Reflections on Realism
Experience is the data we have to work with. One can either work with experience, or one can simply cease thinking. The scientific method does not get one past this, as all it does is compare hypotheses to experience. Whatever you think reality is, experience is how we humans relate to it -- and we can only deal with it as we relate to it.
We do not and cannot have omniscience, so it is a trap to make omniscience the paradigm case of knowing. "Knowing" names a human activity. So as soon as you say "we do not know," you're abusing the foundations of language. "Reality" first means what we encounter in experience. So, if you say "we do not experience reality," you are again abusing language.
When you make "reality" mean more than, or something other than, what we encounter in experience, you're creating a mental construct. If you create that construct, and then claim that what you have constructed is inaccessible, you have said absolutely nothing about what we encounter in experience.
Doubt is an act of will. I can will to doubt anything, including my own consciousness, as eliminative materialists such as Dennett have chosen to do. What one cannot do is eliminate what we experience. We experience ourselves as subjects and everything else as objects. I know what I experience and no act of will, no doubt, can make me not know it.
Of course, I may misinterpret what I experience. I may think the elephant I experience is in nature rather than the result of intoxication. Still, if I did not have experiences I know to be veridical, I could not judge others to be errant.
We do not and cannot have omniscience, so it is a trap to make omniscience the paradigm case of knowing. "Knowing" names a human activity. So as soon as you say "we do not know," you're abusing the foundations of language. "Reality" first means what we encounter in experience. So, if you say "we do not experience reality," you are again abusing language.
When you make "reality" mean more than, or something other than, what we encounter in experience, you're creating a mental construct. If you create that construct, and then claim that what you have constructed is inaccessible, you have said absolutely nothing about what we encounter in experience.
Doubt is an act of will. I can will to doubt anything, including my own consciousness, as eliminative materialists such as Dennett have chosen to do. What one cannot do is eliminate what we experience. We experience ourselves as subjects and everything else as objects. I know what I experience and no act of will, no doubt, can make me not know it.
Of course, I may misinterpret what I experience. I may think the elephant I experience is in nature rather than the result of intoxication. Still, if I did not have experiences I know to be veridical, I could not judge others to be errant.
Comments (418)
The first thing I'd wonder is if that's really the way all phenomena are to you. For example, it's never for you just that there's a tree, say. It's always that you have something like "I'm a conscious entity, aware of a tree" present?
For me, there's often just a tree (or whatever).
If I make:
1) Reality synonymous with actuality,
2) Experience an awareness event, and
3) Awareness a perceptive and/or cognisant condition,
have we made similar assertions?
Quoting Dfpolis
All else being equal, it is impossible to cease thinking and remain a rational agent. If thinking is necessary, and if thinking is the means with experience its ends, then experience is equally necessary, which implies data is contingent, in as much as not all data is experience. If that is reasonable, then I submit a reformation of the quote to: data we have to work with is experience.
This is one reason the question of whether it's always the case of not just "tree" but "I'm conscious of a tree" (see my post above) is important.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, trees are often just present. Often they are not even identified. It is only when we fix on this or that aspect of experience that we distinguish trees and even ourselves as subjects. We are aware of the whole complex, but that does not mean that we have focused on any aspect of it so as to conceptualize/categorize it.
Right, but this can be rephrased to one has an experience of a body perceiving things with senses, which provides us an experience of a world that we bodily inhabit.
In this phrasing, it's experience all the way down, which leaves up the question of whether there is something behind the experience, like a vat, demon or material world.
It depends on how you explicate your terms.
1) What does "actuality" mean to you? Is it accessible, or quarantined?
2) Are you thinking of "events" as disjoint, or simply points in a continuum we happen to be fixed upon? And, how do you conceive awareness?
3) By "Awareness" i mean what makes intelligibility known. So, it rises above sensory perception in that we can perceive and respond in complex ways without being aware in the sense required to know.
If I've over analyzed what you said, forgive me.
"Data" means what is given, and it is given exclusively in experience. I do not see any other way for there to be data. We even find out about our innate capabilities/propensities in the experience of using them. If, for example, I had an innate fear of 8-legged things, I would find out in experiencing my response to one -- and not as a priori content independent of experience.
I don't think that reflective thinking is the means of experience. I think that reflective thought is how we seek to integrate experience into a comprehensible whole.
Please forgive me if I missed your point.
I don't think we start by positing that. Rather we seek to organize our experience by classifying it, and in doing so we come to concepts that include our body. We come to understand things in terms of objects (ostensible unities) that persist and learn the conditions under which we can and cannot encounter them. It is out of such considerations that we develop notions of body, senses and sensible objects.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You will need to expand on this, as I don't see your point. The center of our subjectivity is not given as material and so not as a body.
1) Actuality is accessible through perception (sensation effect).
2a) Events as points in a continuum we happen to be fixed upon.
2b) Awareness consists of perception and cognisance (automatic and/or controlled acknowledgement).
3) Automatic cognisance is recognition (identification based on association with tacit knowledge)), controlled cognisance is cognitive appraisal (evaluation of context involving slow brain pathway processing through frontal lobes)), and automatic and controlled cognisance is appraisal (Two-Process Model per Smith & Kirby, 2009; or Multilevel Sequential Check Model per Scherer, 2001).
Sure. So going from that to "this is something I'm perceiving" etc. is theoretical, isn't it? That is, it's literally invoking a theory about what's going on.
I agree experience is all we have to work with empirically, but I wouldn’t call experience “data”. I understand you to mean the thinking subject draws on extant experience for his subsequent judgements, so experience does serve as a database. Of sorts. I guess.
Nevertheless, when you say Quoting Dfpolis and if “data is given exclusively in experience”, implies there can be no data outside our experience. If there is no data outside our experience we are presented with two absurdities, 1.) we should know everything because all the experience we have is all the data there is, or 2.) data and experience are congruent which would force the impossibility of misunderstandings.
Be that as it may, I accept the gist of what you’re saying in the OP, so my little foray into the sublime can be disregarded without offense.
It depends on how you define "theory." If you mean a hypothetical structure, then, no, it is not a theory. If you mean a way of organizing experience, then yes, noting that certain things (trees) are equally capable of evoking the concept
1. I have not assumed or implied that our experience exhausts being. I have only said that our concept of reality begins with what we experience. ("'Reality' first means what we encounter in experience.") We say "seeing is believing," not because seeing is exhaustive, or even inerrant, but because our concept of reality begins with things that can act on us in experience. I left out that we expand the extension of our concept of reality (being) far beyond this humble beginning because I was discussing the relation between experience and reality.
I think the problem is that we are not defining "data" in the same way. I am defining it as what is experienced, not things that could be experienced or known indirectly. You seem to be defining it as what we could know. I agree that\ much more is intelligible than we actually know, than our actual data.
2. I agree that being is not fully congruent with human understanding, but I think every experience is caused by an existent adequate to cause it. Our errors of understanding are due to misjudging/interpreting/classifying what we experience -- not to mis-experiencing. The adequate cause of my experience might be a neurological disorder -- and in time I might learn to recognize it for what it is. (As John Forbes Nash did.) Usually, the cause of my experience is just what I judge it to be.rly.
Quoting Mww
Even misunderstandings are opportunities for both parties to learn to communicate more clearly.
My question is: is this empiricism, rationalism, or neither (such as in Kant’s view)?
The argument is mine. I'm a moderate, Aristotelian-Thomistic realist, who thinks that we can have different projections of reality, which is to say that we can represent the same reality using different conceptual spaces.
I understand the gist. My question specifically is: is there knowledge that can come from something other than sense data, or that doesn’t have as its foundation, sense experience?
My other question is: in the case of JF Nash, he had insight into his illness. Someone else may not have this insight. Does someone who hallucinates and doesn’t recognize it not have useful knowledge of reality?
For example, how does a baby know how to suck on a bottle? Isn’t this an example of innate knowledge? If not, why? Don’t we already know things coming into this world that aren’t derived from sense experience?
I’m sorry to bombard you. This is just very interesting to me. I’m sure you’ve heard of the neuroscience experiment involving “the God helmet.” It’s a helmet that electrically stimulates a part of the brain that when stimulated causes people to report having “spiritual experiences,” or seeing “God.” Since this is hardwired in our brains, what does this tell us about reality?
After reading W. T. Stace, I started taking mystical experience seriously. I now think it is veridical, but not (usually) informative. It is veridical in that it is exactly what one would expect from an experience of God, but not informative because God is unlimited and information is the reduction of possibility. I think that a few mystics, such as John of the Cross, have grasped empirical reality via their awareness of God, but that this is extremely rare.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
I don't know that "useful" is a relevant criterion for knowledge. I would say that if you don't know you are hallucinating, you could learn to recognize it, as Nash did, but in the meantime, you will be holding false views.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
It is an example of instinctive behavior. If the child were old enough, it could know that had such instincts. I do not think that we should confuse behavioral propensities/desires with knowledge. For example adolescents have a sex drive, but not an innate knowledge of the mechanics of intercourse. It is rather that the things they want to do will get them there.
The "God's Helmet" experiments could not be replicated and are now considered debunked (by researchers in Holland, if memory serves -- I wrote about it in my book). The "results" were explained by suggestion.
But, supposing we had such a propensity, we would learn of it when we experienced its activation -- just as male transsexuals learn that they are "girls." Many people see religious behavior as a reflection of such a propensity.
I don’t know. Perhaps two teenagers without knowledge of intercourse were marooned on a desert island. Certainly they would figure out what to do. Calling it “instinct” or “innate knowledge” is splitting hairs in my view.
Well......there ya go. I’m a transcendental idealist, who must be an empirical realist by inclusion. I support different projections of reality, but adhere to the thesis that because there is some general empirical data, re: experience and therefore knowledge, potentially common to all rational humans, reality in and of itself is most probably one iteration of all those various and sundry individual projections.
Yes, we think of data differently, but herein I think we are both right with respect to what we each are saying.
Yes, we cannot mis-experience. Odd, isn’t it? We can easily misunderstand, misjudge, and even if those have philosophical explanations, we never characterize our experiences, in and of themselves, as missed. That bell cannot be un-rung.
I suppose I agree with this.
I am in agreement with both of you. I understand the Critique of Pure Reason and see what it says as the best model of reality that I’ve encountered. What @Dfpolis describes seems in line with it except for his caveat in the “Foundations of Mathematics” thread regarding the “radiance of objects” or however he put it. Df is quite the philosopher! For someone with his knowledge base, he is very skilled at putting things into easily digestible chunks. Thank you, both.
What are they aware of? Not some intellectual content, but a desire. In a sense it is knowledge, but not in the same sense that awareness of intelligibility is.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
I thought about it. Then I agreed with you.
I am not sure I understand this. Are you saying, that as a projection, reality is a construct? That seems odd for an empiricist, for to be an empiricist, one must stand ready to be surprised by reality, and our own constructs have a hard time surprising us.
I would say that we try to model reality, and the more projections we incorporate into our model, the more adequate to reality it will be.
You are welcome. The term was "radiance of action."
Pretty much covers it, yep.
Minor distinction, perhaps. I consider projections of reality our expressions about it. Reality itself is that which is given to us. Reality comes in via perception, projections go out via understanding.
Do I get a ribbon? Just kidding.
I don’t do ribbons.
Gold star, now. That’s worth awarding.
Have a couple.
:starstruck:
To me a projection is first some aspect of reality existentially penetrating us -- projecting itself into us -- and second, our fixing on some part of that presentation and projecting it into our conceptual space. Each of these steps is represents a potential loss of content and so is a projection in the mathematical sense of a dimensionally diminished mapping.
"Theoretical"--basically in the sense of reasoning about something, coming up with an account of "what's realy going on" contra the phenomena in question, etc.
The point is that phenomena that are present aren't actually always of one as a conscious being experiencing things. The only way to move away from realism with respect to experience is to introduce theoretical explanations for what's really going on.
Quoting Dfpolis
This requires a more in depth discussion to distinguish the differences.
...
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think it is naming, not theorizing. In what way does "this is something I'm perceiving" go beyond our experience? I think Maritain's analysis is on point. He sees us as mentally dividing in abstraction, and then joining what was divided in the act of judgement.
So, here we are aware of the integrated act of my tree perception; seeing in it mentally separable notes of intelligibility (
So, there is reasoning going on -- specifically mental separation and reunification, -- but there is no new, constructive element being added.
It is not an account of "what's really going on." For that you have to wait for something like Aristotle's analysis in De Anima iii. All the judgement is doing is explicating a unified experience.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I have no desire to move away from realism. I think you're confusing realism with naivete.
Feel free to ask for clarifications.
I don’t understand Terrapin, either.
Fair enough. Cheers.
Quoting Dfpolis
I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.
IOW, is there a second, third, fourth (etc) elaboration of the meaning of reality (what we encounter in experience)?
So something wasn't understood about the question I'm asking.
First, just to clarify, I was referring to phenomena that are present in general. Whether those phenomena are "experience" qua experience or not needs to be left unanalyzed for the question I'm asking. (The point here is merely that the term "experience" can come with a lot of connotational baggage that I'm trying to avoid, because otherwise one won't understand the question I'm asking.)
And then the question was whether sometimes the phenomena that are present aren't simply things like trees, rivers, etc.
This is to say that the phenomenon present sometimes is not "I am perceiving this tree," but simply a tree. In other words, there's no conscious notion, awareness, etc. of perceiving something per se (or of conceiving, etc.) There's just a tree.
If it's the case that the phenomenon present can sometimes just be the tree, then the phenomenon present on that occasion will not be "I am perceiving a tree." So, for those occasions, "I am perceiving a tree" is doing something theoretical (as I'm using that term) that isn't present in the phenomenon it's about.
Granted, but what is a model but a construct? Whether model or construct presupposes that which is its cause, which in its turn presupposes a necessary displaced orientation of it. That is, because it is reason modeling, the cause absolutely must be oriented exclusive to reason, otherwise reason is merely modeling itself, from which knowledge of the model cannot be distinguished from knowledge of the cause of the model. Hence, empirical realism, and the inescapable aspect of epistemological dualism associated with it.
Everydayman is seldom surprised by reality, but he is exposed to precious little of it, and that of which he is exposed is rather tedious. This can be explained by theorizing that data, re: information, generating experience, once so generated, is no longer considered information, for it provides no new knowledge. But give to his sensibility something for which he has no ready conception, he should be all the more surprised by what little he really knows.
Of course there is. We call these shoes philosophy and natural science. In my view, the goal of philosophy is to provide us with a framework for understanding the full range of human experience. Natural science seeks to discover general principles for understanding objective reality in abstraction from the knowing subject.
Of course. Sometimes they are experiences of reflective thought, meditation, dreams, pains and joys, etc. Over time we learn to divide the content of experience into "self" and "other" categories. How this is possible is a profound open question in my view.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I would not call "I am perceiving this tree," a phenomenon, but a refection on a phenomenon. The tree presents itself, is apprehended (or not). Then, we can stop to reflect on the experience, or not. Quine's analysis of introspection in the Concept of Mind is deeply flawed. We don't have separate awarenesses of the tree and of ourselves perceiving the tree, but a single awareness that can be reflected upon and articulated in various ways. Aquinas understood that we come to know our intellectual powers not in se, but in actu, i.e. by reflecting on what we do.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I agree that often the intelligibility of the knowing subject is not actualized. Still, the knowing subject is always intelligible in acts of awareness. Awareness makes no sense absent a subject being aware.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This misunderstands "I am perceiving a tree." It is not a phenomenon, but the result of actualizing/articulating intelligibility already present in the perception of a tree. So, if you see theories as adding content, that isn't happening here. Theory theory is wrong.
That was a lot to type that shows nothing at all as to whether you now understand what I was asking you.
All I'm interested in is whether my post made it any clearer to you what I'm asking you. Because I want to ask you what I did (ask you), I want you to answer it, and I want to move on with that as a starting point. Otherwise I can't get at what I'm trying to get at with you.
Again, what showed that you didn't understand what I was asking you was this comment: "I think it is naming, not theorizing. In what way does 'this is something I'm perceiving' go beyond our experience?" That question doesn't make sense in the context of the question I asked and your initial response to it.
Just to make it clear, I asked, "The first thing I'd wonder is if that's really the way all phenomena are to you. For example, it's never for you just that there's a tree, say. It's always that you have something like 'I'm a conscious entity, aware of a tree' present? For me, there's often just a tree (or whatever)."
And you said, "Yes, trees are often just present."
So "In what way does 'this is something I'm perceiving' go beyond our experience?" doesn't make sense in the context of the question I asked and your initial answer to it. "Just a tree" is not the same thing as "This is something I'm perceiving."
That suggests that maybe you didn't really understand the question.
