Speculations in Idealism
Apologies if this seems superfluous. I'm hoping to start a discussion which helps to clarify in basic terms some of the conceptual models inherent in the various forms of idealism, from Berkeley to Hoffman.
Much of this is referenced in other threads on materialism and reality, but not greatly expanded upon. It is often said that physicalists misunderstand how idealism works. Which begs the question, do idealists understand it?
As food for thought. Bernardo Kastrup writes:
For Kastrup a belief in physicalism is confusing the map for the territory.
I'm not an idealist myself, but I'm particularly keen to enhance my grasp of how idealism accounts for such matters as:
1. How we can appear to have separate people with unique conscious experiences.
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular.
3. How evolution tracks to idealism.
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models?
5. Whether the Copenhagen Interpretation and the perceived flaws in a materialist metaphysics have been key in a recent revival of idealism?
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model?
Much of this is referenced in other threads on materialism and reality, but not greatly expanded upon. It is often said that physicalists misunderstand how idealism works. Which begs the question, do idealists understand it?
As food for thought. Bernardo Kastrup writes:
...as Ive elaborated upon more extensively in a Scientific American essay, our sensory apparatus has evolved to present our environment to us not as it is in itself, but instead in a coded and truncated form as a dashboard of dials. The physical world is the dials.
Once this is clarified, analytic idealism is entirely consistent with the observations of neuroscience: brain function is part of what our conscious inner life looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. Therefore, there must be tight correlations between patterns of brain activity and conscious inner life, for the former is simply the extrinsic appearance of the latter; a pixelated appearance.
For Kastrup a belief in physicalism is confusing the map for the territory.
I'm not an idealist myself, but I'm particularly keen to enhance my grasp of how idealism accounts for such matters as:
1. How we can appear to have separate people with unique conscious experiences.
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular.
3. How evolution tracks to idealism.
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models?
5. Whether the Copenhagen Interpretation and the perceived flaws in a materialist metaphysics have been key in a recent revival of idealism?
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model?
Comments (256)
I take an idealist to be someone who believes that minds are immaterial objects and that reality is made solely of minds and the contents of minds. So, everything is either an immaterial mind or a state of such a mind. (Berkeley is the paradigm case of an idealist, and that's what he believed).
One way of arriving at the view is from particular self-evident truths, such as that a) mental states cannot exist absent a mind whose states they are; that b) mental states can only resemble other mental states; and c) that the external sensible world is a place that resembles our own sensations of it.
I don't understand the stuff about neuroscience. A neuroscientist - so long as they stick to doing neuroscience and do not start doing metaphysics - is investigating a small part of the sensible world. They're not committed to any view about what the sensible world is made of. So it strikes me as obvious that idealism is consistent with neuroscience - how could it not be? Those who think otherwise must mistakenly be thinking that neuroscience carries with it some commitment to materialism about what it is investigating - which is just false.
Idealism is not the view that there is one mind (yours). That's solipsism.
I am an idealist and I believe in billions of minds. And so did Berkeley. Note, the basis upon which one infers the existence of other minds is going to be the same whether one is an idealist or a materialist about them (with one exception - the idealist will typically posit one extra mind as the mind who is bearing the mental states constitutive of the sensible world we're all inhabiting). So, although many confuse idealism with solipsism, it is materialism that is the more stingy view when it comes to positing other minds.
Quoting Tom Storm
The external sensible world appears to be external and singular - that is, there is 'the' external world, not lots of them. Conclusion: the sensations constitutive of the external sensible world are the sensations of a single external mind. One then concludes that as the sensations seem to cohere, then the mind whose sensations they are is a very orderly one with an extremely good memory.
Quoting Tom Storm
The evolutionary process would describe the thought process of the mind whose sensations constitute the external sensible world.
Quoting Tom Storm
There needs to be a mind bearing any sensation that there is. If one supposed, for instance, that the external sensible world is not external at all, but a figment of one's own imagination, then one still has a universal mind on the books, it's just that one has made it one's own (unjustifiably, of course).
Quoting Tom Storm
No, for science investigates the behaviour of the sensible world and does not take a stand on its composition. That is, whether the sensible world is made of mental states or mind-external extended substances is a question in metaphysics that science has no bearing on.
Quoting Tom Storm
There's no connection between idealism and us having any particular role. Note, to have a role you need to have been created for a purpose. Well, it is consistent with idealism that we have not been created for any purpose (for idealism is not a view about how minds come to be, but a view about what reality is made of). And it is consistent with idealism that we do have a role. (And it is consistent with materialism about you that you have a role - if your parents created you in order to stop up a hole in the wall, then that's your role).
The sensible world, on idealism, is the creation of a mind. And this means it can in principle have a purpose. But then that's true if the sensible world is material as well, as nothing stops that from being the creation of a mind either (it just would not be 'in' the mind in question, that's all).
To put it bluntly, Hoffman is misusing science. To set up his model he has to have preconceived notions of what is real and what isn't. Not only does his theory start with evolution then throws it out, but his theory that to perceive falsely is better than to perceive rightly (in the course of evolution) is indefensible. He is a conman who doesnt understand philosophy
For a physicalist, (Kastrup's) idealism confuses the map with the territory that it is (we are) maps "all the way down".
Quoting Bartricks
My words were probably unclear. I wasn't implying that idealism had a role for us but more that if we are idealists how might this have impact upon how we should live?
Yes, that's what I was getting at with the question. Would I be correct in assuming that for you God is the universal mind in idealism?
May well do. It's interesting how this is one of those rhetorical tricks which can so easily be turned on the trickster.
Have you ever had any sympathy for any form of idealism?
There's a tension between materialism and normativity. That is, it is hard to make sense of how there could be 'shoulds' in a wholly material universe. Such shoulds - the shoulds of reason - seem to require there to be a master mind whose edicts they are. And idealism arrives at the conclusion that there is such a mind by an independent route (although whether the mind whose sensible contents constitutes the sensible world is the same mind whose edicts constitute the edicts of Reason is an open question). So in that sense there is a happy marriage between idealism and the reality of morality. But dualism could also accommodate normativity as well.
I have no confident views on the matter. But that'd be the default, given that one should not posit two minds to do the work that one can do.
:yikes: :rofl:
I think this is true but wrong. Oh, wait, I forgot the Law of the Excluded Middle. It's true sometimes. That's not right. It's true if it makes sense in a particular situation. Ok, that will do for a working answer. I've tried to avoid this recently, since I've overused it, but it's relevant here. The isms you're talking about here are metaphysical entities. As such, they are not true or untrue, only useful or not useful in a particular situation. That's gets back to the Kastrup quote. Sometimes his way of seeing things is a good one, but sometimes it makes sense to see the world as objective reality seen imperfectly.
Usually, reality is consistent with whatever sound metaphysical position one takes.
I think I'm ok with this.
Quoting Tom Storm
Again, right but wrong.
Quoting Tom Storm
Because it sort of is and because we overlay consistent and regular on a swirling flow.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't see why it doesn't track physicalism just as well.
Quoting Tom Storm
Actually, in order for most, perhaps all, metaphysical positions to be true, I've always thought that God or god surrogate is needed.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't see how there is any inconsistency.
I've written this before. I read someone, can't remember who, who wrote that mathematicians tend idealists and physicists tend to be physicalists. That makes sense to me. I don't know whether they enter their professions because of their metaphysical predilections or their professions mold their metaphysics.
I think your conclusions are right, with a quibble. Although neuroscientists don't generally do metaphysics, they swim in a metaphysical sea. I'd guess for most that sea is physicalism, at least during work hours. I agree that idealism is consistent with neuroscience. As you note - how could it not be. I also agree that neuroscience carries no metaphysical commitment to materialism.
Quoting Bartricks
I agree with this.
Quoting Bartricks
But disagree with this. I don't see any reason to think that our mind is any different from all the others or that saying it is is useful, much less true.
Quoting Bartricks
Quoting Bartricks
I agree.
Quoting Bartricks
I don't agree with this. We have evolved as, not moral, but rule making organisms. I don't see why evolution and the evolution of mind are in any way inconsistent with materialism.
I am not sure what you're disagreeing with, for I am not positing a different mind but an extra mind. The idealist takes the sensations constitutive of the external world to be the sensations of a mind (for all sensations are) and thus the external world turns out to be the mental activity of a mind. Not mine or yours, so another mind. That's one mind more than the materialist posits. For the materialist does not posit a mind, but an extra-mental extended realm. So, the idealist posits one more mind than a materialist, other things being equal. Neither view should be confused with solipsism, but given that materialists posit fewer minds than idealists, other things being equal, it is the materialist who is closer to being a solipsist, despite the tendency to think that idealism somehow implies it.
Quoting T Clark
That is not an account of how materialism can accommodate the shoulds of normativity. It is, rather, an account of how we have come to take there to be such shoulds. (This is my point in another thread, the one on God, evolution and intuition).
A materialist seems committed to having to make the shoulds of normativity edicts that we are issuing to ourselves and others. And those views about normativity - individual and collective subjectivist views - are grossly implausible (they're pretty much universally rejected). If we make a rule that says if P, then Q, then if Q then P, that does not mean that we have reason to believe that if P then Q, then if Q then P. Hence why normativity poses a problem: there are norms of reason, but nothing in a material world to be the source of them save us (and clearly we are not their source).
1. An idealist might say 'entities are finite monads within / constituting The Infinite Monad and only from the perspective of finite monads do finite monads "appear separate with unique conscious experiences" (i.e. a Leibniz-Berkeley hybrid).'
2. An idealist might say 'reality is "consistent and regular" due to the Principle of Sufficient Reason constituted by Platonic Forms, such as in Schopenhauer's "Fourfold Root of ..." (& WWR, vol 1.)'
3. An idealist might say 'like matter, or nature, "evolution" is merely an idea a self-organizing sortition algorithm.'
4. An idealist might say (see #1).
5. An idealist might say 'more than a "revival", a vindication of idealism (i.e. im-materialism, non-physicalism, anti-realism, etc)'
6. An idealist might say 'human beings are finite monads (see #1).'
NB: Though I'm an anti-idealist (and despite my biases), I believe my interpretative answers are fairly charitable. :smirk:
They're not totally unique. The more unique there are, the harder to communicate. Look up the meaning of 'idiosyncratic'. It basically means not understandable to others.
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular.
We are all the same species, culture, language group, etc. But glaring discrepancies appear all the time. I mean, there are still people who think Trump was great.
3. How evolution tracks to idealism.
Appealing to evolution as a support for why reason might be true is the subject of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, and also the broader Argument from Reason. Both have generated many volumes.
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models?
That mind is not numerically one, but is of a kind, like space - the capacity for experience, or something of that nature.
5. Whether the Copenhagen Interpretation and the perceived flaws in a materialist metaphysics have been key in a recent revival of idealism?
If the alternative is Everett, the Copenhagen is a model of modest philosophical reasoning.
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model?
Sentient life of all kinds are the way the Universe realises dimensions of being. Rational sentient beings are able to reflect on that.
Any theory/philosophy, including but not limited to idealism, that implies the existence/occurrence of something special is likely to be wrong/nonsense.
Representationalism is odd in that it always assumes an image or representation (a pixelated appearance) of what is seen, but can never show us this image, upon what medium it appears, and can never point to the being whom is observing it. It is odd that it is present in both materialism and idealism, as if one conceded something to the other.
Goodness, I need to watch the words I use! Not my intended meaning. By 'unique' I just meant people have individual conscious experiences that don't seem connected to other's conscious experiences. No hive mind. Kastrup says this is one of the most common questions he gets asked - 'How come we are all different if all reality is one consciousness.' It's like the opposite of solipsism.
Quoting Wayfarer
I was referring to reality - 'the world' and observed regularities within it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Idealists like Hoffman and Kastrup say that idealism supports evolution - I don't quite get the model. If all is mentation why did life evolve? -Presumably there was a concomitance emergence of higher consciousness in humans somewhere between being a fish and being a high functioning ape? :razz:
Quoting Wayfarer
I was referring to universal mind as a 'god surrogate' that holds the reality we perceive in check. At least this is how Berkeley and Kastrup seem to describe it. E.g., Why is our car still in the carport the next morning after we sleep? Is the moon still there when we are not looking?
Quoting Wayfarer
So by that token idealism makes no practical difference to a life lived? We can reflect perfectly well as physicalists or is it your contention that we need to know more to reflect properly?
The thing with neuroscience is that the brain is taken to explain the functionality of the mind. But we don't normally have experiences of our brain. Why is it that investigation our head gives us an idea of an organ that's supposed to be responsible for us having those ideas? There's a thousand such questions about everything. How come we find fossils in the ground? Are they ideas of something that lived before we did?
How do you explain pandemics? Is Covid just an idea? People get sick and die because of an idea? What is death to an idealist? How do ideas cause you to die?
Interesting point.
Idealists have interesting answers for all these questions. Nothing is 'just an idea' it seems. Idealism seems to maintain that all we have access to is experience which presents itself to us symbolically as the matter we think we are seeing. So no doubt COVID, or falling off a cliff for that matter, are representations of something happening in consciousness when viewed from a particular perspective.
But they are! We're connected with others through all of our relationships, speech, thoughts, empathy, and so on. The only sense in which we're not connected, is that each individual's first person perspective is unique to oneself. But that's also the same for everyone; everyone is 'I' from their own unique perspective. I know only my own pains, joys, and sensations directly, but I have no reason to believe that all of the other beings I'm sorrounded by do not have exactly analogous experiences of their own. Empathy is an antidote to solipsism.
That also accounts for the regularities we perceive, the fact that we all seem to see the same things. Hegel discussed that. 'Like Kant, Hegel believed that we do not perceive the world or anything in it directly and that all our minds have access to is ideas of the worldimages, perceptions, concepts. For Kant and Hegel, the only reality we know is a virtual reality. Hegels idealism differs from Kants in two ways. First, Hegel believed that the ideas we have of the world are social, which is to say that the ideas that we possess individually are utterly shaped by the ideas that other people possess. Our minds have been shaped by the thoughts of other people through the language we speak, the traditions and mores of our society, and the cultural and religious institutions of which we are a part' - lecture notes.
