how it might be attained to. Yet, I am confident that the adopted values that define my character will prevail or fail in life - time will tell.
One more thing. If I divorce myself from societal judgement of my character, I become the sole remaining judge. And this is where the death of God concept becomes relevent. God was killed in the slave revolt, when the appeal to human truth and human value superseded and ultimately negated the individual as judge, or g0d, to himself.
This always makes me think of the Ubermensch as a parody of the Christ Pantocrator. :lol:
As for N.'s 'death of God' - I think that really means the death of the ability to believe, as man has outgrown the myths and tropes which sustain the belief. But whether or not you believe in God, He is, by definition, not something literally subject to death. (Totally different topics however.)
Isn't it ironic that the even the most formulaic quantitative methodologies require a fundamental qualifier, or constant, for any further quantification?
I may not have worded it optimally, but I meant that "one can judge in and for one's self alone". The most pious of men are able to entirely divorce themselves from the judgement of other's and confine their judgment to themselves, and also to whatever God relation that self may entail.
But not all things, and probably not even the biggest or best things. :blush:
That is one of my favorite interpretations. But can you agree that my interpretation holds water, at least a few drops? If nothing, my interpretation is more optimistic than yours, depending on what you reduce 'God' to?
I think Nietschze viewed God anthropomorphically (as opposed to panthiestically), as existing in the individual. And I find this to be an unwitting derivation from Kierkegaard's claim that "God is subject". In this sense, when a man loses faith in his own existence/life (say, by putting his faith in consensual speculation), he loses his personal relation to god. If the personal relation to God is drastically severed (and for Nietschze, everything was drastic), it is the same as if God were dead/killed.
What is belief? How is it?
Whatever the case, belief is most pertinent in relation to the living individual.
Add:
This interpretation can easily adapt the notions of 'will to power' and the 'Dionysian'.
Great topic, but it's almost impossible to get right in public conversation. It's not that such taboo things would be said. It's just tough to get the tone right. Anything shrill misses the point. A looseness is central here. It's an old idea that a man wins the heart of women by being funny. It's this cosmic laughter that really is important in Nietzsche than this or that thesis.
As a machine for the production of assertions, Nietzsche isn't that important. As a poet of cosmic laughter he is arguably the best in the tradition.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Or actually seeing the world aright by improving one's character. Mask is lens.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
Indeed. I suppose I have to agree if creation of values is understood as self-creation. I guess I think the elements are pretty much given. The arrangement and proportion is on us. Whatever I say about existence, I also say about myself. A cosmic vision == an interpretation of human existence. For me it's just that most of this is outside of science. It's framing, metaphor. It's usually not testable but rather makes observation possible by disclosing a system of objects. So philosophy is ur-science, etc.
That is a powerful/terrible idea. That's one way to look at Sartre as well. The idea is like : man has no essence but is self-created or self-creating like God. We are what we decide to (pretend to) be.
All of this was also in Hegel (he contains multitudes.) He viewed something like this position (held by hipsters in his day) as 'The Irony.' Stirner took this an expanded it into a long book. Nietzsche may have read Stirner (up for debate). For me it is half the truth. The business side of me embraces traditional virtues. Don't lie. Don't steal. Don't beg. Etc. But the icing on this cake is a kind of ironic mysticism (cosmic or golden laughter, divine malice.)
[quote=Hegel]
Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.
Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.
True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3
Examine: he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. This seems like a big part of the eros of philosophy. We want to strive against the fixed, essential, and obligatory...and be like gods above those still tangled in the contingent that they, poor dullards, still understand as necessary.
Consider 'language on holiday' or 'forgetfulness of being' or 'woo' or other intellectual sins. Where I think Nietzsche really nails it is his focus on the drives ('will to power'). Control is up. Transcendence is up. King of the mountain, etc.
'I must create a System or be enslaved by another man's' (Blake)
I am 100% with you on this issue. If I had to pick the essence of philosophy, I might choose the denial of mediation. No priest or sage steps between me and existence/life/'God'/reality. I think of this as 'spiritual' masculinity. It's not about parts tucked away in briefs. It's about facing reality directly, or about wanting to do that. This is the anxiety of influence, the desire to be one's own father. Sartre would call it the impossible project that makes us so creepy. This gap between us and nature is what Feuerbach might call the essence of Christianity. Introducing 'man,' the monkey who wants to be god. And for that reason 'monkey' doesn't fit so well.
But surely you do have some sense of virtue that guides your steps? I do understand a certain inescapable darkness. We carry a torch through the forest at night.
[quote=Nietzsche]
But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
[/quote]
The position he describes is 'behind' words. I'd say it's beyond piety and impiety. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. So what is this 'life'? Anything we can say about it is not it, since the concept of life is an attempt to climb out of the mud of mechanistic distinctions.
'Under' or 'over' what I might call a practical, worldly realism, the attitude above is something like the 'spiritual' for me. In this context, we can see how the quotation marks apply. If 'it' ain't beyond the words we are tempted to stick on it, then it ain't it.
In Braver's A Thing of This World, he stresses how often detachment as a path to correct seeing comes up in what he calls realism. Bias is distortion. So I agree.
I suggest that the emotional appeal of science is a spiritual/philosophical. Those who reject science 'sin' against the holy ghost of unbiasedness/objectivity. To avoid bias, we have embraced an amoral staring. I think of Kinsey at IU. He was a violator of the sexual norms of his time, but he got away with it in the name of science. It was one norm versus the other.
As I think Nietzsche saw, it's the will-to-truth (a modification of Christianity) that leads to the death of God. Being biased (believing without justification) becomes the mortal sin. Christ puts on a white lab coat. Eventually, however, scientism itself is revealed as a superstition. Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein can be understood as anti-scientism. So 20th philosophy has largely been anti-scientism, with phenomenology as a truer and richer approach to knowing existence.
How about primarily quantitative? As some of the Vienna Circle discovered, the metalanguage is (for instance) English. We have to understand what a measurement is, how to be a decent person in a community, etc., before we can dream of doing science. So science clearly depends on something that we largely take for granted, a kind of know-how and being-in-the-world. Because this foundation is not controversial, it's mostly ignored. We look at equations and equipment. We take paradigms as necessary rather than as contingent poetic acts that caught on.
Maybe the essence of science is that its hypotheses can be uncontroversially tested (at least ideally.) The hypotheses aredefinite enough to be falsified. Quantification is needed for this.
On a related note, I think intuition is the life of math. Logic is a hygiene. But math is more of a language than a 'dead' game with symbols. Of course we can intuitively use math to investigate dead games of symbols.
I agree.
It does seem that we can only argue within a common framework. So perhaps we have 'arguments' for frameworks that are (value-neutrally) rhetoric and then arguments proper within these 'irrationally' founded frameworks/paradigms.
I gave some reasons in that post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/298936 , you might have missed it.
Quoting g0d
Sure, although the philosophically-inclined ones are on average less rude. I'd say the rudest are the professional physicists, they base all their reasonings and career on the belief in an objective reality, they consider themselves to be uncovering and probing the fundamental constituents of reality, and there is some prestige that comes with being a theoretical physicist, so there is a lot of smugness that gets unleashed when they encounter people who dare question their most cherished beliefs and their position of importance. As someone who once considered having a career doing fundamental physics, I dealt with them for years, I guess it shows.
Quoting g0d
It's not so much that we insist reality is hidden, rather the widespread view is that reality is right there in front of us, but there is a lot that doesn't fit in that view. If we were all blind we wouldn't call real a lot of what we call real today. There are plenty of things that used to be considered real that aren't considered real anymore, and plenty of things that didn't use to be considered real that are now considered real. There is a lot that shows that what we call reality is socially constructed.
Now if you only focus on those things on which most people have agreed on for a long time, then you might get the idea that there is no need to think that reality is hidden, but when you start focusing on all the rest then what we call reality appears to have really shaky foundations.
If only you saw that apple, and no one else can find a reasonable explanation for its disappearance, then you might start being seen as delusional, as not being able to discern reality. Was the apple real? Well to you it was. To everyone else, you imagined it.
What we call imagination is socially constructed too, same as reality, if you see it and other people don't consider it real, then it's your imagination, but if later on they happen to find a plausible explanation to account for your observation then it becomes reality, and then some time later when the widespread scientific paradigm changes it might become imagination again. There is no unshakable foundation there, rather it's all temporary.
Quoting g0d
Self-contradictory. But the self-contradiction doesn't exist out there in relation to another mind-independent reality, it is a mind seeing a self-contradiction.
I have been around that type myself. In my own adjacent field there is some scientism here and there.
I personally agree with your resistance to the notion that physics tells us what is 'really' there. The table is just as much the place where we have our dinner as it is molecules. Objects have many descriptions that suit different purposes.
Quoting leo
I agree that consensus plays an important role. What we call 'madness' looks like a function of consensus. At one time homosexuality was viewed as an illness. These days a diagnosis of homophobia is more likely. I do think that it's hard to intelligibly deny that some kind of bodily contact is constant 'beneath' our interpretations of whether our feelings about that contact are virtuous.
One of Kant's critics summed up his system as 'persistent illusion is reality.' I think there's some truth in that. 'Reality' can usefully be described as the intersection of our private dreams. But any system like this tends to have problems. It's as if most metaphysical systems get this or that right but run aground on close investigation.
Quoting leo
I largely agree. If we take 'mind-independent' in a sharp, metaphysical sense. But I think the opposite position fails for the same reason. What is the 'mind' but experience of the 'world' or 'non-mind'? I think Mach made some good points on this. For me the mind versus non-mind distinction is problematic when we try to do 'math' with it. I think Wittgenstein and Heidegger are great at wrestling with these issues.
In ordinary life, I think we are mostly concerned with bias and wishful thinking. Reality is largely verified by the senses. In a murder trial, there's usually a sense that the defendant did it or did not do it. As we move into metaphysical psychology, thinks get murky. We are tempted to call all reality as we know it a 'dream' which is a function of some unknowable X. We get lost on a Mobius strip. The world is in the brain and yet the brain is in the world.
I suspect that we are up against some kind of glitch in our cognition on this issue. I also think that the 'world' or 'reality' is more like an a priori structure of communication than an object that can be talked about.
If 'mind-independent reality' is a contradiction, then that only matters if it's a contradiction for us. What is it that is 'for us' and 'not just me' that grounds intelligible conversation? You and I have to share a language and a sense of logic to even discuss the issue. So being in language together is (I argue) being in a 'world' together. But this 'world' is not some object. It's the 'wherein' of all objects, including conceptions of the world that ignore the structure I'm trying to point out.
Good point. "Character" and "seeing aright" do seem to be quite inseparable.
Thanks for quoting with such surgical precision. Not my idea, but I claim that particular metaphor.
I'm digging A Thing of This World at the moment. By connecting all the great continentals since Kant, it really brings out the theory of the mask/lens and the (futile?) attempt to get beyond the lens metaphor.
I do agree that what we often call 'reality' is socially constructed. By agreeing, I'm saying that 'in fact' (in reality) what we call 'reality' is a function of power, etc., to some degree.
In the quote above, you open with There are. What is in this 'are'? Heidegger talks about this stuff (I know I'm not original), but the issue itself fascinates me apart from any particular lingo. 'Reality is socially constructed' seems to want to tell me about reality, about 'real' reality.
I understand anti-realism in terms of the lens metaphor and the desire to abandon it. We see through a cultural lens, a personal lens. Deeper than either is the biological lens, our sense organs and nervous system.
What I'm getting at may be a feature of this biological lens. It's as if we can't coherently deny reality or at least some virtual other. Alone of a deserted island I understand my words as potentially intelligible to others, even if they aren't there. Maybe this is switched on as we learn language.
That is the post my post you are responding is a response to, and I already read it and there is nothing in there that addresses the question I raised.
Quoting Wayfarer
This also sidesteps and fails to address it.
I can't see any value in responding to either of you further until you make a genuine attempt to address the point at issue.
This is good point. If we are made of physical entities, then it appears our concept of the physical entity is missing something. How does a sperm cell and an egg cell join together and eventually become what we call conscious?
The mobius strip boggles the mind. We use concepts (if we still want to call them that) to divide experience into self and world. If we stretch out theoretical imaginations, we can imagine a pure plane of [s]experience.[/s] (I cross it out because the 'ego' that experiences is one more [s]experience.[/s])
You may have already looked at this, but in case not:
[quote=Mach]
Colours, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, are connected with one another in manifold ways; and with them are associated dispositions of mind, feelings, and volitions. Out of this fabric, that which is relatively more fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and expresses itself in language. Relatively greater permanency is exhibited, first, by certain complexes of colours, sounds, pressures, and so forth, functionally connected in time and space, which therefore receive special names, and are called bodies. Absolutely permanent such complexes are not.
...
The apparent permanency of the ego consists chiefly in the single fact of its continuity, in the slowness of its changes. The many thoughts and plans of yesterday that are continued today, and of which our environment in waking hours incessantly reminds us (whence in dreams the ego can be very indistinct, doubled, or entirely wanting), and the little habits that are unconsciously and involuntarily kept up for long periods of time, constitute the groundwork of the ego. There can hardly be greater differences in the egos of different people, than occur in the course of years in one person. When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories. Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
...
Colours, sounds, and the odours of bodies are evanescent. But their tangibility, as a sort of constant nucleus, not readily susceptible of annihilation, remains behind; appearing as the vehicle of the more fugitive properties attached to it. Habit, thus, keeps our thought firmly attached to this central nucleus, even when we have begun to recognise that seeing hearing, smelling, and touching are intimately akin in character. A further consideration is, that owing to the singularly extensive development of mechanical physics a kind of higher reality is ascribed to the spatial and to the temporal than to colours, sounds, and odours; agreeably to which, the temporal and spatial links of colours, sounds, and odours appear to be more real than the colours, sounds and odours themselves.
...
That in this complex of elements, which fundamentally is only one, the boundaries of bodies and of the ego do not admit of being established in a manner definite and sufficient for all cases, has already been remarked. To bring together elements that are most intimately connected with pleasure and pain into one ideal mental-economical unity, the ego; this is a task of the highest importance for the intellect working in the service of the pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking will. The delimitation of the ego, therefore, is instinctively effected, is rendered familiar, and possibly becomes fixed through heredity. Owing to their high practical importance, not only for the individual, but for the entire species, the composites " ego " and " body " instinctively make good their claims, and assert themselves with elementary force. In special cases, however, in which practical ends are not concerned, but where knowledge is an end in itself, the delimitation in question may prove to be insufficient, obstructive, and untenable.
Similarly, class-consciousness, class-prejudice, the feeling of nationality, and even the narrowest-minded local patriotism may have a high importance, for certain purposes. But such attitudes will not be shared by the broad-minded investigator, at least not in moments of research. All such egoistic views are adequate only for practical purposes. Of course, even the investigator may succumb to habit. Trifling pedantries and nonsensical discussions; the cunning appropriation of others' thoughts, with perfidious silence as to the sources; when the word of recognition must be given, the difficulty of swallowing one's defeat, and the too common eagerness at the same time to set the opponent's achievement in a false light: all this abundantly shows that the scientist and scholar have also the battle of existence to fight, that the ways even of science still lead to the mouth, and that the pure impulse towards knowledge is still an ideal in our present social conditions.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
Brain -> Awareness -> Consciousness.
If legs are restricted, it is impossible to walk. However, movement is still possible.
Can there be consciousness without awareness in the brain?
(The body of a brain-dead person can survive on life-support machines for a long time. So, without the brain, how do the body parts and organs detect, process and respond to stimulus? Is it all mechanical? Or are there parts of the neural network that are still functional? If so, perhaps consciousness is not of the brain, a notion we've always suspected, science has hints but nobody wants to admit it could be true. Is there something to this... ?)
[quote=Mach]
The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). What was said on p. 21 as to the term " sensation " must be borne in mind. The elements constitute the I. s have the sensation green, signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important. ...But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual.
[/quote]
Note how willing he is to let the 'valueless and personal memories' go. He takes the impersonal personally. The 'content' (the flame) is what's important and not the container (the candle). Of course we don't see the flame without its candle, so the body is the temple of [s]god[/s] 'content.'
And this dude resisted the theory of the atom. That's how skeptical he was. Was his passion for understanding not spiritual somehow?
And here's the cash value:
[quote=Mach]
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses. He would find an idealistic system, or such a monstrosity as solipsism, intolerable in practice.
It may easily become a disturbing element in unprejudiced scientific theorising when a conception which is adapted to a particular and strictly limited purpose is promoted in advance to be the foundation of all investigation. This happens, for example, when all experiences are regarded as " effects " of an external world extending into consciousness. This conception gives us a tangle of metaphysical difficulties which it seems impossible to unravel. But the spectre vanishes at once when we look at the matter as it were in a mathematical light, and make it clear to ourselves that all that is valuable to us is the discovery of functional relations, and that what we want to know is merely the dependence of experiences or one another. It then becomes obvious that the reference to unknown fundamental variables which are not given (things-in-themselves) is purely fictitious and superfluous. But even when we allow this fiction, uneconomical though it be, to stand at first, we can still easily distinguish different classes of the mutual dependence of the elements of " the facts of consciousness "; and this alone is important for us.
...
The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.
The philosophical point of view of the average man - if that term may be applied to his naive realism - has a claim to the highest consideration. It has arisen in the process of immeasurable time without the intentional assistance of man. It is a product of nature, and is preserved by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished - though we may admit the biological justification of every advance, nay, of every error - is, as compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind. Professor X., who theoretically believes himself to be a solipsist, is certainly not one in practice when he has to thank a Minister of State for a decoration conferred upon him, or when he lectures to an audience. The Pyrrhonist who is cudgelled in Moliere's Le Mariage force, does not go on saying " Il me semble que vous me battez," but takes his beating as really received.
Nor is it the purpose of these " introductory remarks " to discredit the standpoint of the plain man. The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it. No point of view has absolute, permanent validity. Each has importance only for some given end. ...
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
Balderdash! Mach was a rank materialist, which I discovered when I first encountered him in 1979, Notice the reference to 'ideal mental-economical unity' (whatever that means) - but there's nothing ideal about sensations. According to traditional philosophy, ideas and sensations belong to completely different ontological levels, namely that of form and matter, respectively. Logic consists, not of the relationship of experiences, but of ideas (including number and arithmetical proofs etc.) These are not 'experiences' and nobody 'experiences' them. When you see a mathematical proof - well, you migjht have an experience, 'Eureka', or whatever, but the seeing of it is not an experience at all, it is the operation of reason, which solely concerns the relationship of ideas.
Nonsense on stilts, empiricism run amuck.
That is consistent with my post of yesterday, which expresses a very similar idea.
So I would paraphrase the 'things do not exist, but only our impressions which appear to us in our conception as objects' as 'things do not possess inherent reality, but their reality is imputed by observers.' Which is, again, close in meaning to the Copenhagen [s]interpretation[/s] attitude.
Quoting g0d
Quoting g0d
That's why I didn't want to use the word 'mind', because the word is imbued with the idea that the mind is part of an external world, but what word could I use? People mostly use language in a context where they presuppose an external reality, so the words they use refer to things that are part of an external reality, but I am not referring to an external reality myself. That's the difficult thing with language, the same words can be interpreted in many different ways.
My point of view is that every being has their own reality. But when I talk of beings, I do not mean they are part of an external reality that can be described in any way. To me there are only beings who create their own reality and influence the realities of one another. We might say there are only minds, or that these minds all make up one whole, but what sense would there be in speaking of an external world or of non-mind in that view? Whatever world I speak of, it would be my own, not some external one.
We can't even say that "there are only minds" is an objective statement of an objective world, because we see that many minds do not agree with that view. And I talk of "we" because we have a common ground, our realities partially intersect.
When I say "there are only minds who create and shape the reality of one another", I am not talking about a "real reality" that applies to everyone, I am talking about my own reality, this is what I experience. And in my reality, others have a different reality, sometimes with a lot of common ground, sometimes with little. And in my reality, your reality will have been changed through our interaction, maybe in a negligible way that you don't consciously notice, or maybe in a significant way. And maybe you will come to agree with that, maybe that will become part of your reality, that will become real to you too.
I can't talk of a world in which minds move through some objective space or time and experience that world. I do not experience an external world in which other minds are, I experience other minds. My world was created and shaped by other minds and by my own. Maybe others will come to see that too. Maybe they won't.
In my view, in the temporary intersection of our realities we find regularities, which we summarize in what we call scientific laws, and we make predictions from them, from which we create technology, which is a way to shape our shared reality. In that view scientific laws would not have a universal everlasting validity, they would apply to a temporarily shared reality, and they would be wrong or meaningless to someone who doesn't share that reality.
No, that's not the post you quoted. Looks like we are not sharing the same reality?
I think it's more than just language. I think it's our recent habit of using science as the one and only tool for examining the world. To use science makes a lot of sense to me, because it has proven so helpful in the past. But to apply it where it doesn't really work is pointless. Other perspectives than the scientific one can also have merit.
From my Twitter timeline this afternoon:
[tweet]https://twitter.com/NoraBateson/status/1141662849984585728[/tweet]
We already went over the free will issue. Re "never seeing things as they are" why would we believe that? Especially when we don't have evidence of how things really are, where that's different than the way we are seeing things, BUT, if we have evidence of that, then we're saying that we can see things as they really are, so there's no way to support the claim that we can not.
Right. At the very least we have some kind of intersubjective situation. We are both (partially) 'here' ---wherever or whatever 'here' is.
Quoting leo
I think I can meet you here. Science is only possible within a 'form of life' or 'understanding of being' or a context of know-how and sharing an ordinary language for a metalanguage. Thanks to Hume, we know that it's just in our blood to expect the persistence of such patterns. And then, as I'm sure you know, science itself is filled with approximations that make calculation convenient or possible. Beyond that there are conceptual difficulties. We have algorithms that give reliable predictions, but we don't have an intuitive grasp on 'why' they work. We trust them as we might trust buttons we push that happen to keep giving us what we want.
Yet in practical life there is such a strong experience of law & order that it's like sanity itself to recognize and adapt to the patterns we find and trust.
Quoting leo
I agree with you. I suggest that philosophers try to theorize this external reality in ways that don't work out (contradictions, ambiguities, aporias.) Non-philosophers think in terms of the food in the cabinet and the guilt or innocence of the accused (roughly the distinction between dreaming and actual sensual experience of the shared as opposed to private reality.) But even philosophers appeal to 'world' as I intend it. 'World' is what our philosophical theses describe. 'There is no single reality' is aimed at some kind of a single reality, since otherwise it would have no use. We who speak only have reason to talk and listen inasmuch as we are in a single reality/world which we can inform one another about. Yet we don't seem to be able to get clear on what this reality is (pre-conceptual? a priori structure of cognition?)
I think that just means that intelligence is directed. To make sense of things we have to simplify them. And make sense of things in order to live well.
Quoting Wayfarer
I can't make sense of this claim. The paper I linked to sure looks 'non-dual' to me. It's not far from James' metaphysics. What we have are 'elements' that are neither mental nor physical. As I read Mach, it's only for selfish/practical reasons that we have to tighten up and think in terms of ego versus world. This also reminds me of Hegel's 'speculative truth.' Objects are concepts are objects are concepts. Elements are intelligible unities in a network, with interdependent essences. Idealism is holism. Abstraction is grasping an element out of its context and losing information. The truth is only in the whole, and we live that evolving truth (completing or extending god-reality).
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, but this idea/sensation distinction is one of those useful abstractions. We live in a world of apples and tornadoes. It's hard to for us to dry out out concepts. When we do we are left with math or symbolic logic. I think Kant was basically right on math. It's based on a shared intuition of space.
On logic, what can we mean by 'nobody experiences them'? It is raining or it is not raining. P v ~P is a tautology. If no one experienced the force of logic, then what are arguments?
And as far as seeing proofs goes, I say look again at the proof without words of the Pythagorean theorem. Where is logic in that? The truth of that theorem can be grasp by spatial intuition being pointed in the right direction.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm surprised you say that. What have you done today/tonight? Surely you have moved through the usual world of objects. You ate some food. You didn't doubt that the floor was beneath your feet, and that it was an 'external' floor that others could walk on. Naive realism looks like the default position of everyday life. It requires philosophy to think that it's all a dream or the intersection of private dreams, etc.
