What is the best realist response to this?
[quote=Wayfarer]So imagining an empty forest, with no observer to hear the tree fall, still amounts to a perspective. What would any scene or object be like, from no perspective?[/quote]
I recall in the old forum a couple years back when Bert made the comment that the challenge for the realist was explaining how the world is differentiated absent a mind (or perspective). I take this as the fundamental challenge to any metaphysical realism. What is the world independent of us?
Possible answers:
1. The world is pretty much as we perceive it (naive realism, direct realism?)
2. The world is pretty much as science illuminates it. (scientific realism)
3. The world is mathematical. (Tegmark, Meillassoux)
4. The world can only be known in its relations. (object-oriented realism)
5. The world is unknowable, but it's still real. (Kantian noumenon)
6. This isn't a meaningful question. (Wittgenstein, quietism, deflationary, positivism)
I recall in the old forum a couple years back when Bert made the comment that the challenge for the realist was explaining how the world is differentiated absent a mind (or perspective). I take this as the fundamental challenge to any metaphysical realism. What is the world independent of us?
Possible answers:
1. The world is pretty much as we perceive it (naive realism, direct realism?)
2. The world is pretty much as science illuminates it. (scientific realism)
3. The world is mathematical. (Tegmark, Meillassoux)
4. The world can only be known in its relations. (object-oriented realism)
5. The world is unknowable, but it's still real. (Kantian noumenon)
6. This isn't a meaningful question. (Wittgenstein, quietism, deflationary, positivism)
Comments (130)
1. Numerous, ranging from the ancient Skeptics, to Berkeley, to modern science.
2. Science is incomplete. We don't know how far from a complete scientific understanding of the world we are. Also, the Kuhnian challenge of paradigm shifts.
3. What breathes life into the equations? Also, the challenge of mathematical realism in and of itself.
4. Not sure what the critique is here.
5. This is admitting to global skepticism. Why even suppose there is a real world if you can't know anything about it?
6. Demonstrating how this is different from anti-realism. But it has been used by various realists in these forums and elsewhere as an attempt to avoid traditional objections, and out of a suspicion for metaphysical questions in general. But can metaphysics be avoided altogether without assuming realism is the case?
I think the world has a structure and thought has a structure, I don't think there is necessarily an isomorphism between the two. There may be evolutionary reasons why we perceive the world in the way we do. If we can decide on the structure of thought shouldn't that drive our conclusions about what is real. Perhaps what is left over might be what is real..we make a claim about the tree, that claim is for something, the claim and what the claim is for are separate, and it allows for error.
Plenty of realists would disagree. "In itself" need not denote Kant's "ding an sich", which is just his particular take on the concept.
Then how does the realist distinguish between a veridical and a non-veridical experience? The very principle of realism is that the way the world is is independent of our experiences such that we can see things that aren't there and not see things that are there.
But, if you are claiming that there were evolutionary reasons for how we came to see and think about the world, are you not, implicitly, claiming that there is an isomorphism between your conception of evolution and what actually happened; the actual evolution?
Regarding '5', I think the claim is not that we cannot know the Real, but that we cannot know, in any determinable sense, how we know it or exactly what it is we know of it. The empirical world is still understood to be an expression of the noumenon; and we know things about it. So through knowing about the empirical world we are knowing the noumenon, even though we cannot know anything determinate about it. It's really just pointing at the limitations of discursive knowing.
Acknowledging that knowledge has limitations is not global scepticism. Given that the world we know is the 'world of appearances', it regardless behaves with an enormous amount and depth of consistency and predictability. Look at how much has been accomplished by virtue of quantum theory, even though it is widely acknowledged that the fundamental nature of what it describes remains a mystery.
So you can know a great deal about it, while still not knowing what it really is. All this amounts to is, among other things, acknowledging the 'role of the observer' in whatever it is we know, instead of presuming that we can attain a knowledge which is completely independent of our own faculties. Meaning that, science remains a human undertaking - something which seems to disturb many scientists.
Were there craters on the moon before a telescope enabled us to see them? (Yes.) Were there canals on Mars before a telescope enables us to not see them anymore? (No.) Are there really a trillion trillion galaxies in the universe? (Maybe. They'll have to count them all. Finding out how many holes it took to fill the Albert Hall was relatively easy.)
I assert that nature existed prior to our existence, it exists independently of our observations, and it will be around after philosophers have departed the scene at some (in)convenient moment of time in the very near future.
Samuel Johnson attended a lecture by Bishop Berkeley, and after having emerged from the lecture, when asked of his view of the good Bishop's sophistry, vigorously kicked a large stone, declaring 'I refute it thus!'
I'm saying that if you think there has been a process of "perceptions becoming structured as thought related to utility, to survival" then you are thinking that something has actually occurred which is isomorphic with that thought of it having occurred.
We cannot both think about the world and escape the assumption that what we think corresponds to the actual world.
Edit: that should read "escape the assumption that what we think could correspond or fail to correspond to the world". If what we say could correspond to the world, then it could also fail to correspond; rather than being utterly discontinuous with the world.
Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy
To try and unpack that a bit further, the perspective of time in terms of a sequence of events of finite duration, measured in terms of units such as years, is part of what the mind brings to the picture. Is there time outside of such a perspective? The answer will intuitively appear to be 'yes', but whether 'time is objectively real' is still a matter of debate in science itself.
I am not suggesting that we can escape the world, I am suggesting that the way the world is structured does not necessarily correspond to the structure of thought.
Sure the structure of thought is dependent on the structure of the world, but that does not mean there is an isomorphic correspondence, which is why I brought up the bias of evolution. I think unless we understand the structure of thought, we will never be able to understand the structure of the world. Epistemology, I think must drive ontology, and not the other way around.
Our concept of what is real is dependent upon our concept of the world, and I don't think that reality can be grasped without our epistemological understanding of our concept of the world.
But in Kant's system, knowledge only occurs at the level of judgement, right? Since the noumenal world (i.e. the world in itself) epistemologically and ontologically precedes the functions of judgment, it literally can't be known. Kant is then faced with the seemingly intractable problem of having to explain how we can know both that noumena exist and that they cause our sense impressions, given that both "causality" and "existence" only have meaning within the context of the content generated by the operations of the mind.
If objects only exist in minds as a result of some external cause that isn't a object, then indirect realism would be the case.
Thank you Aaron. But I wonder. If you investigate the word 'noumenon', it actually means something very much like 'an ideal object' or 'the object of thought'; the root of the term is 'nous'.