Quoting Tom Storm
It's not as if things come into and go out of existence when you or I are looking at them, or not. Existence of the car or the moon or anything else is constituted within our cognition of those objects. Furthermore, they are designated objects by sentient beings.
Quoting Tom Storm
You will often encounter those who rationalise human intelligence because of its supposed 'survival advantage'. You know, we were sorrounded by sabre-tooth tigers, but we could outwit them because of our bigger intelligence. I think that argument is dubious, because sharks, blue-green algae, and mushrooms have survived and flourished for hundreds of millions of years with little or nothing by way of rational intelligence. Second, because it subordinates reason to the exigencies of survival, which is typical of social- and some schools of neo-darwinism. It sells reason short, by equating it to mere adaptation. (Dawkins et al often commit this fallacy).
My view is, plainly h. sapiens evolved, along the lines that paleontology and evolutionary biology has discerned (although the detail are continuously changing). But the advent of speech, reasoning, story-telling and tool-making opens up a dimension of being which simply can't be explained in purely biological terms, without falling into biological reductionism. One thing I think I can state is that h.sapiens alone is able to ask 'what am I?' (I know other animals can pass the mirror test, but I don't think it counts.)
So what evolves is not reason as such, but the capacity for reason. I mean, it's not as it the law of the excluded middle, or real numbers, came into existence due to evolution. What evolved was the capacity to understand them. Which is reasonably contiguous with both evolutionary theory and Platonism, in my view.
There's another point, but it's a major argument in its own right, about whether reason can be understood in terms of biological adaptation:
Quoting Leon Wiesletier
That criticism is also the basic thrust of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, and C S Lewis Argument from Reason.
Quoting Tom Storm
By no means! Living beings are the way in which meaning enters the universe. Rational sentient beings are those able to realise that.
That's my intended point. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
A digression - Where do you sit on the notion that true art criticism/aesthetics should rest on identifying transcendental notions of truth, goodness and beauty which are part of humanity's platonic/idealist heritage?
Back to evolution. If what we take to be the physical world is the product of mentation - can you guess/describe what evolution is 'doing'? Did the single, self-replicating cell begin as nascent consciousness, as part of universal consciousness and eventually develop into full blown meta-cognitive awareness - human sentience? Is such a journey to be seen as purposeful, or simply Schopenhauer's blind will doing its thing? I'm not necessarily asking you to go down Hegel's giest or Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness territory unless you think it apropos.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but from your account of idealism are cars, for instance, essentially the product of mentation - even if built from materials and labour that is also mentation expressing itself? They are not physical objects, surely? Idealism being a monist ontology.... Can you say more about this point?
Quoting Wayfarer
We see objects based on an inherent structure in our consciousness? The 'designation' process interests me.
Each perspective is unique, but we're members of the same culture, species, tribe, language group, and so on. So we're unique in one way, but in others ways members of a group. The point being that our experiences are connected with those of others in our milieu, even if we only have first-hand knowledge of our own. (That's why the question 'how are you feeling?' is meaningful :-)
Quoting Tom Storm
On the one hand, the scientific attitude to evolution is non-teleological - evolution in a biological sense refers to nothing more than or other than the propogation of the genome and the evolution of species. To think of it evolving 'towards' anything, or having any particular reason, is rejected as orthogenetic. Of course there are philosophers who say those kinds of things - Henri Bergson was one, nowadays there are those who talk of 'creative evolution' or 'evolutionary enlightenment' but they're not mainstream (although there is a good deal of philosophical ferment in evolutionary biology).
So I suppose the question itself is really a metaphysical question - it's really a form of the question 'what is it all about?' I think natural science as such doesn't really consider such questions. Richard Dawkins, asked that kind of question, said, 'Why we exist, you're playing with the word "why" there. Science is working on the problem of the antecedent factors that lead to our existence. Now, "why" in any further sense than that, why in the sense of purpose is, in my opinion, not a meaningful question. You cannot ask a question like "Why down mountains exist?" as though mountains have some kind of purpose. What you can say is what are the causal factors that lead to the existence of mountains and the same with life and the same with the universe.'
Even so, both Donald Hoffman's work, and Pinter's book, assume an evolutionary stance, in that cognition is understood through the perspective of evolution. Beings have to cognise aspects of their environment in order to survive - even very simple beings. The point about beings is that they are differentiated from the environment, but have to exchange both information (in the form of stimuli) and matter-energy (nutrition) while still maintaining themselves (homeostasis). So in that sense, cognition is present in even the simplest of organisms (there are studies showing that bacteria are capable of learning). So cognition in that sense goes way back to the origin of life itself.
My intuitive belief is that as soon as life begins, there is the incipient development of a perspective, or a germinal subject of experience. Of course in bacteria and so on it's extremely vague and attenuated. So in that sense I'm getting closer to pan-psychism, with the caveat that I don't see consciousness as being at all characteristic of inorganic matter. But I mean, some of the ideas of the German idealists are all quite compatible with these kinds of ideas - not that I'm an expert in them - but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, none of them would be particularly challenged by evolutionary theory (although I'm sure they would be critical of standard-issue neo-darwinian materialism.) (ref)
Quoting Tom Storm
I would've thought that pretty non-controversial. If some alien found Elon Musk's sports car sailing through space, it wouldn't see it as a natural phenomenon.
Quoting Tom Storm
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 1). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
This is not exacyly true. Hegel rejects Kant's noumena as fiction and says Spirit, which is us, is noumena
"even among the most committed absolute idealists of the nineteenth century it is not always clear whether they are actually denying the existence of matter or only subordinating it to mind in one way or another)." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#IdeaEarlModeRati
(italics mine)
With Hegel I am sure it is the latter. Although he says that all is mind and we are all reality, this is through connection to Spirit and he explicitly rejects Berkeley in the first part of his Logic and says the world is real and concrete. He just thinks that thought is even more real and concrete. I am not as familiar with Schelling, Fitche, or Schopenhaur however
Can you paint? I ask because if you paint you view the world as sensations rather than as objects.
But then I'd wonder about the chemical makeup of paint, and the atomic structure of the canvas.
[quote="Bartricks;715504]It puzzles me why you think idealism is challenged by the existence of any sensible thing or process.[/quote]
Many of those things exist outside of human experience much of the time, if not entirely, and are the explanations for the world we experience. We don't perceive atoms (unless when viewed with an electron microscope), but atomic bods are the explanation for chemistry, and chemistry for the experience of ordinary matter and it's many forms and behaviors.
But COVID isn't just the symptoms people experience, it's the explanation for the pandemic, and why millions have died. It's also not just the experience of falling off a cliff, but what happens when you hit the bottom.
How does the idealist explain the end of their experience when hitting the bottom or dying from an infection? Because someone else comes along and has an experience of their death? So why does an idealist's experience come to an end? It can't be a material cause such as an invisible virus or the rocks at the bottom.
As I said, I am not an idealist, but - the point being that everything humans experience is simply mind when viewed from a particular perspective. Chemicals, brains, atoms are all visual representations of mental processes. We use these 'dashboard' images to negotiate our apparent world. Idealists don't necessarily say they have an explanation of death other than your particular discrete experience of consciousness ends.
Quoting Marchesk
You're not there yet. Idealist Bernardo Kastrup would say that a virus and rocks are not matter - they are visual representations of mental processes. Consciousness has it's own risks and hazards which are represented to us as material things.
Of course it's odd. An idealist might argue that we have centuries of thinking that the material world is a pure representation of reality.
I'm not a materialist (solely) because of consciousness and abstract objects, but the the problem with idealism in the modern world, is our scientific explanations start with the material and build to the mental once you get to biology and brain processes. So the idealist is put in the awkward position of explaining why the material representation has mind as a latter development on brains, surrounded by a universe of mostly physical things and processes, where mind is a relative late comer, one that we only know about in one little corner of the cosmos.
IOW, why does the world appear to be mostly physical?
That's not really an issue for some idealists. They postulate that consciousness - something like a universal mind - preexists all.
Quoting Marchesk
We regard it as psychical.
Here's Kastrup summarizing his model - it's a snippet from his vast output on the matter (no pun intended). From an essay called The Unexpected Origin of Matter.
Now, you seem to think covid poses a problem. Why?
Do you include viruses in the sensible world outside experience which cause human sickness and death?
That covid is a theoretical explanation under a materialistic framework for pandemic experiences. This isn't my first idealist rodeo on here. Granted, the idealist arguments have varied from a Kantian to anti-realist to subjective.
We used to have a couple hard core subjective idealists on here that would make rather extreme sounding anti-realist arguments.
Do you think an idealist denies that covid exists?
Depends on the idealist and what is meant by "covid exists". I would ask you how covid exists outside sensible experience and it not be material/physical.
There's only kind of idealism? Tell me what it is then, and what it means for covid to exist for an idealist.
I believe this matter and the nature of the physical has been answered several times already. I think @Bartricks has a very succinct definition of idealism.
Quoting Bartricks
Disputes about Kant and Hegel and the meaning of noumena are a labyrinth which many enter but from which few emerge.
Quoting Marchesk
Notice that your question assumes a perspective outside that of the subject of those experiences.
The point Im making is that the very notion of existence is predicated on there being defined objects arrayed in space and time. The meaning of exist is to stand apart - to be this, as distinct from that. And it is the mind that brings that order to the Universe. All of your statements assume that this order is real absent any point of view or perspective, not noticing that the mind creates the stage against which all such judgements are made in the first place.
Quoting Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea
Yes, and it's this sort of implied idealism I was wanting to criticize. If there is no perspective outside our subjective experiences (like God or the universal consciousness), then idealism is put into an awkward position of explaining why covid or evolution are explanations for our experiences. And why experiences tend to end when a subject falls off a cliff.
But if God or the universe are there to experience covid and people falling to their deaths, then that's not an inherent problem. I understand that a Kantian discussion of noumena would take this to a different place about whether we can say reality (noumena) is anything like covid or cliff falls. Cue questions of space and time and the wavefunction, lol.
For the record, I tend to think reality is something other (more than?) the physical.
And it is not just consistent (unlike materialism) it is also demonstrably true. The sensible world is the place your sensations resemble, yes? And sensations can only resemble other sensations, yes? And sensations can't exist unsensed, can they? Join the dots.
A materialist about the sensible world must maintain either that our sensations of it in no way resemble it (in which case in what sense are they 'of' the sensible world?) or they must maintain that the sensible world is composed of extra-mental sensations, which is incoherent. Sensations are essentially sensed - that is, for any sensation there is a mind that is having it. The idea of a sensation that is no mind's sensation is inconceivable and makes no sense.
That tells me you didn't understand the point of my post, but I've been down this rabbit hole umpteen times in the past, so I'll leave it there.
You're right I don't understand the point of what Schopenhauer is trying to say. It doesn't explain the end of experiences, and how we have objective explanations for them. I'm definitely in the realist/objective camp.
I would disagree there. Sensations resemble physical things, or at least real things which are not always sensed by some mind. Because we have real bodies in a real world that produce those sensations.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah... I think this is the issue. People don't seem to follow the argument. I think they fight it rather than go with the flow. IMO one doesn't have to accept it as true to understand it.
This is philosophy. In philosophy one uses reason to try and figure out what's true. That means something. It means that worldviews shouldn't turn up in premises, but conclusions. YOu need to 'conclude' that materialism is true without simply assuming it is. Otherwise you're not doing philosophy.
Now, Berkeley concluded that the sensible world is made of another mind's mental states. He didn't just assert it. He arrived at the conclusion from apparent self-evident truths of reason alone.
But what you're doing is assuming the truth of a worldview and then rejecting premises that imply its falsity. That's dogmatism. It's no different from a detective deciding ahead of investigation that Tony did the crime and then rejecting any apparent evidence that implies otherwise.
Materialism needs to be in a conclusion, not a premise.
Make an effort. He's saying: you assume the reality of the objects of experience, but what are 'objects', unless you've assimilated them into your mind via the synthesis of data, sensation, perception and understanding? What do you think your fantastically elaborated hominid forebrain spends all its time doing?
This is not a discussion about your or my personal experience, which obviously is limited by your or my death, but about the nature of knowledge, how the understanding works. It's an analysis made by standing back and reflecting on the processes implied by your seeing of the [apple/tree/chair/star].
It takes a change of perspective, but that's what philosophy requires - seeing things differently.
So if one doesn't accept Berkeley's "self-evident" truths, one is guilty of dogmatism? One wonders why all philosophers aren't idealists then!
The things which are responsible for your mind having something to assimilate. Also that which you ends your experience. How does Schopenhauer account for death? Should we bring Meillassoux and fossils into the discussion? Evolution has already been mentioned.
I didn't quote you?
Quoting Bartricks
I didn't assume the truth of idealism. I said Berkeley's idealism is internally consistent.
Yes - concepts without percepts (=mind with nothing to perceive) are empty, but percepts without concepts (=perception with no mind to organise them) is blind.
If you take 'the universe' and remove from it all structures, all features, all relative distances, and the framework of time - what do you see?
Quoting Marchesk
Reminds me to dig up a critique of Mellasioux I noticed recently - Here, but it's pretty dense.
I said that a dogmatist is someone who starts with a worldview and then rejects premises that conflict with it. Which is what you did.
Now, if you want to do philosophy, try and reject one of Berkeley's premises without assuming that materialism is true.
They don't seem self evident to me. What then?
:rofl:
It is dangerous to desire knowledge too strongly. To say the reality consists merely in our thinking is fantastic poetry because it is so fantastical. To doubt or deny the existence of an external world is to be stuck continually reminding oneself of this. It creates one of those annoying subjective itches
Berkeley's major problem is that he's a strict empiricist, meaning that his nominalism won't admit the reality of universals. So he has no coherent account of the function of reason. When Kant's first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was published, some of his reviewers thought he was simply re-stating Berkeley's philosophy, which infuriated him, so in the second edition he included his Refutation of Idealism
But it's also important to say that Berkeley' arguments and rhetoric are ingenious and persuasive, and remain a challenge to this day. There are some excellent editions of Berkeley's dialogues on Early Modern Texts and if you take time to peruse them you will see that he anticipates and disposes of many seemingly obvious objections to his philosophy.
