Brains do not cause conscious experience.
If your conscious experience is caused by your brain, this means that the body (including your head, which you believe contains a physical brain which is causing your experience) and the world around that you perceive - perceptions being conscious experience - must therefore be caused by your brain.
So you're left in the horrible epistemic position of the brain state that gives rise to/is equal to your conscious experience not being within your head that you feel, see, touch, etc. Rather, all those sense experiences, and the perceived world around you, and the people you interact with, must all already be caused by/equal to the particular state of a brain.
So basically you're a homunculus. An onboard body/world model within the brain of a physical human.
This is a horrible epistemic position to be on, because from the position of the onboard self/world model, you do not have any access to anything BUT the model. So if you have no access to the supposed brain which is carrying the conscious experience which you exist as within itself (or, as itself/as it's state), then I don't see how you can justify even positing it's existence. You can't know anything about it from your position, all you have access to is your phenomenal world.
Basically, if a brain is giving rise to your conscious experience, it can't be located within your head. Your perceived head would already be being caused by a brain, and so the brain causing this perception can't be located within this perception. You can't locate the brain that is causing your conscious experience, within your conscious experience of a head. It has to be the other way round, with perceptions being located within a brain, perceptions of your head included. But if this is so, then from your epistemic position you can have no knowledge of this brain which is causing your experience, including whether it even exists or not.
So you're left in the horrible epistemic position of the brain state that gives rise to/is equal to your conscious experience not being within your head that you feel, see, touch, etc. Rather, all those sense experiences, and the perceived world around you, and the people you interact with, must all already be caused by/equal to the particular state of a brain.
So basically you're a homunculus. An onboard body/world model within the brain of a physical human.
This is a horrible epistemic position to be on, because from the position of the onboard self/world model, you do not have any access to anything BUT the model. So if you have no access to the supposed brain which is carrying the conscious experience which you exist as within itself (or, as itself/as it's state), then I don't see how you can justify even positing it's existence. You can't know anything about it from your position, all you have access to is your phenomenal world.
Basically, if a brain is giving rise to your conscious experience, it can't be located within your head. Your perceived head would already be being caused by a brain, and so the brain causing this perception can't be located within this perception. You can't locate the brain that is causing your conscious experience, within your conscious experience of a head. It has to be the other way round, with perceptions being located within a brain, perceptions of your head included. But if this is so, then from your epistemic position you can have no knowledge of this brain which is causing your experience, including whether it even exists or not.
Comments (91)
If conscious experience is caused by your brain, conscious experience is caused by your brain.
And I would have thought it obvious that we have no knowledge of our own brains. It could not be otherwise. I cannot for the life of me see why that should be a cause of angst!
My point is not that we can't perceive the brain in our heads.
But it's hard to see how that could actually be, when one is a subjective lived experience and the other is an object in the world. How could they be the very same thing?
If identity is the case, they're both subjective experience (I don't know what "lived" adds to that) and an object in the world, of course. What's causing the dichotomy is considering the thing in question from two different reference points, and again, it's important to remember that EVERYTHING is from some reference point. There's a reference point of being a brain, and a reference point of observing a brain that's not one's own. Those are different reference points.
Also, just as an fyi aside, if you want to make sure that I see a post and respond (well, or if you want to have a better chance of that), hit "reply" on my post. I often just check the number next to "YOU" in the menu here.
What if you substituted body/brain with "camera" and perception/experience with "image"? Does it make sense to say that cameras don't take pictures because they could potentially take a picture of themselves, (in a mirror)?
Quoting dukkha
The treachery of images is that the image is not the thing. A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, but it is possible that some real pipe was involved in the process of making the image. It is only horrible if you assume that images and the things they represent are identical and have some vested interest in everything being real. So it is a kind of paradox -- trying to deal with the contradiction that everything is an image, but everything must be real.
Quoting dukkha
Well, even if an image/perception isn't the same as the thing being shown/perceived resolves the first problem, you might still have a problem that you ultimately can't completely perceive your perceptions, because you end up with infinite sets-of-sets. I don't think that is a problem, just a hardware limitation. It is still possible for something else to be capable of perceiving everything you perceive without contradiction if perceptions are finite.
