Why do some argue the world is not real/does not exist?
https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses/info?course=why-the-world-does-not-exist
https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses/info?course=the-non-existence-of-the-real-world
It just seems.....weird to me that some folks would do that? I mean doesn't that amount to shooting yourself in the foot more or less? Who are you talking to then? Why charge for your courses? Why tell this to anyone?
https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses/info?course=the-non-existence-of-the-real-world
It just seems.....weird to me that some folks would do that? I mean doesn't that amount to shooting yourself in the foot more or less? Who are you talking to then? Why charge for your courses? Why tell this to anyone?
Comments (75)
Notice the first two sentences of the abstract of #2:
That lecturer, Jan Westerhof, was the author of a really interesting New Scientist article in a special edition about ten years ago, on this question.
With regards to money, it should be no different from a televangelist asking for donations or someone selling a weightloss book.
Asking questions about the questions merely proves it.
The perception of independent existence seems likely to be a pattern of conceptual division which the inherently divisive nature of thought imposes upon our view of reality.
As example, if we're wearing tinted sunglasses all of our lives, and so is everyone else, a group consensus is likely to form that all of reality is tint colored. But the tint is not a property of what is being observed, but instead a property of the tool being used to make the observation. Consider the sloppy astronomer who has a speck of dust on the lens of his telescope. Everywhere he looks he sees "this huge thing, it's everywhere!!!"
It would be wise for philosophers to shift their focus from the content of thought to the nature of thought, because the content of thought is a symptom of the nature of thought.
If the question pertains to matter of perception, it becomes very hard to talk about this topic, like, if I'm hallucinating and seeing a dragon, I can say I'm seeing a dragon. You may reply by saying that the dragon I'm seeing "isn't real". Then what am I supposed to say? That I see fake dragons? No. I'd say I'm seeing an image of a dragon, which is relevant to the occasion of hallucinations, but not relevant for "ordinary life". Something along those lines.
Wikipedia: "In an April 2020 interview he [Markus Gabriel] called European measures against COVID 19 unjustified and a step towards cyber dictatorship, saying the use of health apps was a Chinese or North Korean strategy. He said the coronavirus crisis called into question the idea that only scientific and technical progress could lead to human and moral progress. He said there was a paradox of virocracy, to save lives one replaced democracy by virocracy."
Who would pay money for this guy's lectures?
Husserl wrote:
The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non- sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.”
“Let us imagine that we effect natural apperceptions, but that our apperceptions are always invalid since they allow for no harmonious concatenations in which experienced unities might become constituted. In other words, let us imagine that, in the manner described above, the whole of Nature, in the first place, physical nature, is "annihilated."”.. (Ideas I).
Husserl here isn’t eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call ‘real objects’. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the wortld of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.
Husserl explains:
“In Ideas I , I chose the way which at that time seemed to me the most impressive. It proceeds egologically at first, as a self- reflection entirely within the realm of purely inner-psychological intuition, or, as we can also say, as a "phenomenological" reflection in the usual psychological sense. Eventually it leads so far that I, the one reflecting on himself, come to realize that, in the consistently exclusive direction of experience toward what is experienceable purely as inner, toward what is "accessible" to me phenomenologically, I have a proper essence that is self- enclosed and self-coherent. To this essence pertains all actual and possible experience by means of which the Objective world is there for me with all the experiential verifications in which it has for me ontological validity, one that is verified even if never scientifically examined. This essence also includes the special apperceptions through which I have for myself the status of a human being with Body and soul, a human being who lives amid others in the world of which he is conscious as surrounding world, who is engaged with them in this world, who is attracted or repulsed by it, and who deals with it in work or in theory, etc. Reflecting further on myself, I realize as well that my phenomenologically self-enclosed proper essence can be posited absolutely, as the Ego (and I am this Ego) that bestows ontological validity on the being of the world of which I speak at any time. It is for me and is what it is for me only insofar as it acquires sense and self-confirming validity from my own pure life and from that of the others who are disclosed to me in my own life.” (Ideas II)
That's quite fine. In so far as I understand what he's saying, it seems sensible. I mean, Bertrand Russell in Analysis of Matter says something similar, albeit less radical, given his empirical temperament. I'd agree that we can put aside or bracket all of the world, and be left with only pure conscious experience. It could be confused with solipsism, but I think something like it is the case for human beings, in that, we only have access to our thoughts, not those of others. Other people's thoughts are interpreted by us, and of course, we can only see the data of behavior, so far as people are concerned, in addition to whatever they say about what they experience. But I'm unsure if it makes sense to postulate "pure consciousness" absent a subject of experience- his "ego" I take it. I don't quite follow that train of thought.