Ok, oh wise one. Is there some knowledge you would like us not to seek after, such as how on earth you afforded that helicopter?
Quoting Gregory
What? That's not what an idealist thinks, at least not a sensible one. And that's not poetry either, but a thesis. Poems are poems. This is a poem: Gregory, Gregory, Gregory, how does your thinking go? With a fallacy here and a non-sequitur there, and several confident misunderstandings all in a row.
Quoting Gregory
That is not what an idealist thinks.
Quoting Gregory
All itches are subjective. What's an objective itch?
:fire:
Only a true blue philosopher would say that!
No he isn't.
He's known as one of the great British empiricists.
He wasn't British or an empiricist.
Note, minds are not empirically detectable. Yet Berkeley believes in them. If he was an empiricist, he wouldn't.
Again: he takes it to be manifest to reason that thoughts require thinkers (and that sensations require sensors).
That's at the heart of his case. It's not an empirical truth - one cannot see, touch, hear, smell or taste that thoughts require minds. It is a manifest truth of reason.
And he takes it to be manifest to reason that our sensations must resemble what they're providing us with some awareness of.
And he takes ti to be manifest to reason that sensations can only resemble other sensations. Just as a texture can't be like a sight, or a sound like a texture, so too no sensation can be like something that is not a sensation.
From this it follows that the sensible world our sensations tell us about must itself be composed of the sensations of a mind.
That's his positive case for idealism.
He also has a destructive case: materialism doesn't make any sense. There is no need to posit any material objects. Plus a material object is extended in space by its very nature. But any object that is extended in space will be infinitely divisible. Yet nothing can be infinitely divisible, for that would involve it having infinite parts - which is to posit an actual infinity. There are no actual infinities in reality, thus there are no extended things.
Now the fallacy that Berkeley is often accused of having committed is the fallacy of confusing a vehicle of awareness with an object of awareness. It's a fallacy that many here commit. The fallacy involves going from "I think that p" to "p is therefore a thought". Lots of you commit it when you try and think about morality. You go from "I feel some acts are wrong and feel some acts are right" to "rightness and wrongness are feelings of mine". That's the fallacy.
Berkeley is said to have committed it, for he is thought to have argued that as we know the sensible world by sensation, then the sensible world is a sensation.
Yet clearly that is not something he argued. He drew that conclusion, but not in that way. He did not think the world our sensations give us an awareness of is made of those sensations - the sensations that give us an awareness of it. Our sensations are 'of' the world, but do not compose it (thus at no point does he confuse a vehicle of awareness with its object - our sensations are the vehicles of awareness, and the sensations constitutive of the world are their object). HIs point is that in order for them to be 'of' the world, they would need to resemble it. And it is from that, combined with the claim that sensations can only resemble other sensations, that we get to the conclusion that the world is made of sensations (and thus the sensations of a mind).
Perhaps the argument is unsound, but it's not fallacious.
Oh, and he was Irish, not British. The part of Ireland he was from was not part of Britain.
Quoting Bartricks
He is known as an empiricist due to his emphasis on the primacy of sensations. I dont think the rest of your interpretation stands but as you invariably begin to insult and belittle anyone who dares disagree with you I have no desire to engage.
There's no reason an extended object in space needs to be indefinitely divisible. Atomic theory would say atoms making up the object are indivisible. Today it would be subatomic particles. Or even possibly space itself is atomic. At any rate, length below the plank level is considered meaningless. This is where armchair philosophizing by first principles gets philosophers in trouble. The world need not play by our rules.
I'm skeptical of actual infinities, but what makes Berkeley so sure? What about the argument that space extends forever? That would constitute an actual infinity.
He was not British. And he was not an empiricist.
Empiricism is a stupid view that, by its own lights, has no support.
He was not an empiricist.
It's a label that he would not have known and that was applied to him later by people who hadn't bothered to read or understand him.
Explain why an extended object could not be divided. It would have a top and a bottom and sides, yes? And there would be some space in between, otherwise it is not occupying any space and is not a material object. Now why couldn't that object be divided?
Maybe a segment loops around on itself in self creation as if I go North all the way until I arrive from where I started
:up:
Quoting Bartricks
Here you go from old thread:
Quoting 180 Proof
As I mentioned previously, Berkeleys dialogues are a model of ingenious philosophical prose, although I dont regard his system as a satisfactory form of idealism, mainly because of his nominalism. But I dont reject it outright, either.
Quoting Wayfarer
Marvellous quote.
I don't see how modern versions of idealism like Hoffman can be reconciled with type of realism that is opposed to nominalism (that of Anselm of Canterbury, Albertus Mangus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus) although I see Hoffman as consistent with Kant
Incidentally I thought I'd mention the Essentia Foundation https://www.essentiafoundation.org/ which is associated with Bernardo Kastrup and also Donald Hoffman, among many others. It's a think-tank of sorts, dedicated to current idealist philosophy and science.
Tell me, did Berkeley say it? What was he referring to?
You don't know. I know you don't know, because no one who has read him would leave out the context.
So, what is he talking about?
I will tell you. He is talking about sensations. It is the essence of a sensation that it be sensed. That is, sensations exist as mental activity.
He was not saying that it is the essence of anything's being that it be sensed. That would not make sense at all.
You are confusing idealism with anti-realism. They are not the same thing. There is an entire subset of idealism called "objective idealism," that accepts the reality of external objects. This is probably the largest subset of idealism actually. Objective idealism doesn't deny that diseases exists, so there is no problem here. The key German Idealists were very into the science of their day actually. What they rejected was the claim that matter was ontologically basic and represents discrete "things in themselves."
Mental/physical is a false dichotomy in their opinion. Only subjective idealism is the claim that "everything is mental," in the sense most people would take that claim. The better way to think of objective/Absolute idealism is the claim that: "the subjective and objective are part of a unified whole." One cannot be understood except in reference to the other. This is also not dualism, it is a monism; we have different emerging from one thing, but two things.
Schelling wrote a lot. What I have from my notes is:
"
1. Ego is the highest potency of the powers of Nature.
2. Nature is the source of creative intelligence.
3. Reason is able to abstract from the subjectivity of the ego to reach the point of pure subject/object identity.
Nature is actually the self in disguise. After all, all of nature is only experienced through the self. But the self necessarily posits that which it is not, thus we get nature (Schelling following Fichte here). Schelling departs from Fichte in not having the self at the center of everything. Instead, the claim is that nature and the self represent natural dualities, and the whole of the entirety of being (the Absolute) is an outgrowth of/resultant from these contradictions.
The fulfilment of nature is to become object to itself (here we can see the influence on Hegel)." My handwriting is pretty bad, but I think that's what I came away with.
This seems pretty foreign now-a-days, but actually the claim isn't too far off from those many modern philosophers and scientists make when they claim that talking about various phenomena from "the view from nowhere," or the "God's eye view," is misleading at best, meaningless at worst. Objects and entities only exist in the mind. Empiricism is necessarily the study of how experience is. The positing of a discrete, ontologically basic world that fits the models we deduce from experience is a profound overreach and mistake.
What the older idealists add, which is now less of a focus, is an ontological argument about the nature of being. That the differences in being we experience are logically necessitated by the fact that there is something rather than nothing.
That and they tend to start by focusing on the self for building up their arguments, which is less popular today. But I think when you get rid of all the strange terminology and vivid metaphors, 19th century idealism's core arguments aren't that far from modern versions, they are just couched in very different language.
It seems to me that the problem of "something rather than nothing" only has force if matter is real. If all that exists is thought sensations, I don't see the problem applying. What do you think?
But there is also a subjective idealism that rejects objective reality since they don't locate ideas in the mind of some supreme or universal mind. It's just individual subjective experiences. We've had some on here before.
I don't see how that works. You still have a world full of concepts, symmetries, cause and effect, etc. Why this plethora of entities and endless variety instead of nothing?
If the world around us shows us causes preceding effects it is natural to ask: "what causes things to be?"
What the Boehme inspired idealists try to do is show how being emerges from logical necessity. You don't need a demiurge shaping the world based on some sort of Platonic blueprint, you just need for there to be something and not nothing. This then sets up the being/nothing contradiction, resulting in our experienced world of becoming. The rest, all the differences and possibilities of our world, flows from logical necessity.
Hegel takes this to its most complete form, having physical science, cognition, and history flowing from this necessity and progressing to the point where all being becomes known object to itself, finally resolving all contradictions.
What I find interesting about this is that one of the attempts to provide a fully scientific metaphysics: Every Thing Must Go, walks right up to this line, almost states it as an apparent fact, then opts to shoehorn the "physical" back in:
That's a head scratcher; it certainly recalls Hemple's Dilemma.
The only subjective idealist I am all that familiar with is Berkley, and for him these are tied together by the mind of God. My intuition is that these systems would tend to be very idiosyncratic.
My problem with Hoffman is that you can't encode at a very basic level the idea of "seeing reality in itself" and "seeing only an appearance" into game theory (which he works on). The subject must accept the object as it is and from there and from then only can you say that it perceives it wrongly. Only on the condition that it can see rightly can it see wrongly (in terms of science).
Maybe the medievalists were idealist though. Their rejection of nominalism suggests this, and Kant's Critique of Judgment seems to suggest this to me as well
How so? It's bad writing to say, "I experienced experiencing the pain" but it isn't illogical.
But with what first principle do you start with. Descartes argues there must exist something that is at least as great as all our ideas. This he calls God, and he goes on to reason that this God must not deceive. So it was like going around a triangle, from himself, to God, to the world. Hegel starts with being, which he says is also a nothing, because it is pure becoming. This seems to say matter is necessary and the way to understand "why" there is something is almost mechanical: because there is a cause behind every cause
I haven't looked in his models in any depth, but I can see how it works if you have the condition that an organism looking for resources so that it can reproduce can only store a finite amount of information about its environment.
If the amount of information in the enviornment exceeds that which the organism can store then the organism must have some method for compressing information.
Likewise, if the organism has finite computational power than it will also need to optimize how it compresses information about its environment.
Already we have established that the organism won't represent the enviornment with full accuracy. The next step is to see if the compression methodology will hew towards as accurate a representation as possible or one optimized for fitness. This is where the game theory models and computer simulations come into play in that they show how more complex organism will find optimal solutions that move further away from lossless compression and towards compression techniques that are optimized for reproduction.
It varies by person. Fichte starts with the apparent self. Schelling and later Hegel start with being itself. I think the latter approach is the best technique. How do you get anything more ontologically basic than being itself?
They will never to able to say how much information a brain can process because it is first person experience alone that knows how it processes information. Also how the noumena reveals itself is not science but phenomenology. Knowledge is inexplicable
Also, how can they map the terrain and compare with storage capacity if there is no terrain?
This is a very good question, perhaps the most important of all, to which an idealist must give a very thorough and detailed answer. Kastrup's answer to the question is very wild and speculative. The superior mind suffers from a multiple personality disorder. That's what he thinks.
Then there is the problem that the superior mind is looking through all of our eyes. But how can it accomplish all this at the same time? If this mind currently experiences my subjectivity, how should it then be able to experience yours at the same moment? It seems inconsistent. Because a consciousness of something is absolutely private and focused. If the Master Mind does not participate in our minds, then it might be redundant.
Quoting Tom Storm
If it were not consistent and regular, there would be no experience in the mind. The mind operates with categories, which constitute the formal structure of the external world. And without such categories, experience of consistency and regularity would not be possible. This is the Kantian answer.
Quoting Tom Storm
Schopenhauer, an idealist, considered them incompatible. Because evolution starts from the reality of time. But idealism excludes this. Time is given only ideally in a subject. Without a subject there is no temporally extended evolution. The whole millions of years of evolution are without subject actually only an instantaneous moment.
The question would be, how does the universal mind perceive evolution? With our understanding and feeling of time?
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, without this universal mind there would be no idealism. But a realism. There would be a plurality of animal minds.
Another human being, for example, whom I perceive empirically, might then be a kind of rendering of his momentary mind status into my mind.
And for plants and the elements one would have to assume an unconscious, which exists in and for itself. Panpsychism could be an alternative.
Obviously, idealists have a hard time with the unconscious. In the strict sense, there must not be such a thing for them. Everything must be conscious, at least in the universal mind.
Quoting Tom Storm
This Copenhagen quantum view would say that things, unobserved, are in a state of being able to be brought to mind. They are a pure potential.
But the ontological status of such a potential is somewhat obscure. On the other hand, everything is supposed to be already observed in the universal mind. This mind should always already bring the wave function to collapse.
Quoting Tom Storm
The role of people's illnesses must be reconsidered in any case. Most of them are then likely to be merely psychosomatic. But all would have to be due to a mental disorder. Factors like repression, guilt, stress are then responsible for most of the diseases.
This is a logical consequence of idealism. Materialism sees everything only physically, idealism sees everything mentally.
Therefore, it is only consistent when the idealist Otto Weininger says the following:
"Every illness is guilt and punishment; all medicine must become psychiatry, care-of-the-soul. It is something immoral, i.e., unconscious, that leads to illness, and each illness is cured as soon as it is inwardly recognized and understood by the sick person himself."
Quoting spirit-salamander
I think his idea may be more nuanced that this. He says experiences of individual consciousness are dissociated alters of universal mind - which is not metacognitive and entirely instinctive. My sense is he uses dissociative personality disorder more as a metaphor. But you are right, it is entirely speculative.
Quoting spirit-salamander
Yes.
Quoting spirit-salamander
Interesting and controversial. Maybe the word metal disorder is a bit too strong. What are we to make of schizophrenia , say vis-à-vis diabetes? What are we to make of the word mental when all is mental?
Quoting spirit-salamander
Wouldn't time simply be another way in which mentation appears to us on the dashboard of physicalism? Isn't time one of those Kantian structures we bring to our understanding of experience and reality. Perhaps time in this model is our understanding of universal mind 'thinking'.
Hoffman is a realist. As a scientist, he's not going to get hung up on metaphysical challenges to the existence of the external world. His goal is to challenge unexamined assumptions about that external world.
