Troubled sleep
Just a question, and I am sure there is a ready answer; and then, I will be on my way, satisfied that the world is the world. Would someone please tell my why, when I greet my uncle Sidney, I am not "greeting" exclusively (!) systems of neuronal activity?
Troubled sleep over this.
Troubled sleep over this.
Comments (113)
Who's systems of neuronal activity exactly? Yours or his?
We are all systems of neural activity - impossible to untether from external environment through our senses.
A two way system of information exchange.
Ideas, thoughts, beliefs, imagery, sounds, smells, tastes, touches come into our neural system. We process it either storing it as memory or ignoring it/not paying much attention and it is soon forgotten.
And similarly we are also an active source of those things: thoughts, ideas, art, knowledge etc. That we put out into the environment through our verbal (speech) and non verbal (body language) as well as our behaviours and interactions.
We experience sensations and we are also "a sensation" for others- the sensation of what it is like to experience Constance for example, to interact with her, to observe, understanding, question etc. To build a knowledge of that person.
But then, what is a "sensation" in the context of this inquiry? What does it even mean to be a system of neural activity if that which produces the very utterance is itself neural activity? How does perception exit neural activity to observe a brain and conceive of neural activity?
As Morpheus asked Neo, "Is that air you're breathing?"
Are you suspecting that there's more to your uncle than a system of neuronal activity? I guess it will be damn hard to provide any scientific proof of it, and without a scientific proof we are reduced to speculation. That's as much as I can say without having actually met your uncle.
Through self reflection. The brain has the ability to focus on, conjure up, root around in its storage (memories) for large swathes of beliefs, concepts, sensations and ideas that it holds, in essence compartmentalise some of itself, review that info, make new associations (novel perspectives/insights) and in doing so condense that into some more refined conclusions.
The whole brain cannot self reflect on the whole brain as there is no neural networks available to make computations while the others remain static and observed. It can only compartmentalise portions of itself but I suspect these portions can be quite large. Mathematically it doesn't take many neurons to exponentially increase their computational ability. Like factorials in maths.
10 factorial (all the possible arrangements/connections between just 10 neurons) is around 3,628,000 anatomical arrangements. And that's assuming they can just make one connection with one other neuron that isn't already connected to another in the set at a time! When in reality they can connect many branches/synapses with one another - up to 15,000 - dozens of which can be just between two neighbouring neurons.
The "focus of attention" is just that - a focus/focal point, that part of your conscious awareness that can meander through the matrix of collected information and compare it with other stuff. What we aren't actively focusing on at any given time is the subconscious - all those things you "didn't realise you knew" until prompted by a specific trigger or cue that directs you to the memory in question. Like nostalgia for example when you smell something that suddenly reminds you of your grandmother's cooking as a child.
Not only can neural networks process themselves in this way (self reflect). But they can also look outwards to learn about/ secure its own identity by associating with what's around it. Knowing the self by knowing what it isn't (the external world). Observation of exterior incoming data (the external world) is just as important as the reviewing and modulation of internal data (the mind/internal world).
Because in discerning similarities and differences between us and other things (people, animals, beliefs, cultures, customs, classifications: living, dead, animal, plant etc) we are gathering information and making associations between them within our mind (our own neural network).
When we can relate with another for example - by referencing their trauma to a similar trauma that we have already stored away, or if their behaviour and opinions towards the trauma are in line with what we would expect them to say, because its what we ourselves would say, then that's empathy. That is how empathy as a concept can be associated with neural processes - comparison of data and rejection/acceptance of the "likeness" of their data with ours.
We naturally tend to empathise more with loved ones and friends because they are similar to us. We have experienced eachother and enjoy that experience and feel connected to them. They are relatable. It's much harder to empathise with things we have never experienced - strangers, and unfamiliar/strange situations and events that we can't approach with the memories and experiences we have available to us to compare.
Not necessarily speculation. Without scientific proof we can also "trust" that uncle Sidney is more than just a neural network. We can go with common sense (cultural assumptions) that everyone has an "I" ness, a selfness, beyond simply being some mechanical binary machine calculating one's and twos (philosophical zombies) because we know we are, and assume similar things (other people) have similar qualities and behave in similar ways.
I take your word for it that you are in essence similar to me and not a binary machine or a zombie. I follow my instinct and "trust" that this is the case. This trust, however, is far from certainty. This is a form of speculation. We have to make such operational assumptons or we would be paralysed in our decision making. But it's ok. Life is a game of limited information, just like poker. Going for perfect solution wouldn't be viable. I assume you are like me, in other words give you a benefit of the doubt, knowing perfectly well that it might be a wrong assumption, but will have to do for now.
I couldn't agree more Enqramot. Very well said.
Well, that rather complex neuronal activity is unique to that particular system, in which it has stored senstions, memories, emotions, responses, knowledge, feelings, interactions with other systems, skill-sets, melodies and a pattern whereby it recognizes and can distinguish from all others the unique system of neuronal complexes which is designated as "Constance" in its realm of perception. All this neuronal activity takes place in a unique container of specialized cells that are all busy replicating, dying, doing all kinds of work to process elements from the environment into materials to maintain the edifice which is "Sydney", the sum of all those cellular activities, interstitial fluids and structural elements and containing membranes in which it takes place, one of whose various designations is "uncle to Canstance".
Yeah, that seems pretty exclusive. But why is it a problem?
I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. It got to be that he was unable to look at people or experience them in ways that was stable and orientated to the present. He could only 'see' what was underneath - organs, tissue, bones, blood... it made intimacy and connection very difficult. So he quit his job in the morgue and took up gardening. :wink:
Probably a wise and necessary choice. It's scary to see people as completely objective - just a conglomerate of systems, mechanical processes and matter behaving in a way seemingly removed from its material basis.
But that's the beauty if the human body. We are not only matter (substance) carrying out sterile, cold, dead operations. We are also electricity, warmth, energy - that which invests the matter with sense, with capacities beyond the solely objective, the purely physical.
IOW, a gob-smackingly elegant, fragile, complicated, confounding, terrifying and amazing piece of machinery. And all different, to boot!
Precisely!
I witnessed a few autopsies and processed the tissue samples afterward. I had a kind of opposite problem for the first year or so: I couldn't help thinking of them as 'patients', people, just like the ones the surgical specimens came from. None of the techs or pathologists seemed to have any social problems. But I had a friend who couldn't face or stomach or somehow accept the notion of being made of slimy, oozy, squishy living components. She insisted she was all white plastic inside her very pretty skin.
It's a very individual reaction, the one we have to corporeality.
Indeed. And I think it demonstrates how readily someone's equilibrium can be undermined by dwelling on a specificity.
But let's say you had met my uncle. The assumption in place is that it was my uncle, and that this was not something reducible to interior events inside a three and a half pound mass. My uncle is not IN your brain. He is exterior to this object. Why is it that this object can extend beyond itself and do something like affirm something that is not part of a brain at all? It really is a simple question. I mean, we all know what uncles are, and what brains are. How absurd is it to say a barn door "knows" what the wind is that howls through its hinges? Why are brains and uncles different regarding this epistemic connection?
How is an uncle different from a barn door? Sounds like something the Mad Hatter might ask.
I'm more intrigues by why you'd want to go to Wonderland, if it disturbs you so?
It's just one story among a multitude of other imaginable stories. At another level Uncle Sidney is just electrons, protons and neutrons, doing what they habitually do. Or multitudes of twelve kinds of quarks. Or a perturbation in a quantum field. Or chemical elements interacting, combining and separating. Or tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves and a brain that controls. Or a person; a member of a society who shares the same basic conditioning and set of presuppositions about human life that you and I do. Or he's your beloved (or not so beloved) uncle. And so on...
Quoting Constance
Uncles seem to have brains; barn doors do not. Your uncle takes himself to be something, you take him to be something more than merely neurons, barn doors do not take themselves to be anything. We don't know ourselves as neurons at all, other than at "second-hand"; i.e. because the scientists tell us it is so. Neurons mean nothing to us in our everyday lives (unless we are neuroscientists, I guess).
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say but will try to respond anyway.
Quoting Constance
It seems there are 2 versions of your uncle. 1) The real uncle - some kind of entity producing impulses, sending various kinds of information etc 2) an instance of your uncle that your brain manufactures and then customizes, i. e. interpretes those impulses (or signals) and based on them creates a coherent set of rules that it tags/labels as "uncle Sidney". So, while not being "in your brain", your uncle can still sort of send a copy of himself to your brain for further processing, not unlike a computer virus replicating itself. Now, let's say, another person who knows your uncle created another copy of him in his brain. His customized copy will be different to yours. He might say "What an awful person, this Sidney. Full of himself, patronizing, unkind, not listening.", whereas your opinion might be quite different. Are we talking about the same person? Yes, the core is identical, it's the interpretation that makes up the difference. Like god flavour vs devil flavour. Another comparison that springs to mind is a dream being influenced by sensory perception, e.g. sound of the alarm clock being interpreted in dream world as dog barking etc. So, again, the original impulse, and an interpreted copy.
Quoting Constance
It may seem absurd in case of a barn door, but isn't so absurd in case of a computer. In a way, it does "know" certain things and acts upon them. It doesn't make a computer conscious, of course. Sensor-based input can be built into computer systems. This works very much like unconscious part of our brain, for example, when goose bumps appear as an automatic reaction to lowering the temperature. Fully automatic reaction, something in you "knows" how to react.
Quoting Constance
I don't see how this assumption could be proven or disproven. What if he IS reducible? How can you be sure? Have you seen Cast Away movie with Tom Hanks? His only companion on a desert island was a volleyball that (whom?) he called Wilson. He's reduced to tears when Wilson the volleyball floats away during a storm. Modern, much improved upon, version of Wilson would be lamda the word processor (chatbot), a machine that fooled a supposed senior software engineer doubling up as a priest to believe that it's sentient (maybe he wasn't really fooled, maybe he did it for money, I don't know - he lost his job anyway). So, as you can see, creative interpretation can go a long way. Maybe you add something to your uncle, something that isn't there.
Quoting Tom Storm
Reminds me of a girl I dated for a few months decades ago who'd grewn up on a farm and who couldn't eat any meats, poultry or fish that still in anyway resembled the animals they once were. Including eggs! :smirk:
But the thinking cannot go this way. How is it that the whole brain can "compartmentalize portions of itself"? What is, in the simple conditions I have laid out, mathematics? That is, if my uncle is not my uncle because there is epistemic avenue of access to something that is remote from systemic assignment possibilities, then why is it that mathematics can escape this fate? How can you, in other words, make mathematics non reducible to neuronal networks itself, or, speaking generally, how is it that anything is what it is called and familiarly talked about remain what it is if this very thinking itself is confined to something that is itself thought?
It is a problem because your foundational explanatory setting is in no better position to be defended than my uncle. I'm sorry, neuronal activity did you say? But what is this, as I have problematized my Uncle, that is any different? You could have a phd in brain science, and the best you will ever get in the basic philosophical analysis regarding all of the terms of your analytic is more of the same reductive analysis: the very thoughts used to construct the rationalization of Henry's distance from neuronal events are themselves "distant".
I find that fascinating. My daughter is an illustrator and she had this morbid curiosity about working in a mortuary, a kind of "goth" obsession of a Halloweensih pov on such things. Anyway, she applied, didn't get the job, and I was relieved, because she could have either gotten desensitized to the idea of dead people, to put it bluntly, or over sensitized. Doctors in general, surgeons esp., have to be a bit sociopathic, I've read, to have the requisite grace under pressure dealing with such things.
In a similar vein, for me, the more I think philosophically, especially reading the phenomenologists, the more I am "sensitized" to being an existing human being, for the questions that have been thrown aside in the advent of modernism have never at all been resolved. Human existence is still the same impossible mystery it has always been. But now, simply ignored.
Rorty put it nicely: How is it that my relation (my brain's) to my uncle any different from a dented car fender and the offending guard rail? The qualitative complexities of the brain that leap to mind to explain this MUST be resolved into an epistemic connection. Mere causal connectivity does not establish a knowledge relationship.
Yes, as I see it, this is poignantly true. So then, how do I establish a reasonable idea that can make Sidney a person, apart from me, over there, and so on, NOT reducible to any of the above, given that the above are all true? I am concerned that Sydney got lost in the rigorous analysis and no one noticed. So, I am noticing.
This is, in my thoughts, the second most important philosophical question there is.
Then I will not attempt to defend it.
Quoting Constance
You said it first!
Quoting Constance
It's not different, just a little more holistic, as I attempted to reunify the uncle's electrical impulses with the brain and body in which it takes place, and which it appeared you had overlooked in describing him.
Quoting Constance
I'm sure that's true; you seem to know Henry and I don't.
Quoting Constance
That depends on how Sydney has offended you.
But how do you escape the final description of all you say above being brain events only, even, and this is important, the reference to something being a brain event? Talk about my "real" uncle: is such a thing even possible to imagine in good analytically grounded conscience?
Quoting enqramot
The barn door: The complexity of your computer is not at issue, for first you have to explain the fundamentals: at best, at the level of basic questions (the most basic, which is what philosophy is about) the best you are ever going to get is a causal connection between your computer and and the wind howling through its receptors. It could be AI of the highest order, and you would still be routed to this question: how do causal explanations suffice for knowledge claims? Barn doors and howling winds have exactly this same causality "between" them.
Quoting enqramot
It is not a matter of "what if he is reducible." You are facing here an ineluctable situation, for, as you and I will agree, there are brains and uncles and there is a world. I simply ask, how does the the latter get into the former?
But it wasn't overlooked. Saying something is an electrical impulse itself is subject to the same issue being raised, so the question is clearly begged:
Quoting Vera Mont
The particular traits of Henry are outside the discussion. It could be my cat or interstellar phenomena. If Sidney is, to put it plainly, nothing but a bunch of brain manufactured events, then everything is, because the matter turns to therelationship, not the incidental features.
Quoting Vera Mont
No, it's not this. Sydney has not offended me. This "offending" is not about the violence, but about the question: Given that the causal relationship is the relational characterization in both cases, the car fender vis a vis the guard rail, and my uncle vis a vis my brain events, then causality itself has to be explained as to its ability to "deliver" my uncle to me.
