Can we see the world as it is?
Quoting Andrew M
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/tetrachromacy/thescience/
So it seems we are in a world where most people (including all men) are colour-blind, and we are not seeing things as they are.
https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-cryptochrome-cry4-photoreceptor-2018
Robins (European robins, Erithacus rubecula, not the fakey American ones) can see the earth's magnetic fields.
I conclude that nobody can see the world as it is.
See also the picture of the coordination game example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)#In_coordination_game
Is there a square that stands out to you? That it stands out is not a function of your agreement with others that it does, but of the way you perceive things in the world.
If it so happens that other people perceive things in the same way as you, then the distinction between that square and the other three squares will result in language that the community will use. Per this example, the words "red" and "blue".
Now suppose you were color blind (often this is between red and green, but I'll stick to the example). In that case, the red square won't stand out. So if everyone were color-blind, there would be no red-blue distinction. Language would instead arise around other (for them) prominent features of the environment. But in a world where most people are not color-blind, the color-blind person has to adapt to the color-normal use (say, learning how to navigate traffic lights by noting the light intensity at a bulb position). With regard to this very specific distinction (and the color-normal standard), they would not be seeing things as they are. But if language instead emerged according to the distinctions that they would naturally make, then they would be seeing things as they are.
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/tetrachromacy/thescience/
The Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University:
Tetrachromacy is an enhanced type of colour vision that may allow the individual to see colours that others cannot.
Normal colour vision depends on three types of specialised cells in the eye called cones. These cones are often referred to as blue, green and red cones depending on the particular wavelengths of light that trigger them into action. In comparison, tetrachromats are endowed with a fourth type of cone, which is most sensitive in the yellow-green region of the visible spectrum. [...]12% of women carry such an altered gene, but we do not know how many of these women can use their additional cone type to make colour discriminations that are unachievable for the rest of us.
So it seems we are in a world where most people (including all men) are colour-blind, and we are not seeing things as they are.
https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-cryptochrome-cry4-photoreceptor-2018
Robins (European robins, Erithacus rubecula, not the fakey American ones) can see the earth's magnetic fields.
I conclude that nobody can see the world as it is.
Comments (297)
That's not the interesting question though. The interesting question is, if no-one can see it, is there a world as it is?
If we can't see the world as it is, then can we know the world as it is? For instance, you seem to know that we can't see the world as it is, but how did you find that out if not by reading words on a page - by seeing words as they are?
Once you start typing a reply are you seeing the words that you typed as they are? If not, then how do you know that what is on the screen is what you intended to type?
Just seems to define "the way things are" as "the way things seem to most of us" @Andrew M
Quoting Echarmion
I would say that's even less interesting. Who cares?
edit. Have a great day!
edit. Have a great day Daemon! How do you feel about panen-psychism or constitutive micro-psychism?
Need we be able to see everything in the world as it is in order to be able to see anything as it is?
The cat is on the mat? The cup is in the cupboard? The lights are on the Christmas tree? I'm typing on my computer? We're talking about whether or not we can see some things as they are?
That actually is quite interesting. The world as it is does not necessarily imply observation of it. Just sitting there, all by itself, whilin’ away the hours, chillin’. Seems like that would be the world as it is. But then, what’s to say the world is just sittin’ there, all by itself? Takes an observer to come to that conclusion.
We’re left with nothing but the logic of it:
Good logic: we’re here now along with the world, we weren’t here before but the world was, so there was definitely a way the world was. If we allow the world to be as it was except now we’re in it, the world can’t be the way it was. But it can still be the way it is.
Bad logic: Now we’ve contradicted ourselves, if it is the case that the world as it is doesn’t imply observers, which are the only way to tell the way the world was is different than the way the world is.
Reconcile the bad logic by just saying the observer is the only difference between the way the world was and the way the world is now, therefore however the world is, is because that’s the way it occurs to the observer. Or, which is the same thing, the world is as the observer says it is.
Doesn’t mean he’s right; just means he’s the only one who can say, the world being merely something for him to say things about.
My first response was meant to point out the appeal to omniscience inherent/implicit in so many arguments regarding "seeing the world as it is". My second was meant to point out that we certainly can see some things as they are.
Now I'll point out yet another issue with the idea... it's untenability.
In order to know that we cannot see the world as it is, we must know the world as it is, the world as we see it, and the differences between the two.
Hi Mww,
I don't see why the mere arrival of the observer should change the way the world is in the way you suggest, so that it is now dependent on his views, however misguided they may be.
What the world was before us is different from what the world is with us, because of us. That does not say anything about what the world depends on. World still is, just is different.
The way the world is as it occurs to a human, is simply how he describes it to himself. That is the same as him saying the world is as he says it is. I mean.....what other choice does he have? He is necessarily stuck with his own cognitive system, so that system is what he must use when he says stuff about the world.
According to a Platonic (idealized) standard, sure.
But not according to a standard that arises from what is observed in the world.
That is as things are. It takes into account what grounds the language being used, namely, the prominent features of the environment. Hence the reference to focal points.
That relationalism is very much a part of modern science. Most obviously with Einstein's relativity where the characteristics of observables can vary depending on the frame of the observer (length, time, mass/energy, simultaneity).
A natural extension of this idea is that a reference frame for a person fixes not just the relative spatiotemporal features of the environment, but also the relative qualitative features of the environment.
So two people travelling at the same velocity will perceive the same length for an observed object. Similarly, two people with the same perceptual systems will perceive the same color for an observed object.
No, that's a naturally arising distinction. For example, we learn to distinguish a straight stick from a bent stick. But then a scenario arises, such as the straight stick partially submerged in water, where the straight stick seems bent. So things aren't always as they seem.
The key point to note here is that there is a natural standard in play. That is, we are comparing one human-observed scenario to another. We are not applying an idealized (Platonic) standard about what constitutes a straight and a bent stick.
Perhaps there are other creatures that don't perceive things in that same way (perhaps they see things in a distorted way compared to us, and us to them). So they would have a different standard. But, again, not an idealized standard, but a creature-specific standard.
Ha!
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, but not one which is perceived. A mathematized world is the best we can do. Even if there are limits to our knowing the world as it is, this doesn't mean there is no way the world is. Epistemology and ontology need not be conjoined at the hip.
Object Oriented Ontology is one such effort under speculative realism which attempts to flesh out things as they are. It starts by noting that all objects are correlated to one another, which means the exact nature of the object is never transmitted, only as it is correlated to another object.
and as a tangent, if you believe that we do not see the world as it is (period), then you must think that art, in fact all art, is creative (at least I think so)...re:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9835/can-art-be-called-creative/p1
I am not sure what is being asked for beyond that.
Quoting Andrew M
Which is to say that "the way things are" is "the way they seem to us" (creature specific standard). I am not saying that a stick that looks bent in water is actually bent, but that whether or not the stick is "actually bent" is found out by employing a creature specific standard. That there is no "direct access" if that makes sense, we see things through fallible senses and fallible reasoning. I find people forget this often.
:up:
Quoting khaled
OK. The way I would put it is that we are capable of being mistaken about what we perceive.
I would say we are capable of being mistaken about anything.
Yes, that's been my conclusion from observing humanity too...
Though our perceptions -- our filling in of the gaps and extending of patterns and attempts to correct for distortions of our senses, in other words our interpretations of our senses -- can be wrong, our senses themselves cannot, and there is nothing more to the actual truth than the sum of what all kinds of senses (of any beings, not just us) could potentially sense.
Whether or not women with two different cones for perceiving reds can see more shades, the simple fact is that the EM spectrum is much wider than the human eyes' gamut, and indeed many animals can see out of our range.
It would be possible to set up a game like in the OP where a trained animal picks a square based on its color despite all the squares appearing black* to a human.
Or echolocation or whatever...it's pretty clear we don't sense everything that's capable of being sensed, let alone every phenomenon "out there".
* What's "black" anyway? Since we see black where there is a comparative dearth of cone cell activation, is black "out there"?
When you talk about seeing the world as it is as in the material manifestation or in it's more subtle invisible aspects? That is where it gets so complicated, and the limits of our senses is apparent in some ways, but even the most materialistic thinkers would not deny invisible aspects, especially those in daily life, such as electricity and wifi.
The philosophy of Plato and Kant spoke of forms and transcendental aspects, which would could gain some grasp of, but were, nevertheless, beyond our awareness.
So, the whole question of seeing the world, which does involve the whole question of what is reality, is so complex, and one of the most profound philosophy questions. I would say that at most, each one us with the limits of our sensory faculties, and reason, can only say that our perception of the world is an interpretation.
In saying that, I do not wish to undervalue our perception and at least we can communicate with others to go beyond the limits of our iindividual minds. And of course, we are not, at the present time, able to know how the world is seen by other lifeforms.
So, your argument is that other folk, including robins, see things differently to you, and hence... no-one sees the world as it is.
Why hasn't anyone pointed out that this conclusion does not follow from the premiss?
Interestingly, we know what magnetic fields are, and we know that the robin sees them. We are in agreement with the robin. We are seeing the same thing, but in different ways.
The same point holds for the other examples given. We know the colourblind person does not see red. They and we are in agreement as to what is the case.
So the question that should be addressed is, can the argument be made complete? What would be needed to make the conclusion follow from the agreed fact that different folk see different things?
Until and unless Daemon completes the argument, there is nothing to address.
I don't have very clear views myself as yet about "seeing things as they are".