Models mix abstracted and constructed elements. They are not pure constructs or they would have no relation to the reality modeled. When we combine divers abstracted projections of the same reality, there are invariable gaps because no human understanding is exhaustive, so we fill these gaps with constructs that may not even be consciously added.
Quoting Mww
I do not understand this sentence. What does "a necessary displaced orientation of it" mean?
Quoting Mww
Our reason is intentional (manifesting "aboutness" per Brentano). Thus, it points beyond itself.
Quoting Mww
As I explained above, models combine abstracted and constructed elements. Since we can distinguish them, we can differentiate what we add (what occurs in the model, but not necessarily in what is modeled) from the portions of the model abstracted from reality. So, there is no need for epistemological dualism.
Quoting Mww
I agree we know precious little and should always be open to surprise.
If reality is "what we encounter in experience" and experience is "the data we have to work with", then reality is: what we encounter in the data we have to work with.
What is objective reality, and does it require subjective reality?
No problem.
Does it make sense to you that "(Just a) tree" is different than "I am perceiving a tree"?
So the experience (again, I was trying to avoid that word--we could just say the phenomena) of:
<<(just a) tree>>
would be different than the experience (phenomena of):
<>
Does that make sense to you?
Reality is "objective" to the extent that it can enter into the subject-object relation of knowledge, which is to say insofar as it is intelligible. It can be intelligible without being actually known by a subject. So, we know that there is objective reality when we actualize its intelligibility, but our knowing is not a condition of its existence.
Are hallucinations real?
Trees exist in the same way that other people do - as perceived objects independent of my perception of them. If we are going to question the existence of trees as "just trees", then what about "just people"? How do biological organisms with brains exist independent of my perception of them? This forum is full of idealists questioning the existence of objects independent of us, yet contradict themselves when they talk about other minds, or talk about people, as if they are sure there are more than one. If we are going to question the existence trees independent of perception, then why are we not applying the same skepticism to the existence of other minds? Once you question realism, you slide down the rabbit hole of solipsism, and there is no such thing as a middle ground (ie. idealism) because that would be a contradiction.
Yes.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes. The first is an experience of a tree, the second the experience of making a judgement about experiencing a tree. My point was that while the form of these is different, their matter is the same. The judgement adds no content. It only actualizes content already present.
Yes. They are real experiences potentially informing us of the reality of some neurological disorder.
This makes no sense to me. The first is just a tree. That's all it is phenomenally. The second is phenomenally the tree plus phenomenally the notion of a self, an I, the notion of a perception (or if you want to say a judgment).
Just a tree doesn't have a notion of self, of perception, etc.
So how are they the same?
I think this is right.
Quoting Dfpolis
So, they are an encountered experience type of experience potentially informing us of the encountered experience of some neurological disorder.
This is nonsense.
But if you say that phenomena (experiences) refer to real things, as in the phenomenon of a tree refers to a real tree out there, and the phenomenon of consciously experiencing a tree refers to a real conscious being experiencing a tree, then the phenomenon of a ghost refers to a real ghost out there, and the phenomenon of water refers to real water out there.
You may never have encountered the phenomenon of a ghost but others claim to have, so are ghosts really out there but only some people can see them?
You may have encountered the phenomenon of water in the distance while encountering the phenomenon of a hot day, and then as you got closer the phenomenon of water started disappearing until it disappeared completely. Does that mean that there was really water out there but as you got closer it progressively disappeared?
First, you're missing the point that if you're positing an "out there" (versus an "in here") you're a realist.
Saying there is no object that is perceived as it is independently of the perceiver is not saying that there is nothing beyond perception, of course if you assume there is nothing beyond perception you end up with solipsism, idealism doesn't make that assumption.
I'm not missing that point because in that post I put on the realist shoes, so to speak. Remove the "out there" if you want, the point still stands, in realism encountering the phenomena of a ghost or of a god or of water means that they refer to real things.
That would have nothing to do with anything I was talking about, but it doesn't follow. Realists don't believe that we can't have false beliefs, that we can't experience hallucinations, etc.
I actually think this might be a better model than Kant’s from Critique of Pure Reason. Df’s model isn’t saying that time and space are mental constructs projected on the world as Kant said, and I kind of have a problem with that aspect of CPoR.
Can you explain this, though?
@Dfpolis
Terrapin, if I understand him, believes that there is a direct apprehension of the physical world. There is nothing lost in perceiving. He doesn’t buy the cognitive science theory of perception.
Did I get that right, Terrapin?
So, dreaming does not count as perception, but imagination? This question has long been thematic in the East:
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
? Zhuangzi, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang-Tzu
We seem to be perceiving when we dream, just as when we are awake. Of course it is a merely logical requirement that if we are perceiving something, then there must be something being perceived. But perception is the result of something acting upon us, as well as us acting upon what acts upon us, and what we seem to perceive is not necessarily precisely the same as what is acting upon us.
A common connotation of "perception" is that it's referring information obtained via one's senses--via your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or via touch.
Other questions might be as to whether proprioception, and introception are forms of perception. When we think how do we know we are thinking? Because we are aware of ourselves thinking and/or of the thoughts we are having, no? If so, then thinking might be counted as a kind of perception
Quoting Dfpolis
Close enough.
————————
Quoting Dfpolis
Abstraction has multiple meanings and applications, and as much as I detest running to a damn dictionary for clarification.....here I go running away, but only to forward a guess about your intention in using the word: “the process of considering something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments”. I submit that’s diametrically opposed to what we do when we think; all thought is associative, insofar as understanding is the synthesis of intuition with conception, the epitome of an a priori construct. That which is constructed, is the model of whatever object affects perception, better known as representation.
———————
Do you agree empirical realism does not diminish the theory that the human cognitive system is representational? If so, then I don’t understand how epistemological dualism can be denied.
But that’s OK. No worries. We hold with different metaphysical predicates, is all.
Fine. It’s a free country, doncha know. Plus Brentano is all of half a century more modern than that crazy old fart from PRUSSIA, which doesn’t even exist anymore!!! (Grin)
Don’t mind me.....I’m just sittin’ here wonderin’.....what mechanism does reality use to project itself?
Light?
And perception?
Ergo, reality ceases to exist when there isn’t any? Or reality is still all there, just doesn’t project itself in the absence of wavelengths we can see? I can experience the reality of electrical shock in the dark. Trust me on that one.
The eyes receive the light radiated or projected off of objects. The ears receive sound waves that moving and colliding objects create through the air. The nose receives compounds in the air, etc. Consciousness draws distinctions between different percepts by creating distinct objects, projecting borders onto reality from a mental construct, creating a visual field. Sounds are a kind of given phenomenal experience, but direction of where the sound is coming from can be determined by which ear the sound waves hit first. Smell is picking up projections from objects’ vapors so to speak, etc.
That’s an electric field projected from certain objects. Duh!
Gimme back those gold stars.
You haven’t said anything that isn’t reducible to human cognition. I asked for the mechanism for reality projecting itself, but I got back how it affects us, which is not its projection but is merely our own receptivity.
You presume realism here when you say that. Not saying it's wrong, just pointing that out.
I don’t know what realism is.
Fine. Again. Square one.
So what mechanism does reality use to project itself?
Why don’t we just say reality appears to us, rather than projecting itself? That way we don’t need a projection mechanism for reality......it’s just there. Besides, reality can project itself to hell and back, but it’s completely irrelevant to us, until we are affected by that minuscule part of it we perceive, or can possibly perceive.
That’s fine with me, too. Tomaytoe. Tomahtoe.
The light bouncing off objects is within our perceptual experience. If we project that out as the transcendental conditions that give rise to perception then we have committed to some form of realism.
Not saying you’re wrong, just wondering how projection would work, as you see it.
Six of one, half dozen of the other, when it’s all said and done.
:grin: I think we philosophers just confuse ourselves with our different uses of language.
Exactly, wtf does it really matter? Thinking one way or the other would not seem to change anything regarding what we experience.
Yeah, I’m a transcendental idealist which includes realism, I think?
What about idealism; do you know what that is? Be fucked if I do!
But transcendental idealism may carry the connotation that the fundamental reality is mind (although Kant would never say that, because that would be tantamount to Berkeleyism, which he was at pains to distance himself from) and that is how it seems to be often interpreted by those on these forums I have encountered who identify themselves as transcendental idealists.
I agree with all of this. The mind doesn’t just construct time, space, and frames of reference, but also draws borders and delineates objects, so that we don’t directly apprehend reality. We perceive an independent reality that is most likely at least somewhat different than than how we construct it in our minds. There is truth to materialism. There is truth to idealism, but not Berkeley’s conception of idealism.
They’re just plain wrong.
Yes, but to posit those as "mental constructs" seems to imply that mind is somehow fundamental, since it, on this view, constructs the world.
The other way of parsing this would be to say that reality is a quantum process, wherein time and space are irrelevant, nonexistent, and that all apparent objects along with the spacetime in which they appear are somehow emanated from the quantum vacuum. Then the question becomes as to whether we think of the quantum vacuum as some kind of [s]mental reality[/s] (transcendental idealism) or some kind of [s]physical reality[/s] (transcendental realism). For me the question seems to lose all meaning at this point, so I identify as neither an idealist or realist in this context.
Definitely an empirical realist, though!
The other issue is that we might think that the four forces of nature, along with mind, matter, energy, time, space and everything else as having their provenance only within human cognition.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
To my knowledge he very explicitly does identify his position as being that. Since Kant, though more sophisticated, plausible models (informed by QM and Information theory) of transcendental realism have evolved. See, for example, Indirect Realism, Ontic Structural Realism and other forms of "relational" realism.
Anyway, I've enjoyed conversing with you, someone who seems to actually have an open mind, but I've got to go do some work now. :yikes:
It's a hard life! :cry: :groan:
Likewise.
Quoting Janus
I haven’t made up my mind on the hard problem. I don’t think there is an easy solution. It’s unknown.
It may be hard to solve right now, it being so private, but a great penultimate step would be to surround it by localizing it to the brain.
That seems like common sense, but I’m not sure that that would necessarily be metaphysically coherent with the rest of human knowledge. It remains to be seen. It’s not just up to science, in my view, it’s also up to philosophers to come up with a coherent TOE.
What shows through from the brain to consciousness? What can block consciousness? What can alter consciousness?
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
So far, philosophers have it narrowed done to two: from 'Nothing' versus Eternal/Timeless as being that was never made. Note that they might converge, for, 'never made' as not from anything resembles from 'Nothing'; however, seeming paradoxically, 'Nothing' can never have being, suggesting that existence has no opposite, no alternative, and thus must be. So, the TOE has thus been limited, too.
And how does the realist get to conclude that what he experienced was a hallucination or that he had a false belief? For instance if the realist sees water in the distance and moves towards it and the water progressively disappears as he gets closer, how does he conclude that this water was an illusion and not that it was real water that progressively disappeared?
You were saying that moving away from realism requires theoretical explanations, but so does sticking to realism as soon as you invoke false beliefs or hallucinations.
Then idealism is no different than realism.
Illusions are simply misinterpretations of what is real. It only seems like water when you don't move towards it. When you move towards it, it doesn't behave like a pool of water. This is how you know it's not a pool of water.
When it is understood that it is light we see, not objects, then mirages and "bent" sticks in water is what you would EXPECT to see.
One wonders how to make sense of this. One works with hammers, data sets, roadways, and other people. Does one work with 'experience'? It's hard to know what this means. Is there a contrast here that is not just sheer negation (not-experience)? Is there some other thing that we could instead, in principle, might 'work with' besides 'experience'? The OP says 'experience' is 'how one relates to the world'. Is it? I 'relate' to the road by walking on it. I 'relate' to the hammer by hitting the nail and building the hut. I 'relate' to the other by sharing in our laughter and work. 'Experience' tends to be a shadow word, a word that looks to do conceptual work but does not. It conjures phantoms. It usually does. The OP doesn't seem to alter this situation.
If we say that what we call the physical world stems from minds, that objects do not exist independently from minds, that's not realism no. And "The physical world stems from minds" does not imply at all that "there is nothing beyond your perception" so that's not solipsism either.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It behaves like a pool of water that progressively disappears, so you don't have to conclude that it's not water.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I guess Terrapin would disagree with that, he says he encounters mostly phenomena of direct things, for instance the phenomenon of "just a tree", not the phenomenon of "light traveling from a tree towards our eyes", so how does a realist conclude that everything he sees is light reaching his eyes?
Terrapin said "The only way to move away from realism with respect to experience is to introduce theoretical explanations for what's really going on", I'm arguing that to stick with realism we have to "introduce theoretical explanations for what's really going on" all the same, unless we say that everything we experience is real.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Realism isn't simply the view that there are things that exist independent of perception and idealism isn't simply the view that only one's own subjective experiences exist.
If we look at Kant's transcendental idealism as an example, it is accepted that there are things that exist independent of perception but argued that these "noumena" are unknowable and not the objects of perception. The objects of perception – known as "phenomena" – are not independent of perception and so Kant's transcendental idealism is a kind of idealism.
So it might be clearer to say that one is a realist about some X rather than just to say that one is a realist. For example one might be a realist about the kind of fundamental entities described by our best scientific models but believe that the objects of perception – chairs, trees, people, etc. – are not reducible to these fundamental entities.
An example of a theory that suggests something like this is enactivism: "organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, ... [they] participate in the generation of meaning ... engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." Objects of perception are products of our interaction with an external world and as such are as much dependent on us as they are dependent on this external world.
Experience doesn’t amount to data unless it is interpreted. Besides, ‘experience’ is too broad a word in the context to really mean anything. You could say that if you’re not conscious, then you are unconscious, although it’s a pretty trivial tautology. But different people can share experiences, and draw completely different conclusions from them, so there’s clearly more than ‘experience’ in play.
Yes. Although as Janus pointed out to me a while ago, while he fully admits to it in the 1781 edition, as quoted below, he does not go so far in the 1787 edition. Makes one wonder who or what caused him to back off from declaring for the metaphysical doctrine he himself developed. Probably figured it was so obvious everybody should declare for it.
“...From the start we have declared ourselves in favor of this transcendental idealism, and our doctrine thus removes all difficulty in the way of accepting the existence of matter on the unaided testimony of our consciousness, or of declaring it to be proved in the same manner as to the existence of myself as a thinking being is proved...”
Bear in mind the proof spoken here is merely a logical proof, based on the concept of law, which is itself based on the principles of universality and absolute necessity. Very Aristotelian on the one hand and very Cartesian on the other.
That’s the first thing I said back on page one.
Great minds.......etc, etc, etc.
Exactly, methinks. We directly perceive, but indirectly apprehend. As dpolis says, we add elements from within us. Which is the fundamental principle grounding epistemological dualism.
The tree in the first instance does not simply exist, it exists in relation to me. I can change my relation to it by doing things to myself, not to the tree. So, encountering a tree is loaded with intelligibility about myself:
- As I can change my relation to it, there is a relation to be changed, and thus relata which I choose to name "the tree" and "myself."
- I have encountered the tree, so I am a being with the power to encounter other beings. I can call this kind of encounter "experience."
- I have the power to receive content in experiences and call this kind of receptivity "subjectivity" and so see myself as a subject in relation to a tree object.
- Etc.
All of this allows me to tease out of the encounter with the tree. The essential point is than an encounter is not a concept. I can't tease any of the above out of the bare concept
I never said otherwise. Idealists pretend it's not the case and that idealism is clearly the default however.
What's important to realize is that we have to make theoretical moves in our philosophy of perception, our basic stance on realism/idealism, whatever our stance is. Once you realize that, we can deal with the reasons why we'd choose one construct over another.
You were guessing that I was arguing that one choice didn't involve invoking theory at all, while the other did. That's not at all what I was doing. I'm trying to get "your side" to admit that you're making choices based on theoretical options. It's worth exploring how you're arriving at the theoretical options you're arriving at, what those theoretical options imply, why you'd choose them over other options, etc.
That is how implication often works. It allows us to move from the data of experience to new realities, many of which are available to experience. For example, Jane has a hallucination and seeks medical help. The doctors may do blood tests and MRIs to seek the cause. That is medicine, not nonsense.
But this is the very question I'm asking you. Isn't it ever just that there's the tree, and not the phenomenon of "the tree in relation to me." If I'm asking you if it's ever that there's JUST the tree, you can't say "Yes, that's sometimes the case" but add "it's always in relation to me"--because that latter part isn't JUST the tree, it's something else, too.
I'd say that sometimes there's just the tree (well, and just the stuff around it, too--the grass, etc.)
Carnap has a model in which the yes or no answers to logically independent questions define different dimensions in the vector space of knowledge. While I see problems with his model, I think it can be a useful analogy. (Also, it can be used in conjunction with Shannon's notion of information.)