No, it evidently cannot be explained to you in any terms that you accept. The problem(s) of Sydney, Henry, the barn and the car are intractable and insoluble.
But my being me has nothing to do with it. The matter presented as an objective and arguable problem. I mean, if you really think my uncle is unproblematically there in some way, you have to first take on the epistemic obstacle of describing the relation between brains and what brains encounter such that the former know the latter.
As to the intractability, it is not as if the matter stands the way it is; it is a matter of "parts". What is needed is an understanding of the epistemic requirements for knowledge, and an account of how the brain/Uncle Sidney relationship could make this possible. One is reluctant to make a radical move, I know; but then: this IS a radical problem, so the solution has to be commensurately radical.
No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done?
Take your pick. We could follow Quine, Davidson , Wittgenstein , Putnam, Rorty or Nietzsche out of the trap of physicalism. We could embrace a Gadamerian hermeneutics , a phenomenological approach, poststructuralism. We could follow the work of neuroscientists influenced by Peirce, or those adopting enactivism. Lots of options here.
Then you'll just have to do that, I guess. How is not my problem; I sleep very well in my physicalist model. Except for the bladder in the middle night thing, but that, too, is insoluble short of death.
Perhaps for the same reason that when you read this post you are not merely inspecting marks on a screen. Your uncle means something to you. Hopefully more than this post.
But is this 'meaning something' anything but a bunch of electrical impulses in your own neurons?
Ach, you'll never be satisfied. It's not just you. Personally I do complicated mental arithmetic and eventually drop off.
I'd say all of those ideas of Sidney: as neural activity, as electronic or chemical activity, as meat, bone and muscle, as a relative, a citizen, or experiences of Sidney as just a human presence, someone you love, or don't love, someone you feel comfortable with, or not, and so on cannot, do not and should not have equal weight in your relationship with him.
The ideas of what Sidney is, based on objectifying analysis, are parasitic upon your, upon our, lived experience, and your experience might be explainable, to some degree and in some connections, by those observations and analyses, but is not reducible to them. It is lived experience which is primary, and which makes the secondary analyses possible.
I wonder what is, for you, the most important philosophical question?
I feel that descriptions such as: internal, external, real, imaginary etc. are purely arbitrary and used to make sense of the surrounding ocean of information. Both "external" and "internal" events are processed in the brain in a similar way. In that sense everything is internal as truly external events would be inaccessible from your world. Is there an objective reality? Does the Earth disappear the moment the last conscious being cease to exist? In what sense does it exist if there's noone left to perceive it? Yet, should conscious beings reappear later on, they'd be able to "see" the Earth in the same place it used to be. Or not? Let's suppose the real uncle exists. How does he get into your world? I don't see how that could happen. Maybe there's some limited interaction between independently existing worlds whereby some information is shared between them and influence events across multiple subjective worlds. Maybe some part of your uncle leaks into your world and to see the rest of him you'd have to become him or be able to somehow "see through his eyes". Maybe such merging of minds, straddling the two worlds, is possible. Human history is short, I guess there's still a lot left to discover. Trial and error is the way to go in the absence of user's manual. In its essence, everything in our worlds is of virtual nature. What is "matter"? Is a hard wall essentially different to its representation in a computer game? It has arbitrarily defined properties, such as: hard, dense, opaque etc. Arbitrarily, because I can imagine a world in which a wall would have different properties. In a computer game a change like this would be a simple matter of changing a couple of lines of code. Let's imagine we live in a simulation. With sufficient level of detail, how would you distinguish it from reality? And if we accept the virtual nature of reality, we sort of bypass the question: "How does consciousness arise from matter?".
Quoting Constance
The difference between "know" and know, know being reserved for conscious beings. No, my computer had to concede defeat and withdraw in shame. The question of consciousness is not an easy question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the contemporary science has no clue about the nature of consciousness. So how likely are we to solve it in this forum?
Quoting Constance
I'm not so sure I agree with you here. I may agree with you that there are brains, uncles and worlds, but what if our definitions of these objects are not quite in sync? Wouldn't it unhinge our agreement a little bit? As to the question: "How does the world get into uncle's brain?", some clarification of what exactly you understand by that would be welcome.
But none are suitable to the issue at hand. Very helpful, but they miss the mark. Sorry for the long response, but you asked a big question, and I'm no professional philosopher.
I have my limitations. I know Quine is a naturalist, and he declared himself just this, "Philosophically i am bound to Dewey by naturalism....With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world...that they are bound to be studied to the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." And I read his Indeterminacy of Translation paper, his Two Dogmas. Rorty seems to follow in suit: He is unyielding in his insistence that the truth is made not discovered,
I have always been suspicious of this pragmatist's naturalism, for on the one hand, there is a commitment a pragmatic theory of knowledge at work, and this to me is right and it leads into a pragmatic phenomenology. Rorty asked, famously, how does anything out there get in here? And by this, I take him to mean he wants his cake and eat it, too: He rejects "scientism" whereby the philosophical foundation of being is something scientists and naive physicalism have a theory about in their empirical grounding; yet, because science is not philosophy, it takes the latter to get to this grounding, which is pragmatism. But if the grounding lies in a pragmatic analysis of out relations with the world, then the answer to the question in OP cannot be anything close to naturalism; naturalism is just a default term for "what works", and my uncle whose existence is being questioned and examined here is NOT a "what works" manifestation. I read somewhere that Putnam argued against Rorty on this, Rorty, he claimed, defending a kind of pragmatic solipsism, could not allow Putnam's wife to be simply Putnam's wife. This goes to the point I raised here. Jumping to the chase, as I see it, is impossible to argue that a brain thing can "know" anything, and it is not because pragmatic avenues of discussing knowledge don't allow. It is really a simple matter of discovering any path at all. By Rorty's standard, it is not even brain events Putnam is really witnessing; obviously, this kind of talk itself is brain events, so one event to another cannot generate what a brain event is, for that would be the worst kind of circular thinking. Rorty liked Wittgenstein and Heidegger because the latter accepted an "open hermeneuticist" position and the early former held that, like Quine, the best we can do with Metaphysics was say mass, take up the rituals, and so on, and all rejected traditional metaphysics, or, any metaphysics.
I have no use for Nietzsche, for his rejection of metaphysics ended up with a kind of eulogy of the Hemmingway hero, living a life of stylish aficionado (like those opponents of Socrates who were men of bearing and substance who lived with spirit, who the miscreant Socrates would antagonize). Nietzsche adored the gladiatorial! And poststructuralists, like Derrida? His deconstruction is helpful in finding the bottom of things, like a zen master's fan flying across the room at the reader, the world is under erasure at the level of basic questions, and when no center is even thinkable, one can no longer conceive at this level of inquiry. We are foundationally adrift. But the question is, what is there to be discovered AS being adrift? Rorty would say nothing at all, and he takes his cue from Heidegger, who thought poetry broke beyond the bonds of mundanity into new territory, and dropped philosophy to teach literature. But they were, both of them, too wedded to language to give it up.
The matter to me turns on value, and I always come back to early Wittgenstein for support on this. Russell called him a mystic for thinking that the Tractatus' whole point didn't rest with the stand it took against nonsense statements, but rather with that which could not be said, and I think he is just being Kantian about this, not so much with value (and Kant, though I haven't read much into the Critique of Practical Reason, but I have read the CPR and the Metaphysics of Moral, and others, seems to have no grasp of the true metaethical foundation of ethics) but the denial that metaphysics can be talked about, yet insisting that that which had to be passed over in silence was not literally nothing. The good, Witt said in Culture and Value, is divinity, and by the good, he meant the value of value, and this goes to the true mystery of our existence: the Good of good; the bad of bad. So Dewey, Rorty and Quine were naturalists in their own way, and believed that any notion of noumena or talk about non propositional knowledge was simply off the table, leaving them in disingenuous position, as I see it.
But then there is Buber, Husserl and Fink, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry and Meister Eckhart, pseudo Dionysius, many others across history have had intimations of a different sort entirely. When Meister Eckhart prays to God to be rid of God, he trrying to shake off the presumptions that rule his mind implicitly, tacitly always, already. Of course, he had, I presume, never heard of Buddhism.
At any rate, the trouble with these philosophers you call upon to answer the odd question of this OP, is that they are ensconced in a world of thought. It is said (by Rorty and others) that Derrida takes Heidegger to the conclusions he began; hermeneutics (and I haven't read Gadamer) leads to only one place, and that is to bedrock indeterminacy for knowing the world, and he didn't pursue (though, reading Khora and then Caputo's defense of an apophatic approach through Derrida) the possibilities of radical departure of the East.
And the riddle of the missing uncle? As I see it, one has to reconceive the relation between brain and the world. It is meant to take a very obvious epistemic disconnect in the very popular scientifically based concept of physicalist reductionism, and bring out a glaring fault. So much talk in these posts that simply assume conscious thought and feeling is produced by the brain. Well, what is a brain if not, and this is to use science's own paradigm and not even touching upon philosophy at all, if not the product of the brain events that produce experience, and the brain is not supposed to be the product of anything. It is supposed to be a brain.
?? Well, it is a rather flippant pov to say this. It is your problem because it is a philosophical problem, and this is a philosophy club.
I don't have an Uncle Sidney, so put your concerns to rest.
Yes, I understand. But the world is not mathematics, is it? The dropping off place for you, in philosophy has JUST BEGUN with this little scenario. You mean, you have no interest at all in the epistemic conditions that make knowledge of the world possible....here, in a philosophy forum???
Most perceptive! How shall we resolve your little predicament, monsieur/mademoiselle? Do we havta do what you feel we can't/shouldn't do?
Just so you're not flippant about it!
Ok!
Consider that there is impossible to talk about the relationship between an agency of perception and that which is perceived, not simply because it is really difficult to talk about how knowledge relationships work, as if this awaits some future quantum discovery about the behavior of things in particle physics; but because on the physical model, the world itself, the totality of all that can possibly exist, is reduced to the behavior of a hundred billion neurons or so; and these neurons are reducible to an impossibility, because the only way to affirm that they exist is through neuronal events themselves. Pure question begging.
This doesn't seem to make an impression on people, which was to be expected (such are the priorities of clarity over content); but consider Wittgenstein's example (Lecture on Ethics): Let's borrow Wittgenstein's example from his Lecture on Ethics. My Uncle's head, suddenly right before my eyes, turns into a lion's head, just like that, and there you are, or anyone, and it would be miraculous and disturbing and wondrous; but how long would this stay a miracle? The search would begin to understand it, and in this process, the miracle vanishes, and becomes a research project with all of the usual assumptions and paradigms attending, and if nothing conclusive is produced, we would have one of Thomas Kuhn's anomalies, and regular science would have amend a paradigm or two, and regularities would be sought after to establish principles at work, and so forth.
Here, it is far worse. The world is not the world, and there are no scientific resources that can bend the situation to the insistence of a paradigm, or even an anomaly against a paradigm's principle, for paradigms are just more grey matter at work. We want to say the connections are easy to identify, for example, the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are reflected while others are absorbed by the surface of my uncle's presence, and these pass across space to the eye, which receives them, and rods and cones around the retina condition the light and the retina delivers signals to the brain and so on, and hence, the scientific grasp of sight that in part affirms my uncle has its explanatory basis.
But then, one has to ask the astoundingly easy question: how is a light wave in space anything like a chemical event in the brain? Or for that matter, how are words and meanings that are brain events, anything at all like the world "out there"? And this kind of explanatory breakdown applies across the board to every possible faculty of access. And it is so obvious one has to wonder how the assumption that science is about some world out there has any regard at all.
This has, of course, in philosophy, a long history, which is idealism, which goes back to Kant, Berkeley, but really Kant was the one to put this complex thesis out there with amazing clarity and comprehensiveness. But since scientists don't read Kant, and so many in this forum have a scientific background, one way to show that the idea is plausible and important is to approach it from a physicalist model pov. As I see it, this really is a far more efficient and effective way to talk about this.
Not the most important philosophical issue. The second most. the most important is, by far, ethics and metaethics.
The world itself, if we are speaking in the Kantian mode, is far more than merely the behavior of neurons. Our knowing of the world, our model of the world, maybe be generated by the behavior of neurons but in its conventionality it becomes a publicly available abstraction insofar as it is recorded, let's say, in many publicly accessible places and media.
Also, my thinking about, my experience of, the model is not itself the behavior of neurons, even if it supervenes on the behavior of neurons,
Quoting Constance
A light wave in space, as idea or model, would be commonly thought to be underpinned by a chemical event in the brain. An actual light wave in space, it would commonly be thought, might trigger a chemical event in the brain if it were to enter the eye. In one sense the world "out there" is known and thought about only "in here", but it is assumed that it must be "out there" in order to provide the content to be thought about.
Of course we don't know that, and the fact that we cannot explain our situation in absolute terms, leads to the possibility of skepticism, idealism and anti-realism. I'd say we just don't know/ That said, I'd also say that the plausibility of the idea that science is about "some world out there" is bolstered by the observed technological success of science. But there's no denying that it is possible that it is all going on in consciousness, and that without consciousness nothing at all would exist.
I'm not sure what you mean by approaching the question "from a physicalist model pov".
Quoting Constance
I agree that the ethical question "how to live the best life" is the most important, but I'm not sure it is susceptible of philosophical treatment; at least not under the rigorous analytic model of what constitutes "doing philosophy". Wittgenstein thought ethics and aesthetics are beyond the purview of philosophy if I am not mistaken.
But I want to point out that it is not that internal, external, real and the rest are obviated by the subsuming internal events of the brain that process all things equally; I mean fine, but it goes further: for even brain processes are not "really" brain processes, because it took a brain process to produce this very notion of brain processes. Nothing at all survives the physicalist model, even the physicalist model.