Not only that, the conclusion undermines the premises. How does he know that robins see differently if no one, including him, sees the world? To know that would entail seeing the world in the reaching of that premise.
I'll add also that the issue is not binary. It's not either we see the world perfectly or we don't see the world.
And then what you said.
Yes, but what if Sarin gas, deadly radiation or Smallpox were released on the field. Would a person see that?
All the stuff sparrows and humans can't sense. Also, how sensation is a relation based on the interaction between reflecting light, eyes and brains, for example. The photons of a narrow range of light look like they are combination of three primary colors for normal sighted humans, because we have three kinds of rods in our eyes. Some birds and other animals have more, and can see a wider range.
[quote=David Hume]Sounds, colors, heat and cold, according to modern philosophy are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/[/quote]
[quote=Stephen Palmer]People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive. (Palmer 1999: 95)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/[/quote]
If sensations of perception are generated by our biology, then the world we perceive is not the way the world is, but rather the way we humans interact with the world based on the kind of sensory organs and nervous systems our ancestors evovled.
Well, sure. But I still think the statement that we don't see reality doesn't hold. There's no need to treat it as a binary issue. Further, if you mount an argument, supporting that statement, it will be based on what you think are accurate observations of reality.
I was responding to...
Quoting DaemonThat contradicts itself. I mean, how would this completely blind person know what others see. I suppose if he was a Rationalist who could make the claim in any case. But an empiricist is on thin ice and what would the Rationalist be talking about. What do any of his or her words refer to)
Don't see reality as it is. The bolded part is the key part. We do perceive reality. But we do so from a certain perspective.
Quoting Coben
The best we can do is rely on what science reveals about the world. That's an abstracted view, but it gets at the properties and processes of things as they are, if imperfectly.
Stove's Gem. We can only see the world with our eyes, therefore we cannot see the world.
We cannot see the world as it is, only as it looks to us.
Remember the black cat radiating heat? You don't see a thermal cat.
And then there’s the faculty of reason, which, arguably, is not reducible to biology, even though it’s an evolved capacity. In any case, the contention that we see the world as it appears to us, but not as it is in itself, is basic to Kant’s critique of pure reason. Furthermore it’s indubitable that the ‘act of seeing’ comprises a synthesis, ‘the act of putting different representations together, and grasping what is manifold in them into one cognition” (A77/B103); it is a process that “gathers the elements for cognition, and unites them to form a certain content” (A78/B103).”
I don’t really get why any of this is regarded as controversial or mysterious on a philosophy forum, it’s fundamental to critical philosophy.
For you, yep.
We cannot see the word as it is, so the claim goes.
So, is water constituted by hydrogen and oxygen? Is California on the edge of the Pacific Ocean? Is Covid19 a bit of a problem? Do we know stuff about how things are? Anything?
Let's cut to the philosophical issue here. What we're discussing has been described under the heading of the Cartesian anxiety.
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
This has been the subject of quite a bit of commentary, but I think it identifies the root problem.
You acknowledge that there are true statements about the world but insist that we cannot see the world as it is. How is this not a contradiction?
Empirically speaking? Not really. We have less than certain facts and theories explaining those facts, subject to further revision and new facts.
Ah, but the demanded condition for being able to see the world as it is, is to be able to see it free from all perspectives; which would mean being able to make absolutely true, that is completely context independent, statements about it. The true statements we are able to make are all relative to various contexts, which just isn't good enough, dammit! :rofl:
Then we cannot be perceiving it as it is! I echo Wayfarer in that this pretty standard philosophical
fare, and not new at all.
Agreed. Perceiving is relational. It’s also conscious.
Quoting MarcheskYes, I've noticed that also. I've acknowledged that in different words. Notice, for example, the word hallucination only makes sense when contrasted with something that is not a hallucination. In order to determine it was a hallucination, one needs to trust other perceptions.
Two, you never really respond to the points I make. You reiterate your position. You do not address how we do see the world, even 'as it is', in my examples. Nor do you explain how science avoids basing its conclusions without using observations. Which the scientists then trust. (with provisos for revision).
Quoting Marchesk
Science has not overturned all our intuitions about the world. One one they are not is that we can use our senses to draw correct conclusions about the world. Like the guy running through the field.
Rubbish. One does not have to "see the world from all perspectives" to see that the cup is on the table.
I didn't write " see the world from all perspectives" I wrote " see the world free from all perspectives". That is the criterion being used for being able to see the world "as it is", by those who claim we cannot see the world as it is. If you read all my comments in context, you's see that I think this is an absurd criterion.
Quoting Janus
Jeez, you didn't even quote the end of the sentence. I cannot imagine a more openly evasive response.
I am going to ignore you from here on out.
I am not clear yet what Janus is doing, but one has to wonder why Marchesk thinks his posts relate to anything we say. I mean, if he doesn't see the world as it is art all, he isn't seeing our posts free from perspectives or with infallible perception. I mean, how does he know he's not milking a cow when he thinks he's responding to what we wrote?
Yes, we do perceive something about the world as we're running through the field. That which we evolved to see to avoid those sort of obstacles. No, it's not as it is.
Maybe a clarification is in order. We do not perceive the world exactly as it is. We perceive it as hominids. But that's so far from the complete picture that there's no need to explicitly state "exactly".
Maybe I was waiting at a bank teller on my phone and couldn't finish responding to the post.
Quoting Coben
If you can't stand the heat, get out of he damn kitchen.
Quoting Banno
Why don't you read what I write? I'm characterizing the position of those who claim we cannot see the world as it is, not my own position: I don't claim we cannot see the world as it is, because I don't apply such absurd criteria as the proponents of that claim do.
Do I have to quote myself again?
Quoting Janus
Fair call. Still rubbish.
I can see form here that the cup is still on the... damn, I put it in the sink.
This perspective will do. From some other perspective, it would be concluded that from my perspective the cup is in the sink; or that perspective would be wrong.
That is we adopt the Principle of Relativity; what is true from my perspective will be true for you, given a suitable translation.
Irony never works out well on a forum.
As I already pointed out if you care to look at the quote from myself directly above your post.
Uh-huh. We made this shit up. Not like Hume, Kant, Locke, Pyrro, Schopenhauer, Rorty, Meillassoux or a hundred other philosophers haven't made or discussed similar argument in the entire history of philosophical inquiry.
To a degree. I'm not espousing skepticism, except to dogmatic claims. I think we know a lot, just not with certainty. But much of that knowledge came with a lot of work, and the invention of various tools to get beyond our senses.
That is just your inability to commit. Which disappears when you stand up from your armchair.
If you are suggesting I don't read what you write, then you are wrong. As far as I can tell I'm agreeing with you in this argument. There's no irony, unless you can indicate some point of disagreement.
Or is it,
Assuming the latter, is this short for,
Or does it have to be,
Or,
Or is it short for something else? Or is "as it is" perfectly clear as it is?
Answer: [hide][3] ... reject [4] and [5] for the same reasons as [1][/hide]
My thought was that we can tell from the robin and the tetrachromats that there are aspects of the world that are inaccessible to us.
But we know they are inaccessible...? Think on that.
So if there aren't any creatures about, there isn't a way things are?
There are also the unknown unknowns.
Quoting Echarmion
This seems to me to be a reasonable question: can we see the world as it is? The question is not is it real? Is the cup on the table? But can we see it without our discriminatory ideas and thoughts, without our cultural biases, without our ego. Not very often. But it’s there as “a thing”.
“ We can interpret Zen’s nondualistic experience epistemologically as that experience which arises from a nondiscriminatory state of meditational awareness. ... It may also be characterized as nondiscriminatory discrimination, in order to capture a sense of how things appear in meditational awareness. In such awareness no ego is posited either as an active or a passive agent in constituting the things of experience, as this awareness renders useless the active-passive scheme as an explanatory model. This awareness lets a thing announce itself as a thing.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/
So the reality is not there and we that do not perceive it, no, the reality is exactly what we perceive. “Ah, but it is always incomplete”, so tell me the idea of ??a complete reality that can be presentable to anyone. You cannot. That is, showing itself only in certain aspects is proper to all reality, that is the structure of reality. For example, you take the cube; how many sides does the cube have? There are six, you only see three! Is this a limitation of our perception? No, it is a limitation of the cube, and so on.
Things that present themselves in all their aspects at the same time only exist ideally. For example, the ideal cube that you draw on the paper shows six sides, but this is a cube of descriptive geometry. It is a business that if you cut and assemble you can create the cube but on paper it is not. So only this non-existent cube has six sides at the same time.
This is one of Kant’s mistakes, he thinks that all of these are limitations of our knowledge, that we cannot know things in themselves, however, I assert that what I’m talking about is things in themselves! That aspect of the cube that I perceive is the aspect that the cube can show me. It cannot show that same aspect of itself to an earthworm. Only a human being can see this. Another animal will see it in yet another way. But we can understand how the bear sees itself, how the cat sees the bear, how the worm sees the bear and so on. All of these aspects are articulated, they are not separate, but distinct.
:100:
I notice that not everyone saw your comment as it really was...
:up:
There is. But we can only describe it from a human point-of-view. That is, we start from what we observe. Our theories of the universe (along with the rules of logic and mathematics) don't emerge in a vacuum.
Exactly.
Quoting Rafaella Leon
Yes. And as you suggest above, you're talking about those things from a human point-of-view (yours). You're not asserting a Platonic (or idealized) point-of-view.