He takes a que from Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." The core idea there is that, regardless of whether the central dogma of genetics holds up, or even the entire field of biology, we nonetheless have a theorem of how intricate complexity that seems to suggest a "designer," can come about with no such designer. The concept of natural selection works just as well for understanding why we see the types of physical things we do as it does for evolution. We don't see exotic matter (composed of four and even five quarks) because it isn't stable. This is also why we don't find certain elements or molecules in nature. Ockham's Razor suggests natural selection over design when it comes to complex systems.
The theorem of natural selection, "Darwin's universal acid," can explain selection even if most of what we think we know about the world is wrong.
Hoffman assumes the external world exists because all empirical evidence tells us it does. He is looking for fundemental flaws in how our senses represent the world because empiricism has also show us that our senses mislead us about reality at a fundemental level, and the history of science has shown us how our preconceptions have frequently allowed us to miss answers right in front of our faces.
With those as a given, the only extra assumptions you need for the theory he is testing is:
A. The enviornment (everything except the organism), contains more information than the organism does.
B. The organism cannot store an infinite amount of information and lacks an infinite amount of processing power.
There are, of course, objections to the reality of the physical world that don't seem resolvable. He is rejecting radical skepticism in that sense.
Hoffman goes through the objection I think you are getting at, i.e. that his argument is self refuting, in his book. "If you say we don't know the real world, how can you know we're wrong?"
The answer is that the logic of his argument is "if p then not q." This does not require one to have a full, absolute definition of p. "-X * -X is a positive number," does not require one to have defined X. The logic of multiplication is that two negatives multiplied together produces a positive number.
The logic of his argument is the same. Fitness versus truth theorem is saying that natural selection will favor representations geared towards representing information in terms of fitness. You don't need to define what truth is to have a theorem that says selection will favor representations that do not favor it.
One example he uses is a simulation where a "critter" has to find food to survive and reproduce. One set of critters sees the absolute value of food in each cell they can move to. The other sees only a color pallet, darker if a square has more food than the one it is currently on, lighter if it has less food than their current location. This second model gets the critter more useful information with a fraction of the information.
And this is also how our sensory systems actually seem to work. Wear color shaded glasses and your perspective will quickly adapt to them. Look at the picture below and you'll see square A as a different shade from square B. In a truth based system, they should appear exactly the same because they are the same.
This is all psych 101 and not terribly interesting. The more unique idea is that discrete objects, three dimensional space, etc. is simply a more deeply engrained illusion. Science is hamstrung by these persistent illusions and our tendency to project models that work with our perceptual system into reality. Thus we'll look for how neurons cause minds and forget that neurons aren't actually discrete systems and that there is no evidence that they produce anything like minds without glial cells, CSF, oxygenated blood, etc.
I think he is missing something though. Given the enviornment can change so drastically, it would seem to me that there would be merit in anchoring perceptions closer to truth somehow. I think this might be why animals evolved discrete senses that are processed separately from one another and experienced quite discretely.
He gives synthesesia as an example of how our senses don't reflect reality. The argument goes "if the number four is blue for some people and the shape of a triangle is rough textured, this shows how far off our senses can get." He sees these as an advantageous adaptations because many artists and people with high intelligence have them.
I don't think it is so simple. I think our senses are kept separate for a reason. Our senses are kept discrete as a way of cross checking perceptions and getting closer to reality (even if we still don't get very close.) If you perceive yellow as "light and airy," you might carry something yellow you might otherwise not and waste precious calories because your sense of sight is too entangled with your sense of touch. Deception is common in nature and discrete senses help ferret out deception. A bug might look visually identical to a stick to a predator, but their hearing might be able to detect the insects' internal moments and allow it to score those calories by eating the insect nonetheless.
That said, this anchoring doesn't have to keep us very close to reality, it just keeps us close enough.
That's where Charles Pinter's book Mind and the Cosmic Order has some interesting things to say. He says that all sentient creatures up to and including humans negotiate their environment by seeing in 'gestalts' which are ordered wholes. But these gestalts don't exist in the physical world, they're wholly and solely the creation of the animal mind. He doesn't say that the external world doesn't exist, only that the way in which it exists is devoid of features, structure and form, which are imputed to it by the mind.
However what appears missing in both Hoffman and Pinter's ideas is an account of reason. Humans are distinct from other creatures in having meta-cognition - they are able to examine their own cognition and ask questions about it through deductive reasoning. This suggests it is possible to arrive at a kind of understanding which is not simply given by way of sensory data (which is the ancient conception of rationalist philosophy).
But it is interesting how both support the model of the mind as a constructive process that creates, generates or builds our world-picture, which seems to me to irrevocably disrupt the view of naive realism.
(Also might be of interest that Hoffman is one of the academic advisors to Kastup's Essentia Foundation.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
How does that square with this statement from his interview:
So mentation is timeless, that is, without succession? The universal mind has no dashboard of physicalism? The universal mind is unbounded mentation?
If one answers yes to all, then there is no evolution in and of itself. Our dashboard then fabricates evolution out of the time- and space-less. Evolution would be just a story we tell ourselves.
Realist, eh? ;-)
So, just to be clear, you think what I said was wrong, do you? So, when he said "Their esse is percipi" - so, their being is to be perceived - you think he was talking about all things and not just sensations?
It's just that he's really clear on this - clear on pretty much everything, in fact, as you'd know if you'd read him - and so it's a bit odd that you think I'm misunderstanding him. Only someone who knew nothing about Berkeley and had just read a wiki page written by a confident ignoramus would think he was talking about being in general as opposed to the being of sensations. That's how it seems to me - someone who has read Berkeley. Odd. Yet you think I don't understand him.
As you no doubt know, the quote ' "their esse is percipi" occurs in paragraph 3 of the principles, so perhaps correct my misunderstanding by explaining how the words surrounding it do not mean precisely what I said, and not at all what you said.
Do you see as well how he didn't actually say "to be is to be perceived"? He said "Their esse is percipi". That means "their being is to be perceived". And the 'their' refers to what....? Sensations. As you'd know if understood him. Which you don't. Demonstrably.
Throughout his book he refers to his belief that there is "something" out there. That to me bespeaks realism. I'm not sure if his opinions have since changed, but I don't see how that quote would necessarily rule out realism. In Wheeler's participatory universe and later iterations by other physicists there are not definite "objects" or "space" before observation/interaction, but observation also doesn't generate what it finds wholly on its own. There are rules as to how the actual emerges from the possible through these interactions (allowing that they are still incomplete models). So that "something" is very strange in comparison to naive realism, but it is also still quite far from a model where the self wholly generates that which it finds around it.
Neither does it do so in Kant's philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is referred to as 'subjective idealism', and usually associated with Berkeley, which Kant took pains to differentiate himself from.
If realism understands sensory perception to be a veridical representation of mind-independent objects then it certainly is ruled out by these considerations. Hoffman calls his position 'conscious realism':
Plainly an idealist philosophy in my reckoning.
You'll need to read Kastrup more closely to get a better explanation that I can provide. I'm neither an idealist, nor a philosopher, so for me all this more like trying to understand the plots of various stories. Kastrup is committed to evolution and to matter being an illusion. What all this means in terms of coherence and big ticket philosophical notions like time, being and becoming, I can't tell you.
I don't have time to read the book, but does he speculate at the nature of those gestalts? Are they arbitrarily built into the evolutionary process, or more of a symbiotic relationship between animals and nature (whatever what is)?
And it is one book well worth reading. It's quite brief, very direct and to the point. Phenomenology of Spirit, it ain't. :-) (Here's the amazon page. You will note the positive review - they're all 5 star - by yours truly.)
"Idealism" (like materialism, etc) is neither a formal theorem nor a factual truth-claim so the question is incoherent.
It is a claim, oui? The question of its decidability arises quite naturally as far as I can tell. Why would we argue the point otherwise?
No. It's a speculative supposition (or avowal), not propositional statement / thesis.
It's an intriguing idea. Do you believe that ideas like 'goodness' and 'beauty' are part of our cognitive heritage and how would this differ to them being instantiations of Platonic forms?
I see. Idealism = Everything is mind-dependent. Is this not a proposition? It feels like one to me. Prove to me that idealism is nonpropositional.
Again, Pinter's book is not a philosophy book as such. So he himself doesn't go into that. But I have a strong interest in Platonic idealism, and I think you can map it against his model. I see h. sapiens rational and linguistic abilities as developing out of, or evolving from, the simpler cognitive forms present in earlier species. H. Sapiens crossed a developmental threshold with the development of reason, story-telling, speech and self-awareness. Within that model, such notions Plato's universal ideas are like consistent structures within a rational intelligence. (That's more the subject of Kelly Ross' article Meaning and the Problem of Universals.)
The basic takeway from Pinter's book, is that ideas, and indeed all qualia (qualitative mental states) are not objectively real i.e. they don't exist in a way which is discernable to objective measurement (which of course is the hard problem, which he mentions). But they're real, in that they comprise the foundational elements of our own experience of the world. You can see how that fits into a kind of dualist theory but he supports it with many references from cognitive science.
I would say instead that the mind is infinite intelligence and that Hoffman is coming from this from a materialist scientific frame of mind instead of with philosophy. Science can continue to find aspects of an object that we can't ordinarily sense but what we sense is real. Color tests are tricky but in the real lived world apart from electronics someone with good eyesight can tell what a true color is. Finally, you do need a definition of real and true if you set out to deny them.
Hoffman rejects physicalism/materialism. In his view consciousness is fundamental. His wiki entry is here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
Nice primer. Thanks.
My "proof" is that there is no truth-maker for "idealism" (e.g. reality is mind-dependent).
How would you separate the aspects of human thought which are innate and eternal, as platonic realism dictates, from the aspects which are constructed by the human mind, and are "evolving"? Is this an example of the distinction between content and form? Would you propose that the content, being some fundamental platonic forms, which constitutes the subject matter of thinking, is distinguishable from the formal structures which the mind creates, as a "world-picture" for example.
The reason I ask this, is that you seem to adhere strongly to platonic realism, which would understand "ideas" or "Forms" as eternal unchanging, innate features of our intelligible universe, yet you also allow features which are constructions of the mind when you want to discredit naive realism. The following is a quote from a few posts back.
Quoting Wayfarer
The issue here, is the nominalist/realist debate which you often refer to. You seem to employ nominalist principles when you are arguing against some forms of realism, But then when it comes to supporting platonic realism, you appear to be anti-nominalist.
Would you be proposing some sort of hylomorphism of intelligible objects? In this case, a conceptual structure would consist of some parts which are eternal unchanging platonic ideals (the subject-matter or content of the intelligible object), and some parts would be constructs, produced or created by the human mind (the formal aspect of the intelligible object).
From this perspective, would we as human beings, have a vantage point, toward understanding the nature of true, pure, separate, independent, and immaterial Forms? If this form of dualism which you seem to be proposing places the innate, eternal Ideas, of platonic realism, as the subject matter, being the material content of the intelligible object, how can we turn this around to give true separate, existence to the independent Forms, as immaterial?
Do you see the point I'm making? This type of thinking, which gives priority to platonic realism, instead of denying all forms of realism, as a first principle of Socratic skepticism, gives us an upside down, or backward starting point. If instead, we assign "intelligibility" only to what is created by the mind, under Plato's principle of "the good", then we have a true starting point, to see that anything intelligible is necessarily created by a mind. And the idea of eternal, unchanging intelligible objects, as platonic forms, must be dismissed as incoherent.
In the wiki reference, theres a citation, #9. Did you investigate?
If not, check out the 40 minute mark, and thereafter.
No, didn't notice that one.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There's an entire essay in this question, but to answer very briefly - I think 'eternal' is oversold for Platonic ideas and the like. It's more that they're non-temporal - that they don't come into or go out of existence - they're not temporally delimited or composed of parts.
[quote=Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra]Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distiction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed. [/quote]
The evolution of h. sapiens is fairly well understood. But I share with Alfred Russel Wallace scepticism that the intellectual, artistic and creative faculties can be understood solely through the lens of evolutionary biology. That we evolved, just as the science says, but we 'passed a threshhold' when we learned reason and speech. I think the Greek philosophers literally discovered and articulated the power of reason, the Logos. And I think Western culture, on the whole, has since forgotten it again.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Insightful observation. Naive realism and empiricist philosophy, as you know, rejects 'innate ideas'. That is what practically defines them. So I believe that the intelligence has some innate capacities. (Heaven knows, the mind might even have memories or insights from previous lives, as Plato seemed to accept. Perhaps that is passed on through something like morphic resonance.) In any case, there are universal ideas, and they're bigger than any individual or any specific culture. Even many of the principles discovered by science can be included in that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Dualism - partially physical and partially intellectual (noetic in the traditional sense). One foot in each world. Look at what humans have been capable of. I don't think physical evolution alone accounts for that. The pre-modern intuition was that 'nous', the power of reason, provided insight into the causal realm. That has also largely been lost (as per Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, amongst other sources.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's because it's not what I mean, you continually misconstrue it whenever it's discussed, from my point of view.
Not that biga deal; support for your.....
Quoting Wayfarer
....is all.
In addition to what youve been saying, Hoffman says, space, time, causality are fictions.....useful fictions, and the proper idealist against which at least some if not most modern idealists are judged, says, ....the construction of our fictions, which are not the less fictions on that account...., in speaking of just those notions.
https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/consciousness-scientific-materialism-and-the-new-idealism/
https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/12/03/dusting-off-dualism/
He starts with physicalism
I would also add that Hoffman rejects our natural sense of shape of body. For him everything spatial is an illusion, as with Kant. If science says something that is obviously wrong philosophically, follow philosophy because it can define what truth is and science can't. Hoffman even admits that they don't know everything about the brain. This means he hasn't proven anything
That very much echos Wittgenstein's commentary in The Blue Book that briefly touched upon the logic and sense-making of neuroscience. Wittgenstein's entire 'Ordinary Language philosophy' that came after the Blue Book can almost be described as elaborating 'analytic solipsism' , e.g in PI
295. "I know .... only from my own case"what kind of proposition
is this meant to be at all? An experiential one? No.A grammatical
one?
I say "almost", due to the fact that if realism, idealism and solipsism are understood to refer to grammatical stances, and if one is free to choose one's grammatical stance in accordance with one's circumstances, then the so-called "ontological commitments" that are entailed by these contrary positions can only refer to the state of mind and intentions of their asserters, in which case the public debate between realism and idealism amounts to psychological differences among the public that have no relevance to the empirical sciences at large.