Now in the Greek tradition, intelligible objects, such as numbers and geometrical forms, are known in a manner that is 'higher' than the knowledge of sensory objects - when the intellect knows such things as mathematical ideas, then the mind is perfectly united with the idea*. Whereas the objects of sense are only intelligible insofar as they conform to laws and are instances of the forms which nous perceives directly.
In Platonic epistemology, that is the root of the distinction between pistis, knowledge of sense objects and dianoia, knowledge of numbers and geometrical objects (and noesis, although I'll leave that aside here.)
So I think distinction between phenomena and noumena is descended from the Platonic differentiation between appearance and reality. But it's not a dichotomy or an absolute dualism; it's more that the phenomenal domain is how the noumenal realm manifests on the level of appearances; its 'sensible form', as Kant would say.
I think the problems arise when you ask 'what is this "noumenon"? How can you know it exists?' My view is that this question arises from conceiving of the noumenal as a kind of 'invisible phenomenon' that is 'behind' the world of appearances, 'pulling the strings'. We want to look behind the curtain, peer behind the apparent to the real behind it. But in traditional philosophy, the 'cause' doesn't exist on the same level as 'the effect'. If you think back to the formal and final causes, they are not causes in the sense that material causes are; meaning that, on the whole, they're among the kinds of conceptions that have been rejected in most modern philosophy. You find the vestiges of those beliefs in the early modern philosophers, but since then, naturalism and empiricism has tended to seek its explanations solely in terms of efficient and material causation and endeavoured to banish metaphysics from the picture.
So the exasperation that is expressed about the 'thing in itself' is often this kind of eye-rolling cynicism that a (mere) philosopher could intuit the reality of some unknown thing which the vast armoury of modern scientific instrumentation can't detect; in relation to which, a re-reading of the Bohr-Einstein debates about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Heisenberg's later philosophical essays on the same, make for salutary reading.
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*'Aristotle, especially in his De Anima, argues that thinking in general, which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking, cannot be a property of a body, it cannot, as he puts it, ‘be blended with a body’. This is because in thinking the intelligible object or form in present in the intellect and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible.' ~ Lloyd Gerson, Platonism V Naturalism, Pp 16-17.
I agree with you regarding the etymological point, but I'm not sure there textual evidence supports your interpretation of Kant's own use of the word. Kant distinguishes between positive and negative senses of "noumenon":
[quote=Kant, Critique of Pure Reason]
If by a noumenon we understand a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition, because we abstract from the manner of our intuition of then this is a noumenon in the negative sense. But if we understand by that an object of a non-sensible intuition then we assume a special kind of intuition, namely intellectual intuition, which, however, is not our own, and the possibility of which we cannot understand, and this would be the noumenon in a positive sense.
[/quote]
In the positive sense, a noumenon would be the object of a purely intellectual intuition, which is a faculty that Kant believes we do not possess. On the negative side, the noumenon is to be understood as the object in abstraction from sensible intuition which, by his own theory, leaves us with a "concept" that is devoid of any cognitive content and, as such, is not really a concept at all. Noumena, in the negative sense, are literally the contradiction of sense intuitions and, as such, mutually exclusive with the content of cognition. It's a sort-of modernistic return of the medieval "via negativa".
That said, I like where you are going with most of your post, and I don't deny the basic notion that the faculties of the mind color our experience of the world, but not to the exclusion of the possibility of knowing the world as it is in itself. As such, I don't think Kant is "where it's at" philosophically speaking. That is, admittedly, a bias of mine that I won't pretend to be able to justify to everyone's satisfaction.
David Chalmers in a conference on consciousness briefly discussed why he rejected idealism. It was because it left the structure of experience unexplained. I agree with that. There is something beyond our experiences which is the reason for our experiences. What we experience is a world much bigger and older than us mere humans. Even the fact that I have parents which gave birth to me is enough to doubt idealism (I wasn't experiencing anything as a zygote).
Quoting The Great Whatever
This is what interests me, because no answers proposed seem entirely satisfactory, and knowledgeable people can debate them endlessly. I think realism must be the case, but the objection idealism puts forth has not been fully answered by realists. I sometimes wonder if both aren't right in a way, and some sort of synthesis is the answer.
Interesting! I might be reading something into Kant which isn't there.
I first encountered Kant through an unusual source, namely, a book by the name of The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, by T R V Murti. Murti was an Oxford-trained Indian scholar, and his book had extensive comparisons between Buddhism and Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Hume and so on (see e.g. here). It has rather fallen out of academic fashion since, but I still admire it.
In any case, the view that I advocate is 'epistemic idealism', i.e., that whatever we affirm to be real is a statement about what we know. I think the basic problem with the kind of realism that most people take for granted, is that it acts as if 'what we know' exists independently of us - it is what I call 'there anyway realism', that 'reality is what persists when you stop believing it', as one saying has it.
There's a sense in which that is true, but to say that is all there is to it, looses sight of the nature of understanding. After all, the light I see out my window isn't really inside my skull; what's inside my skull are the neural patterns which constitute my consciousness. If I try and imagine that scenario, however, then I'll create this kind of image of 'myself in the world', or of 'the world with no observer in it'. But all of those tacitly rely on the human perspective - not in the sense of being my particular idiosyncratic understanding of life, but in the inter-subjective that language and culture provides.
So the reason I referred to the Einstein-Bohr debates, is that Einstein clung doggedly to a form of 'transcendental realism' - that what science is exploring, must exist independently of any act or thought on the part of the observer. But it was precisely that principle which 'uncertainty' and the 'observer problem' called into question, and which was the subject of decades-long debates between the two of them. I won't go into all the details again, which are always being discussed in one thread or another, except to say that I think the consensus that has emerged amongst philosophers of science doesn't really favour Einstein's position. And it has also occured to me, that it's possible thatn Neils Bohr's 'principle of complementarity' really amounts to exactly what is meant by a 'dialectic'. And I think that these developments generally favour a generally Kantian or neo-kantian view, rather than a realist one. (The most comprehensive study of which being Bernard D'Espagnat's books, but they're very hard to read for the non-specialist.)