Three men looking at a large paddock. One is cattle farmer, he's assessing it for the quality of the feed, whether there's water on it, how many head it will support. One is a geologist, he's looking at the rock formations to determine whether there are likely to be any valuable minerals underneath it. The third is a property developer, he's looking at access roads, zoning of the sorrounding area, whether sub-division is allowed and if so what the rules are.
It's the same paddock, but they're all seeing different things. Furthermore, depending on which of them ends up buying it, the outcomes will be wildly divergent.
Another anecdote I learned in anthropology (or, it might have been cognitive science). An anthropologist drove a pygmy chief up on top of a mountain, where you could see down to the plains beneath. On the plains, as is typical in Africa, there were herds of animals visible. The chief kept squatting down and reaching out in front of him to touch the ground. He did this for some time. After a while, and much translation, it became apparent that the chief was trying to pick up the animals. This is because he was from a rainforest tribe and had never seen a sweeping view before. He didn't have any conception of the scale on which he was seeing those animals, so he thought they were small creatures only an arms-length distant.
Right, and you never saw an optical illusion or perceived something wrongly in your entire life so you are confident in the total accuracy of your senses. Likewise, your judgement is pure of any error and of any subjectivity, ya kna? So when you look around here and see a bunch of jokers who never cared to think, it’s not just your opinion... it’s the Philosophy Forum AS IT IS. :-)
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
Most philosophy takes place on the level of the content of thought, this idea vs. that idea. While there's a place for this, it seems a more powerful form of analysis to examine the nature of thought, that which all ideas are made of.
While we can learn something about say, Christianity, by comparing it to Marxism, Buddhism or some other ideology.... We can learn about EVERY philosophy by shifting our focus to the nature of thought, it's properties, how it works etc.
As example, we could observe how Christianity, a religion supposedly about bringing people together in peace, has subdivided in to hundreds of competing factions, sometimes with murderous results. If we stay on the level of the content of thought we might conclude that this problem arises from some flaw in Christian ideology.
But if we back up a bit and take a wider view we can see that every ideology ever invented inevitably subdivides in to competing internal factions. From this observation we can see that the process of division arises from a deeper level than the content of particular ideologies, but rather from the medium of thought which all ideologies are made of. This insight has profound practical implications...
Imagine I propose that Hippyheadism is the one true way which can unite humanity and bring peace etc. If we understand that Hippyheadism is made of thought, and thought is the source of division, we will know this claim can't be true. If we understand the divisive nature of thought itself, we will know right at the start that it will only be a matter of time before there are Leftist Hippyheadists and Rightist Hippyheadists who will begin yelling at each other.
The content of thought is just a symptom, a product of the nature of thought. So, as Wayfarer suggests, a most productive way of proceeding is to examine one's spectacles.
To illustrate, imagine that you have been wearing tinted sunglasses since birth (you were a really cool jazz musician baby). :-) If you didn't understand the tinted nature of your glasses you would understandably conclude that all of reality is tint colored.
This is the human condition. We don't grasp the divisive nature of our spectacles (thought) and so see division everywhere we look, and take it for granted that the division we perceive is real.
My interest was initially piqued by Andrew M's suggestion that we can see the world as it is, and his subsequent acknowledgement that colour-blind people can't see the world as it is.
Andrew then added something about "standards", Platonic or Idealised standards, versus creature specific standards.
I guess "Idealised" is the same thing as "the world as it is ("in itself").
The tetrachromats are interesting because it means all men and most women are colour-blind. So if you've ever wondered what it's like to be colour-blind, now you know. Fascinatingly, it seems that tetrachromat women themselves often don't realise that they can see colours the rest of us can't, and it isn't tested for routinely, it wasn't known about at all until recently. The robin's ability to see magnetic fields is interesting because it seems so bloody unlikely and it's like a superpower.
I realise these are capacities that we know are inaccessible to the rest of us, but they give us something to talk about, and they provide a pointer towards other capacities we don't know about at all (after all, we only just found out about these ones, and there was no guarantee of that).
There are things we don't know that we don't know, and they are part of the world as it is, so we don't know the world as it is.
?
Where did you get that pronunciation from Olivier?
New York. It’s meant as a parody of a smart ass talking.
Nothing you’ve said is sufficient to prove a mistake. Not to say there isn’t one, but nothing this comment is in response to, serves the purpose of demonstrating it.
But this set of records, in turn, implies the existence of the physical environment, that is, not only of the materials where these records are printed, but also of the world of “objects” to which they refer and with which they relate in somehow.
The notion of “knowledge” as the content of human memory and consciousness becomes totally unfeasible if we do not admit that knowledge, in the form of registration, also exists outside of them. Furthermore, we cannot admit that there are only man-made records, since any material that can serve as a board where these records are inscribed can only serve this role precisely because, in its nature and intrinsic form, it brings its own records, suitable for this purpose: you cannot write in water or produce a musical note by blowing on a compact rock. Registration is any trait that specifies and singularizes any entity.
To perceive the real world is to perceive possibilities, tensions, expectations. The concept of materialism itself cannot be enunciated without self-contradiction, it cannot even be thought of as a hypothesis. You think there is a material world, and, as we have a brain, we invent things other than the material world, but all that we invent is exactly the presence of the material world. If reduced to its “material” properties, the world could not even be material. Because what you call material is just an abstract selection of certain properties out of the countless ones that you perceive and that you hypothetically call materials, but that are not perceived separately. They are never perceived separately. All the knowledge that we can acquire from Epistemology and Theory of Knowledge must be obtained through the analysis of real perception, through the analysis of real knowledge, and not through artificial hypotheses. Real knowledge is that which is obtained in real experience, in actual experience and not in hypothetical experience.
Thank you.
So do you think aspects can enter into relations with other aspects, let's say an asteroid hits another asteroid?
The local dialect where I come from, Tyneside, North East England, is certainly among the most extreme accents of British English, and we say "ya kna" to mean "you know".
The dialect and accent is called "Geordie". You can hear a Geordie joke here: https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/assets/geordie.rm and read a translation here: https://www.hawaii.edu/satocenter/langnet/sounds/geordsound.html The joke includes somebody saying "ya kna".
Naive realists tend to be rather dogmatic about their perceptions.
The first seems pretty much a given. If we don't know everything - that is, there are things we don't know - then we don't know everything.
The second would contradict itself it seems to me. Since we are a part of the world, and you are making a claim about us, you seem to know something about the world.
The question is, by what standard? By normal standards, we are not color-blind. By tetrachromat standards we are.
Similarly consider a six-foot basketball player. Are they tall? By normal standards, they are. By basketball standards they are not.
And by giraffe standards, nobody is tall. But that's not a useful standard for human beings.
Similarly, if seeing the world requires perceiving every possible difference, then that standard has no use for human beings. We would all be blind. Or, as Plato put it, imprisoned in a cave.
Quoting Daemon
That sums up the philosophical dispute. Is "the world as it is" that which human beings ordinarily perceive when not mistaken (i.e., per a human standard)? Or is it an ideal that transcends human perception?
Sure, but they would not be non-relational aspects. I was saying that I think the notion of a non-relational aspect of the world is incoherent.
Thanks Andrew.
Perhaps the words are being used in a technical sense but I feel there's something jarring about "ideal" and "transcends" here.
Could we say that the meaning of "the world as it is" depends on the context? The world has perceptible and imperceptible aspects, and on a day to day basis we usually want to talk about the world we perceive.
How do you identify what is entering into relation with what? Those two asteroids are where they are because of Jupiter's gravitational effect, Jupiter is where it is because of the sun, and the Milky Way galaxy.
Does "everything is relational" get us anywhere?
Science deals with what enters into relation with what and how. And science itself grows out of our relation with things.
Everything is relational is a truism, to be sure; but it is one which often seems to be forgotten. So, there is no non-relational reality, and inaccessible relational aspects are hidden from us only because we lack the properties that would be required to access them.
Yes, that seems fine.
I'd add that knowledge (whether everyday or scientific) builds on what we ordinarily perceive.
One aspect where philosophical claims and distinctions can go wrong is when they deny that premise - in effect, sawing off the branch that they rest on.
The-world-as-it-is can only be a human concept, in the end based on experience. The-world-as-it-is might not be accessible if we had no reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world. Because we have reliable, repeatable, valid sensory experience of the world, we can say we see the world as it is. Were sensory experience highly variable (such that some people perceived water as dry, fire as cool, thunder as a sucking sensation, and so on), we couldn't say the world is as we see it.
When two people seeing the world as it is disagree about what it is, are they seeing two different worlds?
Relevant quotation: ‘Those who are awake have but one world in common, while the many live each in their own private world’ - Heraclitus, quoted in John Fowles, The Aristos.
We have to learn to see the world as it is. Rock layers don't tell a story until one learns something about rocks--sediment, metamorphosis, uplift, folding, erosion, and so on. Same with all the different parts of the world as it is.
And if you don’t?
Has that happened yet?
I’ve always been under the impression that’s exactly the opposite of what “as it is” implies, which technically expands to “as it is in itself”. Because of the very limitations of our experiential methodology, and the cognitive system inherent in humans in general by which such experience is given, we can only say we see the world as it appears to us, as it seems to be as far as we are equipped to say. Which is the off-hand source of the metaphysically-induced invention of qualia.
Does the world appear to us as it is in itself, is the question with no positive proof, but pure speculative epistemology says it is not, nor can it be. Just for fun, throw in energy conversion losses, and even the scientists should agree.
For whatever that’s worth.......
