The Mind-Created World
The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. Idealism is usually distinguished from physicalism the view that the physical is fundamental and the related philosophical naturalism, the view that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, account for the universe. Physicalism and naturalism are the assumed consensus of modern culture, very much the product of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on pragmatic science and instrumental reason. Accordingly this essay will go against the grain of the mainstream consensus and even against what many will presume to be common sense. However I hope to present an argument that shows that common sense and this formulation of philosophical idealism are not necessarily in conflict.
Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise. In so doing I will draw on phenomenology as well as perspectives from non-dualist philosophy an approach that will hopefully be become clear in the subsequent sections.
All in the Mind?
In philosophy it is customary to address objections after making your case, but I will mention two of the most frequent objections to idealism at the outset. First is the criticism that idealism says that the world is all in the mind the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then it would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way: that things pass into and and out of existence depending on whether theyre being perceived or not. G.E. Moore, for example, once said that idealism must entail that, when the passengers are all seated on the train, the wheels would go out of existence for their not being perceived.
The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or mind-stuff, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesnt posit that there is any mind-stuff existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although Im well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).
At this stage I will only note these objections, as to counter them now would be premature, but I hope it will become clear in what follows that these objections are misplaced.
A Thought Experiment
Lets start with a simple thought-experiment, to help bring the issues into focus.
[i]Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.
Now picture the same scene but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.
Impossible! you object. How can I imagine any such thing?! It is really nothing at all, it is an impossibility, a jumble of stimuli, if anything this is what you are asking me to imagine! It is completely unintelligible.[/i]
But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists even if what were discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.
These are the grounds on which I am appealing to the insights of philosophical idealism. But I am not arguing that it means that the world is all in the mind. Its rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.
A corollary of this is that existence is a compound or complex idea. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms that it either exists or does not exist is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether theyre perceived is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things go out of existence when not perceived, is simply their imagined non-existence. In reality, the supposed unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.
So How Does Mind Create Reality?
So this is the sense that Im arguing for the fundamental role that the mind plays in creating reality.
Let me address an obvious objection. Surely the world is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind creates the world?
As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What Im calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us with a kind of inherent reality that it doesnt possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.
By creating reality, Im referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified worldpicture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this world-picture seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole even though this is plainly what we experience.
By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. And that is the subject of the remainder of this essay.
Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise. In so doing I will draw on phenomenology as well as perspectives from non-dualist philosophy an approach that will hopefully be become clear in the subsequent sections.
All in the Mind?
In philosophy it is customary to address objections after making your case, but I will mention two of the most frequent objections to idealism at the outset. First is the criticism that idealism says that the world is all in the mind the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then it would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way: that things pass into and and out of existence depending on whether theyre being perceived or not. G.E. Moore, for example, once said that idealism must entail that, when the passengers are all seated on the train, the wheels would go out of existence for their not being perceived.
The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or mind-stuff, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesnt posit that there is any mind-stuff existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although Im well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).
At this stage I will only note these objections, as to counter them now would be premature, but I hope it will become clear in what follows that these objections are misplaced.
A Thought Experiment
Lets start with a simple thought-experiment, to help bring the issues into focus.
[i]Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.
Now picture the same scene but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.
Impossible! you object. How can I imagine any such thing?! It is really nothing at all, it is an impossibility, a jumble of stimuli, if anything this is what you are asking me to imagine! It is completely unintelligible.[/i]
But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists even if what were discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.
These are the grounds on which I am appealing to the insights of philosophical idealism. But I am not arguing that it means that the world is all in the mind. Its rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.
A corollary of this is that existence is a compound or complex idea. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms that it either exists or does not exist is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether theyre perceived is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things go out of existence when not perceived, is simply their imagined non-existence. In reality, the supposed unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.
So How Does Mind Create Reality?
So this is the sense that Im arguing for the fundamental role that the mind plays in creating reality.
Let me address an obvious objection. Surely the world is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind creates the world?
As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What Im calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us with a kind of inherent reality that it doesnt possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.
By creating reality, Im referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified worldpicture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this world-picture seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole even though this is plainly what we experience.
By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. And that is the subject of the remainder of this essay.
Comments (2162)
You wrote
Quoting Wayfarer
Thinking that whatever we say about reality is conditioned by our perspective doesnt make you a postmodern. You are still assuming very well that reality exists independently of our mind, even if it is impossible to us to think about it without interfering in this thought with our mind.
Your exposition contains an ambiguous language, but actually there are clear signs that you are far from exposing to radical criticism the very ideas of existence, reality, being.
Pinter has the same ambiguity in the passage you quoted:
nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.
The additional note except that they exist destroys the whole argumentation, so that the whole reasoning is nothing at the end, it is still just an old metaphysical philosophy that tries to be a bit more clever, but actually is just hidden behind a mask that pretends to take into account the existence of perspectives.
If you truly want to take perspectives into account, you should consider that the whole idea of reality imagined by perspectives is itself a perspective. Talking about perspectives is itself a perspective. As a consequence, the very concept of perspective has to be considered completely unreliable; this, obviously, doesnt make metaphysics valid again, because metaphysics has already been demolished by considering perspectives.
As a consequence, once we demolished metaphysics by considering perspectives, and then we demolished perspectives by considering that they must apply to themselves, we need to find different routes for philosophy, to see how to proceed after that. Surely we should avoid all those masked ways of bringing metaphysics back to life (like this one I commented on, for example: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/840414).
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the key for me. You said something similar here some months back and it helped me to understand your perspective on idealism - a much more straight forward and, dare I say it, naturalistic account. I can certainly see an argument for the world arising or co-arising as a dynamic interplay of subject and object.
I can see your point here but then we would also probably need to say that your perspective that it's a perspective is itself a perspective... and I fear we can keep doing this until we become a spinning top of infinite recursion.
I completely agree, thats why I said that, after our work, we need to keep in mind that the very concept of perspective is completely unreliable, because, after all, it remains a hidden way of saying that there is an objective reality, from which perspective tries to be different.
We cannot free ourselves from perspectives, because we cannot free ourselves from our brain, we cannot think without using our brain, and I know that this is already a perspective.
I even think that Socrates knowing that he didnt know nothing is already knowing too much, it is actually a claim of knowing really a lot.
After that, I think we are driven to aknowledge that language forces us to make statements that, as such, are far from being correct, aware of perspectives, humble. But attention to language shouldnt make us go to analytical philosophy. I think that analytical philosophy is another masked metaphysical philosophy, because it takes language as a hard point, a hard basis to inquire into our reasoning.
Once we realize that we are prisoners of our brains (the experiment of brain in a vat is not a mental experiment, it is just our condition: the brain is the vat of itself, from which it cannot escape), I think the best we can do is to go to our humanity, psichology, emotions, literature, myths. Not in an obscurantist mentality, but exactly after being enriched by the research we have made about metaphysics, perspectives, criticism and self-criticism.
After all, the fear of the infinite recursion you mentioned is a consequence of carrying on by applying a mental methodology based on wanting to understand, to control, to master what is happening in our reasoning. Now we know that we cannot get any ultimate mastering, so I think it is better to stop trying to build new metaphysics and, rather, go to humanity, humbleness, weakness.
I dont know if perspective is a concept at all; its more that perspective provides a necessary ground for [i]any[/I] concept. Certainly in non-dualism there is awareness of states of contentless consciousness (nirvikalpa samadhi) but not having realized such states then yes, I am still a dualist. Its the human condition, Im afraid. And as such I have to use reasoned argument to point to that which is beyond it. That is all philosophy is good for, as far as Im concerned.
Theres an understanding in non-dualism, that any form of teaching is like the stick used to get a fire going. When its going, the stick is thrown in with it. I think thats what youre driving at and thank you for it :pray:
Thanks. I would hope my view is compatible with what is starting to manifest as extended or transcendent naturalism - a style of naturalism that acknowledges the irreducibility of the first-person perspective. In that sense naturalism itself is evolving.
Interesting. Are you saying that you can't have perspectives without an objective reality from which perspectives are derived? I've never given it much thought, but I am unsure if this is necessarily the case. I will need to think it over. Can I get back to you in 20 years? Perhaps the word perspective is inadequate and just the best we can do to try and convey a set of relationships.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Yes, the comments sometimes sounds like false modesty.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Perhaps. My answer to this has often been that these sorts of questions are probably unsolvable by me and in the end will do nothing to help other people, so best I just get on with my day job...
I think @Wayfarer's idea of extended naturalism does offer potential insights into how we co-create the reality we experience and how it might benefit us to realise the tentative nature of many of our positions.
Thanks very much for the effort of creating this essay and for sharing it here with us. :smile: :flower:
(and for making it accessible without a Medium.com membership but I really must join soon).
Question / invitation for expanding on the essay:
If Im understanding the gist, your essay centers on idealism / physicalism and the
noumenal / phenomenal (beyond the mind / perspectival).
(As if thats not already enough to juggle and discuss lol )
Building upon what you have written, how would you compare (or integrate?) the Buddhist doctrine of the Two Truths? (whichever version of the doctrine you may prefer)
(Two Truths Wikipedia article and SEP entry)
Thanks again!
I watched the "is reality real?" vid in your notes, and the arguments there were all towards indirect realism, which posits a Kantian objective reality to which we do not have access except via 'constructive' senses. What I was hoping for, but the above comment seems to deny me, is an inversion of that, such that the constructed sensed world is the real, of which the 'objective world is a mere abstraction: that just because we are participants in the unfolding of the world, we have direct access to it, and the objective world is an impoverished world that 'works' but does not 'care'.
As a philosophical naturalist I'm unaware of any "style of naturalism" wherein "first-person perspective" is reducible to ... just as e.g. living organisms are not reducible to their constituent phenomenal subsystems (e.g. biochemistry, biophysics, wavefunction, etc) because organisms are emergent complex phenomena. 'Ontological reductionism" is a mere caricature of methodological reductionism and thereby a rhetorical objection to scientism.. Also, though naturalism is presupposed by natural science, naturalism itself is not natural science. This so-called "extended or transcendental naturalism", Wayfarer, sounds like another quasi-Kantian solution is search of a problem tilting at windmills. :sparkle:
:chin: Maybe I should read the OP ...
If anything exists in a universe with no minds, then non-mental stuff exists in that universe.
Still, even though it is a constant presence in our perspective, we barely notice our noses and rarely talk about them, especially when describing to others what we see. Van Goghs nose never shows up in his Café de nuit, for example. Why? Far from generating a unified world-picture, the mind tends to ignore the reality. Perspective is inextricably bound to the body, an object, constituted not only by its relations, but by its being, something any account of mind is forever lacking.
What I think we are really ignorant about, is many aspects of the world absent us, which are not covered by physics, which is, although fundamental, far from exhaustive.
Kant's comments of "things in themselves" covers one aspect of it, but there are several. All in all, a high quality post. :up:
Excellent point, I'll take that on board.
Quoting 0 thru 9
Thanks for positive feedback! I've always found the 'two truths' doctrine compelling, since I first encountered it in T R V Murti The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. One of the footnotes to the Medium essay can be found in the Wikipedia link you provided:
[quote=The Buddha, Kacc?yanagotta Sutta]By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, non-existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
That is what I'm drawing on for much of the essay, as you've correctly intuited.
:pray:
What I find to be the crucial aspect of understanding the essential nature of "perspective", is to consider the temporal perspective of the human experience of being at the present, now. Suggestions as to how long "now" is from the human perspective, range from a couple hundred milliseconds to a couple of seconds, depending on the purpose of the estimate. In any case, if this perspective was radically different, like a few picoseconds on one extreme, or a few billion years to the other extreme, then the way that we perceive the universe would be completely different.
So the issue is not simply a matter of how mental processes shape the "reality" which we know, but how the very basic living processes of the living being shape this "reality" . The living processes are organized so as to perceive the universe from what is probably best described as a "mid-way" temporal perspective. We do not perceive extremely fast occurrences, nor do we perceive extremely slow processes, we rely on logic to figure these out. The reliability of our models of the very fast aspects of reality, and the very slow aspects of reality, are dependent on the soundness of our logic.
The "reality" which we know and respect is produced from empirical observation, sense information, and this is the reality of the mid-way temporal perspective. The senses provide us with the reality of the mid-way temporal perspective. But even things within this mid-way reality are affected by the aspects of reality which are outside of it, in the extremes, so these influences are invisible to us and therefore do not enter into our representation of reality. This makes our reality, the one produced from our mid-way temporal perspective, not very accurate as a true representation, because we cannot account for these influences.
We can somewhat account for such influences, and to a relatively high degree of accuracy in specific cases. Without our ability to choreograph ballets of bits, on a timescale much smaller than we can consciously perceive, we wouldn't be communicating on TPF.
Sure... judgment about what exists always comes via perspective. It does not follow from that that everything that ever existed does as well.
Some parts of reality... sure.
What preceded us... never. Impossible.
Much of it anyway...
One of the thought-experiments I sometimes consider is imagine having the perspective of a mountain (were a mountain to have senses). As the lifespan of a mountain is hundreds of millions of years, you wouldn't even notice humans and animals, as their appearances and dissappearances would be so ephemeral so as to be beneath your threshold of awareness. Rivers, you'd notice, because they'd stay around long enough to actually carve into you. But people and animals would be ephemera. At the other end of the scale, from the perspective of micro-organisms, humans and animals would be like solar systems or entire worlds.
Anthropomorphism.
Oh yes I agree, we can "account" for some such influences, that's how we know they are somewhat real. But look at the way in which that is currently done, through statistics and probabilities, not through understanding. So our representation of reality does not show this level of causation at all, only the probable effects of it, derived through statistical analysis. This is very similar to the way that classical theologians understood God. We know that God exists through an analysis of His effects on the "reality" which we know, as created through our sense organs and minds. But all we know is His effects, and we do not know God Himself as the cause of these effects.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a good example. I like to make a comparison between an atom with its orbiting electrons, and the solar system with its orbiting planets. Our temporal experience of the present is such that the electrons appear to orbit the nucleus so fast, that their locations just appear as a cloud of probabilities. In other words we do not have the required "present" to properly locate them. However, we are capable of locating the planets relative to the sun, using empirical data, because the present we experience allows us to do this.
But even to correctly locate the sun and planets required that we dismiss much empirical data (the appearance of these bodies orbiting the earth) as misleading and deceptive. This allowed that the application of logic could produce a more true model. From this we derived a basic understanding of "gravity", as an invisible force of causation which acts over a huge expanse of space.
Now, if our temporal experience of the present was an extremely long period of time, millions or billions of years, the planets would orbit the sun so fast from this perspective, just like the electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom, so that we could not properly locate the planets, and we'd have to employ probabilities as to where they might be at a given "moment" (a moment from that perspective would consist of numerous years).
What I think we can take away from this, is that it makes no sense at all to think about reality without a perspective, the supposed independent reality. The true nature of time makes it impossible that "reality" as we conceive of it could be independent from a perspective. If, in a thought experiment, we attempt to remove the temporal perspective of the present, then the entire temporal duration of the reality which we are trying to conceptualize must exist 'at the same time'. We'd have no principle whereby we could speak of the state of things at this time, or the state of things at that time, because this or that time is completely perspectival. And since things are actively moving and changing, reality becomes completely unintelligible if we try to talk about the state of things all the time.
First, the idea of a "mind created world". The issue is that you have to explain what you mean, because culturally, this word 'create' in the phrase is seen as meaning that the mind literally creates the world. Of course you're not claiming that. But if you have to clarify the phrase, perhaps a new phrase would work better? For example, a "mind modeled world" We don't really "create" the world, we model it. The only creation is the model, not the world itself. The mistake is thinking our models ARE the world. They are merely the way we understand it.
You'll get a lot less pushback and people will be able to understand what you're saying without you needing to counter an initial normative pushback. The "model" is the "ideal" of idealism. So where does this leave "the thing that is modeled"? A very simple cultural word that needs no clarification is, "the physical". Now I know you have an emotional reaction to this, but you are already evolving out of the white picket fence of philosophical terminology. Terminology is merely a model. It is an invention of some guy somewhere, that can have cultural or personal attachment beyond what the model is trying to convey. Like it or not, "the physical" is a culturally relevant term which can reach a wide audience and quickly conveys what you want to. Like you refined idealism to fit into our underlying sensibilities about the world, so we can do with physicalism.
So humor me for a minute. The ideal is our model of the physical, or the real. We cannot understand the physical without the ideal. And I believe when this is conveyed to others clearly, almost everyone comes to agree with the underlying concept, even the physicalists, whether they use the same words or not to convey it. The real question is how we marry the ideal and the real. Because currently your definition of idealism is an accurate descriptor that "we model the world". But it does not tell us which models of the world are better than others.
Just as you tweaked and clarified that idealism does not mean we are a solipsistic existence, do you not find it charitable to allow physicalism to be " a model that the physical is the fundamental upon which we apply our models", while naturalism to be "a model that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, are ideals we can objectively match to the real"? The debate can be less about debating specific semantics and "gotchas" about broad general theories which have been messily cobbled together from multiple philosophers over centuries, and instead using the underlying cultural and general understanding of those words to tackle the truly important underlying concept, "A methodology that allows us as accurate of a match between the ideal and real as possible".
If you are interested, I would love to hear your input on such a discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1 You have the intelligence and background to give this a serious discussion, and you may find the epistemological approach I use overlaps much of what you are trying to convey.
I can't speak for Wayfarer, but as an idealist, my own thoughts on that are idealism inevitably leads to god for just that sort of reason.
Perhaps that is the reason why we don't know anything about God, because he is hiding in the idealist's mind. :D
Thank you for the courteous response. At back of your critique is the assumption that the real world is what is internalised or modelled by the brain or the mind. The real world exists independently of our model of it, which can be better or worse, depending on how knowledgeable we are or the quality of the signals we receive.
But the problem is, how do you distinguish the model from the world? How can you, on the one hand, look at 'the model', and, on the other 'the real world'? That already assumes a perspective outside the model - that you're able to compare one with the other. But if your experience-of-the-world IS the model, and you're inside it, then how do you step outside it to compare it with the world itself?
In science, you develop a hypothesis, then you test against it. Your experimental results and observations will tend to confirm or overturn it. That's philosophy of science 101. But the question we're considering is a question of a different order, because it concerns the nature of experience itself, not a specific question about a particular subject. That's what distinguishes it as a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
There's an anecdote from the realm of quantum physics. It is re-told by Werner Heisenberg in his book Physics and Beyond and concerns a visit to Copenhagen by members of the Vienna Circle who were addressed by Neils Bohr. At the end of the lecture he asked if there were any questions, and was nonplussed to recieve only polite applause. He was dismayed by this, and said that if the audience was not shocked by quantum physics, then they could not have understood it. And what I'm suggesting is a similarly radical. It should be considered shocking. But it's also suggested by a great deal of current science. (Ironic that science ends up torpedoeing materialism, but there it is.)
Quoting Corvus
That's the question of all philosophy, and I'm not claiming any kind of omniscience or ultimate answers. The main point of 'the mind-created world' is against the assumed consensus that the mind is the result of a material, physical or mindless process. This attitude is deeply embedded in modern culture, the 'evolutionary-materialist' view of the mind. This is the view that living beings are essentially physical and that the mind, therefore, is simply the output of physical processes that can be understood solely through evolutionary biology and through the understanding neural and biological processes. This attitude is grounded in the primacy of the objective sciences and the view that scientific analysis is the arbiter of what is real. It is generally empiricist in attitude, tending towards varieties of positivism.
So the mind-created world is pointing out the priority of conscious experience as the primary datum of reality. In so doing, I'm aligning with the mainstream of idealist philosophy both Eastern and Western, also drawing on phenomenology and existentialism. I'm arguing that even the so-called 'hard sciences' have an irreducibly subjective aspect or component, which, for practical purposes, is screened out or ignored, but which, in reality is essential to any kind of science.
An essential point is that the accepted materialist consensus creates a kind of false consciousness - it generates a false idea of the nature of being, which is very easy to swallow, because it is the mainstream consensus. But it is changing very rapidly, in part because of much greater insight and sophistication within science itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'extreme idealism', but give these modern editions of Berkeley a squiz. He's surprisingly persuasive.
If you say, Esse est percipi, then it is an idealism. But if you say you create the world in your mind, then I see it as an "extreme idealism". :)
Isn't the created world in your mind more prone to be illusive than the perceived world?
The title of the OP says "The Mind-Created World" :chin: :roll:
I think you're missing the point. There is no such thing as the perceived world. A world, or the world, is something created by the mind. As such it doesn't make any sense to talk about "the perceived world". To assume that what is out there as the object of perception is even remotely similar to the world which is what is created within the mind, is to make a big mistake. So when you start off by calling it "the perceived world" you are already on the road of misunderstanding.
Anyway, this is a very interesting topic, and I would like to investigate deeper for the further discussions.
My idea about the world is Evolutionary nature rather than either Physicalism or Idealism. I will think, build my points on that idea, and return to compare with your views.
:up: Indeed the essay is tagged 'Philosophy of Mind'. (Note that I myself never dispute the empirical facts of (for example) evolution, but will often call into question the supposed implications.)
There are imagined world, perceived world and the world itself. If you are an idealist, you would be believing the perceived world as the real world? If you say, the world is created by your mind, I feel your world is likely to be very much in illusion. A perceived world sounds more accurate.
Ouch. Philosophical idealism is saying something like that, but it has to be worded carefully, lest it fall into mere fictionalism or fantasy. I'm not denying the reality of the sensory domain, but drawing attention to the role of the mind/brain in weaving it into a coherent whole.
creatus"
:100: :up:
I think you have this backward. What the ancients, like Plato, demonstrated is that the senses deceive, and we ought to trust the mind with logic, over the senses, as capable of producing a more reliable and accurate "world". The evidence of this reality is that the senses show us the sun rising and setting, when logic has demonstrated that in reality the earth is spinning. And modern science has demonstrated that substance in general is not at all like it appears to us through sensation.
So if you propose a separation between the perceived world (world created by sensation), and a mind created world, the perceived world is demonstrably less accurate.
A very important question. The answer is that we have at some point in our lives, attempted to apply our model of reality to reality, and failed. At its most simple, its the contradiction of reality to our beliefs. The fact that contradictions exist to our model, show us that there is a model, or viewpoint of the world that we have, and something else that we have to model around. For it doesn't matter if I believe that a eating a rotten apple is healthy, the reality of illness will follow. If it were the case that there was nothing underlying to model on, then there would never be any contradictions to the models we create.
The solution then is to create models that are not contradicted by the "the world itself" or "reality'. If you can create as the foundation of your model, something which cannot be contradicted by reality, then you can use that as a base to build a structure of identities and applications that gives us the best models possible with which to apply to reality. Of course, none of those models can ever claim anything more than that they are not contradicted by reality, and cannot point to the "thing in itself" specifically apart from the model. This is because this is the way we function and know. To say we can know something outside of the very means we use to have knowledge, is impossible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Correct. I give the full answer to this question in the OP I linked. It all starts with coming to the realization that people can discretely experience, and what people can discretely experience is known. Demonstrating how this is known, I then show how we can apply this discrete experience to reality to see if our application can stand without contradiction. I think you'll really like it Wayfarer.
Quoting Philosophim
As I acknowledged, the process of creating models and testing them is already well-known - it's the scientific method. In such cases, you do have an hypothesis or theoretical model which accounts for some aspect of the whole, and you frame an explanatory hypothesis which does or doesn't not account for the observed or experimental facts. Your example of reaction to a bad apple is a simple illustration. In this way we progressively refine our models, hopefully converging on a more and more general and truthful understanding. On a higher level, it's the kind of process described in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But I don't think that is what I'm driving at.
Quoting Philosophim
That's actually closer to the point. One of the sources I draw on is Mah?y?na Buddhist philosophy. There is a word in that tradition that describes 'the ability to discern reality' or to 'see things as they truly are' (yath?bh?ta?). But this kind of insight is also understood to be unusual - it is not possessed by ordinary people (in which category I include myself.) But the key point I take to be insight into the nature of knowing and of existence. It is different to scientific knowledge (although not incompatible with it) because it is existential - it is concerned with questions of meaning and value right at the outset.
The principle at stake is scientific but philosophical as I say at the outset:
Quoting Wayfarer
So it's probably best to try articulate the differences between us based on this argument - what you agree or disagree with about that, and why I might put up an idealist argument against it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hate to butt in but it wasn't logic that demonstrated it, so much as the empirical science of Kepler and Galileo et al. And it wasn't until scientists broke with the Grand Tradition represented by Aristotelian science, that they were able to discover this (and it was a hell of a fight when they did, as you may recall.)
It's a fact that the term 'idealism' is itself a product of the modern period - first came into use with Leibniz, I think. Plato would not have known the word. We can retrospectively assess Platonism as idealist but it needs careful interpretation.
First of all, thank you for starting this thread and writing the OP as you have done. I was trying to get comments in this thread https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14673/is-maths-embedded-in-the-universe-/p2
because of the reality sans observer that was brought up in yet another thread. But it seems no one wanted to respond to that problem.
As I have said previously, and before I even read your essay, it is a much different reality because now there's no more privileged vantage point from which everything is seen or experience. But of course someone here, and in other threads, had raised the problem of "we can't or shouldn't even be discussing such problem because we are the observers!"
And to that I say, we come up with a hypothesis. With hypothesis, we enjoy the freedom of the imagination -- we're not making a conclusion yet, but we're exploring the what-if. Like the quantum physics -- I hope they have not made that final analysis.
To me, how would the world be without the sentient observers? The world on a coordinate plane, a flat two-dimensional reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
With this I disagree. I object to the cognitive disorientation and I object to the following comment as well:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What does that even mean?
With our sense-perception, we can't help but view the world the way we do. Only the silly observers would not use the mind, the common sense, and logic to think about the world. How does one perceive without logic?
Descartes, for one, never claimed that humans are being deceived. He brought it up as a thought experiment. (You can correct me here if you like).
Of course. And where would we be without such taking for granted?
Can you imagine yourself functioning as a human without such taking for granted?
With the proverbial "heart". It seems to be perfectly possible to live a good life without any self-reflection or philosophical contemplation. You just "follow your heart".
You don't, you follow your guru.
And I don't mean to be uselessly confrontational. It's that you're introducing conceptualizations from a philosophical-spiritual tradition in which formally joining a lineage of teachers and submitting to one in particular is essential. You're trying to do on your own, individualistically what was never intended to be done that way (even as it is often advertised as such). The condition for the "Eastern" way of "knowing things for yourself" is to submit to a lineage.
So if you block out and disable all your senses, then what knowledge of the world would you get?
Can you list 3 ways in which it might benefit us, in real, daily-job terms?
For many people, "realizing the tentative nature of many of one's positions" amounts to plain old self-doubt and lack of confidence. Which are, of course, generally, bad and undesirable.
Look, I'm not disagreeing, I'm the first to point out the complex nature of what is called "experience." It's just that in day-to-day terms, such insights appear to be more burdensome than they are useful.
In Theravada Buddhism, they even say that the existence of an enlightened being (that is, one who, among other things, "sees how things really are") is too weak to support itself (ie. too weak to earn a living etc.), and that if a lay person attains enlightenment, they have to ordain as a monastic or die within days.
I doubt it. I have yet to see how philosophy of this kind is of use in my daily life - except as a general belief that I might have larger models of speculative reality to play with when I have spare time. And I suspect that one of the consolations of philosophy is that it's often the conceptual version of getting a new toy. Does this suggest decadence or futility? I'm not one to say. I think others take the pursuit more seriously.
As I have said elsewhere - if we are living in a simulation, or if idealism (however this is understood) is true, I don't think it makes any difference to how I go about my business in life.
At a deeper more optimistic level, I think it is quite enough to arrive at a point where you are aware that potentially all of your assumptions and values, your world are constructed and not an immutable, transcendent reality. It might well help us to be less dogmatic in our thinking and actions.
This quote does resonate. And it leaves me with the helpful perspective that I am not going to solve any of the big questions of philosophy - the nature of reality, what is consciousness, is moral realism true, etc. These questions are too difficult to unpack (certainly for the non-specialist) and there's reason to think that we are all caught up in traps of language, perception and cognition which may well be difficult or impossible to escape from. But I am happy to hear the arguments against this.
(1) In order for Mind to "create the world", Mind must be unitary and transcend be independent of the world;
and (2) by independent what is implied is alien to individual minds which are immanent to entangled with, inseparable from the world;
and (3), though the world populated by individual minds (subjects) exists, only Mind is real exists even when the world of individual minds (subjects) does not exist (i.e. before the world was created and after the world dissipates);
and (4), because Mind transcends the world, individual minds (subjects) in the world cannot have corroborable evidence of Mind including that the world is/was created by Mind ...
... therefore (5) Mind functions only as a creator(god)-of-the-gaps placeholder, or implicit appeal to ignorance, such that the thesis "Mind creates the world" amounts to nothing but an unparsimonious just-so story.
So tell me, Wayfarer, what I get wrong here and/or why my objection fails.
addendum to
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/841677 :eyes:
NB: Maybe someone has already pointed this out, but the definitions of "physicalism" and "naturalism" in the OP do not correspond, IMO, to how most physicalists and naturalists use the terms.
You're welcome and thank you.
Quoting L'éléphant
Well, he kinda did. At the beginning of his meditations, he said something along the lines that he had hitherto held many false opinions purely because he'd swallowed the accepted wisdom. This is why he had to go back to square one, as it were, and put aside everything he thought he had known, starting with the self-evident 'cogito ergo sum'.
Quoting baker
I've never experienced any material benefit from my study of the subject. And I envy those who do - I'm aware of freelance writers and academics who've made a career out of these subjects. There are plenty who would tell me I've wasted a lot of my life chasing rainbows. I hope they're not right, but then, look at the icon I've picked. I might have succeeded at it, had the circumstances been different, but as it is, whatever I do here and on Medium is about it.
But I will say that I have experienced a definite shift in my overall orientation and equanamity in life. It's not as my younger self would have hoped a kind of be-all and end-all state but it's still something.
I said earlier on in this thread, that I often feel that what is taken as normality in our culture is actually a kind of false consciousness. I looked into that saying, 'false consciousness', it originated with Marx, about workers who falsely allow themselves to be lulled into a sense of security by identifying with their work, although I think it has also been adopted by existentialism. So a big part of what I've learned through this discipline is to be less bogus (or more 'fair dinkum' in the local vernacular), so as not to be so immersed in the false consciousness of materialist culture.
Thanks for your feedback!
First point - when you say 'the world' here you refer to 'the totality of experience', right? It's not as if any of us 'experience the world' as ' experiencing the entire world'. 'The world' is really shorthand for the sum total of sensory experience, apperception, feeling, knowing and so forth
A point that has bearing on this is the subjective unity of consciousness. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single moment of being. That, I think, is at the basis of Kant's 'transcendental unity of apperception', the faculty which draws together and synthesises all the disparate elements of experience into a unified whole. Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" refers to that unifying self-awareness that underlies all experience. All our representations (sensations, perceptions, concepts, etc.) must be brought together and unified by a single self-awareness. This isn't simply the empirical consciousness of any particular experience (e.g., seeing a tree, feeling pain, thinking about an abstract idea), but a more fundamental, a priori consciousness that makes any coherent experience possible in the first place.
The unity of apperception is "transcendental" because it's a precondition for our knowledge of objects. Without this unifying self-awareness, we'd have a jumble of unrelated perceptions and not the coherent experience of an objective world. In essence, for us to recognize diverse representations as belonging to one and the same object, there must be a unity in the consciousness of these representations. (But Kant couldnt say, and we cant say, what that is, as its not anything objectively perceptible
see this paper about the 'neural binding problem' which is intimately associated with the 'subjective unity of perception'.)
So, yes, so this is an argument that the mind is both unitary and transcendental.
Quoting 180 Proof
You really think so? Even in The Phaedo, there is a section on disentangling the mind - actually the soul - from the world, from outward stimuli, from entanglements. This is where philosophy is said to be 'practising for death'. That is the meaning of detachment, of purity of heart. There are volumes of literature on this theme from across different cultures and historical periods.
Quoting 180 Proof
I haven't asserted that 'the mind exists' when 'the world of subjects does not exist'. What I said was 'The idea that things go out of existence when not perceived, is simply their imagined non-existence. In reality, the supposed unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.' This is why it's not necessary for me to assert the kind of God that Berkeley appeals to, in order to account for the world in the absence of observers. It is more in line with Buddhist philosophy (hence the quotation from the Buddhist texts in this earlier post.)
'Corrobarable evidence' of mind is not required as, in line with Descartes' 'cogito ergo sum', the reality of first-person consciousness is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied.
Well, it is a bit confrontational. First you don't know that I don't recognize a guru. Secondly, I don't see any purpose to be served if I were to incorporate such an affiliation in this essay or in my further comments on the subject. Would I 'appeal to the authority of the Guru' in order to ground the argument? I frequently acknowledge that I draw on Buddhist philosophy, and I will sometimes say that I also have a Buddhist practice, and try to observe the appropriate demeanour. But the context is that we're living in is a secular, pluralist, modern culture, not in ancient culture, and we need to be able to absorb these ideas without overt reliance on a lineage in order to validate whatever it is we write or say. I would like to make a case that stands on its own merits, in philosophical terms.
//oh, and Ill say something else. One of the books that had foundational influence on me was Alan Watts The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who you Are, when I was aged about 20. I dont know how well it reads now - but I think his intuition of the kind of knowledge he was speaking of being taboo is right on the mark. And I wonder if in saying what youre saying, youd rather see it observed.
Thanks! :smile: :up:
Of course there is empirical evidence involved, but it is the application of logic to the discrepancies found in the empirical evidence, which produces the new theories. Empirical evidence shows the sun and all the planets appearing to orbit the earth. However, there were discrepancies in the observations like retrograde motions, which for the longest time could not be figured out.
Even mapping the planets as perfect circular orbits around the sun,(the idea passed on through Aristotle) did not render the correct results as Copernicus showed. That was the stumbling point of the ancient Greek scientists, they assumed the orbits to be eternal therefore they must be perfect circles. It was a simplistic principle which enabled much science, (very similar to today's "symmetries"), but a principle which is fundamentally wrong, because such "ideals" are not consistent with reality.
Aristotle pointed to the problem with this idea of eternal circular orbits. Copernicus laid out the model, perfect circular orbits, and the discrepancies between it and observations were clearly exposed. But further application of logic produced Kepler's elliptical orbits.
Quoting L'éléphant
The problem is that the senses often give us confusing and misleading information, i.e. they deceive us. For example, it looks to me, like there is nothing between me and the far wall of the room, but I know there is air in between. Logic has figured out that air is a substance even though it is unseen.
We do not see air, but we can feel the wind, and see its effects. So sight in this instance gives us confusing and misleading information. The mind acts to synthesize the information received from the various senses, and in doing this it must resolve such issues of misleading and confusing information.
Quoting Corvus
I was not the one proposing the separation between mind produced world and sense produced world. To me, the world created by the mind, and the world created by sense perception are one and the same world. But we need to be aware of the cases where the senses mislead us. And I think your proposal to separate these two is not warranted. So the problem you present here with your question, is just an indication that your proposal is unacceptable.
Aren't the senses part of your mind? Are the senses separate entities from the mind operating themselves disconnected from the mind? You say you were not proposing it, but it sounds like that is the point you are insisting on. I was not proposing anything, but saying what the traditional idealist was saying about the world and perception.
I suppose it would depend on one's job. For a guru, preacher, or used car salesman it might be detrimental to recognize the tentative nature of one's beliefs. For a scientist or engineer it can be extremely valuable to be willing and able to question one's assumptions.
I think they are different. The world created by your minds is totally different from the perceived one. For example, the world depicted by an artist such as painters, novelists, poets would be the world created by mind.
Your musings are valid imo. It reminds me of the old adage "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound".
For me the answer "it causes vibration, but only makes a sound when an ear listens to it" is apt here. As for me I understand things to exist independent of minds (as you said), but there is a dimension to reality that can only be framed within the context of an observer (sound/noise vs simple vibrations).
"Last Thursdayism" strangely comes to mind here also. And it took me a moment to understand why my subsconscious was offering this association.
It has to do I guess with the capacity for precision, detailed and extensive memory that only complex conscious creatures like ourselves possess.
Without the temporality offered by the vast memory that the human mind exemplifies, Existence would merely be the blink of an eye. Began and finished in an instant.
So it seems the details: the minute-to-minute existence that we experience, is part due to our ability to record events and chronology as they happen at a certain pace, in a given "frame-rate" of the passage of time.
So indeed, the mind creates reality; "our reality" but not "thee" reality where time and space are less sure, as we are things that occupy a time frame, and a dimension of space that dictates how we perceive reality.
So perhaps many of the conundrums if human logic and philosophic contradiction whittle down to those very assumptions about our limited/restricted and predefined tempospatial perception
Interesting essay. Thanks for sharing.
(Caveat - so far I have only read the portion of the essay contained in your OP.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I must confess that the way you are using 'Idealism' is somewhat foreign to me. I am trying to understand the general thrust of your position, and specifically the way in which it contradicts physicalism and naturalism.
Would I be correct if I said that the crux is the idea that
On my view there is clearly a cleavage between the scientific paradigm and post-Kantian philosophy, and it does revolve around this question of realism, but I tend to see more problems with the post-Kantian approach than with the scientific approach. Granted, there are problems with both, as both seem to provide only a partial account. In any case, why think it is the scientific-physicalist-naturalist half that is especially problematic?
(It's curious and encouraging to me how strongly this forum focuses on metaphysics. I haven't seen that on other philosophy forums.)
Ironically, even on a philosophy webpage --- presumably a forum for ideas about ideas --- many posters seem to instinctively argue against any form of meta-physics -- especially Idealism -- on the basis of priority of the five senses -- common to most animals -- over our unique human rational faculty. Consequently, they bow only to Physical Science --- with its artificial sensory enhancements --- instead of Meta-Physical Philosophy --- and its cultural reasoning enhancements (e.g. Logic) --- to support their sense-able beliefs.
That's partly paradoxical because the Common-Sense Perspective led most humans to believe in a flat earth and an earth-centered cosmos. Among the sensible ancients though, a few Greek philosophers used un-common-sense (abstract reasoning) to realize that our un-aided senses are not capable of seeing the world "in the round", so to speak. So they used the mental imagery of mathematics to rise above their limited physical plane. Nevertheless, it's hard to argue against Common Sense, because it is literally sense-able, and people tend to implicitly "believe their eyes". It seems that abstract philosophy was developed specifically to work around our inherent materialistic biases. Which is what Kant warned about with his sense-transcending "ding an sich" proposal.
On the other hand, some people are inclined to believe in unseen things that appeal to their Feelings. That's because hormonal feelings are the motivators of actions, and of attractions. But those sentiments are also a form of inwardly-focused Common Sense. Hence, people typically believe what they feel. And it's that latter notion of common-sense that hard-nosed Rationalists strenuously reject. That's why your rational approach to Idealism must skirt the feeling element, because it incites knee-jerk negative feelings in dogmatic Realists. Yet even the sixth sense of Reason is questionable, if it has no material evidence to support it. In the realm of Ideas & Reasons though, philosophers tend to lean on immaterial analogies and imaginary metaphors for props.
A recent scientific metaphor along these lines was Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception*1. That proposal was described in a book entitled The Case Against Reality. It postulated that natural evolution created big-brained animals with the latent ability to "see" what is not before their eyes, by means of imagination. Thereby, viewing a "mind created world". Even some small-brained birds seem to imagine other minds*2. So, it's not a super-natural power. Some of the non-things seen in the Mind's Eye are symbols & icons & gestalts. The latter are imaginary whole systems composed of bits & pieces of sensory perception. Although he makes a good case for Ideality, Hoffman's notion that our physical eyes see only superficial "appearances", has not been well-received among Philosophical physicalists. Was cognitive psychologist Hoffman presenting evidence in favor of Ideality, as an evolutionary offspring of Reality? :smile:
*1. The Interface Theory of Perception :
For the perceptions of H. sapiens, space-time is the desktop and physical objects are the icons. Our perceptions of space-time and objects have been shaped by natural selection to hide the truth and guide adaptive behaviors. Perception is an adaptive interface.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384988/
*2. Ravens can imagine other minds :
Ravens display a human ability to imagine how others are thinking, a study has shown
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/ravens-can-imagine-how-others-are-thinking.601117
Thanks! My thoughts also.
Quoting Leontiskos
To put it in blunt vernacular terms, it is the assessment of life in general, and human life in particular, as being basically the product of mindless laws and forces. Bertrand Russell's 'man is but the outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms'. Jaques Monod's 'Chance and Necessity'. The instrumentalisation of reason. As you can see, I'm not seeking a theistic alternative but questioning it along more Berkeleyian lines (although, unlike Berkeley, I am a Platonic realist, as laid out in another essay, The Ligatures of Reason.)
Quoting Gnomon
We had a long thread on Hoffman recently. The question I always have for Hoffman is how science escapes the apparently illusory nature of perception. I think his book, The Case Against Reality, is misnamed - it should be called The Case Against Empirical Realism. Because then it provides an escape hatch for rational insight.
:up:
Incorrect. By the world I'm referring to 'the totality of facts' (re: TLP, 1.1-1.21).
Then why not instead title the thread
"The transcendental mind-created common experience of the world"?
If X is true by definition (i.e. apodictic), then X is merely abstract and not concrete, or factual. Given ubiquitious and continuous (i.e. embodied) multi-modal stimuli from environmental imbedding, sufficiently complex, functioning, brains generate recursively narrative, phenomenal self models (PSM)¹ via tangled hierarchical (SL)² processing of which "first-person consciousness" consists. That these processes are also voluntarily as well as involuntarily interruptable, Wayfarer, demonstrates that the "reality (that) cannot be plausibly denied" is primarily virtual. :sparkle:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model#Overview_of_the_PSM [1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]
Indeed. Mind-created, one might say.
I disagree. The one that uses the heart also uses the intellect.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, this is a misrepresentation of metaphysics such as Descartes's meditation. It's not the senses that mislead you, it's the thought that ideas come out of nothing. No one is deceiving us. The world out there does not deceive.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. Read below:
He is arguing for causation! You are not the cause of your own ideas of the world -- meaning, you did not just "imagine" falsely that there are things out there that make you see colors, trees, and sky. There really are colors, trees, and sky.
Galileo's distinction of 'primary and secondary qualities' of matter refers to the distinction between the attributes measurable by instruments (mass, volume, etc) with the 'affections' such as color, taste and smell existing only in the mind of 'the animal' (i.e. observing organism).
From the SEP entry on Primary and Secondary Qualities in Early Modern Philosophy:
Compare this with Thomas Nagel's summary of the origin of the modern mind-body problem:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatio-temporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
So, when you ask, under this model, where in the world is the mind, the answer is obviously that it is within the observer. But also, as a corollary, it is nowhere to be found amongst those attributes which are taken to constitute the real objects of scientific analysis. So the mind is nowhere! In those terms, it is unreal or non-existent! All we can do is try to account for the way in which the primary objects of scientific analysis ( comprising matter-energy) must have combined in such a way as to account for the mind (which is of course subject to the 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' argument.) So this is where the axiom of 'the reality of mind-independent objects' has its origin, and it is precisely that which has been called into doubt by the 'observer problem' in quantum physics,
The point of my argument is that reality as experienced is obviously constituted in large part by the mind, which synthesises all of the data, including scientific data, and combines it into the unitified state of experience which is the referent of the term 'being'. It really isn't mysterious, but it's not objective. And, goes the reasoning, if it's not objective, then its not amenable to scientific method, so it can't be considered to be real in its own right. It has to be reducible to what can be explained by science. Hence:
Eliminative materialism (Dennett, Churchlands etc) claims that mind is illusory (notwithstanding the obvious self-contradiction that an illusion can only occur to a mind);
Panpsychism (Philip Goff et al) wants to imbue matter with mind, so as to maintain physicalism by giving it mental attributes.
Dualism of various kinds posits two separate kinds of substance, namely material and mental, although the whole notion of 'mental substance' seems oxymoronic.
I'm supporting a kind of hybrid of Kastrup's style of analytical idealism combined with enactive and phenomenological aspects.
Quoting L'éléphant
That passage is taken from Meditations on First Philosophy, in the context of one of his proofs of the existence of God. It is associated with Descartes' 'ontological proof', that because we can conceive of a perfect being, then such a being must perforce be real. The passage I had in mind was the later one where he calls received wisdom into doubt:
which is the passage immediately preceeding his famous Cogito.
Look at it this way, if you have a lot of ideas in your mind, one of them is the existence of god, and others are the existence of other humans, and rocks, and things, how are you going to argue that your idea of god is objective? By making a statement that god is external to you.
Interesting in puzzling ways.
SO let's go back to your meadow. I stand facing you. A butterfly flutters between us. You say "See the butterfly flutter from left to right!" I reply "Beautiful! But it went from right to left!"
"Ah," says you, "and from this we see that what is happening in this world is true or false only with reference to the perspective of some observer! For you, it is true that the butterfly went right to left, but for me it is that the butterfly flew left to right!"