As you can probably tell, I am one of those unsophisticated ignoramuses that tends to lean in the direction of "there anyway" realism. I don't support the notion that we can uncritically read the content of the "in-itself" directly off of our every experience, but I do think that we can achieve some genuine communion with a world "not of our own making" through the processes of rational and empirical inquiry. Whether and to what extent quantum mechanics supports any particular philosophical outlook is a hotly contested question, as I am sure you well know, and is (as you mention) worthy of a thread all its own. Maybe I'll actually get around to starting it one day (probably not). :)
Generally speaking, I think that there are three main approaches to responding to idealism (here I mean subjective idealism):
1. Dogmatic Realism - simply refuse to accept the burden of proof. Those who take this approach typically believe that you simply can't reason your way to realism starting from idealistic premises, and so the only option is to refuse to play on the idealist's home turf. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and idealistic meals are simply too unsavory to try to choke down. Instead, of trying to refute idealist metaphysics, focus on improving realist metaphysics. The idealist obviously won't be convinced, but good riddance!
2. Transcendental Realism - try to show that realism falls out of an analysis of thought/reason itself. If you can show that the very act of making of an assertion or the asking of a question presupposes realist premises then the idealist is check-mated from the very start!
3. Deflationary Realism - try to show that the idealism/realism debate doesn't make sense because nobody knows what they mean by the word "real". Instead, you'll propose a suitable deflationary definition of the word "real" that undercuts the entire debate and ends the confusion once and for all!
I was really not trying to cast aspersions - just to gently point out that mosty people look to 'naturalism' to defend 'normalism' - the idea that us normal folks, doing our normal things, is the yardstick of what ought to be considered real.
Whereas Plato (and traditional philosophy, generally) questions what us good folk take to be normal from another perspective altogether. So 'waking up to the real' - leaving the Cave - is possible, but not through what is generally understood by naturalism nowadays. Thomas Nagel's essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament describes this very well.
1. Entirely ignores the problem posted in the OP. It's head in the sand philosophy.
3. Deflates to a position indistinguishable from anti-realism (or at the very least, a positon that is not realist, since being realist entails mind-independence).
2. Is a bit more promising.
No worries, I was just being a bit cheeky.
Pretty much the only way to go about this. The OP's options for response all pretty much begin with 'The world is...' - but forget the world: we can begin and end with thought itself: thought as sheerly 'realist' from the get-go. Idealism is thoughtless about nothing less than thought itself.
My point though was that if you think of evolution as a structure or process, that has determined the way we see the world; then you must be thinking of that evolutionary structure or process as being actual and comprehensible; which means that your thoughts about that structure or process are inescapably being assumed to be at least isomorphic enough with the actual structure or process to make them coherent and intelligible thoughts about something that is presumed to have actually happened; that is to be part of a reality which has formed us.
This is in line with Aaron's option 2: transcendental realism.
I'm coming back to this point, because I was referring to something more specific than the general (and vexed) question of 'philosophical implications of quantum mechanics'. The particular point I was making was that Einstein advocated a view which is very much in line with transcendental or scientific realism - that the real objects of scientific analysis must exist independently of observation. But this is precisely what was called into question by Bohr, Heisenberg, and others (albeit in slightly different ways.) And with their emphasis of the role of the observer in the determination of the experimental outcome, and their contention that nature 'reveals herself in accordance with the kinds of question you ask of her', I think overall that Einstein's opponents were much nearer to some form of Kantian philosophy than to realism. And furthermore, that I think their attitude has been borne out by subsequent developments in that discipline.
That's not a good response, since it just raises the question as to why one thing is in need of explanation or not another, along with the question of how something in principle beyond what is in need of explanation is itself supposed to serve as an explanation. I have never seen a realist argument that gave any reason why 1) realist objects don't have to be explained, but experiences do (this is special pleading), or 2) realist objects, being in principle totally separable from experiences, do anything to explain experiences even if posited.
2) is something lots of people have claimed to do, but I've never really seen any good arguments to this effect, and lots of it seems to be rhetorical/ideological rather than genuinely persuasive on any philosophical grounds (cf. SX's post above).
3) seems to me to be a parlor game, played by people who are interested in looking clever, and the easiest way to do that is to claim the whole thing's a sham, or that all arguers are equally stupid and confused, and that you have a magic bullet for 'deflating' the issue. These games become less interesting the more one plays them, and the thirst for genuine insight comes back. The questions are perfectly coherent, just difficult.
While I agree with some aspects of what Hoffman is saying, I think there's an underlying inconsistency, which is this. If you argue that the real determinant of knowledge is what facilitates survival, then you have no real grounds for claiming that anything you believe is true. After all, what you think is 'true' might just be the ruse of the genetic algorithm, the sole concern of which is (to be blunt) the Four F's. So if you claim to underwrite the validity of reason in evolutionary terms - that is, effective because it promotes survival - then you're undermining the sovereignity of reason.
This, of course, is also the basis of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, which is a variant of the argument from reason - both of which argue that reason points to something beyond itself - something beyond reason, which commands the assent of reason. (I would like to think that is the mainstream view of the Western philosophical tradition.)
I wasn't addressing this point though, but something different, (although perhaps somewhat tangentially related). The point I was trying to make to Cavacava was that if we claim that what we say is not isomorphic with reality, but is rather just what works because it has been selected for by a process of evolution, then there is an inconsistency in that, because we are purporting to be saying something about reality, about something that we think really occurred prior to the advent of humans, and we must be taking what we are saying to be meaningfully isomorphic with that posited real evolutionary process, or we would have to admit that what we are saying doesn't actually refer to anything.
To put it another way, if we claim that what we are saying is not isomorphic with any reality then we cannot say anything that meaningfully refers to any actual process which is purported to have occurred.
Yes, I agree they are related points, but perhaps I was thrown off because it seemed to me that your response was based on thinking that I was agreeing with the idea that our view of the world is merely a result of what has been selected for by survival advantage. The two points differ in that yours comes at it from the perspective of the undermining of truth and mine from the point of view of the undermining of reference.
You seem to be saying that if the criteria for our acceptance of worldviews is not really truth, but survival advantage, then we can have no confidence in the truth of any of our worldviews including the one that says that the criteria for our acceptance of worldviews is not really truth, but survival advantage.
I am saying that if we want to be able to meaningfully claim that the criteria for our acceptance of worldviews is not really a rational quest for truth but an evolutionary process that selected for survival advantage, and hence that our worldviews are not isomorphic with the world, then we must accept that the world is intelligible to us, and that what we say can be isomorphic with the world; which is a contradiction.
No doubt with a little more work the two points could be woven together as two strands of the same argument.
We die or fail to reproduce if we get it wrong. Dennett's response is that for bacteria, truth isn't relevant. But for a fox, it needs to know what is a mate, what is prey, and what is predator. It needs to know the truth about such things.