It is the opposite. That we have to work hard, applying a rigorous methodology of experimentation with a heavy reliance on math, resulting in many counter intuitive or surprising results means the world as it i differs considerably from the world as it is.
The whole realty/appearance distinction, which wouldn't be a thing if the world appeared to us as it is.
Then we have discussions like this one.
Yeah, the subtleties and intricacies that make it so are usually overlooked, or dismissed outright, by the common sense realist opposition, because there are no empirical proofs for that distinction.
What that doesn't get, is that within the scholastic tradition, ossified and dogmatic though it might have become, was a critical philosophy. It contained the gist of the dialectical tradition of Greek philosophy which had been developed over centuries, and refined through subsequent debate and analysis, preserved in Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy and its commentaries.
Throwing it out, and starting again with naturalism, results in the loss of the framework to even discuss the question of 'reality and appearance'. Kant realised this, and preserved some of those elements, even while transforming them in light of science. But Kant is very difficult, and besides, his work became identified with subsequent German idealism, which is highly complex, not to say unbearably verbose. The upshot is that philosophy as such more or less died out in Western culture, although the questions it originally sought to tackle always re-assert themselves in new guises.
Likewise, the assumption renders one unable to account for individual bias.
If you wish to educate yourself about the transformation of metaphysics from the ancient to the modern, this would be a good start:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/
In practice, empiricism, and positivism, usually turn out to be precisely the 'elimation of metaphysics from philosophy'. In positivism it is overt. As I've observed before, and despite your denials, your criticism of metaphysics as 'akin to poetry' is indeed 'akin to positivism'. ;-)
Of course there are still people who study metaphysics, but again, empiricism and a lot of English-speaking analytical philosophy is hostile to metaphysics.
And do notice that the SEP entry you've pointed to - which I'm familiar with, surprising as that might be - concludes with a section under the heading 'is metaphysics possible?'
I'm not advocating for any kind of return to classical metaphysics. But you would have to agree there's very little discussion of it on this forum, and precious little evidence that it's understood, going on many of the discussions here. And it was was precisely the subject of this OP that metaphysics originally set out to discern.
The problem with that conclusion (for me, anyway) is that I still exist in the world I perceive and interact with. If the world is, in fact, quite unlike what we perceive, what difference can it make to me? If the solidity in the world I perceive is in truth fluid, well... it seems solid, and solid works.
Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, suggests what it would be like if the 'much different and true reality' should become perceptible:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
My saying that ancient and medieval metaphysics was more akin to poetry than to science was not a criticism, but merely an observation. I think it's undeniable that traditional metaphysics was an unconstrained (except by logical consistency, of course) exploration of the theological and poetic imagination; and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The point is that that practice does not deliver any theses that can be tested, or even that can be warranted as being ontological commitments elicited by, and consistent with, our best scientific understandings of the world. And apart from those scientific understandings there would seem to be no other universally intersubjective, normatively compelling understandings (none which would compel any particular metaphysical commitments at least).
I think the question as to whether metaphysics is possible is a reasonable one. On the one hand of course it is possible, but on the other hand no worldview, scientific or otherwise can be definitively demonstrated to be veracious. Judgements as to the plausibility of worldviews is contingent on what criteria one selects. Personally, I don't think that the deliverances of modern science can be safely ignored if one wants to find a plausible worldview.
Yes, it seems that our perceptual processes are largely eliminative; the significant aspects of the "buzzing, blooming confusion" are retained and the chaotic, meaningless "noise" is filtered out. That chaos could never be "a much different and true reality", as the notion of reality seems to entail coherency. Hallucinogens give us a glimpse of that of which we cannot sensibly speak.
I prefer the version of Fabrizio Dori in Le Dieu Vagabond (The Wandering God), which tells the story of Eustis, a Greek god, a satire to be precise, from the retinue of Dionysos, wandering in the modern world as a bum. If you give him a bottle of wine, he will tell you your future. Like all gods, he sees the world as it really is, not the pale version that human eyes can see. Once, only once, Eustis lent his eyes to a mortal, a painter, who wanted very badly to see the world as it is. After he saw the world through the eyes of Eustis, the painter started to work furiously on canvas after canvas, to try and capture the vision he just had. But the beauty of this vision was so great that the artist started to despair of his ability to paint it, and committed suicide. His name was Vincent Van Gogh... Since then Eustis does not allow men to see the world through his eyes, even in exchange for a lot of wine.
Yes, and indeed there are. It was a comment on this particular thread, and some of the gormless and jejune naive realism that's been on display here.
(Anyway, Happy Christmas. I'm going to log out for a couple of days, it's family time. :sparkle: )
Well, you're on your way to celebrate the holy day with family; Merry [or happy] Christmas.
But... "gormless" is a lovely word. I've only read it here.
adjective Chiefly British Informal.
lacking in vitality or intelligence; stupid, dull, or clumsy.
Mid 19th century, respelling of gaumless.
I'm not familiar with Eustis; but it's a good story (apropo). Thanks.
Yes. There was this young chap who used to be runner for the Physics Department, back in the late 80's when I was managing the Uni computer store. He used to go back and forth picking up orders and the like. He was always running, always poorly shaven, always wore khaki shorts and had never smiled. When we saw him coming, we used to intone, in an Attenborough-ish voice - 'Studies in Gormlessness'.
And Merry Christmas to you, also BC. :sparkle:
I'd say lack of consensus in many, if not most, matters is the province of the unreasonable.
It’s one of many good stories in a stupendous graphic novel by Italian Fabrizio Dori, called Il Dio Vagabondo (the Vagrant God). I don’t think it has been translated in English yet. It should be, it’s a masterpiece.
Imagine a minor olympian divinity left alone in our modern, disenchanted world. Other gods of old, his companions, have disappeared when Christianity swept over the world. He lives by himself in a sunflower field, and he drinks a lot — aptly so, for ‘Eustis’ means ‘good grapes’ in Greek and Eustis’ ex-boss, Dionysos, is the god of wine.
But in fact Eustis has only been banished by the gods in the world of mortals. An old professor will help him find his way to where his divine buddies are hiding from the cold and rational beings that humans have become.
Graphically, Il Dio Vagabondo functions as an homage to Van Gogh. As explained, in the novel Van Gogh saw through the eyes of Eustis once, and tried to paint the world as seen by the gods. Unfortunately, humans cannot stand the full extent of the world’s beauty, and Van Gogh was maddened by it and committed suicide.
Dori’s previous novel was about Gauguin, so he is quite ambitious both graphically and narratively.
A possible interpretation is that the artist lends us his eyes to see the world in a new way, more meaningful, more beautiful than the way we usually see it, and in doing so, the artist helps us rediscover the primordial enchantement of being at the world.
Quoting Daemon
To me those statements just don't work well together. In the first you make a strong, unqualified statement, an ontological one, abot the world. In the second statement you make a blanket claim that we do not see the world as it is. If you believe the second claim, how can you make the first one? And since it seems like you arrive at your conclusion in the second statement via observations like the first one, why do you trust the second claim?
I'm working towards an understanding.
If you mean "Are there things we cannot see with our own eyes" then yes, we know that here are because we can see them using various devices. Microbes and the moons of Jupiter, and as mentioned in the OP, ultraviolet light and magnetic fields.
If you mean "Are there things we have never seen" then yes. You've never seen your own heart, one hopes; but you know it is there from your understanding of anatomy and your continuing heartbeat.
If you mean "Are there things that could never be seen" then we move into modality. You will never see a round square, or a four sided triangle, but these are not things, just words put together without standing for anything. There's an interesting debate around whether we might find, say, unicorns on a distant planet; arguably, the answer is no, since unicorns are mythical creatures and hence horse-like beasts with horns growing out of their heads on other planets might look like unicorns, but would not be unicorns.
Then there is the metaphysical issue of whether a thing that could not in principle ever be seen counts as a thing; Catholics have blood that looks, smells and tastes like wine each Sunday. Is this blood that cannot be seen?
What are you asking? So far I've taken "see" to be roughly understood as "perceive". But it might mean something like "discern".
Can we discern the world as it is? Isn't that just asking if we can make true statements about how things are? And the answer to that is, yes, we can. It's true, for example, that you are reading this, now.
What I've writ so far is along the analytic tradition, breaking the question down into pieces and seeing if, by finding answers for each, we can answer the original question. Other approaches are more expansive, seeking to show the world in a different way, to expand our horizons. SO their question changes "Can we se the world as it is" to "Can we see the world as it is in itself" or "Can we see the world as it really is". The idea is that there is a world that stands outside our perceptions of it, and hence is outside of our capacity to discern. Further, this world, beyond our keen, is the actual thing. Since we cannot discern the goings on in this world as it is in itself, we cannot make statements about it, let alone true statements. On this view, there is precious little that we can say that is true.
I think that there is something fundamental here, and also something fundamentally erroneous. We cannot speak of the world as it is in itself. Then how can it have any significance? if it has no significance, why talk of it at all? One wants both to say that there are things of which we cannot speak; indeed, the most important things are there; and that since we cannot speak of them, anything we say about them is nonsense. The blood of Christ is such a profound nonsense. So are direct realism and transcendental idealism. They beat against the edge of language, as against the edge of the world.
True, but it does nonetheless. The significance being, the setting of limits of human knowledge, the limits being, not the world, but ourselves.
Quoting Banno
It doesn’t. To discern is to understand, to comprehend. Perception doesn’t think, and comprehension doesn’t perceive.