But me being Banno, you know I'm going to disagree. "How can something be true for one of us and not for the other?" I ask, scratching my nose. You carefully explain again how truth, the way things are, is dependent on perspective, and that as a result mind is integral to the whole of reality; how we cannot have the "view from nowhere" required for truth to be independent of some point of view.
"Oh." says I. Then I sit quietly for a while, arms folded, staring at the ground, while you glory in the vista.
"If we swapped places, it would be you who says that the butterfly flew right to left, while I would say it flew left to right"
"Yes", you explain patiently, "The truth is dependent on one's perspective, so if we swap perspectives, we swap truths".
"But we agree that the butterfly was flying away from the river and toward the mountain", I finally offer.
"S'pose so", says you, in the hope of shutting me up.
So on we traipse, over the foothills, through the pass to the valley beyond the mountain; all the while, butterflies flitting past us, heading in the same direction.
Over a cup of coffee, I return to the topic. "Yesterday, the butterflies were going towards the mountain. Now, they are going away from the mountain. And yet they are going in the same direction. How can that be?"
"Well," you patiently begin, "both the butterflies and we are heading East, towards the rising sun. Yesterday the mountain was before us, and now it is behind us".
"Oh. So yesterday the butterfly was heading East, and today it is still heading East, and this is a way of saying which way the butterfly is heading?"
"Yes", you agree, thinking to yourself that next time you might choose a different companion.
"Yesterday we disagreed that the butterfly was heading left to right or right to left, and that this was because we each have a different perspective. But even though we had different perspectives, we agreed that for you it was left to right, while for me it was right to left - that if we swapped places, we would also swap perspectives. We agreed that the butterfly was heading towards the mountain. And now, even though the butterfly is heading away from the mountain, we agree that it is heading East. Is that right?" I puzzle.
"Yes!", your disinterest starting to show.
"So hasn't it been the case that the Butterfly was always heading East, regardless of our perspective? Isn't this a way of describing the situation that removes the need to give the perspective of the observer? And if that is so, then perspective is not an attribute of the world, but of how we say things about the world. We can rephrase things in ways that do not depend on where we are standing...."
Taking a breath, I continue "We started with butterflies moving left and right, but found ourselves disagreeing; then we said the butterflies were flying towards the mountain, but after we crossed the pass found that they are flying away from the mountain. Then we said that they are flying East. Each time, our view became broader, and where we were standing became less important. Sure, I can't talk about taking a point of view from nowhere, but it makes sense to try to talk about things in such a way that it doesn't matter were I am standing. Not a point of view from nowhere, but a point of view from anywhere. We can set out some truths in such a general way that we can agree, and it doesn't matter where we are standing. And if we do that, our personal perspective becomes irrelevant."
How do you respond?
But don't forget, the hypothetical thought-experiment was:
[i]Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.
Now picture the same scene but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.[/i]
To which my hypothetical antagonist replies 'impossible, can't be done!' So had either one of us or both of us been there, then the thought-experiment would have been obviated (because the perspective would have been supplied). I suppose to make the same point rather tritely, had neither of us been there, then we would have no idea of whether a butterfly had, in fact, fluttered by.
So the point of the hypothetical is not that there are different perspectives, but that there must always be a perspective, even if we're contemplating a meadow (or anything else) unseen by human eye. I re-inforce the point a little further along, where I said:
Actually, I had many of the objections you have previously raised in mind when I wrote that.
"Yes, we know we have a perspective, that our view may be different from that of someone else, so we can take this into account; we can change how we talk about the butterflies and the meadow and the mountains in such a way that we agree as to what is the case; that you, I and Maria von Trap over there see things differently, and yet overwhelmingly we agree, the butterflies are flying East..."
"...so there is something more here than just perspective. Something explains this agreement. Sure, there are minds that make the sentences, and sing the songs, but there is more than just mind here".
"The simplest way to explain the smell of Poppies is to suppose that there are indeed poppies."
I start feeling around for a hatchet...
But you will be completely at a loss to say what that 'something' is. (Whilst you're reaching for your hatchet, I sense the impending feeling of futility that invariably accompanies our exchanges.)
"Of course I can say what it is - it's mountains and poppies and butterflies... we agree on this. The thing is, you started this walk by yourself, and forgot about other people. That's the trouble with idealists - they are all of them closet solipsists."
This last bit causes me to fall into silence, wondering how a solipsist could find themselves in a wardrobe...
Could I perhaps suggesting reading some more of the essay? There is rather more to it than meadows.
"But you've set me another puzzle: the cutlery might not be where I think I left it. I might turn out to be mistaken about it's location. That'd be a puzzle for someone who understood the word as being created by the mind. If mind creates the world, how could the world ever be different to what the mind supposes - how could one ever be wrong about how things are? In order to be mistaken, there must be a difference between how things are and how one thinks they are - but how could that happen, if everything is in the mind..."
I frown.
Why are there Californian Poppies in the Alps?
Thomas Nagel reviews biography of J L Austin
Plus a very long interview with someone by the name of Aaron Preston, with discussion of the shortcomings of analytic philosophy, at least some of which made sense to me.
We are all born ignorant, and we are all going to die only somewhat less ignorant.
But that was funny.
You use "the world out there does not deceive" to justify "it's not the senses that mislead you". But you have provided no premise to connect those two.
Do you agree with the following? The mind creates an idea of "the world out there". And it uses information received from the senses. The various different senses often provide the mind with inconsistent and even conflicting information. Therefore we can conclude that the senses can, and do, mislead the mind in its creation of an idea of "the world out there".
I've given this statement further consideration. The idealism presented by Plato (though it was not explicitly called "idealism") was the ontology held by the Pythagoreans. They believed that the cosmos was made up of ideals, as represented by mathematics and geometry. The Pythagoreans put forward the idea of eternal circular motions, an ideal, to represent the motions of the heavenly bodies, each being itself a sort of perfect unity, One. Further, it was assumed that each perfect circle was related to each other through a system of ratios, like musical notes are related through principles of division.
In interpreting Plato, I believe it is very important to understand that Plato was actually very skeptical and critical of the ontology of Pythagorean idealism, but these ideas were highly respected in the philosophical (scientific?) community, so Plato had to tread carefully. The issue is the relationship between the perfect and eternal Ideals (circular motions), which as observable (orbits of the heavenly bodies), must have a real connection with the mundane. (In modern terms this is the interaction problem). This relationship was understood within the precepts of idealism, as the theory of participation, demonstrated in principle in The Symposium. By the time Plato wrote dialogues like The Parmenides, The Sophist, and The Timaeus, he had greatly developed the logical problems with the theory of participation.
What Plato exposed is the need to assume an intermediary, a medium between the Ideas which are conceived as eternal, perfect ideals, and the real existence of particular things. The medium was called "matter", and proposed in The Timaeus as a sort of receptacle which would receive the ideal form. The particular thing could only participate in the Ideal Form (as per the theory of participation) through the intermediary "matter"; and the matter of the particular thing would be the reason for individual differences and deficiencies. "Participation" therefore was compromised as matter would necessarily come between.
The introduction of "matter", and its essential nature, as logically necessary to account for the interaction problem, greatly enhanced Aristotle's capacity to attack Pythagorean Idealism. He showed for example, in On the Heavens, how a supposedly "eternal circular motion" must consist of a material body which is moving, and therefore could not truly be "eternal". This completely collapsed Pythagorean idealism because it became clear that the cosmos was not composed of perfect, eternal Ideals, but was actually composed of material objects engaged in motions which were somewhat other than they were being represented through the perfect ideals of mathematics and geometry.
I believe we ought to recognize two very distinct sorts of relations between the ideals of mathematics and the reality of material objects. This distinction is based in a distinction of two sorts of material objects, natural and artificial. In the case of artificial material objects, we can produce such objects which very closely resemble the ideals of the mathematics which produces them. In the case of natural objects however, we use the same mathematical ideals to represent them, but there is great discrepancy, or difference between the ideal representation, and what actually exists naturally. The problem here is that since we can create artificial things, in a lab or in a factory, which very closely resemble the mathematical ideals which produce them, we tend to conclude that the mathematical ideals which are being employed are very accurate representations of what exists in nature. This conclusion of course, is the product of disrespect for the difference between artificial things and natural things. Recognition of this difference I believe is very important to understanding the activities of high energy physics and the production of so-called "elementary particles" in laboratories.
I think it depends on one's particular starting point. For me, it's the default to think of perception as an active, volitional process, my default is perspectivism*. I take for granted that my opinions are constructed and subject to change. But these defaults are actually hindrances in daily life, and I wish I could be (more) dogmatic.
(*This probably comes from having to function in several languages from an early age and from having to function as a mediator between people. It's not based on a study of philosophy.)
To me, it's self-evident.
Then how do you overcome the problem of solipsism?
How does Buddhism overcome the problem of solipsism?
Well, you don't start off your posts by paying humble obeisances to a guru. :wink:
My reference to following a guru is about bringing to the forefront one's membership in a particular epistemic community, as opposed to assuming one can be beyond such membership and somehow talk about things "as they really are", as if from a view from nowhere; or as if one's view/perspective would be only one's own, idiosyncratic, solipsistic even.
I contend that it is not possible to make a case this way. Because perspective and membership in an epistemic community are inevitable.
I once googled "how to be a genuine fake". That was how I formulated my inquiry! And Google gave me Watts' book! I was quite disappointed by it, though.
*tsk tsk*
Paticcasamuppada explains what you're getting at in this topic, including @180 Proof's objections and the problem of solipsism. It's just that going with paticcasamuppada makes you a member of a Buddhist epistemic community, at the exclusion of memberships in other epistemic communities.
Bitbol provides a counter to this argument:
Quoting 180 Proof
Like most materialists*1, 's Reality is limited to the reports of his physical senses. That blinkered worldview is good enough for most animals. But it omits the distinguishing feature of rational animals : the ability to infer abstractly what is not seen concretely*2*3. That mental function begins with observed premises and calculates conclusions that must also be logically true . . . . but not necessarily real in the here & now.
On a more positive note, Banno's poetic imagery, and yours, is materialistic. Yet the metaphors of poppies & butterflies are not referring to physical objects, but to human ideas & feelings : "the elusive butterfly of love" is not an insect. I wonder if an idea/feeling-rejecting materialist takes the symbolism literally. :smile:
*1. I don't know how Banno would characterize his personal worldview, because his posts are usually so succinct that the cosmology behind the pretty words is left to the imagination. That's fine for poetry, where the reader is expected to read-into the "text" his/her own meanings & feelings. But, for prosaic philosophy, it omits the essence of wisdom, to use words precisely, not just concisely. When is a poppy not a flower?*4 :smile:
*2. Inference in Arguments :
In logic, an inference is a process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true.
https://www.thoughtco.com/inference-logic-term-1691165
*3. Raven reasoning :
It's the strongest evidence yet that ravens have a theory of mind that they can attribute mental states such as knowledge to others.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076025-ravens-fear-of-unseen-snoopers-hints-they-have-theory-of-mind/
*4. Red poppy flowers represent consolation, remembrance and death. Likewise, the poppy is a common symbol that has been used to represent everything from peace to death and even simply sleep.
I don't see how it applies. The form of idealist philosophy that I'm advocating does not say that 'the world only exists in your mind'. I'm referring to the mind - yours, mine, the mind that we as a species and culture share. The mind is not an objective reality, it's not a material thing - yet we can't plausibly deny it! That's the elephant in the room, the fly in the ointment, for naturalism.
Besides, I don't think that Buddhist philosophy has a problem with solipsism, because the basis of solipsism is that 'consciousness is mine alone'. What Buddhist would say that?
Quoting baker
That is the scandalous biography of Watts - I'm well aware of it and was dissappointed to read it at the time. In the end I decided it doesn't detract from the salience of his writings - Supreme Identity, Beyond Theology and Way of Zen have considerable merits in my view. What he said had to be said and I'm grateful that he said it.
Quoting baker
Like I said, you want to uphold the taboo! Push it behind the curtain, declare it out of bounds.
Look at the quote in the next post - that more or less re-states everything the essay says. (By the way, thankyou Josh, that passage really hits the nail on the head.)
Quoting baker
Just for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the terminology, paticcasamuppada is the 'chain of dependent origination' of Buddhism. It is true, as I say in the OP, that I'm drawing on non-dualist perspectives as well as phenomenology and idealism, and also that my overall approach is very much Buddhist. But I disagree that this 'excludes the argument from other epistemic communities'. As I said, we inhabit a pluralistic secular culture which ought not to make such arbitrary exclusions, and I believe the Buddhist perspective (which is really not a perspective!) is uniquely suited to the 'crisis of the Western sciences'. As did Francisco Varela, mentioned by Josh, who co-authored the ground-breaking book The Embodied Mind. It too incorporated many principles from Buddhism - for example:
[quote=The Embodied Mind, p61]The tension between the ongoing sense of self in ordinary experience and the failure to find that self in reflection is of central importance in Buddhism-the origin of human suffering is just this tendency to grasp onto and build a sense of self, an ego, where there is none. As meditators catch glimpses of impermanence, selflessness, and suffering (known as the three marks of existence) and some inkling that the pervasiveness of suffering (known as the First Noble Truth) may have its origin in their own self-grasping (known as the Second Noble Truth), they may develop some real motivation and urgency to persevere in their investigation of mind. They try to develop a strong and stable insight and inquisitiveness into the moment to moment arising of mind. They are encouraged to investigate: How does this moment arise? What are its conditions? What is the nature of "my" reactivity to it? Where does the experience of "1" occur?[/quote]
I think that 'the taboo' exists, that it 'ought not to be spoken' because this kind of analysis is associated with religious philosophy or at least with a kind of deep introspection. Which is why I keep referring back to Thomas Nagel's important essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. He's a non-religious academic philosopher who has had that insight. That is the underlying dynamic, in a 'don't mention the war' kind of way.
Quoting Gnomon
I wouldn't personalise it in that way. It's more the shortcoming of modern philosophy, generally. That's what we're both critiquing, although from rather different points of view.
Are we to imagine perceiving the scene form no point of view (an obviously incoherent request) or from "every possible point within it, and also around it"?
There could be no perception without memory or expectation, so nothing to describe.
If there are butterflies flitting about, there is no possible point of view of them from which they would not be flittering about.
So, I am struggling to see the point of this thought-exercise.
Try reading it in context.
How rude.
I just googled "Buddhism existence of self" and the first thing that came up was:
The Buddha, the first eliminativist?
(That, incidentally, is a very sophisticated review.)
The 'no-self doctrine' would correspond to eliminativism. That is rejected in Buddhism as being nihilistic. The 'self doctrine' is the idea that 'I will be reborn in perpetuity'. Both these are rejected in Middle Way philosophy as 'extremes'.
Take a look at this verse from the early Buddhist texts. It's quite short. The point being that, when asked 'Is there a self?', the Buddha declines to answer (usually given as 'maintains a noble silence'.) That is one of the sources of Middle Way philosophy. Another is this one:
I know it's a hard idea to get your head around! It was the subject of the post-grad thesis I did in Buddhist Studies 11 years ago, I still only got to a rudimentary understanding of it.
And that's a problem with both idealism and materialism, each supposing that it alone has priority.
Something that @Wayfarer sometimes agrees with, when pushed.
Right. It's often given as the materialism or 'the object view' of Hume et al, vs the idealism or subject view of Berkeley et al. This is sometimes depicted as a kind of Hegelian dialectic, whereby first one, then the other, are held up as being fundamental, which plays out over centuries.
But I think that Kant's transcendental idealism evades this dichotomy, because Kant acknowledges the harmonious co-existence of both empirical realism and transcendental idealism.
Quoting Wayfarer
All just ways of thinking about things. How can we count any of them as being the real thing?
Yeah, but then to the never-ending joy of philosophy neophytes, unhelpfully mentions the thing-in-itself.
Quoting Janus
Coke?
What do you mean, real? :kiss:
It might be, if I hadn't read a lot of Suzuki and such, 40 years ago.
And I'm cool with that. A lot of strife is caused by people wondering, hey, what *is* that? What is he talking about? If it's so mysterious, it must be something really important!
[quote=Emrys Westacott]Kant's introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.[/quote]
Excellent, that's what I started with too. I'll always have a special place in my heart for old D T.
No, psilocybin. :hearts:
By "real" I mean how could we know whether some conceptual schema or other corresponds to what is independent of human experience and understanding, or how any conceptual schema could do so?
Yes, I'm assured that Kant's use was innocent, by @Mww and others. But what came next made it into a dog's breakfast, only cleaned up by Russell and Moore. Your innocent use of "Idealism" might give some solace to those who like to eat out of a bowl on the floor. Case in point:
Quoting Janus
It doesn't surprise me that you misunderstood what I was saying, though.
You mean, physics?
I'm guessing not. I don't think there is a way to understand your question, Janus.
Is this the same as saying - if there is a reality outside of physics and how we understand our world, we are unable to access this and therefore can say nothing meaningful about it? (I wasn't thinking of Kant's noumena but I guess it amounts to the same point)
Yes, there is no coherent answer to the question about how things are independently of human experience, although it is possible to imagine that things could be some way impossible for us to imagine.
So, no I'm not talking about physics, since it deals with things as they appear; that is things which are not independent of human experience.
I guess the only place to look for reality independent of human experience might be in the putative claims of mysticism or higher awareness? I guess inevitably this is the elephant in the room for threads like this and most discussions of idealism.
That's a good question. I think there is a sense in which physics is just one way that things appear to us, and also a sense in which it is taken to be the most fundamental way; the way from which all others ways are made possible, or to which all other ways can be reduced, ontologically at least, if not explanatorily.
I think the faith in mystical revelation relies on the idea that, as real beings, we are capable of intuitive insight into the nature of things. However, this insight cannot be explained or explicated, but only alluded to. I don't see how there could be any way to demonstrate such a claim, although I must admit I lean somewhat towards believing it myself.
Oh, you mean when Moore discovered he had hands?
I do understand that German idealism kind of collapsed under the weight of its own verbiage. I nevertheless see it as the last gasp of the real Western philosophical tradition.
Also, it's where showing (and doing) take over from saying.
Quoting Janus
Cool. But at times you seem to look for an answer to those questions. It puzzles me, rendering some of my replies snooty. A bad habit of mine.
Yeah, that lecture, but I think his point was to show the audience that he had hands, and thereby that there is stuff in the world.
No worries, mate. I think Kant said that human beings, due to the nature of reason, will inevitably try to answer these "ultimate" questions that form the basis of metaphysics as traditionally conceived, and I acknowledge that I do find the impulse in myself, but I am utterly convinced that no answer is possible...go figure.
Going off now on a psychological tangent, the other thing is that I think that underlying these 'materialism vs idealism' debates is very often a concern that things should be a certain way, in accordance with what various people want to be the case. So, there are affective concerns at work behind the scenes, otherwise these questions would not be so compelling, having, as they do little to no practical significance for our everyday lives. It seems that some folk on both sides of the debate see these questions as representing a battle between the forces of good and evil, or at least enlightenment and endarkenment, that will determine the fate of humankind. Personally, I don't hold to that idea, I think it is too simplistic.
I will take issue with this. The basic thrust of the OP is to point out that in the 'experience of the world', the objective domain is not simply and unambiguously given. It points out the way our mind/brain construes the nature of the external world. As I've said, there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.
As I say in the OP, there is a sense in which nothing can be said about the world outside any knowledge or experience of it - but that does not prohibit analytical reflection on the question of the role of the mind or brain in the construction of our experience of the world. It needs to be understood what the argument is against. It is against the common presumption that 'the world makes mind' - that the mind is a product of or output of what are presumed to be the (purely) physical processes that purportedly drive evolution (a.k.a. 'evolutionary materialism). The default view of naturalism is that 'the subject' is, at once, simply the consequence of these purported causes, and also outside the domain of what can be known (whence 'eliminativism'). Phenomenology and other forms of (mainly European) philosophy are highlighting that, whereas your Anglo-American analytical philosophers on the whole would rather not. That's the only reason why you say 'we cannot talk'.....
(By the way, googling for the source of the quote that Josh provided above, I happened upon this pdf from the erudite and charming Michel Bitbol, a French - therefore continental! - philosopher of science - Is Consciousness Primary?)
This can easily be misconstrued to be claiming that mind is in some absolute sense ontologically fundamental, rather than it being taken to be simply pointing out that what we mean by "the world" is 'the world as it appears to, and is understood by, us".
Or to put it another way the only reality we can imagine and talk about is a relational reality. but it doesn't follow that without humans nothing would exist. That is merely an imaginable possibility, as is the possibility that things have an utterly mind-independent existence, even if we obviously cannot imagine how that existence is.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing could please me more. This seems to be pivotal:
Quoting Wayfarer
There's your primacy of consciousness.
The demand is that either everything is physical, and mind somehow emerges therefrom; or that everything is mind, and the physical little more than a pattern. What puzzles me is why we feel obligated to phrase the discussion in these terms; why the juxtaposition?
(That juxtaposition, it seems, underpins the Bitbol paper you cite.)
Just my two cents but scientific naturalism doesn't allow for something akin to panpsychism.
Its purely relational equivalent of pansemiosis is all pattern and no qualities.
The next problem is that of emergence. Things like downward causation seem like an illegal move, a sui generis.
All emergent properties are known by an observational setting. How the observation itself comes out of emergence seems an odd difference from other kinds of emergence.
The homunculus fallacy allows people to posit hidden dualisms.
Theories of illusion don't even get at the problem itself, just renames it.
Im careful to explain that Im not claiming that things go into and out of existence depending on whether theyre being perceived, but that, absent an observer, whatever exists is unintelligible and meaningless as a matter of fact and principle. Again, that even if you imagine an empty universe, you still introduce an implicit perspective. I said, of course there are unseen objects and empty rooms with nobody in them, but that is something one observer (myself) is saying to another (you).
Quoting Banno
Physicalism is monistic - it says that there is nothing other than matter-energy. (And I have wondered whether that in its modern form is because it descended from monotheism - 'the jealous god dies hard'.)
Note I said at the outset that Im not proposing mind as a literal constituent, that things are made from mind as yachts from wood or statues from marble. So saying 'everything is mind' is not necessarily isomorphic to saying that 'everything is matter (or matter-energy)'. I think that's the distinction between 'epistemic' and 'ontological' idealism - that mind is the condition by which we know anything at all, which is not quite the same as saying that everything is mind, if you can see the distinction.
As for the juxtaposition - I do believe that there is a real conflict going on, a contest between the materialist attitude and its challengers. That that is what is behind the 'culture wars'.
You remember the brouhaha when Thomas Nagel published Mind and Cosmos?
Quoting Banno
You asked, I answered why the juxtoposition. I am explaining the juxtoposition.. meaning, presumably why we can't (seemingly) have both.
Very clear. When there is no observer at a site then none of the derived features of the site brought into play by a human mind exist.
Drop the mic. Everything is solved.
If we instead said that physics talks about matter and energy and stuff like that, we wouldn't be surprised to find that physics tells us little about jealousy and democracy and stuff like that. A different area of study, with different concerns. Folk who claim love is nothing but oxytocin don't have much of a grasp of love.
I'm not seeing that you did provide any such answer. Sorry. Thanks for trying.
I believe I did.
I will add, though, that for many purposes, it can be presumed that events will run their course as if it makes no difference whether or not there is an observer. That was what was meant by the 'mind-indepedence' of the objects of physics and chemistry, and it was very much presumed by the mechanistic model of the Universe - set in motion by the deist God of Newton, forever to run on its pre-determined course according to mechanical laws.
But that was all called into question by the 1920's discoveries of quantum physics, where the act of observation suddently became relevant to the observed experimental outcome. That is why Einstein felt compelled to ask the question (rather plaintively, I feel) 'Do you really believe the moon isn't there when nobody looks?'
So I wouldn't downplay the implications of 'mind-dependence' or its contrary.
Quoting Banno
I'm attempting a philosophical critique of why it doesn't.
Sure. That doesn't mean that the conflict is about anything substantive - so to speak.
Quoting Wayfarer
So do we agree that the cup, unobserved in the cupboard, still has a handle? I'm going to take it that we do, that the cup in the cupboard is not the sort of thing that you are talking about as "absent an observer".
Then what is it that is "unintelligible"? Aren't you just saying that saying something requires a sayer? That thinking requires a thinker? Sure, why not.
But you seem to think you are saying something else, in between that the unobserved cup has a handle and that thinking implies a thinker. And here I'm at a loss.
Which cup? Presumably you have one in mind.
Good. I like Mary Midgley's suggestion that they are simply different topics. But I also like Davidson's idea that what's true in one topic, if it can be translated into another, must be true there as well.
Now there's a genuine philosophical puzzle.
I would have to have one in mind.
Quoting Banno
Her 'Evolution as a Religion' is a favourite.
Evolutionary Overreach: Midgley suggests that some scientists and science popularizers overreach by making broad philosophical or moral claims based on evolutionary theory. They treat evolution not just as a biological theory but as a complete worldview or ideology.
"Just-so" Stories: Midgley critiques certain evolutionary explanations, especially in the realm of sociobiology, as being akin to Rudyard Kipling's "just-so" stories speculative narratives that seem more about confirming existing biases than rigorous scientific explanations.
Science vs. Religion: One of the book's main themes is that the discourse around evolution is heavily influenced by an unnecessary and damaging conflict between science and religion. This conflict is perpetuated by figures on both sides who treat science and religion as mutually exclusive domains.
Moral and Philosophical Implications: Midgley asserts that the implications of evolutionary theory have been overstretched by some proponents to make broad moral or philosophical claims, often with nihilistic or deterministic overtones.
Critique of Reductionism: A recurrent theme in Midgley's work, including this book, is her criticism of reductionism the idea that complex phenomena can be completely understood in terms of their simplest components. She argues that while reductionist methods are useful in many scientific contexts, they are not suited for understanding human nature and morality.
Scientism as Religion: Midgley suggests that the dogmatic belief in a purely scientific worldview, often at the expense of other forms of knowledge or understanding, can become a kind of secular religion in itself.
Complexity of Life: Midgley emphasizes that life, particularly human life, is complex and cannot be boiled down to simple deterministic laws or principles.
Just my cup of tea.
Sure.
Yet there is *my* mind, *your* mind, and some minds are superior to other minds. This is my focus.
I would describe myself as an idealist, but with a concern for the practical everyday implications of idealism.
I was asking how Buddhism overcomes the problem of solipsism. Every epistemic theory worth its salt has to overcome the problem of solipsism somehow, otherwise it falls into it.
No. I'm saying that you're trying to do too much with words, that you're trying to do with words even things that can only be done with deeds. (I'll keep bringing this up for a concise formulation.)
Sure. But there is still "my lived experience" vs. "your lived experience" and the question of which is the right one, or at least superior.
We somehow need to account for epistemic individuality as well as epistemic commonality and epistemic normativity.
And I contend that you're trying to do with words what can only be accomplished with physical actions.
How is it not a perspective? (Because of your commitment to to it?)
I dont really accept that. This is a philosophy forum, and the medium of discourse is writing.
But you hold that the things said, and said here, have an application beyond this forum, do you not?
More about trying to do with words even things that can only be done with deeds: The very act of joining a lineage, of accepting someone as one's teacher (with all the vows taken, all the bows, prostrations, money given, time spent, the other people witnessing it) has a real cognitive/epistemic effect on and for the person.
This effect can not be replicated merely by thinking about such sumbmission to a teacher, or reading about it.
It's like the difference between actually going to the bank and taking out a loan, signing documents and becoming subject to all the legal and criminal ramifications of having done so, vs. merely thinking about taking out a loan. Or the difference between actually eating an apple and merely thinking about doing so.
It seems that you're trying to get the benefits from Buddhism without really signing up for it. (If you really signed up for it, you wouldn't post here anymore, among other things.)
I got a notification of mention, by Banno, but I wasnt even aware of this thread. Dunno how that happens, but anyway ..
Interesting thesis, and well-spoken.
This assumption that there are things which we cannot talk about is unequivocally defeatist. That shows a very similar attitude to the judgement that there are aspects of reality which are fundamentally unintelligible. Succinctly, it is unphilosophical, and when it's allowed to fester it becomes anti-philosophical.
Quoting Banno
Those with the philosophical mindset, the wonder and desire to know, will inquire as to why it is the case that physics tells us little if anything at all, about things like jealousy and love.
It's one thing to recognize the reality of fundamental differences in the various aspects of reality, and the need to employ completely distinct disciplinary methods to acquire an understanding of these very different aspects, but some of us want to know why such differences are very real.
Quoting Wayfarer
Banno appears to have the attitude that this is something which cannot be talked about, so shut up because you're proving me wrong by talking about it.
Those who include scientific inquiry within the philosophical mindset are apt to recognize that the immense complexity of the brain very well explains the fact that physics tells us little about things like jealousy and love.
Well, not really. Physics, with one of its principal subjects being the relations of one thing to another, motions, is actually designed for understanding complexity. So all you are saying is that physics is not sufficient for the task which it is designed for, understanding complexity, because there is a complexity which is too immense for its capacity.
Saying that there is a physical complexity which physics cannot understand, when physics was designed to understand physical complexities, is like saying that despite the fact that the natural numbers are designed to be able to count anything, by being designated as infinite, there is a number which is greater than the capacity of the natural numbers to count. It's simply defeatist.
Instead of addressing the issue, which is the reason why, and proceed toward a real solution, it is to accept defeat.
One can do something close to that. It's called a map. From the map, if it is a contour map, one can construct elevations along a sightline and thus reconstruct the perspective at any point in any direction.
I therefore conclude that perspective is not personal (as @Banno points out if we swap places, we swap perspectives), but a feature of topography.
[quote=Spike Milligan]Everybody has to be somewhere![/quote]
The trick, as always, is not to confuse the map, where one is not, even when there is a label saying "you are here", with the territory where one has to be, with or without a decent map. In general, theoretical physics is in the business of map-making, whereas engineering alters the landscape. New telescope produces new perspective, produces new physics.
It seems that your history of trying to keep scientific understanding from entering your "fortress" has left you with so many misconceptions that it doesn't seem like a very good use of my time to try to disabuse you of those misconceptions. However, feel free to explain who designed physics and quote their explanation of what they designed physics for.
This is an interesting point. How can it be extrapolated? That a person's psychological, social, economical situation is also a type of topography? So that we can say, for example, that someone is a drug addict because of their psychological, social, economical topography (and that any person who would be placed in such a topography would also become s drug addict)?
Quoting Wayfarer
One of the important features of the paper is that it isnt trying to posit consciousness as an ineffable, inner sanctum. On the contrary, Bitbol emphasizes the irreducibly intersubjective nature of experience.
Well, I would like to suggest that social and psychological situations along with social constructs are all real, but I don't have that map to hand, if there is one. Humans are territory rather than map, is more my point, whereas physics is map.
:pray:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
:lol:
Quoting baker
That's not at all what you said. What you said was
Quoting baker
Which is patronising, and also irrelevant. The argument I'm putting forward has similarities to that of Berkeley, who had never heard of Buddhism, and other idealist philosophers including Schopenhauer (who had, but who was completely independent of it and Kastrup (who is a current philosopher.) The OP doesn't mention the Buddha, and the full version of the essay does only once in a footnote. As I said, this is a philosophy forum, and mine is a philosophical argument, convergences with Buddhist philosophy notwithstanding.
Quoting unenlightened
Quite. I recall an interesting article I read somewhere on how quantum physics and relativity required the invention of many novel forms of mathematics which were required by concepts that had never previously been considered. And I've mentioned many times the immense philosophical fallout from the advent of quantum theory in the 1920's, which is ongoing.
Quoting Joshs
I didn't think I was trying to do that (a criticism, by the way, that echoes Buddhism's criticism of Vedanta). I will add, I learned of Michel Bitbol from this forum (from @Pierre-Normand) and have found his work fascinating and enriching.
By the way, as I mentioned Bernardo Kastrup above, here is an interview with him that provides an effective intro for those who aren't familiar. Worth the read, in my opinion.
As you should know I agree that whatever is real beyond human experience and understanding cannot be imagined. Nonetheless, we cannot but imagine that things must somehow be real independently of the human; I think that is an existential fact about human existence, and its importance lies in it making us recognize that, at bottom, life is really an ineluctable mystery, and how that opens up the field for all the riches of the human speculative imagination. As rich as the imagination is, though, I think it should be borne in mind that whatever we imagine should not be taken too seriously as it can never be definitive.
I am in agreement. Seems this kind of leaves us with the phenomenal world as our only domain for fruitful exploration. Which for me, as someone who probably qualifies as scientist in orientation, leaves us with science as the primary (but not sole) source of reliable information about the world we inhabit. I remain however, somewhat fascinated with phenomenology and process of human interaction with the world and co-creation (if that is the right word) of our reality.
:up: I think the human imagination is a domain for fruitful exploration, but not for definitive knowledge of anything other than just what is imaginable. I, like you, am science oriented in that I think the only really definitive knowledge comes from observation. Phenomenology, including introspection, I would say gives us knowledge of how things appear to us to be, but I don't have any confidence that it can tell us how things really are. Here I have principally the nature of consciousness in mind, and maybe we can never know what its nature is as it cannot be directly observed.
I tend to think our world is pre-cognitively co-constructed by the bodymind/ environment and that we are constitutionally blind to that process. We and the world, the whole shebang, emerge out of the other side of that process, so to speak,
Just to re-iterate the point of the argument: I am not disputing the scientific (i.e. naturalist) account but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What Im calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us with a kind of inherent reality that it doesnt possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth. (That, I contend, is the major source of 'scientism' and a major weakness of naturalism, generally.)
By creating reality, Im referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified worldpicture within which we situate and orient ourselves.' That part of the argument is supported with passages from Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order, not a philosophy text as such, but a cognitive science book.
From this, what I'm saying is that philosophical reflection or analysis reveals the way in which the mind creates - or construes! - the nature of reality. That is where insight, self-knowledge, becomes a factor.
You frequently put this up as a kind of maxim, but one of the over-arching themes of philosophy since ancient times has been the possibility of self-knowledge. The fact that this seems such a remote or perplexing idea might be as much a consequence of the shortcomings of our way of looking at the question, as of the question itself.
So this:
Quoting Wayfarer
seems to be you relying on the objective relaity of the empirical scientific understanding of the brain to support a claim that empirical investigations cannot show us what is real because they
Quoting Wayfarer
which seem to be a performative contradiction.
Quoting Wayfarer
For the very reasons which you have adduced, I am not as confident as you are that what might be called self-knowledge is anything more than an appearance- it just tells us how things seem to us with no guarantee that it reflects any reality beyond human experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I see those "shortcomings" as inherent limitations of human knowledge and understanding. Obviously, I am more of a skeptic than you are.
Agree. And it's a point well made. I think this kind of thread is rich in potential triggers for all sorts of other related discussions.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm aware of this view (Know Thyself, Delphic maxims, etc) but I've not seen philosophy as playing an extensive role in self-knowledge. The self-knowledge (insight) I am aware of (and I doubt people much acquire it except through experience) is generally acquired through the process of living or through therapy/counselling/meaningful interventions/dialogue from/with others.
Can you give me a couple of examples of self-knowledge arrived at through philosophy?
I understand that is your belief, but not that it is definitive.
Quoting Tom Storm
I certainly won't hold myself up as one. But I have the idea that this is what philosophy in the pre-modern sense used to mean. You know - Pierre Hadot and philosophy as a way of life, how ancient philosophy used to be practiced rather than just being an academic pursuit. I had a kind of intuition of that, and I'm interesting in pursuing it although in today's world, it's something like forensic pathology. It is really difficult to tell if I'm actually learning something or progressing or whether I'm chasing rainbows (hence the icon.)
:up: It's a very interesting question for us all here. I think terms like 'self-knowledge' are used imprecisely by many of us and self-knowledge is automatically assumed to be a virtue we don't really question. I think what we do here mainly is engage in disputes over contesting epistemologies, often slogged out through metaphysical presuppositions. I don't see where self-knowledge comes into it much except perhaps in understanding the limitations of our own positions and knowledge.
Unless solipsism obtains, mind is dependent on (ergo, inseparable from) More/Other-than-mind, no? and that "experience" consists of phenomenal traces (or outputs) of the 'entangled, or reflexive, interactivity' of mind with More/Other-than-mind? and therefore mind interprets "experience as world" which is wholly subjective, or imaginary an 'online hallucination' that is nothing but mere folk knowledge (i.e. parochial heuristics / biases) aka "common sense" to the degree "common sense" is n o t bias-filtered/error-corrected by hypothetico-deductive testing (i.e. science and/or sound arguments)?
So what is 'mind'? AFAIK, basically mind is a recursive (strange looping, phenomenal self-modeling) aspect of More/Other-than-mind a nonmental activity (process ... anatman), not an entity (ghost-in-the-machine ... X-of-the-gaps), that is functionally blind to its self-recursivity the way, for instance, an eye is transparent to itself and absent from its own field of vision.
Of course, I am happy to admit that, since I don't think anything is definitive except observation, and that only within the context of observation.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that philosophy can be a practice in the sense that Hadot outlines in Philosophy as a Way of Life, but the methodology of such philosophy is not speculation and critique, but acceptance of a body of cardinal ideas, or systems, which are to serve as guidelines for practice, for "spiritual exercises". I don't believe such exercises yield any definitive knowledge in the propositional sense, but of course, like any practice, they develop certain "know-hows".
But I have said this to you many times, and you are probably tired of hearing it, since it doesn't accord with your own beliefs apparently.
Imagination and observation cant be disentangled in the way you think they can. It is not as though what we imagine is locked in some secret inner sphere we call subjective consciousness. Thats an old fashioned way of thinking about subjectivity which just perpetuates a dualistic thinking (imagination is non-observational subjectivity, scientific observation is oriented toward contact with a real, objective world). This way of thinking is utterly unable to explain how leading edge philosophical ideas thoughout history have anticipated , by decades or more, the results of the sciences. Observation indeed.
Quoting Janus
This intersubjective construction of objectivity is what phenomenology is about , not introspection , which is a common misunderstanding of its method.
I haven't said or suggested that imagination and observation can be disentangled. That said imagining abstruse metaphysical possibilities and observing everyday phenomena are very different activities.
I also have not denied that speculative ideas can sometimes anticipate what is later observed to be the case.
Quoting Joshs
This I don't agree with, since I think the construction of objectivity is a pre-cognitive and hence inscrutable process. For me phenomenology consists in reflection on experience in order to clarify how things seem to us. And the only possibility of anything definitive in that comes with intersubjective assent in the form of "yes, that is how it seems to me also". What other kind of demonstration do you think could be possible in that context?
The problem though is that not all aspects of a human perspective can be reconstructed in the way you describe. And a human perspective, as @wonderer1 pointed out, is very complex. So the fact that one, or even a number of aspects of a perspective can be reconstructed, does not produce the conclusion that a human perspective can be reconstructed. That's a composition fallacy.
Quite simply, swapping places does not imply swapping perspectives, because the unique particularities of the being brings a lot to the perspective. If swapping perspectives was just a matter of swapping places, you could take a dog's perspective, or a cat's perspective, by taking that creature's place. But this is all wrong. And that is why "walking in someone else's shoes" is a matter of understanding the other person, not a matter of swapping physical positions.
Think about alternative terms for mind - psyche or geist, for instance (or the Sanskrit 'citta'). Is it not conceivable that the first stirrings of life, the very simplest organisms, are also the manifestation of mind? Which then over the course of aeons evolves into self-aware forms including rational sentient beings such as ourselves? So which comes first, viewed that way? Did the primitive proto-organic chemistry suddenly and miraculously develop into a chain reaction capable of homeostasis and evolution, thereby giving rise to mind? Or does a latent tendency in the Cosmos towards self-awareness manifest where circumstances are favourable? If that sounds like vitalism, I am not proposing that 'life' or 'mind' is an actual essence or substance in any objective sense. Think of it as a metaphorical expression which is nevertheless suggestive. And it maps well against the ancient maxim of 'man as microcosm' (from hermetic philosophy). In any case, it is a plausible model for preserving the ontological priority of mind (as disinct from relegating it to 'the product of' mindless processes.)
Quoting 180 Proof
Well, as said above, I agree that mind is not anything objectively real. 'Anatman' is a term in Buddhism, usually used adjectivally, i.e. 'all phenomena (dharmas) are anatta (not self)' - which does not deny that there are subjects of experience, although it is often misinterpreted to mean that. The meaning is to recognise that phenomenal objects are not the self (in addition to being transient (anicca) and unsatisfying (dukkha)).
As for the eye being 'absent from its own field of vision', that is exactly the metaphor behind The Blind Spot of Science article which you have previously dismissed (and which incidentally is being published in book form next March.)
Quoting Janus
I agree with that, and I don't recall your having put it that way. That is what I think was the distinction between 'theoria' and 'praxis' in ancient philosophy, was it not? And the kind of 'unitive vision' that it was thought to culminate in was a blend of 'knowing how' and 'knowing that'. It's often said that philosophy lost its way by becoming totally absorbed in intellectual abstractions, whereas traditional philosophy (and Buddhist praxis) is very much grounded in bodily awareness (which is a basic feature of enactivism and embodied philosophy).
I've got to do an advertisement for a book, again - a little-known book, hardly commented on, which is why I mention it - De-fragmenting Modernity, Paul Tyson (a UQ academic):
He traces the historical development of this 'fragmentation' quite plausibly, in my view. It's germane to the ideas in this thread. That re-integration or holistic vision is what I think philosophy ought to be striving for.
:roll: Any "manifestation of" that which "is not objectively real" is, of course, "conceivable". But are we just fantasizing, Wayf, or are we philosophizing?
:up:
Cool. Cuz I cant make heads or tails out of self-knowledge.
It does surprise me that you don't recall me framing it that way before, because I am sure I have more than a few times. But anyway, no matter; and I have to say I still don't see the possibility of a definitive "unitive vision" that could be shown to be based on anything other than faith.
I mean, I don't reject the possibility that intuition might give us insight into the nature of reality, I just reject the possibility that it can be demonstrated to be able to do so or demonstrated to be doing so in any particular case, and that is why I say it remains a matter of faith.
That said, I lean towards the idea that intuition might sometimes give us insight into the nature of reality, and I acknowledge that to the extent that I believe that I am believing something which cannot be tested. Even scientific theories can never be proven to be true.
It's not just me then... :wink:
Quoting Janus
And I often wonder how having an insight into the nature of reality matters? What happens then... chop wood, carry water?
Sometimes it seems to me that the quest to gain glimpses of transcendence is more about self-aggrandizement or a kind of metaphysical tourism.
I don't think it really does matter in any practical sense, since such insight cannot be definitive. However, the insight might be conceptually creative and rich, inspiring creative ideas and activities, heightened affect and altered consciousness. I value such things in themselves, because I see them as enriching experiences.
I agree with you about chasing enlightenment being very often a cult of the self and a kind of "tourism". I've seen quite a bit of that in my travels.
As stated at the outset, the OP is an argument against the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion of what is real. Accordingly, 'objectively existent' is not the sole criterion for what is real. There are kinds of things, like abstract objects such as numbers and logical principles, which are real but not necessarily objectively existent. There are a priori truths which are not necessarily objective, in that their veracity can be judged without recourse to external experience. More to the point, as you yourself said, the mind itself is not something that can be known objectively, in that it's never the object of cognition (except metaphorically). So when we try to consider what it is, or how it originated, then perhaps the best we can manage is suggestive metaphor. That doesn't necessarily fall to mere fantasy (unless you want to be completely positivistic about it.)
I don't deny that there is an entire vast domain which can be encompassed by the term 'objectively existent' although, as has been pointed out a few times already, this can also be understood as being 'inter-subjectively real'.
Speaking of 'anatman' - the Sanskrit term ??nyat?, meaning 'emptiness', is grounded in the awareness that objects of cognition have no intrinsic being (svabhava, literally 'own being'.) 'Realising emptiness' is the path of understand how the mind misconstrues objects of cognition as being inherently existent. I think the Buddhist expression 'realising emptiness' has a lot to do with seeing through the way in which the mind manufactures meanings about objects which they don't really possess. But it takes a pretty severe inner discipline to pursue that.
Quoting Janus
I would have hoped that a Philosophy Forum might be a place to discuss such endeavours, although there are always quite a few tourist members.
Quoting Mww
It's always struck me as one of the fundamental elements of philosophy, paradoxical and difficult though it might seem.
Right, well isn't that what we've been doing? I don't deny that the kinds of philosophical practices such as the stoics, the epicureans, and the neo-Platonists pursued could be possible and even transformative today, but that is not what we are doing here. Here we are speculating and critiquing, the very activities which apparently had no place in such spiritual practices.
I'm not sure what you mean by "objectively existent" or "objectivity". Please clarify what makes this "criterion" problematic.