Because it's not possible for there to be a truthmaker or because it's not possible verify the existence of said truthmaker?
It seems to me like there is no logical reason a truthmaker for physicalism cannot exist. A physical thing existing in the absence of mind does not seem necessarily impossible. Likewise, idealism is the claim that what people call physical things don't exist without minds. There appears to be a possible falsemaker for this negative claim.
It seems like for this:
to hold you need some other premises such as: "only knowable factual truth-claims have meaning," i.e. something like verificationism. Logic doesn't necessitate that the truthmaker for physicalism cannot exist, it only entails that it cannot be known. But unknowable truths seem like they might be around anyhow (e.g. Fitch's Unknowability Paradox).
The other problem in that case is that the limits of knowabilty seem to move around quite a bit on us.
I don't think he has rejected the idealist label, but I also don't think idealism = anti-realism. I agree with the SEP article that idealism is more often defined by "what it is not," and that seems to hold Hoffman's model. But it's also possible the he puts forth a quote different model in other places, people's ontology changes.
But maybe the issue here is that we're not clear on terms.
By realism I mean simply the idea that there is something "out there" which has a casual role in perceptions. I put Hoffman in this bucket because he repeatedly stresses that he does believe there is a "something" outside the mind. It's also the case that his entire argument makes very little sense if you hold that there is no reality outside the mind. What then would be the point of references to evolution, apparent illusions, etc.? A core premise of his fitness versus truth theorem is that there exists a tradeoff between more and less faithful representations of "things," and this is true regardless of whether fully faithful representations are actually possible (his claim is that they are not, in part because the entire question is framed wrong).
I would place him with Schelling and Hegel in this respect. For them, nature was an actual entity, it was merely the objective/subjective dichotomy that was false (somewhat similarly to Shankara, but without the problems of seemingly falling into an excluded middle).
Hoffman, like Hegel, would be a fallibleist, in that we, as individuals, can never come to know a "thing-in-itself." The entire idea of the noumena becomes nonsense because "things-in-themselves" don't actually exist. The discrete objects the idea entails are an illusion foisted on us by our evolutionary heritage. Hoffman seems to embrace models of a participatory universe, which entail that what we think of as things only exist as sets of relationships, i.e. what "things" are in terms of something else.
This might fit certain definitions of anti-realism because it makes our propositions not references to actual entities. But in another sense it is realist because it definitely posits a "something else," outside perception. This is like the difference between Advaita Vendanta and Absolute idealism. Everything experienced isn't falsity as in Advaita, you don't have this reduction where Brahman is the sole ontic entity, the "something else," has an ontic status. Indeed, Hoffman's whole goal per the introduction is to help us move past misconceptions and gain better understanding of that something.
Since the book isn't centered around philosophy, I can't really say if there is a contradiction here. It seems like he might be falling into the same sorts of trouble Kant had with his unresolved semi-dualism. It might also be that he played down a more anti-realist position in the book to make it more accessible, or that he developed those positions later. That would certainly make sense if he looked at his model and said "damn, I recreated Kant's incoherence."
I covered that in the post with -X * -X <> any positive number. He includes the formal logical proof for FvT Theorem. You don't need a definition of something to say what it cannot be given simple premises, otherwise formal logic would be useless.
But this is not what we see in experiments on color discrimination. The ability to discriminate between colors changes with age, varies by person, varies by gender, and crucially for the argument, varies significantly with context and exposure to other colors. In terms of remembering color, the native language of a subject and how said language categorizes colors effects how well they can remember color differences.
Truthmakers are components of the correspondence theory of truth. A truthmaker is not evidence. It's a state of affairs.
The proposition that idealism is the case would be true if that state of affairs obtains. This implies the dubiousness of correspondence theory, and why it's not a popular theory of truth.
For my sake....what is scientific idealism? Single sentence kinda thing?
Exactly. And physicalism could indeed be a state of affairs even if solid "evidence" for it cannot exist due to the fact that all such evidence comes in the form of first person experiences.
It's not? It seems to me like the most common theory I've seen. It's either in its pure form or wrapped up as pragmatism. A paragraph or two is spared to identify that the author is aware of issues with the correspondence theory, they invoke pragmatism, and then promptly carry on using what is essentially the correspondence definition for the rest of their work.
And I can't totally blame them because for many topics it is the most straightforward definition to use.
The more I think about it, most versions seem to be evolutionary epistemology plus reinventing Kant's problem of a noumena that we can never know. Same problems, different environment lol.
We'll need to wait for scientific Hegelianism to emerge to rectify this.
That seems like a recipe for suspect metaphysical shenanigans, though. Do they faithfully adhere to the limits of pragmatism?
In saying for instance, that the redness of a strawberry isn't semantically reducible to a perception of the strawberry, one is pointing out that the meaning of 'red' is predictive and refers to the conditional expectation of seeing other phenomena in relation to the strawberry if committing hypothetical courses of action, such as performing a chemical or spectroscopic analysis of the strawberry under laboratory conditions.
For the idealist, a conditional expectation is by definition part of the present that includes the state of the observer and his environment. This implies that if the observer who previously judged the strawberry to be red decides upon further investigation that the strawberry is in fact grey, that his previous judgement that the strawberry is red isn't falsified by his later change of mind. For the idealist, the observer's judgements changed because his situation changed, and so he hasn't committed a 'real' epistemic error. So for the idealist, perceptual errors and failed predictions aren't the result of failing to predict perception transcendent 'truth' but instead merely refer to classes of changing circumstance. This viewpoint has the physical advantage of interpreting human perception no differently to other physical measurement apparatus such as geiger-counters that are never said to be 'wrong', but only faulty under conditions in which where their desired or expected responses are unexpected or misunderstood.
The grey strawberry illusion for reference:. :grin:
Formal logic is a part of philosophy, which defines truth. You couldn't think at all without the concept of truth. As for colors, they change is relationship to each other but they are objective. All these science people have preconceived notions they don't question
As in....reinventing them so they can be known? Then they wouldnt be Kants noumena, then, right? So it isnt so much reinventing as re-defining. Which is fine; happens all the time. Historical precedent and all that.
Even so, if scientific idealism is a version of evolutionary epistemology, Im no better off then when I started. From this armchair, both look like a subject with a qualifier, that is, idealism as a doctrine grounded by scientific conditions, and, epistemology as a doctrine grounded in human evolution. I find it more productive to ask folks what they mean by these phrases, or, ask how they wish me to understand what they mean.
Anyway....thanks.
Rarely. But it can work well enough for cross disciplinary analysis of scientific findings. You can still see how different models fit together and what their implications are even if you're working with faulty premises. That said, handwaving these epistemologicaly issues aside also does lead to bad reasoning in many cases.
Wilczek's "The Lightness of Being," is a good example of when this works well. He notes that quarks only exist as a mathematical structure. "The bit is the it," as he puts it. However, he explains quantum chromodynamics using analogies to objects that do occupy space in our perceptions (colored triangles, etc.) The goal is to give readers an understanding of QCD and local vs global symmetries without them having to understand the complex mathematics undergirding the theory. I think this is a fine aim. I think I might still have been lost if I hadn't already taken a course on the topic, but I feel less lost than I did then because he's presenting the information in a way that is more accessible even if the examples contradict the metaphysical position he's also asking us to take re: abstract objects being the foundation for physical "stuff."
I am referring to:
Physicalism is a factual truth-claim. It's the claim that the physical, which is mind independent, is ontologically more primitive than experience; that the physical supervenes on everything that is. Arguably this definition is too broad to be particularly meaningful, but generally physicalism also entails the claim that physics (once completed) provides a full description of "what is," and that this description holds regardless of whether there is anything around to observer said being.
Idealism has a more squishy definition. We could say it is the claim that: "things do not exist outside the experience of them." This doesn't cover all forms of idealism but works well enough for showing it is a factual claim.
The truthmaker for physicalism would be the existence of the universe described by physics in the absence of experience. This seems to me like a truthmaker that is possible (I suppose many idealists would say it is not), but not observable. Is your argument that claims about "what being is like" outside of experience are incoherent?
I'll allow I do find those arguments somewhat convincing.
Most common versions of physicalism would agree that a truthmaker for their claim would be that, long before any experiencing thing had time to develop, stars were doing what physics describes them as doing, fusing hydrogen into helium and giving off light.
Idealism is harder to pin down, but the version put forth above is a negative claim. If nothing exists outside experience, then idealism would have a correspondence with facts of the world.
Maybe it should, but I'm not at all certain it does. Philosophers seem to make plenty of propositions. They make whole books of nothing but numbered propositions.
No, I say "reinventing," because it is the same paradoxical issue. Our perceptions are about the noumenal world, but we can never know the noumenal world as it is, full stop. Seems like the same problem to me.
The truthmaker for physicalism (as a proposition) would be physicalism (as a state of affairs). Same with idealism.
Ok. Thanks again.
Isn't it the case that many physicalists subscribe to methodological naturalism, not philosophical naturalism? They don't say there is no supernatural - they maintain that all we have access to and can investigate is the apparent natural world. In other words, the physicalist who is a methodological naturalist, doesn't make truth claims about the nature of reality.
I don't think that's the same thing. Physicalism is an ontology, it's an explicit claim about the nature of reality. Epistemological/methodological considerations stand beside that. If "the physicalist who is a methodological naturalist doesn't make truth claims about the nature of reality," then in what way is their position physicalist?
You can claim the ontological question is meaningless metaphysical mumbo jumbo, or just not worth debating, but then you're not arguing for physicalism anymore. "Epistemological physicalism" or "methodological physicalism," do not make sense as concepts, they're conflating two different things, "how you can gain knowledge of the world," and "how reality is."
At their worst, those titles represent a bait and switch, where arguments are offered up in favor of the methods of science, and then the successes of the methods science are offered up as evidence for physicalism. At their best, the "physicalism," part of the term is just superfluous.
But obviously you can be a physicalists, not want to debate ontology, and advance methodological naturalism. That makes perfect sense to me; you just pass over the questions you don't think you can answer.
So:
"Everything in the world is Brahman and is caused by Brahman."
"Only things that are experienced actually exist. If no one is around to see the Moon it ceases to be."
"Only my mind exists. What appears to be other people, with other minds, do not actually exist."
"The world we experience is a simulation run by advanced AIs who use our body heat to generate power."
None of these are claims? The existence or non-existence of other minds isn't a factual state of affairs that can make solipsism true or false?
Ontologies are definitionally sets of claims. I'm giving the definition because they are defined by the claims they make.
Well, for me it is not a lot different to atheists who claim there is no good reason to believe in god but they do not say there is no god. That would be an unfalsifiable potion. The argument might be, there's no good reason to accept that there is anything to reality other than physicalism.
They may be. If they are factual truth-claims, then there are truth-maker facts to which they correspond. Thus, they're expressions of science, not philosophy.
I don't think these are analogous. One about God is saying "there is no evidence for X, so even though X can't be excluded by necessity, it does not make sense to believe that X is true."
The formulation re: physicalism would be: "There are no solid reasons to accept Q, R, S, etc. (other ontologies) so we should accept X."
The problem here is that the same arguments for why Q, R, and S can't be shown to be true all apply for physicalism. We know there is a reality, hence the formulation of ontologies. I don't see how you make the argument that "unless other ontologies can prove they are true, we should go with physicalism." Why is that ontology the default we need positive evidence to move away from?
I totally agree. The truthmaker for solipsism would be that the solipsist's mind is indeed the only mind that exists. The truthmaker for subjective idealism would be the lack of anything existing outside of experience. Other minds existing is a state of affairs. The Milkyway rotating in space even when there is no first-person awareness of it would be a state of affairs. How is the claim that "things do not exist without experience," different from "smoke does not exist without fire," such that one is a claim/proposition and the other is not? I'll allow that one does not seem falsifiable, but that doesn't mean it can or can't correspond to reality.
So, I don't think I understand your objection.
This may not be premium philosophical reasoning, but I guess you would say that there's no good evidence of anything supernatural or non-physical. The time to believe something is when there is good reason to believe it. The default ontology is physicalism until this is defeated by new information.
@180 Proof how would you tidy this up or piss it off?
And what is the evidence that that supports the position of ontological physicalism in the first place? Does anything make it the default?
What would constitute evidence of something supernatural? If tomorrow someone made a giant breakthrough in M theory that made amazingly accurate predictions about our world and:
- The theory also included "soul particles" that enter our dimension from another dimension and suffuse conscious entities; and
- Experiments based on the theory that aimed to confirm (at least to the standards of top scientific journals) the existence of the soul particles did indeed appear to confirm the existence of the particles, their extra dimensional nature, and the fact that they only enter our world in relation to intelligent entities;
...wouldn't people just claim that "well yes, of course soul particles are physical, look at this evidence for them." Likewise, we have a lot of experiments that have verified that an observation of one thing can instantaneously affect another thing at any distance; this non-locality is now considered physical. We also have a few experiments that seem to suggest that there is no one objective description of events at a fundamental level, that is, which observer you are determines what you observe. If these results do keep piling up, I have little doubt that "the lack of a single objective, public world" will also be considered physical. This is Hemple's Dilemma.
Point there is that asking for evidence of non-physical phenomena doesn't work when the definition of physical expands to include all phenomena we think we have good reason to accept. Historically, this is what has happened. But any other ontology can just as easily do the same thing.
In practice what this means is that worldviews should turn up in the conclusions of arguments, not the premises. The premises should be self evident truths of reason (or apparent ones).
If one sticks to that practice then one will be following reason rather than simply applying one's arbitrary worldview to the world and only accepting as evidence that which is consistent with your worldview. The latter is what most do. And it's just silly. It's not proper philosophy. It's just echo chamber construction. If you start with a worldview then all you'll do is confirm it. Stop it. Follow reason, don't follow whatever worldview appealed to you first.
Now, if one does that - if one follows reason - then idealism is revealed to be true. This is because Berkeley provided an argument for it that seems to demonstrate its truth. He did not just assume it is true and then interpret everything else accordingly. He just reasoned to the conclusion that it was true.