[quote=wiki]
In his Journal (2 May 1896) Tolstoy wrote: "Still another important event the work [Thought and Reality] of African Spir. I just read through what I wrote in the beginning of this notebook. At bottom, it is nothing else than a short summary of all of Spir's philosophy which I not only had not read at that time, but about which I had not the slightest idea. This work clarified my ideas on the meaning of life remarkably, and in some ways strengthened them. The essence of his doctrine is that things do not exist, but only our impressions which appear to us in our conception as objects. Conception (Vorstellung) has the quality of believing in the existence of objects. This comes from the fact that the quality of thinking consists in attributing an objectivity to impressions, a substance, and a projecting of them into space".
[/quote]
But this reading sounds just like Mach, who responded to Kant and had a problem with the thing-in-itself (along with other post-Kantians).
To navigate existence as a whole, we find patterns in the pieces of existence, some of which we classify as self and others as world.
But usually we are something like naive realists, IMO. We are 'Conception' and we 'project' objects into space. Except we just experience them as objects that are already there.
Quoting g0d
If there are only minds, then there is no mind-independent 'here' or 'world' that our minds are in. In that view it is wrong to attempt to imagine minds moving or changing in some 'world', because there is no such world, the concepts of space and time do not apply to minds. Where we do encounter is within our realities.
What use is it to talk of a single reality if we can say nothing at all about it? Just like it is seen as meaningless to talk about what's outside the universe, in the view here it is meaningless to talk about a single reality.
And if we participate in creating our reality and in shaping the realities of one another, then in principle it would be possible to shape the realities of others to the point that we all see the same objective reality, in which subjectivity is gone. And that would be the death of our minds.
I think I was incorrect, that Mach wasn't a materialist but a naturalist and monist.
Quoting g0d
I think that abstraction is more than simply a technique. The ability to grasp and form concepts is basic to language and reason. To refer to a neo-thomist explanation, 'As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images...and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).'
So what I'm questioning is the idea that everything amounts to a form of 'experience' - logic and reason don't arise from experience, but are an innate capacity. But, 'innate capacities' are generally verboten to empiricists with their dogma of the 'blank slate' onto which everything is 'inscribed by experience'.
The other point I objected to is the role given to evolution. I seem to recall, Mach was one of the earliest scientists to philosophise on the basis of Darwinian theory. It seems to me, he assigns a degree of creativity or invention to evolution which I am questioning - when he says 'The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind'. But I'm not trying to defend a doctrine of 'creation'; my view is that at the point humans are able to use language and reason, they transcend the biological and our capacities are no longer explicable in purely biological terms. So it's the reduction of all the elements of human capacity to sensation and experience that I'm objecting to. But perhaps it's not materialism, so I was mistaken in that regard. But it fails to come to terms with the sense in which the mind generates or constructs our world-view, instead seeing it in biological terms. I’ll read the paper later.
But what can it mean for you to say what you said above? About what is it true?
Quoting leo
Is it meaningless for us to talk about a single reality? Or just for you? For me there's a performative contradiction in arguing against a single reality. Or rather the good arguments against a single reality are well aimed at bad conceptualizations of the single reality.
The single reality I have in mind is manifest in the very structure of our communication, the same communication we use to give artificial names to it like the 'physical.'
I agree. It's a faculty. I believe that Hegel called it the 'understanding,' which tears organic unities to shreds.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well I agree. But I don't see too many blank-slaters. Or if people still like the empiricists it's not for that. To be sure there are probably non-philosophers who still hold such crude views.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. I personally think we can't just ignore biology though. For instance, I don't believe in the afterlife because I do think my consciousness depends on the life and health of my brain --and therefore, at least these days, on the heath of the rest of the body. No brain, no consciousness. I can't prove that. If there was disembodied consciousness, it would be hard for us to verify it for obvious reasons. Especially in the context of wild claims from criminals who hear voices.
In the same way a UFO very well could grab a human for experiments and let them go. But if one thinks that most stories like this are false, then the true is lost in the haystack. I would need to see it happen.
It's the same with genuine spiritual experiences. They exist in the context of fakers. To me that is one reason why thinkers tend toward explaining things in terms of the familiar. And then anything too esoteric is almost by definition outside of (public) reason. One gets it or not. A sign is flashed. Let those with ears to hear...
Anyway, here's an example of Mach's relative open-mindedness.
[quote=Mach]
In this investigation we must not allow ourselves to be impeded by such abridgments and delimitations as body, ego, matter, spirit, etc., which have been formed for special, practical purposes and with wholly provisional and limited ends in view. On the contrary, the fittest forms of thought must be created in and by that research itself, just as is done in every special science. In place of the traditional, instinctive ways of thought, a freer, fresher view, conforming to developed experience, and reaching out beyond the requirements of practical life, must be substituted throughout.
[/quote]
Hi. I agree that other perspectives have merit. I'm not so sure that humans have ever used it as their one and only tool or that they ever could.
Hey, sorry for the absence, been busy with shit. I have read your previous responses, and we will circle back upon them when the time is right. For now, let me jump in...
Science, or at least its general methodology is definitely the best known tool by which we, as a whole, can obtain a high degree of objective knowledge. But this in no way suggests that objective knowledge is superior to non-objective knowledge, and by that measure, neither can science be declared as the superior method for obtaining knowledge. Knowledge of my self, my life, who I am and where I stand is something that science cannot touch, at least not at the purest levels of subjectivity, and something that I would suspect has been on every true philosopher's mind at one time or another. For me, such subjective knowledge is infinitely important. Nevertheless, science shows excellent results.
It's not a matter of ignoring it, but of extending it beyond it's domain of applicability. This is precisely what many a 19th century scientific rationalist wanted to do. Mach is a giant and I really am not disposed to trying to read a lot of his material, but I think this indicative statement from SEP might suffice:
The issue I see with it is that of biological reductionism. What does the theory of the origin of species set out to explain? As the name implies, the origin of species. I question the legitimacy of extending it to include the origin of science, or of the intellect, or of rationality as a faculty or capacity, because it implicitly or even explicitly reduces these capacities to those which can directly be understood for the advantage for reproduction that they obviously might provide.
You see, this is very much the kind of thinking that is the subject of the 'argument from reason'. That is a deep theological and philosophical argument, but it is basically a critique of metaphysical naturalism - which is what Mach's theory seems to be.This is that 'Reasoning requires insight into logical relations. A process of reasoning (P therefore Q) is rational only if the reasoner sees that Q follows from, or is supported by, P, and accepts Q on that basis. Thus, reasoning is valid only if it involves a special kind of causality, namely, rational insight into logical implication or evidential support. If a bit of reasoning can be fully explained by non-rational causes, such as fibers firing in the brain or a bump on the head, then the reasoning that arises from such bases is inherently untrustworthy.’ Or as Leon Wieseltier put it in his review of Daniel Dennett's 'Breaking the Spell'
This actually is a really deep conundrum in modern philosophy, we can't just brush it off. Even though theists such as C S Lewis and Alvin Plantinga have used this argument in support of theism, non-theistic philosophers such as Max Horkheimer have also argued along similar lines in respect of the 'instrumentalisation of reason'. And I suspect Ernst Mach is one of those who set this wheel in motion.
Quoting g0d
Thanks for the link, I have read the quotes you cited here but I will read the whole thing. I agree that not all physicists are rude or not open-minded to ideas that go against their cherished beliefs or theories, but they are the exception rather than the rule. And there may have been more exceptions in the past than there are today. Ernst Mach, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré, Nikola Tesla, Henry Margenau, Arthur M. Young, David Bohm, John Stewart Bell, and many more that aren't well known, but they are still a tiny percentage. But then again they had in common that they did philosophy and not just physics. When you do physics only, you are stuck thinking within the mainstream theories of the era, seeing the assumptions at the root of the theories as truth rather than as assumptions.
Quoting g0d
I started the sentence with "If", "If there are only minds", "If there are only minds, then there is no mind-independent 'here' or 'world' that our minds are in". If you disagree with that sentence, I would be interested to hear what makes you disagree, because in my reality I don't see how it could be wrong.
If there are only minds, then nothing is not mind, so there is no 'here' or 'world' that is not mind. This is true to me because this is what I see, just like "the sky is blue" is true to me if I see something that I call sky which has the color that I call blue. I am involved in creating my truth.
Quoting g0d
It is meaningless to me if I assume that there are only minds and that minds do not see the same reality. If you tentatively make the same assumptions, and you do not see it as meaningless to talk about a single reality, then again I would be interested to hear what makes you disagree, because to me this points to your reality being different to mine in a way that I cannot yet grasp.
Quoting g0d
If I see/hear you using the word 'tree', and you see/hear me using the word 'tree', and I see you point a finger towards what I call a tree, and you see me point a finger towards what you call a tree, does that imply we are having the same experience, seeing the same thing? That same word could refer to very different experiences. Now if there is repeated consistency and agreements between how we name our experiences, then we can say there is a common ground between our realities. Does it imply there is one single reality? Are we going to agree on everything? What of people who don't see that tree? Is there something wrong with them, are they delusional because they don't see the single reality that you assumed exists?
It seems to me that as soon as there is subjectivity in our experiences, we can't reconcile that perfectly with a single objective reality. For instance, if you see something that others don't see, then others can attempt to explain why you see that in terms of what they see. If there is a single reality, then in principle they could find an explanation, such as your brain being different in some way to theirs. But if there is subjectivity in the way others see your brain, then they wouldn't all come up with the same explanation, some might even not find an explanation. Or even if they agree on an explanation, you may not agree yourself because they have not seen what you have seen, and they may not see how their explanation does not account for what you have seen.
There is comfort in the idea of a single reality. When we stick to what we agree on, it seems like there is indeed one reality. And when there is a disagreement that doesn't get resolved, we say the other is wrong, or delusional, or we agree to disagree, or we say that some day we might be able to explain that disagreement in terms of something we agree on. Today many people agree on the idea of a single physical reality, but they can't explain how is it that they can experience anything at all in such a reality. At that point there is only faith holding that single reality together. Minds believing in it.
There were quite a few German scientists of that period who opposed atomism on philosophical grounds. I seem to remember this attitude was one of the things that drove Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide.
Again though basic principle seems to be ‘only sensation is real’ and abstraction is like a form of ‘generalised sensation’. So Mach was opposed to materialism, not from the same perspective as idealist philosophers, but because if only sensation is real then the positing of real external existents is unwarranted. That is why he is counted as a source of later logical positivism. But whilst he might be opposed to materialism, like all positivists he is completely opposed to the idea of there being a metaphysics. And I defend metaphysics on the basis that abstractions such as universals and number, are real, and can’t be derived from empirical principles.
A Heraclitus quote which has always stuck with me is ‘whilst the many live each their own private world, the wise have but one world in common.’ (Quoted in The Aristos, John Fowles.)
Now you can see that modern science in a sense is striving for that ‘common world’ also, which is the world of primary objects and forces that can be shown to be ‘the same for all observers’. This notion is elaborated in great detail on Thomas Nagel’s important book, The View from Nowhere (review here.) Again, the particular contribution of modern scientific method was to bracket out the individual, the subjective, by discerning what could be quantified and validated by all observers. Or that was the theory. But as Nagel says, ‘Among philosophers of mind, the prevalent form of objective blindness is a cult of the method of the physical sciences, which leads in extreme cases to the outright denial of subjectivity. Against this Mr. Nagel insists that the subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and number.’
The blind spot, again.
This is strongly connected to the original post. The faith you speak of, is the faith that reality is physical and objective, or in any case, is amenable to discovery by the sciences. But as we have been discussing, this approach brackets out the subjective, as it presumes that whatever is real is indeed objective and quantifiable, but then what of the myriad points of view that seem to possess a reality of their own?
Again, I think the solution lies in the direction of ‘transcending subjectivity’ i.e. transcending the sense of self-hood, but not on the basis of according sole reality to the so-called ‘objective domain’. That’s the sense in which it is basically a spiritual quest.
I agree, thanks for the reference, I will check it out.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this is why I am posting in this thread ;)
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems to me that in the idea of transcending subjectivity there is still the idea of finding something objective 'out there', some eternal objective truth. I am more of the idea that we do not find the 'out there', we create it, and that when we create it it becomes real, to us. That we and others before us have created or shaped what we experience, and that we are the ones changing it. That if we insist in believing that scientific laws are the truth, are objective, are eternal, and we silence those who disagree, and we dismiss any experience that doesn't follow these laws as hallucination, or delusion, or imagination, then we will create such a world where nothing can transcend these laws, because in a profound sense we will stop experiencing anything that transcends these laws.
So in a generalization, there could be said to be perhaps three or four meta-positions: “Winner takes it all” aka the science vs religion worldview death match (Dawkins and creationists). The “two ways of looking at the same reality” view (Ayala, Teilhard de Chardin, et al). The “separate spheres” aka non-overlapping magisteria position (Gould). And the related view of “mostly separate, with some overlap and interconnection” (Wilber, et al). For whatever it is worth, I find all except the first (“only one winner”) interesting and worth exploring...
How do you deal with the claim that this is simply relativism, that the only truth we can know is the truth 'for us'?
Quoting leo
There's two things here - the notion of laws, but also a sense of dogmatic authority. That there is a privileged perspective which is the correct perspective, opposing other perspectives. In some sense, you can see how the Enlightenment attitude drew on the preceding tradition of religious dogma. Actually you see that very distinctly in so-called 'new atheism', which oddly mimics the kind of fundamentalism which it criticises. It is dogmatically certain of the fact that 'all that can be known can be known by means of science'.
But it's also said that science accepts no authority but evidence. Scientists will always assure you that, should the evidence warrant it, they will change their hypotheses. The problem is, that you can then argue about what constitutes 'evidence'. There are some subject areas, or ideas, which are not amenable to the kind of analysis that will yield the kind of empirical evidence that is considered scientific, so questions about those kinds of topics aren't considered legitimate at all by scientific standards. I think one of those surely must be the argument about orthogenesis, whether evolution is governed by any overall direction or unfolding purpose. It seems to me that this is something which the kind of evidence that scientists would consider can't actually address.
But then, finally, I also refer back to this post and the traditional virtues of sagacity and detachment whereby the sage 'sees things as they truly are'. That is what science aspires to do, it is the very impulse that science arose from.
Quoting 0 thru 9
:up:
Yes that's how I remember it also. It reminds me of Cantor being given hell, especially by Kronecker. Cantor irrationally hated infinitesimals, which eventually were made respectable. While both atoms and set theory have been useful and illuminating, I still think both Mach and Kronecker had a point.
Atoms are a useful way of looking at things. My mother isn't 'really' atoms. She is atoms and many other things. And then subitizing ('God created the integers') and metaphor ('and all the rest is the work of man.') look like a truer foundation of math than today's set theory (impressive though it be.)
I think we can meet in our appreciation of scientists that are also philosophers. There are indeed philosophically naive scientists who don't realize they are caught up in primitive systems. They add on lots of junk philosophy to a living core of utility.
Quoting leo
The word 'mind' loses its traditional meaning along with the 'here.' I think overlapping minds is a plausible theory. It gets something right.
Quoting leo
I value the anti-realist points that you make. For me anti-realism + naive-realism = sophisticated realism. We would call people who hear voices we can't hear 'delusional.' We would call people who couldn't see the tree 'blind.'
Let me put your point in another way. We shine a certain frequency of light into many people's eyes. They all say that it is 'red.' Are they therefore seeing the same color? No. Or we can't know. So I agree that we are caught 'outside' of the 'direct experience' of others.
https://aeon.co/videos/does-the-meaning-of-words-rest-in-our-private-minds-or-in-our-shared-experience
That's a nice video. Not saying I agree 100%, but it's a good point.
Quoting leo
Fair enough. But don't we naturally think and talk in terms of a single 'ideal' intersection? I don't think we are good at exactly specifying it, but I think our talk is constantly aimed at it. Quoting leo
For me explanation has limits. So single reality != explainable reality. Brute fact rules as we climb up the ladder of why-why-why. We get either an infinite chain of 'whys' or some first principle that just is.
Quoting leo
I hear you, but aren't you aiming this insight at the same single reality? True, you see as I do the problem with framing it as 'physical.' The anti-realist points do indeed devastate scientism. But to do so they still have to aim at something that grounds their statements.
BTW, I do enjoy your posts and am glad to discuss this you.
Well I do relate to the sense that anti-realism has its problems. I argue against the strong reading of Nietzsche, Rorty, and others.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree with you here. This is one of the sore spots of that view. And I am moved by Husserl's arguments against psychologism. I'm not saying that I reject the theory of evolution, but I do see the problem. I haven't studied biology closely. That said, I do think it's possible that currently unnoticed factors are involved. And it's logically possible that those factors won't ever be detected in traditional ways.
I agree with all of this, and I look forward to you returning when you have time to other issues we've touched on. I think we share a cosmic sense of humor.
To me scientism is an awkward attempt to be detached and objective. I think good philosophy and bad philosophy chase the same ideal, and we call that philosophy 'good' that does a better job of it from our perspective.
What is his monism but a metaphysics? He was powerfully influenced by Kant.
Quoting Wayfarer
The way I understand Mach, there are 'elements.' If the ego is a useful fiction, then 'sensation' cannot have the same meaning. It's like me writing '[s]experience.[/s] '
If one assumes as I do that something like naive realism is our pre-philosophical starting point, then post-ego views have to be expressed awkwardly in ordinary language to be intelligible.
[quote=James]
'Thoughts' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it, and may be expected to vary in the future.
...
To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably 'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles must still provide in some way for that function's being carried on.
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one if its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[2] the other becomes the object known.
[/quote]
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/consciousness.htm
This goes back to Hegel & Fichte. We get a system of intelligible unities, since the meaning of 'cat' is entangled with the meaning of 'mouse,' and ego is entangled with world, etc. In practical life, some of these distinctions are vividly lived. We are sure that we have isolated selves (ghosts in skulls) without much thinking about it.
In short, I read Mach as a radical metaphysician along the lines of James and Hegel. But he addressed the same problem that I try to address also, and that's the gap between our wild theories and our lives outside of Hume's study. We never forget ordinary language and its naive realism. We just learn to talk at different levels of abstraction and immediate utility,IMV.
I did a semester on philosophy of matter in which we read that 'the atom' was a way of resolving the paradox of the One and the Many. The One (c.f. Parmenides) was believed to be the source of all multiplicity and yet beyond all change - which was a paradox, as all we see is multiplicity and change. The stroke of genius of atomism was that 'the changeless' could be understood as the fundamental element of everything; that whilst the atom remained indivisible and eternal in itself and so, like the One, it could at the same time combine in countless ways to produce the 'ten thousand things', so resolving the paradox. I think that intuition remains behind atomism but the original philosophical inspiration long forgotten, as it still preserved the division between 'the uncreated' (unconditioned, unmade, unfabricated) and 'the manifest realm'. So now the original appeal of atomism has been forgotten, but it wanted to discern the bedrock, the basis, the fundamental ground from which everything appears.
Quoting g0d
Emphatically, neither am I. I never even thought about it until much later in life, when through the arguments of evangelical atheism I began to notice what I thought were many spurious philosophical arguments based on 'evolution as a religion' (Mary Midgley's book.) Then I noticed how much evolutionary paradigms had seeped into all kinds of philosophical problems - that everything could be understood through the lense of evolutionary biology - including Mach, by the way. It's a Procrustean attitude, because evolutionary biology was never intended to explain the problems of philosophy, while a lot of people - almost everyone on this forum - simply assume that it does. We are this way 'because of evolution'.
That is why the predominant materialism of secular culture is based in neo-Darwinism; it's kind of a 'reverse fundamentalism', as it believes that evolutionary theory debunks the religious account of creation. But it only does that if you first believed that the religious account was literally true; if you've never thought it was literally true (as I did not) then the fact that it's *not* literally true has no significance.
But 'evolution' has become kind of a pseudo- or quasi-religion, standing in the place vacated by religion to inform us of what we really are. That is why there is a taboo on saying that we're anything separate, different or superior to animals, which is a secular heresy. (See also It Ain't Necessarily So, and Anything but Human.)
Actually in pretty close agreement with James, but would parse it differently.
'Thoughts' are not objects as such; objects exist in thought, or rather, in mind, but you can't be discursively aware of that, because you can't step outside mind or treat mind as an object, as it never is an object. We use the term 'object' metaphorically to describe 'object of thought', but as James says
But I think, all respect to James, whom I have always found a congenial philosopher, something else is forgotten in his work, which is how reason operates at all. Actually in both those excerpts from Mach and James, much is made of 'generalisation' and 'abstraction' as this is just a natural function, but it overlooks something uncanny about reasoning. I think it's something the Greek philosophers intuited, and which was preserved in the tradition of classical philosophy, but which in these empiricist philosophers has been lost.
Quoting g0d
Forgive me, but I'm going to ask you to consider an intriguing passage that I unearthed during another discussion here a few years back which I think is a strong case for a form of dualism. It's in this blog post which I won't reproduce here, but will break out this para:
I just find this completely persuasive. What this author - neo-thomist, by the way - is arguing, is that the sensory organs perceive the matter of an object, but the intellect perceives its form - i.e. what it is, what makes it "this" as distinct from "that". 'the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the forms of objects in an immaterial manner. '
So, intelligibility arises from the ability of intellect (nous) to discern the forms of things, to understand them as being part of an intelligible order - and emphatically not merely as a 'kind of sensation'. The intellect (nous) recognises the eidos (idea) of the particulars and this is what allows the whole process of reason to get any traction in the first place. But I don't think that reason, as such, is explained naturalistically, as it is not 'evident to sensation', right? I mean a non-rational animal, such as a chimp, will see the same things a human does, but will not be able to interpret it, name it, analyse and compare, etc, because the faculty of reason is not operative. And while the faculty of reason is certainly something that evolved, what is discerned by reason didn't evolve; I mean, the 'law of the excluded middle' didn't come into being when we evolved to perceived it; what evolved was our capacity to perceive it. And this is something I don't believe the empiricist philosophers would agree with.
So this is hylomorphic dualism, matter-form dualism, and I have to confess, it makes sense to me.
It really was a work of genius.
Quoting Wayfarer
To me the mystique of physics in particular is still connected to this. Even those who don't want to learn physics still perhaps enjoy their image of it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed, though I think the historical evolution of ideas was noticed first.
[quote=Wiki]
Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare, and thus comprehend, human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealized figures. The final age is characterized by popular democracy and reflection via irony; in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarie della reflessione or barbarism of reflection, and civilization descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages – common to every nation – constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history.
[/quote]
I think someone before Vico already thought as much, but Vico came to mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
I hear you. For me the gap is between religion that experiences God as an invisible person who sees inside one's heart and does miracles and other more abstract versions of God. More abstract versions of God aren't controversial, as far as I can see, but somewhere between myth and metaphysics. I call myself an atheist because it's the least confusing word I could choose, but I think the myths are profoundly true in ways I would not defend with arguments.
Quoting Wayfarer
I like the quote. I think that we indeed grasp things in terms of concepts. For me it's important that we also create new concepts. This creativity helps account for the historical evolution of culture. Meaning is cumulative, both for the individual and the community.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed, we don't receive the world as sensation.
[quote=SEP]
What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
But I must say that I don't think the empiricists ever believed that we experienced a mess of sensations. I think they were just proto-Kantians. Look at the titles of their works.
If we think about our sense organs long enough, it's fairly clear that somehow our organized experience of the world is synthesized from independent streams of information from our differing sense organs.
Kant made the project explicit, added important detail, and carved out a problematic sanctuary for religion.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we organize sensation into a world, but this requires time and a culture for human beings. Even animals have some reason, though. Experiments have investigated the number sense in animals. But this story brings it home in context.
[quote=link]
A landowner had been quite bothered by the crow since it had chosen to nest in his watch-house. He had planned to shoot it. The bird would fly away and wait until the landowner had left to return to its nest inside the watch-house, given that no-one would be inside to shoot it. In order to deceive it, the landowner had two people enter the watch-house and one leave. The crow was not deceived by this malicious plan, even when three men entered and two left. It wasn’t until five men had entered the tower and four had left that the bird did eventually fly back inside the watch-house. The crow thus shows a certain numerical ability to count up until four but not five.
[/quote]
https://blogofthecosmos.com/2016/03/01/the-numerical-abilities-of-non-human-animals/
Of course that makes sense if cognition evolved.