Well, it can't be an identity. The information content of DNA is not the DNA. The program that won at Go is not the hardware, the symphony is not the notes on paper.
Just to keep this simple to start, the relation can't be one of identity because of other things that you would say are not identity relations?
(Part of what I'm trying to do in this comment by the way is to get you to clarify an argument, including clarifying just what relation(s) you're saying those other things have, and why you're saying that they're the same as the brain/mind relation.)
I don't know what you mean. The information (though more precisely knowledge) encoded in DNA can be transferred through multiple media and preserved. There has to be something objectively independent of DNA for that to be possible.
That "thing" is the subject of information theory.
Re what I mean, there has to be some relation between DNA and the information content of DNA for example, right?
If Einstein's theories were written in incomprehensible code, then the books and papers would be forgotten.
DNA contains information that, when instantiate in a suitable environment, causes itself to be replicated.
The weird thing about this, is that information theory is fundamentally counterfactual. If you do not accept that the code could have been otherwise, then information does not exist.
So, what do you think, determinism or information?
Did you understand my previous post/the question I had asked you?
Does that sound about right?
Why this is so is a very complicated question involving philosophy, semiotics, and cognition.
"Why this is so" is not at all complicated. It's a rather simple thing called intention. It so happens though, that most people deny the existence of intention. And, by trying to explain matters of intention without referring to intention, they produce a very complicated issue.
So assuming that we were to agree on that for a moment, and ignoring that we're not actually saying what the relation is, but instead we're just saying what it isn't, the idea is supposed to be that DNA/DNA informational content, computer hardware/the program that won at Go, notes on pqper/a symphony all have the same code/meaning relation, as does brain/mind?
To the extent that brains/minds give them the same meaning, which some are happy to do, like Dennett and Kurzweil, and others, less so, like Lanier.
So you agree with Searle that it's a biological property, and not something that can be functionally recreated in a computer.
They are all examples of the idea that information and the way the meaning is information is encoded are separable.
A more simple example is that you can take any proposition and translate it into a variety of languages, or media, or codes. Take a proposition that is determinative - the instructions for constructing a device or formula or recipe. That means that, no matter how it is represented, the output or result is invariant - otherwise the devise or meal or chemical substance won't turn out correctly. So the information is quite exact. But the means of representing it, in terms of which language, which media type, and so on, can vary enormously.
So this suggests that the information or meaning or propositional content is independent of the physical media type or type of symbol.
I think 'caused by' is an problematic. The brain is obviously fundamental to conscious experience, but the lesson of embodied cognition is that brains are always associated with nervous systems, sensory organs, bodies, and environments.
But I think your post is grappling with a real philosophical problem, i.e. 'knowledge of the external world'.
Is it also independent of the rules needed to translate it between physical media or types of symbols?
I guess you could say that in the case of speech, first there's the intentional meaning - what needs to be communicated - and then you 'search for the words' to encode the meaning, then put them together according to the syntactical or grammatical rules. Similar with programming - required output, modelling, then coding. The lower-level code is what actually translates the commands into binary and executes it on the level of microprocessors.
How that happens on the physiological level is definitely beyond my pay-grade.
But I think my original point still stands.
It is spoken about from a biological perspective, but that doesn't mean it can be understood solely in biological terms. To say that it is just or only a biological phenomenon is the precise meaning of 'biological reductionism'. It simply provides a way of managing the debate from a point of view which is understandable by the physical sciences, in the absence of any other agreed normative framework.
Sure, but let me ask the question a different way. From the POV of physics, does any of that exist? Or, to describe the physics of a computer, is there any need to invoke software at all?
No. But this is where the 'epistemic cut' comes in. There is a level of order found in biological systems and language, which is not reducible to physics. That area is @Apokrisis' speciality, although he still claims to be a physicalist (but I think that is because in modern philosophy, the concept of mind is irretrevably tied to Descartes' reified abstraction, i.e. there isn't a proper lexical framework within which to discuss 'nature of mind'.)