Quoting enqramot
He doesn't, which is the point I am making. The only thing that gets "in" a world is what is "in" the world, and even this doesn't really happen. Events in this world never get out, nor does anything get in. Certainly, things occur, but to say even this itself is a neuronal event, and so neuronal events in an exchange between neuronal events working in vastly complex arrays of chemical exchanges in which understanding occurs, syntax and semantical phenomena: there is no way out, and to say there is, one would have simply say what it is. Is it the causal relations between the inner and the outer? But how can one affirm such a thing independently of just these causal relations confined to the brain? And how does a causal relation establish an epistemic one? Does a dented car fender "know" the offending guard rail? Dented fenders are not brains, of course, but how is it that a brain's complexity qua complexity make for an epistemic connection; I mean, "something out" there still has to make it 'in here".
Quoting enqramot
I am reminded of Zizek, who defends Hegel and borrowing from someone else, likens our inability to grasp where Geist is going in future rational possibilities to a program in which there are trees and clouds, but there is nothing in the program that allows for any detail beyond the beyond the distant visage. There simply does not exist, in this world, any interior to the trees or sun that illuminates the clouds and the like. Such things are therefore "impossible" in this world. It is like this here: What stands before me, this visage of my uncle, is just a brain event, and every thought in my head that asks questions like, what brought him here, how did he get here? and so on, are not anything but a program. there are no events. Events are just the way we interpret affairs before us; but there is no "before us" or near or far, or anything at all. Even the thought experiment questioning my uncle's existence is just patterns of complexity in the brain. Nothing at all, and this means everything conceivable, survives this model.
This may sound odd, but keep in mind, I am only following the course put before me. If consciousness truly is a exclusively a manifestation of brain events, then all of the above is true.
quote="enqramot;754072"]The difference between "know" and know, know being reserved for conscious beings. No, my computer had to concede defeat and withdraw in shame. The question of consciousness is not an easy question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the contemporary science has no clue about the nature of consciousness. So how likely are we to solve it in this forum?[/quote]
Contemporary science? But what do they have to do with philosophy? You call Neil De Grasse Tyson, and talk like this, and he will simply give you a condescending sneer.
But then, there certainly is a way to go. First, do you accept that when you observe something, you actually are observing it, and this is not reducible in the way the model indicates?
No. I probably think about Kant more than I ought. I mean that, like you, similar questions keep me awake at night. You can't do philosophy without a good night's sleep. So arithmetic it is. Nighty night!
What is a brain? A physical object we are told is responsible for our awareness of the underlying reality. I cannot verify any of this, of course. But what is fundamentally wrong with physicalist theory? What is in it that you don't accept? What if your uncle's world is separate to yours and most objects are private to each pertinent world but some are shared across worlds. I'm repeating myself here but you haven't addressed it so far. Shared objects make limited interaction between worlds possible. What am I missing? Do you or do you not subscribe to the view that unperceived objects exist? Guess not if you don't accept physicalism. What (if anything) defies logic in such a view? We have remote transmission of data between worlds, conscious agents in both worlds. Your objections?
Quoting Constance
It's yet to be established beyond doubt that "the brain" is essentially different to "car fender" in this context. So far the supposed link between consciousness and "brain events", neurons etc. is just an operational hypothesis. Why transport of information, which in itself doesn't require consciousness, is controversial for you? You don't experience the whole uncle, but only information that he voluntarily shares with you (or is coerced to do so). What prevents external information from entering?
Quoting Constance
Why should things that are temporarily hidden from view be regarded as non-existent? Even if the aforementioned program doesn't have a function like "unhide()" and doesn't go beyond most rudimentary level of detail, our own reality might be different in this regard.
Quoting Constance
But why do you rule out external input?
Quoting Constance
Since researching the nature of consciousness has potential to generate enough commercial interest to justify directing more resources/capital/brain power/time to it than I, as a single person, or collectively we, the users of this forum, would ever be able to devote to it, and despite that effort no noteworthy progress has been achieved, that just shows the scale of the problem and helps estimate likelihood that our efforts will culminate in actually solving the problem the OP (in this case you) has.
I claim that the whole system of understanding is based on a lie, to put it dramatically. I am not arguing from the perspective of a categorical context of understanding, whether that would be knitting or genetics or economics, and so on; but from a "context" where one meets the impossibility of all things. This is an extraordinary event in a person's philosophical evolution and the primacy of science has all but cancelled it in a wave of assumptions grounded in, as you say, technology. Yes, it sounds like Heidegger's complaint, but the idea is here not the way he put it. I feel a bit like in Wittgenstein's corner in his argument with Russel, the latter (and subsequent analytic philosophy) taking the call for clarity, and away from nonsense, to be the essential idea of the Tractatus, while Witt insisting that he had it all wrong: it was that-which-one-passed-over-in silence that was essential. The physicalist model is the "clarity" of science's most basic assumptions, which is physicalism (not to argue distinctions here in what this could mean), and its broad acceptance has entirely eclipsed the true epistemic and ontological foundation of the world, which is indeterminacy. We don't know what it is to stand in the openness of our existence "free" of vast body of knowledge claims that are always already there "making the world" as Rorty put it, which is one way say why Kierkegaard thought the medieval mind was closer to God.
The tonnage of human suffering keeps me awake. I make a lousy Ubermensch.
Consciousness cannot be reduced to systems of neuronal activity. Physicalism claims that if you take a certain amount of non-conscious stuff, assemble it in a certain way, run some current through it, voila! consciousness. This is a fairy tale.
Right, in Buddhist terms the modern scientific physicalist worldview is clinging to "nihilism" (the idea that all is meaningless substance) and the medieval (European) mind was clinging to eternalism (the idea that there is an eternal realm of God or gods) that, if we are virtuous, we can escape to after the death of the body.
The essence of Buddhism seems to be that the kind of knowledge which can be acquired via study and reading can never constitute liberation because all it is doing is reinforcing the discursive, dualistic mind and egoic delusions.
The objection is not to say this is wrong, but that there is a deeper level of analysis that takes up the assumptions of what you say, the presuppositions that are in place that make it possible for you or me to talk about this kind of thing, or talk about anything. The supposition that my uncle is there in a world at all is in question, as well as even the supposition that the posited physical brain can be there ar all given the reduction of all affairs to brain events. This is a way to present a reductio ad absurdum on the premise that the physical brain is the sole foundation for experience. After all, if there is a strict correspondence between brain and mental events such that only brain can produce these, then the physicality itself of the brain is no longer tenable, since it, too, now, the knowledge of it, is just a brain event.
Quoting enqramot
But this is the assumption in place. It is there to test the soundness of the idea that consciousness and its knowledge experiences is produced by the brain according to the physical model.
You have to step back from objections like the above; way back. It is assuming all things are physical, and there is your brain and there is my uncle, and the rest; but on this assumption, things instantly fall apart. It says this: If the physicalist model of the world is true, then the brain is physical; and if the brain is physical, then all brain events are subject to this physicalist analysis, that is, the brain event in which I perform mathematics, or see a house or read computer data, and everything that is "known" are all physical brain events; but physical brain events cannot be shown to carry epistemic connectivity, that is, there is nothing in a physical description of relations between objects that can account for epistemic relations (hence the barn door example); hence, according to the physical model, brain events remain localized within the brain; but this means nothing can be confirmed outside of the brain, and therefore exterior events cannot be outside at all, and indeed, the axiom that affirms physicality itself is made untenable.
Something like that is the argument.
Quoting enqramot
"Things" did you say? What things? How does a physical brain affirm things, for the logic itself is reduced brain events, meaning is a brain event, I mean, intuitions, dogs, cats, religion, and the entire human dramatic unfolding are brain events only, according to thsi model. why? Because physicality is not epistemic, meaning looking closely at physical relations, there is nothing that place what is out there, in here. Does the circuitry in my computer through its camera "know" the world it "sees'? Look at the opacity test: is a brain opaque or transparent to the world? And even if it were some sort of mirrored organ, it would remain a 100 billion neurons of dense matrical events, and dense matrical events are not my uncle.
Quoting enqramot
See the above.
I agree; although I would argue about the egoic delusions. I mean, that gets complicated as to the self being so disposable.
Most perceptive! Buddhism is simply a way.
The fact that everything in YOUR world is reduced to brain events doesnt preclude independent existence of a parallel world that exists in another realm. All that it takes is flow of information between the two realms/worlds and there is no need to reduce everything to brain events. That assumes independent existence of unperceived objects, of course. The brain in this context would be a physical object from another realm, producing mental events, then sending them across realms to you. What are the flaws in this reasoning?
Quoting Constance
Correct me if Im wrong, but as far as Im aware the word experience is not a part of the definition of the word to exist. So, to reach a conclusion that something doesnt exist, you must do more than just demonstrate that its not a part of the experience realm.
Quoting Constance
See above.
Quoting Constance
Cannot be shown as of now but this might change in the future. In my view, to make assertions which go beyond speculation about a system you have to have total knowledge of the system. Say, chess is a system. So far the game of chess hasnt been solved, but endgames including up to 7 (possibly 8) pieces have. So, within such a subsystem some definite assertions whether a given endgame is won, lost or a draw are possible, otherwise not. Your assertion belongs to the not category.
Quoting Constance
Are you an expert in epistemic relations to make such bold statements? Maybe the current description needs updating? Maybe its flawed or incomplete. Btw, why would we want to restrict ourselves to purely physical model? What about coexistence of physical and non-physical elements including some kind of interface between them?
Quoting Constance
Once again, does the fact that they cannot be confirmed preclude their existence? If so, how? In what scope?
Quoting Constance
Is it really?
Quoting Constance
Physicality doesnt make it through to your world but may be necessary so that your world can be what it is. Camera doesn't know anything because the object "camera" doesn't support "knowing". But how can you be sure that a future version of "camera" won't acquire this function? Let's say you go to great lengths to convince yourself and others that a thing such as a conscious camera is impossible, only to see one walk past you one day. There is no contradiction between being "certain" that statement A is true and this same statement being false. One must always bear this in mind or one risks making a colossal error.
Quoting Constance
What is and what is not your uncle is yet to be established so any too specific assertions are uncalled for at this early stage. You dont see your uncle as he is but a heavily filtered version of him instead. If I hide my face behind a mask does it mean that my face no longer exists in your world?
But are you reading what I wrote? the assumption of a physicalist conception of the world as foundational provides NO epistemic extension so that other worlds is anything more than the one localized body of events. Knowledge connections, this is what is needs to be shown. How does the physicalist model of a brain manage to "get to anything out there"? And, as I said, even the concept of physicalism itself now to be understood with exactly this delimitation. How is it that when I am gazing at my uncle. the entire affair is not reducible to brain events?
What you want to do is play out the assumption that all things are physical under the assumption that all things are physical. Seems reasonable enough until you make the attempt to explain knowledge relationships. This is the foil! If you can't explain knowledge events in your foundational view of what the world really is at the basic level, then you have a foundational explanatory deficit that undermines all things, for before we can talk about all things, other worlds, or anything at all, we have to have a theory of justified belief that can such talk at all. It is quite simple.
Quoting enqramot
How is it that existence itself is not just a unique brain event; that when you ponder existence and other sweeping terms that are all inclusive. you are not just making a statement that entirely conceived within a brain matrix, and everything you can imagine is just this and nothing else.
You would have to have an independent theory of experience, then, apart from what science can observe and think about. Is this what you have, some experiential, acausal theory about how cognitive events "discover" the world? How would it be that this three and a half pound greyish "thing" produces ideas that are "about" something else? This is what is required, and of course, you can say that science is an experimental/theoretical work in progress that will one day unlock the secrets of epistemic relationships, but this will have to include a dramatic reconception of what it means for a thing to be physical; some new "law of epistemic connectivity" will have to be introduced, but note that physicalism does not have this at all! Scientists all believe the moon is out there, as are genetic sequences and fossils embedded in rock, and so on, and have no idea at all as to even WHAT an "epistemic principle" would even look like. And they don't care because this is simply not what they think about. Scientists are not philosophers.
Quoting enqramot
But this misses the point. See the above.
Quoting enqramot
You may not want to restrict yourself to this model, and I say very good. Because such a model doesn't work. I took a course in epistemology once, and I have read Kant through Derrida and a bit beyond. The current analytic philosophy community simply put the matter to rest by ignoring it. In S knows P, the traditional analysis of knowledge simply assumes P is the case, and long as you are justified in believing P, then you are good to go. But the devil is in the details: how can you extract P from the knowledge conditions that make knowing P possible? This is the issue here.
Quoting enqramot
The complaint of this rests solely with the epistemic deficits of physicalism. I do prefer the simple way of putting this: there is my uncle there, and here am I: how is it that HE gets IN HERE? If causality worked to explain knowledge, then, of course, science steps in explaining how light waves reflect, pass through air and space to meet the eye, and so on, but it should be striking, very striking, that brain chemistry is utterly alien to what ever is out there that is not brain chemistry.
Quoting enqramot
The argument doesn't care about what the future holds. Either you can tell me what the essential epistemic connectivity is about or you cannot. Again, if you want to include something that physicalism COULD have then you have to make sense of this "could". Otherwise it is merely empty speculation.
Quoting enqramot
In order for it to be a heavily filtered version of him, it has to be first shown that it is possible to affirm anything at all of him. How would physicalism make this affirmation, GIVEN all that has been said above? (Pls don't just ignore all of this, and continue to say how outrageous it al sounds, The argument itself has to be dealt with.)
Yes, it is. The matter calls for a very different conception of what a brain is, what anything is, and what conscious events are, and this is not going to come from the scientific world. It will have to be affirmed in subjectivity. Perhaps here, the explanation will be discovered that consciousness is NOT a localized brain event. The logic of the argument I have been defending leads to only one conclusion: Either there is some magical acausal connection that intimates that out there to this Me in here; or the epistemic connectivity lies with a metaphysical unity of all things.
My thinking is that metaphysics is nonsense if conceived apart from finitude. Note how analytic philosophy takes Kant's insistence that only empirical truths can make sense about the world, and ends up with just this impossibility of knowing. But can finitude really be separated from infinity, that is, noumena? No. So brain events actually belong to metaphysics, and metaphysics is not some impossible beyond; rather, it is IN immanence!
I'm not clear where you are going with this: can you elaborate.