So, when we look at the front of a house we have a projection that answers certain questions, and leaves others (e.g. those about the back of the house) unanswered. Thus, our experience spans fewer of Carnap's dimensions than exhaustive data on the house would.
This is because classification involves judgement, that may err, while experience does not. There is a many-to-one map from types of causes to types of experience. E.g., the experience of snakes might be due to reptiles or alcohol.
Dreams have a different phenomenology than perception, so the resemblance is only superficial.
This is more nonsense, given your definition of reality in terms of experience. So, we are done here.
As humans can only represent a limited number of chunks of information (typically < 8) at any time, we necessarily focus on some notes of intelligibility to the exclusion of others. That is abstraction -- taking what interests us out of its larger context.
Of course, what we do focus on has associations, but associations are not judgements. We may think of them as suggestions for reflection, not logical commitments. An analytical thinker will not commit to simply because the concept is associated with .
I am not suggesting that we either know anything a priori or make a priori commitments.
As a concrete example of a model, consider the mind. We know from experience that we are conscious, and that damage to the brain affects our capacity to process data (and other data on human data processing). Naturalists add the construct (which they do not know from experience and cannot deduce) that the brain produces consciousness by some unknown physical mechanism. So their model contains both known and constructed elements.
My model includes other experiential elements, derived from Aristotle and from mystical experience, but it also has a construct, namely that there is a physical basis for the fact that some data is available to awareness while other data processing is unavailable to awareness.
We do not construct the forms of representation (qualia) in the sense that we construct hypotheses. Rather they are, themselves, data -- part of what is given in experience. Red light makes its presence felt by evoking a response. If it did not evoke a response, we could not know it was present. The form of that response (the quale red) is contingent and quite unimportant. It is merely part of our biology in the large sense.
Quoting Mww
I take it that "empirical realism" is a term of art. I do not know how it is defined, so I decline to comment.
I will say that I do not see neural representations, or any perceptual representations, as objects distinct from what is "represented." I see them as presentations, not re-presentations. My perception of an apple is an existential penetration of me by the apple. The apple's modification of my neural state is identically my neural representation of the apple. This identity precludes any separation of perception and perceived -- any perceptual duality.
The problem, once again, is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We confuse our abstract notion of the object as contained within well-defined surfaces with the actuality of a core surrounded by a radiance of action. If an object's radiance of action were removed, the object would no longer act as it does -- would no longer be what it is. It is this radiance of action which penetrates the perceiving subject -- creating the partial identity of perceiver and perceived I described above.
In thinking. If we had no experiential content, we would have no material to think about.
Quoting StreetlightX
No.
Quoting StreetlightX
How do you know that you walk on the road, except by experiencing it? Note that I am not denying physical interaction. I am looking at the relation of thought and reality.
Quoting StreetlightX
You will have to make a case for this as I do not see it.
It can't be interpreted unless it is given -- and "datum" is just Latin for "something given."
Quoting Wayfarer
You have not said why "experience" doesn't mean anything.
I did not make any tautological claims. If you think I did, quote them.
I did not claim to give an exhaustive account of experience, or of epistemology. So, I am happy to agree that there is more to be considered than experience.
So one 'works with experience' in thinking. Experience is how we relate to the world. Does thought then exhuast our 'relation' with the world? Or since experience seems anterior to thought in this topology, is there experience which is not subject to thought? If the former than you beg the question. If the latter then you've said very little, almost nothing, about experience.
The tree as an independent existent being is ontologically prior, but logically posterior, to our perceptual encounter (the phenomenal tree). The phenomenological encounters always involve a subject.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is very confused. "Just a tree" describes a being, an intelligible object, not a phenomenon. To have a phenomenon, an appearance, there has to be a subject to which something appears. So, a subject is implicit in any phenomenon.
One can abstract the tree from the phenomenon as it is one of the relata, but an actual phenomena requires two relata: a subject and object.
As you wish.
I don't know why this is so hard, but I'm not asking you anything about that.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is what I'm asking you about. So your answer to "Isn't there (for you) sometimes just a tree phenomenally" is actually "No," it's not "Yes."
For me, phenomenally, sometimes there's just a tree. There's no subject.
Quoting Dfpolis
There's not always a subject for me phenomenally. In fact, quite often that's the case.
So then the issue is why our phenomenal experience is so different. I can't imagine having a phenomenal sense of a subject 100% of the time. And it seems that you can't imagine sometimes NOT having the phenomenal sense of a subject.
No, it does not. My statement was made in the context of the epistemological problem of realism. Taking out of that context is not helpful.
Quoting StreetlightX
No, it is not prior to thought. Experience is a species of thought.
Quoting StreetlightX
I was not trying to explicate experience, but to point out the difficulties involved in attacking realism.
Fair enough. I guess one of the main reasons I'm not a realist is that I have noticed how what I believe changes in profound ways what I experience, so in a sense the reality I see depends on what I believe. And then I can't just model what I see to conclude that my mind reduces to a brain, that conclusion isn't warranted to me, it makes more sense to me to say that what I experience depends on me in some way, whatever that 'me' is (which isn't just the body I see). I have also noticed how interacting with other people can lead them to change their beliefs and to then see a different reality, or how that can lead myself to change my beliefs. "Folie à deux" is a thing (or "folie à plusieurs"), wherein several people come to share a reality that is very different from the commonly accepted one. Of course the realist view sees it as a mental disorder ("there is only one reality so if they don't agree with ours they're crazy!"), but without assuming realism it doesn't have to be seen that way. And it seems many other people have noticed that the reality they see depends in some way on what they believe. And I think that people who always stick to the same beliefs wouldn't understand that, because they wouldn't have had that experience.
Quoting Dfpolis
So if experience is a species of thought, and experience is how we relate to reality, I'm not sure how it follows that thought does not exhaust our relation to reality. Unless of course one admits extra-experiential 'relations to reality'. Or extra-cognitive 'relations to reality in general.
Then I would ask what happens to the tree when the lights are out? Why do you need light to see anything?
Quoting leo
Realism is just one of those theoretical explanations. Idealism and solipsism are others. Anytime we attempt to get at the cause of our experience, we are introducing a theoretical explanation.
Is your mind real? Does it have causal power? If you can talk about your experiences, then they are real, no? The problem here is that we aren't be clear on what we are talking about. Are we talking about our experience, the thing we experience, or something else? When we use language we need to be more specific of what part of reality we are referring to - our experience, our perception, or the thing that we are perceiving (light or the object).
Remember that I'm a realist, but a relativist/"perspectivalist." There is only one reality, but it's not identical at any two different reference points.
Realism also doesn't imply anything about "always sticking to the same beliefs." I'm not even sure where you'd be getting that notion from.
I did not think you were. I was saying this was all that is "just a tree."
Quoting Terrapin Station
The content of an experience can be just a tree, but an experience is more than its content. By avoiding the term "experience," your question about "it" being just a tree is ambiguous.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Then there is no appearance, and so, no phenomena.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Let us be clear. I am not saying that the intelligibility of the subject is always, or even usually, actualized. I'm saying that if there is no subject, there can be no appearance, and so the subject is always intelligible/implicit/latent in any phenomenon. As it is intelligible, it can be teased out by reflection without adding new content/intelligibility. The teasing-out is actualizing intelligibility we did not previously attend to.
I'm not sure what post that was from (I just saw it because Harry Hindu was responding to it).
The question I was asking Dfpolis was about phenomena or phenomenal experience per se (though again, "experience" has a lot of baggage I was trying to avoid). The reason I was asking him that was that the first post of this thread seemed to be from the old idealist/representationalist/at-least-agnostic-on-realism standpoint, where he seemed to be saying that we can only know experience as mental events that we have. That's not what phenomena are at all limited to for me. I often have zero notion of something mental going on.
That's not saying anything about whether we perceive trees via light traveling to our eyes. But that's an issue of "what's really going on." The phenomenon, qua the phenomenon, isn't of light traveling from the tree to your eyes. That's rather theoretical.
What is that supposed to mean? It seems kind of nonsensical to me. What's the difference between "content of an experience" and "an experience"?
Quoting Michael
Sounds like realism to me. For a realist there are objects and perception of objects. The qualia of experience are not objects themselves. Many people here seem to be confusing the two. If there isn't a difference between the two, then solipsism. If there is, then (indirect) realism.
Quoting Michael
If you are a realist about some experience, but not others then you aren't being logically consistent. Experiences exist out in the world, separate from me, and within me. There are experiences that are not part of my experience. We can talk about our experiences just as we can talk about trees. Experiences are real things. Trees are real things. What is the difference?
Quoting Michael
I've talked about something similar. Our perception of X is the effect of our body's interaction with the world. When we attempt to explain some experience as the effect of some cause that isn't the same as the effect, then we are explaining some form of realism. Notice that you still use realist terms, like "organisms" and "environments". Our experience isn't an organism or an environment. It is an experience - which is a causal relationship between the two. You have experiences about organisms and environments.
Because we can relate to reality in other ways than thinking. As I said before, you are ignoring the context of "experience is how we relate to reality," which is epistemological, not physical or metaphysical. So, you are to understand "experience is how we relate to reality epistemologically."
For example, as Michael is quoted above, he says, "objects of perception – known as 'phenomena'" a la Kantianism. But that's not the only way to use the term "phenomena." Synonyms for common senses of "phenomena" (or the singular "phenomenon") include "occurrence, event, happening, fact, situation, circumstance, case, incident, episode, appearance, thing"
Personally, I don't buy any sort of phenomena/noumena distinction, no appearance/reality distinction. Appearances are what things are really like from some reference point, and there's always some reference point.
The content of an experience is the intelligibility actualized in it. The experience is the act (which happens to be that of a subject) actualizing that intelligibility. The act can be understood as an act without adding anything. When we do, we know more than the original content.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This seems reasonable. I would say that whatever the object does in presenting itself to me in these circumstances is something it can actually do in these circumstances.
What in the world is that supposed to refer to? It seems extremely gobbledygooky to me, probably because it's resting on theoretical views that I don't at all buy.
To be grasped, something has to be able to be grasped, i.e intelligible.
Grasped in what sense? "Intelligible" conventionally refers to understanding. How are you conflating understanding with experience or perception?
Understanding makes sense in semantic contexts, and it makes sense in the sense of, say, being curious about how something works and then discovering/being aware of that information. How would you apply it to experience or perception in general?
In the sense that we are aware of it. Knowledge is awareness of present intelligibility
Knowledge is awareness of present intelligibility. Intelligibility is grasping. Grasping is being aware. So Knowledge is awareness of present awareness basically. Or we could say grasping of presenting grasping.
That's gobbledygook.
I'd like to have a conversation with you, but if you're just going to keep falling back on word salad/gobbledygook it's pointless.
Also, why would you be conflating knowledge with experience or perception anyway? Are you using "knowledge" strictly in the "acquaintance" sense?
But if you say reality from some reference point is how things appear from some reference point, then I suppose you agree that when the reference point is a conscious being, what the being sees is always an experience of the being, so even though the being may encounter the phenomenon of "just a tree", it's still an experience of the being, and then doesn't that link back to what Dfpolis said in his first post, that all we have is our experiences?
I agree with that, because I believe that we're beings with bodies situated in a world, in relationships with things that are not us, where our perception works via our senses in particular ways, etc.
Again, this is different than the experience qua the experience, which can be of just a tree. The above is a theoretical account of what's going on.
Hence asking a question about experiences qua experiences versus theoretical accounts of what's going on with those experiences.
(And I already explained this to you above.)
Nothing new here.
An appearance is a reference point. Not everyone is talking about reference points (appearances). Some are talking about how objects are independent of reference points (a view from everywhere). Which one are you attempting to define as it really is - the reference point or the object? What is the nature of the tree independent of reference points?
As it shouldn't be. Now if everyone would just agree with it so I wouldn't have to point it out in contradistinction to other ideas.
Quoting Harry Hindu
There's no such thing, though. Hence the nothing new of "there's always some reference point." The reference point can be a combo of others, but it's still a reference point.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I just wrote that there is no such thing, you just quoted it, and you just said "Nothing new here." So why would you even be asking?
Sure, but it seems to me you still arrive at the same result as Dfpolis, that both in your theoretical account and his theoretical account everything we experience are experiences of a conscious being, even if the conscious being doesn't always identify them as experiences of a conscious being. I think that's relevant, I'm still thinking about how.
You can argue that the objects of perception are identical to qualia but also argue that external world things exist and are causally responsible for the experience. It's not solipsism because it argues that things other than oneself exist and it's not indirect realism because it argues that qualia aren't representations of these external world things – they might be caused by them but that's where the relationship ends.
And this thinking that idealism entails that qualia are identical to objects of perception is a false one. Think of the relationship between printed words and the story they tell. There is a logical distinction even if in terms of ontology there's just ink on paper. So there can be a logical distinction between qualia and objects of perception even if in terms of ontology there's just subjective experience (and whatever otherwise unknowable external world thing is responsible for causing it).
A reference point is a location is space-time. If there are a combination of reference points, where are they located relative to each other? I can see you looking at the tree, and you are located relative to the tree and myself. Why am I suppose to assume you exist independent of my reference point, but the tree doesn't?
Quoting Terrapin Station
You wrote it in the post above - AFTER my post, so how could I have quoted it in my post before you wrote it?
Sure, but I'm not at all endorsing representationalism, idealism, etc. Those require theoretical moves just like any other stance does. That was the point.
It depends on the points, obviously. You can't give a single answer that applies to all cases.
For example, Mars and the Eiffel Tower would have very different answers as to where all the possible reference points for each are located relative to each other, because of the different spatial arrangements, etc.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I honestly have no idea what you're asking here. It doesn't sound as if it's stemming from anything I'd say. Let me ask why you're thinking that anyone is saying that you're "supposed to" assume that some things exist independent(ly) from you but other things do not?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You quoted me saying "there's always some reference point," after which you wrote the phrase "Nothing new here."
If there is nothing but objects of perception, then solipsism is the case. If there is more, then realism is the case. It's really that simple.
Quoting Michael
I never said that is what idealism entails. I have said that there is no coherent middle ground between solipsism and realism (ie idealism). My experience is about an external world, or it isn't.
Mars and the Eiffel Tower don't have eyes and a brain. They don't have subjective experiences. How would they have reference points?
Are you saying that when I look at objects, I'm merely looking at other reference points? How is a reference point different than an object as it is, or are they the same thing? If a tree is a reference point, then why do I perceive it as an object that is part of my reference point rather than experiencing the reference point of the tree? The tree is only part of my reference point. So what is the reference point like for the tree and how is it different than the tree in my reference point? In other words, when I perceive a tree, I'm not experiencing another reference point (which would probably be like reading someone's mind), I experience the tree as an object.
When talking about the tree, are you talking about your reference point, or the tree's?
No. Intelligibility is what we grasp in knowing.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That is not what I said. Objects can be understood. That means they are intelligible. When that intelligibility is actualized by awareness in experience they are known.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Then you have to pay attention to what I actually say.
Quoting Terrapin Station
In the context of experience, I am. In other contexts, not necessarily.
Why would spatio-temporal locations imply eyes and a brain to you? It's frustrating that so much interaction here is people not even understanding what the other person is saying.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You had just written "A reference point is a location [in] space-time." And yes, that's correct. That's what I'm talking about. Spatio-temporal locations. (It's just that I'm stressing that properties are unique at each spatio-temporal location.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
When you look at an object, you're seeing the object as it is from that reference point. (That is, from your spatio-temporal and relational situatedness)
Objects are always some set of ways from any arbitrary reference point. Your presence isn't required. No one's presence is. But when you're present, you experience things from a particular reference point.
There's no way for anything to be any way from "no reference point." There's always some reference point, including reference points on, inside, etc. the "object itself." Again, this is talking about saptio-temporal locations, or spatio-temporal (and relational) situatedness.
Quoting Harry Hindu
So, this is asking "If the tree has a spatio-temporal location, then why do I perceive it as an object and not a spatio-temporal location?" Is that a question you'd be inclined to ask?
Quoting Harry Hindu
The tree isn't part of your spatio-temporal location unless either you've climbed the tree, or you're inside it, or we're considering a reference point as broad as whatever city you're in, or we're simply talking about Earth or the solar system or something.
This is a false dichotomy. Ceasing to think is not a choice for a sentient being. Think about it even if you lack the experience (you cannot do otherwise)! And no, I am not an idealist. the ultimate false dichotomy is ideal/real. :-)
I hope you're not thinking that "Knowledge is awareness of present what-we-grasp-in-knowing" is any less gobbledygooky.
Quoting Dfpolis
Objects can be "understood" in what sense? Not a semantic sense, obviously. But?
Quoting Dfpolis
You have to say things in a manner that's intelligible. (Ironically enough.)
The dichotomy was rhetorical. Of course, we cannot stop thinking, but all the content we think about is rooted in experience. So, the alternative was an impossible counter factual.