The actions of a predator in respect of prey is not comparable to the judgement of the truths of reason; to believe that it constitutes a gradient, with coral polyps at one end of the scale and humans at the other, is to mis-characterise what constitutes rationality.
I endorse what Leon Wieseltier said in his review of Dennett's 'Breaking the Spell' - that:
Back to this. Perhaps the realist can say the idealist is making a mistake here in insisting that the realist be able to imagine what something is like independent of perspective. We can't do that because we're human beings who always perceive from a certain perspective. The best we can do is abstract away. But that doesn't mean the tree or the forest or anything else doesn't exist independent of perspective, just because we can't conceive it that way.
IOW, realism doesn't need to be committed to being able to conceive of something (exactly as it is) for that something to exist. All the realist needs is reasonable grounds for thinking so. And the reasonable grounds are an experience of a world that is much larger and older than us. A world that gave birth to us individually and as a species.
In a way, the idealist is criticizing the realist on idealist grounds, in that the idealist expects the world to be entirely conceivable for it to be. But the realist need not be committed to this at all, since by definition, real things are mind independent, and thus independent of conceptualization.
Further, the realist can just say this is a limitation of human minds, not the world, since human imagination is parasitic on human perception. But the world is not limited by human abilities, or lack thereof. Man is not the measure of the world.
This is a very specific kind of formal fallacy, that I fell under for a long time. That you must yourself imagine a situation in order to imagine it without a perceiver does not mean that the situation itself has a perceiver. This is to confuse the imagining situation with the imagined one.
Analogously, in reading a story, it does not follow from the fact that because you must 'watch' the characters in order to conceive what is happening in a fictional scenario, that in the fictional scenario the characters are being watched by you. To think this is not to understand how imagination and fiction work: the reader and characters do not exist on a level material field, so that the reader can literally look at the characters from within the story or from without. Rather, the imagining scenario (reading the book) requires the resder to imagine the imagined scenario: but this tells us nothing about who is imagining in the imagined scenario. It is thus not inconceivable to imagine a situation in which no one is perceiving a forest, and to think this is not possible is to fundamentally misunderstand how imagining scenarios works.
But this admits that the concept of perspective-independent trees is unintelligible. And how can an unintelligible concept be meaningful and veridical?
The point is that when you imagine this situation you're imagining the experience of this situation – and the experience of a situation does require a perceiver. It's a counterfactual; what I would see if I were there. But a counterfactual experience isn't the same as a realist occurrence (unless it is, in which case realism is akin to fictionalism).
Quoting Marchesk
. . . Which of course implies that I do not believe that those three are incompatible with each other for the most part.
Also re Wayfarer's comment, there are no "perspectiveless perspectives" where, however, I'm not using "perspective" to refer to something necessarily mental, but merely what I refer to as "reference points."
Then the issue is with the truth of Wayfarer's premise(s) rather than the validity of his argument.
Although, your wording is a little ambiguous. According the idealist, the experience of the situation is the situation. According to you, are they different? If so, I'm guessing you prescribe to naive realism?
No possible way TGW prescribes to naive realism. I would be beyond shocked. That would be like Landru coming on here and explaining why he voted for Trump.
Then I'm not really sure what he could mean. The situation is different to the experience of the situation but they both have the same sort of qualitative structure (being that when we imagine a situation we imagine it in terms of what it looks and feels and smells like, etc.)?
Quoting Marchesk
I think naive realism is not a coherent metaphysical position if one supplements it with the claim that one has some reason to believe it. If one wants to assert it dogmatically, then it's I suppose possible in principle, but by its own logic I think it rules out the possibility of having any evidence for it.
Regarding external world realism, I'm usually what the ancients would call a 'negative dogmatist,' in thinking that we can actually positively ascertain that we do not know whether there is an external world in the way the realist wants, or what its structure is. Though I have sympathies with skepticism as well.
The argument does go through, because what you're imagining is still experiential, not some non-experiential material substance (or whatever the proposed mind-independent thing is).
Imagine if I were to write a book about a book. The book I'm writing about is not the book I'm writing, but it's still a book, and so not the sort of the thing that can exist without being written. Similarly, the experiential thing I'm imagining is not the imagination itself, but it's still an experiential thing, and so not the sort of thing that can exist without being experienced.
The point is this: it does not follow that from the fact that you have to have an experience, let's say, in order to imagine a situation, that in that situation there is an experiencer.
Yes, but you can imagine non-experiential things. If you want to deny this, you have to assume your conclusion (idealism). If I imagine a tree falling, I'm imagining a tree, not an experience.
And what does imagining a tree consist of? I would think it's picturing a tree in one's mind (or recallling the things we say about trees). One imagines the look of a tree or the feel of a tree or the smell of a tree. It's a collection of experiential things.
To imagine something experiential in the imagined situation, you would do something different: for example, you might imagine a man by that tree smelling it, and imagine what he smelled.
What matters is that the situation you're imagining is just a collection of shapes and colours and smells and whatnot. These aren't perspective-independent things. So what you're imagining is not a realist thing.
Whether or not there's an experiencer in the imagined situation is irrelevant. Just as whether or not there's an author in the book I've written (about a book) is irrelevant. The thing I've written about (a book) isn't the sort of thing that can exist without being written. And the things I'm imagining (the look and feel of a tree) aren't the sort of things that can exist without being perceived.
But you are not imagining a collection of shapes and colors: you are imagining a tree. You can assert a tree is nothing but this, but this assumes the conclusion.
Quoting Michael
It is relevant because the logic of the argument doesn't go through. You can stipulate that it doesn't matter because all situations are purely experiential situations, but this assumes the truth of idealism, and so is not an argument for it.
To make the analogy clear, the claim is as if you were saying that because every story requires a writer, it must be that all situations that stories describe are ones with writers in them. This of course is false, just as it's false that in all situations that are conceived, or imagined, there must be a conceiver or imaginer in those situations. You can then stipulate that all stories have books in the story (false), or that all situations themselves have experiencers (idealism), but the latter requires assuming idealism, and so you no longer have an argument. The conclusion goes through because you have assumed it, not because of the structure of the argument – the argument itself is fallacious.
I'm not assuming the conclusion. I'm describing what I'm doing. When I imagine a tree I picture one in my mind. I imagine what a tree looks like and feels like and smells like. I then recognise that this is just a collection of experiential things. If someone were to ask me to imagine a tree but not imagine any of this then I quite literally come up blank.
I'd be surprised if anyone did anything else when imagining a tree.
If yes, you've assumed your conclusion.