Quoting Banno
Well, there ya go: your analytical way finds answers to questions, the other, and dare I say all the more fundamentally significant, way seeks the conditions which must have been involved, in order for questions to even be asked in the first place.
—————-
Quoting Banno
Yes and no. The idea is, and yes it stems from transcendental idealism if not other doctrines as well, there is no world for a human other than the world of his perceptions, but rather, the idea is, whatever that world is, is not necessarily represented by his knowledge. It’s just shorthand for the notion that the world doesn’t tell us about itself, but we tell ourselves about the world. The world is as it is, for it couldn’t logically be otherwise, but nevertheless, we just can’t claim knowledge of it as it is, but only as we understand it.
The direct realists say the world and our understanding of it are on a one-to-one correspondence, but that is of course, provably not the case.
So change your evil ways, dump those analytic bovine droppings, and join the real philosophers!!!!
In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.[Wikipedia]
When it comes to social interactions, our sensory testimony can be especially unreliable, and we probably do not see social aspects of the world with clarity, validity, and reliability a good share of the time. There are numerous aspects of social interactions which are not readily observable; things like motivation, 300 different kinds of bias, conscious and not-conscious hopes and fears, and so forth. And that's true of ourselves observing ourselves. Sometimes it is not clear what our own motivation was (in say, quitting a good job) until quite some time later.
The hotness of water or the shape of a tree is more easily nailed down than what, exactly, is going on socially between people, or among a group of people. (Not always, of course; sometimes social interactions are as clear as boiling water.)
I agree with the begining of this quote, of course. The hypothesis of a world independent of what we think or perceive of it is fundamental to explain disagreements between people. However, your last sentence in unwarranted: there is an awful lot of truth we can say about the world, in its relation to ourselves and in our relation to it. What escapes us is its ontology: what is matter, for instance, apart from something we hurt our toes on?
Analytic philosophers do address that question. And in my view, with great clarity. Perhaps the difference is that they do not pretend to have the answer.
But then, that's what I would say.
We might profit form the approach taken in the SEP article on the problem of perception, which sets up the issue by contrasting naive realism with internationalist theories of perception. The final sentence sets up the issue clearly:
For my part I oscillate between these two views, but find myself tending at present towards the notion of representations; however this seems to be at odds with views on belief I have expressed elsewhere, and hence is an area for further consideration.
The role you give to social interactions is perhaps not to dissimilar to that which I would give to language, that being the root of social interaction.
I had hoped it was clear that this: "there is precious little that we can say that is true", was given as a view with which I disagree.
Hence, Olivier, I agree with your comment, there is an awful lot of truth we can say about the world.
I quite agree.
But let's not pretend we have the answer where there can be none.
The problem with this is that, if we cannot see the world as it is, which includes mot being able to see ourselves as we really are, then we can never know what "the conditions which must have been involved in order for the questions to be even asked in the first place" are.
Granted, as Wayfarer would point out, that does mean we have to take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not. We investigate the world given the kinds of minds, bodies, tools (and language) we have. The world though is just whatever it is, including how it appears to us. We do our best to make sense of that, which is somewhere between the naive appearance and a deeper understanding.
So, we don't have to be skeptics in the ancient sense, but we should acknowledge the difficulties and how humans often get things wrong.
(this may all have little to do with your point. I selfishly used it to return to my earlier point that it's not (necessarily anyway) a binary issue. I would disagree with someone saying 'we see the world as it is' and I disagree here with people who say 'we don't see the world as it is'. These, to me are both blanket and wrong and do not recognize that there is a spectrum. Some people seem to say sure, we can see or conceive the world as it is, but only when science is used. But man, we were feeding ourselves and successfully climbing trees and running down deer long before science - iow engaging in fast, complicated assessments of the reality we needed to navigate successfully.)
In its relation to ourselves and in our relation to it, yes. But we can’t say much about the world as it is in itself. If you assume that you know the world as it is, then you are totally oblivious to the possibility that you may have biases. Any disagreement is simply because the other person is wrong. I suspect that is precisely why David Stove was such an misogynist and racist: he believed he saw the world as it was, and if in that world the tenured professors in Sydney U were all white and males, it was because white males display more intellectual merit than other people, not because there was a bias in the system...
We can do better than that.
I think there’s some confusion here, things aren’t relating to each other. I was talking about my gripe with analytic philosophy, in that it answers questions logically by breaking them down, as Banno says, but I hold that questions should have been constructed logically in the first place, if it be granted the human cognitive system is itself a logical enterprise. It follows that breaking the question down doesn’t have near the explanatory power as would breaking down the logic under which the question was constructed. And because logical constructions are metaphysical without regard for language, which has only to do with expressions representing such constructions, the disassembly of that logic should be metaphysical as well. Nothing can be re-stated that hasn’t been re-thought.
As to not seeing the world as it is prohibits seeing my own body as it is......with respect to empirical knowledge, this is quite correct. My foot, e.g., is the same kind of perceptual sensation and I cognize my foot as an experience just as I perceive, represent, cognize and experience the oak tree down back. But the quality of the foot as MY foot among feet in general, is very far from the quality of the one tree among trees in general, from which follows the certainty of knowing very much more about MY foot than feet in general. Still, no matter how much more I know about my foot, I am not authorized to say I know my own foot as it is in itself, without contradicting the entire system by which I base the possibility of my empirical knowledge. For then I must admit my foot is not represented to me as a phenomenon as is every other object of my perception, and I then successfully defeat my own experiential methodology.
Now......the importance of “quality”......
If you say you can see the world as it is, period, then you are confused about your fallibility and biases right from the start. Or course, regardless of where one weighs in on this issue one can still be susceptible to biases. But we do see the world as it is to some degree. You seem to see this professor and his biases, for example.
Agreed, that this can be both dangerous and foolish. Is this a general cautionary statement, or have you witnessed an occasion where such pretension is evident, and refer me to it?
People are easier to see than atoms and neutrinos, evidently. It depends. But as a general rule, the map is always at a variance with the territory, and to maintain this distinction is important to understand biases.
It seems odd that we agree that there are things about which nothing can be said, yet seem to disagree as to what these things are.
In correspondence you spoke of the world as a "euphemism for whatever there is on the input side of our senses"; but for the analytic tradition, at least since the Tractatus, the world is that of which we make true statements - the world is all that is the case.
IS this difference at the root of our disagreement?
Then does "the world as it is in itself" make any sense?
We can make true statements about the world. But add "as it is in itself" and that capacity is removed from us.
So don't add "as it is in itself"
I know.
As far as I can parse the notion: 'being able to see the world as it is', if not taken in a naive realist sense, could only be taken to mean that there are real structures or energetic configurations that the world we experience are caused by/ contingent upon. So we perceive the world in accordance with how it is; but to say that we perceive it exactly as it is would be to suggest that the perception of something is identical with the thing tout court which is obviously not correct.
Quoting Marchesk
But we cannot, as I pointed out to @Mww, on the view that we cannot see things as they are in themselves, "take into account how our intellect understands the world in theory formation and what not" because we cannot see those processes in themselves either; whether those processes are purely neurophysical or not, the pre-conceptual (not to mention the proto-conceptual) processes by which we come to see a world of things is hidden from us. We can investigate those processes as they appear to us, just as we can investigate the rest of the world as it appears to us.
In light of that it seems that talk of "things in themselves" has no referent; and thus would seem to be, if not incoherent, at least useless.
Quoting Mww
I think that is precisely what analytic philosophy attempts to do: analyze and bring to light the logic of thought. I don't see how logical constructions can be independent of language. so I'm not following your thinking there.
Yep. Quoting Banno
Truth be told, the root is in language use itself, and the supremacy I think falsely allotted to it. Case in point.....it may be that the world is that about which true statements can be made, but it does not follow from that, that the world is all that is the case merely because true statements are possible because of it. It is also possible, after all, to make true statements having nothing whatsoever to do with the world, re: change is successions in time.
——————
Quoting Banno
As well, I think this needs qualifiers, insofar as there is nothing about which it is impossible to say anything, from your admitted analytic prospective. There are things that if anything is said about them, such saying will be irrational, nonsensical, absurd, meaningless, and so on, but theses are still somethings that can be said.
Things about which nothing can be said, on the other hand, this from the non-Anglophone continental tradition, is that to which no thought has been given. And THAT is what gives ordinary language use its secondary status.
I'd like to see this filled out: an example, perhaps.
enunciating things that are irrational, nonsensical, absurd, or meaningless is not saying anything, It's just making noise.
What need does an example serve, when the truth of a proposition lays in the fact the negation of it is impossible. If a proposition must be either true or false, and the falsity of the proposition is impossible, the truth of the proposition is given necessarily.
The only way to falsify the proposition, is to change the definitions of the conceptions contained in it. But that’s cheatin’ dammit!!
——————
Quoting Banno
Again with language. By definition, one cannot enunciate incomprehensibly. Incomprehensible speech is still speech, even if it is impossible to understand, re: Swahili to a 10yo Finlander. Feynman could have spoken to me in our common language but with his kind of terminology and I wouldn’t have understood half of what he said, but I wouldn’t dare claim he was merely making noise.
Agreed, but I submit the formal predicate logic they use to deconstruct thought, is not the Aristotelian syllogistic propositional logic used to construct it. Apples and oranges?
But the floor changes between here, where it is wood board, and the bathroom, where it is tile. There was all this stuff, post Kant, about time being one of several dimensions.
But we don't want to go back there. Nothing will be gained.
Might be time to move on.