Even if your experience isn't about an external world it doesn't then follow that there isn't an external world, which is why there is a middle ground. There is an external world that is causally responsible for your experience but these external world things are not the objects of perception and are not represented by the objects of perception. It's not solipsism because things other than oneself exist but it's also not realism because the everyday things we talk about and are familiar with – trees, chairs, etc. – aren't mind-independent entities.
It is not. Before we encounter a duck, it is a duck and capable of evoking the concept
Quoting Terrapin Station
We can become aware of specific properties. "Known" in the sense of "acquainted with" might be a better word.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I try very hard to do precisely that.
First, I said nothing about "ultimate reality," whatever that may mean to you. Second, what we experience is known a posteriori, not presumed.
Seriously? Flailing in the wind are we? At no point did I suggest our experiences are presumed. Instead, what I said is that YOU are presuming our experiential mode of being is capable of grasping ultimate reality. Perhaps you should give the idea some more thought. I am done now.
Okay, so first, you're applying a concept that you've constructed. Do you agree with that? It's not as if you're perceiving concepts or anything like that. A concept is something you do, personally, in response to things.
Secondly, you can perceive a duck and not think anything like the name "duck," or think of the concept of a duck, or any sort of mental content per se period, right?
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't see what that would have to do with the word "understand(ing)" or "intelligibility." Those seem like misleading words to use there. (At least relative to their conventional senses.)
Does anyone here really understand one another? Are we using words differently or are there really differences in metaphysics and epistemic and ontological matters? I think we all know how perception works. At least most of us do.
I think @Terrapin Station is saying that there is a real way something IS from a particular spatial temporal reference point, and how that thing is from that particular point is knowable by thinking about a theoretical model of that reference point in relation to the object. That doesn’t require a perceiver but a thought grounded in theory. Theory comes about from experience from perceiving and about thinking about the objects of perception, which have an actual way they are from a spatial temporal reference point. Is that right?
That doesn’t however explain how the brain and mind construct these theories. It doesn’t say what is inherent to the mind and what is inherent to the objects themselves, which is what Kant explains.
Does this clear up some confusion or am I confused?
That's all correct. To finish the above, it's knowable, for one, from perception, which isn't theoretical. But in cases where perception isn't possible, sure, then we have to do something theoretical.
The point I was bringing up re having to introduce theoretical material was contra a notion that seems popular around here: namely, that idealism or at least realism skepticism due to representationalist notions of perception are somehow a default experiential view. Those views aren't default experiential views. You have to invoke theory and make theoretical commitments in addition to your experiences, your perceptions, to arrive at idealism or representationalism.
But you understand that transcendental idealism a la Kant is more than just idealism a la Berkeley or @leo? And how do you personally explain how theoretical knowledge is created?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Good. Glad that’s cleared up.
I don't want to get into the issues re "explanations" again.
Personally, I don't think that Kant explains anything, by the way.
Ok. That’s the tough work. Has anyone explained that in this thread? If so, I missed it.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Kant doesn’t explain how theories are created. His is a metaphysical claim about what is inherent to mind and what is inherent to that which presents itself to the mind.
Ok, then those properties are what we are talking about, which include the object's location in space and time. Objects have other properties than just spatial-temporal locations. There is more to the world than just reference points.
When looking at an apple and an orange sitting on a table next to each other there is a difference in location, not in time. They both exist in the same point of time but not in space. There's also difference in color texture and shape. All of which are not reference points if reference points are just spatial-temporal locations.
As I already said, I said nothing about ultimate reality. And the point of my experience remark is that what we mean by reality is what we experience.
Right, so the point is that properties of objects vary at different spatio-temporal locations, including spatio-temporal locations on/in/etc. the objects themselves. That's because relations are an integral aspect of properties, and relations vary at different spatio-temporal locations. It's a spatio-temporal/relational situatedness, which isn't something that can be "escaped" in any sense. That has nothing to do with persons necessarily. But when persons are present, they experience this spatio-temporal/relational situatedness perceptually.
What exactly then is your position re Kant about what is inherent to the mind as laid out in Critique of Pure Reason? Is space and time at least partially constructed in the mind? Or are space and time inherent to the physical world ONLY?
I'd say that space and time are inherent in the physical world, which is everything that exists, including your mind.
It's been so long since I read Kant that I can't remember his argument for this (which isn't aided by the fact that it probably didn't make a lot of sense to me when I did read it--Kant's not exactly my idea of a clear writer), but I can't see what the reason would be for one positing that we mentally create and basically "project" space and time onto things.
I'd agree that we'd not be able to make sense out of anything without thinking of things in terms of space/time, but that's because space is simply extension(al relations) and time is simply motion/change. It's incoherent to suppose that there could be existents without spatial extension/extensional relations to other existents, or to suppose that nothing is moving or changing. That's not a reason to suppose that there's no real extension/extensional relations or motion/change.
I guess. The way I interpret Kant is that the spatio-temporal reference points you were talking about as real things of nature only exist in minds.
In other words, a la Kant, if there were no minds it would be incoherent to have spatio-temporal reference points. Is that a good reading of Kant, @Mww?
There are properties that vary at different spatial-temporal locations but not all of them. Color and texture of the orange doesn't change as I move around it or if I were to move it relative to me. The location changes, but not the color or texture.
Right, it just seems like a very odd thing to think. I was reviewing his motivations for arriving at his view a bit, and they seem like really poor reasoning to me, but it would be a big thing to get into detailed critiques of all of the points.
I'd agree that maybe not all properties change at different reference points, but I definitely wouldn't say that color and texture are among them. Color will change if the orange is moving at particular velocities, for example--it can be blue or red-shifted, and it will change as the environment changes, including, of course, as we change from day to night.
Texture will easily change with distance and scale. If the reference point is far enough away, the texture will be as smooth as a billiard ball, for example.
The common objection to this is to say something like, "Well, at the surface of the orange, the texture is such and such"--but that's a different reference point. (And this is just my point--the properties will be different at different reference points.)
The properties of the orange do not change at different reference points. The perception of the orange changes at different reference points.
Oranges do not emit light like galaxies do. There would be no blue or red shift.
Exactly. If the properties of the orange change, then how can we keep calling it an orange? It seems to me that it would be a different object at different reference points if what TP says is accurate.
A relationship between two or more reference points can change if just one reference point changes and not the others. So it seems to me that there could still be constants in reality even though appearances change.
Consider this. Everything is in constant motion. I suppose that my wife sitting on the couch and me sitting in the recliner are both at rest relative to each other, but we are flying through space on this planet. If I get up and go into the kitchen, then my reference point relative to everything else in the house is constantly changing as long as I’m moving. When I stop in the kitchen, I’m at a different reference point to my wife. One always has to pick a particular reference point on an or in an object (such as in the house) in order to perceive or conceptualize what is moving and what isn’t. Conceptualization requires a mind, as does perception. Hence, speaking about reference points as things in nature is tricky. Are they inherent in nature, or are they inherent in minds?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yup.
This is incoherent. If there is an external world that our experience isnt about, then what does it mean for our experiences to be caused by the external world?
The only property that is changing between you and your wife and everything else is location. That's it. Your wife is still a human being. None of that changes when you change your spatial location. Your wife does not cease existing as a human, or an organism, when you change your location.
Perception is about the things causing the perception. One doesn’t directly apprehend the thing in itself. One perceives things. A lot is lost in perception (for example, do you perceive atoms when looking at a chair?), and the mind constructs a “story” about the object that is perceived but not directly apprehended.
Of course. I was talking about whether reference points are inherent in the world absent minds or not.
“Reference” implies a referring to something. Can something refer to something else without conceptualization or perception? That is what I can’t figure out. I’m leaning towards no.
Kantian speculative philosophy, and Enlightenment philosophy in general, tacitly presupposes the human mind. There is mounds of theoretical expositions on how the mind works, but not a shred on what the origin of mind is, the reasoning being, if one is engaged in rational thought he must have a mind, which makes its ontology, and theories concerning it, quite irrelevant.
So Kant....nor anyone else of any repute....is not going to say anything about coherency in the absence of the human mind. Because all meaning of anything whatsoever, is always relative to a human mind, the very idea of coherency absent the mind, is unintelligible.
But if you mean to say the human mind creates spatio-temporal reference points, then Kant would agree, for the excruciatingly simple reason Nature doesn’t incorporate them in her catalog of physical objects. If she did, you can bet yer arse there’d be a preferred one, which from our perspective of course, there isn’t.
Yes, I was trying to say something like this. “Unintelligible” is a better word than “incoherent.”
Do you not understand the difference between causation and subject matter/representation? When I talk to you my speech is caused by my body (lungs, vocal chords, mouth, etc.) but those words aren’t (always) about my body. When I flip a switch on a wall it turns on a light but that light isn’t a representation of me flipping the switch.
There can be an external world that stimulates whatever it is that I am in such a way that it elicits in me a certain kind of experience without it then following that such an experience is representative of or about that external world cause.
The tree we experience isn’t the atoms and photons that cause the experience. It’s a coherent, non-solipsistic, anti-realist account of trees.
But is it anti-realist?
It's not that the orange is emitting light. It's reflecting it. Reflected light is doppler-shifted just as well as emitted light. You could say that it's emitting reflected light if you like. At any rate, just how the light is produced is irrelevant to the doppler effect. The relative motion is what matters.
Exactly how fast does an orange have to travel in order for there to be blue or red shift detected? I’m ignorant on this subject.
Not very fast. Radar guns work via doppler effect measurement, for example. Radar guns use microwaves, but it's all just part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Okay. Now I know! Thank you.
Except that has nothing to do with color which is visible light.
How would you think that the properties of an orange (or anything else) don't change? You wouldn't be able to have orange trees flowering, some of the flowers turning into fruit, the fruit developing, eventually ripening, falling, decomposing, etc.
Category error, I think.
You're it aware that visible light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum? Microwaves would be visible light to creatures that evolved sensitivities to be able to perceive them. It's all the same stuff, just different frequencies.
?
Yes, I know but the discussion was about the color of oranges. We were talking about perception of color.
We were talking about points of reference, not the flux of reality.
You asked how fast they'd need to be moving in order to detect doppler-shifted light. The answer is not very fast. We can detect doppler-shifted electromagnetic radiation at relatively slow speeds.
But visible light is what humans perceive when it comes to oranges.
Yes, spatio-temporal locations. You can't consider anything absent a spatio-temporal location, and all property changes occur relative to spatio-temporal location differences--necessarily so, since time is simply motion or change.
Visible light is a type of electromagnetic radiation. We can detect doppler-shifted electromagnetic radiation at relatively slow speeds.
Can a point of reference be “considered” without conceptualization or perception? That is what I’m getting at.
Yes, visible light is electromagnetic radiation, but not all electromagnetic radiation is visible light, for example, the color of oranges. Microwaves are not visible light. You seem to think that the perception of reality gives you reality. Do you know how perception works? I don’t think you do.
Can it be considered without that? No. Because of what it refers to to consider something.
That’s what I’m getting at that you don’t seem to be getting. I don’t think we understand each other.
To us, no. Again, it just depends on how faculties evolved for the creatures in question. That usually has a lot to do with what's survivally advantageous for the creatures in question. There are creatures that can see different ranges of electromagnetic radiation than humans see. Those ranges are visible light for them. It's very similar to sound waves. Different creatures can hear different frequency ranges of sound waves. Well, different creatures can see different frequency ranges of electromagnetic radiation, too.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Yes. And I can easily show the flaws in empirical-based arguments that claim otherwise.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Patronizing much? And after not understanding electromagnetic radiation, doppler shifts, etc.
I understand all of these things. I’m pointing out that perception doesn’t give you the things in themselves.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This brings us back to perception. Perception doesn’t give you the things in themselves, hence transcendental idealism, which includes empirical realism.
Yes, I know all of this. This just strengthens my argument and weakens yours.
It gives you the things in themselves at particular reference points and everything is always relative to some reference point or other, with there being no preferred reference point.
Nice move basically doing this:
Then what is the point of theorizing or the scientific method? Theory and science are needed exactly because perceiving doesn’t give us the things in themselves.
How would you know that you've perceived something other than it is? Could you give an example?
OK. I can handle that.
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Quoting Dfpolis
Handling that well too, I am.
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Quoting Dfpolis
OK. The latter being the unconscious or autonomic condition, the former being the conscious or attentive condition? But you said some data is available to awareness but some data processing is not. Seems like this is two separate and distinct dynamics, only one of which would seem to have any continuity with the treatise on Realism and experience. What bearing does unavailable data processing have on the topic?
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Quoting Dfpolis
Penetration, projection, same-o, same-o. Ok. I get it.
I call an object’s modification of my neural state the appearance of an object; it is not yet represented by a synthesis of intuition and concept. So yes, we agree perceptual duality is a non-starter.
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Quoting Dfpolis
Radiance of action....ok....just another theoretical tenet.
Not clear about partial identity. What would be full identity? If the apple’s modification of a neural state is identically a representation of the apple, is that the same as saying the apple is experienced? Does this experience correlate one-to-one with knowledge?
Where did “apple” come from? Doesn’t look like this theory has any place for conceptual naming. Must be rather many neural states, one for round, one for red, one for weight, one for the stem sticking up from the top......one for top. One for naming, one for determining the name matches the representation.
I just call it understanding.
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Quoting Dfpolis
If one holds with the idea that any object of perception is nothing to us until we add our own elements to it, by means of synthesis, rather than take away from its totality those <8 thoughts you spoke about, there is no need for confusing the abstraction for the object. While there is still a chance for confusion, it arises from judgement alone, as an aspect of reason.
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Your reification fallacy is my transcendental illusion. Same idea, different predicates.
Good stuff.
Was that your example? So a chair doesn't really look like a chair from a frame of reference that's however many inches or feet away from it and that includes the whole of the chair or a big section of it?
I don’t see your point. Sorry.
I asked you "How would you know that you've perceived something other than it is? Could you give an example?" And then I wondered if the chair was your example.
Yes, that was one example. Your example of certain insects seeing ultraviolet light is also an example. We are not insects.
Sure. So first, I'm confirming that you're saying that a chair doesn't really look like a chair from a frame of reference that's however many inches or feet away from it and that includes the whole of the chair or a big section of it. Is that correct?
Again, my view is that perception gives you things in themselves at particular reference points and everything is always relative to some reference point or other, with there being no preferred reference point.
You didn't think that I was saying that perception gives you "everything about existents from every possible reference point," did you? (As if that even really refers to something that's not nonsensical)
I want to continue this discussion but Crystal says I have to put down TPF for the day.
Do you think that I'm denying theoretical knowledge for some reason?
Yes. See Kant's transcendental idealism and Putnam's internal realism.
Also see Plantinga's How to be an Anti-Realist:
The last sentence is key. One can believe that things like the fundamental entities of our best scientific models or otherwise unknowable noumena have a mind-independent existence but that the everyday objects of perception do not (as these latter things are not reducible to the former). It's a type of idealism (objects of perception are mind-dependent) that isn't solipsistic (things other than oneself exist).
:ok:
No, I do not construct concepts in experiencing and abstracting. I find them latent in my sensory representation. So, I actualize prior intelligibility, converting a potential concept into an actual concept. I do this by focusing on a particular aspect of what is presented. If I constructed concepts as you suggest, there would be no basis for applying the concept to its next instance.
Now, you might say that I partially construct the concept, but then how do I come to the other part? And, on what basis do I apply the construct to a new instance in which (on your view) it is not latent?
No, I do not perceive concepts, I perceive the content of concepts. A concept or an idea is not a thing, not something that can be sensed. It is an activity. The concept
It is well-known that we can do complex tasks (driving, bicycling, playing music) automatically, without awareness. So there is a sensory level of interaction with reality in which intelligibility is never actualized because we act without awareness -- "lost in thought."
Quoting Terrapin Station
That is what I just said. Still, when we focus awareness on this or that aspect of our sensory stream, that is actualizing its intelligibility, even it there is no naming of what we are attending to.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I agree that "knowing" is better than "understanding," still they are related in an essential way. It is by examining the structure of what we are acquainted with that we come to understand it in the sense of making judgements about it. So, to understand requires that we first actualize the intelligibility of what we seek to understand, then parse it by fixing on its various aspects or notes of intelligibility, and then recombine what we have parsed out in judgements that yield propositional knowledge.
Last paragraph.....well spoken.
I freely admit to having some difficulty understanding @Terrapin Station. I also have difficulty seeing any socially redeeming value in transcendental idealism.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
The problem with this account is that when you say, "That doesn’t require a perceiver but a thought grounded in theory," it makes theory prior to our encountering what we are theorizing about. Knowing is a subject-object relation. There can be no knowing without a known object and a knowing subject. So, while one can theorize about things one does not know to exist, to know a thing requires encountering it -- interacting with it. Our informative interactions with physical objects are called sensations or perceptions. So, unless we sense something (directly or indirectly) it makes no sense to theorize about it.