Also, do you reject what I (briefly) say on the thread "What is real?" ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/839360
Not so much problematic as limited, not universal. Isn't to limit the scope of truth to what is objective a form of verificationism? As I already said, there are a priori truths, mathematical proofs, and so on which are not objective (meaning 'inherent in the object'), or rather, true in a way that is not necessarily objective in the strict sense. Objectivity is something to be valued - I'm not a relativist - but at the same time, it's not absolute, or rather, its scope is limited. For instance, Newtonian mechanics affords pretty well absolute objectivity when it comes to the laws of motion, but when you get to quantum mechanics, you encounter the whole issue of 'interpretation of the meaning of the theory' which is no longer an objective matter, even if the predictions it makes are extremely accurate.
What I was trying to get at is that I'm aware of the problem of conceiving life in terms of the 'elan vital'. That is very much like the imaginary ghost in the machine as you said. But, I said, If that sounds like vitalism, I am not proposing that 'life' or 'mind' is a substance in any objective sense - it is ill-conceived to consider mind as something objectively real, but it is AS IF there is a something like mind or life that animates the material form of creatures. But to say it is objectively existent is a reification. We can only be aware of it, because it is constitutive of our being, NOT because it is a knowable object or substance. That's what I'm working on trying to clarify.
Quoting 180 Proof
There's not enough detail to really say.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/842850 ^^
Well, fair enough, but what I was attempting to respond to
Quoting 180 Proof
is hardly a model of clarity itself, you must admit.
Quoting Banno
I get what Wayf is trying to say here, but there 'is' not a [metaphysical] subject except as a perspectival form of being. Husserl's discussion of spatial objects is helpful here. What we tend to mean by a cup is that familiar object viewed perspectively through human eyes. I can never see all of it at once. I can see it from this place or that, in this lighting or that. Our embodied experience has always been and seeming must always continue to be 'perspectival.'
We don't know what we could even mean by the cup 'apart from human cognition'. Or rather such a statement is paradoxical, aimed of course precisely at the same human cognition which is supposed to contemplate the mystically Real cup its own absence.
The 'objective' cup is something like the cup from a (virtual, postulated) 'average' human perspective.
Yes, you are quite right. Even the map-reading is not simple; the information is there in the contours, but working out what can be seen from where is complex. Similarly, one can know something of a persons's economic position, social and psychological condition and perhaps work out to some extent their psycho-social 'perspective'. And if one understands a dog's sensibilities, the same applies. That you bring up such particularities shows that you can do so to some extent, and shows, again, that they are features of the world.
I think this is what the thread is suggesting; that the objective world is an abstract theoretical construct, and to arrive at the real, one has 'to put' back the subjectivity that has been discounted.
I basically agree. We can only speak with confidence from our actual, embodied experience. We know nothing about a world from no perspective at all. We know the world for sapience. Some have postulated a to-me-paradoxical urstuff, admittedly not without their reasons.
But others postulate too much on the side of the subject. It's the world that is given perspectively, not some private dream. Though dreamers and dreams are also given. Still, language is more social than individual, so we intend always the same world, and that includes the toothaches of others, which figure like prime numbers and pretzels in the same kind of justifications of claims and deeds.
A very nicely presented argument which I think is substantially wrong. I hope you dont mind if I boil things down
The following analogical argument is obviously wrong (or is it?):
You cannot look at a landscape except from a point of view.
Therefore the landscape is constituted by (or created by) your point of view.
So the question is either: what is the crucial difference in the case of empirical reality in general (as opposed to a landscape) that turns the argument into a good one; or what are the missing premises?
:up:
The subjectivist camp is right that the world is always given perspectively, but they don't squeeze enough juice from the fact that it's the world, our world that is so given. Logic is ours not mine. We always intend the one and only 'landscape.'
My mind didn't create our world, but maybe my mind, understood as this world entire but from a point of view, has a genuine if merely supporting ontological role.
:up:
In other words, the scientific image is (of course, in retrospect?) just a useful image. It's a map that deserves respect, but it's bonkers ontologically -- if taken as some kind of self-supporting independently-meaningful Thing.
I hear you, but we replace one fallible belief with another. I do think you nailed the practical sense of 'reality.' But I don't think you've made a case for the truly independent object (the one from no perspective.)
That was given as an illustrative analogy, not as the main point of the argument. Note also I that I say that a perspective is required for any judgement as to what exists. There can be no answer to the question 'does [the object] exist irrespective of any judgement?' as that question requires that the questioner already has [the object] in mind, in order to frame the question. You may plausibly accept that [the object] continues to exist in the absence of any perspective, but that remains conjecture, even if plausible.
But the main part of the argument occurs further on, where I say 'there is no need for me to deny that the Universe ('the object') is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ¹. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.'
[1] This insight is central to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant has been described as the godfather of modern cognitive science for his insights into the workings of the mind.
Well, yes. I explicitly used it in the same way.
Otherwise, I dont see how youve addressed my question.
Indeed. That is how language, mathematics, and all forms of communication are effective - they are part of a 'shared mindscape', so to speak, that have agreed references that we all understand. Or rather, that all those of our cultural type understand. (Because, as Wittgenstein says, even if a lion could speak, we would not understanding him.)
But this is also why my approach is not solipsistic. When I say the world is 'mind-made' I don't mean made only by my mind, but is constituted by the shared reality of humankind, which is an irreducibly mental foundation.
What I said was that 'empirical reality in general is not solely constituted by objects and their relations but has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis' - thereby pointing out a lack or absence in the empirical account, namely, the inextricably mental. Doesn't that address your question?
Im not sure. On the face of it its more or less repeating the analogical argument with empirical reality substituted for the landscape. Also, isnt there a tensionit could be worse than just a tension, Im not surebetween the claim that the mental aspect of empirical reality is not revealed empirically, and your appeal to cognitive science? Kants transcendental subject is a kind of vanishing point, not a real mind.
'It might be thought that a neuroscientific approach to the nature of the mind will be inclined towards just the kind of physicalist naturalism that this essay has set out to criticize. But, and perhaps ironically, that is not necessarily so. Many neuroscientists stress that the world we perceive is not an exact replication of external stimuli, but rather is actively constructed by the brain in a dynamic and interleaved process from one moment to the next. Every act of perception involves the processes of filtering, amplifying, and interpretation of sensory data physical, environmental, somatic and in the case of h. sapiens, refracted through language and reason. These are the constituents of our mental life which constitute our world. The world is, as phenomenologists like to put it, a lebenswelt, a world of lived meanings.'
Quoting Jamal
In my taxonomical schema, real but not phenomenally existent.
Incidentally, that above passage has a footnote reference in the original to this video:
I love that Richard Dawkins appears as Witness for the Defense (of objectivity) :-)
Paradox resolved. Self-knowledge is a transcendental paralogism, a logical misstep of pure reason, re: knowledge of self treats that to which knowledge belongs, as object the knowledge is about. (B411)
Quoting Tom Storm
Reason: the source of both wondrous insight and debilitating confusion.
[quote=Russell]
When a crowd of people all observe a rocket bursting, they will ignore whatever there is reason to think peculiar and personal in their experience, and will not realize without an effort that there is any
private element in what they see. But they can, if necessary, become aware of these elements. One part of the crowd sees the rocket on the right, one on the left, and so on. Thus when each person's perception is studied in its fullness, and not in the abstract form which is most convenient for conveying information about the outside world, the perception becomes a datum for psychology. But although every physical datum is derived from a system of psychological data, the converse is not the case. Sensations resulting from a stimulus within the body will naturally not be felt by other people ; if I have a stomach-ache I am in no degree surprised to find that others are not similarly afflicted.
[/quote]
I agree w/ Russell (and Husserl) that we tend to look right thru our own looking. The personal and typically irrelevant how is forgotten in the worldly what. It takes work to really see our own seeing, because such seeing of seeing is even potentially counterpractical.
I think we agree here. This is Geist, spirit, form of life, culture, the they, one, the who of everyday dasein.
Our views aren't that far apart probably. I don't think you are being solipsistic, by the way. And the timebinding human species is the best candidate for a transcendental ego. But consider that this species is part of what it finds in the world. So I'd call it a sine qua non. And what is awareness of...if not the world ? The 'mental,' grasped most profoundly, is precisely the very being of its of 'objects.'
'I' am the there itself. But this is not the psychological 'I' or the person with a credit score. It's vanishingly pure witness, which no longer deserves anthropomorphic trappings, having been recognized as [the perspectival character of ] being itself.
I tend to agree with the spirit of what you are saying in this thread, but I think this metaphysical subject must be dissolved,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte
This is close to Heidegger's being-in-the-world. The 'I' is the world, but this world exists in the style of a sentient citizen's chasing of a streetcar.
I agree with this, and I think the issue is the question of how we can arrive at a "correct way" to put back the subjectivity. If we define "correct way" as the way that follows the conventions, and these conventions are the ones which are consistent with the abstract theoretical construct, then any application of the "correct way" will not put back the subjectivity, as desired, because it will just create a new aspect of the same old "objective world". To "put back the subjectivity" requires including the features of subjectivity which are outside the boundaries of convention.
The interesting aspect of this type of thread, is that there is a significant number of hard realists who flatly refuse to acknowledge this need to put back the subjectivity, as required to have an honest approach to reality. Since these people think that "the real" can be arrived at simply by following the conventions, they are in great agreement with each other, and you'll see them on these threads, slapping each other on the back, giving thumbs up and high fives etc.. On the other hand, those who apprehend and agree with this need, "to put back the subjectivity" as a requirement for an approach to "the real", can never agree with each other as to how this ought to be done. This is because the very thing that they are arguing for, the need to respect the concrete base of subjectivity, as very real, and a very essential and true part of reality, is also the very same thing which manifests as the differences between us, which make agreement between us into a very difficult matter.
So we are broken into two groups. The first group agrees with each other, and commits to an ontology which denies the significance or importance of perspectival difference. The "objective world" is the one we understand through certain conventions of abstract theoretical thought, and those who see "the world" in a different way are by definition "wrong", therefore we can exclude them, and their absurd perspectives, as irrelevant to our objective reality. This first group has explicit terms of agreement supported by the conventions of language, so there is great conformity and unity amongst them. The second group, which supports the real, essential, and significant nature of difference, is pushed further and further away from the first, by the first, so that the first can apply terms of mental illness and things like that, to the second, as required to support the illusion of the reality of their "objective world" construct.
Now the second group, by the very nature of what they are arguing for, lacks unity. Because of this lack of unity, they will always be "wrong", and even my act of classing them together as one group is wrong. They are better characterized as wayward individuals lacking what is required for categorization. And even if some of them find points of agreement, that small group will still be in the minority compared to the first group, and therefore wrong. This ought to serve as a demonstration of how the first group is always "correct", but correct by their own theoretical constructs of what is true and real, and not "correct" by the true reality of honest subjectivity.
Here's an evolutionary example which may or may not be helpful to some. Imagine a species appears on earth, and flourishes greatly, to the point where it overruns and inhabits every space of the entire plane. The species does not understand the toxicity of its own waste, such that its own annihilation from the effects of its own waste becomes imminent. At this point individuals come into existence amidst the toxicity of "the species", demonstrating various differences, perhaps mutations caused by the toxic elements of the waste. Each individual separates from "the species" in its own way, with an instinctual form of knowledge, knowing that the species is toxic and that there is a need to separate from it. Not one of these individuals is "normal" by the conventions of "the species", and not one of them has the characteristics required to be called a new species. Each one is a monstrosity or deformity relative to "the species" They are all within some intermediate condition not covered by the norms of our "objective world" so they are simply mutations. However, these differences are essential and necessary for the continuation of all the features of that life form, which have been progressively building for millions of years, producing the necessary conditions for its extreme flourishment, and this would all be completely lost if the species proceeded to annihilate itself prior to the individuals establishing something new.
Quoting plaque flag
This is very good evidence of the problem I discuss above. In reality, the assumption of "the world" is only supported by the truth of "our world". And "our world" implies an inter-subjectivity, of agreements and conventions. So long as agreement holds, there is such a thing as "the world". But as more and more people see faults and defects in "our world", and those who cling to "our world" refuse to address these faults because they automatically reject those people as simply "wrong", insignificant and irrelevant, the foundation of "our world" gets shakier and shakier as the concrete which supports it, is that very agreement which is not being properly maintained.
[quote=Husserl]
Is phenomenological research solipsistic research? Does it restrict the research to the individual I and, more precisely, to the area of its individual psychic phenomena? It is anything but this. Solus ipse that would mean I alone exist or I disengage everything remaining of the world, excepting only myself and my psychic states and acts.
On the contrary, as a phenomenologist, I disengage myself just as I disengage everyone else and the entire world, and no less my psychic states and acts, which, as my states and acts, are precisely nature. One may say that the nonsensical epistemology of solipsism emerges when, being ignorant of the radical principle of the phenomenological reduction, yet similarly intent on suspending all transcendence, one confuses the psychological and the psychologistic immanence with the genuine phenomenological immanence.
[/quote]
I disengage myself just as I disengage everyone else and the entire world, and no less my psychic states and acts, which, as my states and acts, are precisely nature.
I read this as: the ego, which might be postulated as constituting, is at least also one more thing in the world, so that it would have to be self-constituting. It seems cleaner to me to indeed grant the lived body the status of a sine qua non...but to hesitate to speak of the priority of mentality. The lifeworld is 'given' as a rushing river, as a symphony. I can't see without a brain, but I also need eyes. But then I also need something in the world to see. And perception is conceptual (Sellars was mentioned above), so I need a linguistic conceptual community too. This without-which-nothing or condition-for-the-possibility approach memorably appears in The Fire Sermon.
[quote=Fire Sermon]
The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.
[/quote]
I can sum up by suggesting that it's enough to challenge the intelligibility of the 'pure' object. We probably don't want to put ourselves in the vulnerable position of proposing a pure subject.
What do you mean by "put back the subjectivity"?
I always thought the maxim 'know thyself' was simply about seeing through your own delusions and false hopes. It doesn't necessarily pre-suppose a 'real self' that needs to be known, except maybe as a figure of speech. Self knowledge as an important aspect of wisdom and maturity.
Quoting plaque flag
Those are the 'three poisons' of Buddhism, represented iconographically as the pig (greed) snake (hate) and rooster (stupidity/delusion) chasing each other around an endless circle (sa?s?ra).
These are said to be the chief motivators of the 'deluded worlding', replaced in the wise by their opposites, namely:
amoha (non-delusion) or paññ? (wisdom)
alobha (non-attachment) or d?na (generosity)
adve?a (non-hatred) or mett? (loving-kindness)
Cool. Nice to see a definition. I also think that this self-knowledge is being aware of and being able to manage flaws or patterns in one's thinking and behavior. It seems to be a synonym for a type of self-improvement. This does not necessarily track back to philosophy from what I can see. Although @Joshs made an interesting point about the arrogance of not seeing one's own unexamined and unprovable presuppositions. We are often keen to share our values with others without the benefit of having scrupulously examined those values.
I think it belongs to the therapeutic aspect of philosophy. Did you ever have that 70's perennial The Road Less Travelled? Very much along those lines. (Actually the Wiki entry on 'Know Thyself' is really not too bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself)
I think cultural differences are overblown and that Wittgenstein's comment about not being able to understand the lion is ridiculous. What language is the lion speaking? If the lion speaks our language of course we can understand it. If the lion speaks an unfamiliar language of course we cannot understand it.
Quoting Wayfarer
As far as we know humankind does not have a collective mind. So, it depends on what you mean by "mind". It also depends on what you mean by "world". The everyday world is, as I often say, a collective, in the sense of conventional, representation; it is not something any of us actually experience. It's like the world of fashion or the world of business.
So, the everyday world is convention-created, I would say, rather than mind-created; there are collective conventions, but there does not seem to be any collective mind.
The actual world, that within which we exist pre-cognitively speaking and by which we are pre-cognitively affected does not depend on the human for its existence, or at least all the evidence suggests that it does not. It's perhaps not impossible that it is mind-created, but how could we ever know? And if we cannot ever know, then how could it ever matter?
That said, even though the question is unanswerable, I think the fact that we can ask it matters, even though the question itself, per se, is useless to us.
That notion of self-knowledge is unproblematicit is a matter of developing awareness of what is being felt, thought and done and how those feelings, thoughts and doings are affecting personal happiness and health, one's own and others'.
It was actually @unenlightened's phrase. It was meant to express what the op was about. The issue is that to get a true representation of reality we must include the subjective aspect, which is an essential part of any such representation. So in other words "objective reality" is a sort of falsity because it is an attempt to remove the subjective aspect, which cannot possibly be done. Therefore, in creating a representation of reality we need to "put back the subjectivity" which the misguided attempt to produce an objective reality has removed. This I believe is the point of the op, we cannot produce a true "objective reality" because subjectivity is an essential aspect of any representation of reality.
Quoting Janus
I don't think that this is very accurate. Conventions do not create anything, they are passive, inactive, and minds, which are active, may follow them like rules. It is minds which create rather than conventions.
That's a pretty good definition. It does (to me) slot into a psychological zone as much as, if not more than, a philosophical one.
I can also see how an enhanced awareness of epistemology might lead one away from, let's say, Islamic fundamentalism and into a more nuanced, allegorical read of the Koran. This could make you a better person - more aware of and accepting of other ways of living and the benefits of diversity and non-dogmatic, less judgmental modes of living. Or something like this.
"The world" as abstract theoretical construct exists, and it is mind created.
Nice piece. It's a clear framing of a problem that is at the heart of modern "popular metaphysics." I find myself agreeing with what I took to be the main thesis here:
But I agree with the thesis for some different reasons I will touch on.
I agree that reality is not "straightforwardly objective," but more because of general confusion over what the term "objective," means. It seems to me like there is a strong tendency to conflate the "objective world," with something like Kant's noumenal realm. Thus, you might see a claim that the "objective world is reality-in-itself." This, paired with the positivist idea that "objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit," unhelpfully muddles a number of concepts that are better left separate.
"Objectivity" only makes sense if there is the possibility of subjectivity. If there are no experiencing subjects, then there is no objectivity. If objectivity is not defined within the context of the possibility of something not being objective, then it is a term that applies equally to absolutely everything, making it entirely contentless. Truth is similar in this respect. What is the content of saying anything is "true," if "false" is not a possibility?
"Objective" is not a synonym for "real," "true," "noumenal," or "in-itself," and a close examination of how the concept has historically been used will demonstrate this, conflations notwithstanding. Objectivity is what we hope to arrive at when we try to eliminate the (relevant) biases of any particular point of view. But the "objective view," is still a view; it is not what we arrive at when we have no point of view (as you point out, this makes no sense). When we want an objective view of a phenomena we try to observe it in many different ways, using instruments, creating clever experiments, trying to overcome biases. If the objective view we were after was "what phenomena are like without a mind," scientists could just shoot up anesthesia and achieve something to that effect.
Objectivity also doesn't equate to truth either. Subjective experiences are part of reality and smoothing them out to create a more objective view is itself an alteration of our view of reality. The truth of the horrors of the Holocaust wouldn't best be described by a phase space map of all the particles in Europe for instance.
Further, these conflations are a problem regardless of whether one embraces idealism, physicalism, or dualism. I'd argue that it only seems to be a particular problem of physicalism because popular versions of physicalism seem to be particularly prone to falling into this bloated definition of "objectivity as truth," and as "the world as seen from everywhere and nowhere."
That all said, I think an objective view of existence is quite possible (views can be more or less objective of course). The mistake is simply to assume the objectivity makes any sense divorced from the concept of mind.
I'm not totally sure what is meant here. Are minds not objects that have relations, or is it only the individual's mind that is not an object to itself?
I might disagree if I am understanding you correctly here. While I tend to want to view the universe as one unified process, it does seem like some subsections of that process are far more directly involved in causing minds to emerge than others. That said, I agree that there is an inextricably mental aspect to all experiences of the world. This aspect is implicit in their existence as experiences.
However, it doesn't seem like everything that is experienced is necessarily all that closely related to the emergence of the mind doing the experiencing. Obviously, there is a relation, else how are the things experienced? But the relation between a person and a bag of drugs on a table versus a person and a bag of drugs they've just ingested is quite different because in the latter case the drugs are now much more deeply involved in the processes from which mind emerges. I suppose the thing that is missed in the prevailing view that you are commenting on is that even the drugs on the counter are part of the process that results in mind. Just because we can abstract the functions of a central nervous system from a specific environment does not mean it will function without an environment.
But this is where I might disagree: everything we experience is causally connected to mind, by definition. However, it seems possible to me that there might be distant processes that are far enough away from any minds that the goings on within them are quite irrelevant to any experiences. But I would still say its possible for these processes to exist. Now these processes are, of course, part of the larger, universal process that minds do experience, so their "separation" from processes that involve mind is an abstraction, subjective. But because this separation can be tied to causality, it isn't arbitrary, and seems as "real" a separation as any of our "natural kinds." It's in this sense that I would say "mind independent things" can be said to exist, although this independence isn't absolute.
I'm not sure of this. It seems we can observe our own mental processes, making ourselves, or parts of ourselves, an "object of analysis." But mental life itself is a process, so I like to think of it more as sub processes looping around on a larger stream of process, sort of a fractal recurrance of the way in which mind itself is a process looping around in the wider universal process. And group minds might be thought of as another such "looping."
Right. Moreover, people often fail to realize how our discrete characterization of things into "objects" is itself the result of the mind. Empirically, the universe looks like a single process. There are no truly isolated systems. The "objects" we understand well appear to actually just be long-term stabilities in process.
To use your train example, the passengers absolutely would observe the wheels disappearing if they did disappear when everyone stops looking. They would feel their train derail and go skidding across the ground, which presumably people can see out the windows. The universe is interconnected. We don't have to directly observe things to have them be relevant to our observations. I have never directly observed two atoms fusing, but I see starlight almost every night, I've read plenty of books mentioning astrology, the history of the world I live in is shaped by people with political power making momentous decisions based on the movement of stars, etc. Thus, fusion, even that occurring many light years away, hundreds of millennia ago, is still something I observe the effects of. To paraphrase Bonaventure, 'an effect is a sign of its cause." Distant instances of fusion explicitly effect our experiences every time we even remember seeing stars. If you recognize how intricately connected cause and the process of local becoming is, it becomes silly to talk of things we know to exist "not being observed and so disappearing."
This is also a good example . We don't need to be able to observe photons in fiber optic cables to "observe" them. We would observe them doing their work or not doing it when we go to refresh our browser and it either loads or gives us an error.
I also don't know if I would agree with the "idealism" route though. Lately, I've been trying to figure out if there is even a distinction between "physicalism" and "idealism" once one steps outside of the box of substance metaphysics. If we accept that there is only "one sort of stuff," then process does all of the explanatory lifting, substance nothing, since it is uniform. Things being "physical" or "mental" substance becomes irrelevant. Nor does it seem like creating a distinction between "physical" and "mental" processes will add any sort of extra explanation if the two types flow into one another.
This does not mean the battle of the big 'isms is a "pseudo problem." But there is a posterior problem of determining if stability or change is fundamental. If change/process is fundamental, which I think appears more likely, then these old distinctions lose the purpose they were created for. If the universe is truly one unified process, and the universe clearly has minds, then it is trivial that there are no absolutely mind independent entities just as there are no truly isolated systems. "Mind creating nature" versus "nature creating mind" becomes simply an error of projecting artificial distinctions onto a unified causal process (although this doesn't negate the relevance of many philosophically interesting issues related cognitive science).
There is still the hypothetical question of: "Could a different universal process have come into being, such that it produced no minds," but this seems to be a different question. This isn't physicalism versus idealism, but rather the "problem of first cause," which remains for either ism.
:up:
Great article. Well done sir.
Two things.
Is this not assuming the subject/object dichotomy? I have a feeling youre quite beyond that, but this paragraph left me unsure.
Secondly, a lot of this sounds like Kant, who you reference and credit as developing this central insight. Can you flush out a little more how what youre saying differs from him?
Yes, that makes sense to me.
I'd say there are as many conceptions of "the world" as there are people. The basic idea "the world" is culturally learned, it is now a convention, and who knows who it was that first articulated it?
Sounds like you are probably talking about almost all of the universe, at least with reference to human experience.
Have you ever looked into Mach's The Analysis of Sensations ?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
Did you read The Different Drum?
I think this gels with what you are saying.
[quote=Peirce]
Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a fore-ordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.
But it may be said that this view is directly opposed to the abstract definition which we have given of reality, inasmuch as it makes the characters of the real depend on what is ultimately thought about them. But the answer to this is that, on the one hand, reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it; and that, on the other hand, though the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks. Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to.
[/quote]
The truth (or rather its best surrogate) is belief which is objective and bias-transcending as possible. The world exists meaningly [only ] 'for' an articulate (and therefore social) creature. C. S. Peirce calls it the 'settlement of opinion,' which I think of in terms of the evolution of perspective. Wittgenstein wants to [help us] 'see the world aright' (properly, correctly.)
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.
The real is the world as [linguistically] grasped by the ideal point-of-view, which is also a point-at-infinity, a goal on the horizon. So the 'mental' (meaning, culture, science, rationality, normativity, spirit) is indeed fundamental and irreducible here.
First, thanks for the positive feedback. :pray: You've covered a lot in your comments, I will do my best to respond.
I take the term 'objective' at face value, that is, 'inherent in the object'. Seems to me that estimation of objectivity as the main criterion for truth parallels the emergence of science, which really is kind of obvious. Remember Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos is all there is'? By that he means, I think, the Cosmos qua object of science. So the overestimation of objectivity in questions of philosophy amounts to a bias of sorts (per Kierkegaard 'Concluding Non-scientific Postscript'.) At any rate, as far as today's popular wisdom is concerned, as the domain of the transcendent is generally discounted, objectivity is presumptively the only remaining criteria. I don't hold to relativism, I think objectivity is extremely important in many domains but that there are vital questions the answer to which may not necessarily be sought in solely objective terms. So anything to be considered real has to be 'out there somewhere', existing in time and space. (This shows up in debates of platonic realism.) The ways-of-thought that accomodate the transcendent realm have by and large been abandoned in secular philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, true enough, but let's not forget Samuel Johnson's 'argument from the stone' - when he kicked a stone to purportedly demonstrate the falsehood of Berkeley's arguments for immaterialism. Even though it has been pointed out ad nauseum that Berkeley doesn't deny the apparent reality of stones, but only their existence independently of the perception of them, the 'argument from the stone', or similar are frequently used against idealism. I know there are many here who can't see how idealism doesn't imply things going in and out of existence depending on whether they're perceived or not, which is why I made a point of mentioning it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm inclined to say that the mind is never an object, although that usually provokes a lot of criticism. I've long been persuaded by a specific idea from Indian philosophy, namely, that the 'eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself. The 'inextricably mental' aspect is simply 'the act of seeing'. Perhaps I might quote a translation of the passage in question. This is from a dialogue in the Upani?ads where a sage answers questions about the nature of ?tman (the Self).
Quoting Brihadaranyaka Upani?ad
I'm not advocating 'belief in ?tman' but as I say in the OP, it's a matter of perspective - the mind is never something we can get outside of or apart from. But I understand that this is difficult perspectival shift to make. It's something very like a gestalt shift. It might have been owed in part to my long-standing practise of zazen, Buddhist meditation, by which means insight arises into the world-making activities of the mind. This point is also central to the 'argument from the blind spot of science' that I often mention - no coincidence that Adam Frank, one of the authors, is a long time Zen practitioner.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But notice that as soon as you invoke them or gesture towards them, then already 'mind' is involved. All such conjectures are variations on the sound of the unseen falling tree.
Quoting Mikie
First, thank you for the positive feedback.
The subject-object relationship is a fact of life, even in simple life-forms. Individualism tends towards a kind of atomised individuality, we're all separated selves and everything is interpreted through the subject-object dichotomy. What I'm proposing is aimed at transcending that divided way of being by getting insight into it and the role of the mind in engendering it.
As for Kant, I always feel as though my understanding of him is incomplete - there's so much more to know about him. I first encountered Kant through a mid-20th century book The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, which has extensive comparisions between Buddhist philosophy (specifically Madhyamaka or 'middle-way) and Kant, Hegel, Hume, Bradley and others. According to Murti, the parallels between Kant and Buddhist philosophy are especially striking. It was one of those books which was formative for me, because it enabled me to understand Kant on a kind of experiential level at the same time I had a conversion experience to Buddhism.
Quoting wonderer1
No, that one passed me by. I did read part of his follow-up, People of the Lie, but I didn't like it nearly as much as the first.
Thanks for those passages, as you say, these questions have occupied many a philosopher. I do see some parallels there.
Simply that there is a prevalent view that physics is all there is, and that this is mistaken. When something is called "subjective" or "a social construct", it is usually dismissive to some extent, and sometimes completely. Organisms respond, rather than merely react to the environment. For example, yeast cells need water, sugar, oxygen and various salts to reproduce but in the absence of oxygen they adapt by turning the sugar into alcohol instead of CO2, and in the absence of water they go into a sort of hibernation.
There is a selective response to the environment even at the simplest level, that becomes more complex in plants that respond to seasons and climate. It is impossible to understand what is happening without recourse to the fact that the cell treats itself as a separate whole in its responses. It is already the subject of its actions. Note that nothing has been said yet about awareness or experience; theses are other levels of complexity that can only be built upon an organisms pre-existing and more fundamental subjectivity. We can say, fairly uncontroversially, that yeast needs sugar, where we cannot say that granite needs anything at all, and that which has needs of its own is a subject, and its needs are subjective. The philosopher's need to understand is built upon this, and so the notion of the objective world can only be a lifeless fragment.
Very well said. That's the sense in which otherness is fundamental to any kind of life-form. Because it essentially recognises in some basic way the distinction of self from other. 'Alterity is the basic condition of existence'.
I like to read this in terms of the famous ontological difference, in terms of being itself not being an entity ---though of course the concept of being itself is indeed an entity.
Central to Heidegger's philosophy is the difference between being as such and specific entities.[48][49] He calls this the "ontological difference", and accuses the Western tradition in philosophy of being forgetful of this distinction, which has led to misunderstanding "being as such" as a distinct entity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology
I mention & quote Wittgenstein again (emphasis mine), because his presentation is so concentrated.
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(tree-like_view)
Note the connection of language and solipsism. My belief is the structure of the world itself, but from my perspective. I am this world-from-a-perspective. My beliefs about the world are not 'inside' me. They are simply [ the 'conceptual aspect' of] the world itself --- as it is given to a 'me' that vanishes or melts into this perspectively given world, as its form.
I understand that the lived body looks to be a sine qua non of experience of the world, so it's tempting to make mind fundamental, but I think 'being' is the deepest term, and that the deepest term ought to be radically 'empty' or 'neutral' and before all division.
I cannot follow your use of "objective" here. You define it as "inherent in the object". But according to the article of the op, the human mind has no access to what is "inherent in the object". As per Kant, the mind only has access to how the object appears to it, through the medium of sensation and intuition. But then you go on to discuss the objectivity of science, as if "the objectivity of science" is a valid concept by that definition, which it is not. Science cannot provide for us "objectivity" by that definition, what is inherent within the object, due to the problem elucidated by Kant.
So you have demonstrated an inconsistent use of "objective" which needs to be sorted out. Either we adhere to your definition, and recognize that it is beyond the capacity of science to actually be "objective", and say that this is just an ideal which science strives for (an "objective" used as 'goal'), like a guiding light which will never actually be reached, or we must look to a different, a compromised definition of "objective".
The latter appear to be what most participants in this thread opt for. They would prefer to define "objective" as "consistent with convention". But this definition is extremely problematic. First, and principally, it removes the necessity of "the object" from "objectivity", by basing "objectivity" in a sort of inter-subjective agreement. This means that "objective" is defined by what is agreeable rather than by "inherent within the object". This effectively circumvents the necessity of correspondence with observations, "truth" in that sense, as an essential feature of objectivity, by replacing "within the object" with what is agreeable. That actually allows for other, chiefly pragmatic, principles to take priority over "truth" as the defining feature of "objective". And when pragmaticism takes hold of "objective", the definition is more closely aligned with "the goal" than with "inheres within the object".
A shallow objection to this involves handing the seer a mirror, but I think that something like being is intended, and that seeing is a metaphor for being. Presumably the dead don't see (have no world), so it's not absurd to reach for eyes and ears as a metaphor. Yet we obviously we see the eyes of others seeing, and our own in the mirror, so the intention must be metaphorical.
[quote=Wittgenstein]
It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
...
The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.
To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
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..which, of course, presupposes knowing what they are, by the subject, or self, effected by them.
Anyway, just a thought, probably best left aside out of respect for the OP.
I believe this is a very important point which needs much more respect than it is commonly given. When there is a multitude of possibilities present, what some call "potential", and something "selects" from that multitude of possibilities, or simple potential, then we need to account for the reality of this selection process. The type of words we currently employ to refer to such selections are consistent with the concept of free will, words like "choice", and "judgement".
So this is a good example of that boundary some refer to, as the area of that which we cannot speak of, or where words fail us. If we talk about simple organisms, like the single celled amoeba making judgements, we get ridiculed. This in clearly nonconventional, simple organism do not make "judgements", by conventional use of the term. But if this is not form of "judgement", then on what principles are we going to attempt to understand this "selective response"?
Sure, but they might be very different from the abstract idea of "very causally disconnected stuff in deep space," that I have. Since everything is ultimately connected, the separation is one of degree, but it's still useful to distinguish between the stars whose light we see and processes that are much more proximate to the emergence of mind, which seems to have a "nexus" of sorts in bodies.
I agree with this to a certain degree. We're blind to much of our cognitive processes, and far more blind than we tend to think. But I don't know if it makes sense to abstract "that which experiences," from experience in this way, and further to claim that this experiencing entity is a unity, rather than a collection of composite entities. It seems more to me like the unity of "that which experiences," is an illusion created by the same blindness that makes it impossible for mind to ever become fully object to itself.
That said, I think ?tman/Prakriti is a better division than Western "objective/subjective" in general.
Although it comes from a more eliminativist bent, I always found the philosopher/novelist R. Scott Bakker's "Blind Brain Theory," and "Heuristic Neglect Theory," pretty good on this sort of thing. https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/essay-archive/the-last-magic-show-a-blind-brain-theory-of-the-appearance-of-consciousness/
Plus, it seems necessary that this blindness must exist. If we had a meta eye that somehow recorded and represented to us everything that goes on in generating our experience of sight then we would still be blind to the activities of the 'meta eye,' and so not understand everything under-girding our experiences. We would need a 'meta meta eye,' for full cognizance of the meta eye, and then a meta meta meta eye, and so on. I think this inability for any one entity to fully fathom the ways in which it is cause while also being a source of effect is bound inextricably to basic elements of reality, the way being has a semiotic element, such that effects are signs of causes and only exist as such signs when they interact with a third system (Rovelli's Helgoland discusses this).
So my disagreement comes more from the idea of mind as being necessarily unified. Mind seems to be able to become, to some degree, object to itself only because the mind isn't an indivisible whole. It emerges from many overlapping levels of communication such that large, "conscious systems," (e.g. whole hemispheres of the brain) are to some degree "other" to each other. But this is a relation that seems to go all the way down to the most fundamental level. "That which experiences," seeming unified seems to be more an issue of how, if one looks into a mirror, one can see what is behind them, but not that which lies behind the mirror.
While it's true that we "can't get around the mind," it seems equally true that we both "can't get to (most of) the mind," and that we "can't get around the world," although we can abstract and retreat from it. It's in this that I worry about straight forward relations, such as "the mind creates the world." This is true, but the world appears to create mind as well," and the separation of the two seems to be, causally at least, more one of degree rather than kind.
Something I only discovered in the writing is that subjectivity is necessarily prior to awareness rather than the result thereof. It is of course a judgement by the organism in relation to itself as to whether a substance in the environment is beneficial or harmful to ingest. I don't know if others have looked at this, but it does seem to turn some thinking about awareness and consciousness rather on its head.
I take consciousness to be the awareness of awareness, and perhaps awareness is the judgement of judgement, and judgement is the first responsive action, and the first judgement is the distinguishing of the organism from the environment by the organism itself. (If anyone has been following my thread on the Laws of Form, they will probably notice its influence.)
Indeed. I think it might be a mistake to think perspective emerges at life in the first place. The idea of a totally distinct "semiotic cut," occurring at the creation of life seems problematic for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the definition of life is incredibly fuzzy. This was the weakest part of Deacon's "Incomplete Nature," for me. The dividing line between autocatalysis and the emergence of autogens seems very hazy. It's not the type of progression that seems to lend itself to the distinct emergence of some totally new thing.
Further, perspective matters in very basic interactions. Scott Mueller uses the example of simply enzymes in his "Asymmetry the Foundation of Information." The enzyme will do its thing, interacting with a chemical the same way, regardless of whether the reagent in question contains isotopes for some of its particular atoms. The process is blind to the difference between isotopes. Such differences are, for this interpretant, a "difference that doesn't make a difference."
Mueller further uses the example of a detective trying to figure out if two diamonds have been switched. The diamonds are identical in every way except for one having a higher share of isotopes. For the detective, using all the regular tools of the jewel trade, the two diamonds are completely indiscernible.
Thus, perspective matters even in the most basic interactions. Entropy is another good example. Some differences make a difference in some contexts but not others. Information as difference is obviously context dependent, as when words are written in white font on an identical white background and fail to convey information.
Carlo Rovelli plays with a similar ideas with his relational quantum mechanics, although I think his model runs into problems if we take objects as fundamental rather than process. If the universe is a collection of substances, then we have a hard time explaining why some properties of objects should "snap into place" during some interactions but not others. This is similar to the problems some people have with idealism. "If things only exist as connected to mind, how do we explain properties coming into and going out of being." I don't know if this is a problem for process. It'd be like asking for (4 * 2) * 6^2, "where does the four go once we've moved on to doing 8 * 36?"
How intentionality and mental life emerges is a great mystery. But how perspective emerges seems less so. It's seems like it might be more something that is so fundamental that it is easy to miss, the way a fish doesn't notice the water in the ocean. IMO, it's been a mistake for people to conflate the "aboutness," of first person experience with the "aboutness," of how a computer interprets code instructions, or how a human organization (which presumably doesn't have its own qualia) interprets signals (e.g. international relations, how does "Iran" view the transit of US warships off its shores, etc.)
The last example is probably the best here. We don't think corporations and states have their own mental life, but they do seem able to posses knowledge and priorities that differ from the sum of their members' knowledge and desires (e.g. when the US security apparatus "didn't know what it knew" re: 9/11, but later uncovered this through intentional reflection). And the existence of such knowledge/priorities entails perspective and a form of aboutness, even though the first person "aboutness" appears to be absent.
Absolutely. At one point, all of the universe was contained in one point, so it's unclear if there can be anything that fails to causally affect our experiences. That said, processes seem like they should be able to be more or less central to the emergence of mind, so the separation is one of degree.
Oh yeah, I like a great deal of what I heard from Mach. That said, I dislike the fact that he was among the progenitors of the big trend in philosophy to claim that "anyone who disagrees with me is saying things that are meaningless, and thus no response is possible." Claims of perfectly intelligible sentences being "meaningless" is a pet peeve of mine lol.
Yeah, it's a real problem. If I tried to trace its etiology, it seems to be tied to the drive to deflate truth and turn logic into a sterile study of "closed systems," that resulted from findings in the early 20th century. Faced with having to give up certainty, bivalence, or both, or having to make logic into an almost magical language cut of from the world that floats outside, "out there," we have tended to go with the latter. IMO, this is a mistake. And its funny that this choice was made despite the triumphs of naturalism and scientism, since it directly contravenes core pillars of the former.
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On this wider topic, I'll have to return to finish Pinkhard's "Hegel's Naturalism," at some point. I recall thinking it showed some pretty good solutions to this whole bundle of problems.
Well I agree with that, and already said so.
Quoting unenlightened
And when perspective is extended as metaphor to include psychological dispositions and expertise and limitations of the senses, and social limits, these can each be located case by case.
But you seem to conflate subjectivity with mental life as perspective. What I am saying is that subjectivity is prior to mental life of even the most primitive sort. I am I suppose heading towards that problematic definition of life as being its own subject - that which is self-defining. The yeast cell responds differentially to the environment in a way that constitutes and gives significance to its own boundary for its own continuation. Sugar in; carbon dioxide out.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is an interesting one. Institutions are made of living beings, but might have archival memories. But it is a repetition at the human level of colonial organisms like siphonophorae and complex insect colonies such as ants and bees. In such cases there are aspects behaviour that are individual, and aspects that are functions of the larger 'social organism'.
Are the contents of experience just what we experience? How can we describe an experience to someone who hasn't had it? Generally, when we try, when we try to explain sight for instance, we just end up explaining the things we see, colors etc., not the experience of seeing itself.
So is experience just a transparent window into the world? But if everything else interacts with the world the way it does because of its properties, then it seems a little strange that experience would lack any properties and be so transparent. Yet if experience does have properties, then it seems we should be able to divide it up, at least through abstraction, and talk about how the parts relate to the world.
And this gets to the issue of "indirect realism," as well. I personally am no big fan of indirect realism because it seems to suppose some sort of humonculous that "sees" the representations. But if its representation all the way down, then indirect realism turns out to be just the same sort of interaction as realism.
Transparency in phenomenology, while at first glance closer to direct realism, seems to me to have some similarities with indirect realism in that it supposed a unified whole, perhaps without properties, to which experience is "presented." And this sort of thinking seems to make it easy to fall into circles asking about what things are maps and what things are territories.
:up:
I like the concepts of sapience and sentience. I'd say there's a un-self-thematizing consciousness in sentience, and that something fancier appears with sapience. Judgement is linguistic, and, within a community, one is held accountable for one's judgements. Definitely getting into Brandom / Sellars territory here.
I think so lately, and for me it feels like a great clarification. Lots of ways to say it, but one way is : consciousness is precisely the being of the world from or for a perspective. This chucks indirect realism out the window. My toothaches and daydreams are in your world, but language always intends our world. My 'private' thoughts are just locked away in a dark closet which is nevertheless very much within the inferential space of the community.
Nice essay and presentation.
I think though that it is somewhat burdened with concepts, -isms and philosophical views. E.g. if one accepts idealism and physicalism (or materialism) as the two main philosophical and opposing views of the world, even if one states that they are not necessary in conflict, one is restricted in either of these systems or frameworks of thought and cannot have an independent view, which may touch one or the other system but is not confined in or even dependent on either.
Let's take your question How Does Mind Create Reality?
You take it as granted that reality is created by the mind. Is this maintained by idealism, e.g. Plato's idealism or is it your own view? In the first case you are confined in that view system or framework. In the second case your thought is free from such a restriction.
Now, what about the widely accepted philosophical view that reality is created by consciousness? (BTW, I'm surprised that consciousness is totally absent in your description of the topic.) It seems that you ignore it or at least not accept it yourself. Yet, it is a view that can only belong to idealism, since in physicalism it is believed that the nature of consciousness is physical and more specifically it is created by the brain.
So, based also on what follows, it is clear that you are presenting your own view about the creation of reality, although you seem to favor idealism.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is clearly a physicalist/materialist view. It belongs to Science and its materialist view of the world.
But in idealism it is maintained that reality is created by the mind or consciousness.
So, there's already a conflict between your pro idealism and what you are describing.
There wouldn't be any if you were not talking about idealism and physicalism. It could stand perfectly alone, as an independent, personal view, independent of the two philosophical systems.
I have too my personal view on how reality is created, which is independent of any philosophical system. If it were, it wouldn't be my own reality! :smile:
I hope I made my point clear.
There are other things in your description that I would like to comment on, but this is already a lot. :smile:
Quoting Wayfarer
Okay, thanks for that explanation! I missed a few days and this thread seems to have gotten away from me, so maybe what I am saying has already been covered. In any case...
So for Nagel the 17th century brought the idea,
Yet your 'perspectivalism' seems to be a quasi-rejection of mind-independent objects, and that strikes me as an overcorrection, like falling off the other side of the horse instead of regaining balance. It's a bit like moving from the extreme of nominalism to the extreme of Platonic idealism. Of course rejecting mind-independent objects will avoid Nagel's conclusion, but it will do more than that!
It seems to me that the 17th century spatio-temporal error is a variety of scientism, and in particular a reduction of external reality to that which is measurable (and able to be manipulated). Notably, though, it is not an error to accept the existence of mind-independent objects. That was being done long before the 17th century. So I'm wondering if we need a smaller scalpel to excise a smaller portion of the 17th century's presuppositions.
Its a conceptualization. I dont think of myself as a subject or the world as an object when a Im cooking dinner. I dont see how any microorganisms are seeing the world that way either.
But I think Im digressing from your main point, so Ill leave it at that.
I don't say 'the mind has no access to what is inherent in the object'. Plainly if my shower is too hot, I won't get in it, if my meal is cold, I won't eat it. They are objective judgements. As I say at the outset, I'm not disputing scientific judgements, but calling into question what they're taken to imply. It is especially pernicious when humans and other sentient beings are treated as objects, as if the objective analyses provided by evolutionary biology and the other sciences have the final say on human nature. Beings are subjects of experience, and as such their true nature is beyond the purview of the objective sciences.