Quoting Constance
You could ask the same question about a camera. Of course there is no "homunculus' inside the camera to view the image.
Couldnt the camera have a blind homunculus? :joke:
Couldnt resist - and the question is not to be taken seriously, other than to illustrate the absurdity of the homunculus argument.
Or does the quoted statement mean to affirm that the occurrence of a consciousness is in and of itself equivalent to the occurrence of a homunculus? Just in case: if so, I'd like to understand on what grounds.
It seems that via the eyes and brain an ever-moving image of the "external" is formed. Who is it that sees this image? Is the image already there "in the dark of the body" so to speak, just prior to seeing, as the image is encoded in the camera, on sensor or film, waiting to be seen? It is the seeing which seems mysterious; can we ever get our heads around it?
If we cannot get our heads around the act of seeing, then how could we feel justified in purporting to use the fact of the act to support some preferred worldview or other?
When I take a hard, close look at the world, the first thing I encounter is myself. And when I reduce this encounter to its pure apprehension, dismissing the language and the familiar things that are usually there to take hold of things, and I try to witness the pure intuited event of being there, the singularity of things yields to an intriguing sense of "being"; and as weird as this sounds, it really does go like this, as if existence is affirmed, not in the trees, roads, furniture and so forth, but is within, as if the sense of reality is conferred upon things by my end of the perceptual encounter, not the thing encountered. It is quasi-Cartesian: the reduction takes me to the strongest proximity of what is most directly presented, and this is not the out thereness of things, but in the depths subjectivity.
In meditation, when perception is its purist, an "intuition" steps forward that is not negatable, as a thought or an "attached" feeling. It is the intuition of being itself, and as I try to understand what this is, I find there an affirmation of the self, not a negation, as if the whole point is to uncover just this.
This in itself is a conceptual inference given a) the occurrence of our awareness in general and b) our empirically gained awareness regarding the mechanisms via which our visual awareness is formed, and I disagree with its wording. Hence, with what the inference is saying.
Better: "It seems that via the eyes and brain an ever-moving sight (else seeing) of the "external" is formed."
What we consciously hold is not a movie ("an ever-moving image") we are looking at but, instead, an innate activity of seeing, this activity being termed by us sight. And this activity of physiological sight that pertains to us as conscious beings is as unified with our body as is the activity of physiological tactile feel.
To my mind, imaginations - e.g., the sight we hold via the mind's eye (or the hearing of ourselves inwardly think/question via the mind's ear; etc.) - get weirder, but we are here addressing our awareness of the external world.
Quoting Janus
This then becomes, "Who is it to which the sight/seeing pertains?" ... doing away with a question already set up so as to be responded to only in terms of homunculi looking at images.
Quoting Janus
For my part, I'm not getting into preferred ontological worldviews here, although physicalism isn't it. I'm only disagreeing with the inference that a seeing agent/consciousness entails the occurrence of a homunculus. Here concluding that the first in no way entails the second ... and that the notion of homunculi is a fallacy.
But maybe that's part of the issue: homunculi are conceptually palpable ideas that one can with some ease mentally manipulate; whereas consciousness is not.
I believe that when I observe something its not possible to say whether it exists or not. I believe in a dynamic stream of information that can be categorised so that some categories may not be compatible with others. Can observed objects be reduced to physical states? I dont see why not. It depends how such information is stored inside the brain. I dont get how the knowledge argument against physicalism proves anything. If Mary learns something new outside the room, it can be just another type of physical information, which requires another interface. Say, the physical information Mary gained in the room required physical connection type A, whereas what it's like to see colours required physical connection type B, hence method that worked for type A was not compatible with type B. So I assume she was deluded to think she knew everything physical about the colours whereas in fact some knowledge was missing and was only accessible through different means, learning of a different kind if you will.
Quoting Constance
Yes, but my neurons are having hard time understanding what you're driving at. I've already ordered a new set of neurons at Amazon, so bear with me.
Quoting Constance
It must be appreciated that you obviously did your homework and gained plenty of knowledge in various philosophical concepts so you dont have to reinvent the wheel but rather build on whats already been built, even though Im sure some of these theories are plain false. To truly catch up with you Id have to first spend a lot of time to study at least some of the key theories pertinent to this discussion, something Im not currently prepared to do because of time restrictions and perceived lack of practical value of such knowledge. In particular, Im yet to find out what in physicalist model makes knowledge connections impossible, so right now I cannot comment on that. To my common sense it doesnt seem impossible but if there are existing arguments against it, first they need to be tackled, of course.
Quoting Constance
Your original post asked why, when you greet your uncle Sidney, you are not greeting exclusively systems of neuronal activity. It didnt specify any particular theory, in particular, it didnt mention the physicalist theory. So when you step outside the confines of this theory then maybe it can be demonstrated that even though your uncle cannot be reduced to brain events, your perception of him can.
Quoting Constance
But why a theory should be required for something to exist independently? Say, there's a car in another galaxy. It's something you would never be able to verify. The car doesn't care whether you have any theory explaining its existence, it just exists, independently.
Quoting Constance
As I said, it doesn't simply produce them, but creates customized copies of real world objects, that is: objects that exist independently and as such cannot be reduced to brain events.
Quoting Constance
Yes, I'm afraid if it becomes apparent that physicalism doesn't do a good job as a model of reality, it's physicalism that'll have to go. We cannot discard of reality. And this is exactly what science is, an experimental work in progress. Major changes to our understanding of how the reality works are expected.
Quoting Constance
I'm not married to any particular model. It's the reality that matters.
Quoting Constance
As I see it, what matters is practical implications of how we can use our "knowledge" of P, whereby this "knowledge" should also be treated as "work in progress".
Quoting Constance
I would argue that that the question of "independent existence" has nothing to to with epistemology.
Quoting Constance
So no, I cannot, which is not to say that it's not possible. But for now it IS a speculation. May somebody step in and provide such a connectivity! But just as I cannot provide what is required, neither can you disprove similar speculations. So it may well be that the physicalist model is untenable right now but it is possible to fix it. Don't ask me how.
Quoting Constance
Just as I explained above, I cannot do that within the confines of physicalism without first having learned about and analysed physicalism in depth. Now's the time for someone else to step in.
You should have led with that.
Right, so I'm a time waster, aren't I?
Absolutely not! I, for one, don't come to this forum for conservation. I come to explain and argue, and in the process, I clarify what I think, to myself! Reading is one thing, writing is another, and the latter is where the real work lies.
Thanks.
I'm not seeing any significant difference in the way you've formulated it. I don't see it as an inference, but as an experience. In our visual field we find parts of our body situated in relation to an environment we experience as being external to it.
Quoting javra
Right physicalism is a worldview too and I understand it is not your preferred worldview. I wasn't serious about the "homunculus"; I realize it involves a reductio ad absurdum. As I said we can't get our head around the fact that we can see an image of the environment and parts of our body situated within it. We can observe and analyze the mechanics of vision, which are analogous to a camera, but we cannot understand how the experience of seeing is possible.
Thanks for that explanation Constance; I can relate to what you're saying there, but I have nothing to add.
Quoting Janus
As to the distinction I wanted to make:
That the eyes and brain make the activity of seeing possible is in and of itself an inference, and a very good one at that given all our empirical data. Nevertheless, the activity of seeing is not contingent upon this conceptual understanding that eyes and brain are required for seeing: the experience of seeing can well occur without this understanding, as per toddlers and lesser animals for example.
This inference that eyes and brain are required for seeing can, then, take the conceptual form such as via analogy to the workings of a camera that the eyes and brain make possible an image that we then witness via our sight. Alternatively, we can conclude that eyes and brain make possible our very capacity of sight.
The distinction between these two inferences might be subtle, but its important, for the former (eyes and brain make possible a moving image which we then see) introduces a conceptual differentiation between consciousness and body wherein the body has its own distinct agency whose outcomes (in this case the "ever-moving image" which the body produces) are then witnessed by the separate agency of consciousness and, here, a homunculus argument results: a little person within the person.
Whereas in the latter inference (eyes and brain make possible our capacity of sight, our seeing per se) no such distinction between consciousness and body results in relation to our ability to see stuff. Here, where the issue is that of physiological sight of the external world, the agency of consciousness and the agency of body are one and the same. Remove a humans eyes or brain and the humans capacity to see ceases to occur. With functional eyes and brain in place, the humans capacity to see occurs. Here, there is no homunculus that sees the outcomes of what the body does. Instead, here physiological sight and body are concurrent and interdependent in at least one sense, such that physiological sight as process is the whole that is being addressed and the bodys functional eyes and brain are themselves complex process that serve as parts from which the whole is constituted.
Now, this speaks neither in favor of physicalism, neutral monism, nor objective idealism to list just three worldviews instead simply addressing the relation between a) our awareness via physiological sight and b) our bodys workings. Biased thought this may be on my part, Im maintaining that the latter inference addressed ought to be maintained regardless of worldview held and that the former ought to be done away with.
At any rate, the aforementioned is in attempts to clarify my previous post in terms of differences that, as apo would put it, make a difference.
I wasn't seeking to introduce a dualism of consciousness and body. the physiological study of vision tells us that there processes involving the eye the optic nerve and the visual cortex, and that like a camera the image formed is upside-down (which is "corrected" by the brain. This suggests that there is a "moving image" or visual data there prior to what we call conscious seeing.
Have you heard of blindsight? It seems that some people whose visual cortex has been damaged in some way cannot consciously see what is happening in what would normally be their visual field, but if asked to guess, get it right at rates that are much higher than chance.
To some, yes. Yet to others the working of the brain can be interpreted to suggest the presence of unconscious awareness of the external world which works (in obviously very complex ways) more or less in concurrence to conscious awareness this in a parts-to-whole relation. Such that there arguably is no moving image (else, freestanding visual data that occurs independently of being witnessed) anywhere to be found, but only visual awareness at different levels of mind.
Can there be data ("facts know from direct observation" else "recorded observations") in the absence of awareness which observes? To me the answer is so far "no".
Quoting Janus
But of course Ive heard of it. I find it very much in line with the inference of unconscious awareness just mentioned. As just one of many examples wherein the notion of unconscious vision can be found in relation to blindsight, see here. To me by far the most interesting cases are studies of split-brain patients in relation to conscious awareness. Theres the Wikipedia page, but also research findings such as this one, whose abstract nicely sums up some of what's going on in such cases and also interestingly maintains a divided perception but undivided consciousness.
Much of the info on split-brain patients, as one example, can be deemed to support the inference of different loci of unconscious awareness working in an overall mind (which in a healthy mind would thereby converge into a coherent consciousness).
Just so its said: The issue of how awareness be it conscious or unconscious manifests is nevertheless just as pertinent from this vantage point regarding unconscious awareness of the mind.
Perhaps the "unconscious non-visual awareness" in people with blindsight is the counterpart to the pre-conscious visual awareness in sighted people. Is the 'visuality" of awareness, or the consciousness of seeing, a step in the process of seeing that comes after the unconscious non-visual awareness? In other words do sighted people share this step with blindsight people, and blind sight people lack the next step of visual awareness? I don't know, but it seems possible.
I don't know what you mean by "no moving image", because it seems obvious to me that we do see moving images, or if you want to phrase it differently, that our seeing consists in moving images. I also don't know what you mean by "freestanding visual data" since it seems obvious to me that there is nothing at all "freestanding" ( if I've understood what you meant with this term).
And again I'm not sure what you mean by "facts known from direct observation in the absence of awareness which observes". I do know we can drive on "autopilot"; that is, we seem to be able to process and respond to visual data without conscious awareness of doing so.
A lot of miscommunication here; always tedious, and sometimes unresolvable, but Ill try to better explain where I'm coming from.
In the context of our discussion regarding the possibility of homunculi in relation to the workings of eyes and brain, your latest affirmation was:
Quoting Janus
As we both appear to agree, there can be no data in the absence of observation, which in turn does not occur in the absence of awareness. So the notion of visual data occurring prior to it being seen is misplaced. The last quoted sentence could well be interpreted to affirm this very misplaced notion just addressed. That said, in this interpretation consciousness would then be inferred to observe images that are produced by the camera-like apparatus of eyes an brain.
The alternative is to affirm that - as evidenced by blindsight and other examples - there occurs in us an "unconscious seeing of visual data" from which our functional conscious seeing of visual data is constituted. In this interpretation, there is no camera-like image produced by eyes and brain that is in turn seen by consciousness but, instead, visual consciousness is the very activity of seeing the external world. Such that visual consciousness is a unified compound of multiple instantiations of unconscious visual awareness, i.e. is a unified compound of multiple instantiations of unconscious seeing.
Recall that "an image" is commonly defined as a visual re-presentation of an actual object: in the sense of a picture, a painting, or a drawing; wheres seeing - be it conscious or unconscious - is understood to be a direct presentation of actual objects. We don't consciously see images unless we're looking at something like pictures, paintings, or drawings. What we consciously see is our personal truth of what the external world is visually.
Now, I very much acknowledge this can easily become very complicated by issues of indirect realism (where it's often enough worded that "we create images in our mind which represent some possibly noumenal reality") but if we take care not to equivocate our terms, the same issue would yet remain. We either consciously see a representational image of noumena constructed by the eyes and brain, such that there here are two items in relation to each other (that of a) image and of b) consciousness which sees the image) or, alternatively, the very activity of seeing - be it conscious seeing or unconscious seeing - is identical to the activity of visually representing noumena, such that here there is only one item concerned (the representational visual awareness which looks out at the world). But I don't want to enter into discussions/debates regarding indirect realism. The issues of indirect realism and of homunculi are to me utterly separate.
Quoting Janus
I was addressing "unconscious visual awareness" not "unconscious non-visual awareness".
But in answer, it to me seems like the best inference to make given all the data we have.
It really depends on what you mean by "data". Is there data in a computer when it is not being used? Are the effects of light in the eye and the subsequent neural processes in the optic nerve and cortex,that gives rise to seeing, to be counted as data?