If no, then in imagining a tree you have not just imagined a collection of experiential things, but a tree.
Whether you have experiences in imagining a tree is irrelevant.
Again, it's the conclusion, not the assumption. I've come to that conclusion by imagining a tree and then analysing this imagination. It turns out that when I imagine a tree I'm just imagining the look and feel and smell of a tree. Take this all away and I come up blank. And, again, I'd be surprised if anyone could do anything else.
For example, if I'm told to imagine that a man chopped down seventy trees illegally and was sent to prison, I can do this fairly easily, but it's unclear to me exactly what sorts of smells and sights I am or have to be imagining, and those things seem not to be at all what's most relevant or present to my mind in imagining such a scenario (how tall are the trees? are they elms, or pines? what is the man wearing? what does the prison look like?). I'm not even sure I can consistently picture seventy trees together (as opposed to sixty-nine, after all), as if all in a visual or olfactory image. Yet I can imagine such a situation without difficulty: so you must be wrong.
I would say that if you're not picturing it then you're not imagining it. You're just understanding the meaning of the sentence.
(At the very least, it would commit you to saying I can't imagine a man chopping down seventy trees, too strong a conclusion if this is supposed to imply that a man chopping down seventy trees is unimaginable and therefore somehow impossible).
I didn't say that you can't. You just said that you weren't. I'm sure if you took the time you could imagine a man cutting down seventy trees.
But I think the problem is that many realists do claim to be able to picture a tree that isn't being seen and that this thing they're picturing is coherent and a real thing in the world. Which, some would argue, is as mistaken as imagining a book without an author and thinking that this is a coherent and real thing in the world.
They say you can picture such a thing because you can. If you are picturing a tree, the fact that you are picturing it in the imagining situation does not mean that anyone is picturing it in the pictured situation. This is the formal fallacy.
To think otherwise would be effectively to claim that every picture than an artist paints contains the artist in the picture: not every picture is a picture of the painter, just because you must paint in order to picture.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Truth statements depend on perspective. What we say about what exists and what doesn't exist relies on perspective. I can perfectly well imagine the early earth, where for hundreds of millions of years, forests grew and trees fell before there were even mammals, let alone humans, but even to imagine it relies on a perspective and the human sense of time and scale. The mind organises perceptions, sensations and judgements into a cognitive whole - and that is what 'the world' is, to thinking beings such as ourselves.
Put the word 'idealism' to one side for a moment. When we speak about reality at all, what are we referring to? 'The world', 'the universe', and so on; nowadays science has given us a pretty good idea of the actual scope of the word 'universe'. But whatever we see, measure, observe, etc, ultimately, as perceiving beings, what we speak of comprises perceptions, cognition, judgements, measurements, and the rest'; it is all 'patterns in the neural matter'. The human brain is the most complex known natural phenomenon, and it's output is what we understand as 'the world'.
But don't forget that Kant was able to declare himself an 'empirical realist'. He took pains to distinguish his philosophy from that of Berkeley, which he called 'material idealism' or 'problematic idealism'. So Kant is not arguing simplistically that the universe has no reality outside perception, but that human faculties play an inescapable role in whatever we understand as reality.
Through the quantitative methods of science, we are able as far as possible to identify the mathematical laws and regularities that are the same for all observers, and to apply similar techniques of quantification to all manner of subjects.
But what historically occurred is that, arising from the philosophy of Locke, Newton, Galileo, and the other founders of modern scientific methodology, 'mind' came to be regarded as being of derivative importance, located among the 'secondary qualities', as distinct from the 'primary qualities' which were regarded as the proper objects of measurement by the natural sciences (in other words, those things that really exist. This is elaborated at length by E A Burtt The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.) Hence the attitude (which is nowadays quite instinctive) of 'objectification' - the requirement to seek answers in terms of the purported 'objective data' and quantification.
But all of this is still a human undertaking. The human sciences rely on a human sense of time and space - Kant's 'primary intuitions'. Because of rational thought and mathematics, humans can rise to an understanding that is different in kind to anything that non-rational animals are able to do, but science is still a human undertaking. And I think that is what Kant identified: the Critique of Pure Reason is the necessary corrective to scientific materialism.
And that's why I referred earlier on the the Bohr-Einstein debates (as explained in http://a.co/dsthstv). Einstein was deeply perturbed by the apparent 'mind-dependence' of quantum objects; that is why he asked 'Does the moon still exist when we're not perceiving it?' He was a stalwart scientific realist - the universe exists and we're trying to understand its fundamental constituents, which ought to be 'there anyway' in his view. Whereas Bohr and Heisenberg had (in my opinion) a much more philosophically nuanced understanding of the issues, and they were also considerably more modest. I think they they understood the limitations of knowledge in respect of such questions as the 'ultimate constituents of being'; Heisenberg ultimately published several well-regarded books on physics and philosophy which were also, broadly speaking, idealist in attitude. (Athough Heisenberg's reputation has suffered - rightly - from the fact that he was in charge of Hitler's atomic bomb program.)
Anyway, that's all a long digression, but my considered view amounts to saying that the Universe has an ineluctably subjective pole; reality can't be said to consist solely of objects. You have to understand this whole subject historically, in terms of the 'history of ideas' that has developed from medieval to modern times.
It doesn't matter if there isn't anyone in the picture, just as it doesn't matter if there isn't an author in the story. The thing being pictured/written about cannot be part of the real world without there being an experiencer/author (according to the idealist when it comes to the tree being pictured, presumably everyone when it comes to the book). Strictly speaking the situation makes no sense.
Remember that this isn't just a hypothetical imagining. The realist claims that something in the world "matches" the imagined situation; that the imagined situation is (or could be) of a real thing. And that can't be true if the thing you're imagining is experiential in nature. It would be like imagining being in pain and thinking that this pain is somewhere out in the world to be found.
When you say "I can imagine such a situation without difficulty", are you really sure that you can, or are you just saying that? Did you try to actually imagine that situation? If so, how did you do so without trying to picture it?
Yes
Haven't the people who wrote stories about it imagined it?
Yeah, seems like imagined, visualized, pictured, and conceived are all getting jumbled together. So, I don't think any human can actually visualize a trip to a nearby star, but they can imagine a story in which a trip is made, or perform the calculations for the propulsion system based on estimated weight of ship, crew, food, etc.
This tangent got started by the claim that you don't need to be able to picture cutting down 70 trees to conceive it. One can simply perform the math of cutting down 70 trees for the average human with an axe or chainsaw. It's not a problem for the reality of cutting down that number of trees.