This is a great issue. I'm not a mathematical Platonist, but I experience a shared realm. For me it's plausibly explained as a blend of subitizing, spatial intuition, and metaphor. I don't know how we can see around our own cognition to check whether what is discerned by reason evolved.
I postulate a biological, cultural, and personal lens through which we experience reality. It seems that anything added by the biological lens would be hard to isolate. The 'beetle in the box' video I posted in reply to @leo also suggests that we could only infer a similar understanding in aliens, for instance, indirectly or through their behavior. Consider receiving this message from outer space:
||, |||, |||||, |||||||, |||||||||||, .... [2,3,5,7,11,...]
We'd infer that something out there grasped both natural numbers and what it means for a number to be prime. That would at least suggest similar cognitive structure.
I agree with you in a common sense way, but I think this misses James' point. For him the 'mind' is one more object in a nexus of objects. Objects are thoughts and thoughts are objects. They are pieces of formed [s]experience.[/s] There is no witness left over, only what the hypothesized witness was supposed to be witnessing. The witness is one more thought/object.
For common sense the thought of an apple is not itself an apple. For James these are both just object-thoughts with a similar but still different form.
I'd really have to write [s]objects[/s] and [s]thoughts.[/s] Because we have left mind and matter behind in such a wild theory. We have to climb the ladder of the witness and the witnessed to get there. And really we've just climbed up to an unsustainable speculative truth, since we are sure to come down.
The radical anti-realist don't just insist that the lens is unstable, they deny the lens metaphor altogether and get a 'subject-object.'
I find dualism to be roughly true. On the one hand we perceive redness. On the other we determine the radiation associated with this perception to have a frequency of 710 nm.
To me it's clear as day that redness is not frequency. It may be a beetle in a box, but it's my beetle, and I think it's other people's beetle too.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/6
[quote=link]
“Abstraction, which is the proper task of active intellect, is essentially a liberating function in which the essence of the sensible object, potentially understandable as it lies beneath its accidents, is liberated from the elements that individualize it and is thus made actually understandable. The product of abstraction is a species of an intelligible order. Now possible intellect is supplied with an adequate stimulus to which it responds by producing a concept.”
[/quote]
Yes, this sounds right to me.
Just as I see redness, my intellect 'sees' circularity or a cat and not a dog.
I think it gets quite a bit right. One of the classic neural network problems is deciding whether an image contains a cat or not. This task was out of reach for a long time, and yet it's so easy for humans. It's only in reach now because we have enough computational power to represent the concept of a cat as a massive spiderweb of floating point numbers whose structure is inspired by brains. And because we expose that computer to many labelled examples.
We also have clustering algorithms that (roughly) divide a world of experience into objects, which is like concept creation. I don't think computers see red or see concept, to be clear. I'm just saying that there is a mathematical pattern associated with human conceptuality.
[quote=Bill Vallicella, quoting Josiah Royce]The religious perceive our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer (!) or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. [/quote]
Quoting g0d
Not 'a mess of sensations' but the 'tabula rasa' principle of Locke was and is a firm dogma of empiricism. Organised sensations, with the organising principle being provided by the evolved brain; 'experience' is extended to embrace the experience of our forebears which is handed down through evolution. But look at the role of observability in empirical science - the yardstick of what is real, is what can be ascertained by sensory experience, amplified by instruments, and mathematical abstraction thereof. It is said that 'science relies on reason' but really it relies even more on what is tangible or instrumentally-detectable; it is nothing like rationalism in the sense that a Leibniz or rationalist philosophy understands, which sought to intuit an order wholly transcending the order of the sense; something which is practically unintelligible to a modern.
So the argument against 'knowledge only through experience', is that reason (etc) is an innate capacity without which experience itself would be meaningless.; as per Kant's 'percepts without concepts are blind'.
Very good passage on Heidegger. And I know that crows and monkeys have rudimentary counting abilities, but must say it doesn't impress me much; it can still be understood within the framework of stimulus and response, as can bee dances.
Quoting g0d
Note the difference between hylomorphic and Cartesian dualism. The former never conceived of 'the soul' as a substance, or something that exists over and above the body. In a sense, Aristotle's intuition is that the soul is the unity of the body.
First, to argue for the continuity I mentioned, I quote from Locke and Kant.
[quote=Locke]
Since it is the understanding, that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion, which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into. The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own object.
...
If, by this enquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man, to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things, which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps be so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things, to which our understandings are not suited; and of which we cannot frame in our minds any clear or distinct perceptions, or whereof (as it has perhaps too often happened) we have not any notions at all.
[/quote]
[quote=Kant]
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.
It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion.
[/quote]
As for the blank slate, let's look closer:
[quote=Locke]
For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them; and the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent, which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths: it seeming to me near a contradiction, to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands not; imprinting, if it signify any thing, being nothing else, but the making certain truths to be perceived. [15] For to imprint any thing on the mind, without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths: which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown?
...
To avoid this, it is usually answered, That all men know and assent to them, when they come to the use of reason, and this is enough to prove them innate. I answer,
Doubtful expressions that have scarce any signification, go for clear reasons, to those, who being prepossessed, take not the pains to examine, even what they themselves say. For to apply this answer with any tolerable sense to our present purpose, it must signify one of these two things; either, that, as soon as men come to the use of reason, these supposed native inscriptions come to be known, and observed by them: or else, that the use and exercise of men’s reason assists them in the discovery of these principles, and certainly makes them known to them.
If they mean, that by the use of reason men may discover these principles; and that this is sufficient to prove them innate: their way of arguing will stand thus, (viz.) that, whatever truths reason can certainly discover to us, and make us firmly assent to, those are all naturally imprinted on the mind; since that universal assent, which is made the mark of them, amounts to no more but this; that by the use of reason, we are capable to come to a certain knowledge [17] of, and assent to them; and, by this means, there will be no difference between the maxims of the mathematicians, and theorems they deduce from them; all must be equally allowed innate; they being all discoveries made by the use of reason, and truths that a rational creature may certainly come to know, if he apply his thoughts rightly that way.
...
That certainly can never be thought innate, which we have need of reason to discover; unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths, that reason ever teaches us, to be innate.
...
So that to make reason discover those truths, thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are always ignorant of them, till they come to the use of reason, it is in effect to say, that men know, and know them not, at the same time.
...
The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase. But though the having of general ideas, and the use of general words and reason, usually grow together; yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate. The knowledge of some truths, I confess, is very early in the mind; but in a way that shows them not to be innate.
[/quote]
I recently read Locke for the first time, and I found him pretty likable.
OK, yes I see the difference. But I had the impression that you liked both forms of dualism. In James and Mach we have elements of informed matter but no witness.
I've held a theory like this for quite a while, and it's not far from Feuerbach's humanism. But clearly we don't have consensus about this norm. This site is largely about presenting, comparing, attacking, and defending proposed norms.
The general structure of having a norm ('the sacred') does seem innate.
This is a fascinating quote, but note that it frames the religious person in terms of longing, sorrow, and fear who merely glimpses something Higher now and then. What is not mentioned is a general sense of well-being. To be sure there is plenty of vanity in the world, but we can choose our spouses, friends, books, etc. Can we not get better at life as we get better at riding a bike?
I do like the 'wayfarer' metaphor. And I agree that the intensity of 'spiritual' experience is not constant. Peak moments come and go. But I'm personally more anti-anti-worldly than anti-wordly. As far as I know this is the one world and one life that I actually have. My thinking is that we transcend vanity by identifying with what all good people have in common. We meet in our profound myths, thoughts, rituals, works of science, works of art in different media, etc.
Isn't it more complicated than that?
[math] {\displaystyle i\hbar {\frac {d}{dt}}\vert \Psi (t)\rangle ={\hat {H}}\vert \Psi (t)\rangle } [/math]
Hypotheses are often created in an unwordly language of pure form. Of course they are tested in terms of the tangible, but atoms for instance are beyond the order of sense. QM doesn't even make sense (" I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.") So we trust and use patterns in measurements that we can't ground in intuition.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well empirical means (roughly) 'based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.' So, yes, empirical science is concerned with the observable. As far as leaving rationalist philosophy behind, well that makes sense.
We've talked about the quest for unbiasedness. A careful measurement is just about as unbiased as it gets for us humans. Eternal truths revealed to intuition are problematic, probably because people don't agree about these universal truths.
If you claim that, given measurement x at time t_0, I should expect measurement y at time t_1, then you have truly said something definite. In a world of so much confusion and wishful thinking, this is beautiful.
For me man is the metaphysical animal and philosophy is an ultimate treasure, but science by reducing its project in some sense gains something that philosophy can't offer.
You're most welcome, and thanks for your comments.
Quoting g0d
The problem with Cartesian dualism is the very idea of there being a 'thinking substance'. It is an impossible abstraction, and has lead to enormous confusion. Husserl has a great criticism of that in Crisis of European Sciences. But it is what ended up as 'the ghost in the machine'. Whereas in hylomorphic dualism, mind is 'what grasps meaning'; not a substance or object of any kind; much more subtle.
This is from 'the antinomies of reason'. It is about the fact that there are questions traditionally regarded as metaphysical, which can never be resolved, like whether the world has a beginning or whether there is a first cause.
[quote=John Locke ]The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet; and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind, proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the [21] materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment, increase. But though the having of general ideas, and the use of general words and reason, usually grow together; yet, I see not, how this any way proves them innate.[/quote]
Right - there's a succinct statement of the 'blank slate'. In IETP, on Kant's metaphysics, we read that
This is the sense in which Kant criticizes the empiricists. The gist of it is, to even make the arguments that they make, the empiricists are already assuming the very faculties which they believe they can account for in terms of experience. 'According to the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions, the mind is passive either because it finds itself possessing innate, well-formed ideas ready for analysis, or because it receives ideas of objects into a kind of empty theater, or blank slate. Kant's crucial insight here is to argue that experience of a world as we have it is only possible if the mind provides a systematic structuring of its representations. This structuring is below the level of, or logically prior to, the mental representations that the Empiricists and Rationalists analyzed.'
Notice that Locke is arguing that if ideas were truly innate, then we wouldn't have to learn them, and children and idiots would already possess them. But I think it's a rather simplistic interpretation of what 'innateness' means. The 'categories of the understanding' and the 'primary intuitions' which Kant points to, are not necessarily available to conscious inspection - in that sense, innate - but they're innate in the sense that they provide the structure whereby "making sense of experience" is possible. Likewise, I think that universals are like the real constituents of the mind's capacity for reason - in that sense they're innate, but innate in the sense of being the native constituents of reason, not as fully-formed ideas. On the other hand, child prodigies, etc, really do seem to have an innate talent or recollection. In either case, it's not nearly so simple as Locke makes it out to be.
Quoting g0d
It is extremely complicated, but the fact remains that 'empiricism' means 'demonstrable in objective experience', right? 'Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The “truth” (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: “Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.” - E G Dougherty.
So all science has predictions (on the left hand side) and results (observations and experimental results, on the right hand side). It can be distinguished from philosophical reasoning that is aimed at effecting a transformation of insight, as was traditional philosophy; science is results-oriented and instrumental in nature. Not wrong on that account, but also not necessarily efficacious in any sense other than those.
Quoting g0d
I don't think it's all or nothing. One can 'live in the world' as many a good Christian, Buddhist or Hindu might do, but still feel that sense of the radical insufficiency of natural life. The feeling the post talks about is an intuition of radically transformed way of being; but it concludes that, certainly, not everyone has this sense, which is also true. I quoted it to illustrate what I think having a spiritual/religious type of outlook amounts to, rather than believing in a sky-father type of God, as it's a sense which could equally apply to Buddhists, who don't believe in God.
I would think that nothing is more tangible to a person than their own thoughts and experiences. There is a quote I heard a long time ago, but I don't know who it was. It was something like this-- Some say the universe is made of atoms, but I say it is made of stories.
I would say that I agree with it because all that we know comes in the form of a story. I have never seen an atom. I simply believe the story I was told. This is the case for all I know. No on has ever seen the continents drift from a single land mass to where we ae now. People found a bunch of bones and stones and pieced togehter a story. No one has ever seen the big bang. They observed things and did some math and then told the story that they believe and now so do I. It's all a story that is told to us by someone else, or one that we tell ourselves. We compile the stories and form our worldview. If the stories are harmonious then they are more believable and we enter them in as knowledge. If they are not compatible then one must go and we will look for anoter to fill its place. That seems to be the scientific method.
As far as that which is common to us all that would constitute knowledge that is not learned, but innate; our dissatisfaction with the world as it is, seems to be a norm that binds us all together. Why is it that we all find the state of the world to be disgusting? Wouldn't that point to an innate knowledge?
Well I agree that Cartesian dualism, like IMV every exact metaphysical system, falls apart upon close examination. It gets something right at the cost of getting something wrong. Our language is too fluid and complex to model itself in an artificial structure.
I'd say that the notion of a thinking substance was anything but arbitrary. It sounds like a soul. And it gets the part of us that quietly talks to ourselves right. But indeed it is an impossible abstraction. All brittle systems crumble, and systems are brittle IMV because they imagine that concepts are like distinct crystals. And that distinctions are perfect rather than approximate.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, and you mention one of my favorite antinomies. Kant made it obvious that human cognition has glitches like that.
Quoting Wayfarer
But it's so harmless in context, at least to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think I know what you mean, but empiricism means (roughly) 'a philosophical belief that states your knowledge of the world is based on your experiences, particularly your sensory experiences. According to empiricists, our learning is based on our observations and perception; knowledge is not possible without experience.' So it's more general than that.
I do associate science with demonstration via objective/unbiased experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, but I think that some tie their sense of the spiritual to it. As we've discussed, unbiasedness is also a spiritual concept. I also suggest that engineering can be experienced as art. We love beautiful machines, powerful machines, ...
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that it's not all or nothing.
Hi. I like this. Yes, the world is made of stories...and atoms and windmills and smiles and toothaches and mothers and trapezoids and...
Quoting Cris
Yup. I agree. We mostly just get stories. But I have flown to New York in a few hours. I was up in the clouds. The story of atoms gets our attention because it is connected to events like these. Of course there are profound internal experiences associated with religious stories, but those experiences are more elusive. So religious stories are more controversial.
Quoting Cris
I think you describe the way humans think in general.
[quote=James]
The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalisation is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently.
This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. An outrée [outrageous] explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less eccentric. The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing.
[/quote]
I don't think so. I do think we have something like a human nature, and that would serve your purpose. But I don't think we pop out of mother with a set of justified beliefs. We can't even talk yet! And I think that's the gist of what Locke was saying. I'm not born knowing the Pythagorean theorem, but I can of course grow up, see the proof, and agree with all the other grownups that 'of course it's true.'
So I say yes to human nature and of course to being embedded in a culture that makes us intelligible to one another. But I say no to the idea that we don't need to learn a language and train our young brains. Of course our brains are structured in a certain way that allows for creating knowledge, but I wouldn't call that potential for learning the knowledge itself.
I like to see more textual evidence that empiricists
Kant is great, and he added to the empiricists. But what is the spirit of his work? The preface of the first edition is a natural place to look.
[quote =Kant]
It is plainly not the effect of the levity, but of the matured judgement* of the age, which refuses to be any longer entertained with illusory knowledge, It is, in fact, a call to reason, again to undertake the most laborious of all tasks—that of self-examination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing less than the critical investigation of pure reason.
I do not mean by this a criticism of books and systems, but a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason, with reference to the cognitions to which it strives to attain without the aid of experience; in other words, the solution of the question regarding the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics, and the determination of the origin, as well as of the extent and limits of this science. All this must be done on the basis of principles.
This path—the only one now remaining—has been entered upon by me; and I flatter myself that I have, in this way, discovered the cause of—and consequently the mode of removing—all the errors which have hitherto set reason at variance with itself, in the sphere of non-empirical thought... It is true, these questions have not been solved as dogmatism, in its vain fancies and desires, had expected; for it can only be satisfied by the exercise of magical arts, and of these I have no knowledge. But neither do these come within the compass of our mental powers; and it was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations.
[/quote]
And then the beginning of the introduction:
[quote=Kant]
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.
But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it.
[/quote]
Kant points out that moving from what I'd call naive realism requires 'long practice' and skill. That the empiricists should have accidentally left some of the work of their own minds 'projected' is no surprise. And those who came after Kant criticized him. What we have is an evolving theory of the 'lens' and how it structures the given into experience. Kant aimed at one fixed lens. Others later held to the lens metaphor but insisted that the lens changed with time. Heidegger and Wittgenstein presented something like a soft and evolving lens that we could never quite grasp explicitly and/or comprehensively.
No - he criticized them. As is evident from the very material you provide:
Which is precisely what the empiricists claim. They’re not equivocal about it.
What was it that Hume wrote, that Kant said ‘awakened him from his dogmatic slumber’?
You have the context, though:
[quote=Kant]
For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skillful in separating it.
[/quote]
And of course:
[quote=Kant]
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts.
[/quote]
How are these conceptually structured intuitions so different from Hume's impressions?
Compare that with:
And consider this:
[quote=Hume]
All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides, is a proposition which expresses a relation between these figures. That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. [u]Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.
[/quote]
Hume doesn't go into much detail, but that last sentence is hard to ignore.
We can go back further.
[quote= Hobbes]
By this it appears that Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; nor gotten by Experience onely; as Prudence is; but attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another; and so to syllogismes, which are the Connexions of one Assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call SCIENCE. And whereas Sense and Memory are but knowledge of Fact, which is a thing past, and irrevocable; Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependance of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something els when we will, or the like, another time; Because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what manner; when the like causes come into our power, wee see how to make it produce the like effects.
...
No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditionall. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing.
[/quote]
There is a difference in attitude between the empiricists (excluding the Bishop, whom I didn't quote) and Kant.
[quote=Kant]
I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief.
[/quote]
This is fascinating page: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-causality/
[quote=link]
Whereas the concept of causality is, for Kant, clearly a priori, he does not think that particular causal laws relating specific causes with specific effects are all synthetic a priori—and, if they are not a priori, how can they be necessary? Indeed, Kant illustrates this difficulty, in a footnote to § 22, with his own example of the sun warming a stone (4, 305; 58):
But how does this proposition, that judgments of experience are supposed to contain necessity in the synthesis of perceptions, agree with my proposition, urged many times above, that experience, as a posteriori cognition, can yield only contingent judgments? If I say that experience teaches me something, I always mean only the perception that lies within in it, e.g., that heat always follows the illumination of the stone by the sun. That this heating results necessarily from the illumination by the sun is in fact contained in the judgment of experience (in virtue of the concept of cause); but I do not learn this from experience, rather, conversely, experience is first generated through this addition of the concept of the understanding (of cause) to the perception.
In other words, experience in the Humean sense teaches me that heat always (i.e., constantly) follows the illumination of the stone by the sun; experience in the Kantian sense then adds that:
the succession is necessary; … the effect does not merely follow upon the cause but is posited through it and follows from it. (A91/B124)
But what exactly does this mean?
[/quote]
Yes, what exactly does it mean?
They’re quite different. Understanding why is the kind of question that might make a term paper in Kant or early modern philosophy.
Kant criticised both the empiricists (Locke, Hume) and the rationalists (Leibniz, Wolff, Descartes). The rationalists (following the Platonist tradition) claimed that there were innate ideas inherent in the mind which could be known by reason alone, but the empiricists insisted that knowledge is acquired by experience alone; that is what defined them. So Kant criticized, and in some ways synthesized, both of them.
Hume (empiricist) argued that there was no certain basis for the notion of causality, that we merely presume causation because we observe some causes always have the same effects. Hume argued that a priori truths, i.e. 'a bachelor is an unmarried man', logically follows because the conclusion is implied in the premisses. So this therefore is logical necessity. But the fact that A causes B is not of the same order - it is shown in experience, but is not logically necessary, i.e. it is something like a habit of thought. There is no logical reason why causal necessity obtains, it is an inductive rather than deductive claim. Put crudely, it might be that fire causes heat, right up until the time we observe that it doesn't (and indeed there are chemical reactions that cause something like fire at a low temperature).
This is Hume's 'skeptical challenge', and remember he was 'enquiring into the nature of the understanding'. Hume seemed (as Russell says in HWP) to challenge the very basis of scientific reason.
So Kant answered that challenge, claiming that he
So I think one way of putting that is that Hume is arguing that we can't actually perceive a necessary relationship between cause and effect, but that Kant counters that, without the 'categories of the understanding', which intuitively perceive such relations, then experience itself wouldn't be cohesive - we literally couldn't think, let alone argue. So Hume is arguing that all knowledge accrues from experience, but Kant is saying that the mind must furnish the framework within which experience is meaningful in the first place.
Notice the emphasis on the 'synthetic a priori' - this is the idea that, unlike purely a priori truths which are tautological, in some sense, the synthetic a priori 'synthesis' rational arguments to arrive at a novel conclusion, i.e. one which is not implicit in the premisses.
And there it is: the blind spot of science, as the topic title describes, put simply and clearly. Is this topic over now? :wink:
In some cases, it is exactly that. Cases such as 'Does God exist?', where there is no (scientifically-acceptable) evidence. Cases such as 'What is Objective Reality?', where there is also no possibility of us gathering evidence. And so on.
I agree very much that we need the categories of the understanding. This is being 'in' a language. And I have read about both of their conceptions of causality. I lean toward saying that yes there is a kind of faculty that projects necessity. But what do we mean by this? How is this so different from expectation?
[quote=SEP]
There is no consensus, of course, over whether Kant’s response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be. There has been sharp disagreement concerning Kant’s conception of causality, as well as Hume’s, and, accordingly, there has also been controversy over whether the two conceptions really significantly differ. There has even been disagreement concerning whether Hume’s conception of causality and induction is skeptical at all.
[/quote]
I agree that Kant went in to far more detail about our conceptual structuring of reality, but I think the popular rendition cuts to many corners.
[quote=Hume]
3. Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is any thing beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction.
But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted. A virtuous horse we can conceive; because, from our own feeling, we can conceive virtue; and this we may unite to the figure and shape of a horse, which is an animal familiar to us. In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or, to express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones.
[/quote]
As you can see, Hume believed in ideas like 'gold' and 'mountain.' He doesn't mention that perceiving a mountain as a mountain involves structuring, but that's not his focus.
He clearly thinks the mind has a structure --is a system of faculties:
[quote=Hume]
It cannot be doubted, that the mind is endowed with several powers and faculties, that these powers are distinct from each other, that what is really distinct to the immediate perception may be distinguished by reflexion; and consequently, that there is a truth and falsehood in all propositions on this subject, and a truth and falsehood, which lie not beyond the compass of human understanding. There are many obvious distinctions of this kind, such as those between the will and understanding, the imagination and passions, which fall within the comprehension of every human creature; and the finer and more philosophical distinctions are no less real and certain, though more difficult to be comprehended.
[/quote]
Well, first off, I said it is not necessarily that kind of thing
Quoting Coben
though I could have made my wording clearer. I meant, that just because cannot test something empirically now, does nto mean will not be able to later.
But further we have no idea what questions Science will be able to answer later. I suppose one could argue that if God is purely transcendent answering that question might be ruled out via science- but most Gods have empirical effects and/or break 'rules' and/or reveal themselves. Right now issues in cosmology considered untestable are turning out to have ways to reveal evidence empirically. I don't think we can rule out the future potential of science.
Indeed, and the passage on geometry in Hume suggests that Hume was aware of what Kant called synthetic a priori truths. http://www.humesociety.org/hs/issues/v13n2/steiner/steiner-v13n2.pdf To be sure he didn't focus on them or call them that.
To be sure Kant made explicit something important. We aren't born knowing the Pythogorean theorem but only with a shared spatial intuition that makes the perception of its truth possible for all of us, more or less independently of our cultural-linguistic software.
[I suppose we have wandered from the OP. I think Kant is great. I've just been defending the sophistication of the empiricists, who tend to be cast as more naive than they are.]
I quite agree - but this only supports a point made in the Aeon essay - that 'if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the [current] claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like.'
So if or when a paradigmatic shift occurred away from physicalism, it will be very interesting to see what emerges in its place.
Quoting g0d
Well, there's the element of discovery, of the disclosure of something unknown previously. So that is unexpected, it's novel. And it's a crucial element in scientific discovery.