Quoting plaque flag
Quite! Some aspects of Heidegger have seeped through to me, although I've never bitten the bullet of doing the readings. I have been accused in the past of engaging in onto-theology. One thing I did read about Heidegger is the anecdote of a colleague of his finding him reading D T Suzuki, and admitting, If I understand this man correctly, it is just what Ive been trying to say or something along those lines. Not that he would ever endorse the adoption of Buddhism as a matter of practice.
Quoting Leontiskos
Oh, I dont know. If you read on to the section about Pinters book Mind and the Cosmic Order, he says there are quite valid scientific grounds for his proposals, which I hope my arguments conform with.
Im not saying that everything is a matter of perspective, but that no judgement about what exists can be made outside a perspective. If you try and imagine what exists outside perspective, then youre already positing an intentional object.
Quoting Mikie
Theres no need to, but I think the distinction between self and other is nevertheless basic to consciousness, isnt it?
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Thanks for your feedback!
Thats because for my purposes Im treating mind and consciousness as synonyms. Theyre not always synonyms, for instance in some medical or psychological contexts, but for my purposes. And yes, I have framed the question in terms of idealism and materialism, as I see that as the underlying dynamic that is playing out in the debates. There are many varieties of each of course.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Not at all! I think many elements within science itself are actually starting to diverge from a materialist view of the world. I actually address that objection in the extended version of the essay. Both neuroscience and physics have tended to call into question the modern understanding of realism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We need to understand the mind-making process on a practical level - actually grasp how the mind is doing that. Otherwise, you do really have the hand trying to grasp itself!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The content of consciousness is consciousness ~ J Krishnamurti.
Right, but it seems that you would then go on to draw a further conclusion, "...and therefore there are no mind-independent objects," and that is where things get tricky.
For example, I agree with Locke that shape is a "primary quality," and disagree with Pinter. Yet Locke and Pinter are in agreement that color is a "secondary quality." The first point is that there really is a distinction to be had between primary and secondary qualities.
The second point, regarding shape, is that if a boulder rolls over a small crack it will continue rolling, but if it rolls into a "large crack" (a canyon) then it will fall, decreasing in altitude. This will occur whether or not a mind witnesses it, and this is because shape is a "primary quality." A boulder and a crack need not be perceived by a mind to possess shape.
At the tail-end of this is the idea that intentional objects can represent real properties, and this is called Realism. It's also the thing that scientists take for granted. So if one extreme says that only the spatio-temporal exists, and another extreme says that there are no mind-independent objects (or that the mind is not capable of knowing mind-independent realities), then I want to navigate the middle path and avoid both extremes.
I feel as though your response is made on the basis of a step after the suppositions that inform mine. Youre saying that given that objects exist - boulders, canyons, and so on - then we can say .
Whereas the thrust of the argument Im offering is solely to call attention to the role that the mind plays in any and all judgements about supposedly external objects. Im not saying that, outside our perception, things dont exist but that any judgement of existence or non-existence is just that - a judgement.
As for realism, the point about modern realism is that assumes the reality of mind-independent empirical objects.Thats where the problem lies, as empirical objects are by their nature necessarily contingent. Scholastic realism on the other hand presumes the mind-independent reality of the Forms - these are independent of particular minds, but can only be grasped by a mind. That is where Im coming to in my analysis.
Whatever is out there, strictly speaking, cannot be called "objects" - there no good neutral word for it that comes to mind, unfortunately.
So, let's take the neutral "thing" or "stuff", whatever it out-there is, in part, responsible for how we take these objects to be, they stimulate us into reacting as-if, external objects existed.
But in principle, they are not necessary. But in practice they are.
I think you are committed to the idea, or something like it. For example, "By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it." I am not using the word 'object' in any specialized sense. You could replace it with 'thing' if you like.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am claiming, "This will occur whether or not a mind witnesses it, [and therefore shape is mind-independent]."
Quoting Wayfarer
But is my claim about the boulder meaningless and unintelligible outside of any perspective? Does not the idea that a boulder has a shape transcend perspective?
And how does the existence of the universe prior to the evolution of life rely on an implicit perspective? If the universe's existence at that time relied on a perspective, then whose perspective was it relying upon? I would say that the proposition, "The universe exists," relies on a mind, but the existence of the universe does not rely on a mind.* Thus the universe truly exists in a mind-independent way, even though the true proposition, "The universe exists," would not exist without minds. The common meaning of 'existence' does not connote minds or perception.
This is why that additional conclusion, "...and therefore there are no mind-independent objects," is tricky. It is equivocal, having various different meanings.
Opposing various forms of idealism, I would claim that reality exists and minds are able to know it. This is not to say that all knowledge is objective, but lots of it is.
* Presupposing naturalism for the moment.
Its the natural thing to do!
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes and no respectively. Is shape meaningful outside any reference to visual perception? We see shapes because it is essential to navigating the environment - Pinter shows this is true even for insects.
So again, here's the argument in question:
Quoting Leontiskos
So you are saying that boulders will only treat cracks differently than canyons when a mind is involved?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, because boulders fall into canyons and do not fall into cracks on account of their shape. Thus shape is meaningful, irrespective of visual perception.
Its safe to assume not, but then it is an empirical matter isnt it? But then I am at pains to say that I have no need to call empirical facts into question.
Well, it's not a directly empirical matter, because it could never be directly empirically studied. But if we can have knowledge about the mind-independent world, then we can have knowledge about this. As you say, "It's safe to assume not."
It's often helpful to place the two things side by side and assess our certainty:
I'd say we have a great deal more certainty of (1) than (2), and you seem to agree.
Quoting Wayfarer
We are conceiving of a crack as something much smaller than a boulder and a canyon as something much larger than a boulder. I don't think the definitions are problematic.
As I said in the OP there is no need for me to deny that the Universe (or: any object) is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect
which is introduced as soon as you make any hypothetical object the subject of a proposition.
Sure, 100%. Im not claiming that the world is only in your mind. If you look at the cognitive scientists who appear in the BigThink video I posted Is Reality Real? all of them start by saying, of course there is a world out there. Its just that we dont see it as it truly is (but, the Kantian philosopher would say, only as it appears to us.)
Being able to discern delusions and false hopes is not a tall order, is it? Its obvious that a lot of people dont do that, or arent capable of it. But I associate the saying know thyself with Socrates (although of course the Delphic maxim preceded him), and his quest for understanding piety, justice, goodness, and so on, seems to me to clearly require a deep kind of self-awareness, doesnt it? (A digression perhaps but a worthy one.)
Hi, Leontiskos ! Though I'd jump in here.
The boulder's shape is independent, in some sense, from this or that individual human perspective. So it transcends the limitations of my eyesight or yours. But it seems to me that what we could even mean by 'shape' depends on an experience that has always been embodied and perspectival.
Has anyone ever experienced a spatial object a-perspectively ?
I was going to also add, that measurements of space and distance are also implicitly perspectival. You could, theoretically, conceive of the distance between two points from a cosmic perspective, against which it is infinitesimally small, and a subatomic perspective, against which it is infinitesimally large. As it happens, all of the units of measurement we utilise, such as years or hours, for time, and meters or parsecs, for space, ultimately derive from the human scale - a year being, for instance, the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun, and so on. Given those parameters, of course it is true that measures hold good independently of any mind, but there was a mind involved in making the measurement at the outset.
I think J. S. Mill has a nice take. Objects are only independent in the sense that they are 'permanent possibilities of sensation.' So the world is not a video game where the couch disappears when we leave the room. Instead we understand couches in the first place in terms of how humans tend to experience them. I can wander into the living room and plop down with a book. And the couch doesn't vanish when I die (I inherited it, after all.)
Speaking as someone who embraces perspectivism and correlationism, I'd would not call the world 'mind-created' or basically mental. But I would insist that the lifeworld is a kind of unbreakable unity, and that embodied perspectival creatures like us don't have a strong grip on the idea of independent objects -- except for one that boils down to 'permanent possibilities of sensation.'
'To be is to be < potentially > perceivable. ' And this, in my view, is more of a semantic claim.
I like to think of maps as little pieces of reality that have some of the same structure as bigger pieces of reality.
I think we can (and do, without always noticing it) put all entities in the same inferential nexus. So it's all real, but various things exist differently (prime numbers don't exist like petunias.)
[quote = B ]
It is indeed an opinion STRANGELY prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But...what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we PERCEIVE BESIDES OUR OWN IDEAS OR SENSATIONS? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?
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https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4723/pg4723-images.html
Berkeley should not, in my view, have said that we perceive our own own ideas and sensations. What he [ should have ] meant is that we understand such things as they tend to be perceived. And any 'idealist' must address the permanence of mountains, for instance, which outlast generations.
[quote = B ]
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their BEING (ESSE) is to be perceived or known...
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He goes on to drag in God, and he problematically takes spirits in the same naive way his opponents take independent objects. @Leontiskos mentions overcorrection. I think Berkeley overcorrects. The 'pure' subjectivity of the spirit is the 'same' error as the 'pure' aperspectival object on the other side.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4723/pg4723-images.html
What is given is a daily embodied experience of the usual objects in the familiar lifeworld. Someone like Berkeley could have merely challenged the semantic emptiness of talk of the pure object.
[quote=link]
The philosophy of perception that elaborates the idea that, in the words of J. S. Mill, objects are the permanent possibilities of sensation. To inhabit a world of independent, external objects is, on this view, to be the subject of actual and possible orderly experiences. Espoused by Russell, the view issued in a programme of translating talk about physical objects and their locations into talk about possible experiences (see logical construction). The attempt is widely supposed to have failed, and the priority the approach gives to experience has been much criticized.
[/quote]
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100322668
As William James and Ernst Mach saw, such pure 'experience' is no longer experience consciousness or awareness at all but just the neutral being of a world given perspectively. This neutral stuff is of course organized into 'appearance' and 'reality' with respect to practical goals.
We find a version of this in Kant.
[quote=Kant]
That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. For that which stands in connection with a perception according to the laws of the progress of experience is real. They are therefore really existent, if they stand in empirical connection with my actual or real consciousness, although they are not in themselves real, that is, apart from the progress of experience.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap77
I know, some philosophers do that. But it is certainly wrong. These two things are ralated but they are of a different kind and nature, so it's a bad habit to equate them, even for just descrption purposes.
(I know that I'm quite strict with vocabulary but this is because I believe that esp. in philosophy we should use terms and concepts with caution, otherwise misunderstanding or lack of undestanding or even confusion can occur. But even if one needs to equate two terms, one should note that, as you did in your reply here.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I see that you refer to neuroscience. Indeed, from what I know, there are a few neurobiologists who admit e.g. that consciousness is not a product of the brain and accept the hard problem of conscioussnes. Thankgod. But the vast majority of scientists stick on the brain. This is their world. They can't work outside the material world.
So, my comment was based on seeing that you are using too the brain to describe the mind and reality.
Mind and brain are related but they are of a different kind and nature. Like consciousness and mind.
Their hierarchy and relation (connection) is:Consciousness <-> mind <-> brain. (I can describe how this works but not here.)
I can't see how you understand this as consistent with your definition of "objective" as "inherent in the object". Clearly any judgement similar to the ones mentioned, "hot" and "cold", are proper to the subject, and so these judgements are not "inherent in the object".
It seems like you are not distinguishing between the judgement itself, and what the judgement is about. Yes, the judgement is about an object, and it may be a judgement about what inheres within the object, but the judgement is not inherent in the object, and therefore cannot be "objective" by the definition you provided.
I believe that this is a very significant and important point to respect because it is the justification for, as the reason for, the idealist/phenomenologist assertion that even an "object" is a creation of the perceptual system of the living being. We sense the existence of "objects" surrounding us, as constitutive of our environment, but even this act of perception, by which things are perceived as objects, is a sort of judgement made by the sensing being, the subject. Therefore even the judgement of "object" which is an inherent part of the perceptual system, the very act of perceiving, which presents "objects" to the mind of the conscious subject, and which inclines us to take the existence of "objects" for granted, is itself a subjective judgement.
This is what Manuel points to:
Quoting Manuel
When we understand as fact, that apprehending the environment as consisting of distinct entities, unities, which we call "objects", is common to all human beings, and also most likely the case for many different types of animals, we need to respect that there must be a reason for this. So we might accept as reality, that there is something about the mind independent "stuff", which makes it appear to us, and influences us to accept as a fundamental ontological principle, that there is "objects" out there.
Humans are naturally endowed with a relational intellect, for which the capacity, as function, for discernment is integrated necessarily, but in doing so, in enacting, as operation, the functional capacity, re: being able to discern, there must already be that which serves as ideal against which the content under discernment is complementary. Herein, then, against being able to discern delusion there stands extant truth; against being able to discern false hope there stands practical reason**.
(**sidebar: practical reason justified under the assumption false hope is an illegitimate cognition, insofar as the attainment of its object is considered given but under false pretenses, which practical reason would expose. The common euphemistic proof being .you cant get blood out of a turnip)
So it is that these ideals against which discernment directs itself, are purely subjective conditions, dependent only on the aesthetic judgement of he who holds them. Reduce it yet another step, and it happens that even if the subject in the act of discerning isnt immediately aware of the ideal against which he is relating the particular occasion, there must be one, for otherwise he wouldnt be in the relational situation in the first place, he being satisfied with whatever happens to have been the status quo. And here is the appropriateness of the Socratic, know thyself, and the systemic Enlightenment sapere aude, wherein being able to discern, and, having the capacity for discernment, while two very different functional parameters, insofar as the former presupposes the latter but is not necessarily a manifestation of it, in which it occurs that the subject actually does comprehend a delusion for what it is, and does recognize a hope as having an unattainable object.
So ..before the digression becomes uninteresting, or perhaps any more uninteresting, yes, being able to discern can be a tall order, iff the subject has no immediate awareness .no immediate knowledge a priori ..of the ideals against which his reason directs its functional capacity. On the other hand, Everdayman, who only under the most extreme occasions asks himself to consider any of this, has to think ever-more to determine the ideals against which he is relating his internal controversy, and is apt to just leave it at .as is wont to say ..damned if I know, but it sure dont feel right.
Being able to discern shouldnt be a tall order, because we come naturally equipped to deal with it. Speculative metaphysics describes why it nevertheless sometimes is, and, what to do about it using that equipment. But descriptions themselves dont fix stuff, so now we have clinical psychology. (Sigh)
Yes, ontological principle which makes us postulate "external objects".
It becomes very murky very quickly.
But you seem to be holding to two conflicting principles. Either the mind can know mind-independent reality as it is in itself, or it cannot. If it cannot, then there is always a reason to deny the existence of external objects a la post-Kantian philosophy (thus modern philosophy is intrinsically bound up with solipsism). If it can, then reality does not have an inextricably mental aspect a la western science.
It seems to me that the scientists got tired of the post-Kantians and their solipsism (or quasi-solipsism). The philosophers were preoccupied with trying to figure out whether the external world exists, and the scientists decided to ignore them and build cars so that we could travel from city to city. I'm sympathetic to the scientists, and I'm not very impressed with post-Kantian philosophy. I'm not convinced that any philosophy that takes Hume or Kant's starting point has ever worked, or ever will work, even if that starting error is mitigated as far as possible.
Suppose there were an argument about a piece of glass. One person says that anything perceived through the glass has "an inextricably glassy aspect." Another person disagrees, holding that this piece of glass is perfectly translucent. As far as I can tell, that's analogous to the argument over the intellect between Realists and Anti-Realists. If the former person is right, then nothing viewed through the glass can be seen as it is in itself. If the latter person is right, then things viewed through glass need not have a glassy aspect.
(Note that the analogy limps: glass is material, and therefore inherently imperfect. Hence the classical realist's claim that the intellect is immaterial.)
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the same problem from a different angle. Units of measurement are arbitrary, but this does not prevent comparison of finite objects.
But this need not be inherently human-biased. The point about shape, with boulders and cracks, has to do with the relative size of mind-independent objects, and these relative sizes will hold good whether or not they are measured. It must be so if boulders treat cracks differently than canyons whether or not a mind is involved.
Hello, @plaque flag,
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, we learn about shape through experience. My earlier comment may be worth quoting, "Opposing various forms of idealism, I would claim that reality exists and minds are able to know it. This is not to say that all knowledge is objective, but lots of it is" ().
Quoting plaque flag
Okay. Can you give a quick overview of what you mean by perspectivism and correlationism? I have seen these words used in different ways. Generally speaking, I am inclined to lump you, Wayfarer, and Mill together. :razz: It seems like you are all saying that reality cannot be known as it is in itself. Or in Wayfarer's words, "Reality has an inextricably mental aspect."
- Yes, I think Berkeley misses the mark, although I am speaking from the perspective of secondary texts. Really, I think modern philosophy tends to be <shades of grey> with respect to this topic, with the possible exception of Husserl and certain figures in his school.
Here is a concise text from Aquinas that @Wayfarer may also want to read. It situates my view and gives an initial outline of the problem:
Quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 75, Article 2
(The point is not that the power of the intellect is entirely unrelated to the body, but rather that it has an operation which is apart from the body.)
Note that modern philosophers would presumably just disagree with Aquinas that "by means of the intellect man can have knowledge of all corporeal things," but if his point is granted then I believe his conclusion follows, and scientists are liable to grant his point (especially to the degree that they are ignorant of modern philosophy).
Another, related more to Hume but highlighting a relevant danger:
Quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 85, Article 2
A good introductory resource for classical realism is the first issue of Reality, especially the introduction and initial essays (link).
This quote nails it for me.
Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object in itself, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object.
To me it's important to lean toward neutrality rather than subjectivity. Consciousness is the [only] being of the world itself. The world is world-for, and the subject is world-from-a-point-of-view. Wittgenstein whittles it down nicely in the TLP. See <5.6>.
I am my world. (The microcosm.) The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
I would myself tweak that last line. The subject is the [from-a-perspective] being of the world. Ontological cubism.
In my view, this is not so much a positive theory as a challenging of the intelligibility of a certain kind of talk. Permanent possibilities of perception turn out, in my view, to be pretty much all most people can mean by some independent world. Or what else do/can they have in mind ? A round square ? A mystified X ? Kant writes about the possibility of beings on the moon, and he correctly interprets claims of their existence in terms of the possibility at least of experiencing them. In the same way, the mountains that might outlast our species are, seems to me, understood as the mountains-for-our-species, as what they are , in theory, 'not.'
I agree with Aquinas. I count myself a direct (perspectival, phenomenological) realist. We see things themselves, not our images of them. But, following Husserl, we can see them with more or less clarity. And we see them from a perspective. Language generally intends the social-common object. This alone is a strong argument for direct realism. The stuff we argue about it is in our world. Don't know if this'll interest you, but I argue for a kind of minimal foundationalism here. We share a world and a language and various norms for discussion and inquiry to even adopt the role of philosopher in the first place.
I also consider thought to be plenty real. I'd even say that possibility exists in a fairly strong sense. A certain kind of scientistic materialism basically filters out about 90% of that which is and calls a remainder Real. This is practically and sometimes maybe even ethically justified. (A pluralistic, free-ish culture has reason to put various entities safely 'all in one's mind' and leisure and personal space.)
The point to this analogy, better known as the tinted glass analogy, is that to settle this question it must be determined whether or not the glass adds a "glassy aspect" to the perception. If the glass is supposed to represent the human body, through which our perceptions of the world are made, then it is impossible to remove the glass to make a glass-free comparison. Therefore the only way to proceed is to produce a thorough understanding of the glass itself, to be able to determine whether or not it adds a "glassy aspect".
Because of this, the only way that we can achieve with certainty any understanding of the external world, is to first produce a thorough understanding of the perceiving body. That is to say that we cannot know with certainty, the nature of the supposed independent world without first knowing with certainty the nature of the perceiving body.
Quoting Leontiskos
I come to a slightly different conclusion. It has become evident to me that the human intellect cannot have knowledge of all corporeal things. That is where the problems of quantum physics have led us, there are corporeal things which we as human beings, will never be able to understand. The reason why the human intellect cannot have knowledge of all corporeal things is that as Aristotle indicates, the human intellect is dependent on a corporeal thing, the human body, and this in conjunction with the premise given by Aquinas, that to know all corporeal things requires that the intellect be free from corporeal influence, produces the conclusion that the human intellect cannot know all corporeal things.
The point now, is that the human intellect, as an intellect, is deficient in the sense that it can never know all corporeal things. It is deficient because it is dependent on a corporeal body. Aquinas also argues this point when he discusses man's ability to obtain the knowledge of God. The same problem arises in that a man's intellect cannot properly know God while the man's soul is united to a body.
One ought to consider the reason why one might be dismayed about the implications that humans might in fact be objects only, nothing besides, and that he cannot muster any other reason beyond superstition to value human beings qua human beings. Without some angel in the shell we are nothing but meaty robots, or an animal not much different than all othersjust an object, like a stone.
There are a lot of difference between objects, and as likenesses go, "like a stone" leaves a bit out.
I think I understand what you're seeing as a conflict. You think that what I'm saying must necessarily entail that 'the unobserved object doesn't exist'. But what I wrote was 'to think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms that it either exists or does not exist is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether theyre perceived is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things go out of existence when not perceived, is really their imagined non-existence - your imagining that they don't exist. In reality, the supposed unperceived object neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.'
In the Medium version there is a supporting footnote:
By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, non-existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. ~ The Buddha, Kacc?yanagotta Sutta.
Quoting Leontiskos
Hume and Kant are chalk and cheese.
I think that physics has validated Kant's attitude in many respects. Many of Bohr's aphorisms seem to support it: 'It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.' Likewise from Heisenberg 'What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.' Then you have Wheelers model of the participatory universe, suggesting that the universe is incomplete without the participation of observersessentially, that our observations help to bring the universe into existence (see the quotation from cosmologist Andrei Linde in this thread.)
Quoting Leontiskos
As I've said, I don't take issue with the objective facts (and besides, where to draw the line? What is 'lots'?). The question is one of interpretation.
Quoting Leontiskos
All due respect, it is not analogous, but is a misreading. I do understand that Kant's 'ding an sich' has been ferociously criticized (including by Schopenhauer) but I've previously referred to my prefered reading:
[quote=Emrys Westacott, The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant;https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/the-continuing-relevance-of-immanuel-kant.html]Kant's introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.[/quote]
Quoting Leontiskos
And as I say, all such statements still carry an implicit perspective. As soon as you posit such a hypothetical you have created as what phenomenology calls 'the intentional object'*. This exists as a possibility within your mind. Then empirical investigation may confirm or disconfirm that posit.
I'm very interested in pursuing the discussion about Aquinas, but it's a separate topic, and one that I'm preparing further material on. A preview on Medium, The Ligatures of Reason (defending Platonic realism).
------
* The intentional object is not necessarily a real or actual object in the external world. Instead, it refers to the content or the "what" of a conscious act.
Which in the Christian world, would amount to the faculty of conscience, grounded in faith in the Divine Word, which provides the criteria against which to make such judgements. But, of course, Kant was preparing the ground for a post-Christian world and trying to sieve universal principles of morality out of the wreckage of the collapsed Medieval Synthesis. Anyway, as we both agree, a diversion to this particular topic, perhaps more suited to a thread on Ethics. Thank you as always for your insightful contributions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is objective to all intents and purposes (i.e. empirically) but also ultimately requires that there is a subject who judges (transcendentally ideal).
:up: :up:
Yes, we are self-reflexive (i.e. strange looping phenomenal-self-modeling) objects in which this self-reflexivity is completely transparent making each of us the "subject" of a narrative delusion (i.e. ideality, or supernatura) that s/he is not an object, or is ontologically separate from objects (i.e. reality, or natura).
addendum to
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/842295
Thereby absolving us of all responsibility as moral agents.
Apparently.
Why do you say that? The idea of moral responsibility is inevitable for self-reflective social animals. To the degree that someone cannot be responsible to others, then to that degree he or she is not really fit for society.
In whose eyes?
Would it be possible to imagine something that you have never seen or experienced in your life before, or places that you have never visited in real life? If it is possible, how does the imagination suppose to work for such cases?
Imagination is an infinitely resourceful faculty. On the other hand, people do sometimes say they have encountered something, or something has happened to them, which was 'unimagineable' - 'I never imagined that would happen!'
Not "unimaginable", but unimagined; if they can say what happened to them, then it could not have been unimaginable.
Consider impenetrability, the proper essence of physicalism, it can neither be reduced to 1. the matter of experience (sensation) or 2. the concept of impenetrability in our minds, instead impenetrability is synthetic of both 1, and 2, that is, you need some entity which thinks abstractions for there to be a substance which unifies the plurality of sensations.
Touch a stone and you will know right there and then that the feeling that something is impenetrable in/of it can not be reduced to the plurality of the matter of the experience (sensation: touch), yet since all you have (in the totality of your being) is either a. experience or b. abstraction it can not precede the experience, EVEN if the concept itself of impenetrability is a priori.
If certain a priori concepts were allowed in addition to those abstracted from experience it would still need to be justified why impenetrability were one of these concepts and why it (in that constitution, as an a priori concept) applies synthetically to the world of sensation, since the neutral position is always that a given concept is acquired from repeated experience (whether direct or disjunctive) of the thing it depicts or describes. Though as I said in the latter half of the former paragraph, even if the concept applies synthetically to the experience and preceded the consciousness of the experience (a priori) it would still be no evidence for why the experience itself should apply to the stone in its independence.
Idealism is just a rejection of the independence of impenetrability, space, time and emergent phenomena, yet often proposed by people who thinks they have asserted anything what so ever of their own, by imagining that the "mind" could be a substance when the very essence which depicts it hinges on being dual to something different from itself, something different from mind.
:chin:
I suppose you're familiar with the 'argument from the stone', which is based on Samuel Johnson's response to one of Bishop Berkeley's lectures?
It is not "objective" when the intent and purpose is to maintain consistency with the definition you provided, "inheres within the object". What you are saying is that the judgement, "it is cold", or "it is hot", is objective, so that the objectivity is a property of the judgement, not a property of the object. Therefore this use of "objectivity" is not consistent with your definition. The objectivity is something which inheres within the judgement, not within the object.
No, I most certainly do not think that, nor does the view that "the mind cannot know mind-independent reality as it is in itself" necessarily entail that anything does not exist.
I said, "If it cannot, then there is always a reason to deny the existence of external objects a la post-Kantian philosophy (thus modern philosophy is intrinsically bound up with solipsism)." What I meant was that it is possible to deny the existence of extramental objects, but not that it is necessary. I do not think it's a coincidence that solipsism is such a common problem in modern philosophy.
Quoting Wayfarer
Batman and Robin. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think so, but some more than others. We would have to examine these in detail to give them a fair hearing.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well say why in your own words. I give simple examples so that they can be easily interacted with. In my opinion folks too often advert to abstruse quotes from philosophers rather than speaking plainly in their own words.
But regarding your quote from Westacott, it seems premised on your initial idea that I think Kant must dispense with the noumenal altogether, which I do not. I think the glass example should have illustrated that, for surely there is no reason why the person who says that everything viewed through the glass has a glassy aspect is necessarily committed to the position which says that the viewed objects do not exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
Haven't we already agreed <that it is likely false> that "boulders will only treat cracks differently than canyons when a mind is involved"? And if so, then is the claim that although boulders will act in the way described even if no minds exist, nevertheless the statement that this is so carries an "implicit perspective"? Because there is some categorical commitment to perspectives?
A statement is the affirmation of a proposition, and propositions require minds, but reality does not require propositions. Whether or not there are propositions and minds, boulders will treat cracks differently than canyons. At some point the perspectivalism becomes either strained or tautological. You could think of my argument about boulders as an argument against perspectivalism.
I want to say that the perspectivalism can only avoid tautology if "perspective" is defined as something beyond "proposition-esque." If all propositions are by definition perspectival then I should think we are lost in tautological thinking. We will at least need a middle term or an argument to connect them.
Quoting Wayfarer
And everything hangs on the nature of that intentional object, which is like the <glass>. For example, you seem to want to claim that every intentional object "carries an implicit perspective." What sort of argument would be required for such a categorical claim?
Presumably the next step is to define 'perspective' and give an argument for why every intentional object must be perspectival.
Quoting Wayfarer
Alright, sounds good. I don't know how much longer can sustain this pace, but even if I have to abandon ship I think we've made some headway. :halo:
How would you differentiate a case where there is a mind involved, from a case where there is not?
I think the easiest way is to follow your lead and talk about a pre-human age. Or a post-human age. Or if one thinks non-human animals possess knowledge, then a pre-animal age, etc.
But I don't see that as a valid analogy for what Kant's idealism says. Kant's view is that we never know [the object] as it is in itself (ding an sich). Instead, we only know [the object] as it appears to us (the phenomena, meaning appearance), and this appearance is inextricably a product of the inherent structures of the mind (the primary intuitions of space and time and the categories of understanding). That is always the case for empirical (or sensory) knowledge. So the mind is not just a passive recipient of sensory data; it actively shapes and structures our experience. It is, I would aver, an agent.
The analogy's issue is that Kant doesn't merely claim the "glass" (our cognitive faculties) is translucent. Instead, Kant argues that our cognitive faculties play an active role in constituting our experience, not merely transmitting it. It's as if the glass doesn't just let us see the world but actively shapes, organizes, and structures what we see based on its inherent properties. So it's better compared to spectacles, which focus light so we can recognise what we're looking at. If your natural vision was poor, then without them you can't see anything but blurs.
That can be extended to argue that Kant's critical project was actually to learn to look AT your spectacles, not just THROUGH them - to turn our attention away from objects of knowledge and direct it towards the conditions that make knowledge possible ('knowing about knowing'). Instead of merely accepting our experiences at apparent value, Kant investigates the faculties and structures that underlie experience.
Quoting Leontiskos
I did explicitly discuss that under the second heading.
I sense we're talking past each other here, so I'm happy to leave it at that, unless you have more issues you'd like to discuss.
Your argument is well-made, but I actually disagree. I actually have a thread drafted on why epistemology is always posterior to metaphysics, but I don't know if it will ever see the light of day.
The extremely truncated argument is that it comes down to which of the two is more known: 1) That we know things (as they are), or 2) That there is a glassy perspective. Whichever is less-known must be funneled through that which is more-known, and the modern assumption is that (2) is more-known and that we must therefore begin with epistemology. I don't think that will work. Will I ever get around to addressing this more fully in its own thread? I don't know. :sweat:
(Another argument is that if our understanding is 'flawed', then our understanding of our understanding will also be 'flawed'. We can't fix (or necessarily perceive) the flaw in our understanding by reflexively applying our understanding to our understanding. Any uncertainty deriving from the faculty of the intellect will color both internal and external objects.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well for Aristotle and Aquinas the intellect is immaterial for precisely the reason you are outlining. But on the other hand, matter qua matter (or qua singular) is not intelligible on Aristotelianism, but only matter qua property (or qua universal). So Aristotle would not be surprised that something like the quantum realm begins to approach unintelligibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't begrudge you your conclusion, because it is a reasonable inference. Yet recall that for Aquinas we will know God "perfectly" (as perfectly as we can) not only in the intermediate state, but also in the resurrected state. And in the resurrected state we will have a body of some kind.
Thank you for your thoughtful and cogent post.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly right! I grant everything you say, and it does not invalidate my analogy, it accentuates it! Recall that the central issue here is whether we can know mind-independent reality as it is in itself. The first person in my analogy represents those who say that we cannot, whereas the second represents those who say that we can. I don't think anything you've noted about Kant moves him away from that first group, does it? The "glassy aspect" is merely representative of that which conveys reality in a way other than it is in itself; a "distortion," so to speak.
(Yes there are active aspects to the intellect, and I grant that that is another way the analogy limps, but this too does not move Kant out of the first group.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, that's why I spoke about "following your lead."
Quoting Wayfarer
I think we're close to a good stopping point. :up:
Let's consider the case of bona fide COVID vaccines vs quack cures such as hydroxychloroquine. Scientific studies show that the former are effective and the latter not. That is because of the inherent properties of the real vaccines, which the quack cures do not possess.
On the other hand, there's the interesting case of placebo cures. It is abundantly documented that placebos will often effect a cure even absent any actual medical ingredient in the tablet. In that case subjective factors, namely, the subject's confidence in the efficacy of cure, has objective consequences, namely, healing or cure.
So none of this open and shut. As the closing quote says in the essay ''Ultimately, what we call reality is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world in itself and those parts of our beliefs that simply express our conceptual contribution. The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.
Even so, there are many things, like medicines, that are shown to be effective by objective measures. It's important to acknowledge that, lest you slide into out-and-out relativism.
Quoting Leontiskos
It doesn't, but that is not the point. Surely the point is how to adjuticate which is correct? Kantian, or empirical realist? If you're supporting the latter, then the case has to be made as to why that is correct, and the Kantian view wrong.
Probably, depending on what you mean by 'empirical realist'.
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't said much about adjudication (apart from those quotes from Aquinas). I have only been trying to frame the question, which the image about the glass was supposed to effect. If the question has been framed correctly, then the position you're staking out is an anti-realist position, as is Kant's. Do we agree on this?
I've been wrestling against your alternative framing, where apparently Hume is a kind of anti-realist but Kant is not, nor is your OP.* Or else, that your perspectivalism is devised to resist a scientism which derives from the 17th century.
So the crux is apparently that scientism is realist, and can be resisted by the anti-realism of your OP, but I would prefer resisting scientism by way of an alternative realism.
* For my part I would only say that Hume holds to a stronger anti-realism than Kant.
I would not agree that Kant thinks our cognitions distort reality. I think he would agree that what we perceive is real; the way I see the tree, for example, is just the real way the tree appears to a human percipient. So, our perceived appearances of the tree are real, not illusory or distorted in any way, but they are not the whole story of the tree. It can appear differently to different kinds of percipients, different animals.
The way the tree appears to us is a function of what it is in itself, in conjunction with what we are in ourselves, but being an appearance, it is perspectival, whereas what it is as unperceived cannot be perspectival. The tree can only appear from some perspective or other, but it does not follow that it can only exist from some perspective or other. It also does not follow that we can only exist from some perspective or other, even though it is true that we can only understand our existence from some perspective or other..
Then have a look at Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter. Chapter 1 abstract is:
Note the similarity with my meadow analogy.
So that's the sense in which I'm 'anti-realist' - it's because I recognise that what we take to be inherently real is, lets say, a representation that has been re-constituted by our cognitive system. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, in the opening paragraph of WWI, recognising this is the beginning of wisdom. And I think its validated by cognitive science, although they may of course have a completely different view of the philosophical implications.
But Pinter's featureless [s]stuff[/s] here is empty of content. This is close to Hobbes' view, who took only matter in motion to be real (independent).
[quote = Leviathan, close to the beginning]
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained.
[/quote]
What is 'original fancy' ? How has Hobbes and has ilk got around human cognition ? Matter in motion seems very much based on visual and tactile perception. Kant was 'right' in some sense to put everything on the side of the subject, right up to the Hegelian edge.
:up:
I think your 'rejection approach' is good. The word 'idealism' will be difficult or impossible to rescue, but I like Hegel's understanding thereof:
The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlbeing.htm
Another way to put this is that the lifeworld (the whole of experience) is a kind of unbreakable unity, a continuous flow. We can analyze it, but plucking out an object and a subject, for instance, is engaging in something like useful fiction. The subject (as you seem to point out) is part of a dyad, and part of 'experience.' But if the subject is not absolute or fundamental, it's not even 'experience' anymore but just what is.
:up:
Perhaps you can share any thought you might have on Spinoza's perspectivism, and connections to Wittgenstein's 'I am my world.' https://iep.utm.edu/spino-ep/#SH2b
[quote=link]
He retains his substance monism by affirming the existence of the great variety of ways humans, and moreover all beings, can have knowledge as being so many ways God expresses himself. If all ways of knowing are ways God is known, then God himself, insofar as he is absolutely self-causal and self-expressive, would have to thereby know himself through and as all the different ways he is known. Therefore, from the perspective of God, God knows himself in an infinity of ways, while we, in our everyday existence and from our finite perspective, are just so many of these infinite ways God can both inadequately and adequately know all of reality as himself.
[/quote]
https://iep.utm.edu/spino-ep/#SH2b
I tend to understand this in terms of the 'subjects' being 'views' on a single Nature --- being Nature-from-an-embodied-in-Nature-perspective. Nature is 'painted' ( lit up, revealed ) by 'subjectivity' as if God was a cubist.
Subjectivity is light as the being or possibility of color, or something like that.
Of course! That's the point!
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 93). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition]In a universe without an observer having a purpose, you cannot have facts. As you may judge from this, a fact is something far more complex than it appears to be at first sight. In order for a fact to exist, it must be preceded by a segmentation of the world into separate things, and requires a brain that is able to extract it from the background in which it is immersed*. Moreover, this brain must have the power to conceive in Gestalts, because in order to perceive its outlines and extract it, a fact must be seen whole, together with some of its context.
A fact does not exist if it has not been articulated, that is, if it does not exist explicitly as a verbal entity sufficiently detailed that it can be made to correspond (approximately) to something in the external world. Facts dont exist in the absence of their statement (because a statement cuts the fact out of the background), and the statement cannot exist apart from an agent with a purpose. When an intentional agent sets out to carve a specific object from the background world, he has a Gestalt concept of the objectand from the latter, he acts to carve the object out. Thus, a fact cannot exist in a universe without living observers.
A fact does not hold in the universe if it has not been explicitly formulated. That should be obvious, because a fact is specific. In other words, statements-of-fact are produced by living observers, and thereby come into existence as a result of being constructed. It is only after they have been constructed (in words or symbols) that facts come to exist. Commonsense wisdom holds the opposite view: It holds that facts exist in the universe regardless of whether anyone notices them, and irrespective of whether they have been articulated in words. You may now judge for yourself if that is true.[/quote]
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 93). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
*That is what I mean by 'existence being complex'. It's a manifold, not an off/on phenomenon.
So, facts come into being with us. Not 'the universe', but there is no meaningful sense of existence in the universe prior to this act of formulation (as naturalism never tires of telling us).
But you seem (to me) to be flitting from position to position. Either it makes sense to talk about some object apart from all subjectivity or it doesn't. Kant seemed to feel the need to glue on an empty concept, to get distance from Berkeley. But I think he should have just embraced the perspectivism implicit in most of his thinking.
Plenty of materialists (like Hobbes) are indirect realists. If you are (now) only saying that appearance is not reality, then how is that different from the usual dualistic scientism ? 'The table is really [latest physics theory stuff]. ' Or 'love is really just [brain chemistry].'
But physics stuff (I think we agree) is only meaningful within a lifeworld like ours. It makes no sense to say the world is really [some mere aspect or fragment of that world. ]
Quoting Wayfarer
I sometimes think our views are pretty close, but your insistence on the pure subject seems to require a pure object (the ever-hidden-from-us world-in-itself.) @Leontiskos joked that he couldn't tell our positions apart (including J.S. Mill), but there is a difference. I think I'm defendning a nondual monist perspectivism, while you are defending some kind of still-dualist twist on Kant. But I may not understand you (and our views are naturally evolving as we talk and think.)
Here's a key point:
Permanent possibilities of perception turn out, in my view, to be pretty much all most people can and do mean by some [ mind- ] independent world.
What we mean when we say the mountain was here before us as a species is something like : if we could somehow visit with a time machine, we'd see the same old mountain. Kant discusses the possibility of beings on the moon in CPR, and notes that asserting their existence involves implicitly asserting the possibility of perceiving those beings. So experience is the foundation of sense. FWIW, this seems very close to Husserl's view. And phenomenology can be viewed as primarily negative and critical, as Wittgensteinian 'critique of language,' pointing out (like Kant) our tendency to talk in round squares and light without darkness.
[quote = Locke]
11. How Bodies produce Ideas in us.
The next thing to be considered is, how bodies operate one upon another; and that is manifestly by impulse, and nothing else. It being impossible to conceive that body should operate on WHAT IT DOES NOT TOUCH (which is all one as to imagine it can operate where it is not), or when it does touch, operate any other way than by motion.
12. By motions, external, and in our organism.
If then external objects be not united to our minds when they produce ideas therein; and yet we perceive these ORIGINAL qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies, to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extension, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness, may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them; to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion; which produces these ideas which we have of them in us.
...
15. Ideas of primary Qualities are Resemblances; of secondary, not.
From whence I think it easy to draw this observation,that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us: and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts, in the bodies themselves, which we call so.
[/quote]
This is how the physical study of primary qualities escapes being a mere study of appearance. Reality in its fullness is filtered for purity. The gray result is stripped of color and value. What's left Newtonian machinery abandoned by Deism's demiurge -- blobs of stuff that bump into one another in the void.
I agree that epistemology is always posterior to metaphysics, so perhaps you have drawn the wrong conclusion from my argument. In your glass analogy, metaphysics would be the discipline by which we understand the glass, which is "being" in general, and of which perspective is a feature. This would lay the grounds for epistemology.
Quoting Leontiskos
The problem though, which I tried to describe, is that we need principles by which we can make the judgement, 1) or 2), and these are metaphysical principles, derived from the philosophy of being. If we premise either 1) or 2), we proceed with an epistemology accordingly, but whatever is your argument for choosing one over the other is a metaphysical argument.
Quoting Leontiskos
You say that we cannot "fix" the flaw by understanding our understanding, but this is exactly what we do in practise, to improve ourselves, we repair flaws in our understanding. That understanding of understanding would be an analysis of our methods, procedures and techniques. The method is the means, the goal is the end. The analysis reveals the relation between means and ends.
Initially, the end shapes the means, such that the means are designed to produce the end. However, the means can then be characterized as becoming habits, and the propensity to follow habits produces a special relationship between the agent and the end, whereby the specific end which the means are designed for is "locked in" as the desired end. In habituation the relevance, importance, or even necessity of the end, is completely neglected because satisfaction is guaranteed by the means. In this way, (habituation), the means now determine the ends by crippling our capacity to freely choose our goals. We act in the habitual way, we are satisfied, therefore we do not question the ends and the forms of satisfaction which the habits provide for us.
Notice though, that I referred to a special type of goal, the ideal, as perfection. I said that it was the ideal, perfection as a goal, which cannot be obtained by the human intellect. So the goal then is not to "fix" the understanding, but to improve upon it, in relation to the ideal, which is perfection. This is a big difference, because "fix" implies to put the system in an unchanging state of best operation, while leaving the system open to improvement implies something completely different. So the ideal, the perfect condition, as a goal, takes a position higher than any possible real condition, allowing that the goals, or ends, do not become fixed by habituation, in the manner described above. This allows that the goals or ends which our methods of understanding conform to, can always be reassessed, in relation to an ideal which will always stand higher than the end which the means currently provide for, and the ends will not get "locked in" by a habit which was once good, but is now bad, due to changing circumstances.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree, "matter" is posited by Aristotle for the purpose of accounting for that feature of reality which we cannot grasp, the part of reality which appears as unintelligible. This is derived from Plato's Timaeus. The "form" of a thing, being the universal for Plato, what the thing is, must necessarily be prior to the existence of the thing as the determining factor of what type of thing the thing will be, when the thing comes into existence. But each corporeal thing, each particular, or individual (primary substance in Aristotle's terms), is unique and peculiar as represented by the law of identity. So the reality of those "accidents" which make the individual unique and peculiar, must be accounted for. The "accidents" are fundamentally unintelligible to us, or else they could be accounted for by our understanding of the "form" of the thing. So the accidents are what escape our grasp, our apprehension of the thing, and "matter" is assigned as that which is responsible for this unintelligibility.
Quoting Leontiskos
I disagree that Aquinas believed we would "have a body of some kind" in the resurrected state. But of course there would be ambiguity providing different interpretations on this matter because Aquinas often had to stretch his ontology to appear consistent with Church dogma. Paul had insisted on personal resurrection, which would imply a material body to account for individuality. Aquinas also held that each spiritual incorporeal being, each angel, had providence over a corporeal body, so "will have a body of some kind" could also be interpreted as an incorporeal being having providence over a body.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you are stretching the meaning of "inherent properties" here. When you say that the vaccines are effective because of the inherent properties of these vaccines, that is only half the story. The other half is the inherent properties of the virus itself. Now we might say that the vaccines are effective because there is a relationship between the inherent properties of the vaccine, in relation to the inherent properties of the virus.
However, notice that this is just a sort of assumption we make, that if two things react, there is a relationship between their "inherent properties". But it doesn't require that we know anything about their so-called inherent properties, nor does it even require that we really know what "inherent property" refers to. In reality, "inherent property" just stands to signify what we do not know. The two react, and you as the narrator do not know why or how, so you simply employ that place holder, "inherent properties" to talk about what you do not know. The scientists would not use that place holder, they would talk about mRNA and proteins, immune system, etc., because they have more knowledge about this than us.