I do quibble with the idea of "physical objects", if that is taken to mean a real distinction between the physical and the non-physical. I don't think that distinction holds up anymore. But on the whole, it seems to me to be on right path.
Well, if you assume free will isn't real either, they don't really have a choice. I imagine being a determinist solipsist is depressing, but it's not like they have a choice.
Quoting Manuel
There is always a subject of experience for Husserl, or more precisely a subjective ‘pole’ rather than a constitutes ‘person’. There is such a thing for Husserl as a pre-personal ego. If I have not yet constituted other persons , then it makes no sense to refer to my subjectivity as a person. There is not yet a human being, since that is an empirical concept that is constructed via interpersonal correlations, just the subjective pole of acts of intentionality .
Quoting Manuel
Here’s Husserl’s view on ‘physical’ objects:
One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.
We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.
In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.
From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.
I only want to highlight that it can be misleading to use "physical" in contemporary philosophy and science, as it tends to have connotations related to scientism and the idea that everything will, one day, be explainable from such a framework. If that's what "physical" is used as, then that's not the physical the pertains to nature. Because consciousness is the most certain aspect we have of physical reality, and it certainly isn't an illusion.
It's strange that some people insist on attempting to do reduction in science. It makes no sense. And in this respect Husserl, I strongly suspect, would be appalled that someone like Dennett or the Churchlands are taken seriously.
Husserl takes one the threshold, and Fink's Sixth Meditation puts analysis to the generative threshold of "enworlding." I never got around to finishing this work, but my thanks for reminding me. It is quite a wonderland of extraordinary thinking that follows along with this. Caputo takes this up in his Radical Hermeneutics, but his Tears and Prayers of Jacque Derrida reveals, I believe, where this stain of though ends up inevitably: apophatic theology. Jean luc Marion's Being Given is a nice read on this. Existentialism cannot die, only evolve.
Reads like loquacious Cartesianism!
Quoting Constance
My impression was that rather than taking Husserl anywhere , Caputo simply misread him. I have to question whether Caputo ever fully grasped the implications of Husserlian phenomenology. In wanting to assimilated it to a Levinasian reading of Derrida , I think he was also misreading Derrida.
Derrida: “First of all, in this early text on Levinas, I did not charge him with transcendentalism. On the contrary, I tried to question him, at least provisionally, from an ontological and transcendental point of view. My objections were made to him from a transcendental point of view. So in that respect I have nothing against transcendentalism. On the contrary, I was trying to say that a transcendental philosophy such as Husserl's could resist, could more than resist, Levinas's objections.” (Questioning God: edited by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon(2001). From the conference ‘‘Religion and Postmodernism 2: Questioning God'' on October 14–16, 1999 )”
I completely agreed with Martin Hagglund’s
devastating take down of Caputo’s reading of Derrida in
THE RADICAL EVIL OF DECONSTRUCTION: A REPLY TO JOHN CAPUTO, and Hagglund was able to able to do so using more of a marxist than a phenomenological
argument.
or Shaun Gallagher, all of whom defend him against the accusation of Cartesianism.
“...even in the most marked transcendental idealism, that of Husserl, even where the origin of the world is described, after the phenomenological reduction, as originary consciousness in the form of the ego, even
in a phenomenology that determines the Being of beings as an object in general for a subject in general, even in this great philosophy of the transcendental subject, the interminable genetic (so called passive) analyses of the ego, of time and of the alter ego lead
back to a pre-egological and pre-subjectivist zone. There is, therefore, at the heart of what passes for and presents itself as a transcendental idealism, a horizon of questioning that is no longer dictated by the egological form of subjectivity or intersubjectivity.”(Derrida, Points)
I've read people's responses on here but I still stand by my points. If you want to argue that the world is not real or that there is no external reality then you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. No one would listen to you because according to you they aren't real and you're just talking to yourself here.
AS for the discussion of "real" I say what science says about it speaks far more than anything philosophy brings to the table. I think when discussing reality or the world philosophy is useless as my lived experience remains unchanged regardless of the argument for the world or lack of it.
You may have to clarify what ‘science’ you’re referring to.