The point of the synthetic a priori proposition, is that it enables a kind of deductive certainty with respect to contingent outcomes. I mean, prior to Kant, there was a distinction between the domain of necessary truth and the domain of the contingent. But the synthetic a priori enables us to acquire a kind of deductive certainty with respect to phenomena that you might think were only inductively true. 'Kant understood that both everyday life and scientific knowledge rests on, and is made orderly, by some very basic assumptions that aren't self-evident but can't be entirely justified by empirical observations. For instance, we assume that the physical world will conform to mathematical principles. Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that our belief that every event has a cause is such an assumption; perhaps, also, our belief that effects follow necessarily from their causes.' ~ Emrys Westacott.
Quoting g0d
Note this quote from Einstein:
(One quibble - I can't see how it would be approximately true, but I'll let it go.) But the point I want to make is that while I agree that the Pythagorean Theorem is true independently of anything said or done by us, or even of our existence, it is nevertheless only something that can be known by a rational mind. I am not doubting the fact that it's valid, but I'm questioning the sense in which it exists. In what sense does such a theorem exist? You can't perceive any such thing through the unaided senses, its existence is purely intellectual, but it's real, just as Einstein says.
So the Pythagorean theorem is not 'out there somewhere', it doesn't exist in a phenomenal sense at all. Rather it is close, I think, to what ancient philosophy designated an 'intelligible object' - something the existence of which is mind-dependent, but it is not dependent on a particular mind; it is a noetic device, if you like, through which we then are able to view and explain phenomena.
This mind is not "one mind" or a global mind or some ethereal world-mind, because then you fall back into Cartesian dualism. It is not 'something that exists' but is nevertheless real.
This seems to me a misrepresentation of Dennett's faith in rationality. I take it that Dennett thinks rationality is effective in getting to the truth precisely because it has evolved as a tool which has been honed and refined by natural selection. What else could justify the deliverances of reason beyond the mere fact that they are deliverances of reason; in which case you would be left with an empty circularity?
The deliverances of reason are never merely deliverances of reason in any case; if they are to be of any relevance, and not merely tautologies, they they must be underpinned by experience, observation and experiment. That natural selection operates in a way analogous to the the processes of experience, observation and experiment is arguably a valid way to think about evolution provided we do not fall into anthropomorphization by imputing human-like intention to the process. As intention is absent from evolution so is prediction, and those are characteristics of rationality that are uniquely animal, with humans, via symbolic language, amplifying their efficacy, and consequently the power of reason, to unprecedented heights.
This is a great issue. We might as well bring out the text:
[quote= Kant]
It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.
But the expression, “a priori,” is not as yet definite enough adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say, that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, “he might know a priori that it would have fallen;” that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience.
By the term “knowledge a priori,” therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience.
...
In all judgements wherein the relation of a subject to the predicate is cogitated (I mention affirmative judgements only here; the application to negative will be very easy), this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A; or the predicate B lies completely out of the conception A, although it stands in connection with it. In the first instance, I term the judgement analytical, in the second, synthetical.
...
The science of natural philosophy (physics) contains in itself synthetical judgements a priori, as principles. I shall adduce two propositions. For instance, the proposition, “In all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged”; or, that, “In all communication of motion, action and reaction must always be equal.” In both of these, not only is the necessity, and therefore their origin a priori clear, but also that they are synthetical propositions. For in the conception of matter, I do not cogitate its permanency, but merely its presence in space, which it fills. I therefore really go out of and beyond the conception of matter, in order to think on to it something a priori, which I did not think in it. The proposition is therefore not analytical, but synthetical, and nevertheless conceived a priori; and so it is with regard to the other propositions of the pure part of natural philosophy.
[/quote]
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm#chap08
Kant made a strong case (against received wisdom) that math was indeed synthetic a priori
knowledge. I agree. The a priori and a posteriori distinction isn't perfect though, as others have suggested.
But what does it mean to say that 'in all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged'? I think what's important here is simply our ability to frame the world as incapable of changing its quantity of matter. The quantity of matter 'must' be constant. 'I know that 2000 years from now that we'll have the same amount of matter.'
Our experience is rich with this kind of structure, and perhaps Hume did not do it justice. Perhaps Hume also understood the subject as passive in this regard, when in fact we spontaneously generate theories (sometimes to our detriment.) What Hume didn't emphasize was perhaps the 'conceptual experience' of law. He was aware of such laws but maybe not as explicitly aware as was Kant. I'd have to read more to know for sure.
Still, as Nietzsche liked to joked, Kant's answer was basically 'by means of a faculty.' I guess it's no small thing to bring such a faculty into the direct light of reason as an explicit object of investigation.
I agree that it allows us to think deductively about nature. We can still be wrong. We can postulate some necessity (the quantity of matter is constant), deduced expected measurements, and check them against actual measurements.
Quoting Wayfarer
What does it mean for something to be? Do different entities have different modes of being? I say yes, different modes of being. The 'what-it-is' of grasping a theorem just... is what it is? In the same way redness is redness? There is no gap, no representation more or less correct, but just it, right there. We do have the beetle in the box problem. I can't know that others experience what we call 'red' as I do, and I can't know what it is like for them to grasp the theorem. I think we tend to naturally trust that my red is your red, my toothache is your toothache, my spatial intuition is yours, etc. In my wife's face I think I see my own feeling reflected.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree with mind-dependent and individual-independent. I can't prove this, because it's a beetle in a box. But I think 'world 3' exists for others as it does for me.
[quote=Popper]
Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
[/quote]
And another text:
[quote=Popper]
To sum up, we arrive at the following picture of the universe. There is the physical universe, world 1, with its most important sub-universe, that of the living organisms. World 2, the world of conscious experience, emerges as an evolutionary product from the world of organisms. World 3, the world of the products of the human mind, emerges as an evolutionary product from world 2.”
“The feedback effect between world 3 and world 2 is of particular importance. Our minds are the creators of world 3; but world 3 in its turn not only informs our minds, but largely creates them. The very idea of a self depends on world 3 theories, especially upon a theory of time which underlies the identity of the self, the self of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow. The learning of a language, which is a world 3 object, is itself partly a creative act and partly a feedback effect; and the full consciousness of self is anchored in our human language.”
[/quote]
These ideas are in other thinkers too.
[quote=SEP]
Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason that is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
[/quote]
In short, the we precedes the I in a vital sense. Yet this 'we' and its 'world 3' depend on the lives of individuals. Our individual bodies are candles that share in one flame. I know this makes the haters cringe, but it's as mundane understanding English and talking about philosophy together. The individual ego is not abolished, but its power to disagree and stand apart is not its own. It learns the words it uses to construct its secret name from others.
So, do you take physicalism to be an ineliminable conceptual underpinning of physics or, more broadly, of science itself? What about systems and chaos theory; is that not already a "paradigmatic shift"?
Quoting Wayfarer
This is either mistaken or misleadingly worded, it seems to me. There can be no "deductive certainty with respect to contingent outcomes". I suspect that what you mean is something like that we know that all contingent outcomes, insofar as they are experienced, must conform to the conditions that we know from examining and analyzing our experiences, viz. that they are invariably given spatiotemporally, are common to all experiences. You do seem to have difficulty with distinguishing between form and content, which I think your failure to even attempt to answer this shows:
Quoting Janus
That's a good point, but Nietzsche comes to mind. Is what helps us survive therefore the truth? I'm not against pragmatism's 'truth,' but I think it's fair to point out a tension in this or that position. Why should we have evolved to perceive what we think we mean by 'truth'?
Or do we just call useful beliefs 'true'? (Then I remember my OLP and that we use 'true' in a million ways that don't add up to some clean, single concept.)
No, I don't believe that what helps us survive is necessarily therefore the truth. My contention was more modest: that the general efficacy of reason to draw valid conclusions has been augmented by natural selection. The soundness of any conclusion will depend on the soundness of its premises (assuming that we are considering a valid deduction), and the soundness of premises, and the conclusions that follow from them, is a matter of speculation based on experience that informs our intuitions as to what is plausible.
And it does seem plausible to think that theories which entail predictions that are confirmed by observation and experiment are more likely to be true to the nature of things than those which do not.
Of course that's plausible. I don't see how we could test, however. Let's say we could pluck out a sequence of ancestors with a time machine. We'd have to use the reason we've evolved to evaluate whether progress was made.
I think what we call our reason is an abyssal or groundless ground. I suppose that both individuals and communities (through individuals) employ faculties that they can't justify and mostly don't notice (personal and cultural liquid lenses.)
Of course this is reasonable. I think that's largely what beliefs are for. We only care about whether they are 'true' or not in terms of consequences. 'Your fuel pump's shot' helps us get the car going. Isn't this a classic issue? I do like instrumentalism for just dodging metaphysics.
[quote=Wiki]
A successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes.[4] Scientific theories are assessed on their usefulness in generating predictions and in confirming those predictions in data and observations, and not on their ability to explain the truth value of some unobservable phenomenon. The question of "truth" is not taken into account one way or the other. According to instrumentalists, scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws.[5] Initially a novel perspective introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906, instrumentalism is largely the prevailing theory that underpins the practice of physicists today.[5]
Rejecting scientific realism's ambitions to uncover metaphysical truth about nature,[5] instrumentalism is usually categorized as an antirealism, although its mere lack of commitment to scientific theory's realism can be termed nonrealism. Instrumentalism merely bypasses debate concerning whether, for example, a particle spoken about in particle physics is a discrete entity enjoying individual existence, or is an excitation mode of a region of a field, or is something else altogether.[6][7][8] Instrumentalism holds that theoretical terms need only be useful to predict the phenomena, the observed outcomes.[6]
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That is nothing unique, though; the truth of any theory cannot be tested. My point, in any case, was that IF it is true that evolution has honed the efficacy of reason, then to say that reason is an evolved, rather than some kind of "absolute", faculty would not be to undermine it. as @Wayfarer and Nagel's passage he quoted claim.
Well I can't help but use reason. I swim in it. So I wouldn't use 'undermined.' But I do think that reason is thereby demoted in some sense, and not for the first time. Does it change my feeling about science? No.
I agree. It seems to be our nature to try and integrate our beliefs, scientific and otherwise. More generally, I like this attitude:
[quote=Popper]
When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we can learn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism. A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others — not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others. The emphasis here is on the idea of criticism or, to be more precise, critical discussion. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.
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I never said I swim only in reason, and are you really setting me up as knee-deep in scientism? I'm just saying that I can't catch my own tail. If I reason that my reason is undermined, then I can't trust that my reason is undermined after all. On Certainty is great on this issue. I am in a 'system' that I can always only doubt piecemeal.
Also reason runs out of reasons. For me existence is a brute fact. We've discussed the [s]question.[/s] 'Why is there a there here?' We don't want the kind of answer that we know how to give. We seem to be expressing wonder, perceiving the contingency of the rose without reason.
Science is a lovely instrument, but I also cherish my ironic mysticism of whatever anyone wants to call it. If the words matter, it's not the real thing, seems to me. And I'm @g0d, so that should count for something.
[quote=Nietzsche on Christ]
The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.”
...
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae...It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
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I was watching old Vonnegut videos lately, and I was thinking of the fundamental roles we adopt. I like the jokers. Seriousness is the toll we pay to keep waking up in the morning. For me it's really about something like laughing with the gods. [And of course the usual nice things in life, but I was thinking of intellectual pleasures.]
That's the point of the criticism, though. If you have to underwrite 'reason' by appeal to 'what helps us survive', then how much confidence can you have in the faculty of reason?
Quoting Janus
I don't agree in the least, I think it's a case where biological theories or metaphors are extended well past their actual domain of applicability. Apart from anything else, it amounts to subordinating philosophy, reason, and everything else about us, to the implicit aim of propagation and survival - as Wieseltier says, 'it animalises reason'. And that kind of criticism doesn't only come from ID types.
[quote=Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason]In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature – even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man – frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy.[/quote]
So glad you see this, because it’s actually not generally recognised in analytical philosophy. I think it’s key to many things. (But unfortunately spouse is threatening reprisals if I don’t “get off the computer” so I will be back later.)
I was thinking earlier that philosophy for me at least was largely phenomenology. Words can simply point out and summon our attention to what is already there.
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[quote=SEP]
Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand.
...
Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects.
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So the famous hammer has at least two modes of being, one as tool-in-use and the other as object for theory. And this is a beetle in the box. We can't weigh the hammer to check to for its 'handiness,' but we might realize afterward that we were dissolved with it and the scale in its weighing.
Because phenomenology does seem to aim at the beetle in the box (subjectivity), it give philosophy something to do that science isn't obviously equipped to do. Phenomenology does seem to aim at objective or unbiased truth, without, however, being subject to falsification.
Along those lines, here is something that also ties in with the OP.
[quote=Wittgenstein]
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.-Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.---But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?---If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.--No, one can `divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of `object and name' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible---though unverifiable---that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another.
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For 'the sensation of red' we can substitute 'genuine spiritual experience' or 'what it is like to grasp a concept' or 'the kind of being a quark has' or 'happiness' and so on.
What does all of this mean or imply? I liked behaviorism when I first read about it as a clever way to circumvent the problem of elusive private consciousness. One interesting game with its own kind of purity is finding quantitative and causal relationships among public entities across time and space. Another is contemplating human existence as a whole with all of its troublesome beetles.
Agreed. Further current physics should not be called a physicalism, since the set of what can be considered physical has expanded radically, now encompassing things without mass, fields, particles in superposition and so on. We not only have no idea what will be considered physical in the future - iow how little like matter it would seem to us now and certainly to naturalists in the 19th century or to Medieval theologians, for that matter, but that we already use physicalism as an empty term meaning something like 'the belief in things that are considered real via science'.Quoting WayfarerOne can hope they drop a word with no longer useful metaphysical baggage, but they don't seem to care about that now. I suspect a paradigmatic shift may take place while the term lives on.
To turn the page for the moment, here's some Plotinus I like.
[quote=Plotinus]
If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
...
It has been shown elsewhere that man when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.
...
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
He himself by what he has and is.
And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.
The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.
...
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.
...
If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter—kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork—how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or . . . Zeus . . . by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.
But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?
Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?
But if he go unburied?
Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot.
But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?
The littleness of it!
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Kojeve also mentions satisfaction as proof of the wisdom that philosophy seeks.
What also stands out is the detachment from disaster. The sage looks evil, cold, or irresponsible to those who take the news seriously. Part of the appeal of science to me when I was a young adult was what I perceived as its quest for this kind of detachment. It was above and beyond the good and evil of the tribe. Even if the sage is gentle, his or her detachment would be offensive to most.
[quote=Marx]
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
...
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
[/quote]
Small surprise given this response to Feuerbach that Marx would hate Stirner's sage-like response to Feuerbach. And Feuerbach himself was something of a contemplative. I've read swaths of all three, and the tone of each is different.
Maybe the point of philosophy is to change the philosopher into something more like the sage.
I don't think you've tended to like ironic Western quasi-mystics, but to me the difference is largely one of style. In all cases there's a quest for the high place and its perspective.
[quote=Hegel]
For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.
But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.
The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.[1]
...
God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.
[/quote]
Yes, this attitude is very consistent with the idea of reason being sharpened by experience (which is indeed a kind of externally imposed critique), and not at all with the Platonic idea of reason as an ultimate state of realization or with the Hegelian notion of it as absolute.
Indeed Popper targets Platonism and Hegelianism as paradigmatic examples of enmity towards the "open society".
OK, but the metaphor seemed to be evoking an analogy with fish swimming in water, which is their sole medium, so I thought that was what you were coming from. Also, I know you love Hegel whose central thought is "the Rational is the Real", which is obviously an absolutization of reason, so....
I have no idea how you got the impression that I was accusing you of scientism though.
I think the kind of questions like "why is there a there there" although unanswerable are nonetheless valuable in opening the feeling for a larger context than that of mere reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
But this:
Quoting Janus
should have alerted you to the fact that I am not trying to claim anything like that evolution "underwrites" reason ( whatever that could even mean) but rather just that it has honed it, and made it a more effective tool through natural selection.
I also have no idea why you would think that acknowledging the evolution of reason should "undermine" it. Perhaps you could explain your thought process regarding that?
Consider the standard thought experiment concerning Objective Reality.
- Your (senses + perception) deliver to your mind images of an apparent world. This world is Objective Reality.
- You are a brain in a vat. Objective Reality is the world containing your brain and the vat.
It isn't just that these two are indistinguishable to you, but that your experience in both cases is exactly the same. That's a defining condition of the thought experiment.Science cannot distinguish these two. The evidence cannot be gathered. In the future, this will remain so, until and unless humans develop Objective Perception. This is an example of a problem that science cannot address. [It's not science that 'fails' us in this instance; this is a fixed and unavoidable limitation intrinsic to being human.]
But let's not concentrate on this one example. There are others too, e.g. solipsism. The point is that there exist problems that science cannot address, and will never be capable of addressing.
I think I would have to write a treatise to get across what I try to get across here, but then is it worth it, would anyone read it? Though no one will read it if I don't write it.
There are a lot of ramifications to this point of view I have so I wouldn't call it "simply relativism", or rather by the time you get a good idea of my point of view I think you wouldn't associate it simply with the idea of relativism you have now.
There is a relativist core in this idea, but even if you call it relativism is this such a bad thing? I see truth as an ideal that we strive towards but never reach. Something absolutely certain that we hope to hang onto no matter what amidst the apparent unpredictability of existence. Many claim to have found truth, but what have they found? They are deeply convinced of something, they hang onto it no matter what, but is there anything more to truth than this? If others do not agree with their truth, is it that they do not see the truth, or that they see differently?
I see truth as something we create for ourselves. And that's my truth. Maybe others would agree with me if they saw what I see. Maybe if they saw what I see they would still hope that there is some truth out there that doesn't depend on us. But why this need for a truth that doesn't depend on us, why this need to get ourselves out of the equation? I see the belief in a truth outside of us as a blind spot in itself, neglecting ourselves. In believing in such a truth we see ourselves as not ultimately responsible for our actions, we can justify doing anything in the name of an absolute standard that doesn't depend on us. We see ourselves as a tool working for an outside cause, or as slaves to outside laws that dictate how we behave and how we ought to behave, the being is not anymore the important thing, it becomes relegated to the background, and the outside truth gets the spotlight, and then we forget that we have created it ourselves, that we have created this world, that we are responsible for how the world is. No outside truth is responsible, we are.
No? Then how will you obtain (scientifically-acceptable and -useful) evidence? For without evidence, science can do nothing. And there is no evidence. Thus...
Quoting Coben
Beyond knowing? Yes. Beyond our speculations and guesswork? No. In RL, there are many issues that an individual human cannot solve, so they guess. [Even when the issue has been solved by other humans, but this human doesn't know it.] It's a defining characteristic of humans, this guessing-without-sufficient-evidence, and we're not too bad at it. So we can guess, and we can speculate, but to no avail. Our guesses will remain guesses, unfounded by anything more intellectually substantial. [And a guess remains a guess if we call that guess an axiom or assumption, or even if we call upon Occam's Razor, which is not a logical principle but a simple rule of thumb.]
I was talking about the future history of science. You are saying it is beyond science, so this includes all future possible scientific theory and research.
Before science decided, in the early 70s and over great internal resistence, that animals were conscious experiencers with emotions, it was taboo and professionally dangerous to assert that animals had intentions, emotions, goals, and were experiencers. Do you really want to argue that people who knew that animals were experiencers before that did not know? I think that's silly. If you want to argue that the only possible knowledge comes through science, this backfires also in general, since we require all sorts of trust intuition to even lay a foundation for using scientific knowledge. We wake up in bed and it sure seems like memory indicates that science is a good mode of knowledge creation, so we go with that memory. It's all fruit of a poison tree or it isn't.
You really think you can scientifically demonstrate all the things you know to be true? Must we all wait around for paradigmatically biases subcultures before what we believe is mere guesses?
I have created a new thread starting with your response, as it's tangential to the topic of this thread - is it OK if I post that?
I don't see phenomenology that way. I see it as a search for, and discovery of, ways of understanding that stand or fall only in virtue of their intuitive efficacy.
Sure if you want, but maybe I should get my thoughts together and expose my point of view in a more systematic way, comparing it with other mainstream world views, showing what problems it solves, addressing potential criticisms, otherwise I think my view can easily get misinterpreted/misrepresented, and then once that happens people start talking past each other and then the thread devolves into some heated debate on semantics that doesn't get anywhere.
Or maybe it's fine if you post it like that, if it isn't exposed systematically then that leaves more room for imagination, and that might give rise to new ideas, and I think there needs to be some dose of imagination to see that point of view.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Quoting Coben
Yes, I'm saying it's beyond science, but not that this is a failing of science. God is not detectably present here in the world (I mean detectable by any form of scientific measurement), and this will not change unless God does. Science requires evidence for its function; there is none; there never will be any. Therefore such matters are forever beyond science, no matter what new theories or research emerge. ... Unless science can change so as to be able to do its work without evidence? This could create a new discipline. We could call it ... philosophy? :wink:
I don't! No! I am arguing exactly the opposite of these sentiments! I'm appalled that I have expressed myself so badly that you think I'm championing science as the one and only knowledge-gathering tool we have. I apologise for my laxity.
OK, well good. It seems like the options were science or guessing.
On second thoughts, I have decided not to create another new thread, as duty calls and I won't be able to pay much attention to it. So I'll respond here.
Quoting leo
I think that's characteristic of modernity, of the modern mind-set within which truth can only be conceived of in phenomenal terms. But if you go back to the history of philosophy, an overriding theme was the contrast of reality and appearance. Very generally, the ordinary man, the hoi polloi, was enchanted by, and captured by, the veil of appearances; the task of philosophy was awakening out of that illusory state and to a greater reality (as per the classic Platonist analogy of The Cave.)
Now the problem is from the modern point of view, we can't make sense of that, because many of the philosophies and religions which proclaim this idea seem to speak about it in completely different ways, and there's no way of telling which, if any, are right about it.
For myself, I believe there is such a state, signified by the idea of enlightenment (in quite a different sense intended by the European Enlightenment.) It's the possibility of that, the 'footprints of the elephant', so to speak, which have provided me with a moral compass (which is what is really at stake here).
In the secular West, the 'idea of enlightenment' was in some senses appropriated by the Church - that, if there is such a state, there is only one way to it, and that way is through orthodoxy ('orthodox' meaning 'right belief'.) As generally we've reacted against that, then the whole enquiry is often closed off. That's where the emergence of Eastern spirituality has been significant. And actually the essay we're discussing draws heavily, if subtly, on an Eastern philosophical orientation. In that framework, 'truth' is not something imposed on you, but something that you have to discover within yourself. So it's individualist, in one sense, but on the other hand, it's not grounded only in the sense of the individual ego.
Very generally, Plato created a veil with the appearance of a greater reality that is nothing other than a dreamlike illusory state, an image on the cave wall that many to this day still fail to realize is only an image.
I have posted the following before:
What is often overlooked is the difference between the Socrates who knew that he did not know and the Socrates of the Republic who speaks of knowledge of the whole. One key to reconciling the difference is the banishment of the poets from the Republic. Their myths are replaced by a philosophical poesis. When asked Socrates is circumspect but clear in stating that he does not actually have knowledge of the Forms:
"You will no longer be able to follow, my dear Glaucon," I said, "although there wouldn't be any lack of eagerness on my part. But you would no longer be seeing an image of what we are saying, but rather the truth itself, at least as it looks to me. Whether it is really so or not can no longer be properly insisted on. But that there is some such thing to see must be insisted on. Isn't it so?" (533a)
The truth as it looks to him may not be the truth, and he is not insisting that it is. But he insists that there is “some such thing to see”. What he shows us is a likeness of what the beings must be, that is, an image. He too is a poet, literally a maker. The Forms are, ironically, images. Those who read Plato and think that they have ascended the cave because the Forms, the eidos, the things themselves as they are in themselves, have been revealed, are simply seeing new images on the cave wall, images created by Plato.
In the Republic Socrates does not claim to know what justice itself is. He creates a myth of transcendent knowledge, of noesis, but in doing so points in the other direction to remind us that we are squarely within the realm of opinion; and as a matter of opinion questions of justice remain inconclusive. This is what Socrates famous “second sailing” is about. We do not have in our sights the things themselves, in this case justice itself, and so must take refuge in speech. We must rely on dialectic, on argument to reach conclusions that always fall short of knowledge and so must remain open to further consideration.