The scientific studies show that the vaccines are effective, and the quack cures are not. They also show a whole lot about the interaction between the vaccines and the virus. But notice that the human immune system is the medium between these two, the arena or theatre where this interaction plays out. And in reality the human immune system is the principal role player here. This means that my proposal above, that there is a special relation between the inherent properties of the vaccine and the inherent properties of the virus, is completely wrong, because it totally neglects the agency of the immune system. And so we have an open door for the placebo effect and such things. Therefore it appears like it is this procedure, of using terms like "inherent properties" to cover over what is unknown, and create an illusion of knowledge which is really detrimental and misleading.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is very good and well-written. But ultimately it comes down to a question of what is implied by "re-presentation" here. Notice the difference of intent implied by the difference between "representation" and "re-presentation". The former implies correspondence, the latter implies a presentation with intent. This marks the difference between holding truth as your guiding principle (ideal), and having pragmatics as your guide. Notice that pragmaticism removes the need for an ideal, perfection. If it serves the purpose at hand, it is good, and there is no need, or inspiration, to better it. But when we are looking for "truth", it becomes an ideal perfection, so the inspiration to improve is ever present, regardless of whether we think the absolute will ever be obtained.
This is precisely what we are disagreeing on. The disagreement is somewhat subtle, so at times I am characterizing it in a somewhat imprecise way to get it to pop out. For example, my imprecision seems to have led you, at some points, to think that I impute to you a belief that external reality does not exist at all. But <again>, I am not saying that. The disagreement is over whether we can know external reality as it is in itself.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is precisely what I argued against, beginning <here>. In that post I explicitly disagreed with Pinter's claim that objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, and you agreed with my argument. We agreed that unobserved boulders have shape. Or rather, so as not to put words in your mouth, you said, "It's safe to assume."
I agree with @plaque flag here:
Quoting plaque flag
Compare:
Quoting Leontiskos
Note that I am not saying that every mind always knows mind-independent reality as it is in itself. Only that the mind can so know it.
I'm sort of planning an exit strategy so that I can take some time away, and for that reason I'm trying not to initiate a lot of new dialogues. For example, with Wayfarer I have teased at the idea of adjudication, but it would be imprudent for me to go there in full, given my increasing time constraints. So maybe what I will do is just try to situate my view vis-a-vis your own. In general I am unsure about your first unanswered reply (), but I agree with most of your second ().
So for example, in your second unanswered reply you say that, "We see things themselves, not our images of them," but in your first you say that all we can mean by an independent world is "permanent possibilities of perception." I am then led to wonder whether that possibility of perception, when engaged, effects an actualization of perception, such that we are really encountering a perception/image rather than the thing itself. For me the possibility of perception is derivative on the thing that exists in itself. The thing is more than a possibility of perception, even though we always know by means of perception. ...But then given what you say <here> I think we might be on the same page, and I may just be splitting hairs.
Let me go out on a limb and try to characterize our difference, which is probably negligible for the purposes of this thread. I want to say that you are a "direct realist" with an immanent anthropology, whereas I am a "direct realist" with a transcendent anthropology. I am thinking in particular of your claim that, "the subject is world-from-a-point-of-view" (). I want to say that the soul ultimately transcends and encompasses the world, and is not metaphysically co-extensive with it. So the subject is the world from a point of view, but it is at the same time more than that. It is not only world-from-a-point-of-view. Do we even disagree on that? (I am also willing to toy with the idea that intellect is able to obtain a universal or rather quasi-universal point of view, which is I think what much of philosophy and science is interested in.)
Granted, that's a rather tiny difference, so maybe it's not even worth raising. Maybe it will create more problems than it's worth. :sweat:
And the scare quotes were precisely for you, because of how you responded to my comment in a different thread:
Quoting Leontiskos
There you fixated on contamination and distortion, ignoring conditioning. Anti-Realists certainly hold that reality is conditioned by the human subject. Imputation of or fixation on distortion tends to beg the question, but it is ultimately pertinent given that we are considering the possibility of knowing reality as it is in itself. Thus it is a distortion in relation to that counterfactual possibility.
I like the idea with topography, but it's not clear how morality and normativity can be worked out with it.
I'm just not sure if the bolded part follows here. It seems more like the reverse conclusion should be true.
If:
1. The mind cannot know mind independent reality.
2. Mind independent reality exists.
Then it seems to follow that the unknowable mind independent reality, the noumena, are a part of the world that is not inextricably tied up in mind.
Whereas this isn't a problem if mind independent reality can be known. If mind independent reality can be known, than at least in some way, it isn't mind independent. The mind can access it.
And nature itself doesn't seem to be discrete from itself. There are no "totally isolated systems," and it seems likely that there are no unique "substances," without beginning or end, just one substance (this is the goal of unification anyhow). This being the case, divisions within nature are simply abstractions. They are based on real differences in nature, which we have knowledge of, but in an important way the universe is one undivided process. But if that's the case, and if mind is in the universe, then it is indeed impossible to extricate mind from the world in an important way.
Obviously, there are ways in which we can extricate mind from (parts of) the world, as when we say "that rock is not conscious." But this is a separation via abstraction, which doesn't seem like it should "cause" any real ontological separation. It's just like how our ability to separate the sweetness of honey from the honey doesn't entail that honey isn't sweet. In the rock example, the rock is part of a unified process that includes mind. Further, since mind knows of the rock, clearly the rock is actually involved in mind in some way
So all of the universe is involved in the process of mind to some degree in that mind would not be here if the universe was not. We are cognizant of "the whole universe," when we have these discussions, another relation. And the universe would have different properties if mind wasn't possible, since clearly it has properties vis-á-vis its interactions with mind.
Husserl's notion of the transcendence of the object is helpful here. Sartre opens B&N with it (does a great job). The spatial object is never finally or completely given. I'm quite happy to understand the object as some kind of ideal unity of its possible 'adumbrations.'
Reality is 'horizonal.' I speak too easily of the being of the world when it's better perhaps to stress its fluid endless becoming. I'd say I have a kind of continuous blanket ontology, with all things inferentially linked. Brandom's inferentialism was a recent, powerful influence on me, which allowed me to see how all objects are glued together in one nexus of rationality -- a single network of entities that appear interdependently for their very sense in our reason-giving sociality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good, then we agree. I was mistaken. :up:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, we fix flaws in concrete acts of understanding, but not foundational flaws in the faculty of understanding (the intellect).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
True.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure. My point was only that if one accepts the premise that the faculty of the intellect itself is inherently incapable of knowing reality as it is in itself, then no amount of self-reflection or epistemological work will change that fact. I think we are in agreement.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right. Sorry that I don't have enough time to go into these sorts of topics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well he at least says that we will have a resurrected body in the third part of the Summa Theologiae, questions 53-56, as well as in questions 75-86 of the supplement of that work.
:up:
A guy once broke up with me and he stated as his reason, and I quote, "I question the wisdom of continuing a relationship with someone who barely knows herself".
Somehow, "self-knowledge" tends to be about thinking of yourself the way someone else wants you to think of yourself.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes. And to control the masses, of course.
We fool you.
Okay, sure. I have no truck with this sort of phenomenological approach. Makes sense to me.
Quoting plaque flag
:up:
How does Bitbol account for the possible power differential in such debates?
For example, a teacher and a student may have a debate in class, but because of the power differential between them, the student will tailor her input to the debate for fear of getting a poor grade (or worse). As such, the debate is automatically slanted in favor of the teacher.
The same pattern repeats all over in other settings.
Quoting Joshs
Great point!
How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved?
Earlier in the thread I gestured towards a possible equivocation on "mind-independent reality," but here it is occurring explicitly. Note that if you define "mind-independent reality" in this way, then my hypothesis that "the mind can know mind-independent reality" would be incoherent.
So to be clear, when I am talking about knowing mind-independent reality, I am talking about knowing things whose existence is distinct and unrelated to mind. Your claim that
It's about more than merely affective concerns: It's about normativity.
The traditional focus on objectivity can also be seen as an effort to establish normativity. Epistemic normativity, psychological normativity, and especially moral normativity.
Allowing for subjectivity and perspectivism (as in: individualism) in any way undermines the very notion of an objective, binding system of moral claims about what is right and about what is wrong.
Under this, subjectivity is acceptable only in a trivial sense: "it's in an individual brain that all these processes happen".
For me the world includes promises and daydreams and prime numbers, as well as protons and pumpkins. The lifeworld with all of its cultural structure is fundamental. It's only within this world (famously sketched by Heidegger) that physics or biology can make sense in the first place, though people (absurdly in my view) think they can put the cart before the horse. To me a map is some little piece of reality that 'mirrors' some structure or aspect of a larger piece. There is no 'deep' appearence-reality distinction but only various practical discriminations -- the kind of thing Mach talks about, such as the boundaries of the ego being merely practical. I mention this in case you thought I reduced the subject to a limited kind of worldly being.
I think we agree on this. I see intellectual progress as movement in perspective space, which is also [largely ] character space. We become the universal person, but perhaps Jungian individuation is helpful here too, and we also develop unique gifts, complementing the gifts of others. I think maybe both processes run side by side. As we find ourselves a fitting role in the world, including the mirror, we are less afraid or resentful of the gifts of others. We learn to open up to others' perspectives, to identity with the process of learning rather than the result, with a way of being rather than a claim on ideological turf. So yeah I agree. The goal is toward that point at infinity, the impossibly adequate grasp. Horizon again. And Husserl and Merleau-Ponty also talked about being perpetual beginners, always going back to the fundamental experiences and questions, in love with philosophy.
I would have thought that reality as it is in itself cannot be known in principle, because reality as it is in itself is defined by its not being reality as it appears to us. It's an imaginable conceptual distinction. On this definition it follows that anything we know is not reality as it is in itself.
But I don't consider reality as it appears to us to be any less real than reality as it is in itself. Reality as it appears to us is a function of reality as it is in itself, because reality as it appears to us is on account of the effect the environment has on us precognitively.
In the lived moment we are blind to that process; the best we can do is observe and analyze the environment and our physiologies as they appear to be. So, I'm saying that appearances are real, as real as what gives rise to them, and more real for us, given that we can only think of the in itself, we cannot know how it is.
:up:
Nice to hear ! It's not as easy as one might like it to be to feel understand on an internet forum.
I think this is so by design, because otherwise, any kind of normativity is impossible. And without normativity, society and culture are impossible.
Quoting Wayfarer
How do you propose to build a system of morality based on the above idea?
As also his depiction of 'the natural attitude', which I see as the basis the objections thus far:
[quote=Key Ideas in Phenomenology; https://www.saybrook.edu/unbound/phenomenology/]From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as physical objects, other people, and even ideas as simply real and straightforwardly existent. In other words, they are just there. We dont question their existence; we view them as facts.
When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual thingsthis tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the natural attitude or the natural theoretical attitude.
When Husserl uses the word natural to describe this attitude, he doesnt mean that it is good (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an everyday or ordinary way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?
From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that being can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined.[/quote]
Quoting Leontiskos
'No features', is the expression Charles Pinter uses - shape being one. Features correspond to functions of the animal sensorium, but this thesis is developed over several chapters, and not one I can summarise in a few words.
I acknowledge at the outset that the universe pre-exists us: 'though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective.'
I think it's the idea of 'an implicit perspective' that you're calling into question.
So let's apply this to a practical example:
When the critics of Trump and his followers make claims about them, they (ie. the critics) believe that they are making claims about how things really are.
How do you comment?
I don't see it that way. Why do we, as societies, desire normativity? I'd say it is because we care about social harmony. We don't need to establish normativity when it comes to bare perception; the commonality is there for us, it is not something engineered by us. Psychological normativity and moral normativity are pragmatic concerns; a society functions better and people are happier if there is harmony.
I've been talking about perception not politics.
So when people talk about politics, they don't have perception?
But the results of perception are normativized. There is a clear pressure in society to see things in a particular way and to believe that this is "how they really are", and to further believe that when one sees things that way, one "sees them as they really are".
Not so. It is specific feature of modern and post-industrial culture with its emphasis on scientific instrumentalism. In earlier cultures, the 'is/ought' gap had not yet appeared, because it was presumed that what one ought to do, and what is the case, are connected: 'In the Indian context it would have been axiomatic that liberation comes from discerning how things actually are, the true nature of things. That seeing things how they are has soteriological benefits would have been expected, and is just another way of articulating the is and ought dimension of Indian Dharma. The ought (pragmatic benefit) is never cut adrift from the is (cognitive factual truth).'
Quoting baker
Many pre-modern moral systems never doubted it - the idea that the universe comprises dumb stuff directed solely by physical forces is a very recent one. (It has always been around, but had never before become dominant.)
Oh, I assumed he would do something like that - define 'shape' as a sensory phenomenon. I think it only sidesteps the issue, begging the pertinent question and discarding the colloquial meaning of the word 'shape'. So of course if we define 'shape' to be a sensory phenomenon, then the boulder cannot have shape by definition. But I think we want to move beyond this sort of tautological approach.
Note that my point about the boulder cuts through this redefinition. The boulder must have shape in the colloquial sense, and therefore we have knowledge of the boulder as it is in itself.
Quoting Wayfarer
The point that I have been trying to stress is that it is not a difference of whether there is an implicit perspective, or propositions, or "glass", but rather what the nature of those rational entities is. I think all parties agree that there are such things. The disagreement is always over their precise nature. One groups says that the rational entity prevents us from knowing reality as it is in itself; the other group says that it does not. For the classical realist the extramental world can be known in itself precisely through the rational, perspective-grounded mind.
But I'm thinking this might be a good stopping point, especially because @plaque flag can carry it forward.
An inquisitive one.
It's a blind spot frequently encountered in philosophical discussions. In philosophy, there's a taboo against using a philosopher's philosophy against him, and a taboo against using some philosophical claim on the spot, testing it in vivo, as it were.
It's rather ironic. For example, some philosopher complains about how some people are treating other people (and other beings as objects), yet this same philosopher is treating them the same way, as an object.
The problem there is that you're trying to assume a perspective outside both, in order to arrive at which one of the two is correct. And I don't think that can be done, in this case. (Oh, and Plaque Flag and I go back at least 10 years now. He's a very interesting contributor, although somewhat prone to digression ;-) )
You're muddying the waters :rage:
How do you know we in fact see the same things?
What if we are merely conforming, to the point of sometimes even pretending that we see the same thing? As in, "Do you see this black snow?" -- "Yes, I see this black snow."
The normativity I'm talking about is about what we *say* that we think is real. (And of course, if one says something often enough, one is bound to believe it, even if one originally didn't believe it.)
As for the conceptual image that your dog has of what you call a tree: it possibly isn't the same as yours.
Quoting Banno
*1. Naive Realism :
In social psychology, naïve realism is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology)
Note --- Is it possible that both "naive realists" and "philosophical idealists" are biased (by faith) toward a hypothetical "true" view, that neither can directly access? The key to the Truth door here is that Wayfarer's more sophisticated Idealism openly admits that its perfect Ideal World*3 is an unattainable goal that we can strive toward but never reach. Even the "extinguishment" of the grasping mind (as in Nirvana) would leave us without the means for knowing what lies on the other side of the closed door.
*2. Anti-realism :
In anti-realism, the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism
Note --- As Kant and other philosophers have noted, humans know only their own subjective model of reality, that they have created from sense impressions derived from a local & personal perspective, not from a god-like view of "an external independent reality". Consequently, naive realism is based on faith in a non-human objective model of the totality of reality.
*3. Nirvana fallacy
The nirvana fallacy is the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org wiki Nirvana_fallacy
Note --- I'm not accusing Wayfarer of this fallacy. Just noting that perfect Truth/Wisdom/Reality is unrealistic & idealistic. But that does not stop philosophers from seeking the unreachable Ideal. Wisdom lies in realizing your own limits --- what's impossible. :smile:
The Impossible Dream (The Quest)
Song by Mitch Leigh
[i]To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go [/i]
Talk about upholding taboos!
"Philosophical insights can and should be applied to mountain meadows, butterflies, dogs, teapots, but not to hot topics like the criticism of Trumpistas."
I think you're capable of highly insightful and incisive contributions but right now you're just firing off random questions, dragging Trump in for mention, for instance.
That makes two of us :brow:
Quoting Gnomon
Steady on, old chap. 'Buddha' means 'one who knows'.
My edit: "For the classical realist the extramental world can be known in itself precisely through the rational, perspective-grounded mind."
S(b) can be known. It is known via a contingent and finite perspective. Therefore contingent and finite perspectives do not prevent us from knowing reality in itself.
...So I don't want to reject the idea of a perspective, I just don't think it entails what you think it entails.
Quoting Wayfarer
But does not any decision in favor of one or the other imply an ability to adjudicate, and therefore imply access to an "outside perspective"? I don't think there is any difference between my position and yours, on this score.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ah, okay. I often tend to the opposite problem: saying too little. :smile:
It seems obvious. When I'm working with another carpenter and I ask her to pass me the saw, she does not pass me the router. When I throw the ball for my dog he sees it as a ball to be chased, not a food bowl to be eaten from. No social coordination at all would be possible if humans and animals did not see the same things in their environments.
*sigh*
Philosopher, know thyself!
I brought up Trump precisely because he's such a hot topic, to see if you can apply your insights from this thread when it comes to talking about something other than meadows and butterflies.
And there you go, patronizing me again.
Sure, there are some obvious instances of people "seeing the same things".
Is Pluto a planet or not? When you look at Pluto, you might see a planet, but someone else doesn't. How so?
Quoting baker
When you and I see Pluto, whether through a telescope (that we also both see) or on a TV ( a TV that we both see) or a photo in a magazine (a magazine that we both see) we presumably see the same image or object, but we might disagree about what category to assign it to.
But you're simply appealing to some fact or other. That a particular thing has a particular shape. But as already stated, 'In a universe without an observer having a purpose, you cannot have facts. ...a fact is something far more complex than it appears to be at first sight. In order for a fact to exist, it must be preceded by a segmentation of the world into separate things, and requires a brain that is able to extract it from the background in which it is immersed. Moreover, this brain must have the power to conceive in Gestalts, because in order to perceive its outlines and extract it, a fact must be seen whole, together with some of its context.' You can't argue from outside that framework, as you're trying to do. As I said before, we need to take off our spectacles and look at them, and it's a difficult thing to do.
Quoting baker
I'm attempting to moderate a thread by keeping it on track. There's a very long multi-year thread about DJT, let's keep comments about him in that thread.
:up:
And in previous systems, the equivalent was the tyrannical socio-economic system in which most people were considered expendable and often treated accordingly.
Take away the robes and other thaumaturgical veneer and you get the same discourse that we have today, that has always existed.
In the old days, people were considered subjects of a deity and of monarchs and landlords. Nowadays, we are considered subjects of well, whoever happens to be in the position of power. But we never cease to be subjects to someone or something.
The nature of the discourse has not changed: there is a hierarchy between people, there is a power differential between people, and resources are scarce, and we shape our input in accordance with this knowledge It's only the externals that change (and those are the ones you're focusing on).
A religious/spiritual person will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
A psychologist will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
A politician will tell you that you "need to see things as they really are".
And somehow, "things as they really are" is always what those in position with more power than yourself say that they are.
But to the man in robes, *you* are the dumb stuff!!
It is on track. I'm not discussing Trump. I'm discussing how philosophers, too, have taboos, which is ironically relevant, given the topic.
This is how I view it: Philosophers like Pinter or Hume come up with theories, often abstruse, and then they interpret reality based on their theory instead of allowing reality to correct or even disprove their theory. (It's quite common for philosophers to fall in love with their own theories.) Thus Pinter's argument:
The answer and reversal is always as follows:
I think we actually agree on (2), and if (2) holds then facts exist, (3) holds, etc.
Whether the modus ponens or the modus tollens holds depends on whether [abstruse theory] or [boulders do have shape] is better-known, and it seems obvious to me that the latter is better-known, and that the former must therefore be discarded or revised. While this is a simplification, it at the same time represents a standard pattern for anti-realist systems. (This is another topic I have an unpublished thread-draft for.)
Now often philosophers will just disagree for all eternity on such issues, but the curious thing in our case is that we actually agree with respect to (2), and this signals a tension in your own thinking.
Sure.
But saying, for example, that someone "inoculated people against reality" is already an interpretation of his act, not the act itself. Of course, then there are those who will say it's not so, that it's not merely an interpretation.
Yeah hence the closing comment I made to Wayfarer, re: the intrusion of clinical psychology.
No such thing as self-knowledge. Its a catch-phrase meant to indicate one has an intelligence that gets along with itself more than not. Actually, brought up an excellent point regarding conscience, integrating well with intelligence, which gives .a catch-phrase meant to indicate one has an intelligence and a conscience that get along with each other more than not.
If Trump lies, some may interpret it as him speaking truth. Nonetheless it seems plausible to think there is a fact of the matter as to whether he lied. When it comes to whether Trump's vision for the US and the world is a good one or not, then we might be harder pressed to justify claiming there is a fact of the matter about that, even though it might seem obvious that his vision is bogus.
Charles Pinter is not a philosopher - he's a mathematician with a long interest in neural modelling; all of his previous books were on algebra. And as I said, I can't do justice to all the material in his book with a few extracts. But his basic idea, and that of the neuro-scientists in the Big Think video that I posted, is not that difficult to state: that the brain/mind receives input from the environment and then constructs its world on that basis. This complex neural construction is what constitutes reality for us. These scientists do not deny that there is an external reality, but show that this is only one aspect of the totality of experience. This is why the neuroscience of cognition has something in common with Kant's philosophy (although they will also differ in important respects). Your arguments against, I'm afraid, really are just re-statements of Samuel Johnson's 'appeal to the stone' - even down to your choice of representative object!
----
Actually, a rather poignant note - I have just found that Charles Pinter died, aged 91, in July 2023. After reading his book, I emailed him via his website (now apparently taken down) and received this reply, in June 2022:
I did indeed write an Amazon review, which can be found here. (There is also a review by one Barry N. Bishop who indignantly rejects Pinter's idealism. It is and always will be a perennial dispute. The review above mine, by McIntyre, is a good synopsis.)
Sorry, I don't see the connection. Spinoza is talking about reflective reasoning from (parallax-like) both the perspective of eternity and the perspective of time. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is talking about the constitutive meta/cognitive constraints of logic-grammar. I suppose for both thinkers the "I" is impersonal (ergo universal? ontological?) ...
That sounds like a linguistic use of "imagine" (meaning he never expected that would happen). But I was meaning "imagination" as a creative visual faculty. Doesn't this faculty have central connection to the OP? - The Mind Created World ? If not, which faculty of the mind does the creating the world process?
If you mean, how does the mind (or brain) create or construct the world - isn't that pretty much what the whole brain is involved in? There are many things the brain does beneath the threshhold of conscious awareness - particularly the brain-stem and autonomic systems in the brain. We're not aware of growth, metabolism, and many other functions, not to mention the sub-conscious activities of the mind. The processing involved in conscious attention is only one part of what the brain does.
This leads to a particular set of functions that I think is philosophically interesting. That is the ability of the brain to maintain the 'subjective unity of experience'. We are self-aware as a unified whole - perception of shape, colour and movement appear to us as a unified whole (or gestalt) even though the sub-systems of the brain which process these are separate. Neuroscience hasn't identified the particular brain system that provides for this unification. It's called the 'neural binding problem' and is recognised as a scientific validation of the hard problem of consciousness (note the reference to Chalmers below):
[quote=The Neural Binding Problem(s);https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3title]There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).
Traditionally, the NBP (neural binding problem) concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the explanatory gap and the hard problem (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.
There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense dataprimarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral visionto see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.
But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time. [/quote]
Quoting baker
Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.
The human being lets himself be influenced not only by particular other humans (actual or imagined) but also by social objectivities that he feels and apprehends as effective objectivities in their own right, as influencing powers. He is afraid of the government and carries out what it commands. He views such and such individuals, for instance, the police officer, etc., as representatives of the government only; he fears the person who is an official representative. The customs, the church, etc., he feels as powers, too. Seen from the objective perspective of the historian and sociologist, human beings are real and, among them, such and such interconnected relations exist, such and such social objectivities exist, etc. And the task is to describe this in general, concrete and, where possible, in comparative terms, to describe the factual connection, to delineate universal class-concepts and rules, etc., just as in any morphology.
If the community of humankind is to be described historically in concreto in its becoming and in its dependence on other communities (for even the social objectivities have their causality), then the objective of an understanding of the inner connections requires that one immerse oneself so deeply in the consciousness of the respective individual human beings, so as to be able to exactly relive their motivations. One must immerse oneself so deeply that one brings to givenness their interpretations, supposed experiences, their superstitious fantasies, by means of which they let themselves be influenced, let themselves be guided, attracted, or repelled. The real connections consist in this: Under given circumstances such and such notions, etc., were (understandably) evoked in human beings, whereby such and such reactions were motivated in them, which in turn determined the course of their development. (Basic Problems of Phenomenology)
I understand that, but if he is writing a book on the mind-world relation then in my opinion he is a philosopher. Being a mathematician does not prevent one from being a philosopher. In fact there is a giant overlap between these two fields, so much so that Aristotle complains in his Metaphysics that mathematician-philosophers were creating confusion, scientism-style.
Quoting Wayfarer
That sounds a lot like a Humean model. Impressions -> construction
But I will remember his name for future reference.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have never heard of him, but this is of course a rather bad misrepresentation of my position. Do you truly think a modus tollens argument is an "argumentum ad lapidem"? Premise (2) is not, "Your argument is false." It is a proposition that contradicts your thesis and one that we have both agreed to. Quite different, I'm afraid.
(The crux is not a dogmatic insistence that your argument must be false. The crux is the fact that you have attached yourself to a theory which entails that boulders do not have shape, combined with the fact that we both agree that boulders do have shape. Given that I have not read Pinter at length, this need not be detrimental to your project. But it should be taken into consideration, as a commonsensical critique of the theory. If you look at it from my perspective, there are about a million different theories on offer, and so I am going to start by considering those that account for the fact that boulders have shape. If those turn out to be unworkable, then I will move on to consider the others.)
Lots of us have read lots of things. The trick when it comes to dialogue is to be able to synthesize, state theories in your own words, and interact in an organic way with diverging worldviews. It's quite difficult, but I think this was a good conversation in which good progress was made (at the very least in understanding one another's views). Thanks for that. Until next time.
Quoting Wayfarer
Enactivists disagree with Chalmers belief that we dont have a way to explain the unification of consciousness or subjective experience empirically. For instance, Evan Thompson sees affectivity as the unifying glue.
Gotcha. I see what you mean. I agree, most people don't think of "mind independent reality" the way I put it. I brought it up that way though because I'm not sure if "mind independence," can usefully be defined any other way without recourse to dualism.
If the supposition is that "mind independent entities " are those whose existence is not causally dependent on minds interacting with them, then this seems like a type of "mind independence" objective idealists acknowledge as well. There are exceptions, but generally the idealist claim isn't that perceiving or thinking about objects causes them to exist.
Can we have "mind independent existence," in a stronger sense? Maybe. But if it's something like "all the properties and effects of mind independent objects exist without reference to mind," that just seems wrong to me. It would seem to require some sort of implicit dualism where things' interactions with mind, and the properties instantiated in those interactions, are somehow unreal or "less real" properties.
But what is a definition of "mind independent existence," that goes further than "thinking of things doesn't cause their existence," but also accounts for the reality of the fact that all the objects we know about do,trivially, interact with mind?
This, I am stumped on. Generally definitions I am familiar with run along the lines of: "objects have all the properties they have independent of mind. These properties cause all phenomena. We can know about the objects because of their phenomenal effects. However, phenomena have no effect on objects' properties (i.e. their "mind independence")." This reminds me a bit of Neoplatonism's downward causality, only inverted such that Nous is below Psyche and Psyche is determined by and beneath the material world.
My objection is that it seems to me like the influence between the supposedly "mind independent" objects and phenomenal experience is a two way street. E.g., you don't like how your wall looks so you paint it, people think mountains are pretty so they photograph them, etc. The two causally flow into each other without distinction, which is what monist naturalism seems to suggest should happen.
Any division seems artificial to me,conflating a epistemic distinction with an ontological one. To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world.
I believe that foundational flaws are flaws of the ends rather flaws of the means which are methodological flaws or flaws of technique, according to this difference which I described in my last post. Methodological flaws (flaws of the means) are epistemological, while flaws of the ends are metaphysical flaws. This is why pragmaticism is a form of epistemology and it provides no acceptable metaphysical approach. It can provide no real principles for judging ends and determining foundational flaws (flaws of the ends).
So I believe that we actually can address foundational flaws in the faculty of understanding itself (the intellect), through metaphysics. And, I believe that change in these foundational elements (ends) is a form of evolution which is evidenced by the history of metaphysics and theology. Evolution is very real and the intellectual limitations of one species are not the same as those of another, so we need to be able to account for the reality of real substantial changes to the faculty of understanding (the intellect).
Quoting Leontiskos
As stated above, we are not in agreement here. One thing I tried to explain in the last post, is the point of |the ideal", as the highest possible perfection which is not ever actually obtainable. If we set an obtainable goal, then our efforts to better ourselves cease when that goal is reached. Therefore if we want to forever better ourselves, we need to set a goal of perfection, the ideal, unobtainable goal.
So when it is said "that the faculty of the intellect itself is inherently incapable of knowing reality as it is in itself", what is meant, is that there is an ideal, perfect knowledge of reality (God's knowledge for example), which we recognize that we will never achieve. However, this does not preclude the possibility of greatly improving our knowledge of reality. So it's not like we can never know anything about the independent reality, because clearly we make all sorts of statements, and pretend to know all sorts of things about the supposed independent reality, and many of these things are acceptable as true knowledge. However, such knowledge will always be fallible, and never of the sort of perfect certainty which some epistemologists who exclude fallibility from knowledge would request. Therefore it's only by excluding fallibility from knowledge, and forcing that requirement of perfect certainty, that "knowing" gets defined in such a way which produces the conclusion that we cannot "know" anything about the external reality.
Accordingly, we can accept the premise that "knowing reality", in this sort of perfect sense of "knowing" which excludes fallibility, this ideal knowledge, is impossible for the human intellect. But this need not stimy our attempts to produce such perfect knowledge through good metaphysics. To conclude then, I, as a human being, recognize that I will never obtain this ideal knowledge, but I do not exclude the possibility of another being reaching that level, so I will do what I can to help in that effort.
I replied <once>, but let me revisit my <initial post> since I don't think I will end up writing the thread on this topic any time soon. I find that the misrepresentation of this important idea is significant enough to warrant a response and clarification.
The following is a paradigm case of a bad argument, and it is the sort of thing that Hume falls into. It evinces a failure to even understand what argument is:
P: [Unlikely theory]
Q: [Numerous things we hold with a great deal of certitude]
The problem here is that argument, by its very nature, proceeds from premises that are more certain and more known, to conclusions that are less certain and less known. So in many ways this does not even rise to the level of an argument. It begins with a dubious premise and proceeds to an absurd conclusion, when instead it should reverse course and draw a salutary reductio. Argument is always a tug-of-war between different certitudes and different degrees of knowledge, and this example fails to understand that fact. It fails to understand that, in order for it to function as a real argument, P must be more certain than Q, when in fact the opposite is true.
But then what does this have to do with Pinter? The point is thatconcrete certitudes asideP and Q are inversely correlated, and whichever possesses less certitude will be eliminated in the conclusion of the argument. Hence, as should be obvious, theories which contradict a great many strongly-justified beliefs are implausible theories. If Pinter's theory does this, then it is implausible. If it does not, then it need not be.
The point at issue is that one cannot simply <present a theory as a justification for excluding facts>. The facts must be allowed to have their say. It is perfectly conceivable that the facts will make mincemeat of the theory, and that the rational course of action will be to accept the facts and reject the theory. Of course it may also be as @Wayfarer says, and we may have to give up the facts. But we surely do not want to be uncritical about the way in which facts and theory (among so many other things) play tug-of-war. Just because a theory excludes certain facts does not mean that the philosopher no longer has to reckon with those facts.
...so I apologize that my initial post may have been somewhat brusque and annoying, but it is certainly not the so-called "argumentum ad lapidem." Hopefully this post shows why.
Quoting Leontiskos
The reason that I compared it to Johnson's 'argument from the stone', is because the argument is predicated on the assertion that 'boulders obviously do have shape', meaning that the [abstruse theory] is required to deny an apparently obvious fact. That's the sense in which this argument is like 'the appeal to the stone', the difference being, instead of kicking the stone, you simply gesture towards it. But it is basically the same argument, with the difference that instead of appealing to the stone's hardness, you're appealing to its shape. The reason it is said not to be an effective response, is that it does not counter the claim that what we experience as an external shape is actually an idea or sensation generated in our sensory-intellectual system. What Berkeley actually denied was the existence of material substance that exists independently of being perceived. In other words, he didn't deny the existence of the rock as an idea or perception in our minds. He denied the existence of the rock as an independent material entity outside of our perception. (For Berkeley, a rock "exists" insofar as it is perceived by a mind. If no one is perceiving the rock, God, who perceives everything always, ensures its continuous existence by constantly perceiving it.)
Quoting Leontiskos
As noted previously, it is the nature of 'facts' that is one of the points at issue (if not the main point!) But part of Pinter's case is that there are no facts in the absence of the observer (as detailed in this earlier post.) That is the point at issue.
Oh, and yes, I grant that, and also that I'm obviously putting forward his argument as a philosophical argument.
A proposition that we have agreed upon is not a proposition that is being asserted/imposed (link):
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Wayfarer
But it does address that. If what we experience as an external shape is actually no more than an idea or sensation, then we would have no reason to believe that boulders would treat canyons differently than cracks. Yet you assented to the proposition that boulders do treat canyons differently than cracks (even when no minds are involved), precisely because you believe that shape is in fact more than an idea or sensation. The argument which supplies (2) counters precisely that claim.
I haven't waded through Pinter's system and pinpointed the exact junctures where he goes wrong, but we have agreed on (2), and this implies that he is wrong on that point. Maybe that's less than could be hoped for, but it is something. It's a work in progress.
But the whole reason we've reached this somewhat difficult point in the dialogue is because your intellectual honesty allowed you to affirm two things that you believe to be true, and yet which happen to contradict one another. That's great, and it's why I started the conversation in the first place. I would have skipped the thread if I didn't think the author was capable of this. There's nothing at all wrong with laboring through tensions or contradictions, and I would be remiss for pressing you too hard on the point.* No fruit comes without the aporia, and no one can tell how you will eventually go about resolving it. But I wish you luck in it.
* Really, I just think <this idea> is important to understand, and so I didn't want to let it get trammeled under foot or downplayed. "Systems" loom large in modern philosophy, and receive undue weight. I have not published my thread on that topic because folks tend to be suspicious that what is at play is nothing more than a debater's trick (as you were). Nothing could be further from the truth, but I haven't worked out how to make it more persuasive for publishing.
In my view, there's a very deep and profound underlying reason behind this conundrum. I think it has to do with the fact that in earlier times, as the world was seen as an expression of the Divine Will, then humans understood the world in a more personalistic way - there wasn't the same sense of separateness and 'otherness'.
One of the key quotes I often hail back to is the 'Cartesian anxiety' which 'refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other" (From Richard J Bernstein Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 1983).
Thomist philosophy did not suffer from this 'anxiety' because it had preserved the sense of the 'union of knower and known' from Aristotelian philosophy. But remember, this union was on the immaterial plane, the union of the intellect with the Forms of particulars. With the nominalist/empiricist revolution of late medieval and early modern periods, and the abandonment of scholastic realism, objects came to be regarded as being inherently existent, when, from the earlier point of view, they have no real being of their own.
That's the longer thesis that I'm working towards.
I would point with to Descartes, as I think that distinction is what underlies the "objective domain" cited by the OP.
So when <talking about> the mind knowing mind-independent reality as it is in itself, 'mind-independent reality' designates things like boulders, trees, mountains, walls, paint, etc. It doesn't really matter if the distinction is artificial, so long as an appreciable number of designata are understood by the term, and able to be spoken about. I don't see that the thread has foundered on this distinction in any way. It seems like everyone knows what is being spoken about. To be precise, though, the most obvious and most primary complement would be private, mind-generated realities, such as thoughts, opinions, Descartes' recognition that he is a thinking thing, etc.
---
- :up:
One of the themes I'm studying in Aristotelian-Thomist (A-T) philosophy, is of the way that the intellect (nous) knows the forms or intelligible principles of things. I will probably start a thread on this topic, but here is a passage in a text on Thomist psychology that I find highly persuasive.
To hark back to your 'boulder' example - I suspect that, if we peruse the texts on classical epistemology, we won't find any passages that concern the reality or otherwise of boulders. I would further suspect that this is because 'a boulder' is simply the accidental form of the idea 'stone', the essential characteristics of which are impenetrability, heaviness, and so on. But the nature of stones has not been something of much discussion, I don't think. It reminds me of the question in The Parmenides as to whether 'hair, mud and dirt' have forms.
As I mentioned above, one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy is that objects come to be regarded as being inherently existent, when, from the pre-modern point of view, they have no real being of their own. As Meister Eckhardt said, 'beings are mere nothings'.
I put this to ChatGPT4. You might be interested in perusing the dialogue.
I think maybe you are conflating perspectivism (at least as I defend it) with indirect realism. Perspectivism is not the view that we each get our own TV-screen which merely represents some differing and otherwise obscure Reality. Instead we are ourselves (as 'pure witness' behind the psychological subject) 'are' perspectives, which is to say the very being of the world itself, with the world understood to have no other kind of being. As we look down on that city in the valley, it exists only as the-valley-for, never from no perspective at all.
:up:
Thanks, I am trying to follow a thread, including its running through Leibniz's The Monadology, and I was curious if it runs through Spinoza's work too. We all 'face' and 'intend' the [ same ] world, but this world is given to or through individual 'faces ' ('subjects.') I take the TLP to identify the 'pure subject' with exactly the being of the world --a triumph over dualism and the reification of awareness as some other kind of elusive material.
Maybe this is what you meant by 'ontological' [subject.] The limits of my language are the limits of my world because my 'belief' is the meaningstructure of the world, not something 'in' me.
Saying that we are perspectives implies that the idea that "we are perspectives" has a meaning only inside the perspective of those who say it. This is equivalent to say that it is meaningless, because its meaning is entirely limited inside itself, entirely determined by itself.
Respectfully, I don't think you have responded really to my point. Indirect realism, which seems to be your position, is (I think) even the dominant view.
You wrote:
By creating reality, Im referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified worldpicture within which we situate and orient ourselves. ... By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it.
I think you are also half-suggesting that the brain creates itself, if you really understand it to create the world. On the whole, I think you are more likely presenting indirect realism. Some kind of elusive urstuff is Really Out There --- as in Kant, who does not want to be mistaken for an idealist.
[quote=Kant]
Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses...Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary.
[/quote]
Here's indirect realism, which sounds very close to Kant.
Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the scientific view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.[3] Furthermore, indirect realism is a core tenet of the cognitivism paradigm in psychology and cognitive science. While there is superficial overlap, the indirect model is unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but there are no mind-independent objects.[4]
My own perspectivism (not really mine) is closer to idealism in a certain sense, but it reduces the subject to world rather than the other way around. (Like James or Mach, etc.)
I guess I'm asking you to clarify whether you are basically an indirect realist. Hence my quotes of Hobbes and Locke who are themselves close to Kant.
Perhaps instead, as per Bourdieu, 'my habitus' (or Merleau-Ponty 'my flesh' ... Nietzsche 'my body').
If you spy on your neighbor by peeping in through one window, and I peep in through another, are we not both peeping in on the same neighbor ?
If I believe that the Jones is guilty, while you believe he is innocent, aren't we both believing about the same Jones ?
I think (?) you are assuming some kind of dualism, as each of us is stuck in a solipsistic bubble of world-dream. I'm saying there 'is' not 'ontological' subject, or rather that such a subject is the being of the world, which is given like a cubist painting.
This may be a wild misreading, but, following Mach, are you [also] hinting at the fusion of my flesh and the world ? In a certain sense, I 'am' [also] my coffee cup. The boundaries of the ego are practically-conventionally determined.
But I can't deny that the flesh in another sense is both seeing and seen, and it's 'me' in the sense of its intimate relationship with my 'will.' [ Merleau-Ponty is a great mention. Only in the last year did I finally pay attention to such a great philosopher. ]
:up:
We end up with a boy in the bubble, who can't be sure there's a world out there.
[quote= Aquinas]The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and identifies it as a particular something.
[/quote]
This translates in my mind into a description of the scientific method. The sensitive stage becomes the gathering of data and experimentation, and the intellectual stage is theorising and hypothesis forming.
[quote= Thompson]Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as a prototype whole brain event', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event.[/quote]
"Affect" looks to be functioning here as the objectification of subjectivity. and I think it can help me in this context to clarify what I see as an important distinction between subjectivity and perspective.
Perspective seems to correspond to the form of the rock; the rock has a form, and that gives rise to any subject necessarily having a particular perspective on the rock. Whereas the 'affect' of an organism is the internally generated sense of its own being. The yeast cell defines itself and delimits itself as sugar in, CO2 or Alcohol out.
A subject locates itself as an entity, and its perspective arises from its location. But such a definition of self is necessarily permeable and incomplete. It's affect is its response to its environment as well as its response to itself. ( I am a farmer, teacher, philosopher, scientist an interactor of some sort with the environment...)
So when one starts to speak of colonial species and social species, there is potential for conflicted identification as between the cell and the colony; the conflict we experience as morality. Bees are the original suicide bombers, and greater love hath no bee, than to lay down his life for his hive. Is the hive the environment of the individual bee, or is the beekeeper or the bear the environment of the hive?
It becomes apparent to the environmentalist that the distinction that forms the subject is as real and as vague as the distinction of a weather system. the subject is a temporary vortex that is always part of a larger system to which it is accountable, and into which it dissolves. Forms arise and dissolve and all things must pass.
As the cognitive scientists say, in that video presentation I mentioned, of course there is an external world, but we don't see it as it is.
The reason I don't call that, or my view of that, indirect realism, is because that posits two things - one, the real world, and two, the representation or image of it. But we can't ever compare 'the real world' with 'the representation of it'.
The Mind and Cosmic Order intro again - 'Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxiesbut all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of lifeand the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.'
My argument is simpy that the mind or brain assimilates sensory and rational information and from this constructs what we understand as 'the world'. I'm not denying that there is a world apart from the mind, but saying that whatever we think or say about that purported world absent any mind is meaningless. I'm struggling to understand what about this is controversial or confusing, it seems very straightforward to me.
Quoting plaque flag
In the second edition of the CPR, Kant took pains to distinguish himself from Berkeley, because critics accused him of being like Berkeley, whom Kant described as a 'problematic idealist' on account of Berkeley saying that a world outside himself is dubious or impossible to know. But Kant described himself as transcendental idealist, and differentiated that from what he described as 'problematical idealism'. You can find details here.
Quoting Angelo Cannata
Time comprises the duration between instances, space the distance between points, right? So, how can those have objective reality without an observing mind that perceives the relation between given instances and specific points? It seems to me that as all of these require the connection of points in space and instances in time, that it is only a mind that can ascertain these relations, as without there being a scale or perspective, what is nearer and further or smaller and larger, sooner or later, an immense period of time, or a minute period?
As Kant puts it at the beginning of his critique:
He concludes 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other'.
I take it from this, and please correct me if I am wrong, that Kant denies to space and time a purely objective reality; that, in other words, space and time have an inextricably subjective ground. Hence perspective can't really be avoided.
Quoting unenlightened
Except that scientific method eschews the notion of there being intelligible forms, per se.
I don't think it does. Equations are forms; Classificatory systems are forms. They use another language is all.
That's an idea that I'm pursuing; that what Plato called 'forms' are really more like 'intellectual principles' and the like. But still, science generally, since Galileo, has strongly rejected anything sounding like Aristotelian matter-form dualism, and there's nothing corresponding to the Scholastic idea of the 'rational soul' in scientific theory. It's grounded in naturalism, and the existence of 'soul' is rejected as a matter of definition.
This is maybe the grand issue of German Idealism, so maybe it's not so surprising that it's controversial. Kant's own followers questioned the pointlessness of this X that nothing could be said about. But I think the confusion can be partially laid at your door.
You open with: The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence.
But you offer some kind of Kantian indirect realism, which if fine, of course --- it's a respectable position. And maybe the point was to ease the non-philosophical causal reader into Kantianism in an unintimidating way. Again, no complaint. But maybe saying mind is 'foundational' to existence is a little misleading ? As many philosophers have noted, that X is ambiguous and questionable.
:up:
I'd say it's bad scientistic metaphysicians [ who may sometimes also be physicists ] who tend to imagine these 'forms' as something somehow 'extra-mental' that is hidden 'behind' appearance/experience.
But Kant doesn't call himself, and is not referred to, as an indirect realist. Kant's position is known as transcendental idealism.
Quoting plaque flag
What I'm arguing against is the commonly-held view that mind is a product of physical causes. That is the general view of evolutionary naturalism, is it not? I hold to a view that the mind transcends physical causes. But I'm also not wishing to appeal to theism.
I've read Kant's outraged responses to his early critics. He was truly pissed. I've quoted them here even, years ago. But I don't think Berkeley's point is that we can't know things outside of our individual selves. I think his point is that a-perspectival, a-sensual, a-experiential reality does not compute. Like talk of triangles with 17 sides.