Of course we do view things from a certain perspective. That is one reason why all human knowledge is a projection (a dimensionally diminished map) of reality. Another reason is that our culture may incline us to attend to some aspects of experience in preference to others, and to project the results into a culturally-received conceptual space.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
I have grave difficulties with the notion of imposed "forms of reason." If we automatically imposed the forms of space and time, alternate views of space and time (at least with respect to empirical reality) would be literally unthinkable. The same applies to time-sequenced (aka accidental) causality, which many interpreters of quantum theory seriously question. I think Aristotle is dead on, and anticipates the special and general theories of relativity, when he defines time as "the measure of change according to before and after." Change is real, and time is a way of measuring change. So, time has a foundation in reality (change), but is also a way that humans interact with physical reality (by measuring it). Relativity shows us how the measuring process can affect our measures of time and space.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Okay. So now my question would be, if anything anyone experiences is reality from a particular reference point, how do you ever get to a distinction between reality and hallucination?
As well you should. The first critique, from which the philosophy of transcendental idealism is born and raised, has nothing to do with social redemption or its value. For socially redeeming value, which is more anthropology or empirical psychology than speculative metaphysics proper, one needs examine the second and third critiques.
Yes
Quoting Mww
There are many examples that have to do with sensory processing. For example, the eye does edge enhancement. The brain converts ciliar motions in the cochlea into representations of tone, loudness and so on. These processes occur without any trace of awareness but are essential to the sensory representations presented to awareness.
Quoting Mww
The same insights can be articulated in various ways.
Quoting Mww
I'd say it is an empirical finding -- one taken from physics and which forms the basis of field theories.
Quoting Mww
It is partial because the subject is not identically the object. We are not the apple we perceive. The apple's action on our nervous system is only a small fraction of what an apple is capable of doing and our neural representation of the apple is only a minor part of us.
Quoting Mww
Yes, if you mean sensory experience. Awareness may subsequently convert sensory experience to knowledge (intellectual experience). Or, possibly, the sensation will be ignored or handled automatically.
Quoting Mww
There are different kinds of knowledge. First is knowledge as acquaintance, which begins with awareness of a sensory presentation. Once we are aware of an object, we nay fix on various aspects or notes of intelligibility, dividing it up mentally. Then, in judgement we recombine these notes to come to propositional knowledge.
There is correspondence, but it is not one-to-one. Some experiences are more fully elaborated than others -- yielding more concepts and more judgements.
Quoting Mww
Where we see that many objects have the same intelligibility (evoke the same concept) we come to understand that the concept has universal extension, i.e, that it is potentially applicable to many particulars. (Applicability is based on the fact that each instance can properly evoke the applied concept.) If we wish to communicate this, we assign the concept
Quoting Mww
There is never a need for confusion. Still, it is all to common.
I agree that we have individual associations with objects, but I don't see them as part of the core concept. Also I agree that errors occur in judgements.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Quoting Mww
@Mww, would you say that mentioned mental constructs are part of the same larger world (outside reality) as the experienced?
If so, then @Galuchat's inquiry seems to indicate a need to differentiate among hallucination and perception, yes?
Quoting Galuchat
Quoting Dfpolis
I suppose, like synesthesia and phantom limbs perhaps.
That seems to converge on some sort of ordinary realism, surely not mental monism (idealism).
The mere existence of hallucinations and perception is not really in question (or so it seems to me), yet they're different, and the difference would then be the perceived (which includes other people).
......Quoting Dfpolis....becomes reason may subsequently convert sensory experience to knowledge.
.....Quoting Dfpolis.....becomes knowledge *of* and knowledge *that*.
....Quoting Dfpolis...becomes the ground for the viability of the ten Aristotelian and twelve Kantian categories, as universally extendable conceptions.
....Quoting Dfpolis....becomes due to the fact these differences are at least logically irrelevant, insofar as no identifying property of an apple may ever be logically applied to the identity of a horse, we are permitted to disregard the totality of properties or attributes of objects of perception, and merely assign concepts to them a priori as understanding thinks belongs to them necessarily. As such, accidents are circumvented.
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This was a little tougher to unpack:
Quoting Dfpolis
I think you mean we each understand what an object is by the way we associate extant experience to it, but those experiences are not seen as part of the core concept of the object. If that is correct, or at least close, then I would agree, because the “core concept” of an object would give to us the thing as it is in itself a posteriori, by presupposing apprehension of the unconditioned (assuming a “core concept” is some sort of ultimate cognitive reduction), which my philosophy will never allow.
Ever onward......
I'm not so sure. Is time and space an illusion - a product of how our minds parse the world?
Time is just relative change. If the mind is a process, then it functions at a particular frequency of change relative to the frequency of change in other processes, like trees and oranges. How those things appear will depend on how fast or slow the frequency of change is relative to how slow or fast the brain processes the information about them. So, fast processes will appear as a blur, or may be missed completely, while very slow processes will appear as stable, persistent "objects" in space. Think about how reptiles need heat to warm their bodies and improve their response times. When a lizard is lethargic, its brain is functioning at a slower frequency relative to the rest of the environment. It can't respond to fast changes quickly enough. When it warms up, it can. Our brains have similar states.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Well, yes those are changing properties of oranges and orange trees, only one of which has to do with location - "falling". The others are properties of the orange that do not change when you change your location, like "ripeness". Ripeness is a property of the orange that changes. Ripeness does not change with location. Thought is a property of me that changes. Ripeness and thoughts are properties (that are not spatial properties) of different things in the world that interact and produce taste and smell of ripe or rotten oranges. The taste and smell of oranges would be about that interaction between ripe oranges and gustatory and olfactory sensory organs.
Well, I'm an indirect realist, so I would agree that we don't directly apprehend, but we do apprehend. How would we be able to even posit and confirm the existence of atoms if not for some observation? It seems to me that we don't just look, we interpret. It's just a matter of interpreting correctly what it is you are seeing (a mass of atoms). But we don't see atoms. We see light, which is why a mass of atoms looks bent when submerged within another mass of atoms. If something is lost in perception it seems to me that we would never know and not be able to posit the existence of those things or properties.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Then how can we get at causes by observing only effects? Were the tree rings in a tree stump caused by how the tree grows throughout the year independent of some perception of the tree growing? How is it that we can determine the age of the tree by the number of tree rings if it wasn't for how the tree grows independent of my perception of its growth?
Quoting Michael
I didn't use the word, "representation". I used the term, "about". "About" as a preposition is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as "on the subject of; connected with".
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/about
Any effect is temporally connected with prior causes.
Those sounds coming from your mouth are the effect of all the causes that lead up to you making sounds with your mouth, which goes all the way back to the Big Bang. If the Big Bang never occurred, would you be here making sounds with your mouth? If Big Bangs are a necessary cause for the subsequent existence of bodies that make sounds (determinism), then you making sounds is an indication that a Big Bang happened sometime in the past. Every effect carries information about every cause leading up to it. It's just a matter of which particular chain of causes that you want to talk about or focus on in any particular moment. Hearing you speak informs me that you have a mouth, what your native language is, your knowledge of your native language, as well as the ideas in your head. Which particular cause did you want me to focus on? When we use language it is generally understood that we are meant to focus on the ideas in someone's head.
If there was no tree or light, how is it that you would have a visual experience of a tree?
So we don't agree on what concepts are or how they work.
Also, I haven't the faintest what "find them latent in my sensory representation" or "actualize prior intelligibility" would refer to. To me that just sounds like words randomly strung together.
Re "no basis for applying the concept in a consequent instance"--you construct the concept, and you have a memory.
Quoting Dfpolis
"The other part"? I have no idea what that's referring to.
Quoting Dfpolis
We could start at the beginning, with how infants do this, and we could start in a scenario where there either are or are not other people (using language) in the environment, but doing any of that would be pretty laborious in this setting, and it's not really necessary. Let's say that you already have a lot of concepts on hand--like beetles and wings and eyes and so on, because you're an adult, and let's say that you're an entomologist working in the Amazon. You discover an odd individual insect. It has only one wing but can fly, and it squirts some sort of gunk out of its eyes, and so on. So you wonder if you've discovered a new species. You provisionally call it coleoptera monocornu goopojo (a silly name that doesn't follow scientific conventions well, but that's what you initially come up with)--we'll call it cmg for short. You look for other single-winged, eye-goop-shooting beetles in the area, and you find some that aren't exactly alike--some have one large but one very stunted wing, some shoot green eye goop instead of blue, etc., but per your concept, you decide to call any beetle with more or less one wing, that flies, and that shoots colored goop out of its eyes a cmg.
Later, you might decide that there's an important difference between the green and blue goop shooters, or between the beetles that have no trace of a second wing and those that have stunted second wings. And then you'd revise your concept--either adding subgroups to cmg's, or only considering some cmg's while others would have a new concept-name applied, to accomodate what you consider to be important differences (while ignoring the differences that you don't consider to be important). That's how you apply a concept in further instances.
This is already too long, so I'm going to leave it there for now. We could continue with the rest of the post I'm responding to later.
Hmmmm........
The mentioned mental constructs, re: space, time, points of reference, are not of the same larger world as the experienced; they are the necessary conditions for it. To say that because rational agents holding with these conditions are part of the larger outside world, then by association so too are his conceptions, is a categorical error. To attribute to rationality that which properly belongs to physicality is to ask for a common cause for distinctly different effects.
It can be said there is sometimes a need to distinguish hallucination from perception, yes. All optical illusions are hallucinations from empirical misrepresentation, but some hallucinations are purely logical faults given by understanding itself. In the former, judgement usually reconciles the defect and its cognition is modified, but in the latter judgement often condones it and is thereby cognized as being the case.
But......disclaimer.....I don’t like psychology, so........grain of salt and all that.
The simple answer is that in order to have the belief that reality can NOT be directly perceived (insofar as its perceived, re what's perceived, etc.--in other words, no one is saying that you're "perceiving everything about everything"), you'd need evidence that x is not really like F, whereas your initial perception was that x was like F. But to have evidence of that that counts against the initial evidence, we'd have to be able to accurately perceive the way something really is, contra our mistake, which means that we can at least sometimes directly, correctly perceive things.
This also includes the notion that we can directly, correctly perceive things like eyes and ears and brains and machines that we hook up to them, so that we'd have some accurate info about how they work.
So first, hallucinations and illusions are real hallucinations and illusions. (Where we're not using "real" in the traditional manner to refer to something objective or that exists extramentally.) But we can know that there are no real pink elephants in someone's apartment when they're hallucinating a pink elephant in their apartment, because other people can see that there are no pink elephants, we can tell this via instruments, as well, and we know a lot about how matter behaves and can behave, what's required for there to be an elephant in an apartment, and we also know a lot about how brains work, including how they work on LSD (if that should be the case in this instance), etc.
We know, however, that hallucinating a pink elephant is really what the world is like when someone's brain is in a particular state, perhaps when it's triggered by certain other visual phenomena, etc.
An ontological hierarchy of sorts?
The perceived world depends existentially on spacetime, which in turn depends existentially on the perceiving mind?
Quoting Mww
I'd just say that swimmers in water look different than swimmers out of water.
(At least we do have some understanding of what's going on with refraction, reflection and such.)
(y)
We could differentiate "exist" and "real" (in part) like so:
The bottom "You" would be like those pink elephants.
[quote=Disclaimer]No elephants were harmed during this event.[/quote]
Yes, I am an Aristotelian-Thomistic moderate realist.
Yes, but not for that reason.
If reality is to be defined in terms of experience (an awareness event consisting of perception and cognisance), my inquiry ("Are hallucinations real?") indicates a need to differentiate between typical or natural perception, and atypical or unnatural perception (i.e., hallucination, a type of misperception). And different types of perception implies different types of experience, which implies different types of reality.
So, what do we call these different types of reality?
No. Type-defining properties (logical essences) are latent in sense data, not arrived at a priori. If they were not latent in experience, our experience of a new instance would not provide us with the data needed to categorize it as a previously known type.
"Accident" has two meanings. One is a property whose presence or absence does not affect our type-classification, e.g. hair color is irrelevant to whether a being is a human. Another is a property which inheres in a substance, not as a raisin in pudding, but as a an aspect that is distinguished from, but still part of the whole. An example would be having flesh. Some accidents in this second sense are essential (e.g. having bones) and others (e.g. skin color) are accidental in the first sense.
Quoting Mww
I mean that because of individual experiences we have different associations with things. My mother almost rolled off a cliff at Nevada Falls in Yosemite, so I associate that experience with waterfalls. Others may have entirely positive experiences. None of these associations would lead us to define "waterfall" in a different way.
I am not sure what an "ultimate reduction" would be, but I tend to reject reductionism.
It is certainly an epistemological hierarchy, and I suppose one could call it an ontological one as well, although purely rational philosophy just grants space and time as ontologically necessary without consideration of their respective origins. That is to say, space and time permit knowledge and without space and time there isn’t any, as far as the human animal is concerned. Besides, physical science covers those ontological fundamentals, even if it is brought up short by its inability to discover the unconditioned just as much as reason is likewise brought up short.
—————-
Quoting jorndoe
Quite right, with the monstrous caveat that the appearance of difference doesn’t give you refraction or reflection. One has to extend from mere vision to practical reason in order to qualify why there is a difference at all.
Question: what would a swimmer out of water look like?
Not sure.
Maybe phenomenological versus empirical in some cases, subjective versus objective in others, fictional versus real in others still?
Existentially mind-dependent: hallucinating, thinking, imagining, memory recall, conceptualizing, fantasies, (day) dreams, phantom pain, headaches, love, denial, ...
And (typically) not: the perceived, the Sun, dinosaur bones, ...
Headaches are real enough.
Re optical illusions like that, that's really what something partially submerged in water looks like from a particular reference point. You're getting accurate information from a "system" that consists of everything in the environment between the point of reference and the object(s) in question.
I would prefer to deal with one reality, defined as actuality.
This means that:
1) All experience is objective and subjective.
2) Some experience is also intersubjective.
Monstrous?
If (what we call) refraction turned out plain wrong (like Aristotle's theory of motion), then we'd perhaps discover something else.
Quoting Mww
I wasn't part of the photo-shoot, but more in one piece, like the swimmer themselves presumably would report? :)
Substance dualism included?
Substance dualism seems like a sort of "natural intuition" perhaps because of whatever gaps (Levine's explanatory gap, Chalmers' consciousness conundrum, with a nod to Princess Elisabeth of the Palatinate, ...).
It's a non-explanatory assertion, though, doesn't really bridge any gaps, batteries aren't included.
The numinous, wholly other, seems susceptible to the interaction problem, but maybe that's different.
I prefer my logical essences, however, reside in intuition, given from experience, which is given from sense data. That way, I don’t have to re-learn a thing each instance of is presence, and, thereafter I can remember what a thing is a priori, without having it being presented to me at all. And if a new thing is presented to me, all my logical essences, or, which is the same thing, my intuitions, won’t tell me what that new thing is anyway, but only what it isn’t. And if logical essences are retained in sense data alone, I still won’t know what it is, because I have no extant experience of it, hence no resident intuition logically belonging to it and to which it would relate.
“...Understanding cannot intuite, and the sensuous faculty cannot think...”
The problem with this characterization of hallucination is that for instance until a few decades ago we could also say the following:
We can know that there are no real rogue waves on the ocean when people are hallucinating a rogue wave on the ocean, because other people can see that there are no rogue waves, we can tell this via instruments, as well, and we know a lot about how waves behave and can behave, what's required for there to be a big wave on the ocean, and we also know a lot about how brains work.
What's the fundamental difference between the two examples? In the two cases, a few people claim something while the majority disagrees with them, we don't have instrument records that can corroborate what the minority claims, and we have well-tested models that explain how what the minority claims is impossible.
And yet, over 150 years later, measurements corroborated what the minority claimed, and then we had to admit that our models were wrong. So how can we ever decisively conclude what is hallucination and what isn't?
Also, you're basically defining "real" as something that the majority reports seeing, but then that means that if the majority was blind then everything we see with our eyes would be called a hallucination, and then the blind majority would come up with some model explaining how the minority has some real physical disorder that leads them to have these hallucinations.
And so I see these characterizations of 'hallucination' and 'real' as very problematic, it boils down to "X is a hallucination and not real because the majority agrees that it's not real". What's real is defined through consensus, and we don't know whether something labeled as hallucination might not be labeled real some time later, or the other way around. For instance, maybe the idea that "everything we experience reduces to brain states" will end up being seen as a delusion by the majority.
And all of this is one of the observations that lead me to say that 'reality' is defined and constructed by people to a great extent, or rather by minds.