Quoting Bartricks
In other words "faith" (Plantinga) :eyes: :rofl:
Note how you describe your worldview first. Worldview in, same worldview out. Tedious and pointless.
All you are going to do is tell others that idealism isn't your worldview. By why should anyone care about that? That's not evidence of anything.
Quoting 180 Proof
Thanks.
If you try and use reason to support the worldview you happen to hold, then you are not doing philosophy. You are just a dogmatist. You are using reason, but not following reason. You think you already know what's true and so you have made yourself, and not reason, the measure of things.
Berkeley did philosophy. He presented an argument that had premises that appear self evident to reason and that entail that the world is made of an external mind's sensations.
To challenge him one would need to do philosophy. That is, one would need to show that one or other of his apparent self evident truths of reason conflict with others that are even more self evident.
One does not challenge him if all one does is point out that the worldview described in his conclusion is not your worldview
:up:
Scientists who don't accept that matter (matter/energy) is the fundamental substance. e.g. Richard Conn Henry The Mental Universe, Bernard D'Espagnat What we call Reality is a State of Mind. But, hey, I was one of the first to enroll in Science and Nonduality and went to the first conference in 2009.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The distinction I see is between scientific/philosophical materialism/physicalism, and idealism. Idealism is a realist philosophy, but it has a different conception of what constitutes reality, one which seems unreal from the materialist point of view.
In any context you are only doing philosophy if you're engaging in the practice of using reason to find out what's true.
And in any context you are doing no more than expressing your conviction that your worldview is true if you're just expressing your conviction that your worldview is true.
Try and refute Berkeley without assuming that materialism is true.
What "self-evident true premises" (A) do you believe Berkeley reasons from and to what sound truth-claims (B) do you believe Berkeley concludes? Specify those and I'll refute them.
Previously refuted :smirk:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/715694
Here are the apparent self-evident truths of reason that Berkeley appeals to (as you'd know if you'd read him): a) mental states cannot exist absent a mind whose states they are; b) the mental states constitutive of our sensations constitute perceptions of the world insofar as they resemble it; c) mental states can only resemble other mental states. From these it follows that any world our sensations constitute perceptions of would itself be made of sensations and thus would be made of the sensations of a mind.
:up: Nor, I would add, to any other aspect of human life. These different systems of ideas are interesting and illuminating just in that they exemplify what is variously imaginable, in my view.
lol. Definitional equality isn't a reflexive relation as definiendum isn't definiens. Otherwise not only is Berkeley refuted, but so is the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
I believe "qualia" to be the closest modern translation of Berkeley's "ideas", as that term serves as an indexical that carries no theoretical meaning, unlike the modern understanding of 'mental states' that is theory laden with inferential semantics.
Sensations - visual, textural, auditory and so on - are mental states, yes? That is, to be seeing or feeling is to be in a mental state. (A 'mental state' is just 'a state of mind'; that is, a state that a mind is in)
That's all he needs. Put what label on them one wants, the fact remains that mental states do seem to require a mind to have them (the idea of a mental state that is not the state of any mind seems a 'manifest contradiction' to use his expression).
And when it comes to how those mental states can constitute perceptions of a sensible world, they would need to resemble it.
For example, one cannot see a smell. A smell in no way resembles a sight, and thus it is not by seeing that one can perceive smells. And if I read a book about Napoleon, then although I become aware of Napoleon via the content of the book, we could not say that I am perceiving Napoleon by means of the book. For the book does not sufficiently resemble Napoleon. (This is not to say that resemblance is sufficient for perception, just that it is necessary).
Similarly, if the external world in no way resembles any sensation we are undergoing, then we are not perceiving it. On the assumption that at least sometimes we are perceiving a world by means of our sensations, the world we are perceiving must itself resemble those sensations and thus must itself be made of sensations.
Sure, but this seems like the opposite of your atheist argument. If the existence of God / the physical nature of reality don't have any practical import, and if no evidence supports their being true over their not being true, wouldn't it make more sense to be agnostic?
Anyhow, to come fill circle, I think the rationale for this sort of speculation, aside from being idle navel gazing, is that assumptions tied to our ontology bleed into our methodology and science whether we like it or not. This is probably even more true in we don't critically examine our ontology, but instead pick it up by osmosis, as a default.
As an example, absolute time was an assumption of materialism in the Newtonian era. It appeared to be a fact verified by a great deal of data and experimentation. Einstein's great insight re: relativity was to identify this fact as arbitrary, simply grounded beliefs about the nature of reality.
Ideas about "how reality is," work their way into science all the time. After the paper on special relativity Einstein rewrote his equations to include a constant that would keep a static-sized universe from having all its mass collapse back in on itself. This ontologically motivated addition has stayed ever since, even after the idea that the universe was expanding became mainstream, and now it has a second life in conceptions of the "metric field," and the weight of empty space.
Similarly, biologists found themselves in a bind due to the elimination of formal and final causes from consideration on the grounds that "all that exists is the elementary units of physics and the rules of their interactions." This reduced formal and final causes to useful mental shortcuts at best. Increasingly there is pushback on this. The prohibition of these being "real causes," stems from ontological commitments.
No question. We all live in a shadow land of presuppositions,
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A common question. The way I generally hear it expressed is this - 'atheism' goes to belief; 'agnosticism' goes to knowledge. I don't believe in god, but I don't know if god exists, or not. Like many others, I am an agnostic atheist. Similarly, I don't believe in Bigfoot, but I don't know if Bigfoot exists or not.
Temporality is often associated with change. If something changes, it is temporal, and if it is temporal, it must be generated and destroyed. These are the ideas which Aristotle grappled with in his physics, spatial change and temporality. So Aristotle would argue that if something is non-temporal, it must be never changing and therefore eternal. This is why "eternal", in the sense of Christian theology, has the meaning of outside of time, non-temporal, never changing, while "eternal" in the materialist or physicalist sense means endless time. You can see how different the two senses of "eternal" are, the theological one requires that time has limits, in order that there can be something outside of time, non-temporal, while the materialist one denies that time is limited.
When we posit the reality of something outside of time, "eternal", we must allow for the means for a relationship between the eternal, that which is outside time, and the temporal existents. Are you familiar with Aquinas' conception of "aeviternal", or "aeviternity"? He uses this conception to describe the medium, "the aevum", which is between the eternal and the temporal, and assigns to it the existence of the angels. I believe it's based in a Platonic proposal, of something which is changed, or changes when coming into being, but then is changeless.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think that the artistic and creative faculties of any living being can be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology.
If you listen to the interview with Hoffman on Sam Harris' site that @Mww referred to from about 40 minutes in as suggested (note 9, on the Wiki page you linked) you will find that he agrees with one of the others that whatever gives rise to our world of everyday experience must be somehow "isomorphic" with that experience, which indicates that it is not that we freely or arbitrarily construct reality (although we as part of that "whatever" obviously play a part, in that whatever gives rise to us, to our perceptible bodies and brains as we understand them to be, must also be isomorphic with that perception and understanding).
And as Annaka Harris points out several times in the discussion, this thesis of Hoffman's is not at all controversial in modern science and is quite in keeping with scientific accounts of perception and indirect realism. (It is acknowledged that Hoffmann has arrived at the thesis via a unique route, i.e. via evolutionary theory, though).
So,the salient point is that,while acknowledging that reality might not be "like" (in the naive realist sense) what we experience, what we experienced is nonetheless, in some sense isomorphic with, and determined by, it. So, in that latter sense we have reason to think that reality is "like" what we experience.
So the real world in the naive sense is not "out there independent of us" but whatever gives rise to our everyday world is. And to say this is to espouse a kind of realism.
So, the corollary here would be "I believe in physicalism, but I don't know if physical reality exists?"
This seems different to me because it is a positive claim made in the absence of knowledge as opposed to a negative claim such as: "I don't believe in physicalism, but I don't know if it is true or not."
Would it still count as physicalism if I said I believe in something real that reliably gives rise to our experience of a physical world and is somehow isomorphic with that experience, but that the concept physical would be misplaced if we attempted to apply it beyond the ambit of our experience?
Interesting links; now I understand what you meant by emerging.
Yes, the kind called shifting the goal posts.
:up:
Yes an important distinction.
That's close to what I've already said. Perhaps - 'I believe physicalism is the most likely reality, but I can't know this for certain.' I'm not sure proclamations of absolute truth can be made about anything.
I don't have time to read right now, but I looked and saw this in the heading:
"The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."
I don't think we are entitled to claim that any more than we are its obverse. And one thing is definitely wrong there in my book: observations are of things. Of course, it might not be things as we understand them to be that give rise to the perceptions we count as observations.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not shifting the goalposts if "real" is counted as meaning 'having actual existence regardless and independent of our opinions and perceptions.
Yeah. Meaning is use in a language game (vide Wittgenstein).
Quoting Janus
:fire:
Quoting Bartricks
Composition fallacy. Refuted. (All too easy.) Like I said, kid, the Bishop begins with faith (i.e. "worldview"), ergo his immaterialist dogma. Also, despite having read Bishop Berkeley, you don't understand him (or philosophy) well enough, kid, to recognize his rationalized reasoning from, rather soundly reasoning to "spiritualism". :pray: :eyes:
:up:
Here's what you do: you construct an argument that has the negation of one of his claims as a conclusion and apparent self evident truths as premises.
Has philosophy settled the question of what truth is? Last I checked there were several positions still being argued for. Unless the deflationary one won out, but then I doubt there would be a conflict between scientific claims and philosophy if that were the case, since truth claims depend on the domain in a deflationary account.
So what is the fitness consequence of my actions if it's not a snake? What makes evolution the proper account if we can't say there are real snakes and trains? I think Hoffman undermines his use of evolution here as an account for our mental categories.
That's one interpretation of QM. Decoherence, Many Worlds or Pilot Wave would probably say that macro-scale objects do exist out there independent of us. I'm not terribly worried that the double slit experiment says classical objects don't exist independent of us, since that experiment doesn't work for objects at our scale, unless it's some special supercooled liquid.
What if your reasoning is flawed? What if your premises are faulty? One should start with a scientific understanding of the world, since it's built on centuries of very careful investigation by many smart people. And then see what sort of philosophical view best fits that, and what gaps are left, etc.
So for example, earlier in this thread you gave Berkeley's reasoning for why objects extended in space can't exist, because of infinite divisibility. This ignores what modern physics has to say about subatomic particles and limits to length. It probably also ignores the resolution to Zeno's paradox in math.
:up:
Mathematicians do not have a resolution to Zeno's paradoxes, they just use a work around. And what modern physics says about subatomic particles, is to some extent a product of that work around, because physicists use it. But of course, modern physics is incapable of providing an understanding of subatomic particles.
So we ought to conclude that the work around which mathematics uses, is not very good.
Yeah...I said the links were interesting, but I wouldnt go so far as to say I agree the implications contained in them are all that meaningful.
To see the Universe as it really is means nothing to me. And while I accept the counterintuitive tenets of QM, decoherence never enters my consciousness of grocery lists, road rage or the abysmal foolishness of talking heads. And while it is a mathematical fact toaster ovens will create an interference pattern just as do photons, the scale of the experiment to prove it is currently quite impossible, which reduces to....so what????
So, yes, scientific idealism is emerging, which itself reduces to no more than to, ....raise a loud cry of danger to the public over the destruction of cobwebs, of which the public has never taken any notice, and the loss of which, therefore, it can never feel.....
He sometimes gets dangerously close to the line of undermining his own argument at times, at least by my reckoning. However, overall I think he has a valid argument and summons plenty of good evidence to support it.
For me, part of the apparent "self-refutation," appears to have been due to unexamined assumptions I had absorbed in my studies. I didn't have the ability to easily parse out natural selection as a general theorem from the physicalist ontology that comes with modern biology as extra baggage. I found myself thinking the same thing at that part of the book: "what snake?" But the failure here, for Hoffman anyhow, is due to my assuming that a "real threat to fitness/real selection pressure" = physicalism and all it entails, or that it at least entails all the entities of biology existing as they are currently put forth in the mainstream view.
However, there is no logical reason that you can't have a selection pressure that is constructed by the mind as a "snake," and still have no snake. Sort of how the altimeter of a plane isn't its actual altitude and its hitting zero isn't the selection pressure of the plane crashing itself. The altimeter might be the only information a pilot has access to at night. The argument is that weare flying at night and mistake the altimeter for the ground itself.
Which at least isn't contradictory. How convincing the empirical case is will probably vary between audiences.
The question is if anyone there would see a snake what could it even mean to say there "really" is no snake? If we say it's "really" just a configuration of energy or fundamental particles or fields or "something" atemporal even beyond those things, how would such judgements not be every bit as derivative of and dependent on our perceptions as the snake or the selection pressure for that matter?
Quoting Mww
Nice, is that yours or is it a quote from, or paraphrase of, the Great Burgermeister? I cannot see how it makes any difference what metaphysics or ontology science assumes, or religion for that matter, not to mention everyday life, so for me the whole debate is a "storm in a teacup". It's unfathomable to me how impassioned the polemicists become, as though they are protecting something upon which their well-being, even the well-being of the whole of humanity, somehow depends.
Edit: Thinking further on this, it seems this is the crux of the issue: the supporters of idealism think that materialism will eliminate religion, that it produces an atmosphere in which religion cannot breathe and survive, and the materialist-minded folk think humanity will be fucked unless religion is jettisoned. Personally I don't buy either of these opinions.
The problem is evolution acts on biological entities. It's the reason we have the theory. To explain how there are different species of life forms over time. If you say there is no real snake, then why posit evolution as an explanation for whatever gives rise to the perception of snakes as a threat?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But in this example, why suppose there is flying at all if the data from the altimeter is all we have to go on?
I seriously think we should examine the world we experience and use that to guide our reasoning, instead of just reasoning from first principles. Science is empirical first and foremost.
Wittgenstein in his book On Certainty: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."
To doubt the world is to doubt everything because the world is everything we experience. We have a priori knowledge of the world. This is the foundation at which doubt procedes/ Truth is the correspondence between reality and the mind, and also it applies to truths that lead to full knowledge because all knowledge falls before the Absolute. You doubt that truth exists by claiming to have the truth. That can't be done. It's circular.