You can of course link me to secondary sources, but I was quoting primary sources to begin with. From the book he wrote after receiving that criticism, when he tried to force himself to be clearer.
[i]Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible. As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay,
All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.
The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
...
I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves
[/i]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52821/52821-h/52821-h.htm
[quote=CPR, A369]I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensiblity). The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.[/quote]
Having distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:
[quote=A370] The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us. [/quote]
"The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility" - you will observe that this is the view almost universally defended by others in this debate.
To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, is reconciled by distinguishing the operation of the cognitive system, in and of itself, on its own accord, from talking about the constituent parts that enable its function. The talking about it is that which creates the very Cartesian theater alledged to subsist in it. It is absurd to suppose reason has a partner, or intuition has a twin.
Consider time. At one point the subject thinks, feels, knows .whatever. It is at another time he reconsiders the content of former time, and whether sufficiently identical to it or not, it is still the same system belonging to the same subject in operation for both times. For any times, in fact.
From here, it follows the soft dualism in question doesnt reside within the system, but dualism proper is the condition resident between the system in which representations are the effects, and that which is given to it, by which representations are caused. There is no view; there is merely relation.
I suspect .Id like to think ..the extent to which you have a problem with indirect realism, isnt so great.
I don't think the phrase 'indirect realism' was invented yet. But let's just look.
The indirect realist agrees that the coffee cup exists independently of me. However, through perception I do not directly engage with this cup; there is a perceptual intermediary that comes between it and me. Ordinarily I see myself via an image in a mirror, or a football match via an image on the TV screen. The indirect realist claim is that all perception is mediated in something like this way. When looking at an everyday object it is not that object that we directly see, but rather, a perceptual intermediary. This intermediary has been given various names, depending on the particular version of indirect realism in question, including sense datum, sensum, idea, sensibilium, percept and appearance.
https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/#H2
Here's Kant:
[i]All the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance.
The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
...
I leave to things as we obtain them by the senses their actuality, and only limit our sensuous intuition of these things to this, that they represent in no respect, not even in the pure intuitions of space and of time, anything more than mere appearance of those things, but never their constitution in themselves.[/i]
Kant is truly more radical than Hobbes or Locke. For even matter in motion is mere appearance. The deep Stuff of the world is (in the quotes I've presented so far) completely hidden and mysterious.
For Kant, we only have [math] f(X) [/math], never [math] X [/math], where [math]f[/math] is our cognitive 'filter.' But [math] X [/math] serves no purpose here. I think Kant is misled by an analogy, thinking he can talk sensibly not only beyond individual human perspectives but beyond the human perspective altogether.
It's not my term. It's just standard philosophical terminology. You can of course stick to Kant's terminology. But that's beside the point, is it not ?
Sure we can. We just can't achieve a perfect match between our representation of the world and the full detail of the way the world is. Every day, billions of people are comparing their representations of the world with reality. Some manage to increase the accuracy of their representations.
that's more or less what I'm arguing in the OP.
I don't agree with 'indirect realism' because it posits two separate things - the reality and its representation. As if we could compare them.
Of course you can compare a photograph or a painting with the actual subject that it's supposed to represent, but that is not at issue.
I think Husserl also handles this nicely. We can always get a better and more complete look at something. We have the 'transcendent' (inexhaustible) object which we are never done learning about. We never see even a desk lamp from every possible angle in every possible lighting.
That 'truth' of the object is how it is for an ideal looking-at-it, roughly speaking. But this include accumulating concepts, relating objects to one another, the whole of science even.
But aren't you explicitly positing two things ? The representing and the represented ?
When you made that remark, I had copied in a section of Pinter's text, which, incidentally, was introduced by him referring to Wittgenstein's dictum that 'the world is the totality of facts', to wit:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 93). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition]In a universe without an observer having a purpose, you cannot have facts. As you may judge from this, a fact is something far more complex than it appears to be at first sight. In order for a fact to exist, it must be preceded by a segmentation of the world into separate things, and requires a brain that is able to extract it from the background in which it is immersed*. Moreover, this brain must have the power to conceive in Gestalts, because in order to perceive its outlines and extract it, a fact must be seen whole, together with some of its context.
A fact does not exist if it has not been articulated, that is, if it does not exist explicitly as a verbal entity sufficiently detailed that it can be made to correspond (approximately) to something in the external world. Facts dont exist in the absence of their statement (because a statement cuts the fact out of the background), and the statement cannot exist apart from an agent with a purpose. When an intentional agent sets out to carve a specific object from the background world, he has a Gestalt concept of the objectand from the latter, he acts to carve the object out. Thus, a fact cannot exist in a universe without living observers.
A fact does not hold in the universe if it has not been explicitly formulated. That should be obvious, because a fact is specific. In other words, statements-of-fact are produced by living observers, and thereby come into existence as a result of being constructed. It is only after they have been constructed (in words or symbols) that facts come to exist. Commonsense wisdom holds the opposite view: It holds that facts exist in the universe regardless of whether anyone notices them, and irrespective of whether they have been articulated in words. You may now judge for yourself if that is true.[/quote]
What do you make of this?
I'm a correlationist (or something like that), so I think you aren't being radical enough.
Quoting plaque flag
No. If the world as it is in itself is unknown to us, then it's not a thing. It neither exists nor does not exist.
Yes, commonsense tends to forget or not notice the transparent subject, which I equate with the very being of the world. So people tend to think that the world exists in an aperspectival way somehow. But I don't think we can really make sense of that. We understand 'matter' or its surrogate in terms of possible perception, possible experience. Experience is always a fusion of subject and object, to put it roughly, though it's more like a nondual stream that divides only upon reflection. I agree with Husserl that a certain kind of scientific realism is absurd, despite its popularity.
Well, that's what I meant from the outset.
Perhaps your view is changing as the discussion proceeds. But here you said :
Quoting Wayfarer
So you have a brain which presumably 'really' exists (a brain-in-itself, made of ur-stuff) taking more of this ur-stuff and creating ordinary experience. If the brain is itself mere appearance, then of course the brain-created world no longer makes sense.
Kant wrote that the hidden reality is nothing like appearance, not even spatially or temporally. But by abandoning primary qualities in this way, he abandons the brain and the sense organs. So he pushes Hobbes and Locke to a point of mystic and glorious absurdity.
It's only because of our ordinary experience with sense organs that we came up with the idea of appearance and perspective.
There's no way of being sure that we are both believing about the same Jones.
My own take is that language is fundamentally social, more social than individual. 'Language speaks the subject.'
Basically like this :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Moreover, critical rational discussion presupposes a shared language and a shared world. Rational norms are implicitly self-transcending.
So one can be mad, of course, truly fretting that one is trapped in a bubble, but one cannot argue seriously for the impossibility of the conditions of an argument being meaningful.
The brain doesn't appear at all. Not unless you're someone who is studying brains.
I agree, but we should be careful not to turn perspectives into objective realities. This mistake can be avoided by considering that, by talking about perspectives, we, as a consequence, need to apply the relativity of everything to the idea of perspectives as well, so that, at the end, we need to admit that, ultimately, we don't know what we are talking about.
?
This doesn't seem relevant. Of course our brains are protected by our skulls and our flesh.
Words are words. The issue is deciding when we are just using words or the words are using us.
I think you are making a good point about the fragility of relativism.
But one can say (with me) that we only ever have belief without also saying that all beliefs are equally worthy. We can accept our fallibility without being helplessly lost in doubt. In fact, we always do take all sorts of 'truths' for granted. Peirce is great on the 'settling' of belief. Inquiry is activated by the wobble of this or that piece of our 'belief machinery' --- which mostly runs quietly in the darkness. It's because we don't question the meaning of most of our words than we can question (in those words) the meaning of this or that one. And so on.
I think I should stress that I don't deny the necessity of an individual working brain for though. The point is that we are cultural beings, and that the hardware of the brain is necessary but not sufficient for us to be fully human. The hardware (wetware) is a thin client, a sine qua non.
To think rationally is to think according to norms. Following Brandom's inferentialism, I'd say that meaning is essentially normative/social. I do not at all deny the importance and possibility of acts of individual creativity. Such innovations sometimes spread throughout the culture, and there is no culture at all without actual living bodies. Spirit (culture) is a modification of 'nature.' It's all built on/from living flesh and its environment.
This is why I insist that the lifeworld is always already 'significant' or linguistically-structured. Sort of what Wittgenstein was about in the TLP. How do propositions mean ? The world is all that is case. What does it mean to call P true ? I say that belief is simply the structure of the world given perspectively. But we can have 'signitive intentions,' guesses that a box contains X rather than Y. So our counterfactuals picture the meaningful lifeworld, not some hidden ur-stuff. And 'seeing is believing' means that a 'fulfilled intention' is an extremely strong pressure on our belief (on the articulable meaningform of 'our-world-for-me.') Though we can always retrospectively decide that we hallucinated, or must have been dreaming.
No brain has ever been a phenomenon to the subject to which it belongs. The only brain that will ever appear to me, is someone elses, and even if I intuit it as such, I will still never apprehend its internal machinations.
To be more precise, Berkeley described how the existence of matter is an unnecessary assumption. He provided very good arguments, and demonstrated how "matter" is just a concept employed by us to account for the inferred temporal continuity of bodies, objects. This supposed temporal continuity (which is inferred from observations) makes an object identifiable at different times as the same object, supporting Aristotle's law of identity. The inferred continuous existence of the same object which is derived from observations of sameness (similarity) at different times, is commonly justified as caused by, or the result of the "matter" which inheres within the object.
Notice that I used "inheres within the object", because this is what I explained is a place holder for the unknown. So "matter" is just a place holder for the unknown. The real cause of the temporal continuity of sameness, which people attribute to "the matter" of the object is unknown.
So Berkeley demonstrates that "matter" as a concept of something which exists independently of human minds is no more justified, nor even better than the concept of "the Mind of God". Each of these two concepts serves to account for the temporal continuity of sameness of objects, in its own way, with its own history, but in reality each is just a different place holder for the unknown; each having its own connotations and extensions. Analysis of the connotations, extensions and history of usage is how we find out that each involves a different perspective toward the unknown.
Quoting Wayfarer
That the boulder truly does not have a shape is supported by Einsteinian relativity, as shape is dependent on the frame of reference. This is understood under the concept of length contraction which is related to time dilation.
Haven't you said this from your own perspective?
You are mistaking the appearance of shape from different reference frames with each other.
It is similar to saying a pencil isn't straight because when dropped into a glass of water the pencil appears bent.
No it is not "appearance" only. That is the whole point of relativity theory, it is what is really the case if e adhere to relativity theory. Just like the simultaneity of two events is actually different depending on frame of reference, and the passage of time is actually different (time dilation) depending on the frame of reference, the shape of the object is actually different (length contraction) depending on the frame of reference. When it is the case that from two distinct frames of reference, the shape of the object is different, we cannot say that one is the real, or true shape. That is the whole point of relativity theory in general.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To further understand this difference, it manifests as the difference between transcendent and immanent in the understanding of divinity, as well as the difference between local and non-local in quantum mechanics.
Simply put, the difference is in the way that we understand temporal continuity in relation to spatial existence. If temporal continuity is proper, and unique to each point in space, then each point has its own inherent maintenance as immanence, but if temporal continuity is universal, and the temporal continuity of all points everywhere, is related, this is transcendence.
Yes. But, respectfully, so what ? What do you expect ? A voice from the whirlwind ? But even that'd just be God's perspective, no ?
[1] Belief is the conceptual 'dimension' of the-world-from-a-perspective.
[2] This claim is itself a belief : in other words, the structure of our world as I see it.
[3] You may see the world differently, but the right string of words from me might change the way you see this same world.
If I give testimony, then it's indeed me giving testimony. I'll leave it for a certain stripe of mystic to believe in some naked reality, some grasp of Truth that is more than relatively settled belief. We can always change our minds, on some issues more plausibly than others. As I see it, you are maybe floating the usual bubble theory, paradoxically asserting that our world can't be talked about. The true sceptic is a madman or reduced to silence. Those who bring insight or even criticism take the shared world, shared language, and shared rational norms for granted (this equiprimordial pseudo-trinity is really one.)
I don't pretend to infallibility, and I hold to my right to change my mind in the future. As I see it, we tend to discuss our shared world from our differing perspectives. By doing so, we synthesize what we tend to call more adequate or 'objective' perspectives. I'm a big fan of Popper and his talk of letting our theories do our dying for us. His 'basic statements 'are also useful here. The tower of science rises from a swamp. No statement is beyond falsification or revision, but we take some as sure enough for now.
The newbie calculus student sees the same real numbers as the Fields Medal analyst, but not at all with the same depth or adequacy. They intend the same worldly object, the real number system (a cultural object), just as the child and the neurosurgeon can intend the same brain. Note that if inquiry is the settling of belief, which involves the resolution of a tension, it's no surprise that we understand our newly settled state as an improvement (as us moving closer to the 'truth.') But there's nothing magical in this word 'truth.' I call beliefs I share 'true.' In other words, I call descriptions of the world as I see it 'true.'
Have you ever done the math?
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/691825/will-you-see-distance-contraction-inside-the-space-ship-at-near-light-speed
Might I rest assured youre familiar with the so-called dual aspect vs dual object theory, regarding transcendental philosophy, or theories of perception in general? If you are, and hold with the dual object scenario, which seems to be the case, re: posits two separate things , then your objection to indirect realism may be valid. But for he who holds with the dual aspect scenario, in which there are not two separate things, but merely two methods for examining the one thing**, the objection can be overruled.
So saying, transcendental theory, as epistemologically grounded as it is, makes explicit there are not two separate things, the real and the representation of the real, a seemingly ontological consideration to be sure, insofar as the representation is not a thing in the same sense as the thing which appears, is. This denominates representation to a speculative procedural constituent, logically concluded or rationally presupposed, rather than empirically given. It also makes the determination as to necessity vs contingency a mitigating condition in itself, the logic being necessary, the empirical, contingent.
And, while I agree we do not compare them, per se, the real against the representation, there are judgements which follow in due course. It is the judgements on the synthesis of representations, or, which is the same thing, our cognitions, that are compared, and those by reason for their mutual consistency, and to which Nature informs of the correctness, either of the one in particular, or of the one over the other in a series.
(** two methods: thought, and experience)
Is there another reason you do not agree with indirect realism? Or is it simply that Im misconstruing what you meant by it?
Kant touch this.
:cool:
Right, and this definition of objective is what I most took issue with in my original response. I think it's lumping multiple ideas together that are better separated.
It seems fine as a pragmatic distinction to me as well. Like I said, I think such a distinction is fairly widely recognized. What I was asking was: is there a definition of mind independence that goes beyond merely a rejection of subjective idealism-- i.e. a definition that can challenge objective idealism --- while remaining monist, coherent, and consistent?
Personally, I'm not aware of such a definition that avoids falling into dualism. But if there isn't such a definition, then it's unclear to me exactly what objective idealists are arguing against or what their critics are arguing for.
As you point out, in obvious ways, some entities seem mind independent (rocks versus the mental image of a rock). In other obvious ways, nothing we know is mind independent (trivially true). In general, neither objective idealism nor its physicalist converse challenge these intuitive distinctions, which leads me to question what sort of definition would put what is at stake into clear terms? "Objectivity" here is, IMO, a red herring, neither here nor there, since it is best defined in terms of perspective and subjectivity.
Plus, the obvious cases bleed into less obvious ones. Is the United States of America mind-independent? Communism? Species? Color? It seems fairly obvious that these can all be described objectively to some degree. For example, there is an objective fact about the color of stop lights. But color being "mind independent" seems to spark more debate.
See below for more detail on why I think such a definition of mind-independence will be hard to come up with.
That's certainly an important part of the history. But the problem seems to have accelerated first with Kant's notion of the noumena and again with positivist attempts to argue that "objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit." This is then combined with the larger issue of "objectivity" becoming conflated with "noumenal," "mind-independent," or "real."
Per you're earlier response:
This seems to be a definition of objectivity that requires too many metaphysical assumptions for me. That it might be popular just suggests to me that the definition is part of the problem. It seems to me that it requires:
1. That objects are ontologically more fundamental than properties. I.e., that objects are not defined by their properties. If objects [I]were[/I] defined by their properties, we'd have to explain on what grounds we can eliminate objects' properties vis-á-vis mind from consideration when it comes to "defining" an object. This is the case if we want to achieve a conception of "mind independence," anyhow. If objects are defined by their properties, then mind independent objects and those interacting with mind would be [I]different objects[/I], a sort of Kantian dualism of the sort Kant made efforts to avoid (arguably unsuccessfully).
2. It seems to require that objects hold the properties they do intrinsically. If objects have the properties they do in virtue of interactions with other objects, then any conception of "mind-independence" would need to explain how interactions with mind are not the type of extrinsic relations/properties that come to define an object. Same problems as #1 re dualism.
3. It seems to require a substance metaphysics since objects need to be more fundamental than their attributes. Objects must be somehow "contained" from the rest of the world, such that we have objects, plural, and not a single object.
I think there are ways around #1 and #2. Metaphysics has the idea of "bare substratum," pure haecceities or "objectness" that properties can attach to. But even advocates of substratum have approached it with reticence, and the need for such a view, to my mind, is simply evidence against objects being ontologically basic in the first place.
Of course, you could take most of the above as simply a good argument against any strong mind-independence, which you seem to be arguing for. That's fair. But there does seem to be an intuitive way in which external objects are mind-independent and I'd like to find a way to define that relation too. Further, if "objectivity" gets thrown into this issue, I feel like it puts us in the less defensible position of having to attack the "objectivity of the world," rather than simply arguing that objectivity is not what is at stake when defining "mind-independence."
If we instead define objectivity in terms of views being more or less objective/subjective, not loading the term up with ontological implications, it seems like we can separate the desire to speak of an achievable "objective view of the world," from whole issue of Kantian-style dualism.
For sure. My reticence re indirect realism doesn't equate to support for most formulations of direct realism. It's more a dissatisfaction with current theories of perception. Not that I have a good alternative; it's always easier to critique.
I do, however, tend towards the "direct," in some key ways. Hegel's intuition that, when we come to think differently about something, we change that thing, seems apt to me. The most obvious cases are those involving institutions. As history progresses, we come to view entities differently. "Communism," today doesn't mean what "communism" meant in 1848 when the Manifesto was published. The entity has changed with our conception of it. The very fact of our coming to see the entity in different ways changes the entity. The same is true with "chivalry," "Christianity," "the Second Amendment," etc.
But those entities can obviously also be described objectively in many ways. Hegel's insight is that this sort of change also applies to seemingly more "concrete," entities as well. When we discover more about water, lead, foxes, bacteria, etc. their relations with the world also change because our conception of them is one such relation. Thus, if objects are described relationally, then they change as the history of consciousness unfolds. And in this sense, the relation between perception / thought and entities seems quite direct.
If we say that only our "representations" of entities change throughout cognitive history, I fear we end up in dualism. How does this apply to things like "economic recessions?" Obviously, our representation is part of what that sort of entity is. But then recessions also have global causal powers; they enact a lot of physical effects for mere "representation," effects that can be objectively studied. A hard line between mental objects that change as conceptions of them change and objects-in-themselves who only have their representations changed seems doomed to end up very blurry. Thus, I find it better to talk about concreteness, and just accept that any "representation" is itself a direct relation between mind and the object being represented.
And this is, IMO, the presupposition that is the weak link. I don't agree with everything Hegel says about Kant, but I do agree with the position that the presupposition that perceptions are of objects in Kant is the stumbling block therein. This is given dogmatically, and I tend to agree with Hegel that it can't be taken for granted since it essentially begs the question on the issue of representation vis-a-vis reality. The point isn't that thoughts/perceptions cannot be of objects; it's that we can't start with that as a given. Recovering the objects of sensation without assuming them resolves the dualism (if you buy the story Hegel is selling anyhow).
So does "gnomon". :joke:
A gnomon (/?no??m?n, -m?n/; from Ancient Greek ?????? (gn?m?n) 'one that knows or examines')
Quoting unenlightened
The enactivists look at subject-object, organism-environment this way:
The organism interprets its world, but not by representing it, not by attempting to match an internal model with an external reality. Instead, perception is grounded in sensory-motor interactions with the world. We know by doing, not by representing. Organisms know their world by building a niche out of it and interacting with this niche. Whatever aspects of that world are irrelevant to the goals and purposes that are defined by organism-niche interaction are invisible to that creature. So all living systems, through their activity within their niche, continually define their world via what matters, is significant and relevant to their continued functioning. The organism ceases to be an organism as soon as it loses this goal-oriented integrity and unity of functioning. Affect in its most basic form is simply this normative, goal-oriented organizational a priori. To perceive a rock as an object with properties such as weight, size and shape is to first construct such idealizations as identically persisting object number, magnitude, extension and measure. In other words, mathematics, logic and empirical science are human-created environmental niches that guide the way we interact with our world. They are affective value systems, through which we normatively determine correctness or incorrectness, truth and falsity in relation to all the features of rocks and other value objects experienced from within our constructed niche.
I would be a strong supporter of something like this theory if it were about a process. 'Minding', perhaps.
I know academe studies 'philosophy of mind' but 'mind' is a very English-language concept. Even our neighbours' French and German struggle to translate 'mind'. It's a thing that isn't a thing, an all-encompassing entity that yet has no 'stuff' in it. To me it feels to be in the way, like a homunculus.
Maybe 'minding' isn't right either but (a) it's a process, and I feel that much of what you write about is about process; (b) it relates to 'thinking' without imprisoning that thinking in a particular pseudo-place, allowing the body as well as the brain to get a look-in, indeed perhaps allowing the process to be free-floating in a Hegelian way as plaque flag references; (c) it's got an element of attention or caring in it, 'Yes I do mind', a touch of Heidegger's 'sorge' if we're prepared to mention the old Nazi - and for me that helps, we're talking about creatures who go about the world and aren't necessarily sitting back in their armchairs, puffing on their pipes, reflecting on great Matters, they are rather coping in the here and now with what matters to them, inventing ideas to explain what happens as they move around, improvising, improving, bouncing ideas off each other.
On this account of course there is no 'real' to penetrate to or to accept is forever out of reach, because there need be no ontology, like Collingwood's metaphysics. Epistemology might be all there is :)
All very interesting, but I am more interested in how the boundary is formed; the 'dash' between organism and environment. You say, "the organism interprets..." and one assumes therefrom that the environment does not interpret. So there is an action before the act of interpretation, which is the act of self identification, that has to happen for there to be a separate world to interpret.
Quoting unenlightened
Most of our living is social, and our cultural environment is reciprocally interpretive. In the agential realism of Karen Barad and Joseph Rouse the non-human environment also interprets. Not everything for them has to lead back to a perceiving subject. They are perfectly happy to imagine a world without humans or animals in which each aspect of it interacts with other aspects in an agential way. That is, material interaction always takes place within configurations of mutual affecting that lend to all phenomena an intrinsically interpretive character.
Concerning the idea of organismic self-identification, on the one hand, one would have to say that the self of the organism is not something locked within the borders of the physical body or brain, but is instead the ongoing and continually changing patterns of activity produced by brain-body-world reciprocal interaction. On the other hand, the organism part of this body-world interaction is characterized by a certain operational closure or asymmetry with respect to the world. Merleau-Ponty describes this boundary as a flesh of the world or chiasm, a kind of reciprocal exchange. One would have to imagine a self which continually comes to itself from the world, reinventing itself through this exposure and yet maintaining a certain integrity or style of being through these changes.
Daccord. The analytic dudes got ahold of it, sent it off into the metaphysical puckerbrush.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As do I, re: perception. Every perception is directly real, from which follows every sensation given from any one of them, is directly real.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Ehhhhh Im a staunch, dyed-in-the-wool, card-carryin dualist, so my position is we cant really end up where we always were to begin with.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yeah, but thats a qualitative judgement describing a subject that holds those representations. Just as the representations change in correspondence to the conception of the entity, usually via experience, so too will the subjects judgement change in correspondence to his representations. Blurry may then, if not become clear, then at least become different, in which case, what was formally i.e., a recession, becomes merely (a-HEM) a historically precedented temporary downward trend.
But I get your point.
No, that's a pretty good analysis. Bernardo Kastrup will say that 'tears' are the 'external appearance' of sadness, but that they are not, in themselves, the actual feeling of sadness. They are how my sadness appears to another, whereas I experience it first person. I suppose that is dual-aspect monism isn't it?
Quoting Mww
:lol:
Nice to see you back, and well said! :clap:
In passing it is worth noting that the current understanding of matter is represented by 'the standard model of particle physics.' And where do models exist, if not in minds? Hence, Richard Conn Henry's The Mental Universe and Bernard D'Espagnat, What we call Reality is Just a State of Mind.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Do you have any representatives of objective idealism in mind? Perhaps this snippet from the Wikipedia entry might provide grist for the mill:
[quote=Wikipedia;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_idealism#:~:text=Objective%20idealism%20starts]Objective idealism starts with Platos theory of forms, which mantains that objectively existing but non-material "ideas" give form to reality, thus shaping its basic building blocks.
....
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce defined his own version of objective idealism as follows:
The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws (Peirce, CP 6.25).
By "objective idealism", Peirce meant that material objects such as organisms have evolved out of mind, that is, out of feelings ("such as pain, blue, cheerfulness") that are immediately present to consciousness.[8] Contrary to Hegel, who identified mind with conceptual thinking or reason, Peirce identified it with feeling, and he claimed that at the origins of the world there was "a chaos of unpersonalized feelings", i.e., feelings that were not located in any individual subject.[8] Therefore, in the 1890s Peirce's philosophy referred to itself as objective idealism because it held that the mind comes first and the world is essentially mind (idealism) and the mind is independent of individuals (objectivism)[/quote]
Peirce's vision is congenial to my way of thought. What you see with the appearance of the first organisms is also the appearance of subjective awareness albeit in rudimentary form.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I acknowledge that mine was an idiosyncratic definition, that 'inherent in the object' is not, in fact, the definition of 'objectivity'. But I still maintain that there are more and less objective ways of understanding. I referred above to the efficacy of the scientifically-developed COVID vaccines opposed to quack cures like hydrochloroquine - the scientifically-developed medicines are objectively more effective. I don't see how that can be disputed.
The philosophical issue I see with 'mind-independence' is this: Natural science might be perfectly justified in attempting to attain the hypothetical 'view from nowhere', that is, an understanding free of subjective, cultural, personal and other forms of bias. That is what I would designate 'methodological naturalism'. However, to make of that a metaphysical axiom - that science really sees 'the world' as it is and would be in the absence of any observer - is another matter entirely. In doing this, empiricism attempts to assign an absolute value to the objects of perception which are necessarily contingent. So trying to assign 'mind-independence' to the sensory domain is a performative contradiction, as any perception of it is necessarily contingent upon the senses and intellect (per Kant).
It's worth recalling that, in the classical tradition, objects of perception were regarded as being near to non-existent - they are ephemeral fleeting instances of the Forms. According to Afikan Spir, neoKantian philosopher, 'the empirical world has an illusory character, because phenomena are ever-changing, and empirical reality is unknowable.' Which, again, seems to find plenty of justification in the current state of physics!
Quoting Wikipedia
That notion seems to go beyond your notion of a local Mind-Created World, to an ideal Mind that is literally out-of-this-world. Does Peirce define his postulated "The Mind" in more detail? How does "The Mind" compare to your creative "minds"? :smile:
You are appealing to a narrow concept of existence here.
How so ?
To be sure, I'm using a fairly concrete analogy there (taken from L) , but I embrace the existence of all kinds of mental entities, mathematical entities, etc. Truly I think I have an especially inclusive sense of existence, limited only by possible experience -- hardly a stringent criterion for someone who tries to speak as a philosopher.
You haven't provided an argument. The fact is that depending on the frame of reference, measurement of the same thing will be different, and not any one of the measurements can be said to be the objectively real or true measurement That a frame of reference can be produced which represents the object as "at rest", and this frame is said to provide the object's "proper length" is irrelevant, because that designation is completely arbitrary. By the precepts of relativity theory no object is truly, or really at rest, so "proper length" makes no assumption about a true or real length of the object.
And you haven't answered the question.
It's not called relativity for nothing. Yet it isn't hard to determine that a lot of thing are at rest with respect to my initertial reference frame and I can discuss the shape of many such things as they are in my inertial reference frame. If I, for some reason, need to calculate how they might look from a different inertial reference frame I could do so. It's not a big deal.
Anyway, why would I bother providing an argument to someone who wants to argue about something he doesn't understand? I don't see the point in doing so.
But the question is whether those things have a real or true shape, independent from a frame of reference. That you can provide a measurement, and a representation of the shape of many objects, from a specific frame of reference indicates nothing about whether they have a shape independent from a frame of reference.
Quoting wonderer1
Well, it seems like you took objection to something I said, not vise versa. So if you cannot provide an argument to support your objection, then please be still. But I really wish you would provide such an argument, so I could find out why you think as you do, concerning this matter.
But you won't find out why I think as I do, until you study special relativity well enough to know what you are talking about. So get back to me if that happens.
This echoes the measurement issue in quantum mechanics - it's not until you make a measurement, or specify an outcome, that the object of analysis comes into existence. That is the thing that realists can't handle, so they invented the many-worlds interpretation just to avoid it.
:cool: :up:
I claim that we can only talk sensibly about something at least possibly experienceable by us. I'm saying connected to our experience, not fully and finally or even mostly given, for even everyday objects are 'transcendent' in the Husserlian sense: they suggest an infinity of possible adumbrations. Note that I think a person can be alone with an experience --- be the only person who sees or knows an entity.
If you think one has to do the math to understand special relativity, you clearly haven't read Einstein's book. This is a ridiculous conversation. But you're making it fun for me, so carry on please.
Thanks for the Peircean position on "ideal minds". My personal approach is more like that of the Greek philosophers, who posited "unknowable" entities --- such as Logos, First Cause & Form --- and assigned functional real-world roles to them. Apparently, the Buddha also posited at least one hypothetical unknowable entity -- Nirvana -- and assigned a functional role to that imaginary state of mind : cessation of Duhkha (suffering). :smile:
Nirvana Unattainable? : hence unknowable (except possibly by dis-embodied spirits)
Nirvana is unattainable because you can't be completely desireless because you will still want to reach Nirvana and become Enlightened.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/1b8v0v/nirvana_unattainable/
What is nirvana? :
Nirvana is a Sanskrit word for the goal of the Buddhist path: enlightenment ... impossible to describe.
https://tricycle.org Home Level 1
Note --- Nirvana : extinguishment, non-being, un-knowable (in the normal sense). I suppose that, in theory, a ghost could know the "peace that passes all understanding". (Philippians 4:7)
Scholastic Realism is a type of moderate realism. As such, it falls between platonism and nominalism on the issue of universals. Universals, strictly speaking, only exist in minds, but they are founded on real relations of similarity in the world.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Scholastic-Perspectives-Philosophical-Scholarship/dp/0820442704
Note --- Sounds similar to my own notion of ideal Universals : unknowable by the senses, but imaginable by the rational mind.
For sure. :up: I think I have that book stashed away somewhere.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, a boulder does not have a substantial form because it is a composite object, but the substances that compose it do have substantial form. But this is beside the question of whether extramental physical objects have shape, and there's really no disagreement on this in the Aristotelian tradition.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think this is right at all, but when you investigate the topic we can look at it. Earlier I mentioned this topic:
Quoting Leontiskos
I think that in trying to avoid Scientism you may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Quoting Wayfarer
Eckhart is not going to be a good representative, here. He knows Aristotle and Thomas well, but he was also much more Platonic than they were, and in any case this probably comes from a sermon, and is conveying a spiritual point.
Quoting Wayfarer
Funny thing is, ChatGPT gets this right, particularly in its first two responses to you. That is what he meant. I have actually read a lot of Eckhart. But in examining your question you should look at philosophical treatises, not sermons. Eckhart isn't going to treat such a foundational question.
I actually think your view is bread-and-butter nominalism. From the paper I cited earlier ():
Quoting Reality: The Philosophy of Realism | Introduction, p. 3
Quoting Reality: The Philosophy of Realism | Introduction, p. 10
(Pinter seems to be a nominalist; he seems to be following in the footsteps of modern philosophy, which is thoroughly nominalist. Note that Scientism is closer to Realism than Nominalism.)
I think this is a matter of logic; to be this or that no observer would seem to be required. To be distinguished as this or that an observer is required. Something has first to be this or that in order to be able to be distinguished as being this or that.
I don't see it that way at all. Again, it is a matter of logic. "Fact" is an ambiguous word in that it can be taken to signify a statement of an actuality or simply an actuality; so the encyclopedia is a compendium of facts in the first sense, but not in the second.
If 'fact' can signify either 'actuality' or 'statement of actuality' then it follows that on the first definition facts can exist without being observed, but on the second definition they obviously need to an observer who can, at least in principle, state them.
I don't think citing QM helps your case, because it trades on one interpretation of the so-called "observer problem", by interpreting "observer" to mean "conscious observer". In any case QM seems to show that all things consist in different and unique configurations of energy, and there seems to be no reason that configurations of energy should not exist absent observers, or that what pertains to the microphysical world regarding its counter-intuitive behavior should be translatable to the macrophysical world.
Quoting plaque flag
Of course, I agree that we can talk sensibly only about what we are familiar with. And I agree that everyday objects are transcendental, where that term is taken to signify that our experience of them cannot, even in principle, exhaust their natures or apprehend them in their wholeness.
As you say there are perhaps an infinite number of possible "adumbrations" of any object. But it does not follow that these transcendental objects which appear to us do not exist, or that they are not more than the totality of their possible adumbrations.
The first thread I created on the forum that was predecessor to this one was an exploration and defense of platonic realism. I say that universals are 'the ligatures of reason' - that they are what enable abstract judgement. I'm intending to start another thread on that so I won't go into too much detail.
Quoting Leontiskos
I felt the salient part of the response was this:
[quote=ChatGPT]Modern empirical philosophy grants particulars a kind of primary status. These particulars are real, and our task is to observe, measure, and understand them. The inherent reality of these objects is, in many ways, taken for granted.
Eckharts view, on the other hand, suggests that the inherent reality of particulars is derived and secondary. They are "mere nothings" compared to the greater, all-encompassing reality of God.[/quote]
For Aquinas, all material particulars owe their existence to God. He posits that not only did God create the world, but God also continually conserves it in existence. Without God's sustaining power, material things would revert to nothingness. Accordingly, in Aquinas, the ontological status of material particulars is contingent, dependent on God's creative and conserving act. My argument is that materialism grants material objects inherent existence, sans any 'creating and conserving act' of God. Is that not so? Furthermore, that with empiricism, objects are accorded a kind of absolute status that they would not be granted in A-T philosophy. That is what materialism means. (By the way, I recall in our first conversation, I referred to Jacques Maritain's essay, the Cultural Impact of Empiricism. I look to that for understanding of and support for my view of universals.)
Quoting Leontiskos
I believe the exact opposite. It was the rejection of universals first by nominalists such as William of Ockham that was the predecessor to later empiricism. I've put the argument for the reality of universals many times on this forum. There's an academic paper by a scholar called Joshua Hocshchild, who writes from within the Catholic Intellectual tradition, called 'What's Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West' (available on academia). He quotes Richard Weaver's book Ideas have Consequences, which is also about the rejection of universals and the decline of metaphysics, who says:
I see the decline of the belief in universals as the immediate precursor to materialism in the modern period. This is because it results in the inability to conceive of different modes of existence, such as the reality of intelligible objects. A compelling case is made for this in the 2009 book Theological Origins of Modernity, by Michael Allen Gillespie.
As for Charles Pinter and realism v nominalism, the subject doesn't come up at all. But I am inclined towards the view that what he views as 'gestalts' - fundamental cognitive wholes - might have a relationship with the Forms or Ideas. It is something I'm intending to explore.
Finally, after 20 odd pages of discussion, you still seem to think idealism is saying that 'without an observer reality does not exist'. I do not say that.
Quoting Janus
Disagree. A fact, as the argument states, is specific.
Your response does not contradict what I said. States of affairs or actualities are specific, and so are statements about them. If the actualities were not specific, then no specific statements about them could be made.
You speak about the word "fact" as though only one true definition pertains to it (the one that serves your argument, of course). I think it is a matter of usages, and the usages are patently equivocal. To put it another way 'fact' is an ambiguous term.
Quoting Wayfarer
I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I think it raises a pertinent issue. If the in-itself nature of things cannot be known, we cannot with certainty say whether they exist in themselves or do not. From the fact that we cannot be sure whether they exist or not, it does not logically follow that they neither exist nor do not exist.
As I understand it Kant posits things in themselves because of the absurdity that would be involved in saying that something appears, but that there is nothing that appears. If there is something that appears, then it follows logically that the something that appears exists. So, I say that what we can say about the in-itself is governed only by logic, since we cannot know the in-itself nature of things, and it seems absurd to say that there could be something non-existent whose in-itself nature cannot be known.
This is all true... but in my opinion it's an undue mixing of theology with philosophy. It's also tricky because not all modern philosophers reject divine conservation, nor do they need to. The realism/nominalism debate concerns the status of our knowledge, and this is rather different than a debate about divine conservation and so-called "existential inertia." Also, when we get into the acts of secondary causes, the classical view of divine concurrentism is going to explicitly stop short of Occasionalism, and the point here is that for the classical theist position there is a real way in which things have being in themselves, even though this is ultimately referred to God.
I mean, you could try to make a genealogical argument that a shift from classical theism to naturalism resulted in Scientism, but the curious thing is that Aristotle manages to avoid Scientism without introducing explicitly theistic premises into his Physics or Metaphysics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but empiricism and Scientism are not the same thing. Would you not say that Scientism accepts that the objects of scientific study have being in themselves, and are knowable in themselves, and that this is the crux of the realist/nominalist debate?
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, and I agree that that aspect of Scientism (inability to conceive...) does flow out from nominalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, at this point I have disavowed that view so many times that I am just going to challenge you to produce quotes or evidence for your conclusion. Existence is a related issue, so it cannot be discounted out of hand, but it is not the issue I have been focusing on, for it is not the issue that divides us.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that it flows from Ockham, but Hocschild's project here is very specialized. I tend to think he is either lost in the weeds or splitting hairs (or else attending to a more minute problem than that which concerns us). But note that he is rejecting the received view, which he sets out:
Quoting Joshua Hochschild, Whats Wrong with Ockham?
Philosophers can and will continue to argue at length about what exactly Aquinas or Ockham believed, but the terms 'Realism' and 'Nominalism' have a definite meaning in the philosophical lexicon, and challenging that meaning on the basis of a close reading of Ockham doesn't strike me as a productive avenue. Everyone recognizes that the dichotomy is a simplification of the views of particular thinkers.*
But note that, if we take Hocschild at his word about the received view, then Pinter is a nominalist with respect to the universal of shape.
* The complicated question, which we are not honing in on, has to do with the manner in which a universal is said to be mind-independent. The accurate predication of a universal constitutes a truth, and people (like Hocschild, but I would have to read him further to know for sure) often conclude that because truth is mind-dependent for Aquinas, therefore he was a nominalist. This fails to hone in on the precise distinction. A universal like shape is only known by minds, but it truly exists in things. Even if there were no minds, it would still exist, but it would not be known to exist. (Note that I am speaking of the existence of the universal (shape), not the substance of which it is predicated.)
(Out for a few days)
It seems to me odd that @Wayfarer will say that universals have mind-independent existence, but he will not admit that ordinary objects do. As I see it universals, or generalities, are only possible on account of the observed differences between, and commonalties shared by, objects.
Of course, it is the observer that formulates these observed differences and commonalities as generalities and specificities, but it would seem implausible to think that these are created ex nihilo or arbitrarily by the observer; it seems more plausible, to me at least, to think that the observed differences and commonalities are real attributes of the objects and do not depend for their existence on being observed, even though they obviously do depend on the observer for being apprehended and distinguished.
Quite blustery, but demonstration of more accurate understanding of Special Relativity is what I was hoping to see. So like I said, if you can provide that, get back to me.
Apologies if I am misunderstanding your criticism. (I've had another try at it below).
Hochschild does not hold that Aquinas was nominalist, not at all, but I'm afraid trying to condense his depiction in a forum post would not be possible. There is a passage in his essay that I often refer to, because it helped me to understand what is at issue:
[quote=Joshua Hochschild]Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see forms not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophys highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. [/quote]
That makes a great deal of sense to me. Formal and final causes provide the raison d'etre of things, in their absence, there is a broad streak of irrationality in modern culture.
----RECAP----
I've backtracked through the dialogue to better respond to your criticism, as you're a serious thinker and I would like to believe I've responded adequately.
Quoting Leontiskos
You're saying it's pre-existent, and its discovered by us, which is an empirical fact. I'm not denying the empirical fact. When you say this, you have, on the one hand, the object, and on the other, ideas and sensations which are different to the object, as they occur within the mind. You're differentiating them - there is a pre-existent shape, and here, the ideas and sensations are in your mind.
Quoting Leontiskos
We do not have to give up facts, but to recognise the role of the observer.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agreed a matter of empirical fact, boulders do have shapes, but the substance of the OP is the role of the observing mind in providing the framework within which empirical facts exist and are meaningful.
Quoting Leontiskos
It is indeed. I'm arguing that there is a subjective element in all knowledge, without which knowledge is impossible, but which is not in itself apparent in experience. This is why disagreement is possible. I also have the understanding that as imperfect finite beings knowledge is always limited. But I do not discount revelation or spiritual enlightenment and the possibility of true knowledge.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is what I'm arguing. I know that it is an empirical fact that there are untold, countless things that I will never know or have any contact with - heck, I don't know most of the people in my street - but that is not the point at issue.
Quoting Janus
My point is perhaps best understood as semantic. Let P be claim that objects exist as more than their possible adumbrations (in a wide metaphorical sense of adumbration, which might include the inexhaustibility of the concept of a prime number.) Now what is P supposed to mean ?
In my view, the point is to see that the object is not hidden behind or within itself. It's just we are temporal beings, grasping the objects over time, seeing this aspect and then perhaps that one.
Quoting Janus
I think he makes that point too somewhere (I tried to find it), but perhaps its best to understand him as the radicalization of a tradition.
[quote = Kant]
Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible.
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Kant's final claim is recklessly wrong. If space and time are only on the side of appearance, we no longer have a reason trust the naive vision of a world mediated by sense organs in the first place. Crack open your Descartes, and you'll find a detailed analysis of vision and other surprisingly sophisticated discussions of the nervous system. Locke and Hobbes also acknowledged spatial and temporal reality of the brain that they needed, after all, to tell the rest of their story, the one about it 'painting' a 'gray' world of primary qualities with lovely secondary qualities, like color, sound, value, significance.
Kant makes all of that appearance, leaving nothing behind but a pointless shadow, because he thinks the grammar requires it, and because he's afraid of being seen as Berkeley --- probably because he's more absurd than Berkeley, though apparently more theologically sophisticated.
Whereas I think he's right. As I've said throughout, how can there be time without duration, space without distance, and either of those without perspective? The mind provides the perspective and scale within which time and space are meaningful. That's also shown up in cosmology.
Also an extract from Schopenhauers Philosophy by Bryan Magee.
The previous chapters in this book concern the way in which the brain unconsciously constructs its perception of the world from the elements of physical stimuli and the interaction of autonomic and conscious faculties. The following extract is from end of Chap 4 beginning of Chap 5.
[Quote=Schopenhauers Philosophy, Bryan Magee] It was Locke who first identified the characteristics which could not be 'thought away' from the objects of our experience characteristics without which objects as such were literally inconceivable. This was an achievement of genius. But it was not until philosophy's Copernican revolution (i.e. Kants Critique of Pure Reason) that the true philosophical explanation of it became possible. And this was not, as Locke had thought, that the primary qualities are the irreducibly minimal attributes necessary to material objects existing independently of experience, in a space and time which are also independent of experience, but that they are constructive principles in terms of which the mind creates the percepts of conscious experience out of raw material supplied to it (of necessity prior to perception, and therefore not perceived) by the senses.
Schopenhauer was the first person to put forward 'a thorough proof of the intellectual nature of perception [made possible] in consequence of the Kantian doctrine', and was also the first person to marry this philosophical account to its corresponding physical account. (Here theres a brief account of how Kants work has shown up in biology, cognitive science and even linguistics.)
Schopenhauer's reformulation of Kant's theory of perception brings out implications of it which Kant touched on without giving them anything like the consideration their importance demanded . The first of these is that if all the characteristics we are able to ascribe to phenomena are subject-dependent then there can be no object in any sense that we are capable of attaching to the word without the existence of a subject. Anyone who supposes that if all the perceiving subjects were removed from the world then the objects, as we have any conception of them, could continue in existence all by themselves has radically failed to understand what objects are.