The reason that DNA/DNA info, computer hardware/rules of GO, and notes on paper/symphony are not comparable to brain/mind is because all of those examples are static, whereas brain/mind is dynamic. This is not a small point. When a computer wins at GO, the game it plays is comparable to mind, not the information stored in the circuitry. And that exact game (which is dynamic) can never be reproduced simply by transferring the stored (static) information to another computer or device. Thus it is not the arrangement of neurons that is identical to a mind, but rather the synaptic activity that is identical to mind.
And me. I'm a physicalist/identity theorist, though I'm not an eliminative materialist.
We know it to be a biological property at this point, and there's no reason yet to believe that functionalism is true. I wouldn't say that functionalism couldn't be true, but there's just no reason to believe that it is yet. There's no reason to believe that substratum dependence isn't the case. Mentality might be properties unique to the specific materials, structures and processes that comprise brains.
Not that I agree with that view (which I can get into in a moment, although you should already know why I don't agree from comments I've made previously, and some explicitly in response to you), but I'm more curious re what the argument is supposed to be for brains and minds being the same relation in that regard? People are always criticizing comments for not being arguments. Well, where's the argument here?
The stuff you typed after what I quoted is by no means an argument for this, unless you classify very loose heuristic rhetoric as an argument. Your paragraph beginning with "A simple example" is actually just fleshing out the claim you're making--stating it more verbosely, the claim that I quoted from you above, and without any argument regarding how it fits any of the pairs given earlier (DNA/DNA informational content, etc.), including not being an argument for how it fits the brain/mind pair.
What of my argument (above)? The reason that none of the cited examples are analogues for mind/brain is that they are static, and mind/brain is dynamic.
It is also important to understand the level of complexity represented by our brains. Estimates for the number of synaptic connections in the human brain are roughly 100 trillion, which is many orders of magnitude above the number of stars in the Milky Way! And those connections are highly plastic. Thus the human brain is a massive, mutable structure that incorporates feedback loops. No computer that currently exists (or that will exist in the foreseeable future) even comes close.
One structure that does come close to the complexity of the human brain is the internet. But here, the mutability is controlled by outside agents (i.e., users), so the internet will probably never attain consciousness either.
I don't agree with your argument because I don't agree that anything exists that isn't dynamic.
The problem, in my view, with what their argument is turning out to be is that they're positing real (read "extramental") abstracts, such as meaning (and apparently "information"), where they believe that the same x (a la logical identity) can be achieved by different physical phenomena. Or in other words, they're arguing for multiple realizability (and in a broader context than just brain/mind).
I don't buy that there are any real abstracts.* I'm a nominalist (more generally), too. And of course I thus don't buy multiple realizability. So their argument fails because the premise is flawed.
* Things like meaning exist, of course, but they're not real abstracts. Meaning consists of particulars--particular mental events in the brains of individuals.
Take a proposition that is determinative - the instructions for constructing a device or formula or recipe. That means that, no matter how it is represented, the output or result is invariant - otherwise the devise or meal or chemical substance won't turn out correctly; the instructions amount to a specificaion. So the information is quite exact - it is deteminative with respect to the outcome. But the means of representing the specification - which language, which media type - can vary enormously.
So the fact that 'the information' can remain the same while 'the representation' varies, shows that information and representation are separable.
Yeah, that's not actually an argument. It's a more verbose explanation of what the claim is. Arguments have premises and conclusions that are (putatively) validly implied by those premises. (And they're also putatively non-fallacious.)
The problem with that claim is that multiple realizability is false. No numerically distinct things are identical. Outputs are never invariant.
You should read Alice in Wonderland, Terrapin Station. You would fit in there just fine, along side the Chestershire Cat. Which character was it that said 'words have just the meaning I say they mean, no more, and no less'? Sounds just like you. You could play that role. It would be neat. Invite us along to watch (although I might be busy.)