And yet colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Yes it does, as an horizon, and as the necessary hypothesis for empirism.
Chomsky??? Really.
Boys and girls.....here’s proof of what not to do if you want to be understood in your speech acts. Now, please, don’t bother asking me what to do, because that would be tedious and would require you to actually put some effort into examining your own lingual gymnastics. Sorry.....you’re on your own here. Heaven forfend that there were but a definitive treatise, ready-made and theoretically complete, logically consistent........culminating in the most classic understatement of recorded human history: if your conceptions don’t relate to each other, you be nothin’ but flappin’ yer jaws even if the other guy is statistically cognizant (gasp) of each and every word you be speechifyin’.
——————
Quoting Banno
I went to bed last night; the bathroom floor was covered in tile. I got up this morning, the bathroom floor was still covered in the same tile.
I sympathize with your position, in that the world is all that can be the case. Thoughts are in my head, my head is in the world, therefore my thoughts are in the world. Nevertheless, my thoughts cannot be treated like basketballs are treated, so we must come to grips with that rather obvious monkey wrench.
Moving on.......
Hey.......
One of my very favorite opening salvos in philosophical discourse, Hylas to Philonous:
“....I was considering the odd fate of those men who have in all ages,
through an affectation of being distinguished from the vulgar, or some
unaccountable turn of thought, pretended either to believe nothing at
all, or to believe the most extravagant things in the world. This however
might be borne, if their paradoxes and scepticism did not draw after them
some consequences of general disadvantage to mankind. But the mischief
lieth here; that when men of less leisure see them who are supposed
to have spent their whole time in the pursuits of knowledge professing an
entire ignorance of all things, or advancing such notions as are
repugnant to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted
to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths, which they
had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable....”
‘Course, everybody else with their own important truths and their own idea for plain and commonly received principles, will say just about the same thing.
Do you think there’s anything in Berkeley we can use today?
Which is to say.....right tool for the right job (?)
Yep. Better hope so, especially if you’re on an intercept course with one.
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Quoting tim wood
The idea that reason doesn’t get you there faster is quite likely what Hume meant by his “constant conjunction” phrase......Enlightenment Brit for, this is generally because of that, so if you know this, you don’t need to reason about that. So in his mind, reason doesn’t usually do anything faster (than habit itself, that is), and often reason doesn’t do anything at all.
But just because we are not conscious of reason in action doesn’t mean it isn’t; reason doesn’t turn on and off depending on experience. Reason is thought and the conscious human thinks constantly. But reason obviously doesn’t work as hard, and we don’t think as much, under the conditions where habit seems to be the case, or, which is the same thing from a metaphysical point of view, when an antecedent experience reflects back on intuition. Psychologists call that mere memory, but we don’t care about them, right?
So experience (habit) tells you to use a wrench on that frozen nut, but “faster with more” pure reason tells you to put an extension on the wrench for that added Archimedes leverage principle to play. But only that one time, of course.
Now, as to things present to your senses of which you know nothing at all about, not only is reason faster and more, it is only.
[quote=Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism]As a philosophical conception, Empiricism means a theory according to which there is no distinction of nature, but only of degree, between the senses and the intellect. As a result, human knowledge is simply sense-knowledge (or animal knowledge) more evolved and elaborated than in other mammals. And not only is human knowledge entirely encompassed in, and limited to, sense-experience...but to produce its achievements in the sphere of sense-experience human knowledge uses no other specific forces and means than the forces and means which are at play in sense-knowledge.
Now if it is true that reason differs specifically from senses, the paradox with which we are confronted is that Empiricism, in actual fact, uses reason while denying the power of reason, on the basis of a theory that reduces reason's knowledge and life, which are characteristic of man, to sense knowledge and life, which are characteristic of animals.
Hence, first, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency between what an Empiricist does -- s/he thinks as a [hu]man, s/he uses reason, a power superior in nature to senses -- and what s/he says -- s/he denies this very specificity of reason.
And second, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency even in what s/he says: for what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, - sense-knowledge in which room has been made for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.[/quote]
I saw where you mentioned him elsewhere, but hadn’t seen for myself until this.
Good stuff, by which I mean....it meets with my unabashedly entrenched cognitive prejudices. But he is a theologian, and a post-modern at that, so, boo!!! Advocating the reinstatement of reason to supplant the cultural supremacy of empiricism, so.....yea!!!
Minor point, if I may: this.....
“....And not only is human knowledge entirely encompassed in, and limited to, sense-experience (a point which Kant, while reacting against Hume, admitted like Hume)....”
....is wrong.
“....But as this process does furnish real a priori knowledge, which has a sure progress and useful results...”
(CPR, A6/B10)
But I’m sure, somewhere in his corpus, he espouses in more detail what he means by it. You know....the ol’ “dogmatic slumber” thing? Pretty inconsistent to react against, then at the same time, admit to, the very thing reacted against.
All that aside, thanks for the reference.
All good.
Realist with respect to universals.....universals are real? In which sense? What kind of real?
I’m not sure what I think about them, so.....just wondering. Brief overview will suffice, if you’re so inclined.
And, to repeat again, 'the same for all who think'. So from that, I derived the notion that some ideas, such as natural numbers, are real, but not existent. In Kantian terms, I suppose you could call them noumenal objects (I didn't think of this at the time and it's certainly not something Kant would have said. But 'noumenal' means literally 'an object of nous', as distinct from 'phenomena' which is 'object of sense'. Again, you find this in scholastic dualism, and hardly anywhere else.)
The post went on:
(Incidentally the first and by far the best response to that post was from 180 Proof.)
So, I think *this* is the basis of metaphysics proper. I don't know where I got that idea from but it was certainly not from anything I studied at school or University; I think it was a kind of intuitive leap. But I began to understand, if only dimly, why it was that ancient philosophy was suspicious of the sensory domain, which is, for moderns, the only domain that is real. And those ideas are what was preserved in scholastic realism. You may recall that passage I linked to on Eiriugena some time back - he 'gets' it. But it became lost in the later middle ages, and is now well and truly gone.
Phew. Long post. Although I can stil claim it's related to the op. We can't see the world as it really is, because there is no way it 'really is'. It is constant flux, becoming, appearance only, and moderns search frantically, and futilely, for what about it is permanent and real.
I’d think differently about only two things, for sure, the remainder being nonetheless informative.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nahhhh....he would have called them transcendental objects. “Them” being numbers. For us, with our discursive understanding, noumenal objects are incomprehensible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Because of the kind of intelligence we are as humans, we think there must be a way the world really is. We just aren’t entitled to the irreducible certainty of our knowledge of it. Quantum tunneling aside, it behooves us to respect objective reality as given necessarily, and the practical ground for all objective reality resides in the empirical conception of “world”.
Again.....thanks.
I started on the Prolegomena section on mathematical objects but haven’t made much headway with it. I was recommended Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought which I think I need to read first. (Too many books, as always.)
Quoting Mww
Having rejected the classical insight of 'nous' and made all knowledge subject to empirical validation, we reduce ourselves, as Maritain observes, to animal cognition. We’re just an advanced hominid, so there’s no reason to think we could grasp a transcendental truth nor any scientific means of describing it. This is why we nowadays insist that what is real must be situated in space and time (‘out there somewhere’ although physics itself seem now to have overflowed those bounds). I notice in a promotion from New Scientist I was reading just now, that there's an article titled 'How evolution blinds us to the truth about the world', which is a theme that is increasingly coming up.
It would help if you could explain how you see them differing.
Who claims that animals cannot, within the limits of their cognitive capacities, understand the ways of things? Is it not the case that whales and chimps understand more than sheep and cattle? That's intellect; it's ridiculous to say that animals do not have have various intellective capacities. It;s just that we can do even more courtesy of language.
Guillty as charged. Read up on the sad story of Nim Chimpsky.
Typo corrected above.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am familiar with that story; what is your point re that?
Example: I would throw the ball onto the verandah for my Jack Russell: he would search the verandah first and if the ball wasn't there, because it had gone over the handrail as it sometimes did, he would immediately conclude that it must be down below on the lawn and proceed to search for it there.
As to animalistic behavior in humans; there is tons of it and also tons of behavior no self-respecting animals would indulge in.
As soon as you assert 'something is the case', you're doing something that no animal does. But you don't notice that you're doing it, so you can't see why the dog is any different. As per the Maritain quote above, 'Empiricism...uses reason while denying the power of reason, on the basis of a theory that reduces reason's knowledge and life, which are characteristic of man, to sense knowledge and life, which are characteristic of animals.
Hence, first, an inevitable confusion and inconsistency between what an Empiricist does -- s/he thinks as a [hu]man, s/he uses reason, a power superior in nature to senses -- and what s/he says -- s/he denies this very specificity of reason.'
Only a human can say that.
Quoting Janus
If a culture thinks that we're no different to animals, then it follows. Of course no animal would be consciously evil as humans can be, but that's because they're incapable of reflecting on courses of action or imagining different outcomes. Although animals can engage in extremely violent and destructive behaviour, it's not self- conscious in the sense that human actions are.
Humans are biologically hominids, related to the other great apes, descended from earlier life-forms - I'm not questioning that. But, like Alfred Russel Wallace, I question the efficacy of 'Darwinism applied to man'. But the way I see it, is that when h. sapiens evolved to the point of being language- and tool-using, story-telling, meaning-seeking beings, then their horizons expand beyond the biological. To deny it is the basis of biological reductionism a la Dawkins and Dennett. But that's not to invoke 'special creation' or anything of the kind. Evolution is a natural processs, but it has generated beings who are capable of seeing beyond the bounds of biology.