A wide range of social sciences as well
as biological disciplines , and even within physics , now recognize that the notion of the ‘real’ as it pertains
to their research is not unproblematic and cannot be easily disentangled from subjectivity.
Then why bother with a philosophy forum? There are plenty of science forums.
I will read this and get back to you.
Because science isn't philosophy. Apples and oranges. The latter deals with an entirely distinct set of problems, those that are presupposed by the former. If you find yourself reading science to find your philosophical answers, then you are just asking science questions.
Did you listen to the actual interview or form this judgement based on the out of context quote from Wikipedia?
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/markus-gabriel-on-coronavirus-as-immune-reaction-planet/id1504301339?i=1000473834952
Quoting jgill
which I reject entirely.
The other guy mentioned in the OP, Jan Westerhoff, is more up my alley, he's a specialist in Madhyamika philosophy. (As a matter of fact, I'm going to enroll in that course, as soon as I get my next contract. )
As I mentioned, there was a special edition of New Scientist in around 2010, 'What is Reality', which contained several articles by Westerhoff.
Before deciding that I would recommend you listen to the podcast I linked, where those statements are given in context.
Even if you still disagree with what he says there, that doesn't mean you would have to find nothing of interest in his other ideas, does it? To say it does would be the equivalent of saying there is nothing in Heidegger on the grounds that he had reprehensible political affiliations.
Yeah, I am well familiar with that syndrome!
I don't know what this even means. I would say that there is a sense in which all questioning is, if not dictated, at least mediated in forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. It does not follow from this that the origin of all things is subjective/ intersubjective, although it seems obvious that the latter plays a significant role in how they are experienced and understood.
I would prefer to say , with Rorty, Dewey , phenomenology , hermeneutics and radical constructivism that it doesn’t make any sense to talk of that which lies ‘outside’ of our subjective access to it except in terms of constraints and accordances
which themselves are co-defined by the subjectivity which is shaped by them.
He tries to say that ethics doesn't need an external reality in order to be applied, at which point I couldn't take him seriously anymore.
But in Berkeley's case it leads to solipsism as idealism often does.
To bang all the hipster chicks.
"It is a title that catches the eye but sadly the contents do not live up to the expectations that the title arouses. Most non-philosophical readers will assume that 'The world' means planet Earth or maybe just the whole of humanity. They are unlikely to be aware that Gabriel is using 'The world' to mean not just the entire physical universe but rather everything that exists – whether physical or not. In this sense, unicorns living on the far side of the moon (the author's own example) are part of 'The world' insofar as he has imagined them and therefore they exist – at least in his imagination. So the other part of the title is also being used in a way that is at best 'unusual' – since we don't normally accept that unicorns inhabit the far side of the moon – at least not without considerable qualification.
So once we assume that 'The world' means 'everything that exists – in all senses of exist' – then we are ready for Gabriel's not terribly exciting claim that this concept does not – because it cannot – exist. This is not to say that nothing exists – which would be quite a remarkable claim – though philosophers in the past have claimed it (but then philosophers in the past have claimed all sorts of things – as some do in the present!). The concept 'everything that exists' is paradoxical and it is its paradoxical nature which entails that it cannot exist. It is self-contradictory. Gabriel divides everything up into 'object domains'. It is easier – and just as accurate - to think of these as sets – the set of all unicorns, the set of all teaspoons, etc. Now clearly there can be some sets which are found entirely or partially inside other sets – 'unicorns' inside 'mythical creatures' and 'teaspoons' partially inside 'silver utensils' (since some teaspoons are made of steel or plastic). But then let's imagine the set of all sets – the set in which all sets are to be found – the granddaddy set. Then we get the big question – 'Is the set of all sets a member of itself?' Usually known as 'Russell's Paradox' this question is paradoxical for the following reasons. Clearly if it is not a member of itself then the set of all sets is deficient – it lacks one of its members – namely itself. But if it is a member of itself then it seems to exist in two places at once – inside itself and also itself. And even sets can't be in two places at once. Or as Gabriel expresses it, “The world is not found in the world” [P.74]. So the concept of 'the set of all sets' is incoherent – and in this sense, and only this sense, the world does not exist. But even in Gabriel's strained notion of 'The world' it doesn't follow that just because it doesn't exist that therefore, “One cannot think about the world” [P.79]. To which one can only respond, “Oh yes I can!”. Non-existence or even downright self-contradiction does not prevent me from thinking about it. I could spend the whole afternoon thinking about square circles if I chose."