Gah--that's a CLAIM. It's not an argument. Again, arguments have premises and conclusions that are supposedly implied by the premises. I'm not saying that you need to present arguments, by the way. But if you're going to criticize someone else for not presenting arguments, be prepared to get the criticism right back when you're also not presenting arguments. I'll keep pointing this out if you're going to keep criticizing my posting style. Of course, you could choose not to do that and we could simply get on with a conversation.
Anyway, that claim is wrong on my view.
So when we disagree on a claim that's supposedly serving as the premise of an argument (only in absence of an argument), what do we do?
(I like, by the way, how you completely ignored this: "The problem with that claim is that multiple realizability is false. No numerically distinct things are identical. Outputs are never invariant.")
Why?
"No numerically distinct things are identical. Outputs are never invariant."
No, of course not. It should be obvious that I do not agree with that. Again, to even ask this in the first placfe implies that you do not understand the idea of nominalism.
And of course, no, two Mars bars are not identical. Again, to even ask this implies that you do not understand "No numerically distinct things are identical."
Again, there's no way in hell that you actually have a philosophy degree. You have no familiarity with or understanding of some of the most basic ideas in the field, lol. You also seem to have zero ability to consider views different than your own. You seem to believe that doing philosophy amounts to simply towing the line of a certain subset of status quo views.
I think it's fine that you don't have a background in the field, and that you're just self-educated, probably to help support your religious views, but at least be honest about that, and don't try to act all superior, etc.
Also, how many friggin times have you promised to simply ignore me? Carry through with it already,. You're ignorant, not very intelligent, and certainly not honest. I'd prefer you to ignore me.
It's not a point of view but an explanstion, your campaign to deflate the authority of the sciences, and the best explanations, seems ideological, or religious.
He seems to get that a lot for some reason. :s ;)
If only those folks would carry through with their promises. Instead, they're like politicians.
I agree with you that they are not the same. TS doesn't recognize identity across time, though. I have been over that with him many months ago. His position is woefully incoherent, but he stubbornly refuses to see it. If someone makes a valid point against his position he evades or changes the subject; I have seen it too many times to be bothered any more.
Haha--speaking of (lying) politicians.
Well, I never made any such overt promise. I have made promises to myself though generally not to bother responding to people who I do not believe are arguing in good faith.
Right. I was just referring to those who have.
There are some dispositions/attitudes where I'd prefer that those folks didn't bother addressing me/responding to me. Those are typically the sorts of folks who would wind up promising that they will not be responding to me any longer.
Well, you're under no obligation to address their responses in the first place.
Sure, but obviously it's not that I don't want to respond to them but I just can't help myself. I'm not going to stop responding to anyone, really. If they don't like me enough that they're going to respond with that sort of attitude, they should probably be able to help themselves.
Is it really a matter of like or dislike, though? Like or dislike doesn't come into it for me, I mean, I just see a lot of your conversations where you just basically say "I don't buy this" or "I don't buy that", but don't provide any arguments; probably because you think they are all merely subjective anyway, so why bother.
If you don't buy the kinds of ideas which are the fundamental foundation stones of any discussion at all, such as identity across time, then what's the point of any discussion at all? If it's all nothing more than doxa, absolutely nothing more than a matter of your opinion or my opinion or someones else's, then how can there be any point discussing anything, beyond whatever pleasure someone might get from mouthing off?
That kind of extreme subjectivism just isn't conducive to philosophy at all, but leads only to plays of rhetoric and sophistry. If that's what you enjoy, then fine, but you'd probably be better off on the Sophistry Forums
It might get back on course. I think the original poster has deserted, though. I asked for more precise clarification,
Quoting John
but received no reply.
I don't provide any less of an argument than anyone else does. For example, I pointed out earlier that Wayfarer wasn't providing any sort of an argument--he was simply just making the same claim more verbosely. That's not what an argument is. What typically happens is that people say "That's not an argument" when they do not agree with the claims being made. When they agree, it's an argument to them. That's how this works close to 100% of the time.
Of course, you'll deny this, but it's true, and if you like, I can keep pointing out how you also do not actually provide arguments for anything. I'm not saying that we should be providing arguments. I didn't initiate that criticism. But those initiating it are completely hypocritical.