What about approaches to evolutionary theory that don't posit survival as the end all and be all of adaptation, but consider creativity to be the defining feature of evolution? Piaget, Dewey and James, and Evan Thompson see a compatibility between the 'aims' of organic evolution and reason. Thompson goes so far as to talk about the organizational directedness of self-organizing systems as a forerunner of human cognition. Piaget would extend this self-organizing foundation further back to inorganic and finally cosmological processes, in a move that turns creative self-organization into an a priori of existence. Mark C Taylor's book 'The Moment of Complexity' sees a justification for a kind of post-religious religion(what he calls atheology) in the evolutionary behavior of complex systems in the physical , biological and human world.
And again...finally! :up:
Way to cut through the crap!
Thanks. An interesting reading, but I'm not convinced by it. Raphael Demos notes that 'Plato hardly claims the power to grasp absolute truth for himself. Very often, when approaching the territory of final metaphysical ideas, he abandons the style of logical exposition for that of myth or poetry. There is something characteristically unfinished about his thought; he eschews neat systems and his intuitions often jostle one another.' (Intro to Plato: Selected Writings). We see that in the aporia, in those conundrums for which several plausible suggestions can be made, but none can be decided.
But, nevertheless, I believe that in the metaphysics of the Republic, there is an underlying sense of the 'ascent to truth'. It is made obvious in the analogy of the divided line, which divides the kinds of knowledge from lower (pistis, doxa) to higher (dianoia, noesis).
So the prisoners of the cave are those without knowledge of the forms:
"Such prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows.
So when the prisoners talk, what are they talking about? If an object (a book, let us say) is carried past behind them, and it casts a shadow on the wall, and a prisoner says “I see a book,” what is he talking about?
He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow. But he uses the word “book.” What does that refer to?
Plato gives his answer at line (515b2):
“And if they [i.e. the prisoners in the cave] could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?”
Plato’s point is that the prisoners would be mistaken. For they would be taking the terms in their language to refer to the shadows that pass before their eyes, rather than (as is correct, in Plato’s view) to the real things that cast the shadows.
If a prisoner says “That’s a book” he thinks that the word “book” refers to the very thing he is looking at. But he would be wrong. He’s only looking at a shadow. The real referent of the word “book” he cannot see. To see it, he would have to turn his head around.
Plato’s point: the general terms of our language are not “names” of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.
When the prisoners are released, they can turn their heads (metanoia) and see the real objects. Then they realize their error. What can we do that is analogous to turning our heads and seeing the causes of the shadows? We can come to grasp the Forms through the intellect.
Plato’s aim in the Republic is to describe what is necessary for us to achieve this reflective understanding. But even without it, it remains true that our very ability to think and to speak depends on the Forms. For the terms of the language we use get their meaning by “naming” the Forms that the objects we perceive participate in."
(source)
Platonism generally says that sensible objects are not proper or real objects at all, but only images of the form - the form, being of a purely intelligible nature, possesses a higher reality, because it can be grasped directly by nous, not by the sense alone. But the forms transcend existence, or they are real in a different way, or on a different level, to things of the sensory domain. That is what gives rise to the later hylomorphic (matter-form) dualism of Aristotle and the Scholastics.
Quoting Joshs
Sure, absolutely, 100%. That is why I think the idea of an unfolding telos has to be present in evolutionary thought. There has been a rediscovery of the Aristotelian sense of final cause, the reason for the existence of things, in biology.
But it's still fiercely contested by many mainstream theorists. The whole idea of there being an underlying aims and purposes undercuts the very basis of modern scientific method commencing with Galileo. Stephen Jay Gould: "Replay the tape a million times ... and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again." (Wonderful Life, 1998.) Contrast that with Simon Conway Morris, an expert on the Burgess Shales, who argues in his book Life's Solution on the basis of convergence, that evolutionary processes do indeed 'converge' on the same kinds of outcomes (examples he gives are the many ways that eyes have evolved, and photosynthesis has evolved.)
The actual point there is that what might be seen as the "telos" emerges naturally from within complex systems, and you want to misread that to support your belief in a transcendent telos, given from "above". :groan:
as if by magic!
That's a load of crap. Plato is pointing our minds toward the Forms, he is not claiming to reveal them to us. We cannot see them, we can only apprehend them with our minds, so there is nothing for him to reveal, you must grasp them directly with your mind. Nor is Plato creating images.
I agree, since I don't believe the biological in general can be coherently reduced to the mechanical, even if some biological processes can be fruitfully modeled in mechanistic terms. It is for that reason that I don't agree that animal behavior, any more than human behavior, can be comprehensively understood in the mechanistic terms of "stimulus and response".
This explains why my world is so filled with magic! :smile:
This is an image. Socrates calls it an image. Images are at play on many levels in the Republic.
Quoting Wayfarer
They would only be mistaken if, using your example, the books we see are only images of the one real book which exist in an eidetic realm. Two peculiar things about this - first, the connection between eidos (Forms) and images in the mind, second, since the Forms are singular, what would be contained in the book and how does this relate to the content of books as they exist in our experience, that is, within the cave?
Quoting Wayfarer
When the prisoners are released from their shackles they see puppets, which are themselves images. They are still in the cave but can now see the work of the puppet-masters, the image-makers, the opinion-makers, the poets. It is only when one is able to ascend from the cave into the light of the sun that he is able to see that the light in the cave provided by the fire is the image of the light of the sun. But in turn the light of the sun is an image of the light of the Good.
As to the turning of the soul, this too has a double sense - a turning away from the things of the visible world toward the truth, and a turning toward the truth itself. This is analogous to the turning away from the images on the wall to the source of those images, but the source of those images, the puppets, are themselves images. And this is where we remain in looking toward the Forms. They are the work of the puppet-master Plato. We are able to see that our opinions are shaped by opinion-makers, but we do not thereby transcend or escape the realm of opinion. Plato gives us a likeness of the truth, but unless one is able to compare that likeness to the truth itself one cannot tell how close or far that likeness is to the thing it is a likeness of. The education of the philosopher is an education in self-knowledge, knowledge of our ignorance.
Quoting Wayfarer
Platonism is a misunderstanding of Plato. Fundamental to the education of the philosopher in the Republic is the ability to see things as they are in themselves. The Platonist may believe in transcendence, but unless one has actually seen things as they are in themselves, she is dwelling in the realm of the imagination, imaging what things in themselves must be.
Quoting Wayfarer
The Forms are what most truly are. It is only the Good itself as the source of what is that is beyond existence. But Socrates says:
If the Good itself is beyond being, then the Good cannot be something knowable.
"the books we see," "the puppets," "the images on the wall," etc. are actually things in themselves.
Not according to the argument in the Republic. This is the point of my saying that the prisoners are only mistaken if the things we see are only images.
The worse for the Republic then.
By what criteria would we be saying that some occurrences are things in themselves and some aren't?
The education of the philosopher and the education of the gentleman are not the same. The salutary teaching of the gentlemen who will govern the city is based on a noble lie. The education of the philosopher involves not only the ability to see past the lie but the recognition of the necessity of the lie and thus how to replace the prevailing lies with more salutary ones when necessary. Nietzsche, who read Plato as a philosopher, called it the revaluation of values.
Quoting Terrapin Station
In some cases, such as shadows and reflections, it is easy enough to make the distinction, but if we reject the idea of Forms then the distinction does not hold. It is then not a matter of truth versus opinion, but of opinion versus opinion. And then the question becomes, by what criteria should we hold to this opinion rather that some other?
How would you make it?
Take away the things that they are shadows and images of and the shadows and images disappear.
To be clear, I think the idea of things in themselves is problematic as is the idea that shadows and reflections are not real or do not exist.
That's the point I'm making. Shadows and images are something, they're "things-in-themselves"--discarding them via just arbitrarily or by fiat putting them into a separate bin doesn't make much sense.
The problem with calling them things in themselves is that they are dependent on something else. One might say, however, the same thing about the Forms since they are dependent of the Good. But Plato says that the Good is not. The Neoplatonist Plotinus makes a great deal of the idea that the Good as the source of what is is not something that is. Some contemporary theologians, most notably Tillich, follows this line of thinking and thus claims that God as the source of being is not.
In any case, Plato's distinction between dianoia (thought) and noesis (intellection) as well as the hypothetical character of dialectic indicates why all such theological speculation ends in aporia. Reason functions by way of ratio, that is, understanding on thing in relation to another. The singularity of the Forms means that they are not accessible to reason. If they are to be known they must be grasped as they are in themselves. So, for example, shadows can only be understood is relation to the things they are shadows of.
The ontology of the Republic is the image of an epistemology. In the absence of knowledge, however, this ontology is at best a likely image, but it is one that Plato shows the careful reader that she should be skeptical of. The cardinal mistake here is to mistake this image for the thing it is supposed to be an image of.
How do you know that?
We have found all sorts of things we could not before. Scientific measurement is not static.
If you want to argue that God must be utterly transcendent, which some but not all theists believe, then you have a foundation for saying that (empirical) science can't demonstrat God's existence. But then, how would you know God is utterly transcendent?
Of course I wouldn't, in absolute terms. So I'm reduced to guesswork, as we humans so often are. There has never been even the smallest piece of scientifically-acceptable evidence that God has detectable/measurable existence in the space-time universe that science describes so well. So I reluctantly guess that this will continue to be the case. What alternative is there?
I disagree. Science is a powerful and useful tool, which has delivered all kinds of useful stuff. It's just that science is not applicable to every problem and every situation.
There is a certain pattern of people defending science in principle without actually knowing anything about it. For clarity, I'm not defending science-denial, woo, mysticism, I'm trying to defend scientific thinking from its own idealisation; scientism is just as bad for science as woo.
Well, being agnostic about it. There are all sorts of things that there was absolutely no evidence for that then turned out to be there or the process behind something to the building blocks to something. There was absolutely no evidence there was water on Mars. There was absolutely no evidence that elephants could communicate over large distances. And in the later case natives and Westerners who stated their belief in it were told they were wrong. The ultrasound comminucation was found. We just found out we hadn't noticed most of the matter and energy in the universe. There was absolutely no evidence, then there was a bit, then more, and now it is consensus accepted that there is dark matter and energy. That's most of everything. That space and time are not absolute. No evidence for that. In fact there was no evidence when Einstein deduced it. Only later, after technology changed, could we test it. The examples could go on and on, many seem now right in front of our noses.
Indeed. Or rather, usually there is some sort of evidence, but the scientific consensus chooses not to interpret it as evidence. It also used to be scientific consensus that continental drift doesn't exist, or that we would never reach the Moon. The naïve view is to say that now we know better, but the problem is throughout history the scientific consensus thought they knew better. Now there is the scientific consensus that dark matter exists, even though there is evidence that it isn't the case, but the consensus chooses to interpret that evidence as problems to solve, supposedly the fundamentals are settled and it's only a matter of working out the details. It's also a historical constant that those going against the consensus are ridiculed and ostracized: there is strong incentive to continue developing the consensus, and little incentive to question it.
If those who maintain the consensus refuse to challenge their fundamental assumptions, outside ideas do not get through to them. Evidence that the model doesn't fit some observations is seen as a sign that there are some variables to tweak in the model, or that those who made these observations are crazy or hallucinated, but not as a sign that the model needs to be fundamentally changed. In the end it is not some outside truth that determines the consensus, it is people.
Connected to this is the assumption that phenomena, if correctly interpreted by those experiencing them, entail that all of science or some large area is now false. Which is generally not the case. Science itself does manage to integrate really radical shifts - such as the whole qm set of phenomena - and it doesn't mean that everything before gets thrown out. IOW when faced with an anomolous phenomenon, to them anomolous, they interpret what it would mean, as if this could be known, and as if it would be catastrophic in relation to current knowledge. As a way of saying it is not possible. The idea of not weighing in on the possibility seems completely lost. It is as if they must draw a conclusion now. And that conclusion will be in the negative..
Indeed, if they don't see how it could be integrated to their models then they find it more convenient to assume that the anomalous phenomena are hallucinations or delusions of those who experienced them, or to assume that eventually these phenomena will be explained in some mundane way that doesn't challenge their fundamental assumptions. People who spend their whole career working within a set of assumptions don't want to see these assumptions challenged, because their career depends on them, so they will fight to defend them no matter the evidence.
A quote from Max Planck comes to mind: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".
But the truly sad thing is that even if these phenomena are real, they are merely assuming that it would go against current science. It could simply be forces, phenomena, realms, whatever, that haven't been detectable, so far, by scientific measuring, and which do not contradict what we know about other phenomema they have been able to track.
Some says ghosts are real. Scientists immediately make assumptions about the necessary ontology of ghosts, then conclude that it goes against current science. But within there own history, changes have come that put earlier models into more restricted frames (but do not eliminate them) or change some of the metaphysics of the science but not the use of the former knowledge - say in the example of Einstein demonstrating false assumptions in Newton, but not at all reducing the effectiveness of Newtons theorums in their contexts. And their assumption that it must be a binary winner take all clash is as radically speculative as they accuse their opponents of being.
Yes, I think this is a consequence of the materialist mindset that permeates the scientific community. And of the implicit belief that the important things are already known and we just have to work out the details, measure the variables in the models with more precision and so on. As you point out these beliefs are not treated as scientific hypotheses that can be tested or challenged, which is one example of the non-objectivity of scientific practice. So where do ghosts fit in that view? Since they don't have evidence of them with their usual instruments, and they try to explain them within a materialist mindset, then they immediately conclude that ghosts are imagination, or hallucinations, or delusions, in other words a specific pattern of brain activity. Without assuming materialism and without assuming that we already know the important things, there is a lot more room for inquiry.
Scientific theories are basically algorithms that allow to compute predictions from observations. To say that ghosts are inconsistent with these algorithms would be to assume that these algorithms are valid everywhere and at all times and for everyone, whereas an open-minded scientific inquiry would make no such assumption. The science of our era looks more like religion to me. I believe, or at least I hope, that people will wake up to this, if we don't we'll just keep repeating the mistakes of the past, with people attempting to impose their religion onto others, waging ideological wars, except next time we'll have more powerful technology to destroy one another.
I wouldn't say we are born with knowledge that makes it to where we don't need learn things, especially language, or math either.
And materialism no longer means anything. Waht is considered material is a set of 'things' that now includes fields, massless particles, particles in superposition, dark matter, dark energy. That which is considered physical is that which is considered real. It is no longer a stand on what kind of substance. Anything scientists decide is real, regardless of what it is like, will be subsumed under materialism or physicalism. So it is treated as a metaphysical stance, agains dualisms or other monisms, when in fact the term has lost its onological meaning and now just means real. And this add to their and the sense that certain phenomena must contradict science were these phenomena real. But that is jsut silly.
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson.
April 9th 2024
Also a Youtube Playlist of lectures and workshop sessions conducted following the original publication of the Aeon essay.
The essay and book are strongly influenced by phenomenology. Evan Thompson is a notable philosopher in that school and co-author of The Embodied Mind (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch), the seminal text of that movement.
Sounds very interesting. I've read some essays by Thompson and Varela and seen a few lectures. I've been particularly struck by how humans co-create reality together. I suspect this approach might disestablish notions of God and the transcendent, along with notions of absolute reality held by some scientific positions.
Oh, and an interview with Adam Frank on his Zen practice and its relation to science.
[quote=Adam Frank]Physicists are in love with the idea of objective reality. I like to say that we physicists have a mania for ontology. We want to know what the furniture of the world is, independent of us. And I think that idea really needs to be re-examined, because when you think about objective reality, what are you doing? You’re just imagining yourself looking at the world without actually being there, because it’s impossible to actually imagine a perspectiveless perspective. So all you’ve done is you’ve just substituted God’s perspective, as if you were floating over some planet, disembodied, looking down on it. And, so, what is that? This thing we’re calling objective reality is kind of a meaningless concept because the only way we encounter the world is through our perspective. Having perspectives, having experience: that’s really where we should begin.[/quote]
Just the point of the Mind Created World. And what he's talking about is actually the nature of being.
Quite. I was composing something along those lines myself. That the ability to combine mathematical logic and hypotheses have given rise to a quite astonishingly powerful method. But that doesn't invalidate their critique. You know yourself the numbers of posters who routinely post here directly out of that 'blind spot' typically in threads about philosophy of mind ('consciousness') and related subjects. It is quite a justified critique in my view. So, don't agree at all it is ludicrously antiquated, quite the contrary, it is pervasive and barely understood by many people.
"Blind spot? What 'Blind Spot' !?! I don't see no BLIND SPOT :rage: '
With the right woman, that kind of gorgeous language will get you laid around here. Better than any sonnet….
Yeah .. but when I rub my scars, mate, I only remember the wrong ones. :yum:
Quoting 180 Proof
The natural sciences are conventionalized versions of philosophy whose ‘advantage’ over the latter is not that they secure better access to truths about the world, or that they progress and philosophy doesn’t , or that they progress faster than philosophy, but that they conceal individual differences in point of view by using a generic, flattened down vocabulary, which mathematics excels at. As such , they constitute a kind of common sense with respect to the more nuanced and particularized sense of the best philosophy. They represent the progress of an in-common standardized and technicized sense. Testability and falsification dont eliminate or minimize bias, they tighten up and standardize the conceptualization of a bias ( paradigm) so it can be utilized by a community of researchers in productive ways, and to make it easier to overthrow one bias is favor of a new bias.The blind spot keeps us from recognizing these things.
The only philosopher I can think of who thinks science is the only game in town when it comes to human understanding, is Alex Rosenberg, as presented in his book The Atheists' Guide to Reality.
It's not only absurd and insulting, rather, it is not even wrong. Thankfully, few people are this insane.
What do you think of Thompson's comment towards the end of the video, about idealism being a philosophical crutch?
[Quote=Evan Thompson] One (claim) is that nothing exists outside of or apart from experience. That's not the claim I'm making. That's a first order claim about existence. It amounts to what philosophers call subjective idealism, that everything exists inside the mind, or that everything that exists is dependent on the mind. But the claim I'm making isn't about existence. It's about meaning or sense or intelligibility. The claim is that how things appear to us, how they show up for us in the life world, in our perception and action, is a necessary condition of the possibility of things being intelligible at all. So in philosophical jargon, this is a transcendental claim, in Kant's sense of transcendental. It's about the conditions of possibility of the intelligibility of things, such as the past, or time, given that they are, indeed, intelligible. So there's no problem with ancestrality statements understood as statements about facts in the past, before there was subjectivity. Rather, the point is that such statements have no sense or intelligibility once you remove the life world. In that case, the statements suffer from a kind of presupposition failure, and they have no significance. They're neither true nor false. They don't refer at all. [/quote]
Aligns with the argument made in Mind-Created World.
Quoting Wayfarer
That seems a rather silly thing to say to me. A rather significant element of my lived experience is based in knowing that in many cases that there is a huge amount that can be said about it.
What is the point of such a binary statement?
Can you give me a reason to think that it is not a case of Going Nuclear?
Quoting wonderer1
Not sure, since he didn’t have time to elaborate. How do you interpret it?
This seems either nonsensical or trivially obvious. Of course the (human) lifeworld cannot be "removed" as long as human claims are made, because claims ensue from experience and judgement and that just is what constitutes the human lifeworld as it is conceived.
If I make a claim that there can be existence without any lifeworld, that does not constitute "removing the lifeworld", but rather it is a claim from within the human lifeworld about what may be thought to be logically possible without it. The claim that something exists beyond the human lifeworld is either true or false even though we cannot be absolutely certain about which it is.
It seems quite different. For example, Thompson says, "But the claim I'm making isn't about existence," and yet the claim that you make is all about existence. In your quote of Thompson, after clarifying that his claim is not about existence, he spends nine sentences explicating his position, and he does not reference existence or non-existence once in those nine sentences. Contrariwise, you reference existence and non-existence four times in three sentences, in the quote you provide. More directly, Thompson would apparently oppose something like this, "In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist." Your view reminds me of Madhyamaka Buddhism, but I doubt many scientists would take up a Buddhist philosophy to such a strong extent.
Quoting wonderer1
There seems to be an aspect of "Going Nuclear," and there is another aspect that is not "nuclear" but strongly polemical, but I think there is more to it than that. There are certain schools of Buddhist philosophy that really do view reality this way, and in my opinion these philosophies flow from a specific understanding of psychology and liberation. To oversimplify, it was thought that attributing too much reality to things would result in the sort of grasping and aversion that Buddhists wish to avoid, and so this approach is Buddhism taken to a very extreme but self-consistent conclusion. Yet even the general approach to meta-negation is found in various Buddhist schools, e.g. "I am not predicating existence, I am not predicating non-existence, I am not predicating any affirmation or denial whatsoever, I am not even not-predicating..." etc.
Compare that with what I said here:
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm saying Thompson's 'they don't refer at all' is exactly synonymous with 'nothing whatever can be said about it'. I'm expressing the same idea as he is, in a slightly different way. The whole thrust of the Mind Created World is that it is impossible to speak of a truly mind-independent reality, as whatever is totally detached from the 'meaning world' that constitutes our consciousness is literally unintelligible. Note that I also explicitly reject subjective idealism and the idea that 'mind' is a literal constituent of objective reality (panpsychism). So I see the approach of the Mind Created World as very much aligned with that expressed in the essay at the head of this OP, The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Experience.
Quoting Leontiskos
Why thank you, very perceptive.
You may not be aware, but Evan Thompson was co-author, with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of 'The Embodied Mind', which has become a seminal book in the formation of 'embodied philosophy' and 'enactivism'. That book draws extensively on Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology). Indeed Varela was one of the prime movers behind the Life and Mind Conferences, of which the Dalai Lama is the Chair, and before his untimely death took he lay ordination in a Buddhist order. So there is a Buddhist influence in that book.
Subsequently, Evan Thompson has published 'Why I am Not a Buddhist', in which he explains his critical view of what he calls 'Buddhist Modernism' and gives his reasons for why he doesn't consider himself formally Buddhist. Nevertheless throughout Thompson's writing there are perceptible influences of both Buddhist non-dualism and phenomenology, among other sources. He says in that book and elsewhere he remains positively disposed towards Buddhism.
I was. You had that in the post I responded to.
Quoting Wayfarer
But crucially, his statement is conditional, "...once you remove the life world." He is not talking about unperceived objects, he is talking about objects stripped of their condition of intelligibility (which he calls the life world). I doubt Thompson would say that a lack of perception removes the "life world."
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this sounds more like what Thompson is saying.
Quoting Wayfarer
Okay.
Quoting Wayfarer
But this is precisely what I would expect, and it is why I said, "I doubt many scientists would take up a Buddhist philosophy to such a strong extent." Scientists are perhaps more consciously influenced by Buddhism than any other religion, but I don't see them taking things to Nagarjuna's extreme. I think science requires that the natural world possess a certain degree of intrinsic existence, so to speak. I think natural science will slowly fade out of a culture which does not hold that the natural world possesses intrinsic, discoverable existence of its own (esse).
Which is the same as what I'm saying:
Quoting Wayfarer
That's what he, and Husserl, mean by the 'lebenswelt' - the 'life-world' of assumed meanings and relationships, which is assumed even in contemplating 'the universe prior to all subjectivity'.
Here's a snippet from the essay which drives the point home.
[quote=The Blind Spot]In general terms, here’s how the scientific method works. First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel. Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus. Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate. Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events. Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions. An essential ingredient of this whole process is technology: machines – our equipment – that standardise these procedures, amplify our powers of perception, and allow us to control phenomena to our own ends.
The Blind Spot arises when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality. But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, for example; the Bohr model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus with electrons circling around it in quantised orbits like planets around a sun; evolutionary models of isolated populations – all of these exist in the scientist’s mind, not in nature. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers.
For these reasons, scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate.[/quote]
The realisation I've had, is that all objects of perception are conditioned. (Yes, very Buddhist.) But due to the influence of empirical philosophy, somehow the mind-independence of supposed objects of perception are supposed to be the very yardstick by which we ascertain what is real.