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0745687571/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
We wouldn't have known that one choice that's available to us is we "...eventually have to settle for axioms..." if the skeptics hadn't asked the question in the first place. Of course there are the other two options in Munchhausen's trilemma viz. circularity and infinite regress but what usually happens is we begin our reasoning from a set of axioms. I believe this is the least worst option we have.
You wouldn't have known this if you hadn't done philosophy. Oddly, the truth is that there's no truth or something like that. Amazing, no? Imagine getting bent out shape by someone objecting to what you hold as truths and also imagine someone else being utterly frustrated by you objecting to the truths they hold dear. All for nothing. :smile: Philosophy!
If you really want to know why Markus Gabriel says that the world does not exist, you should read his book, Why the World Does Not Exist, or one of the interviews in which he summarizes the argument, like this one.
Very roughly, he argues that existence applies locally and within domains, i.e., to each object against its background, not to some posited all-encompassing container object that itself has no background or domain.
Anyone thinking that...
Quoting TheMadFool
...is incorrect.
So, Descartes is incorrect?
Cartesian skepticism? The world could be an illusion i.e. it may not exist???
Quoting TheMadFool
Here's a quote from it:
[quote=MG]Skepticism, the position or worry that we cannot really ever know anything, is completely unjustified...[/quote]
http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/world/markus-gabriel-interview
:ok: I wonder what Markus Gabriel has up his sleeve.
[quote=John Michael Greer]I mentioned in last month’s post here that our familiar term “world” is a rounded-off version of the Old English weorold, “man-old,” the time or age of human beings. That bit of etymology conceals more than one important insight. As I noted last month, it reminds us that this thing we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a detached and objective way. It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience.
That point is astonishingly easy to forget. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve watched distinguished scientists admit with one breath that the things we experience around us aren’t real—they’re just representations constructed by our sense organs and brains, reacting to an unimaginable reality of probability waves in four-dimensional space-time—and then go on with the very next breath to forget all that, and act as though matter, energy, space, time, and physical objects exactly as we perceive them are real in the most pigheadedly literal sort of objective sense, as though the human mind has nothing to do with any of them except as a detached observer. What’s more, many of those same scientists proceed to make sweeping claims about what human beings can and can’t know and do, in blithe disregard of the fact that these very claims depend on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that they’ve just disproved.[/quote]
The Clenched Fist of Reason
:up:
Cool article. Do you have any similar references for why Gabriel describes these domains as "fields of sense" - what is it that aligns the characaterisation of these domains with the sensory/the meaningful if:
no domains are given metaphysical or explanatory primacy? Aligning this general ontological construct with the category of sense seems to be a move which gives the concept of sense an explanatory and metaphysical primacy.
In any case I'd need a refresher to discuss it; maybe I'll look at it again. (It could make a nice reading group too, especially in the way it might attract both analytics and continentals).
That sounds like a good idea. The bugger is organising it and then sticking to it.
I will reiterate my last point about if they are arguing the world is not real then who are they talking to or trying to convince.
The ultimate reality is indistinguishable from the self. The self being all, corroborates that there is no world separate from the self. Jan Westerhoff uses the term "irrealism" to describe a world inseparable from the self.
It's important to know that we selves come self-sufficient and self-contained, not independent but self-directing. There are no relationships with other people, since there is only you.
good ol’ religion of science!
what made you land here then?
If you feel there are things you "have to take on faith", then those are not axioms. Axioms are things you're already sure of.
With that inborn human optimism.
Philosophizing can be said to be the act of taking a few axioms, a few things that one is sure of, and then think about what implications follow or could follow from them. This way, one can discover new axioms, ie. those that one previously was not aware of.
If this is your own assessment rather than that of the philosophically illiterate one star Amazon review that you quoted, then tell us in what way it's foolish, why you think Gabriel doesn't have a grasp of the subjects he talks about (whatever that means), and point out his logical fallacies.
When Gabriel decided on his provocative title, he likely wanted to stimulate curiosity. It obviously hasn't worked in your case. You didn't like it and came here to attack what you assume it is he is saying. As I pointed out, you made a mistake. Own up to it.
:up: I like that. Like ‘driving pitons into the cliff-face of possibility’.
Quoting baker
This sort of sounds like the death of philosophy to me. I mean if philosophy is the love of wisdom and the pursuit of truth but everything rests on unproveable axioms then what is the point of philosophizing?
If only you had offered a criticism for me to defend him against.
[Moving this garbage thread to the lounge]