Quoting javra
I don't know whether I would refer to it as "visual" data, at least not in the sense that there is no conscious experience of seeing. I referred to it earlier as a kind of "moving image" there to be processed as a conscious experience of seeing. I would not say we see "visual data" but that we see images, which are constituted from neural data. Of course we can analyze what we see in terms of visual data, light and dark tones, different hues and intensities of colour, parallax and so on.
Quoting javra
I don't think of it that way. I don't believe there is an "actual object"; what we see are always partial views from different perspectives out of which the idea of an "actual object" is abstracted. We don't see the actual object in any wholistic sense. So I think, phenomenologically speaking, we do see in images; the whole visual field at any moment is a more or less changing or moving image.
These are difficult things to discuss without talking past one another, as we all have our own preferred ways of conceiving things, so i am not convinced that we are even disagreeing.
:grin: Sounds about right from my side as well.
I don't know if you can "meet" systems of neuronal activity, or any biological activity for that matter, at least if you have in mind anything that people have in mind when they meet other people, or animals even.
It's not as if the neuronal activity will say anything, given that neurons don't speak, nor will it feel emotions, given that neurons themselves have no emotions.
I've really only met and talked with family members that were people, not abstract systems of their biological makeup. So, I think you can go to sleep with ease, and everything continues as is.
My uncle is not an abstract system, granted. This here is meant to test the plausibility of a physicalist/materialist ontology.
You have to take a radical step back. The thesis of physicalism and its reduced brain to sheer physicality, leads to one conclusion: None of this that we talk about is happening at all at the most basic level of analysis. Not even the "physicality" of physicalism. It is vicious circularity: If all that can be acknowledged is reducible to a physical condition, then the supposition itself is just some physical condition, and calling it 'some physical condition' is also reducible in the same way; and so on.
One would have to include in the concept of physicality an epistemic feature, allowing the brain to have knowledge of something other than itself, (and even this knowledge would be, without without this epistemic ability, just another localized physicality) but this is just pulling a knowledge relationship out of a hat. What "epistemic ability"?? How could this even be conceived, this "knowledge at a distance"? This acausal access between objects, like a brain and a sofa?
Nicely said!
In parallel to the issue of knowledge you address, one of my takes on this issue is that were physicalism to be reformulated to allow for the ontic (rather than the illusory) reality of intentions - such as ones own and ones uncles in any interaction between - then physicalism as worldview would inherently contain the reality of teleological processes. This would in turn entail that physicalism as worldview would then allow for possibilities such as Aristotles unmoved mover as ultimate telos. Which would in turn entail that this reformulated physicalism would then consist of a bunch of concepts that are outright rejected by, and contradictory to, the principles of physicalism as we currently know them.
Muddled reasoning in the just expressed (maybe all too implicit) physicalist stance that intentions are all illusory on account of teleology in no way occurring, yes. Then again, Im not a physicalist.
I'm the odd one out here. I either think Galen Strawson's "real materialism" is correct, namely that everything is physical, including or especially experience, which makes the physical much, much richer than mainstream physicalism or I take Chomsky's view that "materialism" no longer has any meaning.
The best guess I see for mainstream physicalism is that it's whatever physics and co. says, but whatever physics says will change in a year or two, making it very dubious as a metaphysics.
If this latter view is correct, as I think it is, we are merely discussing terminology. But if someone argues for "eliminitavism", then there is content, but it's not a serious view, in my opinion.
Not clear as to why the notion of teleology helps this here. I mean, to me, it makes the matter complicated, as if now one has to reconcile the world with, not just impossible epistemological relationships, but an overarching logos that underlies all things.
Perhaps I am missing something?
I have strawson' paper here. Give me a bit to read it.
Sure.
Missing something in relation to the overall worldview that I hold? Nah, you got it about right.
Wasnt aiming to argue for a particular worldview, though, so much as aiming to evidence one additional inconsistency of physicalism - this so as to further support the threads main thesis that theres something wrong with physicalism. For instance, by pointing out the well, inconsistency in someone engaging in arguments for the sake of - hence, with the intent of - preserving the status quo of physicalism which, as worldview, upholds the nonoccurrence of teloi (such as those which take the form of the very intents to uphold the worldview).
It's a bit like placing the cart before the horse in truth-ville.
Certainly, a theory of everything might not be at hand at any point in our lifetime, but I take it that a philosopher should be honest with themselves in terms of what occurs in the world (e.g., they occur in the world, as do their intents). And then try to work out a coherent worldview from there. A quirk of mine maybe.
But yes, you're right, getting into what the implication are for intentions being real in the world would certainly complicate matters. Not what I intended to do, though.
So I've read it, and as I knew, because I have read enough analytic philosophy to know, it was nearly altogether empty of content. These philosophers write as if Kant, whose thoughts ruled philosophy for a hundred years and beyond (in one way or another) never existed. The mentality here comes from science and the "naturalism" that follows from this attitude,and attitude it is, for there is nowhere in this paper that ever exceeds Moore's axiomatic wave of the hands, as if from this, and the aimless talk about mental and non mental or experiential and non experiential physicality one finds grounds for affirming materialism, implicitly showing that all this amounts to is a "feel" (that is a quote) for the rectitude of scientific thinking at the most basic level. I mean, he hasn't even begun to think philosophically.
If you would like to argue about this, I am open to this, but I have to say that it is a typical approach in analytic discovery: there is no discovery, only an endless reference to what is commonly held in the naturalistic point of view, and he never gets beyond Moore's waving of his arms and declaring this to be ample proof that "there is waving of the arms" is true. Strawson relies simply on common sense. Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and on and on, never happened, as if science is now here and we can finally just adopt science's playing field as a place to play out arguments about ontology. Really? Materialism is NOT an empirical concept, but he tries to make it into one, all the while throwing incaveats about how to qualify materialism away from its being an absurd metaphysical ontology, which, if approached honestly, is just this: ask a simple question, what is the "material" of materialism? He says it is not unlike the question about the material a shirt or a lamp is made of. He sees it as a kind of attitudinal carry over from the common cases of affirming "what is it?" questions, and so, the "material" of materialism just refers us to another body of established thinking, like asking what a bank teller is refers us to talk about banks, money, and so on, so asking about material in his sense refers us to other contexts where material finds a comfortable place to settle; and this is simply the way of it with analytic philosophy: monumentally unenlightening!
Analytic thinking, from Russell to Quine and Strawson is just a lot of very well spoken and painfully elaborated vacuity.
Just look at this passage:
[i]For (briefly) what we think of as real understanding of a natural phenomenon is always at
bottom just a certain kind of feeling, and it is always and necessarily relative to other things
one just takes for granted, finds intuitive, feels comfortable with. This is as true in science as
it is in common life. I feel I fully understand why this tower casts this shadow in this sunlight,
given what I take for granted about the world (I simply do not ask why light should do that, of
all things, when it hits stone).[/i]
This is a stunning example of what I am talking about: Materialism is....what?? Just at the comfortable end of....whatever? How does this serve as a litmus for any kind of affirmation according to the rigorous standards os the scientific method? Does the thesis of materialism really rest with what one is "comfortable" with in the mind set of the scientific attitude?
If one wants a true scientific approach to achieving a scientifically respectable philosophy, then Husserl is the place to go. Just read the first chapters of his Ideas I, and see.
Anyway, sorry for the tirade. I am thoroughly disenchanted with analytic philosophy, as you can tell.
For me the telos rests with what I see as simply without doubt, the most salient part of our existence, which is value. I've said it before, but it always bears repeating: value is by far the strangest thing in all there is. It is sui generis, this "ouch" at the touch of a flame and this falling in love, this happiness, and this what sets it apart from Wittgenstein's "states of affairs". The "Good" is what Witt called divinity, and of course, he knew all about the long historical philosophical narrative of this term, but it is, by my thinking, the true bedrock of foundational analysis. Wittgenstein famously turned on Russell, and Russell called him a mystic. Well, the world is, at the very heart of where the understanding can go, utterly indeterminate. Only value-meaning stands out in affirmation: nobody invented love, bliss, suffering, pain misery and all the thousand natural shocks. This the world "does to us", so to speak. And it is what we live and die for.
It's not a standard of the scientific method, it's saying how much more the physical is compared to the view of the physical presented by people who call themselves "materialists", Dennett, Churchland and others.
As to the "certain kind of feeling" comment, it's more or less true. You can keep on asking why questions infinitely, but beyond a point the question itself does not advance any further answers. So one is either content to give the best explanation we may have of a thing so far as we can tell, or we'll merely end up talking about terminology, which is not interesting.
The point of the essay was to show how much more "materialism" is, than what is commonly assumed. It includes everything there is, because we simply don't know enough to claim that there is something else which is not physical.
We have not exhausted, at all, what the physical is. It's a monist claim. But if you dislike the name "materialism", you can call it "objective mentalism" or "critical idealism" or even "dialectical phenomenology", everything would be that one thing postulated by the term you use. And then you'd have to give a very good reason for justifying the introduction of another substance or ontology. Simply asserting the mind isn't matter is missing the point completely.
Quoting Constance
I don't deny that Husserl has some useful things to say. He is not good at explaining them very well, admittedly, but if one wants to go through that monumental effort, there may well be some interesting ideas to be gained from him.
It's fine to prefer one school of thought over another, that's just the way we are.
For me the physical and the mental (abstract) are interchangeable. Such that I can take an idea (whatever it may be) and manifest it in the physical via poetry, art, invention/innovation or emotive speech, rhetoric, philosophy.
It seems then that the creativity of the mind and the actual are mutually dependent. The ideals we hold within out mental landscape can be made physical through expression. And in the same way the physical can be assumed into the mental as interpretations
Yea, my thoughts precisely. You hit the nail on its head.
The scientific method insists on standards of confirmation that are not arbitrary. A "feeling" that something is the case as it is taken up by Strawson, is not like an intuition of logic or one of, say, Kant's apriori space. It has no content and there is nothing "there" to acknowledge and interpret. Rather, it is just a reification of common sense, a pretending really, that the feeling that assures one all is well ontologically. But nothing at all is "well". And the concept as an ontology is absurd and really no better than religious affirmation in scripture in which feelings are very strong indeed.
Quoting Manuel
But the term 'physical' equally says nothing. This comes down to a term having a descriptive capacity to explain the what is there, and what is there is indeterminacy at the basic level, not the physical or the material. These are terms simply borrowed from everyday talk, stand-in terms for general references. They are anti-analytic, as if inquiry found its terminal point. But there is only one terminal 'point' and this is openness itself; not the kind of scientific openness that looks to established paradigms in science for its clues to proceed, but existential openness that puts science, too, and its objectivity, in abeyance. All Strawson provides is a reification of "common" sense. But the world is not common at all.
Quoting Manuel
I don't assert the mind is not matter. That would be assuming the term 'matter' has any sense outside it comfortable contextualities.
No, materialism comes with very specific baggage, and the point is one cannot simply declare it to be without any real meaning, then conclude all things are this. One is committed to science's paradigmatic limitations with this term and the trouble with this is, science cannot examine its own presuppositions, like the mind-body-epistemic problem. Attention must go exclusively issues raised by Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, so forth into Derrida and others.
Quoting Manuel
We are what we read, and there is such a thing as bad thinking. No doubt Husserl can be demanding. But the Cartesian Meditations are not so impenetrable at ll. But his IDEAS I and II really do lay out the details of his phenomenology.
But pls, it's not just a whatever floats your boat matter. Why not read Heidegger's Being and Time, just for the philosophical pleasure of coming to grips with the greatest philosopher of the past century?
I mean, I don't have issues with that way of expression or thinking about this problem.
If anything, those things not immediately in our heads - objects, hard stuff, whatever - are less known or understood than our ideas. Of course, it doesn't follow that those objects are made of ideas at all; it's a matter of emphasizing one aspect of our experience over another one.
So, you saying that ideas can be made into physical expressions makes sense.
Quoting Constance
Well, one should keep in mind, which Kantians don't usually bring up for some reason, is that he was a Newtonian. He took space and time to be the a-priori conditions of sensibility, as opposed to say, cognitive openness or a background of intelligibility, because he thought space and time were absolute as Newton showed. He then incorporated this into our subjective framework and denied the validity of these to things in themselves.
Today we know that Newton is only correct within a range of phenomena, but not others. We now speak of spacetime, due to Einstein.
I don't read into it much scripture. Again, you can label the world whatever, it's a monist postulate, not more. The idea that experience is physical was mind-boggling to me. But as he says clearly, his physicalism is not physicSalism. These are very different.
Quoting Manuel
What something "really" is, is honorific. You can say I want the "real truth" or the "real deal", that doesn't mean there are two kinds of truth, the truth and the real truth nor the deal and the real deal.
You can ask, what constitutes this thing at a certain level. So in the case of neurons, you stay within biology. If you want to go to a "deeper" level (which can be somewhat misleading), you go to physics, not biology. But if we are not talking about neurons, and instead are speaking about people, we can speak in many different ways, not bound down to the sciences at all.
Quoting Constance
If you say so. That's why I said I'm the odd one out. I could call myself a real materialist in Strawson's sense, or a "rationalistic idealist" in Chomsky's sense and not be committed at all to the ontology of current science. I don't believe in this notion of commitment, my thoughts could change depending on arguments and evidence.
Quoting Constance
Who says I have not read Heidegger? Why are you assuming this? Because I referenced Strawson, you assume I have not read him or Husserl? That's quite amusing. I used to be a Heideggerian, and I think he has interesting things to say, no doubt. Hegel I can't stand. I prefer Schopenhauer. I should read more Kierkegaard, but I have my own interests too.
I don't find Derrida is useful at all, in fact to me it's the opposite. But I am not going to pre-judge people who do find him useful because "they are what the read". You can tone it down a bit you know.
What position would you hold in relation to this view intending a more precise, philosophical definition of materialism?
In sum: In metaphysical essence, materialism is Aristotelian thought when fully divorced from formal and teleological causes.
In so being, it only acknowledges material causes and, as a subsidiary of these, efficient causes - such that it is not forms (like a person as an Aristotelian form) which engage in efficient causes (e.g., we persons as forms do not here efficiently cause things) but, instead, it being matter itself which so does (e.g., we persons are nothing more than our constituency of this and that material causes which, as material causes, efficiently cause things).