And this matters because? Will knowing that subjective idealism is true cause us to behave any differently, or relate any differently to the world? Certainly not. All this is about is which is the simplest way of comprehending reality, which one requires the fewest assumptions. Probably this is some form of idealism.
It matters the same reason for asking any sort of questions about existence. How do we get here, how big is the world, did it have a beginning, and so forth. Humans have this curiosity about such questions. And some of the proposed answers bother us, and are preferably avoided.
It may not affect our daily routines, but it can affect how we think or feel about the bigger picture. Anyway, metaphysics isn't ethics, and some people don't see a use for philosophy beyond ethics. That's their prerogative.
What is an example of a realist who would disagree with a rejection of the idea that the world exists in itself?
Quoting Aaron R
No-one says it needs to denote Kant's ding an sich, but you mentioned "thing in itself", and I replied. Moreover, plenty of scholars disagree on whether Kant's take implies two worlds or two perspectives. One is invisible and assumed to exist "in itself" whereas another is assumed to be a "visible" mind-dependent version of the invisible version. Neither is plausible, and regardless of what Kant's particular take might be I see no good reason for a realist to speak of things in themselves.
How can you be a realist and not suppose there are things in themselves? What exactly are you a realist about? This is very confusing.
If I'm a metaphysical realist, I suppose the world exists independent of us, regardless of what we say, perceive or know about such a world. The world is as it is, and will continue to be long after we're gone.
If I'm a platonist, then I suppose that numbers exist as they are regardless of what sort of mathematical discoveries we fail to make. They existed before our species could count, and they will persist after the universe is without life. And so on.
Because metaphysics doesn't have any direct practical import (even if the metaphysics was different - the world could be the same), you're misunderstanding what you're saying when you say you have curiosity about such questions. You can't be curious about something by considering alternatives which would change nothing if they were true. Even asking "which is the case?" doesn't make any sense.
Metaphysics are frameworks for understanding the world, which are judged by certain criteria. When the idealist critiques materialism, he's not saying that materialism as such is impossible, only that it is unwarranted - ie it makes too many assumptions, and we don't need so many gratuitous assumptions to describe reality. But for sure materialism could be the case - whatever that is supposed to mean. Materialism in itself is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Neither is idealism. These are frameworks. They are not objects. They are not things out there which can be the case or can fail to be the case. They are frameworks or lens through which you can look at the world.
I can be curious about scientific or historical findings that have no impact on my daily life, so that's simply not true. Humans can be interested in all sorts of things having nothing to do with everyday life.
That would be an anti-realist lens to look at the other frameworks with.
For a realist reality exists independently of his/her beliefs or statements about it. The idea that reality would somehow exist in itself adds nothing. It is a term invented by thinkers who seemed to have reasons to distinguish an invisible yet existing reality from its visible parts.
Yes yes, but those things have practical differences, that you can see in the world. The fact that dinosaurs existed or not, you can see the effects of that on the world. But what difference does it make, as Hillary Clinton would say, whether idealism or materialism is the case? Not for you, in your practical life. But for the world. What difference does it make?
You're confusing a framework, and discussion about which framework is the most elegant, the most simple, etc. with discussion about what is the case - with matters of fact. Metaphysics doesn't deal with matters of fact. When I say idealism is true, I don't mean the same thing as when I say chairs are true.
By chairs being true, you mean chairs exist? So when you say that idealism is true, you don't mean that chairs exist because we perceive them, you mean that it's simpler to say that chairs exist when perceived as opposed to materialy, or mathematically, or what not.
Maybe so, but there have always been parts of the world invisible to us. A lot more of it has been made visible to us thanks to technology, but there is still dark matter, electrons, black holes, etc.
Chairs exist materially... What does that mean, and how is it any different from chairs existing mathematically? What are the real differences between those two concepts? And please don't answer that chairs are either material or mathematical in different words because im asking you precisely what information you are communicating by saying chairs are mathematical. Otherwise your statements are like me communicating to you that jealousy is pink. That's what your statements mean to me at the moment. Chairs exist materially = jealousy is pink. So Im asking you to explain to me what chairs exist materially practically and actually means. And to do that you need to list differences: for example, what's the difference between pink jealousy and non-pink jealousy? What's the difference between the material chairs and the mathematical chairs?
Material chairs are made up of physical stuff such as atoms and their bonds. Mathematical chairs only have mathematical properties. There is no physical stuff. Surely you've heard of Max Tegmark and his claim that the universe is mathematical. Instead of particles or fields or space being the ontological structure, it's numbers and their relations.
Quoting Agustino
Berkeley said "to be is to be perceived". Plenty of people on these forums have argued along those lines. They call themselves idealists or anti-realists, or have you been absent the various idealist/realist debates?
For example, by verification.
Quoting Michael
That's not a principle of realism.
Realists assume that the world exists independently of our beliefs and statements. You should not conflate that with talk about experiences and seeing, because many realists differ on questions on the nature of experiences and seeing (direct vs indirect realism).
Ok so if I see a chair, how do I go about deciding whether it's made up of atoms or mathematical properties? What are the real differences between chairs made of mathematical properties and those made of atoms? Do they look different, smell different, behave differently? What's the difference between them?
Don't you see that these are all differences without a difference? What I call a mathematical property, say ratio, is something observable in experience right? What I call an atom is also something observable in experience. Hence all these things are defined RELATIVE to experience. What I call matter i know from my experience. A stone is matter because it's hard, I grab it in my hand. It has mass, i can weigh it. That's all that being matter means. That's what i am actually communicating when I say something is matter. There is no more mysterious matter beyond experience. All I know is all I can potentially experience.
Good, if you're sure that you can do it, then I assume that you've already done it. So, how did you imagine it then? Did you picture someone going out and cutting some christmas trees, or did you think about what it means to cut a tree, and then multiply that by seventy? Or did you use some combination of imaging and thinking about the meaning of the words? Did any images enter your mind when you thought about what it means to cut a tree? I'm interested to know what process you use to imagine something without picturing it?
Not until electron tunneling microscopes were invented. Atoms were purely theoretical constructs created to explain the various forms matter takes (or to be more accurate, ontological posits), and then later, various experimental results. Now that we have tools to see and manipulate atoms, they're more than just theoretical abstractions. Also, chemistry doesn't work at all without atoms.