Quoting John
LOL re "you need to agree with my view about identity across time in order to have a discussion."
Also, LOL, by the way how you're making the error of believing that I think that "everything is subjective."
Anyway, so nothing in this post of yours is an argument. Since you value that, are you going to get around to posting an argument any time soon?
Quoting John
Yeah, probably the more you engage in meta-bickering about my posting style the sooner it will get back on track.
The very coherence of the notion of philosophical discussion relies on there being principles in common, that are not merely subjective opinion, that can be appealed to.
You can say what you want, but I've witnessed over and over again your failure to address the arguments of others and your failure to provide arguments of your own. Since you believe everything is merely a matter of subjective opinion; you would be going against your own principles if you did provide an argument believing that it should rationally constrain or influence the thoughts of others, in any case.
You say you do not claim we should be providing arguments. What do you think we should be doing on a philosophy forum then?
As to my "error of thinking you think everything is subjective" I have seen you claim many times that there are no principles beyond subjective opinion. Really, I believe you have no position at all, and just enjoy being slippery for some reason I can't fathom. Maybe you just don't like being shown to be wrong.
As to whether my response contained any argument; I didn't claim it did. It contained observations and questions about the coherency of your 'position'; questions which you, as usual, failed to answer.
You really need to ask yourself why others respond to you in the ways that they do; that might give you a clue that will enable you to achieve some modicum of self-awareness, which could only be a boon to you. Anyway, it's up to you; I really don't care too much either way.
Do you have any idea how old I am, how long I've been having discussions with others online, and how long I've been having philosophical discussions with others in general? You seem to be under some delusion that I'm new to this and that I'm trying to get others to respond to me in a particular way but that I'm wondering why it's not working.
Aside from that, I'm not going to address every single thing you said in that post in one response, because there were serious problems with ever sentence you typed, which seems to be par for the course with you. I can school you one point at a time, though I'm sure you'll not stick around for it.
I haven't thought and don't care about how old you are or how long you have been doing this kind of thing. Doing something for a long time does not, by itself, constitute any guarantee of mastery or even competence. I haven't seen you engaging in any philosophical discussion at all, actually. What you do simply doesn't qualify as 'philosophical discussion', for me; and I don't believe for a moment that that judgement is merely a matter of my subjective opinion, either.
Didn't I say, " You seem to be under some delusion that I'm new to this and that I'm trying to get others to respond to me in a particular way but that I'm wondering why it's not working"?
That's what the question was relevant to. That second sentence in the same paragraph explained the question. It was right there in front of you. You actually don't seem to be able to reason, which is why you don't recognize what is and isn't an argument.
Deflating the best explanations because of their authority is adolescent, not philosophical. And reductionism is not assumed in my talk of a biological phenomenon.
:s :-} :-d
ad hominem
reductionism is not assumed in my talk of a biological phenomenon.
Your opening statement was 'Consciousness is obviously a biological phenomenon', which is indeed a statement typical of biological reductionism. If you haven't already noticed it, have a quick read of Thomas Nagel's The Core of Mind and Cosmos.
Speaking of arguments, throughout that article he claims that "the physical sciences" are incapable of describing subjective experience, but he never actually presents an argument for that claim.
One place where he does present an argument is here:
The problem with that argument is that it is invalid. It can be the case that (a) the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and (b) a purely physical process can not explain their existence, BUT that (c) biological evolution is not more than just a physical process.
Admittedly, there's some wiggle room with the phrase "physical process can not explain" in (b). Either he's referring to his repeated claims that the physical sciences can not explain consciousness (which again are claims that he never offered an argument for), or he's saying that consciousness can not be physical--but then his argument would be question-begging.
Of course, when folks on my side of this issue say that consciousness is physical, we are not making a claim about the capabilities of the physical sciences as such. We're making a purely ontological claim, a claim about the sort of stuff that consciousness is comprised of. Whether the sciences could describe/explain consciousness is a completely separate issue from that.