"A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space. The latter definition distinguishes hallucinations from the related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness; illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception; imagery, which does not mimic real perception and is under voluntary control; and pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception, but is not under voluntary control."
Leo P. W. Chiu (1989). "Differential Diagnosis and Management of Hallucinations" (PDF). Journal of the Hong Kong Medical Association 41 (3): 292–7.
Perception is one instance of an interaction between body and mind. It is the mental effect of sensation (stimulation-response). Stimulation is the reception and transduction of exogenous and/or endogenous stimuli (transmitted mass-energy). Response is the propagation of action potentials in excitable cells.
Expanding on Chiu's definition, a hallucination is a conscious perception having qualities of environment or corporeal state, but no corresponding (exogenous and/or endogenous) stimulus.
A hallucination is real (actual) for the person experiencing it (i.e., a subjective, not objective or intersubjective, experience).
It's not determined by minds, but by what the world is like. We couldn't just decide to assert that P, where P would then be the case.
No one is saying that we can't be wrong. When we're wrong, we change what we're asserting.
If things we're determined by minds, by what we're asserting, then we couldn't discover that we're wrong.
This merely hides the fundamental issue and does not address it in any way. If most people were blind, reports of visual perceptions wouldn't be linked to external stimuli, because most people wouldn't have an explanation for these perceptions based on what they perceive themselves, and so your visual perceptions would be deemed to be hallucinations.
Or some decades ago you would have said a rogue wave is a hallucination, that is "a perception which has no environmental stimulus", or maybe an illusion, "which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception", because most people didn't believe that rogue waves were things that existed out there, as in they didn't think they would perceive them themselves, and so if they can't perceive it and it doesn't fit into their theoretical models then they conclude it doesn't exist out there in the environment, it isn't external, it is internal.
It's consensus and theoretical models that determine what's hallucination and what isn't. Blind people wouldn't be right to dismiss reports of visual experiences as hallucinations, even if they didn't have these experiences themselves. They could come up with their own model of the world, their own theories, and in them visual experiences would be classified as perceptions in the absence of external stimuli, as hallucinations. In their world, visual experiences would be hallucinations. In our world, they aren't, but we treat some other things as hallucinations, even though in the world of some other people they may not be.
What it boils down to is that when the consensus doesn't perceive something and some other people claim to perceive it, the consensus classifies it as perception in the absence of stimulus, which itself boils down to: "perception that the consensus doesn't have". What is classified as external stimuli is basically perceptions that the consensus has or that it defines as originating from external stimuli. If your perception isn't one that the consensus has, or if it hasn't been defined as originating from an external stimulus, then the consensus says you're hallucinating. It's not more profound than that. If the consensus changes, what is classified as hallucination changes as well.
I think we should do away with the concept of hallucination. To classify an experience as hallucination is basically to dismiss it as irrelevant. Well, the experience of rogue waves wasn't irrelevant to the people who encountered them. Many people who are said to be hallucinating might have experiences that are very relevant to them and possibly to other people as well. Classifying experiences as hallucinations is blinding ourselves and remaining within our own bubble, not opening ourselves to what others experience.
We could change what we are asserting and interpret it as discovering that we were wrong.
Quoting Terrapin Station
If two people are at about the same spatiotemporal location, and they have different perceptions, you're saying they see what the world is like from their reference point, but then because they disagree the first one says he's seeing reality while the other is hallucinating. But the second one can equally say that about the first. So why is a distinction needed between reality and hallucination, why can't we just say that they're seeing the world from their reference point? It seems hallucination only serves as a tool used by the social consensus to dismiss perceptions that some other people have, and to not have to take them into account into their model of the world.
Actually, it's fact which makes that determination.
Believing otherwise is delusion.
We don't just do that arbitrarily. We do it because we observe the world to be different than how longwe thought it was.
Re that other comment, again, part of what the world is like is physical "laws." You seem to be misinterpreting my views as saying that no on can be wrong re their perceptions relative to what they believe those perceptions peg ontologically. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that we can be right re our perceptions relative to what we believe those perceptions peg ontologically. And that fact is the only way that we can say that any perception doesn't get the world right in the first place.
And how is 'fact' determined?
You seem to have ignored everything else I've said.
If you say so.
My concept
Quoting Terrapin Station
As I have said before, we can sense without awareness, responding to sensory inputs automatically while "lost in thought". Obviously, automatic response requires the reception and processing of adequate information for us to take appropriate action (e.g. staying in our lane while driving and not hitting anything). So specific information is present in sensation, but if we are thinking of something else, we do not actualize its capacity to be known, because we are not attending to it. That is present, but unactualized, intelligibility. Content that can be the object of awareness is latent in sense data prior to our thinking it.
If that does not make sense to you, please ask for a specific clarification.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Your theory provides no connection between concepts and things we may encounter. Instead, you are suggesting an entirely imagined world in which the subject can only know itself. An imagined/constructed world of this sort has no capacity for surprise, and so does not reflect the lived world -- which constantly surprises us. So, it is phenomenologically inadequate. Only a world that is intelligible before it is actually known can surprise us.
Quoting Terrapin Station
OK, you are not asserting partial construction. So, for you, we imagine everything but ourselves, and given that you have questioned the "I" in "I perceive," perhaps we even imagine ourselves. Of course, that is an ontological absurdity, as to imagine is an act and whatever acts exists. Further, it has an essence which enables it to imagine.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, we can't -- because on your theory we cannot know that there are infants, other people or languages.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Where would these concepts come from? Creatio ex nihilo?
Quoting Terrapin Station
How can you tell it is an insect if it has no properties that can inform you it is -- no intelligibility? On my view the fact that it has an exoskeleton, six legs, etc. give it the objective power to evoke the concept
Quoting Terrapin Station
How can you know that they are single-winged, eye-goop-shooting beetles if they have no objective capacity (intelligibility) to evoke
Quoting Terrapin Station
Ah ha! Perhaps your issue is that you think I am some sort of essentialist -- maybe a neoplatonist. I am not. I am not saying that the intelligibility of the objects we encounter fullypredetermine our concepts. They do not. Different people can have different, but equally adequate, conceptual spaces. I might have a concept that extends over set A, and another that extends over set B. You might have one that extends over the union of A and B, their Intersection, or perhaps A minus the intersection of A and B. All of these concepts, different as they are, can have an adequate basis in reality -- an underlying intelligibility.
The reason for this is that concepts are not determined by intelligibility alone, but by the intelligibility we choose to fix upon. If I am interested in As that are not Bs, I will have a concept extending over As less the intersection of A and B, even if I don't name it.
My view is not nominalism because I see concepts not merely as the result of arbitrary choices, not mere constructs, but also as informed by objective features of what is conceptualized. If concepts are me thinking of things, what I think is determined jointly by what interests me and by what I find in reality in pursuing those interests -- by the objects I encounter and by what I choose to fix upon in encountering them. Thus, different people can have different, but equally respectable, conceptual spaces.
Right, so I say so, because concepts ARE something that you construct personally. If you don't agree with this, then we disagree on what concepts are and how they work. I already explained how consequent applications of a concept work.
Quoting Dfpolis
The examples you're using for this are not examples where I'd say that you're sensing without awareness. It's rather that there are different "levels" or "degrees" of awareness. Awareness isn't simply off or on, full or nothing. There's a continuum. Is it possible to sense without awareness? Maybe, but such as the driving examples wouldn't work for that.
Quoting Dfpolis
I'm not a fan of the word "information" in discussions like this. I'd need to clarify the definition you're using.
I hate cutting this off, but I can't stand ever-lengthening posts in reply. My goal is to settle things and move on so that we don't have to talk about them any longer. Ever-lengthening posts don't seem to do that. Let's keep things short. Your last post was longer than the previous, then if I respond to everything in it, the next post will be even longer, etc.
Let's do one point at a time.
Thank you.
Quoting Mww
I sympathize with many of Kant's objectives. I just disagree on his mode of execution.
Yes, but how does that contradict the idea that "things are determined by minds"? Other minds could influence the world we observe in a way different than we thought.
Quoting Terrapin Station
But these physical "laws" are determined through social consensus from what the consensus observes, people who have different perceptions could disagree that these laws have universal validity. If the consensus defines hallucination in reference to physical laws, it still boils down to the consensus defining hallucination in reference to what the consensus perceives.
And then when we're saying that such and such experience is a hallucination, all we're saying is that in the model of the world that the consensus uses, such an experience is labeled as hallucination, whereas it could be that in some other model that some other people use, such an experience is not a hallucination, and that in itself doesn't make the first model fundamentally more correct than the second one, would you agree with that?
And then would you agree that it's possible to have a coherent view of the world in which there is no such thing as a hallucination? But rather that people have different experiences, and sometimes people share similar experiences, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes people can come to perceive things they didn't think they would perceive and that others had reported perceiving without being believed.
If you can't observe the world, how would you observe what other people say to know what the consensus is?
There's you isn't there?
I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in rejecting substance dualism. We define "substance" (ousia) as "this something" (tode ti) -- in other words, we see primary realities as ostensible unities. The mental distinction between physical and mental acts does not make humans two things. Rather, we are unities that can act both physically and intentionally.
As we are not two things, there aren't two things to interact. Instead, intentional commitments are law-like realities that guide physical realizations. As the laws of physics determine purely mechanical motions, so they and our commitments determine human motions.
On the occasions in question, no. Not phenomenally.
So is there a reference point when there is just a tree?
This merely shows that we are defining "awareness" in different ways. What I am taking about is knowing data as opposed to having and/or processing data. Either we know it, or we don't. There is no middle ground.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Information is the reduction of possiblity. If we do not know it, it reduces physical possiblity. If we know it, it also reduces what is logically possible.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Fine. Look at the section beginning with "Ah ha!" and see if that does not resolve our differences.
Again, there's a difference between what's present for one phenomenally and what's really the case ontologically.
Of course there's a reference point if there always is.
Keep in mind that I am NOT necessarily referring to persons, perceptions etc. by "reference point." I'm referring to spatio-temporal locations.
The reference point would be whatever your spatio-temporal location is. That doesn't imply that there's a "you" in the equation in terms of what's phenomenally occurring.
You'd have to make the difference clear.
Quoting Dfpolis
? That's just introducing more confusion. Now we'd need to get into the ontology of possibility, too.
Quoting Dfpolis
Okay, I'll go back there. (although it might take me a few hours--I've got to leave in a few minutes)
I would say I observe a world that depends on my mind and on other minds, I'm not saying that what I observe is totally disconnected from other minds.
Can you answer my questions?
Reading over that section, it's a major hurdle for me that you seem to be talking about "intelligibililty" (I'm not even a fan of that word, really, because it seems to be used for a wide number of different things in philosophy) as if it's something that occurs objectively. There's no way I'd agree with that.
This is getting to the questions. I hate going on and on though, so I want to figure out why we're doing that.
So we don't disagree on whether the world is observable.
But you're claiming that, say, the composition of Mount Everest, say, in some way depends upon other minds.
Why would you believe that?
But a spatio-temporal location is insufficient for the appearance of a tree, it seems to me. You need to have an apparatus capable of distinguishing the tree from the rest of the stuff, don't you? That's a bit more than a spatio-temporal location.
Don't you count brain states as part of a reference point, and not just spatio-temporal locations? Or do you mean that when the reference point is a person, by reference point you refer to the set of all spatio-temporal locations that this person's brain occupies?
Let me help you figure that out. If a person perceives a ghost, and says that this is not a hallucination, do you think it's really a hallucination and that person is wrong, or that there really is a ghost from the reference point of that person?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I believe that the very concept of 'composition' stems from minds, and that different minds have different experiences, so minds could disagree about what the composition of Mount Everest is, but some minds could pressure other minds to believe that the composition of Mount Everest is such-and-such, and then these other minds would believe it, and then even if they went to Mount Everest to check for themselves, their belief would influence them in a way that their observations wouldn't disagree with what they have been made to believe, or maybe the observations would disagree in appearance but they would interpret it as errors of measurement or as themselves being too stupid to make correct measurements, and that the only way they could disagree with what they have been made to believe is if they broke free of that belief. In that way other minds influence what we see and what we think we see.
Might there be an edit in the works here?
Really? What confuses you?
Quoting Terrapin Station
You seem easily confused. Something is possible if it does not contradict a contextualizing set of propositions. So, for example, something is logically possible if it does not contradict what we already know.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Is there a basis in reality for calling new beetle an insect? If so, what do you call that basis? If not, how do you know it is a beetle and not a cucumber?
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is nonresponsive and evasive. Either you are present, or you are not. Which is it?
To wit? Have I missed an error?
Maybe not, if you didn’t catch it right away.
Seems like the information we don’t know increases the physical possibilities, not reduces.
The information we do not know is still a specification of reality. The more it is already specified, the fewer its remaining possibilities.
Quoting leo
I believe both of those things, too. So that's not actually what I'm getting at. I'm getting at things that we apparently disagree on.
The concept of "composition" stems from minds because, a fortiori, concepts are mental phenomena period.
It's like saying "Joe's opinion of Britney Spears" stems from Joe's mind. Well, yeah, obviously. Joe's opinion is going to be something that occurs in Joe's mind.
The important point here is that when we're talking about "the composition of Mount Everest," we are not talking about the concept of composition, even though obviously we have such a concept and we need to invoke it in order to talk about the composition. But per the use-mention distinction, that's on the "mention" side. I'm referring to the "use" side. On the "use" side, the composition isn't a concept and doesn't have anything to do with concepts. It has to do with what sorts of rocks/minerals/etc. comprise the mountain.
A lot of these sorts of discussions proceed as if one party has some sort of mention fetish with respect to the use-mention distinction..
No. I'm not talking about making distinctions. When I mention "just the tree" for example, I'm not implying thinking of the term "tree" or a concept of a tree, or separating it from anything else. In order to communicate on a message board, though, I need to use words.
Why wouldn't having or possessing data be knowing it by acquaintance? How would you have or possess data without knowing it by acquaintaice?
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't agree with those definitions, and they're certainly not something that can obtain extramentally.
Quoting Dfpolis
No, of course not. That only depends on how individuals have created and decided to use concepts.
Quoting Dfpolis
By how you've created and decided to use your concept.
Quoting Dfpolis
The word NOT is right there. NOT (present) phenomenally, which is what I was talking about (and specified tens of times).
If it's not separate from anything else, then how is it still itself? Identity depends upon separation, no?
Now you’re saying, Quoting Dfpolis. To me, “it” in this instance is reality, which gives us the more reality is specified the fewer reality’s remaining possibilities. That is agreeable.
Originally you said Quoting Dfpolis. “It” in this instance, the “it” we don’t know, is information. So we end up with...... if we don’t know information, information reduces physical possibilities. Which makes not a lick of sense.
Now, reality can only be specified by the information contained in it. In our Universe, e.g., there is a ton of information we don’t know, and would certainly specify that part of reality to which it pertains. So it stands to reason there is a ton of reality unspecified. It follows that any information we come to know specifies that particular part of reality, thus reducing the physical possibilities remaining to it.
Does an Aristotelian mean to say information reduces possibilities even if we have no idea what that information contains? Let me tell ya....a Kantian, or any reasonable empiricist for that matter, will certainly grant that information reduces possibilities, but only if such information is present to cognition and intelligible. Information could in fact be present to cognition, which makes the presence of the information known, and still be unintelligible, which makes the meaning of the information useless, thus having no warrant whatsoever, including the specification of reality.
What say you?
Okay, but you know my view is that everything stems from minds in some way, so in my view these rocks/minerals also stem from minds, I don't see them as existing independently of minds, so if you're asking me why I believe that rocks/minerals existing independently of minds would depend on other minds, that's already not my belief. I can attempt to tentatively entertain your point of view when needed, but I can't explain why I believe something that I don't believe.
I think it would help if you attempted to answer some of the last questions I asked so I could understand your view more precisely.
For instance it's not clear to me what you mean by "a reference point is a spatio-temporal location" when a person is the reference point.
And considering you say what a person experiences is what the world really is from their reference point, if that person experiences a ghost and says it's real, then from the reference point of that person the ghost is real and not a hallucination; and then would you say that there really was a ghost in the part of the world that was accessible from the spatio-temporal location where the person was?
I mean in terms of isolation, so there's no grass, atmosphere, etc.
Which is why I asked why you'd believe something like that. So you think that a mind exists spontaneously (in the history of the universe) and then, what, thinks matter and then--poof--matter exists because of that? How would that work ontologically?
And then the mind also thinks of people and poof they exist, and then those people think if things like rocks, say, and they poof into existence?
I meant "even if we do not know it, it reduces physical possibility." The reduction of physical possiblity is not conditioned on our knowing or not knowing it, despite the talk about Schrodinger's cat. I think you agree, as you said, " the more reality is specified the fewer reality’s remaining possibilities."