This differentiation between Aristotelian notions of formal cause (the uncle as person) and material cause (the uncle as a plethora of central nervous system cells) to my mind being of direct pertinence to the OP.
Again, the idea is that the implications of this absence of formal and teleological causes in a world strictly comprised of material causes and their efficient effects thereby results in materialism / physicalism as its currently known.
(Btw: Here acknowledging that the scientific method - which in truth historically emerged in rough parallel to this change in metaphysical perspectives - can be founded upon the metaphysics of materialism but that, if we agree as your former writing seems to suggest, it can just as validly be applied within non-physicalist worldviews such as Peirce's notion of objective idealism.)
I don't think my view gives us a more precise meaning of materialism, I think it merely dissolves what is called the "mind-body" problem and in doing so, we can stop discussing terminology and instead focus on ideas.
We used to have, I think, a good notion of "materialism", back in Descartes's time, in which it was held to be something like "mechanistic materialism": everything in the world, nay, the universe, works like a giant clock - if we can build it, we can understand it kind of thing, based on direct contact between bodies.
The exception was that certain aspects of mind, did not fit into this scheme, namely creative language use (ordinary language actually) and thoughts, hence Descartes postulated "res cogitans".
Newton believed this, but then, he showed the universe is not a machine, to his dismay:
"It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact... is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."
With that, our notion of "physical" or material is gone: we don't know what bodies are. So if we are to use the term "materialism", "physical" and point to the same phenomenon Newton had in mind, then it encapsulates everything, there being no other metaphysical distinction.
"That", *I point to something* "is physical". Ok. But then this thing inside my head is so too, or at least, I can't see a reason why it couldn't be. The problem with putting it otherwise and saying "that is mental or idea" is that I don't think objects are made of ideas, I think there is an external world out there.
Quoting javra
Yeah, I mean, I do it sometimes too, I try not to, but using the term "nothing more", or "merely" or "just" is very misleading and can be taken to imply one is playing something down. I do do this at times, but one should be careful.
But's that's the gist of it.
EDIT:
Yes but, according to Peirce's idealism, he says that "matter is effete mind", rendering the distinction between mind and matter kind of moot.
Well, from my pov, we persons are more than our constituency of this and that material cause. Again, this going back to the theme of the OP. But yes, one could reword the statement to read we persons are identical to these and those material causes which constitute us and thereby remove the implication previously provided via the words nothing more than".
I question that this can make sense in any immediate sense of experience. A seen rock is thereby conceptually identical to a bunch of unseen subatomic particles, themselves constituted from an amorphous quantum vacuum, this in the vantage of materialism. But, experientially, we dont inhabit that world which this material-cause concept of identity entails; we inhabit this world wherein we both agree that the seen rock is only identical with itself as rock, its constituents holding their own unique identities. No?
Quoting Manuel
In terms of physicality's reality, yes. In terms of ontology, certainly not. If matter is effete mind then all is mind in various layers of complexity: our own individual minds being themselves constituted of what would then be aspects of a universal effete mind which, as per Peirce, itself manifests via the interactions of individual minds as global habits ... here having paraphrased a bit and possibly made the issue simpler than it ought to be. Point is, here, all is mind. In so being, this thesis then holds possible implications which materialism / physicalism (everything we take to be mental is in fact fine tuned physicality) outright rejects as metaphsycially possible. Confer, for example, with Peirce's notion of agapism.
This is one of the issues of using "physical" as is used in contemporary philosophy, in more or less arbitrarily stipulates that the physical is whatever science currently studies. So, based on this, the argument would be that we as persons are identical with our chemical and biological properties, including cells, synapses, endorphins and so on.
I think this idea is silly. I mean, sure objects are going to be more than the sum of parts, that's why we recognize them as such. What reasons do we have for rejecting that the things science currently cannot study, and maybe never will be able to study, aren't physical too?
Thoughts, sublime things, do come out of brains - based on the evidence we have. Yet they lose nothing of the sublimity for coming out of brains. In fact, brains are constructions of things we experience in the world and label as such, containing those properties we attribute to them. But there is likely much more that we cannot attribute to them, because we know so little.
Quoting javra
I'm unclear on what you mean. We attribute identities to rocks, but when we speak of rocks usually, we tend to speak of "rocks" and related common-sense uses, not of the properties that make it up. Like if we see a sheet of limestone, we don't speak of "calcium carbonate", unless we are geologists speaking about limestones from a technical perspective.
Quoting javra
I mean, what difference is there between effete or "ineffectual" mind and matter as discussed by current physics? If all is mind as opposed to physical stuff, what's the difference? The reason I use "matter" and not "mind", is because I think there is a world out there, independent of us, not dependent on mind.
What I meant was that every physical entity we know of we deem to be constituted of other physical entities. I cant think of any example to the contrary (other than the quantum vacuum, but this is an exotic issue). Changing the examples in a more common parlance way, a rock is constituted of rock fragments which we could obtain by hitting it with a hammer. In turn, if wed grind these down, wed get very small fragments, like grains of sand. We pulverize these, we get powder. Thereon out, we use microscopes and theory to figure out what the physical constituent stuff of the powder is. But we always infer before inspection that its made up of something thats smaller yet still physical. So when we look at a rock, we know that it is made up of other physical things, and this without breaking the rock open so as to validate our inferences.
Yet, at each stage, there is a unique identity of what is observed and of its inferred constituents. Each identity being other than its makeup's identity.
Quoting Manuel
In addressing the first question: none whatsoever (but see the parenthetical caveat below).
In addressing the second question: If all is mind then, for one example, it's conceivable and logically coherent that good and bad could existentially be objective attributes of reality (rather than whatever anyone says they are) - bringing to mind possibilities such the Neo-platonic notions of "the Good/the One". If all is physical stuff, then the reverse holds true: good and bad are relative to just about whatever individuals and collectives care to think about - but they have not existentially objective standing. Point being, there are quite significant differences between the two worldviews, but they have nothing to do with what the empirical science of physics says about the world (This when one excludes certain un-testable hypotheses which current physicists often enough make, such as, for example, that the universe will end in a heat death (also called the Big Freeze) ... these hypotheses being utterly different from the data gathered from physics as empirical science; and they hold alternative, competing, physicist-produced, non-testable hypotheses to boot: e.g. the Big Bounce, the Big Crunch, and the Big Rip).
In addressing the third sentence: Sure, from this vantage, both worldviews work equally well. It's why I make the distinction between mind and matter as well, even though I can best describe myself as a non-physicalist monist.
You comments on Kant are unclear. Cognitive openness? Background of intelligibility? Both of these could be affirmed in the CPR. But you have something specific in mind.
Einstein's space/time presupposes the structures of conscious events that make theoretical physics possible. THIS is why physics cannot serve as a source for thinking about philosophical ontology.
The point about religion misses the mark. The mark was about the non arbitrariness of science and the arbitrarily of "feeling" something to be the case.
Quoting Manuel
No, that's not quite right. I put the term 'reality' in double inverted commas for a reason: Materialism's material IS what takes the place as the "real" substrata that underlies all things, and in doing so, it leads our thinking into thoughts about what is really "real" to a reductionist position delimited by the contextual possibilities of the term "materialism". You should see this. This is not some harmless, neutral idea that embraces all possible relevant disclosures. It carries serious baggage, as I said earlier. What baggage? The assumption that science is the cutting edge of discovery at the most basic level of analysis. That baggage. It is called, pejoratively, scientism.
Quoting Manuel
Rationalistic idealist?? You lost me. especially as to how one could waver between two things that are mutually exclusive. But then, I would have to have this explained to me.
Quoting Manuel
The reason I assumed you didn't read Heidegger is simple: Heidegger undoes any construal of materialism. It simply seems impossible that after reading Being and Time, one could go on with any faith in anything that does not acknowledge the hermeneutical nature of epistemology. The OP is all about the failure to account for just this. Being and Time addresses this in spades.
You think my "you are what you read" was over the top? Apologies.
Derrida just takes Heidegger, as Rorty put it, to the full conclusion of his thoughts. After all, if language is essentially interpretative in laying out the conditions for revealing the world, then all eyes are on language, and Derrida rightly makes the case that this leads to a radical indeterminacy, for words are simply not stand alone in their references.
Look, I have read these guys (and I am by no means an expert, btw) and I can't see how one can move from a Heideggerian to what Strawson defends. Strawson seems naive, frankly, and I attribute this to his love affair with materialism. Not prejudging so much as, I don't see how you be serious.
Sure - that is the way we tend to proceed in scientific investigation. What is taken for granted here, is the presupposition, that we can only attribute identities to these ever-decreasing objects through experience. What I say, is that experience is physical too - not in the sense of it being a scientific discipline, just in the fact that, somehow, matter so constituted yields experience.
It may sound like a contradiction, but as I see it. What we best know out of everything is experience. In turn, this experience when applied to empirical investigations, discovers that it comes from something we categorize as an organ, the brain. But the gap is massive, between stating that experience comes from organized matter and saying that neuronal activity explains it all. It doesn't, because experience is surely not at all identical to neural patterns and also, because we know so little.
Quoting javra
Ah. I see. It's an interesting perspective though the question soon arises, is mind alone without anything else (meaning beside the minimum conceivable experience) sufficient to make evaluative claims about morality? I mean, if non-mental (physical) stuff is primary, does it make morality less important even if its a subjective thing? I don't think so.
But to your point: we see plenty of examples in animals that don't seem to have such moral notions when they act. It kind of begins to arise somewhat vaguely in higher mammals, some evidence hints at a kind of moral instinct, in certain apes. Maybe dolphins too, but it's hard to evaluate the evidence.
It's harder to say that ants or meerkats, by acting in a group, have these notions in mind.
Quoting javra
Agreed. Despite claims to the contrary by many scientists, I don't think science itself, neither physics, presupposes a metaphysics. One can argue based on current physics any number of views, as is done today. I'd even add, as much respect as science deserves, which it does, I think it says little about of depth, of what we'd like to know.
Quoting javra
Then we might agree on 95% or more of the relevant issues. I don't have a problem with such a label. All My main concern is to point out that monism is true (and also that there need be no clash between the physical and experience), and that it's astonishing to see that experience is made of the same thing as the rest of the universe, really crazy if one thinks about it in depth.
Then you have to say the same thing about Kant. If not for Newton's discovery on physics, he wouldn't have come to the conclusion that space and time specifically were sensibilities which shape our perception of the world. So what goes for Einstein, goes for Kant. What exists - which is what metaphysics is about, in part at least - is spacetime, not space and time.
I don't say, nor do I believe that science is a good basis for ontology, it leaves out too much. In fact, my first response to your OP was precisely trying to show how silly it is to equate a person with neuronal activity, that surely isn't scientistic.
Quoting Constance
I agree that scientism is very bad. If you read Strawson's essay carefully, you should have seen this, he says he does not equate materialism with physicSalism. He stresses that experience is physical, not physicSal. It's a claim about the extra-ordinariness of the physical - it includes not neurons and particles but thoughts, novels, history. It's insane, but I think true - IF one accepts monism. It's not at all a call to scientism.
Quoting Constance
I explained the history of "materialism" in this thread - when "materialism" as used in today's mainstream terms actually made sense, as articulated by Descartes.
Under that framework, without knowing what bodies are and not wanting to deny that something exists absent us, if we use the term "physical", "body" - then it covers everything there is. This is not a claim to science.
Chomsky believes that people think, and that thinking - somehow, takes place in a brain. Not crazy.
As for rationalistic idealism, it is related to Cudworth, a philosopher who pre-dates Kant, and who said, in essentially the same terms, what Kant would later expand on in his first Critique, but he is unread by virtually everybody. This view says that what exists depends on the structure of our minds, it's an innatist hypothesis, the richest one of the 17th century.
It's rationalistic because it postulates a world out there, not a perception-dependent reality, like Berkeley who tries to use God to render himself consistent. But if experience comes from brains, and not our eyes, then there is no contradiction between "physical" and "idealism" in this rationalist sense.
Quoting Constance
He can be read in many ways. I surely agree that standard materialism would be an extremely tortured view to read into him. I think his observations about our being in relation to present-at-hand and essentially unconscious activity to be very interesting. But he seems at times to hint at a kind of behaviorism, or at least, does not render clear the role of the mind, in my reading anyway.
Sure, epistemology depends on constant interpretation. I don't see how this touches on Strawson's point. But I do see, more and more, that defending his view is tough: the automatic association of materialism with science is very hard for people to get over. But the history of materialism involving Newton, Descartes, Leibniz and Locke is very important, in my opinion, because it renders any account of materialism-as-scienticism obsolete, in my opinion.
Quoting Constance
Yeah, I could be joking.
This charge of being naive doesn't get old. It seems that a pre-requisite for being deep depends on being as obscure as humanly possible, for some reason. If you find Derrida useful, good. I find Russell useful, you might label Russell naive, as is frequently stated.
Because Descartes, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, James and others aren't deep, apparently.
Its funny to me how the far more instinct-driven lesser animals are outcompeting us humans in terms of ethics regarding environmental sustenance, leaving aside the fact that no lesser animal has ever come close to producing any of the myriad atrocities we humans have (cf. Hitler and Stalin, as just two examples). But this fact can serve one view of this issue just as much as the other.
Be that as it may, it may not be of philosophical interest to you, but the issue isnt one of culture-based morality so much as that of what our terms of good and bad existentially reference for one and all - if anything at all. This issue exceeds morality. For it can apply to which flavor of ice-cream one deems good and addresses the motivational reasons for why one deems the notion of a physical world to be good - this just as much as it applies to the reasons why saving another life might be deemed good. It addresses the very notion of value, as @Constance has mentioned.
At any rate, the empirically known physical world and its study via physics - which so far seems to be your primary interest - indeed has nothing to say on this matter. Whereas materialism can well be argued to imply an existential value-nihilism via its stance of fundamental purposelessness in the world. (As I previously said, materialism / physicalism cannot allow for the reality of intentions - hence, the reality of purpose - in the world without undermining its own stance.)