Yes, I think that is fairly close to his claims. :up:
Quoting Wayfarer
I think much of this is correct, but what I find is that usually, at one point or another, these interlocutors have a tendency to overstate their case. It's pretty easy to fall into an excessive subjectivism when you are pressing hard against modern "objectivism." It's like when you are driving a motorcycle in high winds, leaning hard just to stay straight, and then the wind drops away and the bike swerves. Often these authors write their arguments and perspectives in the midst of the high winds of modern empirical science, and they have the proper corrective force when they are in conversation with modern empiricists, but yet their force is not properly calibrated for speaking to those of us who are not coming from that perspective.
:up:
I think it suggests that Thompson thinks that the matters he brings up shouldn't be taken as supporting idealism.
This is more of a stretch, but perhaps Thompson also recognizes how Stephen Law's Going Nuclear is of relevance in the case of many who profess idealism, and use idealist arguments to feign philosophical sophistication and to avoid the apperance of losing arguments.
I quoted what he said about idealism verbatim. If you missed it go back and have another look. Note the distinction he makes between subjective idealism and Kant - 'Kant's sense of "transcendental"' - and Kant's is still an idealism.
Okay, it would have been better if I had said, "shouldn't be taken as supporting idealism in a broad sense or radical sense.
Still, what are your thoughts on using idealism as a rhetorical ploy, along the lines of Stephen Law's "Going Nuclear"?
Quoting wonderer1
I can’t help but suspect that Law would consider Thompsons’s thoughts below as a form of idealism.
Hmmmm…..
If it is given that a thing is intelligible, in what sense are there conditions for the possibility of its being intelligible? For that which is given, re: those things that are intelligible, the very possibility of it is also given, so wouldn’t the conditions be met?
?
Quoting Mww
What Thompson means by condition of possibility here isn’t simply the generic givenness that things are intelligible but the specific way they are intelligible, their manner of being. Heidegger gives a good illustration of the blind spot for the conditions of possibility for the intelligibility of things.
I’ll have to think about that.
More fully explained in the original essay.
.
Kant's is an epistemological, not an ontological, idealism.
The essay I linked to spells it out pretty clearly. It doesn't come down to the 'reliability of scientific measurement'. Measurement is one of the things that modern science excels at, science can measure things from the sub-atomic to the cosmic with astonishing precision. It is more about the idea that science, or us human beings using science, see the world as it truly is, as it would be without any observers in it.
Looks like it to me. I assume you mean that Kant's project is concerned with the nature and source of knowledge, and emphasizes the role of the mind (structures of human cognition) in shaping our understanding of the world. Kant is not (as far as I can tell) arguing that reality is dependent upon mind as Berkeley would hold it - 'immaterialism'. I have not read Kant on Berkeley but I am assuming this would be instructive.
On further thought, don’t agree. I looked back to when I first posted this five years ago, the response was vitriolic, it was taken as an attack on science. But it is not an attack on science. They say at the beginning:
What I would take issue with is the use of the word ‘experience’ in these passages What I think is being referred to is closer in meaning to the capacity for experience - in other words, being. When they say ‘experience is just as fundamental’ - you can respond, ‘well, sure, isn’t that what ‘empiricism’ means?’ Empiricism, after all, means ‘verifiable in experience’. But that’s not what they’re trying to highlight. They’re pointing to the experiential aspect of even so-called objective measurement. When they say ‘experience is present at every step’, I think what they’re saying is simply ‘science is an activity of beings. The facts it discloses are registered and understood by beings - by human beings.’ But we don’t notice that, because of the ostensibly objective and observer-independent nature of scientific observation. We think that these facts are entirely observer-independent, which in one sense is true, but in a deeper, philosophical sense is not.
That’s what I see as the point of this essay, and the book that comes from it, and I think it needs saying. I talk to people here almost every day who don’t see this point (I don’t mean you.)
(I think there’s a connection here with Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of Being’, although he traces that back to metaphysics rather than to science per se. Although it’s also the case that scientific method was also an outgrowth of metaphysics e.g. E A Burtt’s ‘Metaphysics of Modern Science’.)
I get the point and it interests me. Reality is constructed for us via an intersubjective human experience. This seems to me to be a similar point Nietzsche makes when he argues that truth is always interpreted through the lens of individual perspectives. He takes it further and says that there is no objective or universal truth that stands independently of human interpretation. While you would accept the possibility of something approaching a Platonic realm. Nietzsche also subdivides perspective into both cultural and individual blindspots. His somewhat brutal visual approach to this struck me as apropos.
I generally avoid comment on Nietzsche as I’ve never felt compelled to read him and don’t know his writings very well. But I don’t agree with his perspectivism, that literally everything is a matter of perspective. I accept the Buddha’s teaching that there is an unborn, unmade, unconditioned. But that this can’t be made subject of propositional logic, as it is subtle, deep, and profound, discernible only by the wise, and has to be discerned by each one for themselves (to paraphrase the canonical text.)
The problem with objectivity as usually construed is that it is anchored to sense-perception - that only what can be validated by senses and instruments can be taken into consideration. And as I said before, it’s a matter of fact that all sense-objects are conditioned. This results in a sense of misplaced absoluteness. The stakes in philosophy are much higher than that.
As for ‘we behold these things through a human head’ - ‘going beyond’ I take to be the point of enlightenment or sagacity. One of the books on my Amazon Wishlist which I’ll probably never get around to is To Think Like God, an account of Parmenides and Pythagoras, the title makes the point. But in our culture, such enlightenment is generally lumped in alongside religion by those who understand neither, and then dismissed on those grounds as ‘mere belief’. Can of worms, I know.
That's fair enough. Aristotle and Aquinas also had a much more nuanced understanding of "experience." Cf. "An Essay on Experimentum."
I believe I have mentioned this before, but if you can find yourself a copy of Tallis' The Knowing Animal, I think you will very much enjoy it.
I think it is his best work, by far, and I have read quite a bit of him.
Deals with this thread topic quite well, a very interesting account of the given in experience, even richer than Lewis original one back in the day. Of course, Tallis doesn't call it that.
Nevertheless, worth keeping an eye out for that one.
Yes, I get that now, after paying attention to the video. The elapsed time reference in it, from helped with the transcendental part I took exception to.
Thanks.
I wrote to Tallis after getting one of his books, and he replied very positively. I will look out for that title! (Looking at the Amazon page, one of the reviews comes from James le Fanu, another UK writer from a medical background, who's book Why Us? also really impressed me, about 10 years ago, which is of a similar genre. )
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
I had never heard of Tallis until you mentioned him. I’m sure he has interesting ideas to offer, but he’s an ignoramus when it comes to poststructuralism. Reading the following nauseated me.
I will say, when I did my two-odd years of undergraduate philosophy, late 70s-early 80s, my exposure was pretty mainstream - Descartes, Hume, Rosseau, logical positivism, philosophy of science, are the ones I recall. I'm sure that there were classes on the post-moderns but at that time, in that university, I didn't come across them. Most of what I've subsequently learned about them, which is not much, I've gleaned from references here, although I saw a really interesting video, The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real: the Register Theory of Lacan. That really resonated with me, but it's about all I know of Lacan.
Phenomenology?
What were you thinking?
Interesting OP.
[Edit: just realized this was 5 years ago.]
Quoting Wayfarer
Please don’t be a reactionary. I highly recommend
Lee Braver’s ‘A Thing of this World’, in which he discusses and compares Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida. He is well known for translating the challenging prose of poststructuralist writings into clear and accessible concepts. Do me a favor and send the book to Tallis, too.
This wouldn't be an isolated case, as there is a whole school of Buddhist thought whose basic approach is reductio ad absurdum:
Someone like Law would probably accuse the Prasangikas of "going nuclear", failing to see that there's no "ploy", rhetorical or otherwise.
I think it's sad that someone came up with the idea of accusing idealism as being a "rhetorical ploy". Such an accusation is a complete denial of lived experience.
Both Prasangikas and (some) idealists have one thing in common: they both hold that lived experience matters.
Why do you think that is?
If they go so far as to venture into Buddhist philosophy at all, then why not do it properly? One would expect as much given their academic credentials.
I wonder how this might apply to math research?
And there is an ongoing discussion concerning men vs women in regard to spatial perceptions.
From ChatGPT:
I might have guessed math education, but not the others.
It's yet another form of normativism.
"Lived experience" sounds like a historical topic due to the word "Lived". What about "Having been lived"? And the "experience" is always someone's experience. There is no such thing as objective experience. Can one's own subjective experience have anything to do with the objective knowledge?
well, how can a subjective experience be compared to another without being in accordance to a standard of some kind? I think every subjective experience has something to do with objective knowledge...does the knowledge itself become or is/can be subjective when used from/obtained from a single subjective experiences alone?
[i]You think whatever I say that you think.
You feel whatever I say that you feel.
You did whatever I say that you did.
Your intentions are whatever I say that your intentions are.[/i]
Listen to pretty much any scientist, and this is what they are telling you, directly, or at best less directly.
The irony of you projecting your own behavior on scientists...
Quoting wonderer1
Copy-paste examples.
When scientists say "we think X", why are you interpreting that into "You think X, because you think what we tell you you think"? Surely you can just accept that scientists think X, and you disagree - scientists in general don't imagine nobody disagrees with them.
Not worth my time. But you can look for all the times when people here have responded to you dismissively, and look at what you wrote that led to such a response.
Where do you get that from??
I'm talking about the use of you-language, you-messages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message
“You are such a slob. You just expect me to clean up after you.”
“You are always working. Work is more important to you than your family.”
“You are so frivolous. You just think money grows on trees.”
“You always leave your mess lying everywhere.”
“You don’t care about me or my feelings.”
“You didn’t text me like you said you would.”
“You embarrassed me at dinner the other night, like you always do.”
“You never tell me how you’re feeling.”
The speaker of such statements doesn't say, in first person singular, what he thinks, feels, intends, wants, but makes claims about the other person, esp. about their inner life.
People usually use you-language. It's a form of non-communication (while uttering words), a way of talking at the person or past the person, not to them.
Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost. Like the cost of disagreeing with a doctor, teacher, psychotherapist, boss, anyone who uses science in an argument against you in any way.
And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?
Quoting baker
Do you think that's unjust in some way? What specific examples of this unjustness have you experienced?
Because they want to have control over people.
It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality.
Well, you can always dismiss my experience on the grounds of them being a statistically irrelevant sample.
All in all, I think it makes for a waste of time to utter words without actually communicating.
You can see the downside of this mode of non-communication in medicine (as an applied science) when doctors don't listen to people describing their symptoms and instead jumping to conclusions, followed by wrong medical treatment, side-effects, wasted time, money, and missed opportunities for healing.
sorry, my question was ambiguosly worded. Im not asking you for what you think their motivations are, I'm asking you what has led you to believe they are doing that. I haven't seen any of that myself, so I don't know why you have that belief, it's not obvious to me how you came to believe that - or what evidence you might show me that might lead me to believe the same.
Quoting baker
I haven't read any specific experiences from you to dismiss.
I see you now, and can admit that I still go back and forth with you on this one, baker.
Quoting baker
Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science? Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.
The language they use; namely, you-statements; and we-statements (which are veiled you-statements).
Pick up any scientific piece of writing, and insofar it makes claims in the form of "we humans", as if the generalizations the writer makes apply to all people.
Obviously, the texts in the hard sciences will have less of that. But those in the humanities, neuroscience, neurobiology will have plenty.
I know this thread is quite old, but I do find the topic interesting.
On the bolded, I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? It does not seem to have a particularly strong standing among the whose who of the physics world. Strong commitments to reductionism in terms of particles seems to be more popular in the special sciences and then strongest in the laity.
As far as arguments in metaphysics go, I find Nicholas Rescher's survey of arguments for process metaphysics about as convincing as any. Mark Bickhard in "Systems and Process Metaphysics," lays out a concise summary of these as well, and then Terrance Deacon touches on them in his "Incomplete Nature," although less fully. You can even find some of this in Aquinas.
Since I've quoted these all at length in different places, I'll just throw them out here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 -Bickhard
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631 - Rescher and Aquinas
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241 - Deacon
I think this view helps out with both of the problems listed.
Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. Things only make a difference to other things in the world to the extent that they interact with them. These interactions are both what we care about and what we can know (see the quotes from Rescher and Clarke on Aquinas above for an elaboration). Further, the preferencing of mindless interactions over ones involving phenomenal experience is arbitrary, and the rationale for it confused. The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind."
Process metaphysics helps here in elucidating the fact that the universe is can be seen as just one, unitary process. Yet we experience a multiplicity of beings and there is a multiplicity of minds. The old One and the Many problem. What I think it can help us bring out though is that there is no reason to see processes that don't involve phenomena as somehow "more real" than those processes involving bodies, objects, and environments that lead to phenomenal awareness.
I think information theoretic approaches to the sciences, particularly physics, and applications of semiotics to the sciences, are both instructive here. Through these lenses we are able to see how perspective and context end up being relevant for all interactions, which is another reason for not preferencing processes that don't involve phenomena over those that do.
I believe there is a strong argument that runs through Plato, Aquinas, and Hegel that the processes that involve phenomena might actually be thought of as "more real," as they relate to essences, but this is more secondary, and requires a lot of elaboration.
The shift to the process view helps here because you lose the problems of reductionism. Some authors claim that "process metaphysics allows for strong emergence," but it might be more accurate to say that it doesn't need it. More is different in process, there are no "fundemental building blocks," such that getting anything distinctly new violates the Parmenidean concern about getting "something from nothing." Phenomena are produced by some, but not all subprocesses of the universal process. It perhaps doesn't make sense in this context to have any sort of ontological distinction between physical and mental, at least not in the way physicalism versus idealism is normally framed.
It's earlier than positivism, you can see it with the ancient Greeks already. That characteristic brand of normativisim -- "It's like this and no other way".
What/whom do you have in mind?
Surely postmodernists can go beyond the positivism that the OP likes to criticize.
But there's something else, that I'd like to get at with your quoting Thompson several times by now --
"In Buddhism, we have a case study showing that when groundlessness is embraced and followed through to its ultimate conclusions, the outcome is an unconditional sense of intrinsic goodness that manifests itself in the world as spontaneous compassion.”
You say, "But I never understood how assuming a groundless ego leads to spontaneous compassion and benevolence."
To which I replied earlier that what Thompson is stating as fact is actually Mahayana/Vajrayana doctrine; it's not even universally Buddhist (he should have named his book "Why I am not a Mahayani/Vajrayani/modernist Buddhist", because this is all that he says he isn't, as far as Buddhism goes).
I'm baffled that anyone would even try to understand specific terms from a particular Buddhist discourse in an atomistic, context-independent manner.
Would it even be possible for someone outside of Mahayana/Vajrayana to "embrace groundlessness" and "follow it through to its ultimate conclusions"? At best, such a person would have to work with whatever they think those terms mean, and the outcome would be who knows what (possibly a mental breakdown, as is not that rarely the case for "spiritual practitioners").
I was asking the relations between subjective and objective knowledge. How are they linked? Or are they linked at all? Is one pre-condition of the other?
Problem of scientific knowledge is that the foundation of the knowledge is based on observational activities which are subjective perceptual processes. How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge?
There's a layer of underlying assumptions, but once you accept those assumptions (and they're all pretty reasonable), scientific observations become more and more trustworthy the more scientists make those observations. This isn't only the case in science, in all sorts of venues in life, people will trust a story about something happening if more people also say they saw the same thing happen.
You use the phrase "objective knowledge", but it should be explicitly noted, 100% certainty in science is not attainable.
On the other hand, scientific theses and results are judged as good or bad on account of whether they are consistent and coherent with the whole body of scientific understanding and whether they work, i.e. whether they have useful applications; so, science is preeminently pragmatic.
The word I was thinking of was 'being'. Likewise, in David Chalmer's important paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, his rather awkward terminology of 'what it is like to be' could also be interpreted as a reference to being. It is a word which we use in almost every sentence, but it has many layers of meaning, and is especially relevant in relation to this topic.
Quoting baker
Well, I can see what you're getting at there, but I can't go along with:
Quoting baker
Let's step back a bit. Classical (Newtonian) physics, which, along with several other elements, provided the paradigm for modern science, operates context-free. The results of its predictions and calculations are indeed the same for anyone who performs the same experiments or makes the same observations. That is the sense in which they are universal - they apply anywhere, for any observer.
The problem of 'scientism' arises from trying to generalise that methodology to the whole of existence - to absolutize it, in other words. And in fact the limitations of this already became clear in what we could call the post-modern science that was initiated by quantum mechanics, in the form of the 'observer problem in physics'. Without wading into the troubled waters of interpretations of physics, at the very minimum, it became obvious that context was a factor in determining the experimental outcome, 'context' being the experimental set-up that produces an observation. From one point of view, it's a wave, and from another, it's a particle. There is nothing like that in classical physics (which is why in mid-20th century there was a fair amount of popular science literature on 'the new physics' by writers like Paul Davies.)
Add to this the emergence of phenomenology, which sought to return philosophy to the awareness of lived experience, rather than understanding it in terms of mathematically-precise objective measurement, and you several of the major ingredients for The Blind Spot. But the authors of that article stress that they're not anti-science. They acknowledge right up front that science is effective, that it delivers better ways of understanding things and getting things done:
What they're critiquing is science as an ideology, preached by public intellectuals like Dennett and Dawkins, who make 'scientific thinking' and 'the scientific method' a kind of quasi- or pseudo religion:
So, if that's what you're saying is 'ideologically-driven', then I agree, but I don't agree it is characteristic of science as such.
"Objective Knowledge" does not have explicitly and necessarily 100% certainty. All scientific knowledge is bound to be disproved at any time.
If anything, math is dependent on human involvement to an even greater extent than areas of science. But in a different way. And if the foundations are shifted results may be reinterpreted.
Maybe the belief in the primacy of particles, as such, has waned, but in some ways the assertion of the primacy of scientific method still evokes it. Recall that the original impetus behind atomism was to reconcile the relation of 'the One and the Many'. Atomism provided a way to do this, by attributing to the atom the attributes of the One - imperishability and changelessness. So while the atoms were changeless in themselves, by being combined in multifarious ways (and by their unpredictable 'swerving' which provides an element of spontaneity), they could be said to account for the Many. (I did an undergraduate essay on Lucretius, as part of a Philosophy of Matter unit.) In any case, I see the appeal of 'the atom' as being that of a kind of 'ultimate object', the indivisible core of material reality. Quarks are sometimes still referred to in that sense, although nowadays fields are usually assigned primacy, and their nature is considerably more elusive.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Maybe the world is too much with us. Of those passages you link too - and boy, they're pretty dense! - I find the Thomist example most of interest.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.
Objective knowledge just means that it is the agreed knowledge publicly or academically. If you went to the garden, and found something scientific for the first time in history, and you are the only one who knows about it, then it is a subject knowledge.
"How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge?"
This means essentially, how does one person take their knowledge, and convince enough other people that it's true so that it becomes widely publicly or academically accepted.
There are a variety of ways that happens. One way is, in medical science, you conduct a double blind study with placebo on the efficacy of a medicine in treating an ailment, you publish your study, and then other people can go on and repeat that study. Eventually, in successful cases, the studies are so successful that the rest of medical science comes to be convinced that that medicine does in fact effectively treat that ailment, and that's how it goes from personal knowledge to "objective knowledge".
Not all things you might call "objective knowledge" happen in simliar ways. That's just one possible, but relatively common, narrative.
The process view has its own problems, such as how to explain the reality of mass, as that which stays the same while time passes, inertia.
The two different perspectives, the perspective of "being" and the perspective of "becoming" (process), each if taken to account for the totality of reality are reductionist. The former reduces reality to particles which themselves remain the same as time passes, and in their relations produce the objects we know. The latter reduces all beings to basic units of activity, processes, which in their relations to each other constitute the objects we know.
The problem is that the two, the perspective of being and the perspective of becoming, are fundamentally incompatible as Plato found out, and since reality is revealed to us as consisting of both, the entirety cannot be reduced to one or the other. This is why dualism cannot be dismissed because it provides the only true foundation for a complete understanding of reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting flannel jesus
Yes, it seems a good explanation for the process of objectifying some subjective knowledge.
Quoting flannel jesus
There must be also the underlying principles for objectifying subjective knowledge such as "consistency" of the knowledge. For example, when Newton saw the apple dropping from the tree in his garden, he induced the law of gravity. At that moment of time, it must have had been his own subjective knowledge. But through the objectifying processes, it became an objective scientific knowledge ever since.
There must be "consistency" in the details of the knowledge for that to happen. If apple dropped in Japan, and it kept on floating in the air instead of falling down to the ground, or landed in the kitchen table by itself as soon as it dropped, then it couldn't have been accepted as an objective scientific knowledge or law. But it must have been falling down straight onto the ground as soon as apple dropped from trees wherever in the world, that consistency of the movement was the base of the objective knowledge.
I was wondering if there would be any other conditions like that in the process of subjective knowledge becoming objective knowledge.
Right. "Totally different things happening in different places in the world" kinda makes it a bit more tricky. If things didn't fall at 9.8m/s/s everywhere on earth (air resistance notwithstanding), then making gravity into commonly accepted scientific knowledge would have been... much more challenging.
"Totally different things happening in different places in the world" is kind of how spirituality works, and why there are no universal spiritual facts like there are universally accepted facts about physics, chemistry and medicine. One person prays on one side of the world and finds the book of mormon, another person prays on the other side of the world and composes the Quran. That's, I think, perhaps a lot like dropping an apple in England and seeing it fall, and dropping an apple in Japan and seeing it float.
It's also, I suppose, dislike that in some important ways as well. It's going to be a strained analogy if we take it too far.
I do believe this remains a primary issue even with the waning of particle-based conceptions of being and the rise of process-based (pancomputationalism, "It From Bit") conceptions and ontic structural realism (e.g. Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, the book "Every Thing Must Go."
The move to focusing on universal fields actually makes the problem more acute in some ways. If space-time is really a "metric field" rather than a receptacle-container thing, and if unification suggests a grand "field of fields," what you are left with is a conception of reality that is just one single, unified process. There is no multiplicity.
But then, there obviously is multiplicity. You might try to demote the existence of multiple types of "thing" to the status of "mere appearance" but the very existence of appearance itself underscores the obvious existence of multiple, distinct minds existing in this unified omni-process. Barring solipsism and a radical sort of idealism, it seems that this omni-process gives rise to a multiplicity of phenomenal horizons, and then these also seem to contain a multiplicity of things in them that also must be explained.
I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges. Then, in Hegel there is the intuition that a proper explanation of the world requires something that wraps around the objective/subjective, nature/mind distinction, and explains how multiplicity emerges from mind and nature. Both are also realists re universals in some sense, which I think is essential. Nominalism tends to throw all of the multiplicity on the mind side of the equation, making it impossible to say what causes it, which in turn makes it impossible to describe the whole.
Exactly. The sort of scientific discourse embraced by positivism is useful at times but incomplete. Good science, particularly theoretical work and paradigm defining work, tends to slip between this sort of scientific discourse and the philosophical mode of discourse readily.
How exactly is mass a particularly thorny issue? The convertibility of the main definitions of mass is generally employed to explain it processual terms, mass to energy to gravitational fields, etc. "Fundamental particles," can be thought of as stabilities in process, and the fact that they appear to have beginnings and ends (e.g. the destruction and spontaneous formation of quark condensate) seems to go along with this nicely as far as I am aware.
I agree with this. Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame. Things can be said of this multiplicity regardless of their actualization, and they would seem to subsist in some way as potentials prior to their actualization. So, being can't be reduced to becoming. Although Hegel's conception of becoming emerging from being/nothing seems to offer up a potential way to balance these issues if the dialectical is thought of in an ontological sense, as in Jacob Boheme and Eriugena, Hegel's big forerunners.
I'm reading a book I was alerted to in Vervaeke's online lectures, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D Perl. He traces the lineage of metaphysics from Parmenides to Aquinas - I'm up to the section on Aquinas 'existence and essence', which I'm finding rather difficult, but overall it's been a highly clarifying read. It really helped me understand the original intention of the Platonic forms.
Part of the implicit (but rarely stated) background to metaphysics is the 'unitive vision'. That is where the idea of 'the One' originates. In the chapter on Parmenides, we read:
I think it's highly likely that modern culture, with its rejection of religious revelation, is grounded wholly in 'human seeming', hence its intractable metaphysical conundrums (although perhaps books like The One at least grapple with it.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:clap: Russell mentions in his useful chapter on universals, using that very term:
The way I parse it is that universals are real but not existent qua phenomena. I think, arguably, they provide the real meaning of 'noumenal objects' but, of course, in a very different way than Kant uses the term 'noumena', so it's a can of worms.