Quoting Mww
Agreed.
Quoting Mww
The physical possibilities are already reduced by the way it is. What is reduced in coming to know is what we see as possible, which is logical possibility.
Quoting Mww
Yes, Aristotle sees the forms of things as making the possibilities latent in their matter actual. Matter is open to many possible forms, but only one actual form at a time. That is true independently of our knowing the form matter has taken.
Quoting Mww
If they do, they are confusing logical and physical possibility. This is the whole point of the intelligiblity debate I am having with @Terrapin Station. I hold that things have definite forms prior to our knowing then and that those forms are the basis in reality of our knowledge. We may not be able to know the forms exhaustively, but what we do know of things, we know because their forms are at least partly intelligible to us.
(Note that Aristotelian forms always belong to individual things. There are no universal forms except in our thought.)
Quoting Mww
The is a contradiction in terms. To be known, something has to be knowable (aka intelligible) which means it can't be unintelligible. We could however, know something and realize that we do not, and cannot, know all there is to that thing.
The reason we know that there is information is because we see open possibilities being closed by experience.
So are you basically endorsing Aristotle's metaphysics? (Because in my view Aristotle's metaphysics is a mess that doesn't really make any sense/isn't really coherent.)
I see no reason why you would make such a claim. There are some things he missed, but the framework is quite solid.
For example, he separates substance(s) and properties, which is incoherent. Arguably he also seems to conflate ontology and linguistic analysis.
That's kind of a derogatory way to look at it, I might as well say so you think matter exists spontaneously and then aggregates in a specific way and then poof mind exists because of that? How does that work ontologically?
In my view it's not just a matter of thinking, it's a matter of believing, what we believe shapes what we experience and what we think and what we desire, which shapes what we experience and what we believe, in an interacting whole. Also mind does not create matter that exists outside mind, it's still a part of mind. And minds interacting in some way create other minds, which can appear as people.
But you don't even need to know why I believe that everything stems from minds to answer the questions I asked. Like I said I am willing to tentatively let go of that belief. Here I have let go of it, I'm listening to you, I'm willing to do my best to entertain and understand your point of view. So you say there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location, and that it's meaningless to talk about how the world is without reference to a spatio-temporal location.
So it means that from your spatio-temporal location "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" is true, whereas that might not be true from another spatio-temporal location? Or is the statement "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" made without reference to a spatio-temporal location?
Then, from your spatio-temporal location, if you see someone say that they have seen a ghost who was as real as a tree and that they weren't hallucinating, does it mean to you that they really saw a ghost from their spatio-temporal location, or that they hallucinated a ghost, and how do you reach that conclusion?
So there are just trees in empty space, or maybe there are just tress with no space around them at all?
I was explaining the "not separate" comment, which is why I quoted you referencing that.
It seems like you're wanting to argue via creative misunderstandings. I'm not interested in that.
So yes, either matter comes to exist spontaneously, or it's always existed (those are the only two options for whatever we're positing ontologically) and we can explain how minds come to exist by explaining stellar and planetary development, explaining how certain materials in certain conditions amount to life, explaining evolution and how it leads to brains, etc.
So what, at least roughly, would you analogously do for an ontology where mind somehow exists first and creates things like planets?
Obviously, you have a third- or fourth-hand hearsay acquaintance with Aristotle. I know of no text in which he separates (as opposed to mentally distinguishing) substance(s) and properties. He does distinguish ostensible unities (tode ti = "this something") from the aspects we predicate of them,(symbebecon [if memory serves] = things that "stand together" aka "accidents"), He states clearly that the things that stand together have no separate existence, but inhere in the substances that we predicate them of. So, you are spouting prejudicial nonsense.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Really? Then why haven't you argued it -- starting with an actual text?
Of course.
Being patronizing will surely help the discussion.
I haven't read much Aristotle in about 30 years. So, since you're an expert on him, could you quote some passages about substances and properties that show that (a) he's pretty clearly positing substances as necessarily having properties, and (b) he's clearly not making claims about language use?
You could just reference passages if you like. I have the Barnes complete works at hand, but I haven't read much of it in a long time. (Hence why I'd not be able to point to specific passages without doing a lot of rereading)
If only minds exist on your view, then how would you claim that you can ever observe anything, including other people/other minds, aside from your own mind? In other words, how would you establish anything other than solipsism?
TP, I want to understand you. However, I am struggling to do so, as apparently others are also struggling. Misunderstandings are generally the fault of the writer, not the reader.
This is too brief. I have no idea at all what point you are making, I really don't.
Did you understand the phenomenal versus ontological re "what's really going on" distinction?
Okay, so if you're really trying to understand what I'm saying, why didn't you bring this up a handful of posts ago, when I first stressed the difference? It was the first thing I did when you first asked about this.
Phenomenal--in other words, in terms of what appears, what is present at the time in question (so not present period, but present in terms of appearance). If we're talking about appearance to someone, to their awareness or experience, it's what is present in their awareness at the time in question.
So, the idea is that sometimes, to someone, there's no phenomena, no awareness or appearance of self, as well as no awareness or appearance of names, concepts, etc. There's just awareness/appearance of, say a tree (and of course the grass around it, etc.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
The bolded bits contradict each other. There are no phenomena, AND there is the phenomenon of a tree.
Where am I going wrong?
When people make absurd claims categorically, they need to be called out.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Try Categories i, 2: "By being 'present in a subject' I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject [italics mine]." It is clear from the context that he is speaking of accidents as present in a subject.
With regard to linguistic analysis and ontology, it is you who are confused. His discussion of substance and accidents occurs in the Categories, which is not an ontological work, but one of linguistic analysis -- part of the Organon, which is a collection laying the logical and linguistic foundations for more specific investigations. If you want ontology, read the Metaphysics.
Where you're going wrong is in having trouble with the longer, less simple, sentence construction.
There's no phenomenon of self.
I have to look up the parts before and after that as soon as I can get to it, but how is that about substances and whether they're separable from properties?
Because in this translation "subject" and "substance" mean the same thing. A substance is what other things (including accidents) are predicated of.
Also, try this from i, 5: "To sum up, it is a distinctive mark of substance, that, while remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary qualities, the modification taking place through a change in the substance itself." In other words, accidental changes are changes to the substance itself, not to something separate.
Accidents are properties. If properties are "other things" then substances are not necessarily properties.
It depends on how one defines "phenomenon." What is your definition?
See the post just a few above that explains this to him.
I used "thing" in an analogous sense -- not to refer to wholes (substances), but to refer to whatever can be predicated. Still substances are not properties. Aristotle also states that clearly. Properties are aspects of substances, which cannot exist apart from them.
Which means they're separable=they're not identical, but this is wrong.
However the self is still there, or the phenomenon of the tree could not be possible, it's just that the self is not paying attention to itself, and is therefore not apparent, or not present as a phenomenon. To my mind, a phenomenon entails a subject that the appearance appears to. Is that where we disagree?
This depends on how you define "essential." Aristotle is clear that by "essential" in this regard, he is speaking of species-defining properties.
No, 'Separable' means that they could have an independent being, which Aristotle explicitly denies. They are distinguishable -- mentally, not ontologically separable.
Now you're telling me what I'm referring to. I'm referring to being logically separable. The idea of substances sans properties is incoherent. That's the whole point (that I already made).
There's no sense in which essential versus accidental properties are objective/extramental. The "essential/accidental" distinction is subjective; it's solely one of how an individual formulates their concepts.
But not phenomenally or experientially. That was the point. In order to get to "the self is still there" we need to do something theoretical, to think about this and posit "what's really going on" where that's different than what phenomenally or experientially was the case.
That is not Aristotle's idea, but yours. Aristotle sees substances as wholes.
I was referring to "mentally, not ontologically separable." Is that not Aristotle's idea? You just said it was.
The point made by Aristotle is that some properties can change, and the whole remains the same kind of thing (fits the same definition). That relates to extramental reality, but not not exclusively, because it is humans who define things.
Definitions are something we do with language. So you're saying that Aristotle is doing ontology "The whole remains..." by analyzing language. Which is something I said above that you disagreed with.
And I was referring to the notion of substance sans properties. Aristotle never speaks of it. That is why it is your idea. The reason substances are not accidents is that accidents do not exhaust substances, not because substances can exist (even mentally) without accidents.
Experience is knowledge, knowledge is the reception and processing of intelligible information. The total of possibilities in reality are inversely proportional to our knowledge of the information that specifies it. Exactly what I’ve been saying all along.
———————-
Logical possibility: always derived from pure reason, and is the form of physical possibility....
All there is, is what reality is, which means all the information that would or could specific reality already is, as well. All there is must be possible, or it wouldn’t be, regardless of our knowledge of it. The absolute totality of reality is expressible by the totality of information contained it in. Logically, reality and its information are quantitatively equal; there cannot be more reality than information specifying it, and there cannot be more information than reality to which it applies.
Physical possibility: always derived from experience, and is the matter of logical possibility.....
Each part of the matter of reality is existentially independent, even if not necessarily ontologically independent. While it is certainly the case that some part of the matter of reality is identical in substance to another part of the matter, it is never the case that all parts of the matter of reality be identical in substance to each other. That the diverse and discreet arrangements of the substance of the matter of reality can be given to human perception merely by their impression on it, is sufficient to define and establish the physical possibility of them. It follows necessarily that the establishment of the physical possibility of any arrangement of any substance of any matter of reality not present to human perception, is not sufficiently given. That is not to say such physical arrangement not so impressed is thereby impossible, but only that the possibility of it is not established.
Logical possibility is thought, physical possibility is experience. The two can be interconnected, can influence each other, but cannot be confused by a rational mind. And while it is not absurd that the form of matter lies within it, it is patently obvious, with respect to the human cognitive system, that whatever its label or whatever the doctrine is that describes the matter of reality, and its possibilities, everything must relate to how a human understands it. Parsimony dictates, therefore, that the form reside internally and it be that to which the impressions on our perception relate. Descartes’ perfections, Hume’s sentiments/passions, Kant’s intuitions.......all the same in kind as Aristotle’s forms, except for their location.
———————
Me: Information could in fact be present to cognition, which makes the presence of the information known, and still be unintelligible.
You: The is a contradiction in terms. To be known, something has to be knowable (aka intelligible) which means it can't be unintelligible.
Yours is correct, but it doesn’t reflect on what I said. I can easily know a presence and surmise there to be a content in it, without knowing what the content is.
Point/counterpoint. No harm, no fowl.
I did not say "the whole remains," you did. I said that some properties could change and the substance would still satisfy the definition. That is a linguistic claim.
Which is another way of saying "mentally separable"
You just wrote this: "The point made by Aristotle is that some properties can change, and the whole remains the same kind of thing (fits the same definition). That relates to extramental reality, but not not exclusively, because it is humans who define things."
That's one way to get to the self, yes, to infer it. But I think we can also do it, as it were, reflexively. We attend to a phenomenon, and then deliberately attend not just to the phenomenon but the self that experiences it. We can be aware of ourselves in a way that does not necessarily involve inference.
Sure. I wasn't at all denying that. Hence why I asked the question this way--note the bolded words:
The first thing I'd wonder is if that's really the way all phenomena are to you. For example, it's never [?] for you just that there's a tree, say. It's always [?] that you have something like "I'm a conscious entity, aware of a tree" present?
For me, there's often just a tree (or whatever).
By the way, I asked dfpolis this just a couple posts into the thread, and then on just on page 11 he gets around to asking how I'm using the word "phenomena"
There should be some sort of official PF thing for when this happens. Like a flying pig gif or something.
:up:
I am saying we have no actual knowledge until we are aware of the processed information.
Quoting Mww
I'd say that physically possibility is prior to our experiencing/knowing it.
Quoting Mww
I don't know what the difference between ontological and existential would be.
Quoting Mww
Experience informs thought. Uninformed thought can have no impact on what is logically possible.
Quoting Mww
There is no reason to reject the existence of things to which we do not relate. It is just that our knowledge is human knowledge, which is to say knowledge of how reality relates to us.
Quoting Mww
I think that, since reality constantly surprises us, it is more than an internal mental state, The reason for this is that no state is truly mental unless we are aware of it. A state can be potentially mental (intelligible) without awareness, but it can't be actually mental sans awareness.
Quoting Mww
No, not their location, but their very dynamics differ. Anything "internal" in the sense of "mental" is an object of awareness. Most Aristotelian forms are not. Most are intelligible, but not actually known. That makes them radically different, and gives them an explanatory value internal forms necessarily lack.
Quoting Mww
Agreed.
My understanding is that the notion of a substance without properties serves to demonstrate that such a thing cannot exist, and it’s that which makes it necessary to have properties (form) as part of the metaphysical picture together with substance (prime matter). I think Aquinas presents it that way; perhaps Aristotle does also.
No, it is not. An Aristotelian substance is always a whole. Properties are what we separate mentally.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This statement can be taken phenomenologically or ontologically, but it it certainly does not mean "the whole remains simpiciter." Some aspect of it no longer remains. Still, ostensible unities have a phenomenological continuity to from before to after phenomenological changes. Or, are you denying that?
I think they both would see substances (ostensible unities) as givens, not requiring an argument. Then, on mental analysis, we find and name various aspects of the whole (logical accidents) and rejoin them with the whole in judgements expressed by predication.
The idea that as we abstract properties from wholes we remove them, like picking the raisins out of a pudding, leaving behind an empty, unintelligible matrix which is substance, is an absurd misunderstanding of the Aristotelian doctrine.
You're not understanding that comment at all.
The material beginning with "the whole remains . . . " is presumably about ontology, right?
Meanwhile, it turned out that "the whole remains" was saying something about, or that hinged on, definitions.
Definitions are something we do with language. Insofar as we're talking about definitions, we're talking about language.
Well, something I said about Aristotle's metaphysics earlier, something that you disagreed with, was this: "Arguably he also seems to conflate ontology and linguistic analysis."
It the material beginning with "the whole remains . . ." is supposed to be ontology*, then that's an example of conflating ontology and linguistic analysis if the ontological stuff is supposed to be about or hinge on something about definitions.
That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say, "Arguably he also seems to conflate ontology and linguistic analysis."
*otherwise, if "the whole remains..." is supposed to be linguistic analysis, then it's not addressing any ontological issues, which is what I had commented on.
So there appears to be an irony in that the objection being made against Aristotelian metaphysics here is actually the justification for Aristotelian metaphysics.
"Aristotle famously contends that every physical object is a compound of matter and form."
Matter and form are not a compound. The "two" are inseparable in all respects--logical, physical, conceptual, etc. They're the same thing.
No, it is about what we see. Aristotle has not yet turned to the analysis of the relation between what is perceived and what is. He does that in De Anima iii. Here he is prescinding from that sort of analysis, and discussing how we use language to describe experience. He is not saying that experience revels being, nor is he denying it. It just isn't what he's discussing.
Descartes's confusion of knowledge and belief, and Kant's confused musings about phenomena and noumena had not occurred yet, and so are not part of the problematic he had to deal with.
"Aristotle introduces his notions of matter and form in the first book of his Physics, his work on natural science. Natural science is concerned with things that change, and Aristotle divides changes into two main types: there are accidental changes, which involve concrete particulars, or “substances” (ousiai) in Aristotle’s terminology, gaining or losing a property (see Categories 1–5, Physics i 7). For instance, the changes whereby Socrates falls in a vat of dye and turns blue, or puts on a few pounds from excessive feasting during the Panathenaia, count as accidental changes (in the categories of quality and quantity, respectively). Socrates, a substance, gains the property of being blue, or the property of weighing twelve stone. The other main kind of change is substantial change, whereby a substance comes into, or passes out of, existence. For example, when Socrates dies, or is born (or perhaps conceived, or somewhere in between conception and birth), a substantial change has taken place."
Among other issues, Socrates turning blue, putting on pounds, etc. ARE substantial changes.
And the accidental distinction is subjective--it depends on one's concept. Accidental properties are those that an x (some entity) can have that one doesn't include as a requirement for one to consider or not consider some x an F (to consider the entity a particular type of thing, or to call it by a particular name).
So then of what relevance is it to a discussion about Aristotle's ontology?
"We're disagreeing about Aristotle's ontology . . . I know, I'll bring up something that doesn't have to do with ontology as an illustration."
I am sorry that "compound" confuses you. It may not be the best term. I discuss the relation of matter and form in my article, "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," The Modern Schoolman LXVIII (1991), 3, pp. 225-244. Briefly, "form" (eidos or morphê) names what a thing actually is while hyle (conventionally and poorly translated "matter") names its tendency/potential (Aristotle calls it a "desire" in Physics i, 9) to become something else. Clearly, these are not the same and also are present in all physical objects. "Compound" names this mentally distinguishable, but ontologically inseparable, co-presence.