Obviously dogs can't assert that anything is the case ( in spoken or written language). But they can certainly think things are the case; thinking which is asserted not verbally but behaviorally. For example dogs hear a familiar sound and think you have arrived home.
My current dog (a kelpie/ cattle dog/ border collie cross) only has to hear the word 'chickens' to conclude that I am going to feed, let out or put away the chickens. He is obsessed with the chickens and will spend all day watching them, or of they are out, "rounding them up". As soon as came here at the age of one year he understood that he was not to hurt them even though I was told by the person I got him from, when I asked how he was with chooks, that he didn't know and couldn't guarantee he would be OK because he had not come into contact with them (he was sold because he is a "failed" cattle dog).
Nonsense, all animals are different, including us. We are the self-reflective animal (well, potentially anyway) so we can do things others animals cannot, and hence bear responsibilities which other animals cannot.
However, if that means the flow of time is an illusion because the future and past all exist as part of the block universe, then that is yet another example of how the world is not as it appears to us.
But, that's simple association. Nobody that deny that, I'm not denying that dogs and whales and birds are intelligent. I've had a lot of dogs, some of them understood many words and gestures. One used to bark whenever one of us said Hello, assuming that somebody had arrived.
What I'm denying is their ability to reason and grasp abstract ideas. Why this is even contestable says a lot.
There's a really good entry in Wikipedia on Nous (Philosophy). Worth reading and following up the refs, which I'm doing. I won't digress into it here as it's a huge topic, other than to say that I'm impressed with the idea that there's an immaterial aspect to the human, which is precisely that which can grasp immaterial ideas. Now, I'm not, with Descartes, going to attempt to designate this as a possible object of knowledge, as a 'thinking thing' (res cogitans). It is not an objective reality. But without that capacity, we would be incapable of knowing rational and abstract truths.
So, say you fully accept the evolutionary history of h. sapiens - which I do. At some point in that history, h. sapiens developed the capacity for that understanding. That was intuitively recognised by the Greek philosophers as 'nous'. But then it subsequently became incorporated into Christian theology, and rejected on that account! Now that rejection is so thoroughly socalised in our culture that we'll reject it automatically, without even thinking about it. I'm seeing it happen. That's what the Jacques Maritain essay I keep harking back to, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism, is right on the money. Almost everyone I talk to here exemplifies the very tendencies that he's calling out.
Quoting tim wood
Rocks fall down hills. Water corrodes iron. Sunlight heats the earth.
Not really; just that the world is not always as it appears to us at the moment.
Association of things with other things is the beginning of intelligence. It's by no means "simple" given the neural complexity of even a dog's brain.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course they can't grasp abstract ideas, since they are incapable of symbolic language. But that is only the tip of the iceberg of intelligence.
Is that a difference that makes a difference?
The flow of time is that we experience the present always turning into the past (in memory), such that the only moment which exists for us is the present. That's why the eternalism view of time is one that had a lot of support prior to Relativity, because it was consistent with how we experience time. We can't visit the future or the past, so it's like they don't exist. But the block universe says otherwise.
The flow of time and the present moment being special (what exists) are what is the illusion if the block theory is true.
Well, no it doesn't mean the flow of time is an illusion.
Further, the way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside a block universe. That's rather the point of the description.
[quote=The Illusion of Time]According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock. Even Albert Einstein’s relativistic space-time — an elastic manifold that contorts so that local times differ depending on one’s relative speed or proximity to a mass — is just an effective simplification.
So what does Rovelli think is really going on? He posits that reality is just a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The whole Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7#:~:text=According%20to%20theoretical%20physicist%20Carlo,t%20correspond%20to%20physical%20reality.&text=He%20posits%20that%20reality%20is,of%20past%2C%20present%20and%20future.[/quote]
I can find other physicists stating similar things.
Quoting Banno
No, the point is it makes sense Einstein's theories, which rather overturned our notions of space, time and gravity. The reason for the illusion is probably because our nervous system creates the illusion for adaptive reasons.
Why bother trying to support a naive realist view of the world when even the ancients could tell things were not as they appeared? Modern science makes a mockery of the naive realist position.
Sure, folk say silly things. The way the universe appears to us is exactly how it would appear to a being inside a block universe. That is making sense of Einstein's theories, and anything else would mean that Relativity was not in conformity with our observations.
You misunderstand realism, and as a result your criticism of it repeatedly misfires.
Direct realism is not the view that we perceive the world as it really is, but the view that true statements set out how the world is.
If that's what we would expect, then why has there been a philosophical debate between A and B-theory of time, where the second maintains that the flow of time is an illusion?
Direct realism is about perception being direct. Metaphysical realism is what we both agree on in principle as realists, but we don't tend to agree on how we get there.
They are two possible views of time that McTaggart could imagine. It's not one or the other but either or both from different perspectives. For us the flow of time, change, is not an illusion; even if, from the "point of view" of eternity temporal succession is just myriad "paths" through the block universe.
There is nothing to say those "paths" are illusory or unreal. In other words, from the point of view of time you might say eternity is an illusion, and from the point of view of eternity you might say time is an illusion. Those 'mights' are there just to indicate that these would just be ways of interpreting the situation.
It’s also the point of contention, it’s a difference that makes a universe of difference.
[quote=Andrei Linde] The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.[/quote]
(Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271)
Why, that would be you:
Quoting Janus
‘Rational’ means ‘guided by reason’. Reason requires the capacity for abstraction. And I say that is not not a difference of degree, but of kind.
But, as Maritain said, ‘the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent.’
What are you talking about? I haven't said there that animals are capable of symbolic thought. It is your presumption that reason requires the capacity for abstraction, not mine. As I said earlier, when my dog discovers the ball is not on the verandah and immediately concludes that it must be down in the garden somewhere that counts as reason in my book; one possibility is eliminated, so the next is explored.
Yep, and just like that, what with mental states being brain states, and the observer problem, physics has to come to grips with what the metaphysician always condoned, that the real being internal as well as external, is logically consistent, hence theoretically feasible.
—————
Quoting Wayfarer
And even if there are those who insist animals are gifted with rational thought, it begs the question, as to whether they think in accordance with rules. If such cannot be proven to be the case....and it cannot because it cannot even be proven that humans inhere with that methodology..... animal “thought” reduces to mere reactive/repetitive instinct. And the human can propose this without contradicting himself, on the one hand because his own at least reactive instinct remains with him, albeit below the consciousness of his mental acuity, and on the other, because his rational thought is direct, dedicated acquaintance, which can never suffice for second-order suppositions. That all brains work the same is nothing but clandestine anthropomophism.
Of course humans are on an intellectual pedestal. We put ourselves there, and that should be the end-all of the discussion.
Absolutely. And the greatest caveat is.....in which sense of “appearance” is the world to be taken? Appear as “instill an affective presence”, or, appear as “looks like”.
If the former, the world cannot be other than as the entry it makes into our senses, the doctrine stipulating the passivity of direct perception, insofar as perception itself makes no judgements respecting the objects it receives, and henceforth easily translates to the world necessarily is as it affects the systems receiving it.
If the latter, and because “looks like” implies a non-passive attribution, the world is nothing but that which is actively represented by and within the systems that receive it, the doctrine of indirect realism, which translates to the world necessarily being as it appears as representation, but not necessarily as it appears as an affect.
If there is no distinction between senses of appearance, and given that the human cognitive system is representational, it follows necessarily there can be no distinction in the means for the acquisition of our knowledge. And if there is no difference in the means of our knowledge, it becomes impossible to distinguish whether it is the world as it affects us, or the world as our cognitive system represents the world to itself, that is responsible for the mistakes we make with our knowledge, as its ends.
Ironic as hell, isn’t it, that everything I just said, is rife with caveats. (Sigh)
You mean...like that little gem? As far back as the historical record shows, this has always been relative to that. How and in what manner this is relative to that may have been at the mercy of era-specific investigation, but all that does is affirm the condition. It’s common knowledge SR wasn’t demonstrated as empirically valid for 35 years after its theoretical possibility was conceived, but thanks to 707’s and transistors, that kind of relativity immediately conformed to our observations of clocks.
A straight stick looks bent in a bucket of water. A being inside a block universe sees a sequence of events. In both cases we see the world as would be expected under the circumstances.
Never mind. In trying to relate what you wrote to what I wrote, I see I misquoted you.
Sorry.
Red light is to (red) as (red) is to "red". "Red" is therefore the result of two symbolic transformations.
This is perception as we know it. Symbolic translation is inherent in the concept. We know nothing else. We don't know what it would mean to perceive the world as it is.
Strange then that we can read what you’ve written. (Which is not to say it was worth the trouble ;-) )
I did have in mind things that could never be seen, but not in the way your examples suggest. It would be better to say "could never be experienced " rather than "seen". Things that (I'm assuming) do exist, say the forces between subatomic particles, or the centre of a black hole, which we can't experience.
Quoting Banno
What if it was just "an actual thing" rather than "the actual thing"?
Symbolic translation is inherent in the conception, but then, how is the brain/mind informed as to which perception is in play, if the symbol has no connection with the signal?
Except that time doesn't pass in a block universe, yet time appears to pass.
To a being inside a block universe, time passes.
News article on block universe
Yes, I understand how the block universe works, thanks for the link.