All that being said, atoms aren't fundamental, they're made up of subatomic particles and you have all the QM probability wave weirdness going on. Also, the particles themselves are said to be point particles, meaning they have no length or width. But more importantly, atoms, photons, electors, are abstracted away from colors, tastes, etc of everyday objects. What we know of them is physics, which is heavily based on math. Which leads to the possibility that the only real properties are mathematical properties.
Consider the table. It feels solid, looks brown and polished, sounds a certain way when you thump on it. But all of that can be explained in terms of light and sound waves, empty space with tiny atoms bound together by some magnetic force. The table of physics is very different from the table we see or hear or feel.
And where does maths exist?
SX and Aaron R have given the answer to the question you were asking. I would add that all of the responses you list are, in some sense, true.
1. is correct. The parts of the world we perceive are as we perceive them.
2. is correct. Our observations and measurements of the world represent the world as it acts (this is really 1. repeated in the context of the practice of science).
3. is correct. Existing states express mathematical forms all the time.
4. is correct. Anything we know is, by definition, related to anything else (identity, difference) and cannot be known any other way.
5. is correct, in a sense. When one knows something, it is a representation in in a state of their experience, not the the thing they know about itself. In this sense, everything is unknowable, not because it cannot be known, but rather because it never knowledge-- a state known is never the state of knowledge.
6. is also correct. This is 4. stated in a different way. Since we are a difference, everything is in relation to us, so nothing can be said to be "independent" of us.
No, which makes me think these notions of imagination have to be wrong.
I'm just speaking from my experience, that's how I imagine such a thing. I picture in my mind, a person with a saw, going and cutting a tree. Then I tell myself seventy times. And to imagine this, seventy times, I try to picture 70 in relation to other numbers like 60 and 50, but this seems somewhat vague. So I picture seven in relation to one by counting in my mind, and tell myself ten times that. Then I picture ten as two groups of five. Now I can imagine ten groups of seven, and this is the number of times that the person cuts trees. In this way I can avoid picturing the person cutting a tree seventy times.
I strongly believe that we all think differently though, thinking is an idiosyncratic matter. That's why I'm asking you, how would you imagine such a thing?
Really? That seems exhausting and pointless, and not the way people imagine things.
Maybe you could explain this a bit more (if you haven't already . . . I haven't read all of the posts below this one yet).
No idea!
Naive realism strikes me as incoherent, on any sort of reflection. But our perceptions have this sort of 'naive realist' quality to them. It really feels like my eyes shoot out a gaze at objects which exist in an independent world (i.e. not dependent on my mind). As if I look through my eyes. It feels like the laptop I'm touching is 'out there' and 'not me'. But when we learn about the biology of our sense organs, they don't seem to support this. Looking at the eye for example, the retina just responds to light by shooting off charges into the brain. There's nothing in the biology of the eye which would support a gaze through it.
Realism has no explanatory value. It shifts the 'unexplained' level of reality out from the ideal into a mind-independent world. The realist has no problem with unexplained things, he just has a problem with perception/ideas being that unexplained (as in, it doesn't have something else which is causing it) thing. For some reason the realist is more comfortable with the unexplained 'level' of reality being the material world instead of the ideal. Even though they have to posit an entire 'level' of reality, for no real explanatory reason. I actually think the reason the realist is more comfortable with the material world being the uncaused/unexplained level of reality is due to the school system. In our classes on biology, or physics, or chemistry, we're taught atomic realism, physicalism, biological materialism. Basically we are taught that materialism is the case until we're 18 years old, and beyond into higher education. The realist just struggles to shed this indoctrination.
I wonder why there's no 'super-realism' position? As in, our perceptions are caused by a material world, which isitself caused by some other level of reality. The realist would probably see this position as silly. And yet he does the very same thing in relation to the ideal 'world'. He sees the ideal 'level' of reality as needing an explanation and a cause, and yet has no problem with the material level of reality not needing a cause nor explanation. His problem is not with things which cause their own existence (as in, nothing causes their existence or 'holds' them in existence), in principle. He just has a problem with ideal things causing their own existence. And like I say, I think this double standard comes down mostly to the education system; 18 years of being indoctrinated into realism.
But I also think that idealism assumes too much. Nobody knows there isn't a material world. And there's something intuitively repugnant about the idea that this laptop before me is merely constituted by my perception of it. Intellectually I can peel away my visual perception, the touch of my fingers, etc, ask myself "what's left?" and struggle for an answer. But it just seems wrong that there would actually be nothing! It's a sort of paradox, realism seems intuitively obvious, our perceptions even have a naive realist quality. And yet on reflection, intellectually the position appears incoherent. Or at the very least pointless.
Basically any actual position taken towards this question goes too far, in my opinion. We just don't know. And it's all made way more complicated by inter-subjectivity - how is it that other minds fit into the picture. Idealism struggles with solipsistic tendencies, and yet realism places other minds in a noumenal (as in, entirely independent/separate from our own minds) realm, which is solipsistic in its own right. We (at least me) want direct encounters with others, and yet have what's encountered be, in-principle, incomplete/not all there is to others. A direct encounter with something which transcends ourselves.
No they aren't purely theoretical constructs. They are constructs that suggest such and such behaviour in such and such situations. That's what we meant by atoms - things which behave so and so in such and such. Then we do the experiment, and we notice such and such behaviour. Therefore we conclude that our conception must be correct - because our conception simply is that behaviour in that circumstance. And we don't need electron tunneling microscopes to experience atoms. Experience of atoms is experience of anything that behaves like atoms.
Quoting Marchesk
And if they had a length, would they behave any differently than if they were point particles? The reason why we treat them as point particles is that in order to determine the size of the particles which form a certain other particle, we need to bombard it with something smaller than itself. So we bombard a gold atom with an alpha particle, and we find the size of the nucleus, as Rutherford did. Then we bombard the nucleus by electrons, and other smaller particles, and we find quarks. I don't see any of this being mysterious or pointing to something beyond experience (and by the way, we treat quarks as point particles, because we haven't found smaller particles to bombard them with and see what length they actually have). All that we're talking about is such and such behaving so and so, in this or that circumstance - and we call that an atom. That's what the atom is, everything else is empty abstraction.
Quoting Marchesk
This guy does it better than you. So what? All that we mean is that the "ordinary" table behaves so and so, because we play with it in "ordinary" circumstances. The "scientific" table behaves so and so because we play with it in different circumstances. In truth they are one and the same table, and all we mean by ordinary and scientific is the different circumstances we play with it.
Well, it's the way that I imagine things. I can't help it if it's not the way other people imagine things. Now you tell me, how do you imagine this?