And as always, what counts as an explanation or description isn't well-defined, so arguments that hinge on this idea--as most unfortunately do--are appealing to vague criteria in the first place, which significantly weakens them.
To deflate something merely because of its authority is clearly not philosophical. You're campaigning here against the authority of anything scientific, as if biological explanations would be reductionist, and as if reduction ought to be avoided. But that's nonsense.
If you'd read at least the short intro to John Searle's Consciousness, then it should be easy for you to also understand that there are ways to understand consciousness as a non-reducible biological phenomenon.
So I'm not campaigning against 'anything scientific' at all. The scientific analysis has something to contribute, but it's not the last word, and that appeared to be what you were arguing.
Where I part company with John Searle, is in his view that the nature of mind is ultimately a biological question. But I think he is obliged to hold such a position, because if he didn't, then he would have to defend a metaphysical thesis, like dualism, which, from his perspective, seems to have undesirable implications.
Yeah, the OP is an argument against the idea that your conscious experience is being caused by a brain. If there is a physical brain, independent of your conscious experience that is causing/giving rise to said experience, this brain can not coherently be located within your head. Rather, your experience of a head (which we might think contains a brain that is causing our experience) must already be located within a physical brain. And I have argued that this position has serious epistemic problems. Because from the position of your conscious experience, the brain which is causing your experience exists in a noumenal way, outside of your experience. There's a real issue of how on earth you can know *anything* about this brain, including that it even exists. What would it even mean to believe in the existence of this brain? We would have an idea in our
If we don't trust any of what we perceive and treat it all as a play of mere perceptual phenomena then there would seem to be no cause for anything since the notion of one mere perceptual phenomenon causing another is unintelligible.
I don't see how that appears to be the case? We can't access this mind independent world, so where is the evidence? As in, what's appearing to us to make this idea seem correct? It's not at all obvious.
[quote=]If we don't trust any of what we perceive and treat it all as a play of mere perceptual phenomena then there would seem to be no cause for anything since the notion of one mere perceptual phenomenon causing another is unintelligible.[/quote]
I'm not sure that not believing your experiences are caused by a physical brain means that you don't 'trust' your perceptions. That seems to be saying that conscious experience = unreal or untrue. As if the physical world is more 'real' than the perceptual one.
Regardless, let's say that I think conscious experience has no cause, or something separate from it which explains it's existence. So I think conscious experience is the 'brute' thing in reality, which has and needs no cause or explanation for its existence.
Well this is no different than what the physicalist does. He merely brings what's 'brute' out a level into a mind independent world and says the physical world just exists and has nothing outside it a which causes or brings/holds it in existence. The physicalist doesn't feel he needs to posit a world or cause beyond the physical world which explains the existence of it. He is perfectly comfortable just bringing what is held to exist by 'brute force' out a level from our experiences. So it's not that the physicalist has a problem with some level of reality being un caused and needing no explanation or cause or thing separate from it which is holding it in existence.
All the person who believes there's only phenomena is doing, is saying that there's really no explanatory value in positing an entire freaking world to explain the cause of our experiences. There's no need to bring what's 'brute' out a level when you can just hold that what is brute is our conscious experience. The physicalist has no problem with some level of reality being brute (i.e. he doesn't feel obliged to explain what is causing the physical world to exist, because he thinks the physical world is the 'uncaused thing' in reality), he just unnecessarily brings that uncaused thing out into a mind independent world. Surely parsimony applies and the entire separate physical world does not need to be posited.
So the point is that *some* level of reality is an uncaused 'brute' thing. Why bring it out a level from our consciousness into an entire mind independent world that doesn't need to be posited. It's only being posited because the physicalist believes that conscious experience needs a cause (and yet for some reason he believes the physical world doesn't...).
Why does the physicalist believe that consoles experience needs something outside it to explain/cause its existence, and yet he's perfectly comfortable with the physical world existing by brute force? Why is the physical world exempt from needing a cause but the phenomenal one isn't?