Kant did see this, but only intermittently in the gaps, as it were, between assuming the existence of the noumenon 'out there' as the invisible sustainer of the object. He expressed it once in a passage which, because so blindingly clear and yet so isolated, sticks out disconcertingly from his work: 'If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of this subject's representations.'
Another objection would run: 'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to what Kant has just been quoted as saying, that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was twofold. First, the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room. The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.
This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.
Schopenhauer's second refutation of the objection under consideration is as follows. Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the latter no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the former in short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. [/quote]
I hope you all find this quote from Sartre, basically the opening of Being and Nothingness, relevant (tho maybe all will have a different use or reaction).
I claim that all we can mean when we talk of the existence of this puppy is caught up in actual and possible experience, but I further claim that this experience is really just the being of the world, which 'just happens' to reliably organize itself around sentient and sapient flesh, 'into' which it flows.
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The thing is given in experiences, and yet, it is not given; that is to say, the experience of it is givenness through presentations, through appearings. Each particular experience and similarly each connected, eventually closed sequence of experiences gives the experienced object in an essentially incomplete appearing, which is one-sided, many-sided, yet not all-sided, in accordance with everything that the thing is. Complete experience is something infinite. To require a complete experience of an object through an eventually closed act or, what amounts to the same thing, an eventually closed sequence of perceptions, which would intend the thing in a complete, definitive, and conclusive way is an absurdity; it is to require something which the essence of experience excludes.
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Note the acknowledgment that 'to appear' supposes in essence somebody to whom to appear'. That is the 'transcendental subject' (which incidentally is not phenomenally existent).
My view on that is that it's a mistake (partially of Kant's making) to suppose that the world 'as it is in itself', the 'ding an sich' or 'the noumenal' is something that exists outside of or apart from phenomena and then to proceed to wonder what this 'real world' might be. As for the last four sentences, I don't agree with them at all. Other than that, I don't see much here in conflict with the OP, nor in the following Husserl quote.
If you follow me and understand 'mind' as just the being of the world, then maybe I'll agree with you, for I think space and time are as real as anything can be. But if you insist on tying mind down to the brain, then you seem to be attributing the creation of time and space to a spatial and temporal object (this same brain.) You are basically (at least implicitly) making time and space a dream, as if dreams can have meaning apart from ordinary temporal spatial worldly experience. Do you see the issue ? Kant casts into doubt all of our basic, ordinary understanding.
In our case, as physical beings, the brain is the vehicle of the mind, is it not? I'm talking about 'the brain' as an object - as already noted somewhere upthread. And time is not 'the being of the world' - read the Andrei Linde passage again. He says, that absent an observer, there is no time. (Linde is a mainstream scientist by the way.)
Kant calls into question the 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect'. That is why it produces such hostile reactions - it challenges our view of reality.
I don't think you are seeing the issue. Kant's radicality makes the brain itself a mere piece of appearance, not to be trusted. He saws off the branch he's sitting on. Hoffman does the same thing. But it's such an exciting story.
To me you seem to be misunderstanding the idea that objects are not necessarily merely the sum of their attributes. We only know of objects, the attributes that are accessible to our human cognition. The same goes for other species. But there may be completely unknowable dimensions of objects.
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I have always thought that Kant is wrong about space and time: if there can be things in themselves, then why not space and time in themselves? Kant has no warrant to claim that space and time exist only in perceptual appearances, any more than he would to claim (which I think he doesn't) that objects only exist in perceptual appearances.
For me the distinction between primary and secondary qualities still stands.
I wish people would carry on discussions in their own words instead of posting walls of text which are quotations from supposed authorities. The argument from authority is a weak form of doing philosophy in my view; we need to learn to think for ourselves. (That said, I'm obviously not condemning reading other philosophers, but surely if we have mastered their arguments, we can present them in our own words).
He doesn't have to anything to say about the brain, in his day the physiology of the brain was pretty well completely unknown, but he does no such thing. Please take some time to read through the passages that I posted just before the one from Sartre.
That may apply to some objections to Kant, but it's very much beside the point here. I've explicitly challenged scientific realism, embraced correlationism, gone the whole Hegelian hog.
I understand the temptation to say there may be completely unknowable dimensions of objects, but I'm asking what kind of meaning can be given to such a claim. It's not only unfalsifiable, it's impossible to parse at all. In my view, any attempt to give such a claim meaning will involve connecting it to possible experience.
I did that in the OP. I provide the passage about Schopenhauer's philosophy by way of showing points of agreement with at least one historic philosopher.
I do understand what you are getting at. I think it's a reasonable concern. We already know, using our reasoning, that some animals have better or different than senses than we do. I grant that point. And I'd say that the sentience of those creatures 'is' also the being of the world. But those creatures exist for us, and we speak of them and not their representations or surrogates. But we experience them, from or through our human perspective. And they experience us.
Perhaps we'll even agree if you see that my perspective metaphor is just that ---inspired by the visual situation but suggesting more. To see the object in a different way (from a difference place or nervous system) is still to see the object and not some mediating image.
Quoting Wayfarer
What matters (to me at least) is open discussion and cogent arguments, though, and points of agreement with historic philosophers (authorities) are worthless without cogent arguments presented in our own words and accompanied by a willingness to hear them critiqued and being prepared to sustain engagement as long as is required to either arrive at agreement or agreement to disagree.
Yes, of course we experience everything through our human perspective. We are trying to work out what is best and most plausible to say about things from within that context. Regarding that I don't say that we know anything beyond what we can experience, but we can conjecture beyond that and argue for what seems most plausible to say.
I acknowledge that there will inevitably be disagreement and no way of definitively establishing the truth, since we all have our own groundless and perhaps affectively motivated starting presuppositions, so I don't expect us to all end up on the same page.
I would hope that this process might show all of us where our attachments to particular ideas (confirmation biases) lie, and that we are capable of letting go of what we might want to be the case, if we can come to see just what those biases are.
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This is an important point of disagreement, I think. I would agree that the sentience of creatures is the being of the world, but I don't count it as the whole being of the world.
What I mean by such realism (the kind I reject) is the postulation of 'aperspectival stuff' being primary in some sense, existing in contrast to ( and prior to ) mind or consciousness.
I think you can find a good version of this in Hobbes.
[quote=Hobbes]
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained.
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For Hobbes, matter is 'out there' in motion whether or not anyone is 'rubbed' by it so that sensation and fancy result. Dualism, right ?
You might think that I'm a dualist, but the whole point for me is a monist clarification, which is already right there in the TLP. I am my world. The deepest subjectivity is being itself. Ontological cubism. So-called consciousness is just the being of the world given 'perspectively ' ( the being of the world is arranged around sentient flesh as a kind of origin of a perspectival coordinate system .) [It's like a cubist painting, hinted at in Leibniz and that passage about the bridge. The bridge only exists from various perspectives. ]
I'm well familiar with those positions. Where we disagree is that I don't see perspective as being relevant to existence, except within the context of perception. So, saying that stuff cannot exist without a perspective, to my way of thinking, conflates existence with cognition. I see no reason to do that, and it just seems logically and conceptually wrong.
I don't think science needs to say that we know anything more of things than how they appear to us, while acknowledging that appearances do not exhaust the being of things, and that conjecturing about that being is not science but metaphysics, a realm where strict decidability is not to be expected.
I demonstrated a very accurate understanding. But you requested math, which is not necessary for an accurate understanding of the principles involved. Therefore you demonstrated an inaccurate understanding, thinking that math was a requirement. And still you refuse to state your argument. Please state your argument.
I don't think I can be accused of dodging. I write a lot of responses.
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That's pretty well what I'm also rejecting.
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:up: But the way I have worded the OP, I'm trying to avoid the implication of non-perceived objects ceasing to exist, so as to avoid the necessity of positing a 'Divine Intellect' which maintains them in existence (per Berkeley).
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I've always thought that the designation of humans as 'beings' carries that implication.
All of our 'experience' of the world features it surrounding our sentient flesh. But we tend to look right through our own looking. Russell writes of a crowd seeing an event and then hardly noticing that they saw the event from this or that position, unless that position happens to be relevant. We are such practical, linguistic creatures, then we [ tend ] to 'look right through.' And physical science is a supreme achievement in this direction. But this immense convenience tempts us into paradox.
We pretend that we can mean more by 'physical object' than something like a permanent possibility of perception. I think that the nearest mountain will survive me (of course), but what that means is that I expect others to be able to perceive that mountain, after I'm gone, pretty much they way I did, when I was still around. Part of the experience of such objects is a sense of their being-experiencable-by-others.
I see no reason to do that, and it just seems logically and conceptually wrong.
FWIW, I realize it's a bold position, but 'just seems' is only a report of an initial reaction. It doesn't show how the position is wrong.
Except for the blind spot of science, which ironically is a product of that same tendency not to be aware of our own seeing. Isn't that the main point of Husserl's critique of naturalism?
Well I think my own view (and Husserl's) is very close to a certain side of Kant --- that part in the CPR where he writes about beings on the moon.
But what is the thing-in-itself if not a transformation of the traditional atoms-and-void into something darker and more elusive ? Something radically aperspectival ? Even time and space are made part of the curtain that hides Reality from us. A gulf or moat that is declared eternally uncrossable in principle. Anti-experiential, anti-perspectival. Basically non-sense in the sense of anti-sense or pure negation of experience.
I quote Locke and Hobbes to show that Kant is very much part of a sequence, pushing things to the limit, until Fichte and Hegel went all the way, returning to a now sophisticated (direct) realism. Objects do not hide behind themselves. The subject and the object are one.
I think this is solved with J S Mill's permanent possibilities of perception. It's a semantic twist, really. The point is that what we mean by the existence of the independent object is that it's there if we look for it, etc. If X, then Y. The bullet can kill me even if I don't want it to. If I die, my children can still live in this house. And so on. Possible and actual experience. What else is such 'existence' supposed to mean ? And what about ancestral objects ? If I had a time machine, I could look at the dinosaurs. That sort of thing, even if I can't have a time machine. Sort of like science being at least in principle testable, even if there's not currently enough energy for an experiment. I'd say reality is at least in principle experiencable (which we might speak of as present experience in terms of actuality and possibility.)
When I read (for instance) Husserl's Ideas II (which is thought to have inspired Heidegger in a pretty direct way), it made me remember the way I understood life when I was younger. The vivid sensuality of youth makes it hard to forget embodiment and perspective. But we are trained into an undeniably practically powerful tradition of taking objects radically independently.
This is so much the case that we talk of the hard problem of consciousness. We somehow find it obvious that [today's version of ] atoms-&-void can exist unproblematically prior-to-us and independently in some fundamental way.
This is despite the fact that all of our experience features our own sentient flesh continually at the center of the world. Of course I see the bodies of others as objects in the world, but the deepest part of the other, the true radical otherness of the other, is that they are also the very being of the world, the same world from another point of view. Interpentrating worldstreamings. The body of the other is a kind of avatar or vessel for some strange perspectival worlding of the world. Very strange and yet so familiar. Many many quasi-copies of the world with no original.
:up:
This is in line with my view, and J S Mill's and Berkeley's, I think. Objects 'are' possible and actual experiences.
I tend to agree, but there's a reason I avoid the word 'consciousness.' I really think the way to go here is a kind of monism. It's not that consciousness is one of two necessary ingredients, the other being proto-stuff (thing-in-itself batter.) No. I say so-called consciousness is being pure and simple. The 'pure witness' is no longer more subject than object, even if we find it at the center of an empirical subject, which is to say intensely entangled with sentient flesh. We have something non-dual that's intimately associated with an empirical subject. And world-streaming is care-structured, hence the naturalness of 'transcendental ego' talk. But this will tempt us to stop short of identifying being and consciousness.
I was right with you up until 'physical science'. I want to back up to this point, as it's central to my concerns.
There is an Aeon essay, The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience, which I started a thread about here some time back.
That of course is the main point made by phenomenology. They go on
Which is exactly what I was trying to get at with:
[quote=Wayfarer]What Im calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us with a kind of inherent reality that it doesnt possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.[/quote]
(Incidentally, that Aeon essay, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, is to be published as a book in March next year.)
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Well, that's a relief! I'll take my wins wherever I can get 'em ;-)
Let me clarify. 'Looking right through' is genuine practical achievement, even while being an ontological disaster. I mean we literally train to ignore what phenomenology therefore has to excavate. So that 'what is ontically closest is ontologically farthest.' Too intimate, like water we swim in, clothes we wear. We forget that our body just always happens to be there, right at the center of the world that flows around us.
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Again from Eastern philosophy, you will doubtless recall the Zen koan, made into a song, 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.' That also is about the transition from naive realism (first there is..) to critical philosophy (then there is no...), and the 'return' to seeing 'things as they truly are' (then there is...)
I tend to blame a sort of hitchhiking bad metaphysics rather than science itself. Good clean science just creatively postulates and confirms patterns in experience. And shuts its mouth about anything beyond. Mach was a first rate philosopher, for instance, not just a scientist, and William James was all kinds of things, including a serious psychologist. Note that Mach studied psychophysics. He wrote a beautiful little book about space, very protophenomenological, influencing Einstein of course.
I wouldn't be surprised if the East had it first, tho I'd check the Christian mystics for a premodern grasp?
FWIW, I think what Wittgenstein was getting at (and I'm defending) is some version of tat tvam asi. My own take might be dry and secular, relatively speaking, but I really think there's a discursive approach here. One can reason to the conclusion.
As I mentioned earlier, if consciousness is really just the being of the world, then the eye not seeing itself is the fact that being is not itself an entity (the 'ontological difference.') There's something like the actual 'thereness' of things and also our weird articulation of this fact, invoking the concept of being which is of course an entity.
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I haven't explicitly accused you of dodging. That said, I do have the impression that you are prone to withdraw when the going gets tough.
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I said why I thought it is wrong; it conflates existence with cognition, and I don't think that conflation is helpful. Also, it is not a general feature of philosophy to prove that positions are wrong. So, I'm not here to convince you, just to tell what I think and why I think it, and to hear others' accounts and comment on how I might agree or disagree with them.
It might be a matter of deciding what challenges are worth responding to. There are plenty of times in these debates where people are talking past one another.
Of course, I acknowledge you have no obligation to respond, and I don't really mind. There are some commonalities between our ways of thinking but there are also significant divergences. I'm one who likes to thrash these things out, but if you don't want to, that's OK too.
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Quoting Janus
:up: :up: Universals / generalities are abstracted from concrete particulars.
Quoting Wayfarer
"The world" for me (dream)? for us (culture)? for all (nature)? :chin:
Yes, "meaningless" logico-mathematical (i.e. view from everywhere, or subject/pov-invariant) rather than "meaningful" linguistic-narrative (i.e. view from being there, or a relative / perspectival point-of-view).
NB: subject/pov-invariant is, of course, synonymous with "absent any mind".
Anyway, 'unknown unknowns' are "meaningless" and yet ineluctably encompassing, even constraining, of "whatever we think or say ... absent any mind" or not. What you call "meaningless", sir, seems to me the most meaningful thing we (philosophers & poets) can think or say about the world. :fire:
It's that you (idealists) metaphysically prioritize meaning (i.e. mind (e.g. ideals, idols) over in denial of more/other-than-meaning (i.e. more/other-than-mind (e.g. practices)). I'm afraid this puts the proverbial cart before the horse ...
Quoting Wayfarer
IMO, not for philosophy in general or metaphysics specifically. Naturalism simply excludes, or coarse-grains, super-natural concepts or entities from arguments and models.
So you're an epiphenomenalist? Bodies are, in effect, mind-less automatons (deluded that they are more than that)? Or is it your position, Wayfarer, that "physical causes" are mere illusions, and that all events are intentional?
'Animism' instead? :eyes:
Absolutely. Concur 100%. Youve considered a certain authoritys philosophy as wrong in at least a particular instance, which makes explicit youve thought in opposition to it.
Quoting Janus
So .he was mistaken in that he didnt attribute real existence to space and time? Or, you think he should have? The theory holds that things-in-themselves possess real existence, and are the origin-in-kind of that which appears to sensibility. From which follows that to attribute the same conditions to, e.g., space, originating from space-in-itself, we should be able to represent the constituency of it, which is merely the arrangement of its matter according to form residing a priori in intuition (A20/B34), which is what is done with any other sensation. But the matter of space, according the antecedent conception of it, can be nothing other than an infinite aggregate of greater or lesser spaces, from which follows there is no determinable object possible to intuit at all. In common parlance, no phenomenal representation is at all possible for that which has infinite composition, but equally without any substance whatsoever. And here arises the requisite concreteness of that which appears, insofar as without it, we are presented with . For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appearswhich would be absurd. (Bxxvii)
On the other hand ..theres always an other hand ..the thing-in-itself is never that which appears, or is always that which could never appear, and, space is never that which appears, and, never could be, so perhaps they are a sort of in-themselves after all.
All that being said, and speaking without recourse to relevant authority, how do you think space-in-itself to be conceivable? How was Kant wrong with respect to his treatment of it?
(Sigh)
Overlooked, or outright dismissed, is our brief exchange on pg. 14, re: brain/appearance.
Pretty common knowledge the brain has no nerve endings as pain receptors, hence we cannot feel our own brain. Hardly likely well ever smell it or taste it, and seeing as how theres something drastically wrong if it ever makes a sound we can hear, and the implication well actually see it carries some serious consequences as well, it becomes absurd to then suppose our own brain, in which resides all our mental goings-on, can be an appearance to our own sensibility.
The brain sitting on the bench? Sure, there can be a valid phenomenal representation of that. And the comment expressing Lockes qualities? Of which Kant deems it reasonable to admit the totality, concerns actual existence of external things, which ..DUH!!!! ..cannot be my own brain.
Whats really cool, is the converse. The brain on the bench can be an appearance without contradiction, but it cannot contain my thoughts without being one.
Kant didnt saw off his own branch. He made it so you can take it home and make a killer table out of it, when his peers and successors burn down the tree.
You may be surprised like I was to see how much the brain already figures in Descartes, and therefore, presumably, in Kant.
[quote = Descartes]
...the mind does not immediately receive the impression from all the parts of the body, but only from the brain, or perhaps even from one small part of it...
...when I feel pain in the foot, the science of physics teaches me that this sensation is experienced by means of the nerves dispersed over the foot, which, extending like cords from it to the brain, when they are contracted in the foot, contract at the same time the inmost parts of the brain in which they have their origin, and excite in these parts a certain motion appointed by nature to cause in the mind a sensation of pain, as if existing in the foot; but as these nerves must pass through the tibia, the leg, the loins, the back, and neck, in order to reach the brain, it may happen that although their extremities in the foot are not affected, but only certain of their parts that pass through the loins or neck, the same movements, nevertheless, are excited in the brain by this motion as would have been caused there by a hurt received in the foot, and hence the mind will necessarily feel pain in the foot, just as if it had been hurt; and the same is true of all the other perceptions of our senses...
...as each of the movements that are made in the part of the brain by which the mind is immediately affected, impresses it with but a single sensation, the most likely supposition in the circumstances is, that this movement causes the mind to experience, among all the sensations which it is capable of impressing upon it; that one which is the best fitted, and generally the most useful for the preservation of the human body when it is in full health...
...when the nerves of the foot are violently or more than usually shaken, the motion passing through the medulla of the spine to the innermost parts of the brain affords a sign to the mind on which it experiences a sensation, viz, of pain, as if it were in the foot, by which the mind is admonished and excited to do its utmost to remove the cause of it as dangerous and hurtful to the foot...
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http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations/9.htm
[quote = TLP]
The world and life are one.
I am my world. (The microcosm.)
The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.
The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.
And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I.
The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world is my world".
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limitnot a part of the world.
[/quote]
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)#5
A highlight:
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
There is only world, but physics and ontology look to this or that aspect. of it, ignoring the rest, which can result in the confusion of making some of it a kind of unreal appearance.
[quote=Kant]
Possible experience can alone give reality to our conceptions; without it a conception is merely an idea, without truth or relation to an object. Hence a possible empirical conception must be the standard by which we are to judge whether an idea is anything more than an idea and fiction of thought, or whether it relates to an object in the world.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap78
[chapter 78]
This 'good' side of Kant can be 'read against' his 'bad' side. And that's of course what happened with Fichte and Hegel and others, who followed this 'empirical directive' (Braver).
More in that direction:
[quote=Kant]
Transcendental idealism allows that the objects of external intuitionas intuited in space, and all changes in timeas represented by the internal sense, are real. For, as space is the form of that intuition which we call external, and, without objects in space, no empirical representation could be given us, we can and ought to regard extended bodies in it as real. The case is the same with representations in time. But time and space, with all phenomena therein, are not in themselves things. They are nothing but representations and cannot exist out of and apart from the mind.
[/quote]
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap78
A little farther down than the first quote...
Here's some outright correlationism in Kant, a little further down:
[quote=Kant]
The objects of experience then are not things in themselves, but are given only in experience, and have no existence apart from and independently of experience. That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. For that which stands in connection with a perception according to the laws of the progress of experience is real. They are therefore really existent, if they stand in empirical connection with my actual or real consciousness, although they are not in themselves real, that is, apart from the progress of experience.
[/quote]
To me the point is that objects get their meaning in or from actual and possible experience. But indirect realism is the wrong way to understand this, for this conflates the psychological or empirical ego with the deeper 'nondual' transcendental ego which is no longer more subject than object. This is where Wittgenstein in the TLP and Mach in The Analysis of Sensations and James in Does Consciousness Exist? are all helpful.
Note that Kant allows for what Husserl calls an empty or signitive intention. Well before Kant's time, people could form the idea of lunar inhabitants. And this fantasy or idea was itself real as such an idea. The 'picture theory' is relevant here, and it's a good analogy for signitive and potentially fulfilled intentions.
We might understand Kant and Husserl to be doing 'critique of language,' sorting intentions into buckets which include the square root of blue or round squares on the one hand and that which makes sense as potential experience on the other. J. S. Mill's phenomenalism is best understood in terms of elaborating what we mean by physical or worldly object.
We understand the couch to tend to wait there in the living room for us. Any human being will see it and be able to sit on it. But my daydream, indeed existing in the same world ( because it plays a role in justifications) is not similarly [ ''directly' ] accessible to everyone. So we have [only ] practical reasons for sorting entities into the generically available extended kind and the differentially accessed unextended kind. But all of these entities exist in the same conversational-practical nexus -- in the same 'rationalist' 'flat' (one layer) ontology. All entities (toothaches and tarantulas) have their meaning in a unified flow of [s]experience[/s] interpenetrative arranged-around-sentient-beings worldstreamings.
I like to think about the encompassing as the darkness that surrounds a campfire. Or the dark woods that surround a torch on the trail. I've been walking through the woods at night lately with just a little Catapult Mini, which throws a tight beam, so I can get a look a the doe at twenty yards whose glowing eyes call my attention to her. I found myself next to five of these beauties on a trail just recently, and in the silence before dawn.
Anyway, I perceive (interpret) this surrounding darkness as a deep blanket of threatening-promising possibility. I hear a rustle in the leaves 'as' a kind of blur of maybe. On the level of feeling, I love this fringe or frontier. Exploration is a (the?) reason to be born (a post facto justification maybe.) The 'meaningless' is, in this sense, the creative nothing or the birth of meaning. Any ontology has to tell the truth about the 'Horizon', of becoming. Being is 'really' an endless becoming.
Here's a beautiful sentiment:
[quote=Haldane]
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
[/quote]
My objection, despite my embrace of the sentiment, is that this is a logical absurdity, a bad check. It's like that joke about twelve-tone music being 'better than it sounds.' The emotional value of such an impossible Frontier (what people like about the Kantian X ) is obvious to me, but any pointing beyond all possible experience reads like mystified paradox to me -- which may have genuine motivational value but still lacks content otherwise.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-ix-william-hamiltons-philosophy
It's a nice thing to point out. At any given moment we have only a small piece of the world before us. But this tiny piece is fringed or enclosed within a vast sense of the possible. I could walk downstairs and make some coffee (tho really I shouldn't). I could google X and go down that rabbit hole.
Some might say that possibility is a mere illusion, but I'd just say that 'actuality' is a favored kind of being, typically for practical reasons. I can't spend the idea of one hundred dollars, or the one hundred dollars that only might be there.
The sensations, though the original foundation of the whole, come to be looked upon as a sort of accident depending on us, and the possibilities as much more real than the actual sensations, nay, as the very realities of which these are only the representations, appearances, or effects. When this state of mind has been arrived at, then, and from that time forward, we are never conscious of a present sensation without instantaneously referring it to some one of the groups of possibilities into which a sensation of that particular description enters; and if we do not yet know to what group to refer it, we at least feel an irresistible conviction that it must belong to some group or other; i.e. that its presence proves the existence, here and now, of a great number and variety of possibilities of sensation, without which it would not have been. The whole set of sensations as possible, form a permanent background to any one or more of them that are, at a given moment, actual; and the possibilities are conceived as standing to the actual sensations in the relation of a cause to its effects, or of canvas to the figures painted on it, or of a root to the trunk, leaves, and flowers, or of a substratum to that which is spread over it, or, in transcendental language, of Matter to Form.
When this point has been reached, the Permanent Possibilities in question have assumed such unlikeness of aspect, and such difference of apparent relation to us, from any sensations, that it would be contrary to all we know of the constitution of human nature that they should not be conceived as, and believed to be, at least as different from sensations as sensations are from one another. Their groundwork in sensation is forgotten, and they are supposed to be something intrinsically distinct from it.
We can withdraw ourselves from any of our (external) sensations, or we can be withdrawn from them by some other agency. But though the sensations cease, the possibilities remain in existence; they are independent of our will, our presence, and everything which belongs to us. We find, too, that they belong as much to other human or sentient beings as to ourselves. We find other people grounding their expectations and conduct upon the same permanent possibilities on which we ground ours. But we do not find them experiencing the same actual sensations. Other people do not have our sensations exactly when and as we have them: but they have our possibilities of sensation; whatever indicates a present possibility of sensations to ourselves, indicates a present possibility of similar sensations to them, except so far as their organs of sensation may vary from the type of ours. This puts the final seal to our conception of the groups of possibilities as the fundamental reality in Nature. The permanent possibilities are common to us and to our fellow-creatures; the actual sensations are not. That which other people become aware of when, and on the same grounds, as I do, seems more real to me than that which they do not know of unless I tell them. The world of Possible Sensations succeeding one another according to laws, is as much in other beings as it is in me; it has therefore an existence outside me; it is an External World.
[/quote]
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-ix-william-hamiltons-philosophy
I think there are two views that tend to be conflated that should be distinguished.
The first view features every ego in a sort of bubble of dreamstuff, some of which may [merely] represent a outer, 'real' world. This is what I find in varieties of indirect realism. Appearance is given with a kind of incorrigible, absolute intimacy. But one can never be sure whether it refers beyond itself.
The second view is perspectivism (ontological cubism, neutral monism, etc.) The 'transcendental' ego (the metaphysical and not the empirical subject) is the being of the-world-from-a-perspective. This means that the world is arranged spatially around the flesh associated with that metaphysical [s]subject.[/s] As Mach would put it, there are decisive and especially prominent functional relationships between the elements constituting this special flesh (including 'inside' its 'mind') and the elements understood to constitute everything else.
[quote = Mach]
As soon as we have perceived that the supposed unities " body " and " ego " are only makeshifts, designed for provisional orientation and for definite practical ends (so that we may take hold of bodies, protect ourselves against pain, and so forth), we find ourselves obliged, in many more advanced scientific investigations, to abandon them as insufficient and inappropriate. The antithesis between ego and world, between sensation (appearance) and thing, then vanishes, and we have simply to deal with the connexion of the elements a b c . . . A B C . . . K L M . . ., of which this antithesis was only a partially appropriate and imperfect expression. This connexion is nothing more or less than the combination of the above-mentioned elements with other similar elements (time and space). Science has simply to accept this connexion, and to get its bearings in it, without at once wanting to explain its existence.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm
To me this is a beautiful breakthrough to a kind of phenomenological field of neutral elements, prior to mind and matter that emerge later. We go back to an idealized state-before-differentiation.
Matter, then, may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. If I am asked, whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter: and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this, I do not. But I affirm with confidence, that this conception of Matter includes the whole meaning attached to it by the common world, apart from philosophical, and sometimes from theological, theories. The reliance of mankind on the real existence of visible and tangible objects, means reliance on the reality and permanence of Possibilities of visual and tactual sensations, when no such sensations are actually experienced. We are warranted in believing that this is the meaning of Matter in the minds of many of its most esteemed metaphysical champions, though they themselves would not admit as much: for example, of Reid, Stewart, and Brown. For these three philosophers alleged that all mankind, including Berkeley and Hume, really believed in Matter, inasmuch as unless they did, they would not have turned aside to save themselves from running against a post. Now all which this manuvre really proved is, that they believed in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation. We have therefore the unintentional sanction of these three eminent defenders of the existence of matter, for affirming, that to believe in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation is believing in Matter. It is hardly necessary, after such authorities, to mention Dr. Johnson,
or any one else who resorts to the argumentum baculinum of knocking a stick against the ground. Sir W. Hamilton, a far subtler thinker than any of these, never reasons in this manner. He never supposes that a disbeliever in what he means by Matter, ought in consistency to act in any different mode from those who believe in it. He knew that the belief on which all the practical consequences depend, is the belief in Permanent Possibilities of Sensation, and that if nobody believed in a material universe in any other sense, life would go on exactly as it now does. He, however, did believe in more than this, but, I think, only because it had never occurred to him that mere Possibilities of Sensation could, to our artificialized consciousness, present the character of objectivity which, as we have now shown, they not only can, but unless the known laws of the human mind were suspended, must necessarily, present.
Perhaps it may be objected, that the very possibility of framing such a notion of Matter as Sir W. Hamiltonsthe capacity in the human mind of imagining an external world which is anything more than what the Psychological Theory makes itamounts to a disproof of the theory. If (it may be said) we had no revelation in consciousness, of a world which is not in some way or other identified with sensation, we should be unable to have the notion of such a world. If the only ideas we had of external objects were ideas of our sensations, supplemented by an acquired notion of permanent possibilities of sensation, we must (it is thought) be incapable of conceiving, and therefore still more incapable of fancying that we perceive, things which are not sensations at all. It being evident however that some philosophers believe this, and it being maintainable that the mass of mankind do so, the existence of a perdurable basis of sensations, distinct from sensations themselves, is proved, it might be said, by the possibility of believing it.
Let me first restate what I apprehend the belief to be. We believe that we perceive a something closely related to all our sensations, but different from those which we are feeling at any particular minute; and distinguished from sensations altogether, by being permanent and always the same, while these are fugitive, variable, and alternately displace one another. But these attributes of the object of perception are properties belonging to all the possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees. The belief in such permanent possibilities seems to me to include all that is essential or characteristic in the belief in substance. I believe that Calcutta exists, though I do not perceive it, and that it would still exist if every percipient inhabitant were suddenly to leave the place, or be struck dead. But when I analyse the belief, all I find in it is, that were these events to take place, the Permanent Possibility of Sensation which I call Calcutta would still remain; that if I were suddenly transported to the banks of the Hoogly, I should still have the sensations which, if now present, would lead me to affirm that Calcutta exists here and now. We may infer, therefore, that both philosophers and the world at large, when they think of matter, conceive it really as a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. But the majority of philosophers fancy that it is something more; and the world at large, though they have really, as I conceive, nothing in their minds but a Permanent Possibility of Sensation, would, if asked the question, undoubtedly agree with the philosophers: and though this is sufficiently explained by the tendency of the human mind to infer difference of things from difference of names, I acknowledge the obligation of showing how it can be possible to believe in an existence transcending all possibilities of sensation, unless on the hypothesis that such an existence actually is, and that we actually perceive it.
The explanation, however, is not difficult. It is an admitted fact, that we are capable of all conceptions which can be formed by generalizing from the observed laws of our sensations. Whatever relation we find to exist between any one of our sensations and something different from it, that same relation we have no difficulty in conceiving to exist between the sum of all our sensations and something different from them. The differences which our consciousness recognises between one sensation and another, give us the general notion of difference, and inseparably associate with every sensation we have, the feeling of its being different from other things: and when once this association has been formed, we can no longer conceive anything, without being able, and even being compelled, to form also the conception of something different from it. This familiarity with the idea of something different from each thing we know, makes it natural and easy to form the notion of something different from all things that we know, collectively as well as individually. It is true we can form no conception of what such a thing can be; our notion of it is merely negative; but the idea of a substance, apart from its relation to the impressions which we conceive it as making on our senses, is a merely negative one. There is thus no psychological obstacle to our forming the notion of a something which is neither a sensation nor a possibility of sensation, even if our consciousness does not testify to it; and nothing is more likely than that the Permanent Possibilities of sensation, to which our consciousness does testify, should be confounded in our minds with this imaginary conception. All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities; and the Permanent Possibilities of sensation which experience guarantees, are so extremely unlike in many of their properties to actual sensations, that since we are capable of imagining something which transcends sensation, there is a great natural probability that we should suppose these to be it.
[/quote]
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-ix-william-hamiltons-philosophy
There's so much insight pack in these passages that I'm surprised that Mill is not more talked about. It was Husserl's appreciated of the some of the English philosophers that got me looking into Mill and Berkeley. With Mill, so far, there's no theological baggage to step around.
All experience attests the strength of the tendency to mistake mental abstractions, even negative ones, for substantive realities.
I think Mill hits the nail on the head on this issue of the I-know-not-what that's supposed to be more than possible or actual experience : some kind of [ aperspectival ] Substance that's hidden forever behind or within whatever actually appears. It seems cleaner to understand reality itself as horizonal or transcendent, which is to say never finally given but also not hiding behind itself.
As far as I can tell, this isn't of much practical importance. But for those who find themselves wanting clarity and coherence with respect to fundamental concepts, it might feel like progress.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-the-collected-works-of-john-stuart-mill-volume-ix-william-hamiltons-philosophy
He then tackles the concern that understanding the self as what I'd call a worldstreaming implies solipsism.
He somewhat follows Husserl and suggests that we have good reasons to infer or suppose that others are worldstreams too, though we don't have direct access to this streaming. And in the age of high tech and AI, we may eventually be faced with genuine perplexity. Does this thing feel? Does this thing see ? Note that (for me) we can't 'prove' that other humans are 'really' there, but most of us fortunately don't wrestle with living, genuine doubt.
You'll probably disagree with me (we all have different ways of thinking about these things, apparently) but I see space and time as being for us, just as objects are, appearances. I think I can see spatial extension, and feel duration, just as I see and feel objects. So, for me the status of space and time is no different regarding the "in-itself" than is the case with things.
I think there is a real cosmos, which existed long before there was consciousness of any kind, and I think it always has been undergoing constant change, that it is extensive and always has been. I see time as change and duration, and space as extension, and I see no reason not to think those are real attributes of the cosmos, which do not rely for their existence on appearing to cognitive beings,
I realize that a cosmos without cognitive beings is in a sense "blind", it appears to nothing and no one, and in that sense, we might say that it is virtually non-existent, but I think that view is anthropocentric. Something does not need to be seen in order to be visible.
So, I interpret Kant's idea of in-itself as signifying that we know only what appears to us, which is not to say we know nothing of consciousness-independent real things, but that the reality of those things is not exhausted by how they appear to us and other cognitive beings.
I think many of these disagreements come down to preferred ways of talking, and underlying the apparent differences produced by different locutions there may be more agreement than there often appears to be. It is remarkable how important these metaphysical speculations seem to be to folk. I enjoy it as a creative exercise of the imagination.
Exactly as I see it also.
I quoted from that in my MA thesis in Buddhist Studies. As I've said before, the self is never an object, yet the reality of the subject of experience ('what it is like to be....') is apodictic, cogito ergo sum. Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be noted? Why, that would be 'nowhere', yet otherwise there is no world.
The OP is pretty well an exercise in understanding how this can be true. (A successful one, I would like to think.)
Quoting plaque flag
I once wrote a rather contemplative piece on the old forum, about how meditation is like learning to see in the dark. The analogy was that conscious thought brings everything into the pool of light around the campfire, but there's an awareness that outside that area there is a landscape and other creatures moving about that we're only dimly aware of and feel threatened by. The idea being that moving away from the pool of light and letting your eyes adjust to the moonlight, so you can see the contours of the landscape.
Quoting plaque flag
Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, starts with the British Empiricists, and their insistence that knowledge comes solely from sense experience. But he moves on to Kant who showed that there must be innate faculties :yikes: which organize and categorise sense-data, otherwise we would not be able to make sense of sense.
[quote=Scrapbook Entry, from an archived version of the Wikipedia entry on Philosophy of Mathematics]John Stuart Mill asserted that all knowledge comes to us from observation through the senses. This applies not only to matters of fact, but also to "relations of ideas," as Hume called them: the structures of logic which interpret, organize and abstract observations.
Against this, Kant argued that the structures of logic which organize, interpret and abstract observations were innate to mind and were true and valid a priori ('innateness' being anathema to the empiricists Hume and Mill).
Mill, on the contrary, said that we believe them (i.e. mathematical proofs) to be true because we have enough individual instances of their truth to generalize: in his words, "From instances we have observed, we feel warranted in concluding that what we found true in those instances holds in all similar ones, past, present and future, however numerous they may be".
Although the psychological or epistemological specifics given by Mill through which we build our logical apparatus may not be completely warranted, his explanation still inadevertantly manages to demonstrate that there is no way around Kants a priori logic. To restate Mill's original idea: Indeed, the very principles of logical deduction are true because we observe that using them leads to true conclusions - which is itself a deductive proposition!
For most mathematicians the empiricist principle that 'all knowledge comes from the senses' contradicts a more basic principle: that mathematical propositions are true independent of the physical world. Everything about a mathematical proposition is independent of what appears to be the physical world. It all takes place in the mind drawn from the infallible principles of deductive logic. It is not influenced by exterior inputs from the physical world, distorted by having to pass through the tentative, contingent universe of the senses. It is internal to thought, as it were.[/quote]
(I'll also add in passing that traditional philosophy sees a relationship between the domain of the apriori and the invariance of scientific laws and regularities - another principle called into question in modern philosophy.)
'What it is like to be' is an interpretation of something prior to mind or non-mind. That's the way I'd go here. What interprets then ? If mind is not fundamental ? I'd go with some kind of emergent 'panlogical' timebinding. There is a subject, but it's cultural and emergent and self-positing. Spirit is a modification of nature. I don't pretend to explain this emergence. I prioritize [merely] articulating the given ---only a blurry-muddy-tentative foundation for further plausible speculation.
Acknowledged. And added some stuff.
Quoting Wayfarer
I really like the bolded part of the Kant quote, but I find it in tension with the first part. The objects are given only in experience and don't exist otherwise. So what in the world (but of course not in the world, which is exactly the problem) is left over ?
It'd be very un-Kantian to make those faculties more than structures or possibilities of experience. I have not the least objection to psychological entities like memory, but I'd say these faculties are mere postulations for explaining a structure in the experience that is first and foremost just there.
Heidegger does his own Kantian thing in articulating the care-structure of this world-streaming being-there. An evolutionary psychologist might postulate how expectation in the context of memory maximizes the average number of offspring. Which is fine. But the existence of that care structure (existence as that enworlded care structure) is primary. Explanations are secondary and tentative. This to me is part of phenomenological bracketing. Let's articulate what's there first, before we jump into theorizing.
On the contrary - doesn't C S Peirce say that 'matter is effete mind'?
Quoting plaque flag
Which, now that I reflect further, suggests 'that of which we cannot speak....'
Quoting plaque flag
According to IEP, Kant adopted Aristotle's categories, with some slight modifications.
They do indeed 'structure' experience, but they're not derived from experience. That's what makes them 'transcendental'.
I agree that Mill was guilty of psychologism on the issue of logic. But this doesn't establish some kind of metaphysical machinery hidden in the Self. Indeed, I'm more inclined to take a Hegel-Heidegger path here and emphasize that the self (as normative-ethical-linguistic locus of freedom-responsibility ) is largely and even mostly a social entity, a performance of and participation of norms, including logical-semantic norms. We performing such norms right now, as we try to articulate and explain those very norms within a framework of adversarial cooperation.
As far as I can tell, Kantian logical machinery wouldn't work anyway. How can a 'machine' (a mere faculty) give us a normative 'output' ? Unless you are invoking some kind of mystical supernatural 'biology,' it's not clear how this wouldn't be more psychologism. 'We are programmed to be logical.' Normativity seems pretty irreducible. Invoking faculties doesn't seem to help us here, for is that not equivalent to evolutionary biology, except in an opposite 'theological biology' flavor ?
I grant that we could also read the thing backwards, with nature as a 'segment' of spirit. We create the scientific image from within an encompassing lifeworld. It depends on whether we are reasoning 'outwards' from where we always already are (the enabling assumptions of ontology) or trying to tell a plausible story of how we ended up here.
To me it's implausible for us to deny that we inherit centuries of development, and our best biological stories extend this to millions of years.
Oh, I certainly do, but theres no damage done by it. Different strokes and all that, right?
Is it a precept or some kind of general rule of phenomenology that space and time are appearances in the same way as objects? Say, as in Kant for instance, appearance mandates sensation relating specifically to it, what sensation could we expect of space from its appearance? Or is it that the precept or rule doesnt demand sensation from appearance?
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Quoting Janus
As do I, and grant the rest of that paragraph, given your perspective.
Lemme ask you this: there is in the text the condition that space is allowed empirical reality in regard to all possible external experience. Would you accept that his empirical reality is your appearance?
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Quoting Janus
Yeah, could be. But you know me .I shun language predication like the plague: rather kill it than put up with it. But youre right, insofar as there must be something that grounds disagreements, so I vote for disparity in subjective presuppositions. How one thinks about stuff depends exclusively on where he starts with it.
Ancestral objects are a totally reasonable concern, but I think they've already been covered by Mill's theory of possible experience. The meaning of an ancestral statement ('there used to be these giant lizards') is something like: if we had a time machine, we could go back and see those famous dinosaurs. Now some physical theories (11 dimensional, etc.) are impossible to even imagine, and I'd class them with what Kojeve calls 'the silence of algorithm.' The meaning of those theories only comes into focus with predictions that are finally 'within' the sensibility of the lifeworld. Note that chatbots use a mathematics of millions and even billions of 'dimensions.'
Something like Hegelian semantic holism is central here. No finite or radically disconnect entity has genuine being, because it'd literally be nonsense. Sense is structural-relational. That sort of thing. To explain a cat you need to explain a mouse. Single concepts (a language with only one) don't make sense (Sellars/Brandom).
But all apriori knowledge is fished out of experience in the first place. Patterns in experience are noticed, articulated, and then [now consciously] relied upon. Even the early geometers had to 'see' or notice certain patterns in the first place, till they finally organized an axiomatic theory for the efficient communication of this insight to others.
https://math.unm.edu/~rhersh/geometry.pdf
I loved Pinter's book on abstract algebra, and such algebra is a great example of abstraction. Group theory ignores absolutely everything about a system except its satisfaction of a few simple axioms. This allows for a rich theory that applies to all possible groups at once, even those not yet invented or discovered. But this theory still exists in the world as an intellectual tradition. It uses symbols to support a thinking which is basically immaterial. (I'm not a formalist. Math gives insight.) The theory is also temporal-historical. No mathematician can hold it all in their intuition at once. He or she can review the forgotten proof/justification of a theorem. Can reason (and often does) in terms of Assuming P, then ...
I don't know how seriously we should take 'physical world' if we've already granted that the being of the world is essentially perspectival --that physicality is derivative and conventional --- understood in terms of possible and actual experience.
It's not a precept or rule of phenomenology as far as I am aware, it's just my own take. I realize of course that space and time are not sense objects as trees, smells and sounds are, but I stll think that we see extension and feel duration.
That aside, if the things as they are in themselves is unknowable I think we then have no warrant for claiming that it is not spatiotemporal. Of course, it would presumably not be spatiotemporal in the same way as appearances are, but it seems plausible to think that it must be such as to give rise to the spatiotemporal things, and I don't find the idea that that is entirely down to the mind convincing.
All that said I acknowledge that the mind or consciousness could possibly be ontologically foundational, I just tend to lean the other way.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I find that idea acceptable. But if we want to go beyond phenomenalism and speculate as to what could give rise to that empirical reality, then I think we find ourselves entirely in the realm where the individual sense of plausibility rules.
Quoting Mww
And I think I share (at least some of) your concerns about OLP. I could just as easily have said "preferred ways of thinking" as I have little doubt that our preferred ways of talking reflect that.
There's nothing mechanical about reason. Reason is the relation of ideas. And the reason why it seems 'metaphysical' is because, as we already established, you look with it, not at it. We can't know it, because it is what is knowing. That's what 'the eye can't see itself' means. Not understanding that is behind innummerable confusions about the nature of logic and mathematics.
Re geometery - I read a compelling account that the foundations of geometery were laid by the requirement to mark out parcels of land-holdings on the ancient Nile delta for each planting season, after the annual floods had re-arranged the landscape. Makes perfect sense to me. But that still doesn't explain the faculty of being able to count and calculate. As I understand it, Husserl grounds arithmetic in the act of counting. (I have the idea that this actually dovetails with Aquinas' idea of 'being as a verb'. So arithmetic, even though it comprises 'unchanging truths' on the one hand, is also inherently dynamic, in that grasping it is an activity of the intellect.)