Well, that is not the point of physicalism. And the issue is:
Physical reality is reality as physics could describe it, not as it describes it currently. Perfective and imperfective moods, it is the little things in language.
This is true, but if future physics is anything like current physics, it is not an empty claim.
"Stabilities" are represented as equilibriums which are artificial ideals that have no real independent existence. So the ideal equilibrium is compared to reality in modeling, and how reality strays from the equilibrium, is known as change. But the reality is that things are changing, whether fast or slow, so the equilibrium is just an artificial tool, and does not represent any thing really independent. It's a fabricated mathematical tool.
Then the reality of the situation, how it is possible that a rapidly changing world can maintain the semblance of stability within some aspects, gets completely neglected. The "being" which is represented as a stability, equilibrium, symmetry, or whatever, is taken for granted as conforming to the ideal principle, the equilibrium, when it really does not conform. None of the supposed stabilities could be anywhere near eternal in reality, and the representation just misleads us into thinking that ideal equilibriums are real existing things, which are being caused to surrender their equilibrium by the actions of various forces. Then when we get to the fringes of our understanding, instead of recognizing that the proposed equilibriums are simply not real, and that they get further and further from being an accurate representation as we head to these fringes, the trend is to employ concepts of chance as a cause, like "symmetry-breaking". .
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think Hegel provides a solution because his proposals lead to the violation of the law of non-contradiction in dialectical materialism and dialethism when being/not-being are subsumed by becoming.
To ask of a relation presupposes a content; how can that which necessarily has content be nowhere and at no time?
I don't see why this should be the case. Protons seem to have beginnings and ends, which is why it seems fair to think of them as underlined by processes. However, they are remarkable stable otherwise. I don't see any reason to think we have "invented" rather than discovered protons, atoms, molecules, etc. Indeed, it's hard to see what we can even say about the world if these are to be considered purely as "inventions." To be sure, we invented ways of talking about them, systems for describing them, etc. But such systems didn't spring out of the ether; rather, they were developed by examining these phenomena.
We might accept G.M D’Ariano's claim that particles are like "the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave," because universal fields and information have the ontological high ground, and still accept that these incredibly robust stabilities have a real ontic existence. The fact is, the "particle zoo" is still not all that big. Our "universal process" is such that it results in a fairly small diversity of stabilities that emerge at small scales - the same sort of thing we see when we play around with the rules of various "toy universe" models.
I am not saying that we cannot think of mass as being composed of underlying processes, I am saying that this perspective does not solve any problems. To label a proton as "a stability" provides no sort of understanding. The concept which bears that name, "stability", is an invention, an ideal, and whatever it is that is supposed to be stable, the proposed underlying process, is not at all understood. So we have an invention called "a stability", and the thing called a proton is said to be this invented thing. This becomes more obvious if you describe an atom is "a stability", and a even more obvious if you describe a molecule as a "stability". Describing these things with the use of that ideal really says nothing about the constitution of the thing.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The issue is not the ontic existence of the stability itself, as this is what becomes evident to us through sensation, the thing represented as a stability, as something (an object, thing, or being) with temporal extension. The problem is in understanding the supposed underlying processes which happen to be stable. We tend to understand processes through reference to the things which are actively involved in the processes. So for example if a molecule is a stability of processes, the things involved in those processes are the atoms. And if an atom is a stability of processes, then the underlying things involved in those processes are the parts of the atoms. Now when we get to fundamental particles, you might say that there are "fundamental fields" which constitute the processes, but fields are mathematical constructs. Unless we determine a medium for the supposed wave activity, (the ether), the proposed processes have no substance, and they are simply mathematical constructs built to represent the observed stability.
I'd argue this is getting things backwards. We only understand "things" in terms of what they do. What properties does any thing have when it is interacting with nothing? You can only describe properties in terms of how something interacts with other things or how parts of it interact. Substances without process can't explain anything.
See the two quotes here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631
But the particles are mathematical constructs too. As Wilzeck puts it, with quarks the "it is the bit." These particles are entirely defined in mathematical terms. This is what ontic structural realism makes its hay on, the fact that they are defined as nothing but math. So, if being described in terms of mathematical constructs is disqualifying, then fundamental particles are every bit as problematic as fields.
That's really irrelevant, because the point is that we understand that it is things which are interacting. It's obvious that we understand things through interactions, that's what sensation is, an interaction. But, as I said earlier, these are the two incompatible aspects of reality, the passive thing (being), and the activity (becoming). One is not reducible to the other. Therefore the attempt to reduce everything to processes provides no advantage over the attempt to reduce everything to substance. We need to account for the reality of both, as distinct and not reducible to one another. That is, the thing, and what the thing is doing
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The particle is defined by its interaction with the equipment that detects it, which is substance. The fields represent the potential for interaction. So the particles are not "mathematical constructs" in the way that the fields are. "Particles" is an assumption made from, and supported by, sense observation, just like the existence of a table, chair, or any other object is an assumption supported by sense observation.
Plato's cave/shadow analogy distinguished between noumenal Ideality and phenomenal Reality, but some philosophers debate which is really real. Personally, I behave as-if the material reality (cave & shadows) is all around me, even as the mental realm (fire & illumination) is within me. Likewise, thanks to my BothAnd philosophy, I have no problem accepting the scientific evidence for an invisible universal mathematical field of potential (fire) that somehow engenders sub-atomic tangible particles of stuff that aggregate into the "real" milieu (cave) that allows me to "grasp" both things and ideas. :smile:
Here is passage that is particularly relevant. Socrates and Glaucon are discussing what happens when those who have passed through 'the difficult passage' out of the cave return to it, out of compassion for those remaining, who are the subjects of the first paragraph:
Quoting Republic, Book 7
I do wonder whether the frequently-aired complaint that 'quantum physics is incomplete' might arise because of the fact that matter does not exhaust the totality of existence.
Can one do science without scientism?
Good point. :up:
Can you explain why? I'm not seeing it.
As a retired math person I can see the possibility of the mathematics of Quantum theory somehow reifying into a form of reality. However, I suspect not.
At this time, as is well-known, there are challenging fundamental conundrums about the standard model of physics and other matters. All I’m saying is, maybe that is because physics itself is not after all fundamental. But as everything is defined in terms of matter (or matter-energy) then the question is ‘what else could it be’? I would guess there are dissident theorists (and probably some pretty far-out ideas) about that, and I’m not trying to prove the point. I feign no hypothesis - just idle musing.
Everything we can say about nature is just what we can say about nature, so I don't see why physics should be any different.
Physics concerns what appears to us as most fundamental, so to speculate that there might be something more fundamental is not really saying anything substantive at all. There is perhaps no limit to the non-substantive things we could say or at least the limit would only be the imagination, but are such non-substantive imaginings really of any importance for our understanding of the world and our place in it?
The article this thread is from distinguishes science per se from physicalism:
Interesting idea for sure. Thanks for the clarity!
But why would there never be a physical accounting of consciousness? If AGI is ever to happen - which if it does it would be a long way into the future, then this would be a good counter to this argument, no? If we are to build a “positronic brain” for lack of a better word (and cause I love Star Trek) then wouldn’t we have to account for it physically? Is such a facticity impossible? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Iterative AI will never bear such fruit, but quantum computing (and dna computing) - just for speeds really - may at some point allow for a feedback loop that could be conscious.
And if one believes that we are always striving and improving in our understanding, then the idea that we can disregard a future because it would be empty based on our current understanding seems odd to me. I like the logic of that article, but its boundaries are open to debate imho. Why would they have to be empty? We don’t understand if reality at its root is a wave or particle - or how it can be both, for instance (I am out of date here - but it’s an example from the past) but the idea is that there would be no necessity to assume it is empty (aka it doesn’t exist) because we don’t understand it.
Maybe I don’t understand it. But Hempel’s dilemma seems like a self imposed problem based on a particular division of the world - that seems / probably is a useful and brilliant conceptual tool. Perhaps we don’t need to always use that tool - and as always that would be a decision based on what we accept at the start.
You know, Shakespeare and Horacio?
That is the subject of David Chalmer’s 1996, paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, which has triggered a lot of debate. The gist of the argument is that no physical explanation can account for the nature of subjective experience which is by definition first-person, although you’d have to read the paper for the details of the argument.
But the general drift of the Blind Spot argument is against physicalism, which is the belief that everything can be reduced to physics. Hempel’s dilemma is that physics is subject to constant revision, so what we think of as physical, or non-physical, now, might be completely different in 10 or 100 years.
Facing up to the problem of consciousness can be found here https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
The original article this thread was based on can be found here
https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience
Great I’ll take a closer look, thanks for the links!
Yes, that is the defining claim of a substance-based metaphysics. I fail to see how this is a knock against process-metaphysics. It's saying "if we assume substance metaphysics is true, then process metaphysics isn't." Well obviously.
I will agree that substance metaphysics is more intuitive. However, our understanding of nature has often required us to drop intuitive models for less intuitive ones.
This just seems like question begging. If a particle is defined by "interactions" it seems just as correct to say it is defined by processes. To claim that "detection equipment" is fundamentally substance just assumes the truth of substance metaphysics.
There exist entirely consistent process-based explanations of physics. The existence of fields is likewise supported by sense observation in the same exact way that particles are.
Substance explanations have had a bad track record in general:
In particular, it seems hard to explain quantum foam, virtual particles, the spontaneous emergence of quark condensate, etc. in terms of "fundamental things." The "fundamental things" brought in to explain these are universal fields. But then you just have a thing, and it is changes in the thing, which are always occurring by the thing's very nature, which do all the explanatory lifting. That starts to sound a lot like process metaphysics.
What is meant by "stabilities" is also not unexplainable In brief:
Aside from the track record and difficulties in being adapted to modern physics, I'd also count against substance metaphysics the way it splits the world into subjective/objective, provided strong emergence is barred. But if strong emergence isn't barred, then it seems like interactions, process, ends up generating new fundamental properties/substances. But then process now again seems to be driving the explanatory vehicle.
This relates to the lack of quantum theories explaining some observed phenomenons. The overwhelming majority of scientists will agree that it is matter that will explain things like entanglement and local gravity, and it is not due to bias, as many scientists will not agree that it is matter that will explain consciousness.
So, if there are anomolies in the movement of galaxies, they can only be due to matter, even if it is of a kind we have no knowledge of. Because, what else is there?
Well, I was under the impression that by 'matter' you meant physical things in general instead of just conventional matter. But if that is not the case then, nevermind. :yum:
The point is that neither substance metaphysics nor process metaphysics is adequate because nature reveals to us, the reality of both aspects. And, since one is incompatible with the other, nature cannot be solely described by one or the other. That is why dualism provides the best approach. Neither substance metaphysics nor process metaphysics can provide what is required for a complete understanding
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The issue is in the nature of empirical observation, and the language applied for description. We observe things and make statements, and so we describe the world in this way. You can argue that this constitutes assumptions which beg the question, but it's really just a matter of what constitutes "truth". We must start with true premises, to produce sound conclusions, and true premises describe things (substance). As Aristotle demonstrated, becoming (process) defies the law of excluded middle, so simple descriptions of processes cannot provide us with true premises. If we adhere strictly to process metaphysics we have no truth and no sound logic. Then we get ontologies like model-dependent realism. It doesn't really matter that you might argue that requesting true premises is begging the question, because assuming that there is such a thing as truth is to make a substance assumption, because truth is simply what we want. Dismiss it as "intuition" if you want, but most philosophers agree that to dismiss intuition is to make a mistake.
For anyone else interested, here is the link for Facing Up to the Problems of Consciousness
https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
And while there consc.net also has his recent thoughts, which are probably worth a read too. And look at first glance to be in the same genre.
Happy thinking!
That's the trend, leave room for the prequel. Biologists should get themselves up to date with the modern trends, and instead of leading people toward believing in abiogenesis, they should leave an opening for the prequel, the prior agency.
Adam Frank is one of the three authors of The Blind Spot of Science (the others being Evan Thompson and Marcello Gleiser.) I love what he has to say about quantum mechanics, Qbism and the centrality of the Born Rule.
Quoting 180 Proof
Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.
Nowhere is the materialistic bias in science more apparent than quantum physics, the science of atoms and subatomic particles. Atoms, conceived as the building blocks of matter, have been with us since the Greeks. The discoveries of the past 100 years would seem to be a vindication for all those who have argued for an atomist, and reductionist, conception of nature. But what the Greeks, Isaac Newton and 19th-century scientists meant by the thing called an ‘atom’, and what we mean today, are very different. In fact, it’s the very notion of a ‘thing’ that quantum mechanics calls into question.
The classic model for bits of matter involves little billiard balls, clumping together and jostling around in various forms and states. In quantum mechanics, however, matter has the characteristics of both particles and waves. There are also limits to the precision with which measurements can be made, and measurements seem to disturb the reality that experimenters are trying to size up.
Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.[/quote]
No doubt Woo-farer doesn't even understand the question. :smirk:
This critique of the article seems to me to be more a disagreement of definitions. "That's not true science, true science is methodology..."
No doubt, it's something worth pointing out. However, I don't think the problems related to the assumptions of smallism and reductionism, what the authors label "scientific materialism," are in any way illusory. This is certainly how "what science says the world is like" was presented to me throughout my education, and one sees this view invoked quite regularly in popular and scientific texts.
Actually, it's no surprise that one author here is a cosmologist because in popular cosmology and physics reductionism and smallism frequently come in for withering criticism. That seems to be more the norm. However, in the special sciences, particularly neuroscience, smallism and reductionism still seem quite dominant. I find that even scientists who pay lip service to rejecting them often slip back into them.
I've long thought this was a consequence of the state of these respective fields (see below):
Part of the problem here is perhaps that both analytic and continental philosophy of science has become so divorced from how scientists tend to think of their work that it has become largely irrelevant to scientific practices. The extreme skepticism and general anti-realism one finds in a lot of philosophy of science seems contained largely to the philosophers.
But you need a philosophy of science. It is all well and good to say science is a methodology, but this position needs to be justified. Which methodology? Why are these tools appropriate? This would seem to require giving some sort of metaphysical explanation of the sciences, else the proper methodology is "whatever we think works," in which case, one cannot complain if others takes the inability of science to explain consciousness as evidence that the current methodology is defective.
Plus, a focus on methodology doesn't really resolve these issues. Charges of "pseudoscience" are common, and they are often applied to research that ends up being extremely influential or even paradigm defining (e.g. pretty much the whole of quantum foundations up until the late 90s). These charges are normally made on methodological grounds though. Atoms, quarks, etc. were initially rejected by some precisely because they were considered "unfalsifiable" for instance.
I think that post really undersells the concerns of the advocates of the "view from nowhere." Their concerns don't tie in to difficulties in spacial perspective, but are rather related to how our entire perceptual and cognitive apparatus biases our understanding of the world. I'm certainly no advocate of this view, since I think it leads to the incoherence that "what the world is really like is the way it is conceived of without a mind,"but the problems of spatial perspective are sort of a trivial instances.
I don't see how you've shown this at all. In your example, perspective absolutely is an attribute of the world. "How we say things" is a consequence of how we experience them, and how we experience them says something about how the world is (else we need to write off empiricism). "How we say things" isn't something that is arbitrarily related to how the world is, nor do our practices of speech just happen to be what they are. Terms for perspective are universal across all languages because perspective is universal.
Scientists aren’t paid to think about their work, they’re paid to produce results. That’s why we need philosophers of science. When scientists do engage in metaphysical speculation, it rarely reaches the level of sophistication of someone like a Heisenberg or Bohm, which is why it may seem to many scientists that philosophy of science today is ‘divorced from how they think of their work’. But there is an important difference between a philosophical perspective being irrelevant to scientific practices and that perspective being treated as irrelevant by those who don’t have deep enough insight not the nature of their own practices. It wasnt that long ago that scientists were oblivious to concepts like Popperian falsificationism and paradigm shifts, which are now ingrained within the way many of they think about their practices.
:roll:
Cheers.
Scientific materialism is not necessarily reductionist. Bunge's brand of Scientific materialism is emergentist, and literally so. An ordinary object such as a table is just as real as a quark. In fact, that very same table, is not identical to the plurality of elementary particles that compose it. It is a new thing, a new object, that emerges from them.
Well he was, he died a few years ago. We share "argenticity", (if that's even a thing), not "canadianicity" (if that's even a thing).
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, fair enough. I don't agree with Bunge myself, on several key points.
Well, I noticed reading Mario Bunge's Wikipedia entry that he's critical of phenomenology. I have never read anything about him, but it might be a good starting point, as that article is grounded in phenomenology.
For example, here's a quotation from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology about Husserl's criticism of naturalism:
[quote=Source;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RfRNvIT6Q8zwUXc5jtO7Gvc3JP-ewUhT/view]In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one?-?one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge.[/quote]
How do you think a Mario Bunge would respond to that criticism?
Then I would direct you to the most controversial, scathing, irreverent piece of literature that he has ever written, which is something that I normally don't share with acquaintances, not even with fellow Bungeans. I'm of course referring to his infamous article, titled In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia. Disclaimer: I do not fully agree with Bunge in general, and that document that he wrote is the one I feel the most negative about. It's a very confrontational piece, and it gets a few things factually wrong. But if you're interested in "learning how his mind works", so to speak, that's the article to read.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'll quote him. Again, I don't share the following view, I'm just quoting Bunge's words for ease of reference. This is from the article that I just linked above. He says:
I can give you a very clear answer to this question by way of the tinted glass analogy. When looking at the world through a tinted glass, it is necessary to determine what the tinting of the glass "adds" to the observation, in order to derive a "true" interpretation of the observation.
Since the method applied by the hard sciences, as "the scientific method" is carried out by human subjects, it is necessary to understand what the subject "adds" to the scientific method, as the subjective aspect of science, in the very same way that it is necessary to understand what the tinting of the glass "adds" to the observation.
When the existence of the subjective element is known about, and respected as a true feature, and a deficiency of the scientific method, we naturally account for the reality of this "blind spot", and there is no great problem, just a healthy scientific skepticism and a respect for the fallibility of science. But when the reality of the blind spot is denied, and the relevant deficiencies of the scientific method are ignored, that is an attitudinal illness which is a problem.
Quoting Mario Bunge
What do you make of that? Should I continue quoting, or would you like to argue something?
Go back to the passage I quoted: Quoting Source
I find that neither obscure or opaque. What do you think is wrong with it?
I agree. I don't agree with Bunge on that point, I agree with you, actually. Mate, it's not that I don't understand ya, it's just that you asked me to explain Bunge's POV, and that's wha' I'm doin', ey. Don't get ya knickas up in'a bunch ey.
As for the passage that you quoted, which you find neither obscure nor opaque (and I agree with you there), I'll just quote the next paragraph from Bunge's relevant text:
Quoting Mario Bunge
Again, does that answer your question, or not? If not, then what can I do for you, philosophically, mate?
Do you think this attitude of Bunge’s could fairly by described as ‘scientism’?
Thanks for replying to my old post.
Just briefly, here is the argument I presented. We start with the butterfly moving from left to right for @Wayfarer, but right to left for me. There's an apparent contradiction here, in that I describe the movement of the butterfly as being the opposite of the way Wayf sees it. We resolve this by understanding that although we are both seeing the same thing, we describe it differently; and we develop a way of achieving agreement, we agree that the butterfly is flying towards the mountain. What we have done here is agree that we see things differently, and then to find a way of setting out what is the case in such a way that we are in agreement. In effect we phrase what is going on so that the individual perspective does not imply a contradiction.
Later we find ourselves on the other side of the mountain, and see the butterfly moving in the same direction, but now away from the mountain. In order to capture this we can change the description again, to say that they are moving towards the East.
The direction in which the butterfly is moving, in each case, stays the same. But we have three different descriptions, left to right, towards the mountains, and towards the East. Now the butterfly was always heading East, even when heading towards the mountain or from left to right. What has changes is not the movement of the butterfly, but the description used. We developed a way of setting out that movement that did not depend on the position of the observer. True, the observer still has a perspective, but that perspective is removed from the utterance.
There are three aspects to this account that I think are salient.
First, it is an application of the Principle of Relativity, the general form of which is to present scientific principles in such a way that they apply equally to all observers. Saying that the butterfly is moving towards the East will be true in all three case, while saying that they are moving towards the mountain or from left to right will be false for some observes.
This leads to considering interpretations of each observation in such a way as to achieve agreement. The butterfly moves from left to right for Wayfarer ? The butterfly moves towards the mountain for someone on it's inland side ? the butterfly is moving towards the East. We can apply the Principle of Charity to reach agreement on all these observations.
And this speaks to the communality of language, that what we say about how things are is part and parcel of our role as members of a community. This in firm opposition to the view that some individuals observations are somehow paramount, or must form the foundation of knowledge. Knowledge is not built from solipsism.
This is in contrast to Wayfarer's thesis that science neglects lived experience. A better way to think of this is that science combines multiple lived experiences in order to achieve agreement and verity. So sure, "our entire perceptual and cognitive apparatus biases our understanding of the world", and yet we can work to minimise that bias by paying attention to contexts and wording our utterances with care, so that they work in the widest available context. Not the view form nowhere but the view from anywhere.
Yes. It's one of his flaws as a philosopher. He fails to understand that his scientistic Crusade should drop all of the classicist sentimentalism. Enough with that. I actually met Bunge in person. I shook his hand. I can't say that I understand the man, at least not in what matters, but he had his flaws. He had his flaws as a philosopher, as a scientist, and as a human being. And I'm sure that a genius of his caliber could only agree with me on that, after careful thinking. The man was not alien to Ethics. He wrote a book about it. It just strikes me as hypocritical of him to write a tome on Ethics and then to write such an incendiary, sentimentalist pamphlet like "In Praise of Intolerance in Academia". Like, Bunge, mate, what is the matter with you? Why are you like this, mate? What unfathomable, horrible thing happened to you for you to be such a God-damn Ogre?
Quoting Banno
Actually I think you’ve conflated this thread with the other one, Mind Created World, although they’re obviously related. My point in that other thread is simply that it is meaningless to say that of anything that it exists outside of or independently of any perspective, which I don’t think your patiently-explained butterfly effect (forgive the conceit) actually addresses. Outside any perspective, there is….well, you can’t say. That’s the point, and it’s a simple one.
Quoting Banno
Firstly, the ‘Blind Spot of Science’ was not written by me but by Adam Frank (cosmologist), Evan Thompson (philosopher) and Marcello Gleiser (physicist) on the basis of Whitehead’s process philosophy and Husserl and Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology. And they would have no problem agreeing with the principle of inter-subjective validation. What they’re objecting to is the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion of what is actual, the idea that science provides a transparent window on the world as it truly is.
Yes, it's Hegel's Spirit of the Age. I find that concept tiresome, though. He had a more interesting concept, the Ortgeist, the "Spirit of the Locality", or "Spirit of the Place". There is a dialectic, a language, a dialect, between Zeitgeist and Ortgeist, a conversation between the Spirit of the Age and the Spirit of the Locality. It's fascinating stuff, if you read it like a work of literature. It's Tolkien-esque, I would say. Poetic.
The science of perception, like every other science suffers the same problem. Why would you think that it would be exempt? Suggesting that it would be exempt only demonstrates a denial of the problem, which is a display of the attitudinal illness I referred to.
Quoting Janus
Respecting the reality of the subjective input in science greatly improves one's understanding of the results, through an enhanced ability to recognize where deficiencies lie. This provides the scientist, philosopher, or anyone reviewing any scientific results, with an approach which is known as "critical thinking".
Accordingly, the scientist might also look for ways of minimizing the subjective input, or even devising ways of exposing it as much as possible, to be studied by philosophers. This is in stark contrast to the attempt to hide the subjective influence which results from the aforementioned attitudinal illness.
Eh, I would go that far. It beats Bunge's "line" of scientism, or his "version" of scientism, if you will. It doesn't beat my version of scientism (I'm very immodest, mate. Delusional, even).
They are on much the same.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, to say. And yet there is gold in those hills, even if no one says it.
What a sound thing to say. Brilliant, even. I'm not trying to be funny, I agree with the realism here.
I'd recommend Quentin Meillassoux's book, After Finitude. You might find his concept of "correlationism" interesting.