In short, non-physicalism might not be a sufficient condition for the existential reality of the good as a universal applicable to all particulars that so intend, but it is a necessary condition.
Apropos, as (mutually) altruistic as they are, meerkats are mammals with complex cognitions that require a lot of learning to be functional, and biologically shouldnt be grouped in the same category with ants any more than primates should.
Sure. I don't deny that human beings are capable of the most horrid actions imaginable. Animals will tend to behave as they have done so for thousands (or more) of years, it works for them. The non-trivial question is that if in acting this way, are they being ethical in any sense of the word and concept, as used by us. I don't know.
Quoting javra
I don't think the physical world is inherently good or bad. I see no issue with being altruistic and saving lives nor do I see a necessary connection between metaphysics and the good.
If something is good or moral, it is no more forcefully so because the universe is mental, or even because God (whoever believes in him) says so.
Quoting javra
Absolutely, physics says nothing about this - and much else, no doubt about it. But my main concern is not physics, it's attempting to separate our notion of "the physical" from scientistic "physicalism".
The mentioning of physics is to point out that nothing in it says anything about experience not being possible or saying that experience is an illusion. It's the one thing we know with most confidence out of everything there is.
Quoting javra
Yes, it can, that's correct. It need not, but it can.
I don't think intentions or purpose are touched by physicalism for good or ill. We have intentions and give purposes, I don't see any contradiction.
Quoting javra
That's true. These are the first animals that came to mind when writing, but they are quite different. Thanks for pointing that out.
Can you point out any physicalist philosopher that accepts even so much as the possibility of teleological processes in the world? I so far can't. Rather, from to my knowledge, physicalism denies the very reality of teleological processes in the world - such as any that might occur in biology. Hence, it very much does address the issue.
The contradiction I see is in considering the teleological processes we term intentions to either be a) illusory aspects of the world (this being inline to considering our own mental faculties acknowledged in "folk-psychology" to be illusory aspects of the world via epiphenomenalism or else eliminative materialism) or b) real aspects of the world, in which case the world at least in part consists of teleological processes.
The two options are in direct contradiction and result in different ontological perspectives - this having virtually nothing to do with the reality of the physical world as we know it.
But I don't mean to be too forceful on this issue. Just wanted to affirm that, to me, there is a substantial underlying contradiction, as I attempted to illustrate.
Maybe Nagel? I recall him saying something about that in his Mind and Cosmos, but I read it years ago and forgot much of it.
Quoting javra Quoting javra
These are views I very much abhor, not so much because of teleological considerations, but because they really play down the richness of experience and render much of traditional philosophy to be worthless, especially elimnitavism. It's not worthless.
Quoting javra
I think intentions are real.
The question is the universe itself is teleological. It's a good question. Maybe it's partly teleological? As in there are certain tendencies that occur: stars form, planets form, etc. But something in nature, as trivial as being too close or too far from a sun, might render the rest of the telos impossible.
But I don't have strong convictions either way, I may lean towards non-teleology, but if arguments and evidence are given to the contrary, I all ears.
Quoting javra
This follows if you think of materialism as scientism, I don't think this connection is necessary.
Quoting javra
I am here to learn and discuss, so being forceful is not a bad thing. The very aspect of choosing a form of idealism for the reasons you give, is interesting, so at least I got to see that.
I'm glad to hear. Thanks for the meaningful discussion.
Likewise.
No, it's not crazy at all at this level of analysis. Nobody, from Kant through Derrida says so. But as a way to describe the foundation for knowledge relationships, it is so bad that it is instantly refutable. For when one thinks the word 'brain' and all that is a brain rushes to mind, all one can "get" is the phenomena, the stuff that the positing of a brain is supposed to take care of, explain. But the brain itself is just this kind of thing: a phenomenon! In order to posit something that can explain phenomena, one would have to step OUT of phenomena, but this stepping out would require some impossible distance, separation, pov that is not phenomenological at all. Simply. after now more than two hundred years of transcendental philosophy, NOT possible. And everyone knows this; obviously Strawson. As you said, he takes his inspiration from Moore's hand demonstration (like Diogenes who walks across the floor, thereby refuted Zeno); but this is just the analaytic school throwing up its hands and affirming, yes, it is impossible to escape the phenomenological nature of any assumption. So, after years of struggling with Kant (and the varieties of Kantians) they quit, and started with "best explanation" talk, and this has led them to a crisis of vacuity (as Strawson admits several times here) for if you just take philosophy down to verifiable/falsifiable standards, science then moves to the forefront meaningful thinking.
Strawson seems to address this in his contra-Ryle:
[i]The way a colour-experience is experientially, for the subject of experience that has it, is part of its
essential natureits ultimate realityas a physical phenomenon. When we claim (with
Russell) that to have an experience is eo ipso to be acquainted with certain of the intrinsic
features of reality, we do not have to suppose that this acquaintance involves standing back
from the experience reflectively and examining it by means of a further, distinct experience. It
doesnt. This picture is too cognitivist (or perhaps too German-Idealist).[/i]
And this is the extent of his argument. Simply and absurdly dismissive. His examples all from physics space/time, atoms and subatomic particles, energy/particle interconvertability, and he considers "that physicss best account of the structure of reality is genuinely reality-representing in substantive ways, and that the term materialist is in good order. I sail close to the wind in my use of the word matter, facing the charge of vacuousness and the charge (it is seen as a charge) that it may be hard to
distinguish my position from idealism"; so what he gives us is an idealism, with the many inclusions for the monist view he defends, of a unity that must be inclusive of both the assumption of non experiential "being" and experiential being. So what does the non experiential being amount to? No more than what science and common sense tell us: a kicking of a chair; a raising up of arms. He has never in the course of the paper exceeded Moore's Diogenes-like example (of course, as he promised). He has, at most, made clear that the assumption scientists make that there must be an outside to our inside, is a good one. Let's call this a defense of materialism.
Quoting Manuel
But again, there certainly is a difference. There is a reason why Heidegger wanted to be liberated from the history of bad metaphysics, and dropped terms like 'physical' and idealism'. I am the one challenging the physicalist model. Heidegger doesn't bother with this because in his world this belongs to an entirely improper orientation. I am simply doing a reductio on the assumption of materialism, underscoring that there is no epistemic way out, not of the interior of a brain, for the argument goes much, much further than this: Eve the idea of a brain itself is annihilated. This is where Rorty is coming from. He is not saying materialism is wrong. Rather, there is beyond what can be said, nothing to say (from Wittgenstein, whom he ranked as high as Heidegger).
Strawson's Real Materialism fairs no better, because BOTH inside and outside are nonsense terms. In his terms, he would allow his thinking to be called experiential-and-non-experiential ?-ist But here, he is just buying into a scientific category.
Quoting Manuel
Heidegger is wrong in his notion of present at hand. If this is interesting to you, then it can be explored, but for now, let's say his accusation that Husserl is trying to "walk on water" with his intuitionism lacks insight.
Quoting Manuel
I don't mean this to be insulting. I call it naive for the above reasons.
Sure, and I've said so too, in this very thread:
Quoting Manuel
The added italics are new, not in the original post.
Quoting Constance
That's true, and I disagree with him on that point. I'm not clear if we have any access of "thing in themselves", if we do have some kind of relationship with it, I think Schopenhauer's concept of will comes closest to it, but it may be wrong. By saying I agree with Strawson's "real materialism", doesn't mean I endorse everything he says or thinks. Not that you're saying this, but, making this point clear.
Quoting Constance
Yeah, I think physics tells us information of the external world and not trivial information either. But one thing is to say that physics tells us some things about the world, another is to say that physics tells us something about "things in themselves", it doesn't follow. Some people could argue that it must follow, I am less confident about that. It seems to me that that leaves us stuck in a view in which all there is, are appearances all the way down. I don't agree with that.
Having experience tells us something about the mental aspects of the physical, I don't see this as naive, it's simply follows from the logic of it. I hesitate to say "common sense", because I guess you'd say that's scientific reductionistic emptiness.
It's very hard to spell out what common sense is, but I think it's something people have.
Quoting Constance
The distinction is very difficult, but not non-sense. Being able to tell what's a novel, a hallucination and so on, is pretty important.
I mean, if you continue to equate materialism with scientism, then that's fine - it's what most people take the term to mean. I don't think that term must follow. All I'm saying is that there is one fundamental stuff in the world, and that everything else is a variation of it. This doesn't reduce representations to neurons, nor does it deny that a novel can be more profound than quantum theory, nor that history is just meaningless events. I think it's pretty astonishing.
Quoting Constance
This we can work with, so long as we keep to materialism-as-scientism. Here we can actually make some progress, such as agreeing that a person is not a collection of neurons. Or that language is an important factor when thinking about metaphysics. Or that there are important facets of life which science tells us virtually nothing.
The idea of appearances all the way down is completely absurd. The essential task that philosophy brings one to is not the drawing of a line between appearance and reality, but to ground what it is in the world that intimates the Real, and first the Real has to be affirmed as something that is not nonsense. So what is it that is there, in our existence, that intimates the Real? This is a prohibited question in analytic thinking.
The rejected philosophical alternative lies with Husserl and his phenomenological reduction, which was taken up by post Heideggerians in the so called French theological turn. This is why I reject Strawson's materialism: his thesis includes a typical rigidly determined sense of the impossible that separates what we know (and he cites science for this) from what is not known, which is vast, by his estimate, and this is why he defends such a flexible or inclusive concept of materialism, to accommodate the radical distance between the known and what is not known. He does not take seriously the Husserlian claim that a true scientific approach to philosophy requires a thematic redirection toward the intuitive grounding for all scientific thinking; nor did Heidegger, Sartre, or anyone I have read, until Levinas and Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, et al.
But as you say, this is an imposing philosophical task, reading Husserl. But as I see it, it is essential. The epoche is a method, not a thesis, whereby one removes from the perceptual act all but the essential givenness of the intuitive encounter. All schools are in abeyance in the attempt to approach the "pure phenomenological" that is IN the world prior to the "naturalistic attitude". Husserl holds this to be a method of discovery, not simply a thesis, and he claims this method is THE way philosophy should go. I think he was right. Not something I can convince another person to see. One has to "do" this, and it requires a turn away from science altogether. It is a new set of philosophical themes.
Quoting Manuel
What is it that underlies common sense? I think you're right to say it is something people have, as if there is this unexamined intuition that is always already there, from which issues forth tacitly, assumptions about the Real of everydayness. Strawson calls it a sense. Why I call his position naive is his belief that this is as far as one can go. I think this sense can be isolated and analyzed. Heidegger does this, but he rejected Husserl's dramatic epoche. I thought it strange that you could read Heidegger and move toward Strawson because Heidegger examines the very thing Strawson indicates to be that which justifies his materialism, namely, that "feeling"; for Heidegger, that feeling or sense is the dynamic of the temporal structure of our existence (which he got from Kierkegaard, among others). Heidegger's dasein leaves Strawson's feeling rather in the dust.
Quoting Manuel
Well, all of his ideas about where thinking leaves off prior to the abyss of not-knowing are from science. I think the very concept of material substance is from science, I mean, the term itself is a scientific one, and any give or take regarding its meaning is stuck with this. I know, he invites us to choose another, and he knows he teeters on idealism.
But as to fundamental stuff, one could go with Heidegger and Derrida and admit that the question that we encounter issues forth IN language: the question is the piety of thought says Heidegger, and when we reach the end of thought, it is thought's end, and not some impossible intuition.
Partly right, I say. Husserl had it right before him. This is, of course, very tough to defend.
Here we disagree from the very beginning. I don't think there is one fundamental task for philosophy, there are several, and the most important of them to you, can be considered the "fundamental task" of philosophy, for you.
I don't see this particular question as being prohibited by analytic philosophy, it perhaps has not been pursued as you frame the issue. Bryan Magee, for instance, a philosophy popularizer, maybe the best one, surely thought about this question and concluded that Schopenhauer's "will" is the maybe the closest answer we can get. He could be called analytic.
But others will have different accounts.
Quoting Constance
As far as I know, Husserl was motivated to create one science, phenomenology, which could serve to unite them all. It is true that he was Heidegger's teacher, but Husserl also taught Carnap.
Strawson's claim, and Chomsky - is simple, I think, either we are part of nature (the universe, reality, being, whatever) or we are not. If we are part of the universe, not gods, then we will have limits as other animals do. I think it is a safe statement to say that there is a great deal we don't know - not "just' in science, but everywhere else.
In fact, I think elementary phenomenology shows this. Do we understand how we can lift a finger? I can't discover the reason in my action.
Quoting Constance
Well, if you can't give reasons, that's a problem. What matters is that you like this approach.
Quoting Constance
It was simple really. Although I think Heidegger gives a very profound account of being, in a very particular way that often highlights things we take for granted, I could see no way forward from his program, it was mostly being stuck in Being and Time. I don't think his "turn" work ever matched his early stuff.
With Strawson and by extension, many of the 17th century classics I felt as if I could build on what they were saying. As for the "feeling", all he intends to point out is that in giving any explanation, not "just" science, there comes a point we can say no more about it. Temporality plays a role, of course, so do many other things, our cognition, our intuitions and so on.
Quoting Constance
Yes, "materialism" was a scientific term that meant something. I don't think - as it is used today by most people - that it makes any sense. I don't see a difference between mainstream materialism and scienticism. Strawson includes everything in his materialism. Big difference.
Quoting Constance
I don't get much substance from Derrida. Nor do I get much substance from Henry, Levinas and others. They don't incite me to want to learn more about them, whatever it is they're talking about is not something I want to follow in that tradition.
I disagree. there is only one issue, but this plays out in complicated ways, and I am of the evolving opinion that these are pragmatic in their nature. The one question is an ancient one: what is the ground for the "phenomenon" called the Good? This is a category of inquiry called metaethics, an metaethical matters are metavalue matters. So the real question is, what is metavalue? As a problem, it is complicated, because what is declared good in the ethical/aesthetic sense, is embedded in factual entanglements.