Re your extended SEP quotation:
The Physics is not, for the most part, a book on "natural science" as we now define it. It is a philosophical analysis of nature.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Only if you equivocate on Aristotle's use of the term, He explains:
Quoting Physics i 7
So, your absurd claim is that Socrates does not survive being dyed blue or gaining weight.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, it is not subjective. A substance is an ostensible unity (tode ti). When Socrates dies, he does not continue as a unity but decays into constituents which are no longer a unified organism.
If you take it so. It can also be about what we perceive. As Aristotle is not distinguishing the two (as he is not a post-Kantian), it is not meant as an ontological vs a phenomenological claim. That distinction is an anachronism you are imposing.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Which properties are essential hinges on our definitions because Aristotle defines essence as the basis in reality for a certain kind of definition. Whether Socrates survives turning blue or or a weight gain does not depend on a definition.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You are the one confusing the analyses in the Organon with ontology.
At any moment, the matter and the form are identical, and you don't have identical matter or form in another moment, in another instance, etc.
The matter by itself IS the ball. The doorstop matter wouldn't be identical to the rubber ball matter. And the form IS the ball. You can't bounce redness, but redness is just a part of the matter. Redness isn't a mere abstraction. It's a property of matter, and inseparable from it. Same for roundness, etc.
The mistake of this sort of view is that it sees matter as something that can be given, or can have taken away, properties, while still being the same matter. That's incorrect.
Feser, following Aquinas, does not pay enough attention to the difference between artifacts (which have their form imposed from without), and natural objects (which have their form as a result of internal principles of motion). Matter can be passive in the reception of an imposed form, but it has to be active to generate a new natural form. That is the point of my hyle article,
What is "naming what a thing actually is"? Things actually are whatever they are, and you can name them whatever you want to name them. There's not a correct/incorrect way to name something.
I'm not going to address every problem because this would be thousands of words long. One thing at a time.
Just in case we don't get to this, nothing is literally/objectively identical through time.
No, they never are. What something has the potential to become is never identical with what it is. The problem is that you are using your notion of matter (which is a poor translation of hyle), not Aristotle's. For him, hyle is always potential -- active in natural objects and passive in artifacts.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Really?? So the rubber injected into the ball mold is not the rubber in the ball?
Is this not the same or very similar to noting the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic final causes? Because I have heard/read him make mention of that.
You are equivocating yet again. The identity here is not immutability. It is numerical identity or dynamic continuity.
Also, Aristotle is quite aware of the difference. Accidental changes do not affect numerical identity, but substantial changes do.
Yes, they always, necessarily are.
So, this is what I mean by Aristotle making a mistake about this. You misunderstood my language, but this was what I was saying. Aristotle separates them so that they're not identical. That's a mistake. They're identical. It's incoherent to suppose them to be otherwise.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is wrong. Even putting aside your wonky ontology of potentials/possibles, which I don't at all agree with, what something is is necessarily identical with something it has the potential to be, otherwise it couldn't be what it is.
Aside from that, nothing is identical through time. We form conceptual abstractions of things being identical through time, as it's easier to deal with the world that way--it's an evolutionary necessity, but nothing is actually identical through time.
My notion of matter isn't a translation of anything, lol. Quoting Dfpolis
Correct, it is not identical to it. Things change through time. After all--that's what time is in the first place. Change/motion.
Things are not NUMERICALLY IDENTICAL through time. "Dynamic continuity" is not identity.
Look, at this point it seems as if we're not going to agree on a single thing.
Why don't we make that a challenge? See if you can come up with some simple claim that we'd agree on? And then we could try to go from there. (Maybe if you'd say something that's the opposite of what you think is the case that would work?)
It is analogous, but has different implications.
Fair.
You refuse to understand that you are using Aristotle's language equivocally. I tried to explain this, but you ignored my explanations.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You are so fixed on justifying your ideas that you are not even reading what I wrote. I said has "the potential to become," not "the potential to be what it is."
Quoting Terrapin Station
You will not even allow me to define my own terms.
You're right. You are not open to what others say, so we will never agree.
You tried to explain. I showed you things wrong with the explanation (that is, philosophically wrong with it), and then you ignore addressing the objection. That's your standard operating procedure. (And to my memory it always has been, but I forgot who you were for a bit . . . I kind of get the impression that you can't do much but regurgitate bits of Aristotle in a very confusing, word-salady way.)
Quoting Dfpolis
If x is a ball, obviously it has the potential to become a ball.
So how about trying to start off with something really simple and obvious (in your view) that you think we could agree on?
I am done wasting my time.
That would only be the case if you give all of this up and focus on watching TV or something.
I am happy to dialog with reasonable people, even if we disagree. Constant equivocation and twisting what is said is not reasonable.
I hope you're not assuming that I ever thought you were reasonable.
I had no such expectation.
I don't think once you've ever really been able to understand what I was saying. Including at the start of this thread, where I still believe that you have no idea what I was getting at re perception.
You also very comically were unable to grasp the Euthyphro idea in that other thread.
Are the reasonable approved by Terrapin because they are reasonable, or are they reasonable because approved by Terrapin?
And then poof minds arise out of brains.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You can have a primary mind that imagined what we call the universe, and we would be part of that mind.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Our minds would be connected in some way, I'm not saying we would all live within our own mind disconnected from others.
I have shown my good faith answering your questions, now it would be nice if you could start answering mine. Your view is the realist one, so discussing it would be more on topic than discussing mine. But it seems like you stop reading my posts after one or two sentences, so I'm not even sure you're gonna read that.
Can we say matter can be passive in its reception of an imposed form?
How is the form imposed? Where does the imposed form originate? What forces are in play to impose the form?
There's not much "poof" to it. That's simply the properties of the matter in question, from the frame of reference of being the matter in question.
Quoting leo
But just "some way" doesn't really answer it. We just have no idea how it's supposed to work other than "some way," and then don't worry about it?
Quoting leo
Sure but one thing at a time. Let's keep the posts short. I like to do this more or less just like we'd talk if we were having a conversation in person. (Which is what ideally I'd prefer, and then I'd prefer a phone conversation, then online chat.)
I don't see how that's not rephrasing the "poof" in a more complicated way.
Quoting Terrapin Station
"Some way" is how I feel about your explanation for how minds arise from brains. I agree that saying minds interact in some way is not a satisfying answer, but I also think there is a lot to discover by looking in that direction, I'm not saying it's a final answer.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Okay, but as I said this is a thread on realism, and you are the one holding a realist view, and I don't see how discussing my idealist view can help me understand your view and answer the questions I asked. As I had explained in other threads I used to be a realist and as I explained in this thread I'm willing to tentatively let go of idealism to try to understand your point of view, so I don't see how it is useful to discuss idealism in order to eventually address my questions.
Here they are again:
Quoting leo
Without getting into issues about truth, yes. What's the case at reference point x might not be the case at reference point y. For example, at reference point x, F is round, while at reference point y, F is oblong. This is easily shown via perspective in realist art, for example.
Re the ghost thing, I answered that already.
So you agree that the statement "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" is true from your spatio-temporal location, but this statement might not be true from another spatio-temporal location? So for instance one could say that "there is no real way the world is from some particular spatio-temporal locations", and it could be true from their spatio-temporal location? And while their statement is not true to you, it could be true to you as well if you were at their spatio-temporal location?
Quoting Terrapin Station
What I'm trying to understand is, do you consider you would have seen a ghost as well if you were at their spatio-temporal location, do you consider that there really was a ghost which could be seen from that spatio-temporal location? Or that if you were at that spatio-temporal location you wouldn't have seen one?
So you're rehashing the old attempt to justify (subjective) idealism. :meh:
Yes. That's what the word "yes" is doing in this sentence: "Without getting into issues about truth, yes."
Quoting leo
It's hard to get into that without getting into a big tangent about truth theory.
Trying to avoid that, I'm not saying anything like, "Whatever anyone claims is what's the case." What I'm saying is something about the relativity of mostly objective properties (I'm only saying "mostly objective" because I'm not excluding that we can be talking about persons' perspectives, too).
Quoting leo
Although I love the fantasy of ghosts, it's difficult for me to say what would be required for me to believe that I actually saw one. Chances are that I'd be skeptical of it no matter what, because I can't figure out how to make the idea of them coherent.
By the way, what you're asking about doesn't have much to do with realism per se. You're asking about what I call my ontological "perspectivalism" (for want of a better, less misleading term).
Nay, it is idealism that is the default. The burden is on the realist.
But when you say that what a being experiences is what the world really is like from their spatio-temporal location, it seems like you're saying that as long as people don't lie then what they claim is what's the case.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Just to make sure, when you talk of reference point it seems to me you're not just referring to a spatio-temporal location, rather you're referring to a spatio-temporal location in addition to what is present at that spatio-temporal location. So for instance two beings present at approximately the same spatio-temporal location could disagree about what the world really is like not in virtue of their different spatio-temporal location, but in virtue of them being different beings.
Which implies that in your view, what the world really is like doesn't just depend on spatio-temporal locations, it also depends on beings. It seems to me your ontological primitives are spatio-temporal locations and things such as beings, rather than a world that contains spatio-temporal locations and beings. Is that correct?
When you brought up hallucinations the first time, I said, "So first, hallucinations and illusions are real hallucinations and illusions. (Where we're not using 'real' in the traditional manner to refer to something objective or that exists extramentally.)"
I'm not saying anything like "Whatever someone believes to be the case is the case where that's not a hallucination, not an illusion, etc."
I'm not saying anything like "Perceptions can not be mistaken."
What I'm saying is "Perceptions can be accurate." Contra claims that they can't be or that there's no reason to ever believe that they are.
Quoting leo
There's no difference. Space and time never exist "on their own."
Quoting leo
That would be possible, but it's important to remember that I'm not focusing on creatures. When I say something existing at a spatio-temporal location it can be something like a proton or whatever.
Quoting leo
I never said anything like "what the world really is like DEPENDS on spatio-temporal locations." I said that properties are different at different spatio-temporal locations, and there's no way to be absent a spatio-temporal location. I'm not talking about dependencies, though. What things are like depends on properties, and everything has unique properties, including beings.
Quoting leo
My ontological primitives are matter and relations, where the relations are often dynamic.
Well, if we understand matter as stuff we can, and the kind of matter that is passive is stuff that is shaped in some way -- like rubber of marble. In a natural process, the matter (hyle) is never a thing or a stuff. It is always a tendency (what Aristotle calls a "desire" in Physics i, 9).
Quoting Mww
Since this is the artificial case, the form comes from the artificer. In the natural case it is implicit in law-like tendencies that anticipate the later idea of laws of nature.
Simple as that, huh? Cool.
Guess the explains why there are no statues based on the inverse square law.
Yet another incoherent idea. Nothing exists aside from "things or stuff."
"Imposed form" would refer to forces applied to something (that already has a form, and the forces are applied from something that has matter/form, too.). It's not "passive." See Newton's third law.
Yep
I don’t suppose a real thing such as a man, to be passive stuff upon whom is imposed a form of justice, that shapes him in some way? Wrong kind of shape?
I think we become just by actively willing to make just decisions.
True enough. But there is a judicial system now, and there was in Greek antiquity as well. Besides, you’re on record has denying a priori determinations in general, which would be imposing a form, your “actively willing”, on ourselves, as opposed to an administrative doctrine that imposes justice as its due course.
Again, I realize this is not in line with the subject matter, but nobody else is talking, so......
How does Aristotle treat what we now understand as established entirely subjective predications?
Aristotle does not talk much about subjective decisions, except for his discussion of proairesis. Proairesis is the process leading to a decision. He sees it very rationally, proceeding iteratively. If we want A, we have to effect B, If we want B we have to effect C, etc., until we come to something we can do now to get the process started -- and that is what we should do now. He sees the goal of human behavior as happiness, and ethics as studying the means for attaining happiness.
His general view of ethical reasoning is that it is very imprecise and it is an error to expect it to be as exact as the other sciences.
He also had agents in the field with Alexander the Great, documenting the "constitutions" of the nations encountered -- in other words, how they ruled themselves. In so doing, he placed political science on an empirical footing. That suggests to me that he wanted to find out what worked rather than approaching the subject more theoretically as Plato seems to have done.
I will have to admit to being more interested in his views on metaphysics, nature, and epistemology than in his work on ethics, art and politics.
My interests also, obviously from a more historically evolved point of view.
This is why I think that if we're in a Matrix then it doesn't matter: this so-called 'unreal' world is more real than the so-called 'real' one that we never get to experience.
But I think we can use the term 'objective reality' in two different ways. If by 'objective reality' we are referring to the reality that is actually signitifantly real, the reality that matters, and the only reality that we can know actually exists, then that is, indeed, experiential reality.
If we are, on the other hand, referring to the possibility of a reality consisting of things-in-themselves, apart from how they are experienced, if that's what we mean by objective reality, then objective reality is not experiential.
But, in that case, I would say that objective reality doesn't exist. Because EVERYTHING is experiential. But, because subjects are actually a subcategory of objects, objects do exist so it would be really weird to say that. A world of real objects should really be considered objective reality. But, I guess, most people think of an 'object' as necessarily ontologically distinct from a 'subject'. Most people think that an object refers to an object that necessarily has no subjectivity. In which case, it's just that most people are wrong. Objects having subjectivity is no more problematic than brains having minds.
But, basically, from the point of view of those who believe in a noumenal world of things-in-themselves-apart-from-experience: I can understand why they call that objective reality. It just makes no sense to me, because I'm a panexperientialist, and, also, because experience is by definition the only thing that we can ever have any evidence of.
Evidence is empirical and empiricism is experience-based. What's more, something is only evident if it's evident to someone, a subject, so, again, evidence is entirely experience-based. Nothing non-experiential is evident—and nothing non-experiential ever can be evident.
Okay, but you do say that what a being perceives is what the world really is like from their spatio-temporal location, correct?
So how can you distinguish between perceptions that are accurate and perceptions that are mistaken? If a being perceives A from reference point P1, how can you tell whether A is accurate or mistaken? If you compare A with other perceptions from other reference points to reach the conclusion that A is mistaken, how do you know in the first place that the other perceptions are accurate and not mistaken?
It seems to me that in the first place you necessarily assume that some specific perceptions are accurate in order to conclude that a given perception is mistaken. And the issue I see with this is that if at the beginning we take a different set of perceptions that we label as accurate, then we wouldn't reach the same conclusions as to which perceptions are mistaken. Which means there is an irreducible arbitrariness in labeling some perceptions as hallucinations rather than some others.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Is there such a thing as what the world really is like from a reference point where there is no being perceiving? For instance in your view is there such a thing as what the world really is like from the reference point of a rock?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station
Okay. To make sure we understand each other, I'm going to rephrase your view in two different ways, let me know which one is correct, if any.
1) In your view, matter is the fundamental thing, the constituent of every thing, and matter has unique properties. Matter can be related to other matter in various ways. A thing has unique properties, which depend on the relations between the matter that compose the thing. A rock and a being are examples of things. In turn, there are relations between things, so for instance there are relations between a rock and a being, which depend on the relations between the matter that makes up the being and the matter that makes up the rock.
2) In your view, there is no such thing as matter existing in isolation, there is always matter in relation to other matter, every thing is matter in relation to other matter. When you talk of a thing such as a rock or a being, you always refer to the thing in relation to its surroundings, so for instance strictly speaking a being is not a thing, but "a being and its surroundings and the relations between them" is a thing, which has unique properties.
Depends.
You cannot experience another's self-awareness (or you'd be them instead), so, unless you go by solipsism, there are already things always just over the horizon.
Feel free to call them ding-an-sich if you like.
Individuation, self-identity, ..., already always presupposed one way or other, or our chat loses meaning.
Shouldn't conflate ontology and epistemics.
But experiences occur like whatever else; the "subjective versus objective" thing can be misleading.
It's what some part of the world is like at that spatio-temporal location, sure, including possibly their brain--if they're hallucinating, for example.
Quoting leo
I already addressed this. So why are we going through it again? Keep your responses shorter and let's settle one thing at a time so we don't have to repeat stuff.
So let's stop here for a minute and make sure there's no issue with the first part ("It's what some part of the world is like . . .") so that we don't have to repeat that bit.
Sure.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You're saying what a being perceives at a spatio-temporal location is "what some part of the world is like at that spatio-temporal location".
What do you mean exactly by "including possibly their brain--if they're hallucinating". Are you talking about the being perceiving their own brain, or are you saying that the spatio-temporal location possibly includes their brain?
I wouldn't actually call a hallucination a perception--I reserve perception for information acquired from external things via one's senses. But at any rate, hallucinations give accurate info about the world, information about how one's brain is working. Hallucinations can be related to/in response to perceptions, but the bulk of of isn't a perception.