That link makes exactly the same point that I am making. It uses the term "illusion", which is unfortunate. Time passes for a person inside the block universe. It's not an illusion, it's just what time is from that frame of reference.
"Unfortunate" is one way of putting it. Contrary to your view is another, since "illusion" indicates that time doesn't actually pass or flow:
Quoting the news article
Quoting Banno
Can you provide any reference or support for this claim?
Quoting Banno
Pointing back to the article that states that "in the block universe model, time doesn't flow" seems contradictory.
ETA: the news article doesn't state that the block universe model is true or that we live in a block universe, which you appear to assume without argument.
An illusion occurs when something looks like something else, but isn't. It would be an illusion if time appeared to pass, but didn't. The word is being misused. for our perspective, time doesn't just appear to pass, it does pass.
Obviously time appears to pass, whether illusion or not. But you seem to take this as some sort of evidence that we inhabit a block universe:
Quoting Banno
It is also exactly how it would appear to a being inside a non-block universe.
How could time appearing to pass differ from time passing? What would that difference look like?
Quoting Luke
Yep. there is no difference in the observations made.
It wouldn't look different. The only difference is that temporal passage is an illusion in a block universe. If the appearances may or may not be illusory, then the appearance of temporal passage shouldn't be regarded as evidence of a block universe. Furthermore, block universe proponents need to provide additional argument or explanation for how we experience illusions in the absence of temporal passage.
Damn, you got me. Checkmate.
You don't understand. But looking at your many "contributions" over the years, that is an unreasonable expectation.
Quoting Mww
Of course it is connected. I'm saying it's not intrinsically connected. There is nothing doglike about "dog". You cannot examine the 3 glyphs comprising the word and arrive at canines. An outsider can only look in an extrinsic rulebook to discover it's meaning.
As opposed to a vinyl record. A record has an intrinsic relation to the sounds it captures. It is a time series of sound waves, captured in a different, stable medium, frozen in time. You can literally examine a record and see the sound waves. A clever archaeologist can feasibly deduce what it is, just by examining it. Unlike words, records are in direct, non symbolic, relation with sounds.
And I claim that qualia stand in the first, symbolic, extrinsic relationship with reality. Our relationship with reality is mediated by symbols, and so it is an extrinsic relationship too. The very notion of perception implies this extrinsic relationship. Therefore there is no such thing as "directly see reality", it is a contradiction in terms.
I can't see how what you are saying is any different from what I have said, except that you say that the passage of time would be an illusion, while I say it is real.
To be sure, I do not claim that the appearance of temporal passage is evidence of a block universe.
Okay, but you are contradicted by the article which states:
Quoting the news article
And you still haven't provided any support for your claim that time actually passes in a block universe.
You can say, tautologically, that the world as it is is non-perceptual, simply because as soon as you perceive it, it is a perception, and therefore not the world as it is. .
But if symbolic form is not at all representative of the world as it is, how could devices such as these operate? After all, symbolic codes of many kinds are integral to virtually all electronic technology.
Saying that the passing of time is an illusion makes for a neat title. But on analysis, it's not so.
Yes. We have to speak with implicit if/thens to cover our mountains of assumptions.
So the block universe model and the illusion of temporal flow are logically impossible?
You say there is nothing you can say about things as they are. I'm just making the obvious point that there is plenty you can say, even though things as they are cannot be perceived. Science is the endeavor of doing just that. I'm butting into a conversation I didn't fully read, so I'm probably missing something.
Quoting Banno
The news article states that "in the block universe model, time doesn't flow", so any appearance of time flowing in the block universe can only be an illusion. Yet you say that there is no difference between "time appearing to flow and time [actually] flowing", which implies that it is impossible that time appearing to flow is an illusion.
Therefore, you are implying that it is logically impossible for temporal flow to be illusory, which implies the same for the block universe in which temporal flow can only be illusory.
Not really. I'm saying that he notion that there is a world seperate from the world we talk about, and about which we cannot talk, is a bit of a non-starter.
To be sure, Quoting Banno
...is an expression of the view with which I am disagreeing. I do think we can make true statements.
So I'm not sure we disagree.
Edit:
Quoting Luke
That's not right. For someone inside the block universe, time does flow.
On this, we agree, no?
...then what is the difference between time flowing and time just appearing to flow?
I kind of see your point, and sorry for my earlier snide remark.
It's just a misuse of the notion of illusion. It's not an illusion in a way not dissimilar to one not being able to have the illusion of pain.
But that's not right. Time does not flow relative to an observer who can see the whole block. Time does flow from the point of view of an observer within the block.
Do you have any supporting evidence for this assertion?
Fuck. The only difference is that I object to the word "illusion" - it's not an illusion.
End of posts on this topic.
I've repeated it several times: "in the block universe model, time doesn't flow."
Quoting Banno
Then time does flow.
Quoting Banno
Huh?
It appears to flow, but it does not actually flow. This is not because of the physics of the block universe, since time does not flow. Rather, it's an illusion created by our nervous system.
The context of this is that the world is different from how it appears to us. Time does not flow, despite appearances, if the block universe is true.
@Banno doesn't recognise a distinction between the appearance of flow and actual flow, so he ends up logically excluding the possibility that the appearance of flow could be an illusion. He's not willing to accept that time does not flow in a block universe, and he offers no support for his assertion that "Time does not flow in the block universe" actually means "Time does not flow relative to an observer who can see the whole block."
@Luke @Banno - enjoying your discussion, by the way.
Philosophy is a pastime for the leisure class.
Once you notice that some knowledge is apriori, it's natural to wonder how that kind of knowledge relates to the world.
On the one hand, we could be a type of organism that lives in a semi-detached dreamworld.
Or we could know things about this universe because it lives through us (as someone put it).
Oh. Ok, then......
Call it a feature or incomplete if you like; the model has use.
(e.g. Time and such)
Because they are part of the flow, or one of the things that flows (changes), relative to the flow of the other things inside the block. It's not time that flows, rather it is the objects inside the block that flows. Time flowing isn't the illusion. Time itself is the illusion.
Does it even make sense to ponder the existence of an observer outside the "flow of time"? Observing itself is a "flow" (change). It's "flow" all the way down.
Sure, the model may have a use, but some people think it matters whether or not time actually flows when discussing the nature of time. Does the block universe accurately describe the nature of time if it does not include temporal flow? J.M.E. McTaggart, who introduced the A- and B-theory discussion, was of the view that temporal flow (including a changing present moment) was required for time:
Quoting J. M. E. McTaggart
Quoting jorndoe
You might think that the future coming to pass is "what the block model is supposed to have", but it doesn't have this - unless you "plug it in". The impetus that involuntarily propels us from one moment in time to another is what many consider to be time's most essential element. This impetus comes for free with Presentism, because it's what a present moment does. You might be able to insert or imagine or "plug" this impetus into Eternalism or a block universe, but it does not belong to Eternalism or a block universe, by definition.
Every time we predict or anticipate events, we posit a perspective outside the ‘flow of time’. And every time we test those predictions, we edit and refine a relational structure that perceives the block universe in potentiality. Time isn’t an illusion - it’s just structured differently in the block universe.
:up:
I agree. The phrase is self-contradictory. To « see » is to extract, to translate, to interpret, and therefore it implies a certain disturbance and interpretation.
I don't understand what this means. It takes time to make predictions and they are all happening in your brain, not "outside" the flow of time. At best, you are talking about imagining that you are outside the flow of time, not some ontologically real view somewhere outside of your own head, and "outside of time".
Potential is just another type of imagining, akin to predictions (they may just be the same thing). To say that something that hasn't happened has the potential to happen just means that you predict it could happen, but there would have to be some other pre-existing conditions. A ball on the table has the potential to fall off of it, but only if it's pushed, pulled, or acted on in some way, and until it is acted on in some way, it will stay on the table and the potential remains an imaginary construct.
I wouldn’t dismiss imagining so quickly. Potential in physics refers to a relational structure inclusive of the event and its pre-existing conditions, and is as real as a ball on the table. What I’m talking about is similar to how people imagined the structure of our solar system, and then tested, refined and even relied on those predictions, all before they could even leave Earth’s atmosphere. You can’t tell me that wasn’t some ontologically real view somewhere outside of their ‘known’ universe.
So I think potential refers to the relational structure of conditions under which an action/event is determined. It doesn’t require a defined temporal location to exist as such, and can sometimes more accurately determine an event without it. When we say that something that hasn’t happened has the potential to happen, it means that this relational structure of conditions is perceivable in the variability of existing conditions. A ball stationary at the edge of a table has a very real potential to fall off of it - this potential is not an imaginary construct.
But the way I see it, predictions don’t need to be ‘made’ into conscious thoughts happening in the brain. Consciousness is an ongoing interpretation of effort and attention that aligns interoception with conceptual reality. All three of these consist of predictions.
But it doesn't follow that all that exists is available for us to experience. We'll lack innate capacities other creatures have as a matter of fact. There's then the question of what is the cause of appearances? Some may say science and speak of physics, for example. But physics also conforms to our way of interpreting the world and is also an appearance. It just so happens that this appearance might hold true of certain aspects of the mind-independent world. But at bottom, I don't think we know what causes physics to behave the way it does. So the nature of the world is a mystery, on this view.
Though I suspect ideas concerning "things in themselves" could be developed that do not focus on Kant. It's one thing to talk about what Kant said that about this topic, but it needn't stay under his exact terms, nor is reference to him essential, however much he has done to popularize and develop these ideas.