Think of it like this: language is a pragmatic tool, socially constructed. Then consider (and this is why Derrida is so important) that the world of meaningful utterances issues from language, which is what Wittgenstein, in the analytic world, understood very well. Face it: all talk about consciousness, material substance, reality, and of course, across the board, is first, prior to any sense that can be made, talk. And talk is contextual. It does no good to go on about space time, e.g., in philosophy, if you haven't given that in which understanding itself occurs. Kant is the progenitor of this, but he was blinded by a primacy of reason. It was Husserl then Heidegger (and the Greeks, and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and on and on) that pushed forth the "Totality" of being a human self that hit the mark. The self is a language construct, argues Heidegger, and through language, his ontology issues. This is the bedrock of hermeneutics and its thesis of indeterminacy (which I have a lot of reading to do on).
Derrida plays out the hermeneutical problem in spades, drawing on Saussure, first, in his Structure, Signs and Play, a very accessible essay. (unlike Differance, which is not friendly at all, by most accounts). Derrida is important for one reason, by my take on this: he shows that the true grounding of true propositions is a profound indeterminacy, and this indeterminacy is the 'true" grounding of our existence. This is Heidegger as well, but Derrida forced hermeneutics to its logical end.
Schopenhaur's will? I, not for a moment, accepted his infamous pessimism; and the idea of a will has never set well with me, simply because as a term that is supposed to be foundational, the "will" brings in too much. It is not a candidate for foundational "metaphysics".
Quoting Manuel
"Everything else" is, epistemically, science, and when the term science is put under review, it is not its method that is in question; it is it content. There is no escaping the method, the scientific method is, I hold, simply part of the structure of experience itself. It is a "forward looking" experiment, that looks to results of hypotheses as what yields knowledge. What IS a house? One must look first at the structure of language acquisition that makes it possible to ask the question. Infants hear noises, learn to associate these in social settings, and it is the pragmatic successes that constitute the meanings of terms. What Dewey calls the "consummation" of engagement. For Dewey, to acknowledge a house as a house at all, is a problematic completeness, like making a step on the sidewalk and having a "theory" of what stepping on sidewalks is, confirmed in the successful negotiation of foot descending on concrete.
The so called hypothetical deductive method. So experience itself is like a laboratory, of spontaneous confirmations that the world is the world, and here you would have Strawson's "feeling" bound up in tis very pragmatic idea. Reality is just this "sense" that everything, every default problem solved that saturates apperceptive events, like mindlessly walking down the street, is in, if you will, working order. Not at all far afield from Heidegger ready to hand "environments of instrumentality".
Talk about nature brings up the most important dividing line in phenomenology, from Kierkegaard through Heidegger, and this is our "throwness" (geworfenheit). The natural setting in which we live and do science is familiar place, and in it, we move along fairly regularly within its norms, but phenomenology makes a very big deal out of what Heidegger will call ontology, Husserl calls the epoche, Kierkegaard calls the recognition of spirit (original or inherited sin): it is what happens when one is dislodged from stream of events, and stands in wonder of existence. This is a structural shift in Being towards authentic freedom, responsibility (esp Sartre who wanted WWII traitors to be held accountable), and for Heidegger, it is the point of doing philosophy. Many questions, yes, but one purpose, which is to realize one's own freedom in the radical dynamic of becoming, We are not IN time; we ARE time.
Science and its naturalism is suspended for the deeper analysis of our existence that is part of ontology.
Quoting Manuel
But of course there are reasons. they would take too long to discuss. The essential reason why phenomenology is THE preferred method of ontology, is essentially Kantian: All talk in empirical science cannot escape the Totality of human dasein. THIS IS OUR FINITUDE. I capitalize this for a good reason.
But the proof is in the pudding, true. One is not going to "like" this at a glance. It does take a lot of reading, which is why I said earlier, you are what you read. Literally. If all I ever read were science, I would neither understand not like any of this. But Mill's argument steps in: how does one judge the superiority of one thing over another? Well, one would have to know both, intimately. Everybody already knows empirical science, for this is ubiquitous in our education, in the news, in practice, and so science rules thought. Phenomenology is NOWHERE is this education. Therefore, in order to "know both" one has to take special pains to learn phenomenology. It is not an idea. It is a completely new thematic enterprise.
Quoting Manuel
But Strawson and the classics, to put it bluntly, get it completely wrong vis a vis philosophical foundations. Evidence? Explain how knowledge of the world works at the most basic level (the OP). I mean, this question annihilates materialism's assumptions instantly. Most, and this is true of almost all papers in analytic philosophy, or what Strawson talks about is what he does not intend, but the term 'materialism' and really what is left is this "feeling" that he led with based on Moore's hand waving example. There is NO analysis of the hand waving example. NONE! Phenomenology is all about this one matter, one could argue.
Quoting Manuel
He includes a systematic disclaimer.
Look, I write too much, I know. My fault.
I think we have good reasons to believe that talk is the "vehicle" of thought, so prior to all that, is thought. The actual processes of language use is, misleading, when we utter a word, we are mixing several aspects of people: the way they produce sound, mixed in with various organs trying to express what thoughts try to convey. Actual language is something we can't introspect into. But there's evidence that an immense amount of effort goes into something even prior the articulation of speech.
Quoting Constance
What is a house is a combination of "matter and form", as Aristotle said and we have advanced now to the point where we recognize that we cannot pick out a "mind independent" entity and call it a house. It is dependent on our conceptual scheme.
Quoting Constance
It's a fine line between basing all arguments on science, which is poor philosophy, but no less important, is not to downplay it all. Yeah, many of us have read science books, journals, podcasts etc.
Not that many are actual physicists or biologists. It's not an easy skill for most us to develop. So we should be careful here, it is all too easy to go one way or another.
Quoting Constance
Look, I know that there are disciples of Husserl and Heidegger who are constantly and furiously saying that "that is NOT phenomenology, it ignores the crucial aspect of X, as Husserl (or Heidegger) point out!"
I'm not a particular fan of restricting a discipline to one or two figures. As a name of class in school, sure, there is no "phenomenology". But if you read a very good novel, as far as I can see, you can very well get excellent descriptive phenomenology, which can then be applied to real life.
Quoting Constance
I think you are assuming that all can be explained, or that there is a deeper level that needs to be taken into account. I don't agree with Moore, I don't know why you keep bringing him up, yes, Strawson mentions it, I think Moore is wrong on what he was trying to prove, direct realism.
Quoting Constance
I don't mind, I have this habit too. The only thing I could say is that you should perhaps try to take one example to flesh it out to the max, to get the point across. I'm not sure of what you are trying to say, other than a certain phenomenology is needed, that we need to take into account that which allows us to raise these questions, which you say is language, and that Heidegger destroys materialism.
Maybe I'd agree that more phenomenology is better, perhaps.
But to say the classics are wrong, is too vague as they cover many topics. In any case, it was the classics who inspired Kant (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, etc.), and Husserl and Heidegger.
But it is this "good reasons" attitude that stands in the way of acknowledging something important, that the move toward an analysis of language and the structure of knowledge relations is the foundation of our understanding existence. Transcendental idealism, as I said, dominated philosophy for so long for a very good reason: one cannot get around this. Good reasons is an understatement, a bit like saying there are good reasons to believe it gets dark at night. You illustrate thinking in a terrible turn toward positivism that simple divested, and continues to do so, philosophy of its gravitas.
Language makes the world. See Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity for an excellent read on this. Rorty straddles the fence, and I don't agree with what amounts to a nihilism, epistemic and ethical (hard argument) but he gets Heidegger and Wittgenstein and sees that if one is going to talk about things at the most basic level, then the description of the making of meaning is where the issues are. think about it: You say, "there's evidence that an immense amount of effort goes into something even prior the articulation of speech." How do you know this? What brought you to this "understanding"? There is simply no getting by this: through language the world "appears". And this is not to say talk about conditions prior to language is wrong AT ALL. Of course, this is part of the "science" of anthropology, speaking generally. But this is philosophy, and the questions are about the presuppositions of this kind of thing. It is like talking about the unconscious. Psychologists have been doing this since before Freud, and they are not just being absurd. But take the matter one step further, and ask, isn't it a contradiction in terms to talk about the unconscious given that in order to bring it to mind at all, it has to be conscious? And unconscious affairs are really conscious theories about metaphysics. And again, consider the concept of the past: isn't the past just some impossible concept? Has it ever been witnessed? Material substance is like this, for we use this term all the time in many contexts and it is certainly useful, but take the matter down to basic questions, and it simply vanishes, for talk about the philosophical thesis of materialism simply has no referent. If it's a "feeling" then the matter goes to others, beginning with Heidegger (or better, Kierkegaard; see his Concept of Anxiety), who give this a thorough and daring examination.
Quoting Manuel
And this is just pre-analytic. Of course there is a house over there, by the tree. Kant would never deny this because he had to go home after work. But then CPR is very different. Philosophy is NOT a confirmation of our everydayness. It is an annihilation of it.
Quoting Manuel
It is the Willard Quine's attitude that is the failing of anglo-american philosophy. He said, "I hold that knowledge, mind and Meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." This is the bedrock of analytic philosophy, and it has led to a crisis of vacuity by ignoring the onto-theological/phenomenological dimension of our existence. Quine had a Erdos number, meaning he was very mathematical and good enough to write a paper with Paul Erdos. Put the two together, and you have the ideal of clarity and logical efficiency--which would be fine if the world were reducible to these. the problem lies in the attraction these values have for prospective philosophers: they tend to be very positivistic and find their inspirations from the rigidity of mathematical models.
This is why reading contemporary analytic papers amounts a very meticulous handling of almost nothing at all, for once you divest philosophy of its theological content, it really has nothing to say. this is why Rorty simply left philosophy and went to teach literature, He knew analytic philosophy had reached its end, and there was simply nothing to say, convinced that "non propositional" knowledge" was nonsense. Analytic philosopher simply do not see that the world IS theological. This is what gives it its depth of meaning. this is not to say it is "religious"; rather, it says what stands before one in the openness of inquiry is thematically theological. Hence my complaint about Strawson.
Quoting Manuel
No, it is not a philosophy for living; not a didactic novel. It is a rigorous system of thought. In the recent writings, consider Michel Henry introductory remarks:
Phenomenology rests on four principles which it explicitly claims as its foundations. The firstso much appearance, so much beingis borrowed from the Marburg School. Over against this ambiguous proposition, owing to the double signification of the term appearance, we prefer this strict wording: so much appearing, so much being.1 The second is the principle of principles. Formulated by Husserl himself in §24 of Ideen I, it sets forth intuition or, more precisely, that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition2 and thus for any particularly rational statement. In the third principle, the claim is so vehement that it clothes itself in the allure of an exhortation, even a cry: zu den Sachen selbst! The fourth principle was defined considerably later by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Reduction and Givenness, but its importance hits upon the entirety of phenomenological development as a hidden presupposition that is always already at work. It is formulated thus: so much reduction, so much givenness.3
My point about the long science oriented schooling we have all had was to emphasize that the kind of thinking that issues from the above is, as I have said, thematically alien. Kant is just this, though keep in mind that I find his rationalism is way off the mark. Heidegger took the Kantian "Copernican Revolution" to the lengths of our Totality. Heidegger Through Phenomenology to Thought, by William Richardson, is very helpful to understand him.
Quoting Manuel
He does more than mention him. It circulates throughout, this unanalytic demonstration of what is plain to see. His "feeling" is grounded in this.
Quoting Manuel
I'm trying to say: If philosophy is the a study of our existence at the most basic level of analysis, then its purview lies beyond, or underlying andsubsuming that of science. It job is to discover the presuppositions that are implicit in our affairs of thinking and living, so that the world that stands before us gets a foundational analysis that discovers, and this part is most controversial, what is its own presupposition. This precludes the various contextualities carved out by the familiar categories of worldly thinking, though (and this is ALL borrowed thinking). The only way to accommodate this purpose is phenomenology. But, as I said, this is so unfamiliar to our education, it gets little air time, if any at all. Most don't know it even exists in anglo-american philosophy settings.
Philosophy's mission? To replace popular religion with a rational phenomenological discourse on human spirituality. The essential thematic direction is metaethics and metavalue analysis. Rorty was right about this: philosophy has already reached its end, its analytic Camusian end of rolling rocks around and going nowhere, and now finds it self as mere entertainment, solving Gettier problems and the like. The analytic tradition is dead, after one hundred years the "naturalistic" attitude in the spirit of Quine.
I agree with transcendental idealism.
Quoting Constance
How? By mentioning Carnap? I don't like this work.
Quoting Constance
If language makes the world, then animals have no perceptions. And all of geology is essentially garbage. Call a fossil what you like, something was here prior to us.
The linguistic evidence put for by Chomsky in UG. Call it "scientistic" if you like, it's still hard evidence. You may want to insert the rebuttal of Chomsky's work by mentioning the Piraha language...
Quoting Constance
No. We don't introspect the photons hitting our eyes, yet without photons, hitting our eyes we could not see. Same with sound waves.
Quoting Constance
The matter you have in mind, the scientistic one, is not the matter I am talking about. The matter I talk about covers everything.
Heidegger does nothing to touch this subject to me. As I said, I got stuck in Heidegger without a way forward. But if you can proceed with him, good.
Quoting Constance
Sure, these things should be studied scientifically, in so far as they can be. Often, they can't be so studied, or leave plenty to leave desired. I do not like Quine's philosophy by the way, I don't see much content in it, he may have an interesting essay or two, but he is scientistic and not too clear on what science is even supposed to cover.
Quoting Constance
Look, when I finished my studies in Spain, one my teachers was best friends with Henry, they might have even worked together. He was mentioned and discussed with some frequency. I never was attracted to his characterization of phenomenology, so I am not impressed with his points.
Quoting Constance
Thanks, will check that book out.
Quoting Constance
That's one task, which you are interested in. I don't see why this MUST be philosophy's goal. It is a distortion of the history of philosophy to look at in this manner.
It is not an historical claim and cares nothing for historical consistency. Philosophy isn't the history of philosophy any more than empirical science is the history of science. It is something that issues from the structure of existence itself.
At any rate, Good Luck in all your study endeavors. You sound like someone with an open mind and I am sure you will find great things!
Thanks and likewise!