What about phenomenology?
I feel like this is similar to the objection raised earlier. Saying something cannot or is highly unlikely to be right does not require you to know what the correct answer is:
See above and the earlier part of the post:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/715874
The only thing you need for this sort of selection is the assumptions that:
1. Living things can die
2. Living things inherit traits
3. Living things can only store a finite amount of information, less than the total of the enviornment and have finite computational capacity
Again, try and refute him without assuming a materialist worldview.
If you can't, then all you're doing is insisting materialism is true and then interpreting everything accordingly. That's silly. It's no different from just assuming Christianity is true and interpreting everything accordingly. Which is what you'd have done 200 years ago on "Ye Philosophy Forum"
Sure, I agree, but my point was more that it doesn't seem to make sense to say something isn't right if we can't say what its not being right could even mean.
So we could say that a snake is really a configuration of energy or quantum fields, but in any case that would just be another description, and we have an idea what that means. But if we say it is "something" that defies all categorization because it is "beyond" all our categories of judgement and modes of intuition then we would not be saying much, if anything.
Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, again. This is the first paragraph in the introduction:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 1)
What the observer brings *is* the picture:
(p. 67)
Pinter makes the point that the scientific 'view from nowhere' comprises nothing more than, or apart from, the formal relationships of objects and forces, but without any features:
p.118
Thoughts are real, but in a different sense to the formal objects of scientific analysis:
(p. 52).
Which is, of course, the meaning of the hard problem.
Pinter advocates for a form of dualism but it's exceptionally clear and quite simple. It has really helped me to understand the sense in which the world is 'mind-generated' - not the world in its entirety, not the whole vast universe of space and time, but 'world' as, and insofar as it is, a meaningful whole - which is the meaning of 'cosmos' - and in which the mind plays a fundamental part. We see everything 'through' that projected, 'mind-created' world, which is, on the one hand, not objectively existent, but on the other, the very basis of our own experience of the world.
This is incorrect, and Wittgenstein was obviously wrong with this principle. In reality, we go ahead and act when we are still in doubt of the outcome. Certainty is clearly not a requirement for acting.
But when we say of the independent objects, that they exist, we use "exist" as a property. And, we've already said, that objects are a property of "the independent world". So we have already a double layer of predication. From this perspective, we've made the predicate "objects", into a subject and we proceed with another layer of predication, concerning the objects. But we are restricted in what we can say about "the objects" by the first premise, already assumed, that these are property of a further object, the world.
The issue is that the first object "the independent world", as a united thing, is not a justifiable assumption or conclusion. This assumption cannot be made as a premise as it is not at all supported by empirical observations, and we do not have the premises required to conclude logically that there is a united object which we can call "the independent world". So there is absolutely no support for "the independent world".
By Occam's razor, we cut this first principle, "the independent world", and we start with what sensation and intuition gives us, individual objects. In Platonic terms, the first principle is "the Many" instead of "the One", then we can proceed to enquire as to what makes an individual object an individual object, in a way which was exemplified by Aristotle, and from this enquiry we can derive principles to justify the existence of "the One", as an individual, rather than as a whole.
In this way we can proceed toward an understanding of what it means to "exist". The quoted passage says that all we can say of objects is that "they exist", but this is rather insignificant if we do not know the conditions for existence. So we dismiss the united object, whatever you call it, "the independent word", or "the universe", as an unsound premise which will only mislead, and ask what does it mean to be one of the many independent objects, thus justifying the concept of "existence".
That got a chuckle outta me, I must say. And you know me.....everything philosophical worth repeating originated in Königsberg.
Quoting Janus
Agreed, in principle. Whatever the name of the issue, in the form of various and sundry -isms, and thereafter the juxtaposition of any single -ism with its dialectical negation, or, as you say....its polemic..... the crux is always the instigation of it, which is, of course, us. We are the crux, insofar as nothing, other than sheer accident, ever happens to or because of us that isnt determined by us.
Which is precisely the exposition given by : What the observer brings *is* the picture.
Quoting Janus
....just like that.
Is there any way at all, to reconcile the glaring contradiction in that statement?
I wanted to bring this up the other day, but thought better of it, cuz it was so obvious to me it made me think I missed something, even while in tune with the rest of the passage. But now that its been presented again, as if to reiterate a point, its weight has doubled.
Forgive the monkey wrench, but, you know......inquiring minds.....
I'll quote this passage in full to convey what Pinter is getting at:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 118-120). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Where I see that converging with the meaning of 'noumenal' is in the definition of the term, which is 'In philosophy, a noumenon (/?nu?m?n?n/, UK also /?na?-/; from Greek: ?o???????; plural noumena) is a posited object or an event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception. ...The Greek word ???????o? nooúmenon (plural ???????? nooúmena) is the neuter middle-passive present participle of ????? noeîn "to think, to mean", which in turn originates from the word ???? noûs, an Attic contracted form of ???? nóos[a] "perception, understanding, mind." A rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought". ' (wiki)
In this context, noumenon means 'object of pure thought' i.e. something known directly by reason or nous, but not by way of an image or likeness - the word is derived from 'nous'. (This is actually different from how Kant uses it, but then this is something for which Kant has been criticized, by Schopenhauer, among others.)
I do see what you're saying is a contradiction, but there's a tricky point here, which is that the noumenal 'exists independently of human sense or perception'. But that is rather different from the idea of a thing that exists independently of human sense or perception, is it not? Because, insofar as it is a sensable object, then it is (according to Pinter) a gestalt which is generated in the mind of the perceiver, not an indepently-existing object. Whereas, as Pinter is saying, the formal objects of science are defineable only in terms of undefined objects formally related (and described in quantitative terms, I would add.) As such, they are independent of sensable perception as a matter of definition, yet can be discerned by scientific analysis and measurement.
Yes, that's a fair point. Hoffman's "Conscious Realism" could be aptly labeled "Conscious Idealism." It's saying that the things we want to talk about 90+% of the time don't exist outside our minds. In my opinion, the conclusions one is forced to draw if they accept his argument are largely in line with those of idealist ontologies, at least in terms of how we should think about the phenomena of experience (including scientific observations). However, there is an important caveat that, hidden away at the ontological basement of being, there is this rather mysterious "other," we're grounding our view in.
The interesting thing is that it is empiricism and the advancement of science that leads us to this weird place. Another interesting trend is that different authors seem to be reaching similar conclusions about what the observations of science are telling us about reality from two distinctly different angles: the lens of physics and the lens of cognitive science/neuroscience.
Now, how big of a problem is this mysterious other in terms of a consistent ontology? How fundamentally different are these two different things, the world of appearances and this "other" and how do they coexist? I think these are unresolved questions and people are right to feel unhappy with the conclusions of the theory in that it doesn't give satisfying answers to them. But it's not all bad news, if you like philosophy, it shows that the field may still have some relevance yet! (And relevance to science too, as working out ways to deal with the issues highlighted could be crucial to answering some of our biggest scientific questions; that is after all the whole point of the theory).
He means you have to be certain of something, because when you TRY to doubt EVERYTHING then you can't doubt anything
All good.
It would be counterproductive, I think, to get into the subtleties of Kantian metaphysics. That being said, the aforementioned contradiction resides in the proposition, ...nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist..., insofar as that they exist says something about its objects.
The confusion arises by calling something an object of pure thought, when, from the perspective of the faculty responsible for it, it is just a thought. Understanding thinks conceptions, understanding thinks noumena, noumena is a conception understanding thinks, and nothing more. It is we that screw it all up by reifying it through conventional language use. Thus it is, that an object of pure thought has very different connotations than that which understanding thinks, yet we, as careless thinkers, use the same word to represent both.
Yes, Kant treats noumena differently, in that for him, they are merely not logically impossible, the existence of them being beyond the capacities of our system, or of any rational intelligence similarly predicated on intuitive representations, to cognize.
Quoting Wayfarer
The tricky point is existence, of which you hold a different perspective than I. I consider both noumena and ideas as non-existent, hence their existence independent of sense is moot. Noumena and ideas do have the commonality of being conceptions having their origins in understanding alone. Ideas, though, with a sufficient aggregate of empirical knowledge, may eventually have conceptions inferred as belonging under them, whereas noumena can never have that end. Kant shows that, by such as the idea of space, the idea of justice, the idea of an ens realissimum, but not once ever enounces an idea of noumenal object.
Strokes....folks.
All good.
"This only perhaps can be remarked, that hitherto the determination of quantity has been made to precede quality and this as is mostly the case, for no given reason. It has already been shown that the beginning is made with being as such, therefore, with qualitative being... It is easily seen from the comparison of quality with quantity that the former by its nature is first... The qualitative determinateness, on the other hand, is one with its being: it neither goes beyond it nor is internal to it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality therefore, as the immediate determinateness, is primary and it is with it that the beginning must be made."
This is from the beginning of phenomenology. What your senses immediately perceive is reality. We are attached to the world through our bodies and psyches. To reject the world as having no being is to deny the reality of the body which you are. What we sense is first in knowledge. We cannot doubt the world's existence without first knowing the world. That's the consequence of being born. This results from our understanding of truth. Even if we were all just minds like Bekerley said, the idea of truth would be a correspondence of our thoughts with reality, although the reality is purely immaterial. It wouldn't be thought to thought without any reality involved. But we know we are inof this world, so that first thoughts which bind all our others is that we are a part of a world which has true existence
Right, but you didn't answer the question as to whether it was a quote from or paraphrase of the Meister... :smile:
Quoting Mww
I think where he and I might disagree, at least in terms of emphasis, if not substance, is that I don't think the observer brings the whole of the picture, in fact I would say the observer is just one part of it, or to put it another way, the observer emerges as one frame out of the (living) picture (or perhaps "movie" would be a better term). (But again, probably more a matter of emphasis than substance).
:up: I'm all for it if some new interesting ideas might emerge.
[quote=Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3title ]There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mindbody problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world.
We normally make about three saccades per second and detailed vision is possible only for about 1 degree at the fovea. ...There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience. The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the explanatory gap and the hard problem. There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.
There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense dataprimarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral visionto see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.
But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene. That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the neural binding problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.[/quote]
Note that what is referred to above as the 'stable world illusion' is what we generally and uncritically think of as 'reality'.
Ok, fine. It was quoted verbatim, but before my feet get held even closer to the torturous fire, I must admit the original context is in regard to the schools (that raise a loud cry), whereas my context is the theoretical science community.
I don't see the logic. Why not just doubt everything? There's no problem with that.
Do you doubt that you doubt?
If you're doubting everything, of course you'd be doubtful of your doubting. Where's the problem?
The difference between an accidentally infinity and an essential one is pertinent. A mind conceiving an essential infinity recurs back upon truth when doubting or saying truth is non-objective. How can you have consciousness if you are an infinity of doubts?
I don't see how infinity is relevant. Your proposed "infinity of doubts" is unwarranted, and a person's consciousness may simply be a doubtful, or uncertain consciousness, i.e. the skeptic.
Well you are God to your thoughts
[quote=René Descartes]Cogito ergo sum.[/quote]
Take that Agrippa, Pyrrho, and all skeptics!
Reminds me of Laozi! Maybe this a formula which we can apply to everything! :chin:
It is a mistake to classify doubt as a type of knowing. Doubt is a form of uncertainty, and knowing is a form of certainty. So in relation to any particular subject, one effective excludes the other. Uncertainty, doubt, is a lacking, privation, or want of knowledge, and it is absolutely false to say that the person who is deprived of knowledge must know oneself to be so deprived. That is contradiction at its most fundamental level. This is the common mistake of all such arguments, to classify doubt as a type of certainty, and insist that the uncertain person must be certain of one's uncertainty. But that is nonsense which completely mischaracterizes, and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of uncertainty.
To properly understand uncertainty and doubt, we can look at the behaviour of children, babies, and other creatures which have not developed the certainty of epistemic knowledge. This gives us a far better understanding of the uncertainty which ought to be associated with radical skepticism, and radical doubt. The issue is with the understanding, or interpretation of meaning. If a person is unsure of what a word or combination of words means, that person will have real doubt with respect to the proposition. And if the person is uncertain of the meaning of all words, then that person has doubt about everything which is expressed in words.
So we cannot portray radical doubt, (or foundational uncertainty as I prefer to call it, in opposition to those who insist on a form of foundational certainty) in the way that Augustine does here. A person does not need to know oneself to be uncertain (doubtful) in order to be uncertain, and this is a very important fact about the nature of knowledge, which Socrates did an excellent job of demonstrating. Knowing-how is prior to knowing-that. So Socrates went through the entire range of human activities, from artists to craftspeople, to manufacturers, to mathematicians, scientists, lawyers, and theologians, and demonstrated that in all forms of human activity people were doing things who could not explain, or understand what they were doing. Doing precedes the human capacity to understand what one is doing. Consider as examples, a child learning to talk, or at the other extreme end of knowledge, the activities of quantum physicists.
The fact that we learn how to do something before we learn what we are doing, demonstrates the priority of uncertainty, because knowing-that involves a higher degree of certainty than knowing-how. And, it shows that it is not required that the person who doubts, knows oneself to be doubting. To portray uncertainty in this way, such that the person who is uncertain must be certain that oneself is uncertain, is a mistaken and profoundly incorrect representation of the nature of knowledge. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not based in certainty, it is supported by uncertainty. As Socrates said, wonder is the base of philosophy. And we know that wonder is a form of uncertainty. and philosophy is what supports knowledge. So we can conclude that knowledge is itself supported by uncertainty, the support being distinct from that which is supported.
Actually, it's what you posted which is beside the point. Look, Augustine demonstrates that one "ought not" doubt such things, just like Wittgenstein claimed to have demonstrated such doubt to be irrational.
The point though, is that claims that we cannot have this sort of doubt, it is logically impossible, because doubting, it is claimed, presupposes certainty. And that is what I objected to, the claim that doubting presupposes certainty, so that such doubt is logically impossible. That someone might demonstrate such doubt as irrational, or another might claim that one ought not doubt some specific things, is beside the point. The point being that such doubt is a very true aspect of reality, whether it's irrational or not, as many living beings, humanity included, commonly do irrational things.