Only because you won't shut up... :wink:
See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15574/is-the-distinction-between-metaphysical-realism-anti-realism-useless-andor-wrong/p1
There is an extended, somewhat absurd, argument about whether there is gold in those hills, form about page 10. I won't blame you for not reading it, but thought I'd at least let you know some of the back story.
Thanks for the reference. I'll take a look at it. I'm familiar with this topic of conversation, though not with that specific reference, so thanks for that.
I'm just a realist at the end of the day. There are things that exist outside of my brain. Those things are still there when I go to sleep, and they are the same things that I find in the morning when I wake up.
Exempt from what?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I doubt anyone with a sensible attitude wants to deny that science relies on the senses or that perception is conceptually mediated or that scientists, being human, may have their biases. What else do you think the "subjective influence" consists in?
He’s been discussed here, I’ve taken a look. Mine is the kind of argument he has in his sights.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
That statement is made from a point of view outside both, which takes the brain as one object among others.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Yet amazing as it may seem, that is not an argument against transcendental idealism. There’s an anecdote that Bryan Magee tells about Karl Popper on this point, I’ll find it later.
It's what Meillassoux calls "speculative materialism". Contingency is necessary, as absurd as that sounds. I think it's absurd, and false. Meillassoux's claim, that is. Which is why I prefer to say that contingency and necessity are different modalities, and that it its possible to be aware of both at the same time. And when you are aware of both of them at the same time, an unpleasant feeling ensues. That's what happens in my subjective case, at least. I don't expect others to have a similar experience, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
EDIT:
Quoting Wayfarer
I believe you. I don't intend my version of materialism as an argument against transcendental idealism. I'm tolerant of other people's philosophical premises, as long as they don't lead to dehumanizing conclusions, to say nothing of the possibility of justifying ideas whose sole objective is to dehumanize humans.
Does that make sense to you? It sounded better in my head, before typing it.
It's a simplistic point, not a simple one. We can perfectly coherently say that things existed before human beings existed and will exist after they are extinct. You can say that we can't know what that existence is, because all we know of things existing is via perception, but that would be to conflate our knowing something to exist with its actual existence.
You can stipulate something like 'to exist is to stand out for a percipient' and of course on that definition nothing can exist absent percipients, which is basically what you are doing insisting: on your stipulated definition being the only "true" one. But that is a trivial tautology, and it is also not in accordance with the common usage of 'exist'. So, in Wittgenstein's terms, you are taking language on holiday.
And immediately afterwards, he says:
What do you make of that?
EDIT: Tagging @MrLiminal as well, as this has something to do with the concept of Liminality, I think.
Tagging also @Corvus and @Mapping the Medium, as this point may interest them.
This is, up to a point, compatible with Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the construction of empirically objective facts via the coordination of subjective perspectives among an intersubjective community. But when Husserl points out that the intersubjectively produced empirical objects are entities that no one actually sees, he doesn’t find it necessary to anchor this objectivity in a principle of charity that assumes a transcendence of perceptual bias via a grip on ‘the way things really are’.
I'm keeping away from him, and from 'speculative realism' generally. There's a considerable body of work there but still within the generally physicalist-naturalist ambit, and I'm defending an idealist philosophy. Bernardo Kastrup is more my cup of tea. And philosophical cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, who's not an idealist philosopher, but is doing fantastic work on history of ideas.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
You are in good company.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy]in practice it is surprisingly difficult to get transcendental idealism taken seriously, even by many good philosophers. Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it, whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night'‚ a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson's to Berkeleianism[/quote]
The reaction of Johnson to Berkeley is the (in)famous Argument from the Stone.
Magee goes on:
That would describe the attitude of most of the contributors here, with some illustrious exceptions (including the one directly above this post).
Husserl can't see the butterflies?
Of course I do. I might articulate such a notion differently, but I agree with the substantial part of the claim, not necessarily with the details of the case.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I don't. Again, I can "play the harp", if you want, but I see no need for that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Maybe I am, maybe I am not. I don't think it's a substantial point of disagreement between the authors and myself. I would prefer to disagree with them on other intellectual fronts. I choose my battles, if I can. I have no quarrel with transcendental idealism as a philosophy. So I see no point in arguing with its core premises.
Does that make sense?
What phenomenology do I personally dislike? That's a tough question. I would say (and this is certainly controversial) that Husserl is the low hanging fruit of the phenomenology tree. At least what we know about his work. Personally, I'm not going to go through the thousands upon thousands of pages that make up the Husserliana. I don't think it would be necessary for me to do such a thing.
Phenomenology really came alive for me through the book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch. (Thompson is one of the authors of the Blind Spot.) Also Francisco Varela's interest in Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) really impacted me as I have an MA in Buddhist Studies and practiced vipassana for a long while. So the convergence between phenomenology and Buddhism is now a kind of genre in its own right. Another great exponent is the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, whom I learned about here on this forum. I love his style.
The agnostic part makes sense. As someone with materialist leanings I acknowledge that I cannot be absolutely sure that idealism is not the case; that there is not a cosmic consciousness that holds every little invariant detail that we experience in place. Idealism just seems to me the less plausible of the options. But it is a part of intellectual integrity to admit the defeasible nature of all our theories, even scientific theories.
I don't buy the kinds of arguments like @Wayfarer makes; that we cannot coherently speak of things existing in the absence of percipients. I think such arguments are tendentious at best and profoundly mistaken at worst. I agree with Meillassoux that correlationism is incompatible with the conceptual coherence of thought about the Arche fossil, which is to say it undermines the coherence of paleontology and cosmology.
It's a long time since I read After Finitude, though. so it seems a bit vague to me now, and I never got the idea of the necessity of contingency.
Just as well I’m not selling, then.
As you mention Wittgenstein you might be interested in this snippet:
[quote=Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson;https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/regulars/55561/wittgensteins-forgotten-lesson] "Understanding a sentence," Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, "is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think." Understanding a sentence, too, requires participation in the form of life, the "language-game," to which it belongs. The reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.
All this may sound trivially true. Wittgenstein himself described his work as a "synopsis of trivialities."[/quote]
'participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.' Quite in keeping with the theme of the original post, I would have thought.
[hide="Reveal"]
What he sees is similar but not identical to what every other observer of the ‘same’ butterflies see.
What do you mean by that, @Wayfarer? I can definitely see a convergence between them, but perhaps I would articulate it differently. Not that it matters, though, if I agree that there is a converge between them.
If the butterflies-in-themselves are never seen, then he's probably right, and we can't say in which direction they fly. But we don't seem to need butterflies-in-themselves to have a simple chat about the direction in which butterflies fly.
That is, Husserl appears to be talking shite.
Quoting Banno
Just read the man instead of working yourself up into a tizzy. Do you honestly think he’s stupid enough to claim that we can’t do what we obviously know we can? He’s not trying to take away from us a single scientific achievement, consensual fact or logical inference. He’s simply showing us how we manage these feats from a more fundament vantage than the how’s that the sciences take as their starting point.
Cheers. It's not me who is worked up. I am unable to make sense of your notion of the thing in itself. It's obviously important to you, but to me is an example of Antigonish language.
It doesn't do anything.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not seeing the relevance.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you are going to cite, I'd suggest you would do better to cite the original source.
Anyway, I'll leave you to your interminable search for authority.
1) There is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.
2) If so, then: if science has a blind spot, then phenomenology has a blind spot.
3) Science has a blind spot.
4) So, phenomenology has a blind spot.
This is known in the literature as a "parity argument". Think of it like the Ying and the Yang. And you can transition, in a liminal way, from science to phenomenology.
It's a Dream-like level of awareness.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
That's an assertion not an argument. How would you justify that? And what do you mean by 'ontologically significant'?
It might help to use this previously-quoted passage as a reference:
Quoting Source
I can craft a new argument in support of it, like so:
5) If science can be compared to phenomenology but not to astrology in some sense, then there is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.
6) Science can be compared to phenomenology but not to astrology in some sense.
1) So, there is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.
In regards to what I mean by "ontologically significant", I'm alluding to the type of difference that would be a difference-maker when we compare science and phenomenology. Like, it's not apples and oranges, it's not that sort of debate. If science and phenomenology are not like apples and oranges, then they have something more important in common than being "just two fruits".
Cool synopsis. I’m all for reduction from the naturalist attitude, but that realm of “transcendental experience”…..that just felt weird coming out of my mouth. To just call it “reason”, of course, doesn’t advance the phenomenological program, so I get it.
How are you? Just writing to ask you politely if you've found the time to consider my latest argument, above.
All the best,
-Arcane Sandwich
P.S: Time flies and so do fruit flies.
Look at the passage above your post, specifically:
Quoting Source
Agree or disagree with that proposition? Why?
The difference in ontological stance between the natural sciences and phenomenology is that science is solely concerned with the objectively measurable. It doesn’t take into account the role of the observer in (for example) deciding what to observe or measure, what hypotheses to pursue and what not to, and so on.
This was made unavoidably obvious by the observer or measurement problem in quantum physics. Although that is a special case of a far wider issue, which is also a subject in philosophy of science.
Firstly, in QM the so-called "observer problem" is not recognized uncontroversially as entailing that human consciousness is paradigmatically the observer.
Secondly, it is not at all controversial that science begins with observation. How else could it possibly begin? Seems like clutching at straws.
I agree with it, of course. Why? Because consciousness is of the elements of subjectivity. And the world is what is not the subject: it is objectivity itself. So, of course, I am against the reification of consciousness. To reify is to commit the fallacy of treating a non-thing as if it were a thing. It is even worse if one believes that consciousness is indeed a real thing, such as the Cartesian res cogitans. Technically speaking, Descartes was speaking nonsense on that point. Literally. Consciousness is not a res to begin with, it is not a "thing". It is, instead, a series of physical processes occurring in the brain of every living creature on this planet that is endowed with a central nervous system. So yes, "the mind is what the brain does", so to speak. None of this means that I am necessarily right. It does mean, however, that I have the right to say it publicly, and to think it privately at the same time. That, is what I call "the Absolute", in the Hegelian sense. It just so happens that I don't believe in Dialectical Synthesis. Instead, I utilize "Dialectical Analysis", if you will, to achieve a sort of reverse-engineering of language itself, and that reveals many things, including the Nature of consciousness. It is a "situated phenomenology", if you will. And that grants it more dignity than pure, non-existential phenomenology.
That is what I believe. Again, I may have beliefs that are false, it just so happens that I am unaware that they are false.
Let's unpack that, there are elements I can go along with, others not so much.
That is indeed what reification means, and I agree that 'res cogitans', the 'thinking thing' is a highly problematic expression in some ways. Husserl himself says as much in Crisis of the European Sciences, where he says that, despite Descartes' genius in recognising the apodictic nature of conscious experience, he then makes the mistake of treating it in a quasi-objective way, 'a little tag end of the world', is how he puts it. Nevertheless Husserl recognises Descartes' genius as do I, so it is not simply a mistake. I think of Descartes' dualism of extensia and cogitans as more like a conceptual or economic model, than a scientific hypothesis in the modern sense.
The point I completely disagree with, however, is that consciousness is a physical process. What does it mean to say that? If it's physical, it ought to be describable, without residue, in terms of the principles of physics and chemistry. But I'm of the school of thought that as soon as living organisms form, no matter how rudimentary, there is already something about them that cannot be so described. It is not an element, a literal elan vital, some mysterious thing or substance, which is reification again. It is more like what Aristotle said in the first place - that they posses an organising principle. (I mean, look at the etymological link between 'organ', 'organic', and 'organisation'.) That manifests in the way that all of the components of organisms are self-organising in such a way as to form a single unified being. As Aristotle put it, organisms possess an intrinsic organisational purpose (as distinct from artifacts, who's purposes are extrinsic.) Stem cells, as is well known, are undifferentiated - which is what makes them so useful for medical purposes - but depending on where in the body they begin to develop, they acquire the specialised characteristics that make them liver cells or eye cells or what have you. That resists reduction to physical principles, although that is still a controversial matter. So I object to the way that you assume that life is known to be physical, as it if it is something already known to science, when in fact it is not. I know that many scientists and philosophers assume that it is so, but that is among the assumptions that I question, and that those I cite are inclined to reject. Not just because 'Aristotle says so' - there are many elements of his science that are completely superseded. But he was right about the model of self-organisation that distinguished organisms from minerals etc. That is something that has been picked up and refined by philosophy of biology.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Sorry, not buying. I've learning things here including about an emerging discipline called biosemiotics. As far as 'situated phenomenology' is concerned, one of the key texts is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, which as the title says, is about embodied cognition. Evan Thompson is one of the co-authors of that book and the OP we're discussing.
Agree. The essay puts it as follows:
[quote=The Blind Spot]Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.
According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device. Other approaches, such as the ‘many worlds’ and ‘hidden variables’ interpretations, seek to preserve an observer-independent status for the wave function. But this comes at the cost of adding features such as unobservable parallel universes. A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the world’s behaviour, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this viewpoint, the equations of quantum physics don’t refer just to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom taken as a whole in a kind of ‘observer-participancy’.
Participatory realism is controversial. But it’s precisely this plurality of interpretations, with a variety of philosophical implications, that undermines the sober certainty of the materialist and reductionist position on nature. In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world.[/quote]
Put another way, the very fact of the controversy counts against a materialist explanation.
Not quite, at least not if one is not a reductionist, and that is precisely the case of Mario Bunge, for example. He's not the only one to think that, many realists (even anti-materialist realists) postulate (or deduce) that emergence is indeed real, it is "out there", in the external world, not merely "in our minds".
This is not to say that the mind "emerges" from the brain, for that would be to speak nonsense. The mind is what the living brain of an organism does. It is more like an act than a series of processes, but that is what it is: a series of neuro-cognitive processes, which have a "one to one" mapping (1:1) to biochemical processes that the brain undergoes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but then I would humbly argue that the same can be said for the case on an inanimate object, such as a stone. As soon as a stone forms, no matter how "rudiementary" (whatever that means, in absence of values), there is always something about the stone and other inorganic objects that cannot be so described.
And what is that? OOO calls them "real qualities". They are inaccessible by definition. Think of it like the Kantian distinction between "phenomenon" and "noumenon", but in the sense of "appearance" and "reality". Inanimate things relate to each other in the same ontological sense that a living subject relates to an inorganic object. The flame that burns the ball of cotton does not access what the cotton is as a thing-in-itself, it only accesses an appearance, in the way that cotton "presents itself", "makes itself manifest" to the flame.
Quoting Wayfarer
I see what you're saying there, but I think Aristotle got it wrong there. And I say that as a rogue Aristotelian.
Quoting Wayfarer
So? That's not exclusive to living beings. A tornado, for example, is the sort of object that Carmichael calls "event-based object", distinct from what he calls "lump-like object". Organisms are event-based objects. It does not follow from there that they have something different, in that regard, from inanimate objects, since tornadoes are similar to organisms in that sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course it resists reduction. It's emergent, in a literal sense, it is real emergence. Again, why is this a big deal to you? I'm not a reductionist in that sense, and neither is Bunge. I'm all for emergence, it's one of the premises of my personal philosophy (though I would prefer to deduce it as a theorem instead of merely postulating it as axiom, but that's Off Topic).
Again, where is the disagreement between us, exactly, @Wayfarer? Because, honestly, I can't see it. The only difference between our philosophies, as far as I can see, is some sort of Aesthetic difference, and only that.
Language and the symbolic forms which characterise the cellular activities of organisms cannot be reduced solely to chemistry. That’s one implication of biosemiotics, hence why I mention it.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
What about a stone cannot be described in terms of its physical attributes and chemical composition? The distinction between stones and organisms is that organisms maintain homeostasis, they grow, evolve and seek sustenance. They distinguish themselves from their sorrounding environment by a membrane or enclosure. In what way do stones do anything analogous to that?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
How?
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
What does 'access' mean? Fire doesn't 'access' anything, it is a chemical reaction.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Bunge's materialism was rooted in a rejection of dualism, idealism, and other metaphysical views that he considered unscientific. Scientism, in other words. Emergence is just a useful gap-filler to account for the many attributes of life and mind that are left out by physicalism.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
Chalk and cheese :-)
Right, so think of the OP this way:
The Living Subject is like a dot. It is surrounded by a sea of Blind Spot. Then it Phenomenologizes on an Ontological level, and it concludes, from inference-to-best-hypothesis that Realism is "More True", in an important sense, than idealism and materialism. It is "conceptually superior", so to speak, in a purely formal way. It has nothing to do with materiality as such.
But then, The Living Subject looks at the world. The Subject forgets about itself, ontologically speaking. It becomes "metaphorically blind". And thus you are now in the state of awareness that you are already familiar with: the state of awareness of ordinary life.
At that point of your own phenomenology journey, one becomes a materialism. Matter is just the brute fact that there is a physical world outside of your consciousness. The world just imposes itself upon you like that. And if one were to ask? What is the reason, for such a fact?
Well... That's what we all want to know. That is why we all philosophize.
And yes, I said what I said, even grammatically. I will not edit that part.
The blind spot is a well-known phenomenon which arises where the optic nerve attaches to the cornea. As a consequence there is a blind spot in the middle of your field of vision. It can be detected by gazing at a piece of paper with two crosses on it, and moving the paper back and forth in your field of vision. One of the crosses will become invisible at a certain point. That is the 'blind spot'.
The Blind Spot uses that as a metaphor for the exclusion of consideration of the subject from the scientific method. As a consequence of this methodical exclusion, there is an 'absolutisation of the objective' - the attitude that anything worth knowing, can be known by means of science. But this forgets that science is still a human undertaking, carried out by subjects, who make decisions as to what to study and to consider.
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
That is a fair description, but the point the article makes is the distorting influence of this on the modern world view. That 'state of awareness of ordinary life' is what Husserl calls 'the natural attitude'.
So, you're analysis is on point in some ways, but the recently-published book lays it out in much more detail including an historical account of how it developed in history and what the consequences are.
You remarked before, that whatever philosophy you have, should have the consequence of a more humane outlook. I agree wholeheartedly. But materialism cannot do that, because it fails to recognise the fundamental distinction between beings and things. As far as it is concerned, beings are simply complex things. The subject is simply an emergent phenomenon and is basically unreal. Whatever can't be subjected to objective analysis and measurement is relegated to secondary or derivative status. This is why materialist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett believe that the mind must be eliminated from scientific discourse, as there is no real objective way of accounting for its attributes (which is the 'hard problem of consciousness'.)
Quoting Arcane Sandwich
'First, there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is' ~ Zen Koan. (Interpretation.)
I agree that this is a problem, comparable to reification. One should not absolutize what is not absolute to begin with, just as one should not "thingify" what is not a thing, just as one should not reify what is not a res. And one should certainly not objectify what is not an object. That, is one possible argument, and further line of inquiry.
Yet, for the very same reason, you seem to be suggesting that one should not materialize what is not material. And I would agree with you: that should not be done. It would be a category mistake to do even do such a thing.
But then you seem to be suggesting that one should not idealize what is not idea. And I expressed, even said plainly, that I agree with you: one should not do such a thing. It would be a category mistake to even do such a thing.
So I sincerely do not understand what is the actual difference between our Philosophies. The only difference that I perceive, the only difference truly "worthy" of the name, is a difference-making Aesthetic difference, and only that. Allow me to explain what I mean, with the help of a metaphor. Speaking less formally, here's the "picture" that I would suggest as a conceptual metaphor of "what I've been saying" in this specific Thread.
It is, as you already know, the symbol of the Yin and the Yang. We can "appeal to erudition" if you want, in this discussion, yet I would begin in a non-erudite way. In other words, I would "go about it" as a commoner would, because that is precisely what Wikipedia does:
Quoting Wikipedia
But you've said a number of times that you advocate scientism and materialism. Scientism is the belief that science is the adjuticator of all knowledge, materialism the belief that only the physical is real, and everything is reducible to it. The Blind Spot is arguing against those beliefs. So you can't agree with both sides.
OK, I can't leave this just like this. Let me invent an excuse for it (yep, 100% honesty mode right not).
First of all, the syntax. It's not necessarily wrong. Because what I clumsily said in my original quote might qualify as a garden path sentence.
So, what I said, now means "At that point of your own phenomenology (your personal Phenomenological) journey, one becomes (through a process of increasing abstraction), a "materialism" in the sense that one has forgotten about oneself as a subject in the ontological sense of the term.
How about that?
Hmmm... Do I agree with this? This is the part where it becomes a complicated discussion. Just for the record, no, I do not believe that materialism is a tendency at a certain point to the development of cultures. Maybe it was in the past, in some instances. But it is not today, and has not been, for a very long time. And, honestly speaking, I don't think that materialism will ever be in a position to "get that back", so to speak. But that is of no important consequence, for "materialism" is not my only premise. Whatever deficiencies materialism might have as a premise, it compensates for its weakness by drawing strength from the other premises of the system, premises such as realism, atheism, and scientism. Lately, I've been considering the public addition of literalism to that list, but the system already had it as a "secret" axiom.
In any case, I don't see why I would switch the term "materialism" for the term "idealism". What do you "get out of" idealism that you don't get out of materialism? What "objective benefits" does idealism bring to the table, that materialism can't bring? I'm listening.
Do you understand the difference between them? Not according to your personal philosophy, but what would be said in an encylopedia or what you would say if you were asked to explain it for an exam question. An objective explanation.
Right. But I'm just stupid like that, mate. I mean, if that's how you want to phrase this talk, then I'll tell you that I'm just plain stupid. As in, you're literally smarter than me. So, should I feel bad about that? I don't don't think so. I genuinely don't see how our Philosophies are different, @Wayfarer. I appreciate the fact that you're trying to explain to me that there even is a difference to begin with, but my brain just can't process such a notion, so I'm kindly asking for a more simple, common-sense friendly explanation, if you would be so kind.
Unless, of course, you tell me that you are somehow unable to do such a thing.
Like Wikipedia.
Quoting Wayfarer
Then I would explain it like so. Materialism is the black part of the Ying Yang, Idealism is the white part of the Ying Yang. Apply the rest of the ying-yang theory accordingly.
So, again, what I call the absolute, can be pictured like the symbol of the ying-yang. So, let us proceed:
I declare that the Phenomenological Subject is the "white dot" inside the black part that is Materialism. And I also declare that the Noumenological Object is the "black dot" inside the part that is Idealism.
And that, is what I call "The Absolute". Its truth is in its Spirit, not in its Letter. Its Law, however, is outside of itself as mere symbol, and its Chaos is what we do with...
... well, you "catch my drift", so to speak.
EDIT: And what I call "The Blind Spot of Science", is the black dot in the white part: what I have called the Noumenological Object.
And what I call "The Blind Spot of Phenomenology" is the white dot in the black part: what I have called the Phenomenological Subject.
EDIT 2: From the preceding hypotheses (for they are only that), the following can be deduced:
The Blind Spot of Science = The Noumenological Object
The Blind Spot of Phenomenology = Phenomenological Subject
Perhaps that makes no sense. Either way, there are 2 possible expressions that I have not used yet:
1) The "noumenological subject", which would be the Scientist as a subject (i.e., the scientific subject, as distinct from the phenomenological subject), and:
2) The "phenomenological object", which would be the object related to intentional consciousness.
EDIT 3: The scientific subject (also known as the noumenological subject) wishes to know, from a scientific standpoint (that is, from what Husserl calls "the natural attitude"), what is the noumenological object (the world itself, as science understands it, as existing independently of all subjects, both scientific as well as phenomenological).
In doing so, the scientific subject forgets about its constitutive blind spot, which is none other than the noumenological object itself, it is the way that the world is, which science cannot access. This awareness has somewhat of a "bracketing effect" on the scientific subject, in the sense that the "scientific" part is "bracketed out" by a sort of "sui generis époché). In other words, the "scientific" part is momentarily ignored, and only "the subject" remains. But that mere subject quickly becomes a phenomenological subject, which gazes at the world in an attempt to intuit the essences of the phenomenological objects in general, as related to that very same subject that is conscious of them.
However, there is also the realization that the subject may freely flow from one state of awareness to the other, and vice-versa.
EDIT 4: The white dot is the idealistic part of materialism, and the black dot is the materialist part of idealism. There is usually some idealism within materialism as a philosophy, and there is usually some materialism within idealism as a philosophy.
(I bailed on it after about 20 minutes but I’ll leave it here.)