What about the fact that our perceptions of things often turn out to be wrong? If perception is all that was real, then how is it that we can have mistaken perceptions? A stock example is a straight stick appearing to be bent when half-immersed in water. So in that state, it appears to be bent, but when you take it out of the water, it isn't bent. Don't such cases tell you that your perception might be simply mistaken?
I think you misunderstood me; what I meant is that there appear to be heads with brains in them; that's what actually appears to us. And they appear to be within certain paramaters as to size, constitution, shape, colour and so on. We don't have any say in what is perceived; what appears is what appears.
Yeah, but we can understand mistaken perceptions without recourse to an external world. Illusions, hallucinations, etc (or even this idea of perceptual relativity, a plate appears elliptical from one angle but circular from another, which is correct?), can be understood simply as a different *kind* of perception. As opposed to normal perceptions being veridical to an external world and illusions not. So an illusion is one particular type of perception, and 'normal' perception another. Neither is more real or truthful than the other (at least in terms of truthfully corresponding to an external world).
There's also a conceptual issue with the notion our everyday perceptions being veridical to an external world, and that's that how can conscious experience somehow accurately match what is not conscious experience? So lets take that arrow illusion, where one arrow appears shorter than the other when both lines are the same size. So what we'd be holding here is that there are two lines in an external world which exists separate to our conscious experience of two lines (and the two lines are the same size). But our understanding of lines is perceptual, is it not? A line is something which *looks* straight. I believe what's happening when we think of lines in an external world, is we're imagining how straight things appear to us (horizontal lines) as existing in the absence of a perceiver. What's our justification in thinking that lines in an external world are basically like visual perceptions of lines but existing without someone perceiving it? I mean when I think about external world lines I am imagining a straight thing existing beyond my visual perception (I might imagine it as say lacking colour, or 'being made of atoms', etc, but the point is these are all still my imaginings). But, my understanding of what a 'straight thing' is, comes about through conscious experience (I see straight lines, I feel straight edges, I do maths with its notion of parallel, non curved, etc). It doesn't even really make sense to imagine what the external world is like, because the external world is devoid of imagination.
I don't see how a visual perception can accurately or truthfully represent/correspond to something which is not a visual perception, or any kind of experience at all. I think when we do think it's an accurate representation, all that's happening is we're imagining our visual perceptions (of eg, a straight line) existing in an external world in the absence of a perceiver. I suppose I'm just assuming other people do this, but I don't see how else you can understand your perceptions as being truthful representations without *imagining* the thing which is being represented. And there's no imagination in an external world, the external world is non-experiential, so this is conceptually wrong. The external world doesn't 'look like' anything, so how can how straight lines look to us accurately represent/correspond with the external world?
Well I've never seen the inside of my head and I doubt you've seen yours. It might seem silly but this is still theoretical. Our brains don't appear to us, we posit them. Even things like someone getting brained by the wheels of a school bus and painting the sidewalk - it's still theoretical that the brain existed within the guys head *before* it splattered out and was perceived.
As an aside, my way of understanding this illusion is that 'see-through' things (eg, water, glasses, glass, plastic, quartz, etc) are not actually see-through. Rather they display what's behind them on their surfaces, and we make the mistake of thinking we're seeing the actual thing beyond/behind the surface because the display is so seamless.
So if we imagine a bent straw in a glass full of water. The explanation is that the part of the straw which protrudes above the glass we are seeing directly, whereas the lower half of the straw which appearss below the lip of the glass and looks kinked, is not the actual lower half of the straw within the water, but rather is a almost completely seamless image on the outer surface of the glass. Seamless as in, we mistake the image for being the actual world beyond the surface.
A way of understanding this is to imagine a pane of glass as like an ultra high-def television screen, which takes it's feed from a webcam situated on the other side of the glass and pointing outwards. And the image is so good we mistake the glass for being 'see-through' and it's the real objects beyond the glass which we are directly perceiving.