You miss the point again, which is simply that to doubt there must be one who doubts. You've so far wasted 750 words obfuscating this simple observation, I am not going to indulge you any further.
You're just restating the same point, that one ought not doubt everything, such a doubt is irrational, because "to doubt there must be one who doubts". But as I said, showing that such doubt is irrational does not demonstrate that it is logically impossible. Therefore it is you who is actually missing the point by refusing to accept that this sort of irrational uncertainty is a very real part of human life.
And, as I explained with those 750 wasted words, the point you are missing is very important epistemologically, as Socrates demonstrated. Because you miss this point, you will continue with your belief in platonic realism, falsely assuming that some non-temporal, intelligible objects of absolute certainty, underlie all our knowledge as a foundation to it. And, you'll be attracted to faulty theories, like the theory of recollection expressed in Plato's Meno, to support your false belief.
Ha, so you were more correct about Hoffman than I. I had read about 90% of The Case Against Reality by this point, before getting distracted by Wilczek's The Lightness of Being.
In the first 90% of the book, Hoffman is making an argument against physicalism from a physicalist perspective. He keeps pointing out his commitment to the existence of the noumenal. I got distracted because, like many popular science books, it turned into a literature review of famous studies, showing how each supported his propositions. Good backup to produce, but it can get a bit dull, especially after the opening arguments had been so interesting.
In the last small bit of the book he radically switches gears and proposes a totally idealist ontology. It's a mathematical model that has finite conscious agents as its ontological primitive. Each agent posseses a measurable space of different possible experiences and decisions it can make, which can be described probabilistically. This allows theories based on the model to be tested empirically. Decisions by any agent change future options for decisions it will have, and agents interact by changing each other's options and experienced, so these units are Markov Kernels in the model.
A key point to recall here is that, while of course we observe unconscious things like rocks, i.e.things that are not conscious agents, the fact is everything we observe is unconscious. When we observe another person, we observe our icon of them. The icon is not sentient, it is our representation.
The ontology recalls "It From Bit," in some ways to, with the idea that complex conscious agents with a wide menu of possible experiences and decisions would be composed of simpler agents. For example, the odd behavior and experiences of people with split brains is because a more unitary agent has been separated into something closer to two agents in many ways. At the ontological bottom of the model would be agents with just a binary selection for actions, and binary information inputs. This allows for the possibility of a neat tie in to information theoretic versions of physics and the participatory universe concept.
His claim is that such a model can make empirical predictions, and could serve as a basis for working up to our laws of physics, and describing evolutionary biology. That's a big task, but I see how it seems at least possible in theory.
In the last bit, he gets into the concept of an infinite conscious agent that could be described mathematically. This infinite agent would have little in common with the anthropomorphic deities of many religions. Such an entity could actually be described mathematically, but it would not be omniscient and omnipresent, etc. Rather, it has an infinite potential number of experiences and actions. He poses the possibility of a scientific theology of mathematical theories about such infinites. This, to me, sounds like the Absolute, and he does mention Hegel by name in the chapter.
Neat stuff. A bit jarring to have it at the end, although I get why he did it that way. If he started with it many people would drop the book, and there is value in his critique of current models even if you think his model is nonsense. It's a little disappointing though because I'd rather have more material on the theory at the end, but I also see how creating such material is incredibly difficult. It's likely a task akin to the heroic (and somewhat successful) attempts to rebuild the laws of physics without any reference to numbers, totally in terms of relationships. If anything, his idea requires an even larger rework of how we think about things, but the payoff could be considerable if it allows us to make new breakthroughs in the sciences.
So, you were right, I was wrong. I do still like his initial framing, which keeps the noumena, more in some ways. It seems way more accessible to the public at large.
Side note;
Like Katsrup, he denies that AI could be sentiment. I don't know why this bothers me so much. But it seems like, if we get AI that can pass a Turing Test, which we may well get to this century (GPT-4 is coming soon), this standpoint is going to open a huge philosophical can of worms. I don't see why an idealist ontology that can allow for new life being created through sexual reproduction should necessarily have such issues with life being created synthetically. Because, even if we never get to fully digital AI, the idea of hybots, AI that uses both neural tissue and silicon chips, could get us there. We already have basic hybots, for example, a small robot that moves using rat neurons. But then you'll end up with the question of "how much of the entity needs to be composed of neurons versus silicone for it to be sentiment," which seems like it will lead to arbitrary cut offs that don't make sense.
All in all, I am not totally convinced by his solution to the problem he diagnoses, but I like it way more than the Katsrup model in the Idea of the World. I need to take a break from these sorts of books, they're going to end up converting me.
Hegel, following Schelling, had a philosopher of nature. He believed the world was real, not a simulation. The real world comes from the spiritual Absolute but matter is matter for Hegel. If Hoffman is correct, then all of science has been refuted and so why follow science at all anymore? As far as I can see that is the conclusion.
See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBonZ5suKuU
The world may be infinitely complex, but the brain is part of nature and where the intellect and storage capacity is cannot be permanently found if matter is infinitely divisible. You just take it to the quantum level and than below this to infinity. Or the above video has a point that consciousness emerges from brain and is it's own entity with laws that we can never pin down. It's a philosophical assumption that the building blocks can explain what emerges from it.
This sounds like a misunderstanding of the theory, which might be my fault because I was trying to explain it. The theory is not that the world is a simulation, nor does it refute or attempt to refute science. Science is ontologically agnostic; it's a mistake to assume that a theory that attempts to replace physicalism is somehow attempting to supplant science.
Given the degree to which the teaching of science is uncritically grounded in physicalism, I can get how it seems that way. However, the worst the theory is saying vis-a-vis popular physicalist conceptions is that a lot of the entities of science are useful fictions. But this isn't anything new in science, physicalist or not. The "laws" of science are useful fictions. They are idealized mathematical representations of how observations behave. Cartwright uses the example of Newton's laws for this point. The laws don't actually describe how gravity works for classical objects, they describe how gravity works for two idealized objects, which is good enough for most purposes. Add another body into the mix and you get the "three body problem." A gene is an abstraction, a "fundamental unit" of heritability, but it it's not supposed to be an elementary object. It's a fiction, or maybe a better description is "a type of mental shorthand" for an idea that is useful for theories. The mistake, for Hoffman, is in assuming that these bits of mental shorthand are the fundamental objects of reality.
Nor does the theory say that matter isn't real. The theory is grounded in empiricism and we have plenty of observations of what we call matter. What it's doing is pivoting around the ontological baggage that is attached to the "idea of matter."
Well if everything has always been mental entities why cant a mental entity have storage capacity beyond it's form? Hoffman can't continue to apply his theory to his new world
Let me add that, because one set of scientific standards (Hoffman's case) leads to a change once the ontology changes (so that we do know the interfaces), then science does act differently in face of ontologies
Good summary but I wonder about this last bit. Is Hoffman all that clear about what the reality is in itself, outside of our 'desktop icons'? I thought he was pretty much with Kastrup that all is pure mentation experienced as matter.
My take is that he is fairly close to Kastrup in the final chapter of the book.
I think. Part of the problem is that you spend 90% of the book with the Hoffman who is still committed to an objective, mind independent world "out there," and then only get a short time with the idealist Hoffman. Most of what he's focusing on in that last chapter is how you can have an idealistic model that can be used in science, a model that makes empirical claims and predictions. So the ontology is a bit fuzzy.
Unlike Kastrup, who is fine leaving science mostly alone as a methodological system, Hoffman thinks ontological baggage from mainstream physicalism has bled into the sciences and is halting progress there. That makes his goal much different, he wants to find a way to radically shift our intuitions, but to do so in a way that can be modeled empirically and can directly inform science. I'm not sure if I agree that this makes sense. It seems like he is in danger of mixing the methods of science and ontology too much, the same thing he is accusing the mainstream of doing, but again, it's short, so I'm not sure.
I don't think I understand the objection here. Are you saying, "if mental entities are ontologically basic, why are they finite?" Why wouldn't they be?
If I am a thought and the tree is a thought, is the argument that the tree is infinitely complex and hence not comprehendable still intact? I think not. Otherwise we can't understand anything around us. But where does this leave arguments of information and storage if ontology doesn't change the science? The arguments work in one ontology and not the other, so ontology matters
Hey, big of you to say so! You know that Hoffman is one of the academic advisors on the board of Kastrup's 'Essentia Foundation'?
In my view, they represent the mainstream of philosophy more than analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world. I've recently finished Kastrup's book on Schopenhauer, and shows there are many convergences between them.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
'Monadology' comes to mind here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
'Through the looking glass', I call it. ;-)
I'm not sure what this is in reference to. I was talking about Donald Hoffman's book The Case Against Reality. Are we talking about the same thing?
His argument about being able to see reality "as it is," is about how natural selection will favor a sensory interface that represents fitness payoffs, not truth. Not that things are infinitely complex and thus not able to be represented accuracy. The starting point for the work looking at fitness versus truth theorem is that entities are finite.
Earlier on this thread you mentioned that humans can't process infinite information. I don't know why you brought that up if you didn't assume there is infinite information out there. Anyway, the simple answer to Hoffman is that we see things accurately, but incompletely. There is no way for him to prove our representations have no counterpart in nature. He doesn't know what the full reality of an object is, and he knows we get information from the object. So how is he going to prove that there is nothing in the perception that sees *something* about the object? You earlier said yourself that we might sense some of reality and that is all I'm saying. If I see a car I see it for real even though there is much we can't see. So maybe we are on the same page
I see now. My reference to information was simply that we assume that organisms are not infinite. It's not that objects in the enviornment contain infinite information, it's that organisms lack infinite capabilities for storing information, and thus face limits and tradeoffs vis-á-vis information storage and computation speed.
I covered this earlier in the thread. There is no logical necessity to have a complete definition of p to show what p cannot be true of p.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/716647
I'm not totally convinced with his argument, so yes, I think we're somewhat on the same page. But I do agree with his point that the "car" does not exist outside our minds. The relative ratio of information in our conception of the "car" that comes from the "object itself," appears to be:
1. Very low.
2. An extremely small fraction of all information contained within the object.
3. Filled with semantic meaning, and filtered through concepts of space and objects that have no connection to reality.
The further issue is if thinking of objects "as they are themselves," is erroneous in the first place. In an informational analysis, the phenomena of the car only is as it interacts with the enviornment, and as its parts interact with each other.
If we can use evolution to say anything about the infinity or finity of an object, then we have contact with it. The only way to say that we have hardly any real knowledge is by comparing our knowledge to something. I have a philosophical problem with how Hoffman deals with data. He trusts his senses for evolution but only to over throw evolution and leave us... where?
Kastrup's arguments are interesting and sometimes useful. He does seem to me to vastly exaggerate issues pertaining to "alternative" personalities or selves, attributing these to the objects of experience.
We do not know enough about the self to say whether the extra-mental world is or is not compatible with things like selves, whatever they are.
On the other hand, what Kastrup mean by "materialism" is essentially a form of scientism, it seems to me. It need not mean that.
It seems to me that these metaphysical stances could be helpful, but also abused as can be seen with people who fall into Deekpak Chopra's nonsense.
The argument for natural selection as driving the creation of complex organisms isn't based on empirical findings in biology. He is using natural selection as a general theorem. The concept is applied in many ways outside of biology. For instance, we see the type of elements we see because elements above a certain size are selected against; they are unstable. Potentially, we see the type of universe we see because black holes generate new universes and so universes with physics that generate singularities are selected for (a speculative idea, for sure, but one that shows how wide natural selection can be used).
The argument for natural selection is merely that it is a theorem that describes how great amounts of complexity can arise without a designer. Consciousness is very complex. Consciousness arising from natural selection requires fewer entities than consciousness arising from an intentional designer (God). So, parsimony, Ockham's Razor, suggests natural selection as the driving force behind the complexity we see in consciousness.
As you can see, the theorizing comes down to deduction and observations of consciousness, not observations about the world as it is. I'll admit this reasoning seems a little weak, but since it is meant to convince people who don't agree with Hoffman's view on our relationship to the noumenal world "out there," I think it is strong enough. After all, if you reject Hoffman's reasoning here in favor of the idea that we do have solid knowledge of the noumenal world, then the arguments of fitness versus truth theorem still hold (indeed they seem grounded even better), and so you end up back in the same place.
Likewise, we don't need experience of external object to decide that our consciousness is finite. That comes from experience, but experience of consciousness itself. Same for our experience of what appear to be external objects. We know we get a finite amount of information from them because we can look at a poster from far away and not see a bunch of text in the lower left corner. When we get closer, we can now make out the text. This is an observation of incomplete information existing in consciousness; it applies even if you totally reject the external world. If you take the step of positing the external world, you're still going to have that observation that not all information about objects make it to experience, i.e. that our perceptions are finite and do not admit all information about those objects. But these points can all be proved by observations of consciousness itself, without any appeals to the external world.
But you're right, this whole model misses crucial details. Information theoretic approaches to cognitive science suggest a mechanism by which we can have perceptions that derive some of their content from "things-in-themselves." However, I think this doesn't necessarily kill the theory. Sure, some of the content of our perceptions is from those things, but if we lack a clear ability to define which information that is, if we can't track the morphisms that survive the long process from light waves bouncing off an object to our experience of sight, then I think his argument may still hold.
Thanks for the thoughts. Allow me to add that if we start out saying that the world is mental the same arguments seem to continue, in an infinite loop, that we see only for fitness. We don't have to know everything about something to reject it, but this is different from saying we observe objects first in order to even have an argument for fitness. So whether the world is mental or not, Hoffman's reasoning is lethal to any understanding of the phenomenal world. It would be an infinite regress.. But this is ok for me because those arguments loop back and from the finite canceling itself out we have the Absolute return in the form of the world. I don't know how someone can believe the world is in their minds. That doesn't have any meaning for me. What we do have is a world we experience without having to put it in a category. I accept the world as it appears and that is reality. What more is needed except that we experience material objects and ourselves as a physical individualized identity? There is the spiritual of course, but our world is a reality unto itself. In a sense Berkeley was right: to be perceived is to be. Noumena is all around.. What comes first is our understanding that we are part of a larger world. The risk of solipsism is too great otherwise