I wouldn't say that it's pointless, because it's how I come to a real understanding of what has been said to me, by imagining it. I agree, it does take effort, but that's a simple fact of life, understanding requires effort.
I know that in many of my everyday conversations I simply assume that I understand what has been said to me, without taking the time or effort to imagine it, and I respond accordingly. But those cases I am not imagining what has been said, and sometimes I'm wrong in the assumption that I understand; the result is misunderstanding. So whenever someone says something to me, and I don't feel certain of what they mean, I have to take the time to imagine it. This often requires questioning of the other person, and it may be annoying to that person, but I think it's better to annoy the person in this way, than to misunderstand the person.
So I get the feeling that this is the case right now. I think that I don't really understand what you mean by "imagine", so I'm asking you to clarify this, in order that I can imagine what you mean by "imagine". Since you refuse to answer, I get the impression that I am just being annoying.
But this is exactly where the falsity lies. They are not one and the same table. Playing with it in this way makes it different from the other table which we play with in that way. The moment a table is "touched" by someone it becomes different from the table it was, as untouched. The idea that human beings can play with things without changing them is clearly false. And this points to the falsity of the premise of human beings as passive observers.
Ok, I agree, but why is my statement contradictory with the statement that human's participate in experience and thus alter it by experiencing it?
No you don't create your experience. You don't have that much power. Part of your experience comes upon you whether you want it to or not. But you participate in the creation of your experience.
From the outside world? The fact you go out to work for example, and you meet a lion on the road to work. Is that your creation too? Meeting the lion? Of course not. That's something that you didn't cause, and yet it is part of your experience.
Why does the "outside world" have a history? Why are there fossils?
I didn't mean "distinguish" in the sense of "ascertain". I meant it in the sense of the factual difference between a veridical and a non-veridical experience. My understanding is that, according to the realist, there's a way the world is, independent of our experiences, and if our experiences "match" this way then they're veridical, otherwise they're non-veridical.
And "the world" here refers to what? Presumably the things we see and talk about (among other things)?
Unless you want to say that the world is separate to the the things we see and talk about, in which case you're confirming Kant's distinction.
You didn't read what I wrote? First I imagine what a tree chopping event is. Then, I can imagine 70 by putting it into context with numbers like 60 and 80, but this is a bit vague and doesn't give me a good understanding of how many trees seventy is. I can imagine it better by imagining how many things seven is, and taking that group of seven, ten times. I find it is a bit difficult to imagine how many times ten is, without actually counting out ten, so I find it easier to imagine ten as two groups of five. Then I can imagine chopping seven trees, five times, twice. That's a lot of tree chopping.
I've described how I imagine a guy chopping down seventy trees, you seem to have a hard time believing that this is how I actually do that. Why would you think that I am lying, unless you imagine this described act in another way? So I'll ask again. How do you imagine a guy chopping down seventy trees?
Some interesting parts:
Imaginination without picturing seems to amount to just recalling sentences.
If they are created from within you, then it follows precisely that your experience bears no relationship at all with reality, which is nonsense. Your experience necessarily is intertwined with the rest of reality. You cannot be eaten by a lion while experiencing something completely different, that is just ignoring everything we know about how the human organism works.
Quoting tom
That's like asking why we experience the world in time. I'd answer because it's a necessary precondition of any experience at all.
Oh man, I actually agree with you!!!
(L)
I don't see how that follows, I said that external things affect the experience which is created by my internal being. How does it follow that my experience has no relationship to reality? There is no logic to that kind of nonsense. Why do you bother saying something like that without thinking about it first?
Human beings create all kinds of things, buildings, cars, trains, planes, computers etc.. All of these things came from within the minds of human beings, they had absolutely no existence prior to being created by human minds. Would you argue that these things are not real because they were created by the minds of human beings? Why do you insist that the human experience could not be real if it's created by the human mind? That is what is nonsense.
What in the fluck?! It must take you like 37 years to read a single book haha.
It usually doesn't take long for me to imagine things. Most novels are quite simple and the scenarios generally come to my mind as fast as I can read them, though I have to stop and go back over things once in a while. Some things like "70 trees" I would imagine in a vague way. Non-fiction is much more difficult for me, sometimes requiring a good deal of effort to understand. Some philosophy I have to read over and over, and yes, I have been reading some of the same books of philosophy for about 37 years. If that's what it takes, and your interested, why not? I guess some people learn faster than others. I'm hoping that someone can teach me the trick.
Sorry I'm late to this party, been busy trying to write philosophy :)
I'm with TGW and Agostino, as far as I can see...there is no simple answer to such a question. I've been fretting about 'the world' lately. The idea that we can talk about 'the world' in some univocal way is often assumed without argument. But it's just a metaphysics, argued for alike by some monotheists or by believers in fundamentalism about particles. (An unholy alliance, as it were) As Landru used to argue on the old forum, there are many discourses and no single one of them seems exhaustive.
None of this stops us calling certain phenomena or concepts 'real' in some contexts, but the -ism tag is awfully constricting. An -ism gives a certain shape to your beliefs in discussing them with other people, but it also leaves you arguing for some nitpicking detail you're secretly not quite sure about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Except that it's the other way around. The mind merely structures the data received from outside - it doesn't CREATE anything.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a wrong analogy. The buildings created by human beings don't stand in the same relationship to human minds as their perception does.
Right, just like human beings merely structure the elements around us, they don't actually create any trains or cars or computers. Your answer is a farce.
Quoting Agustino
No, you're refusing to face the facts, human beings create things. Your claim that there is a significant difference between creating something material with your hands, and creating something immaterial in your mind is unjustified and untenable. Look at the architect, or the engineer, the idea is drawn up in the mind, put on paper, then produced with material. The initiating aspect is the work of the mind. The mind is what creates, not the hands. As I said, your claim that the mind doesn't create anything, is a farce.
And I never said the mind doesn't create anything - just that it doesn't create sense perception.
Quoting Agustino
I didn't say that the mind creates the sense data which it uses to construct the experience. Why do you think that it is necessary for the thing which creates, to create the material which it uses in the creation? That's not the way we create things, we take existing materials, and construct something out of them, that's what creating is. Sense data is the material element, the mind takes that and creates the experience.
Look, there is sense data, and there is experience. These are two distinct things. The existence of sense data does not necessitate an experience, something must take the sense data and cause the experience to occur. This is the mind. Therefore the mind creates the experience, by collecting sense data and causing an experience to occur. Why is that so difficult to comprehend? If you're so certain that the mind doesn't create the experience, then what do you think does?
Independent. =