You're probably better off not believing this (or rather, realizing this is true - which I think it is) haha. Every time I drive now I feel like i'm driving blind. Because I'm not actually seeing the road/world beyond the windscreen. Rather, I'm 'using' a display on the inner surface of the windscreen to drive the car and not crash. The car might as well not have a windscreen, just a webcam on the hood and a t.v. screen inside displaying the image, because it's basically the same thing. Clear things display what's behind them on their surfaces, mirrors are the same but they display what's in front.
I'll make a separate thread about this. I'm going to assume a lot of people are going to think this idea is crazy.
Seeing straight lines, such as ones draw on paper, or occurring on manufactured things, gives you a representation of a straight line. From this representation you can imagine a straight line. But these representations are only tools which guide you in learning what a line really is. The true line is ideal, existing in conception only, as a defined thing, like the true circle is ideal, existing only through definition.
So our understanding of lines is not perceptual. It is aided by perception. This is important to understand, because then you can start to see that the straight lines in the world were put there through construction and manufacturing, and these are processes of producing within the world, a representation of what's in the mind. It is common for people to believe that concepts are produced as representations of what exists in the world, and this is what you imply in that passage. In reality though, concepts are produced as tools which help us to understand, and use the world, while the artefacts, the artificial parts of the world, are reflections of these concepts. That's from Plato's cave allegory. So we understand the line, which is a concept, by means of perceiving representations of it, in the world.
Your way of understanding is incorrect, then. 'You have a right to your own opinions, but not to your own facts', as the saying has it. Transparency occurs because of materials that let light travel through unimpeded.
This is conceptualism, right? I wouldn't argue against this. Poor word choice on my part, I should have said our understanding of straight lines is ''ideal'' rather than perceptual.
This is not an argument. You're just stating your own opinion on clear things as if it's a fact, which you just said we don't have a right to do...
What's this got to do with the phenomenology of glass? Spell it out.
The argument here seems be, if some object has the physical property of allowing the transmission of light through it, when we look at this object, we therefore directly visually perceive the objects on the other side of it.
The physical one can kill you, I'm not sure whether the perceptual one can, even though some movies like the Matrix made it out to be so. I've yet to die from a dream or a perception.
That is not 'an argument', it is what 'transparency' means.
Disregard for facts is unbecoming. I don't see anything to discuss.
:-}
Some people die from the experience of pain, depression, a broken heart, delusion or a reality perceived as unbearable etc..
How about simply looking up "comprise" in the dictionary?
"Comprise -- consist of; be made up of" (from Google, for example)
Or
"Comprise - to include or contain, to consist of, be composed of" (from dictionary.com for example)
Apparently you're unfamiliar with any sort of anatomical research, for one?
Quoting dukkha
What on Earth would lead you to believe that? How, historically, did you come to this view?
Also, if you don't believe that there's a mind-independent world, how do you get to a point of believing that there's a mind in the first place? For example, you experience something like a car, let's say. Well, how do you get to a point of saying "That's just my mind" rather than just accepting it as the phenomena that it is--the appearance of a car, where you'd believe that tha's all there is to it.
You seemed to be arguing against the possibility of a priori knowledge. You argued that we can only produce conceptions through the means of sense experience, like we sense something and produce a concept in representation of the sense image. So are you now ready to acknowledge that this isn't actually the case? Do you acknowledge that the concept is something other than a representation of what is sensed, that sensing aids us in producing concepts within our minds (education for example), but the concept is actually something other than a representation, it comes from somewhere else.
Are you prepared to go where this leads in the Platonic dialogues? Do you apprehend that external objects, things which are sensed by you, are merely representations of concepts, or ideas? This is very evident in artificial things, the sensible things exist as representations of the ideas in the minds which created them, just like the words, numbers, and sensible demonstrations of our teachers exist in the sensible world as representations of the concepts which we are supposed to learn. What about natural things though? How do they achieve their existence?
You can die from experiences as well as knives, which result in physical ailments and death. In the case of a knife it might be loss of blood, in the case of an experience some stress-induced heart failure. You won't get away with murder by selective talk about the loss of blood, or heart failure.
You can also wake up from the bang, or pain, and experience a shock which causes your heart to stop, regardless of the physical damage caused by the bullet.