Quoting plaque flag
I'm having great experiences with ChatGPT4 - it's just amazing for bouncing ideas off and generating other ideas. I call it, not 'artificial' intelligence, but 'augmented' intelligence.
Quoting plaque flag
Right! I had noticed Pinter's books on abstract algebra, although not being a mathematician, they probably wouldn't mean much to me. But do look at the abstract of his Mind and the Cosmic Order, I'm sure you'd like it.
Quoting plaque flag
Even though this quotation is about geometry and astronomy (as algebra hadn't yet been invented), it still rings true to me:
Quoting Republic 527d
I'll agree with you partially here, on Heideggarian terms. Our fundamental form of being is a kind of 'subrational' understanding or knowhow or skill. And we live in language like a water lives in fish (I'm keeping this accidental reversal in, because it's fun.) We rely upon this blind skill in order to even begin to articulate our own ability to articulate. Our minds are an especially 'transcendent' object in the Husserlian sense ---the most complicated, manifold, and 'horizonal' of familiar entities.
:up:
Have you ever seen rectangles of dots used to prove the commutative law ? Very persuasive. For me math is more visual than temporal, though it's grasped in time. Peirce thought of it in terms of diagrams. I think he was right, but that might be my visual bias talking. Others might 'see' the same mathematical objects differently. As long as people agree on their nature, it'd be hard to know. Sort of like the red-green reversal issue.
Indeed, and it's like being thrown into a kind of driving or sleepwalking. We are thrown into doing things the Right way. One eats with a fork, says please and thank you, doesn't walk outside without pants on. One circumspectively takes a couch as something for sitting on. And, as we've discussed, one looks right through the way that objects are given to their practical relevance. In our culture, one learns that the human is a rational animal in the system of nature, and not of course (how silly ! ) the very site of being. Also religion is a Private Matter. I don't object to this last one, but I notice it. I'm aware that it emerged after centuries of something else.
I like Heidegger's phrase which is translated as 'falling immersion.' Our tendency is to fall back into the cultural default, which is not all bad, because plenty of conventions are justified.
except for when we don't, which seems to happen an awful lot.
Sure, we are a wicked bunch, and there's an entire tradition with a right way for talking about that.
I've been reading some mathematical biology stuff, and it all makes a sick kind of sense. It's almost tautological that the world is snafu, given certain plausible assumptions and mathematical theorems. Life 'is' exploitation in a certain sense, with altruism 'forming' the inside of a larger organism (my group against yours.) I'm following the mess in Israel, and it's the same old history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.
Yes, the accounts from Israel are absolutely shattering and heart-breaking, aside from being absolutely bloody terrifying, although there is a separate thread on that (although I'm refraining from general comments, it will only add to the hubbub.)
Humes dilemma, and a logical snafu: it is impossible to both structure, and be derived from that which is structured. Build a house with boards, and the house gives you the boards? Say wha..!?!?
I jest, but the principle holds.
-
Quoting Janus
I might argue that point. Ya know .we cannot think a thing then think we have thought otherwise, but we can think a thing and talk about it as if we thought of it otherwise. You cannot fake your thoughts but you can fake your language regarding your thoughts.
Quoting Janus
Cool.
I agree that Heidegger was influenced, etc., though I personally have no trouble yanking 'falling immersion' and many other concepts into a secular/'universal' context. I can't speak for others, but I'm interested in the work as a body of potential insight which can be personally sifted and tested. Part of the attraction of phenomenology is its deeply anti-authority check-for-yourself spirit. It's also largely descriptive, simply pointing out what's typically overlooked, eschewing fancy uncertain constructions.
One of my concerns about hidden-in-principle stuff in the self is that it leads us back into dualism. If to be is to be [potentially ] perceived or experienced, then nothing is [ absolutely ] hidden. If the world exists perspectively for 'transcendental' subjects which are ultimately nondual, then the deep structure of the subject must exists as manifest, both in the structure of the worldstreaming and then in the conceptual layer of this streaming as part of an intellectual culture that unveils it. The 'self in itself' which is 'infinitely' hidden ruins the whole nondual project, it seems to me.
I do acknowledge the obvious reality and intensity of memory and fantasy. And obviously we have the concept of both faculties, but I'd say the meaning of such faculties is ultimately in actual memories and fantasies that we've learned to classify. The lifeworld is always already culturally structured, and that includes interpretations of 'inner' states (and our sense of them as inner as opposed to outer, mine and not ours.)
But it only does that when you begin to speculate 'what could that be?' By positing it as something, then you're introducing a division or rupture. Obviously this is a very deep subject, but it came up in the MA thesis I did in 2012 on Anatta (no-self) in Buddhism. The first excerpt is from the Buddha referring to the states of jhana (meditative absorption). Then there's a Q&A between a monk and a senior monk on what this means.
[quote=Pahanaya Sutta, SN 35.24]The intellect is to be abandoned. Ideas are to be abandoned. Consciousness at the intellect is to be abandoned. Contact at the intellect is to be abandoned. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain that too is to be abandoned.[/quote]
Does this say, then, that beyond the six sense gates and the activities of thought-formations and discriminative consciousness, there is nothing, the absence of any kind of life, mind, or intelligence? Complete non-being, as many of the early European interpreters were inclined to say. This question is put to Ven Sariputta (Sariputta is the figure in the Buddhist texts most associated with higher wisdom):
Quoting Kotthita Sutta, AN 4.174
The phrase objectifies non-objectification (vada? appapañca? papañceti) is key here. As Thanissaro Bikkhu (translator) notes in his commentary, the root of the classifications and perceptions of objectification is the thought, "I am the thinker." This thought forms the motivation for the questions that Ven. Maha Kotthita is presenting here. The very action of thinking creates the thinker, rather than vice versa. In effect, the questioner is asking, is this something I can experience? So the question is subtly ego-centric.
The way this translates to me, is in the form of a strictly apophatic approach: knowing that you don't know. That is different to wondering what it might be, if you can see what I mean. That was the approach of a particular Korean Son (Zen) teacher, Seungsahn, who's teaching method was 'only don't know!'
Of course, it's easy to say such things (particularly for me as I'm overly loquacious) but actually realising it requires considerable dedication. That is the practical application (praxis).
:up:
In other words ( ? ) , language speaks the subject. A convention of selfhood emerges, a very early piece of intellectual technology. This conceptual-cultural self is real enough, just not (in my view) absolute.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/#Foun
I'd say our skill with the word 'I' is part of that thrown falling immersion or they-self that we only can even begin to investigate after the fact of our enculturation. I'm a master of use before I even begin really to theorize about that use.
Personally, I think those six elements are a plausible decomposition of all possible experience/reality in the abstract. So I'd answer no. Intellection includes the structure of the rest (and its own self-referential, arbitrarily complex internal structure.)
As long as you include Kant in your criticism, I hear you. I do appreciate the relative clarity of English philosophers like J. S. Mill and Hume and so on. Descartes is excellent on this point too. But that's a bit of a secondary issue. I agree with ol' Popper that the source of an idea don't matter. It stands or falls on its own. One of Heidegger's problems was his reluctance to embrace this idea of the independence of the fruit from the soil. And how can we drag in Buddhism (and so on) without the assumption that such a transplant is meaningful ? So, respectfully, I'm not tempted to reject ideas on the basis of their circumstantial embedding context. Though obviously, like anyone, I'm less likely to bother figuring out what someone is saying if the package isn't promising.
More generally on the issue of charisma, authority, and other related source issues, I invoke a mathematical metaphor. I care more about the 'theorems' than the 'mathematicians,' but as a 'mathematician' I have a secondary interest in other players of the game. Indeed, a big part of reality is this cooperative adversarial structure of the [self-positing] Conversation that comes to understand itself. Theology constructs the God it seeks in that very seeking. (?)
I've often said, and sorry if I'm repeating myself, that I first encountered Kant in The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, a book that became very much part of my spiritual formation. Murti compares Kant with Madhyamaka (the middle-way of N?g?rjuna) and details many convergences between them. This book has since been deprecated by more current academics on the grounds that Murti (an Indian, Oxford-educated scholar) was too 'eurocentric' in his approach but one of my thesis supervisors endorsed it. As to how to incorporate Buddhism in such a way that it's meaningful, I won't pretend that is an easy question.
I would have thought the "preferred" would take care of that...but perhaps not with everyone given human diversity.
Bateson is a really original thinker, and goes some way, I think, towards resolving the difficulties being expressed here.
Oh. My fault then. Sometimes I get too analytical. Preferred implies intentionality, but theres only one way to think, within the confines of the legislation intrinsic to the three logical laws, which eliminates a preferred way of thinking. What is thought about may or may not be a conscious choice, but we cant choose what to think of what we end up thinking about.
Yes! :100:
But doing such just maintains the status quo. If one puts oneself into another's shoes, one can always understand them, always perceive them as reasonable. How does that solve anything?
Who is "us"? Mankind as a whole, any particular person, or a particular person (but not some other person)?
I think there is a big reason why someone says
"This is a good book"
and not
"I like this book".
In the first instance, they are making a claim about the inherent, immanent quality of a book and implying that they are qualified to see things "as they really are" (while not everyone has such qualification).
In the latter case, they are stating a personal preference without assuming objectivity.
To wit: I once said to someone that Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" was one of my favorite books. He replied, "You're wrong, because this is actually a very boring book."
From this, it's clear he took for granted that there is an objective reality, that a book has a particular immanent value, and that he knows "how things really are" while I don't. Other conversations with him supported this.
The differences in locutions are not superficial.
Quoting baker
I would have thought it should be obvious that I was referring to the way things generally appear to humans; you know, things like 'trees have leaves', 'water flows downhill,', 'clear skies are blue' and countless other well-established commonalities of appearances.
Quoting baker
I think what you say here has no relevance to what it aims to respond to. In any case, the person who told you're wrong to like Portrait of a Lady was speaking idiotically; it's uncontroversial that there is no accounting for taste, no possibility of establishing objective aesthetic criteria. Anyway all you report saying was that you liked it and not claiming that it is a great work. That said, if canonicity is at all to be thought to be a reliable guide to quality, the book is widely regarded as a classic.
Which is impossible when one of the participants is a moderator, putting his moderator foot down.
Close enough. When I see way of thinking, I interpret way as method.
[quote = The Blue Book ]
The idea is that the same object may be before his eyes and mine, but that I can't stick my head into his (or my mind into his, which comes to the same) so that the real and immediate object of his vision becomes the real and immediate object of my vision, too. By I don't know what he sees we really mean I don't know what he looks at, where what he looks at is hidden and he can't show it to me; it is before his mind's eye. Therefore, in order to get rid of this puzzle, examine the grammatical difference between the statements I don't know what he sees and I don't know what he looks at, as they are actually used in our language.
Sometimes the most satisfying expression of our solipsism seems to be this: When anything is seen (really seen), it is always I who see it.
What should strike us about this expression is the phrase always I. Always who? For, queer enough, I don't mean: always L.W.
...
What tempted me to say it is always I who see when anything is seen, I could also have yielded to by saying: when ever anything is seen, it is this which is seen, accompanying the word this by a gesture embracing my visual field (but not meaning by this the particular objects which I happen to see at the moment). One might say, I am pointing at the visual field as such, not at anything in it. And this only serves to bring out the senselessness of the former expression.
Let us then discard the always in our expression. Then I can still express my solipsism by saying, Only what I see (or: see now) is really seen. And here I am tempted to say: Although by the word I I don't mean L.W., it will do if the others understand I to mean L.W. if just now I am in fact L.W.. I could also express my claim by saying: I am the vessel of life; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I say this should be unable to understand me. It is essential that the other should not be able to understand what I really mean, though in practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional position in his notation. But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, |(Ts-309,109) not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else.
[/quote]
https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_Book
In my view, much rides on our approach to this issue. 'I' see the same object from my perspective. But 'perspective' must be generalized and metaphorical here, because I also include colorblindness and myopia. Indeed, my entire system of beliefs and training meet 'my version' of (or rather are my perspective on) the same object --- same because [our ] language always intends our object in the world.
*****
We might review why we are tempted toward a 'solipsistic' or 'idealistic' position in the first place. Our nose is always in the picture. Our body is always at the center of worldly experience. The '[s]camera[/s]' (the there itself) follows this hungry and fearful body around. What I believe is just how the world is, while I believe it to be that way. If I'm in true uncertainty, the world itself flickers threateningly. The limits of my language are the limits of 'my' world (the world from my perspective.) I will say, in retrospect, that certain dimensions in were invisible or unnoticed by a younger me. I didn't know then there were transfinite numbers or phenomenologists.
I'm trying to make a case for the centrality of of the issue of subjectivity. I'm not saying we we agree on the details, but we seem to agree on the importance of the issue.
[quote=The Notebooks]
What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!
I want to report how I found the world.
What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world.
I have to judge the world, to measure things.
[/quote]
https://archive.org/stream/notebooks191419100witt/notebooks191419100witt_djvu.txt
I have to judge the world. The normative-responsible claim-making mask-choosing ego (not the transcendental [s]ego[/s]) is itself already in a quasi-isolated situation, especially in more individualistic societies. I have a vivid 'direct experience' of my little corner of the world, but in a high-tech society, I take so much on trust. I am a good progressive, maybe, who 'trusts the science' --- though this may boil down to trusting a consensus I don't know how to check directly.
What others in the world have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience of the world. The world is 'given to' highly motivated creatures who mostly notice and remember what keeps their body warm and fed. Traditions of history or physics construct a picture of the world without our noses in the foreground. Hence the achievement of forgetting subjectivity, of seeing around one's little household ways and gods. Some updated version of matter moving in void is taken as the truly real.
The status of the color and meaning and culture that we somehow paint on this bottom layer is typically left obscure. Consciousness is a mere paintjob, not being itself. But this suggests our being 'trapped' in the paintjob, and that 'atoms and void' are still merely representation, a kind of instrumental fiction. True reality is forever Out There, though it must exist because we've presupposed mediation, the paintjob, indirect realism. We did this because: nerves, brains, fuctional relationships between bodies and the reports from their mouths. Because we took common sense to be real and trustworthy enough to build the rest of a weird ontology upon --- one throwing into doubt its own foundation.
The key representatives of objective idealism I can think of are Hegel and Plato. Both vary from one another, but both accept that rocks, trees, chairs, etc. are plenty real in some sense. They are "mind-independent" in terms of not being causally generated by minds and their properties are not created by the mind either.
However, both have an understanding of entities as being more or less real. Things are more real when they are more self-determining and more necessary, less contingent on things outside themselves for being. So, a rock, is far less real than the idea of a triangle because an individual rock is essentially a bundle of effects. A rock isn't self generating or rationally necessary in any sense. Thus, we get an idea of a higher level of reality where ideas, which are more self-determining and necessary exist "above" individual instances of objects.
This view rejects a mechanistic view of reality. If anything, the "view of science" as a view that uses logical principles, self-determining reason, and active self-discovery, and which progresses dialectically, is more real than what that view purports itself to "be about." Which is why for both, the type of project that science is, a "going beyond of the given," is of paramount importance, even if the metaphysical claims attached to the project are denigrated.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.174.than.html
Note the media metaphor here, which is all too natural for us. The gates of the eyes, gates of the ears, for the world flow 'in.' And it does in some sense, for the subject is a kind of infinitesimal central vortex, seemingly the body 'for which' it all happens or exists. But this witness is only the verbal-bodily cultural-conventional ego, and this still-worldly ego is an object existing among others ---though crucially 'entangled' somehow with the 'site of being ' --- world-from-perspective.
The perception, "I am the thinker" lies at the root of these classifications in that it reads into the immediate present a set of distinctions I/not-I; being/not-being; thinker/thought; identity/non-identity that then can proliferate into mental and physical conflict. The conceit inherent in this perception thus forms a fetter on the mind. To become unbound, one must learn to examine these distinctions which we all take for granted to see that they are simply assumptions that are not inherent in experience,
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.4.14.than.html
Hume dissolved the self. Mach and Heidegger do so in their own ways. I hope it's not too eurocentric to hope for some kind of universal human insight here, which is a product of a universal-enough human logic.
Quoting Mww
So, you it seems are focusing on the method, and I'm focusing on the foundational presuppositions that support the method. The other thought that occurred to me was that not all ways of thinking are methodical.
:up:
Some of my best work related thinking has ocurred when I'm not thinking about the topic, and possibly even while I was sleeping. It's commonly been the case, that when I'm in the shower getting ready for work, that I've recognized a way to understand or deal with some problem - an understanding that I hadn't had before I got in the shower.
There have been many comparisons between Humes so-called bundle theory of self and Buddhist no-self teachings. But obviously the context and intentions of Humes philosophy and Buddhism are worlds apart. (Although theres an interesting, if overly long, essay in The Atlantic, about the possibility that Hume encountered Buddhist teachings in the French town of Le Clerche we he lived whilst composing The Treatise.)
With respect to the six sense gates, that is from abhidharma, Buddhist philosophical psychology. Its a very sophisticated system and very hard condense, although its noteworthy that its often mentioned by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana in their research into embodied cognition. Its convergences with phenomenology have also been subject to a lot of comment.
Quoting wonderer1
An interesting book by a 60s-70s author whose name is rapidly receding in the past: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe is a 1959 book by Arthur Koestler. It traces the history of Western cosmology from ancient Mesopotamia to Isaac Newton. He suggests that discoveries in science arise through a process akin to sleepwalking. Not that they arise by chance, but rather that scientists are neither fully aware of what guides their research, nor are they fully aware of the implications of what they discover. Its full of serendipitous discoveries and scientists making astonishing, accidental discoveries whilst in pursuit of something else altogether. And accounts of discoveries like you mention, where insights arise unexpectedly when going about their daily lives.
From an excellent blog post on idealism and non-duality, the following solution is given:
(I think this is the same point I try to make with the argument that the mind is not simply the individual mind, your mind or mind, but the mind, which however is never an object of consciousness.)
The view I've been arguing for is this: there is no 'deep' subject in the first place but only the-world-from-a-perspective.
There are of course empirical-psychological subjects/persons, but crucially these are just entities in the world. My brain is an object in the world, but my 'consciousness' is part of the being of the world. '[First-person] consciousness' just is is. --- just exactly the world's being.
Quite right, although as often pointed out, the term idealism was not current in Platos time and would not be coined until the 1700s. But theres another contemporary defender of absolute idealism, Sebastian Rodl, professor of philosophy at Leipzig University. From the jacket copy of Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: an Introduction to Absolute Idealism Self-Consciousness and Objectivity undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. Sebastian Rodl revives the thought--as ancient as philosophy but largely forgotten today--that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.
Why the worlds being? Could you elaborate on that?
:up:
I think this is the same idea. Consciousness in the radical sense (first person sense) is just nondual being.
Sure. Thinking is intrinsically social, and we always use a shared language to intend objects in our shared world. [To deny this claim is a performative contradiction. ] We also discuss all of reality in the same inferential nexus. So my toothache or daydream may come up in a explanation of why I was late for work. A molecule may explain a hallucination. And so on. Our world includes toothaches , promises, prime numbers, and memories. Even this or that entity is in a little pocket of the world like someone's empirical-psychological ego. It's all in the same nexus of rationality. The truth is the whole. No finite-disconnect entity is even intelligible, for one defines or explains it only in terms of other entities. Hence Brandom's so-called 'neorationalism.' And of course Hegel's idealism defined as holism.
I think this is close to what Leibniz was getting at. Each of us is a kind of copy of the world. But the world has no original. It only exists perspectively. But that's not so much an empirical claim but an appeal to what we can even mean by worldly objects, which gets us back to J S Mill.
https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf
This same town becomes numerous in aspects. The town stands for the world, which exists only perspectively, in billions of related but differing 'copies' and yet is glued together by our empathy and language. We build the scientific image and so on. We have Heidegger's 'one,' which is a taken-for-granted collective habit of interpretation and practical skill. So we look right through perspectival being itself.
I took a look at the Wikipedia page for the book, and I didn't get a very flattering impression. The title didn't sound like something which someone well informed about the thought processes of scientists would chose. There is a lot of work involved in developing intuitive faculties that can solve problems 'in the background'.
Looking into the background of Koestler himself, I didn't see any reason to think he was someone with relevant expertise.
I don't think I'll be looking into it further, but thanks for bringing it to my attention.
:up:
This is exactly what I'm also saying. The empirical subject is in the world. The transcendental 'subject' is so pure-transparent-diaphanous ( a mere 'nothingness') that we finally grasp it as being plain and simple. The outside vanishes with the inside. We can call the stream 'transcendental consciousness' or 'pure experience,' but these subject-biased terms are a bit misleading.
https://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2021/02/non-duality-and-problems-of-western_12.html
Quoting Wayfarer
True, I agree with that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Okay, thanks. 'Wish I had more time at the moment. :blush:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, right.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems that you have a stark premise that empirical facts exist. But the question is whether the thrust of the OP and of Pinter's thought is compatible with that premise. They may be irreconcilable. For example, it may be that shape is an "empirical fact" and Pinter's theory does not allow for shape (as a fact), in which case Pinter's theory would be at odds with that sort of "empirical fact."
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but we all agree to that. The question, to put it bluntly, is whether the glass distorts. Or conditions, if you prefer.
Yes, good point. I agree.
, - Interesting, thank you.
Quoting plaque flag
Right.
- Good quotes. I wish you had given the sources.
- This is what I don't really agree with.
Thanks too for the various quotes on page 18.
I've said a number of times, I'm not questioning empirical facts. This is also Kant's attitude, as he was at the same time an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. Kant acknowledges that in our everyday experience, we interact with a world of objects that apparently exist independently of our perceptions. This is what he refers to as empirical realism. In other words, Kant recognizes that we can reasonably assume the existence of a mind-independent external world. We perceive objects, interact with them, and make empirical claims about their properties. (Shouldn't forget Kant also lectured in scientific subjects and his theory of nebular formation, modified by LaPlace, is still considered mainstream.)
At the same time, the principles of transcendental idealism concerns the nature of empirical knowledge itself (which is why it's called 'critical'). Empirical knowledge is shaped and structured by the inherent categories and concepts of the human mind. These mental structures, including space, time, causality, and the categories like substance and quantity, are not inherent properties of the external world but rather conditions for the possibility of experience. (This is where Kant's philosophy dovetails with the cognitive science approach. There's a scholar named Andrew Brook who has written extensively about Kant and cognitive science, including contributing some of the SEP articles on Kant. Wiki entry.)
Kant argues that while the external world exists independently of our perceptions, we can never know it as it is in itself. Instead, we can only know the world as it appears to us - as phenomena mediated through our mental categories and senses. This is the much-debated distinction of phenomenal and noumena, appearance and reality, as depicted in Kant.
Contrasted with that, the common sense view, and maybe even the view of scientific realism, is what Kant would have designated transcendental realism. Transcendental realism is a term used to describe a philosophical perspective that asserts the existence of a reality independent of the mind, which appears to be the testimony of common sense, as the world plainly precedes our own existence. But in so doing it over-values our sensory and intellectual faculties - it's at once hubristic and naive.
Quoting Leontiskos
Again the analogy is misleading. It's not as if you have one party, that sees with eyes, and another, that sees without them, so you can compare the two. The question would be better put 'do the eyes distort?' - to which the response is, in their absence there is no capacity to see. It's not as if there is a choice.
Your first paragraph contradicts your second, and this is what I anticipated when I said, "They may be irreconcilable." You say that you are not questioning empirical facts, and then you immediately go on to question empirical facts. Or you redefine them. You have been doing the same thing at a more concrete level with regard to shape.
Quoting Wayfarer
<Right>, but the question, again, is what it means to see; what is the nature of the glass. The disagreement has always been over "whether we can know external reality as it is in itself."
But it doesn't. It simply states that empiricism is not the sole arbiter of what it true. There's no contradiction.
Quoting Leontiskos
Remember that in this analogy, 'glass' represents 'the act of knowing'. The nature of knowledge is what is at issue.
Thanks ! And sorry about leaving out the sources. Here they are:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm
You mean this : Objects 'are' possible and actual experiences ?
For me the point is to examine with real seriousness what we mean by 'physical object.' I always see the spatial object as a kind of continuous series of adumbrations from various perspectives. To be sure, I don't experience the object as a mere projection. Instead the wolrd pours in. I live in the system of possibilities that is only analyzed theoretically, brought to attention to phenomenology, for instance.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Perspectivism
The microcosm here is the idea that boulders possess a mind-independent quality of shape (link), and you specifically called this an "empirical matter" (link). Presumably such is an empirical fact.
But thenand this occurs at the more general level as wellthis empirical fact gets redefined to be a sensory phenomenon (link), and that is how we continually fall away from the point at issue, which is "whether we can know external reality as it is in itself." Thus you seem to simultaneously admit and deny the empirical fact that the boulder has shape in itself. In fact we fall away from the point at issue so consistently, that my task becomes merely designating the thesis at issue.
Thanks. Once this criticism occurred to me (I was inspired by Nietzsche*), the absurdity of Kant's system (as a whole, but not in all its details) became obvious. Indirect realism is, without realizing it, dependent upon direct realism.
[quote=Nietzsche]
Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs!
[/quote]
https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm
This is the quote I can't agree with:
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Quoting plaque flag
Right.
Quoting plaque flag
Exactly! And thus if indirect realism's critique of direct realism is thoroughgoing (as Kant's tends to be), then it saws off the branch on which it sits (as you already noted). That's the part that is always hard to see for the first time.
When we find any object, we will generally find that it has qualities and attributes such as shape, which pre-date our discovery of it. But at the same time, shape is an attribute of our sensory apprehension of the object. Whether it has shape outside that, or whether it has inherent attributes outside our sensory apprehension of it, is unknowable as a matter of principle, as we have to bring it to mind or present it to the senses, to discuss it. Shapes, spatial relationships, duration, position, and all of the manifold which makes such judgements possible, are brought to the picture by the observing mind.
Then you are simply remiss in claiming that the object has a quality of shape that "pre-dates our discovery of it." The same contradiction is present.
There's a long interview with Linde in the Closer to Truth series, where he explains this in more detail, in his rather charmingly Russian-accented English. (Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse. )
I can't say what Magee meant, of course, but I embraced this quote from my own [confessedly weird ] 'perspectival phenomenalist' position. What I can mean by 'broom' is (as I see it) limited by my experience. To be sure, this experience is always 'fringed' or 'horizonal.'
I can chisel ESSE EST PERCIPI on a mountainside somewhere. Then somehow all of the species dies, and that inscription remains. But I understand its so remaining in terms of possible experience. If someone had survived, they might have found it and read it. If aliens arrive, they may be able to decode it. So for me the point is semantic. The neorationalism inspired by Brandom starts to sneak in here.
An agent is rational in Brandoms preferred sense just in case she draws inferences in a way that is evaluable according to the inferential role of the concepts involved in those inferences, where the inferential role of a concept is specified in terms of the conditions under which an agent would be entitled to apply, or prohibited from applying, that concept, together with what else an agent would be entitled or committed to by the appropriate application of the concept. This articulation of the content of concepts in terms of the inferential role of those concepts, and the specification of those roles in terms of proprieties of inference, is combined with a distinctive brand of pragmatism. Instead of the content of a concept providing an independent guide or rule that governs which inferences are appropriate, it is the actual practices of inferring carried out in a community of agents who assess themselves and each other for the propriety of their inferences that explains the content of the concepts.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/reason-in-philosophy-animating-ideas/
Note that inferential role semantics is a flavor of structuralism, which is famously the salt to phenomenology's pepper, the peanutbutter to its jelly. A concept (to some degree) has its meaning in the role it plays in which inferences are allowed and disallowed. Meaning is fundamentally normative, systematic, and social, and concepts all function in sets. FWIW, it's this deep sociality of langauge that glues all the 'monads'/perspectives together. We intend [ discuss ] the same objects in the same world, however differently we perceive them.
It may be hard to see because radical indirect realism is so sexy. I watched a Donald Hoffman Ted talk, and it was gripping. I knew it was fallacious and confused, but I still enjoyed it. I felt the pull of the sci-fi. I could be one of the those in on the Secret, while others were lost in the shadow play on the cave wall.
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- Okay, thanks, that helps some. The "inferential role" idea adds a great deal. Sorry for the short responses. I am trying not to get trapped in this thread again. :sweat:
It'd be great to get your thoughts on this aging OP, but no pressure.
You'd need to be in the same street to do that ;-)
Let me know if my paraphrase is acceptable ?
The object itself (better phrase for my money than the object-in-itself) and not some representation of it is known. Others may see the object itself from the other side of the room, and they will therefore see it differently, but they also see the object itself, not a representation.
I think we agree on:
Mediation is unnecessary here. Perspective is the better way to approach the varying of the object's givenness. The complicated machinery of vision is a often-mentioned red herring, in my view. The intended object is always out there in the world. 'I see the object' exists in Sellars' 'space of reasons.'
BECAUSE the rational intellect knows the forms of things. Google 'the union of knower and known'. Most of the top results are either Islamic or Thomist. Why? Because they preserve Aristotle's 'active intellect', with the remnant of the Plato's forms (modified by Aristotle), which in turn were inherited from the dialogue with Parmenides. THAT is what becomes lost in the transition to modernity, where instead 'the object' is endowed with 'mind-independent' status as the criterion of what is real. That is what I'm arguing against.
Here is the general outline of a position I hold which to me presents an intermediary view:
On one hand, the rock cannot hold a shape in the complete, or else absolute, absence of sentiencefor no distance nor duration whatsoever can obtain in the absence two or more cooccurring (and interacting) sentient beings. This positionwhich I presume can be argued via a Kantian worldviewacknowledges the idealistic aspects of reality.
However:
Given the just mentioned cooccurrence (and interaction) of two or more distinct transcendental egos, there then will necessarily occur distance and duration which equally applies to all cooccurring transcendental egos in the cosmos that in any way interact or else hold the potential to interactfor, devoid of any such equally applicable reality, no interaction would be possible. This distance (i.e., space) and duration (i.e., time) which is thus equally applicable to all cooccurring transcendental egos in the cosmos will then necessitate some form of shape(s) within the cosmos which is not contingent on any one mind or any one set of minds but, instead, is strictly contingent on the totality of all cooccurring minds (this as per the first clause provided above). The shapes which occur in the cosmos and are equally applicable to all individual minds (e.g., an actual, physical rock as contrasted to some minds particular imagination of a rock) will then occur in manners wholly unbiased to any one mind in particularfor they are equally applicalbe to all minds in the cosmosand will thereby be objective in at least this sense of the word: a complete impartiality of being or occurrence. This overall proposition then readily allows for empirical facts in the world to obtain; such as the empirical fact of a physical rocks particular shape remaining constant regardless of the sentient beings which might happen to interact with it and of their particular faculties of (empirical) perception.
This objective reality as just outlined would then remain relatively constant (yet in flux rather than being perfectly static) where sentient beings to be perpetually birthed into the cosmos and to perpetually pass away (or else disappear) from it, this as can be observed to in fact happen. The rocks shape predates us as individuals and as a particular cohortyet nevertheless, in this roughly sketched model, remains fully contingent on the occurrence of all individualized transcendental egos that interact or hold the potential to interact in the cosmos (which as a physical, objective given, is a contemporaneous result of there being numerous transcendental egos that in some way directly or indirectly affect each otherthis being a type of formal causation of the former by the latter.)
The point of this post is to illustrate that philosophical idealism and empirical facts can coherently coexisti.e., that there is no necessary contradiction between them.
:up:
My approach to this is to stubbornly demand some actual meaning from physical theories. The 'silence of algorithm' (often math that just has no definite interpretation or only an absurd-counterintuitive interpretation) is finally brought down to earth and the lifeworld and genuine meaning through the [ understandable ] measurements it 'compresses' [ see algorithmic information theory ] and predicts. Then there's the associated technology, which we experience in the usual, familiar way.
As far as I can tell, some people experience the math involved as mystical hieroglyphics, like the streaming green source code in The Matrix. I think Tegmark is like this, but such thinking has left the empirical scientific spirit behind. It's bad metaphysics drunk on its close association with good physics.
I think you are agreeing with John Stuart Mill, that objects are permanent possibilities [and actualities, of course ] of sensation.
How so, if you don't mind my asking ?
Yes, quite right. :up: And that it occurs is known most surelymore surely than any epistemological theory that might undercut it (hence my post <on the topic>). Of course you have also raised the additional point that indirect realism tends to presuppose direct realism.
Courtesy a link provided by @Janus, I've just acquired Jane McDonnell, The Pythagorean
World: Why Mathematics Is Unreasonably Effective In Physics - a very recent title, McDonnell being a recent grad of Monash Uni in Melbourne. This is her PhD thesis in book form. Seems to present a kind of Pythagorean idealism, although I've barely started reading it yet.
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- I think we disagree on what anti-Scientism requires, but I will look forward to your thread on this topic.
This is still the way I would put it:
Quoting Leontiskos
Questions I might ask: Is color real (are there really colorful things) ? Is sound real ? Are feelings of love real ? That we humans got good a measuring things and finding mathematical patterns in those measurements is undeniable. But why do certain thinkers pretend/claim that the visceral-embodied measurement process is unreal ? It's all real. The numbers too, but not only the numbers.
As I noted, briefly, I think there's a lot in Aristotlelian-Thomist philosophy - which surprises me, as I'm not Catholic, and it's usually associated with the Catholic faith. I have learned there's a school of thought called Transcendental Thomism, associated with Rahner and other mainly European Catholic philosophers. I'm interested in that.
No, it's quite fine (although I'll have to take a break shortly). As my initial post on this thread intended to explain, this within a system wherein the objective world and all objective things therein are formally causal products of a necessary co-occurrence of two or more transcendental egos which interact or hold the potential to interact. These transcendental egos - as per Kant - hold within them (for lack of better phrasing) space and time (and causation) as categories requisite to experiencing anything empirical whatsoever. For them to actively interact, an equally applicable space and time will need to apply to all momentarily interacting agents. Whatever is equally shared between all co-occurring transcendental egos in the cosmos will then be impartially, i.e. objectively, occurrent in the cosmos.
The physical rock's spatial, temporal, and causal attributes are examples of what is equally applicable to all co-occurring transcendent egos in the cosmos (complexities of spacetime curvature aside). So the rock as objective thing remains constant regardless of perspective which apprehends it empirically, be the perspective human or otherwise. Two humans will then see it at the same time from different angles but yet agree on the properties of its shape.
Apologies if this doesn't make better sense of what I previously wrote.
As you know, since Day 1 on the forum, I've been pursuing the question of the question of the reality of number (and abstract objects generally). My view is that they're real, but they're not phenomenally existent; they're inherent in the way the mind categorises, predicts and organises its cognitions. And as 'the world' and 'experience' are not ultimately divided (per non-dualism) then this is why mathematics is uncannily predictictive. That, I think, is the thrust of McDonnell's book.
I've tried to read up on Tegmark but have been dismayed to learn that despite his commitment to what he calls 'pythagoreanism', he still remains wedded to a scientifically materialist philosophy. 'Its fair to say that Tegmark, a physicist by training, is not a biological sentimentalist. He is a materialist who views the world and the universe beyond as being made up of varying arrangements of particles that enable differing levels of activity. He draws no meaningful or moral distinction between a biological, mortal intelligence and that of an intelligent, self-perpetuating machine' ~ The Guardian.
As always, 'the philosophy of a subject who forgets himself'.
Yes, there are many different schools of Thomism. My teachers tended to be in the Laval/River Forest school, or else the analytic Thomism school. Transcendental Thomism is more conciliatory towards modern thought:
Quoting Edward Feser, The Thomistic Tradition, Part I
Sure, but I thought it was obvious that I wasn't just adopting Leibniz's entire theory. I've been trying to follow the evolution of perspectivism in Western philosophy, and Leibniz and Berkeley are important, but they come with the expected theological baggage of their time, which I don't need of course.
For me there is no world-in-itself: some weird collection of asperspectival stuff. Hence ontological cubism. A world shattered into perspectives on that world. This isn't an empirical claim. It's a semantic claim. People can't even say what they mean by it. Or so I claim.
But our best physical theories are great at transforming coordinate systems, till maybe we forget that measurements are finally done by embodied perspectival beings --that physical theories refer, finally, to actual and possible human experience. [Or they aren't science anymore but mysticism written in difficult mathematics, which isn't that hard to do really.]
Sure. And they also exist culturally, viscerally, just as the rest of our mentality does. As a student of math, I'd be lost with pencil and paper (I've been working on math when stepping away from here, a construction of the real numbers.) Much of mathematical thinking is externalized, embodied. And more generally reduce pure subjectivity to pure being itself. The psychological subject is part of the world, and we can articulate all kinds of causal relationships between it an its environment --do the usual psychology.
To me it's not math itself but theories in that syntax that are predictive. Math allows for precise measurement and precise prediction. It also allows for more and more complex models, with more and more impressive inferences allowing us to move from general theory to a prediction in this or that specified context.
The world just happens to be orderly, it seems to me. Maybe the anthropic principle is worth something here. Without order to exploit, there could be no life. (?)
The book begins:
Quoting The Democracy of Objects, Chapter 1, by Levi R. Bryant
(link to chapter)
(Tagging @schopenhauer1 on account of the reference to Graham Harman)
I'll let their ghosts debate that issue with you, since neither system is my own. Wittgenstein basically states my own current position in the TLP and early notebooks. Mach gives a powerful, more detailed presentation. James is also there in Does Consciousness Exist ? None of them hammered home the implied perspectivism, though, which gives me something useful to do.
:)
I appreciate you checking it out. I'd be happy to clarify my weird prose, of course.
I can't speak for all correlationists, but I take speculative realism to be an empty promise, grounded in nostalgia. The investigation of being (ontology) is something like grasping its essence in concepts. So it's weird to talk about grasping forever-ungraspable being. And of course our 'talk' is a contamination of this 'being.' So what now ? The speculative realists tend to present themselves as tough-minded types, but I feel like I'm the genuine positivist in such a context, up against mathematical mystics whose attachment to physics is supposed to obscure the mysticism.
My point was only that the importance of their systems (given that we accept for the sake of argument that they are important beyond merely their place in the canon) principally relies on what you want to discard. Even just their importance as members of the canon relies on their system being accepted as a whole.
Just to clarify, you mean @Wayfarer ? I don't know if he embraces the term. But, for the record, we can do without the subject before we can do without the world. [The empirical subject is part of the world, albeit a central part.] [The world is just 'Being' --- how it is, all that is the case in all its sensuousness, etc. ]
The problem of hallucination, right ? I can decide that what 'seemed like' an X was 'really' a Y. But I can changed 'my mind' yet again. One 'appearance' 'corrects' another. Belief is the intelligible structure of the world given perspectively. There is no stuff out there beyond all perspectives. Not in my system. Wouldn't have it. [Smile] So the world-for-me itself flickers and smokes with possibility and uncertainty. Despite our practical and shrewd repression of this aspect of the world.
To quote early Notebook boy Wittgenstein, 'p is true' just means 'p.' Which means that the world is like this rather than that [the world for me, but I have to remind myself of that sometimes.] We can learn a detachment or distance from our beliefs, so that we call them 'beliefs' and not just (like a fanatic) the obvious truth. [I mention this because my theory of belief and deflation of Truth is important for my perspectivism.]
derivative on the thing that exists in itself
Can you unfold this ? My bias is that you won't find more than what Mill described, but perhaps you'll surprise me.
To me that's a bold claim which I very much dispute. I take an opposite Hegelian view. The timebinding [ scientific ] philosophical Conversation is the actual protagonist, and relatively ephemeral personalities become relevant if they catch up with it enough to help it along.
Your thinking, applied to physics, would reduce Newton to dust -- as if we weren't basically still Newtonians. To be sure, we aren't pure Newtonians anymore.
(1) We 'can only ever speak' of being as something we are speaking about. This tautology is supposed to be offensive. But one could also tease when it's presented as a profundity.
(2) The 'for us' can be reduced to pure perspectival being, as in Wittgenstein. The world 'just happens' to gather around sentient flesh. But this can be thought of as merely contingently true. It takes effort, but one can (and I think Husserl did) imagine a pure bodiless worldstream. But there will be an implicit 'eye' implied by the visual space (a perspectival space) , even if no eye is actually posited, for that's the kind of space we can talk sensibly about.
On further reflection, it occurs to me that an Aquinas would not endorse the notion of a 'mind-independent object'. Why? Because in his philosophical theology, particulars derive their being from God - that they are created and maintained in existence by the divine intellect. Not only does God grant existence initially (through creation), but He also continuously sustains all things in existence. Without the continuous causal activity of God, things would cease to exist. In this way, God is not just a distant first cause; He is intimately involved in maintaining the existence of all particulars (cf Jean Gebser, 'The Ever-Present Origin'.) And whilst the 'divine intellect' might be an unfathomable mystery to us mortals, it is still a mind, rather than an impersonal physical force such as energy.
This is what I clumsily referred to with the earlier reference to Eckhardt, that being the gist of his aphorism, 'creatures [i.e. created things] are mere nothings'. They have no intrinsic reality outside the Divine Intellect which sustains us and all things in existence.
Quoting Wayfarer
In this thread when we have been speaking about "mind-independent objects," 'mind' is taken to refer to the human mind. To speak about God's mind is a rather different thing, and now you seem to be flirting with full-fledged Idealism. I think you are working above your pay-grade at this point. :wink:
But there are sparks of truth in such an idea. For the classical theist human knowledge is a re-cognition of God's own thought, and the fact that we are made in God's image explains why we can know God's creation. This is one of the reasons why science (the study of mind-independent reality) is thought to have grown up so readily in theistic contexts. At the same time, your conclusion about the ontology of creation goes much further than classical theism would admit. It essentially moves towards a pantheism that undermines natural science for want of a determinate object of study.
Almost certainly, but then I am trying to follow a thread through a labyrinth. And thank you. :pray:
I think you're reifying an imagined entity.
Quoting plaque flag
That's untrue and irrelevant, for three reasons: first I was talking about philosophy, not physics, second, I don't think Newton's mechanics are obsolete, just not as accurate as Einstein's and third I was speaking about the relevance of thinkers as being relative to their whole systems of thought. How do you think Newton's mechanics would fare if you removed its lynchpins? The point was simply that both Leibniz' and Berkeley's metaphysics fall apart if you remove God.
Quoting Wayfarer
And here is another case in point. God is central to scholastic metaphysics as well. Although that said, on a different point, Wayfarer, how do you (or Aquinas) know God holds things in existence via his "intellect"? Could it not be his desire or will? And a further point is that even in this scenario things are human-mind independent. God, if he exists, could presumably create a whole world with no humans in it. The Catholics accept the current cosmological paradigm, according to which the cosmos existed for far, far longer without humans than it has with them.
Edit: I see @Leontiskos beat me to the point concerning human mind-independence.
Aquinas has a quote that goes something like this, "Do not wish to jump immediately from the streams to the sea, because one has to go through easier things to the more difficult."
It's from somewhere in his Compendium of Theology, and I think it's good advice. Granted, it's also fun to try to eat the whole meal in one bite. :grin:
I tried that and I nearly choked. not my idea of fun. :wink:
In classical philosophy and scholasticism, particularly within the Thomistic and Neo-Platonic traditions, there is indeed a view that the human intellect (nous) is a reflection or an image of the Divine Intellect. That shows up in the doctrine of the rational soul and also in the role of intellect in hylomorphic dualism. I don't know if they ever entertained the idea of other solar systems (actually wasn't that somerthing that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for? Unlike Mah?y?na Buddhism, which acknowledges 'a myriad of life-bearing orbs'.)
Quoting Janus
Indeed. The inventor of big bang cosmology was Georges LeMaitre, a Catholic priest. I've often told that anecdote that Pope Pius wished to use LeMaitre's argument to press the case for 'creation ex nihilo', but that LeMaitre was embarrased by this conflation of the scientific accounts with religious cosmology and asked the Pope's science advisor to intervene, which he did. I loved that story on a couple of grounds - first, LeMaitre's utter commitment to scientific impartiality, while still maintaining his faith, and seeing no conflict between them; second, that he got the Pope to agree not to do something.
Quoting Leontiskos
I understand your concern. But my philosophical quest started with an eclectic approach - very much in the spirit of the 1960's. I read, for example, quite a few of Alan Watts books, also Thomas Merton, and other eclectics. Heck, I first learned the name 'Jacques Maritain' through a book I bought at Adyar Bookshop (one of many!) God, Zen and the Intuition of Being. All of those kinds of sources quote Aquinas and Plotinus and pseudo-dionysius, and others of that ilk. Later in life, I came to recognise the lack in my own education, never having been schooled in 'the Classics' but some elements of classical philosophy have really come alive for me. Yes, it's syncretist, and definitely unorthodox but there is a thread.
That's fair. There are definitely different ways to go about it, and it sounds like you have some good sources to work from.
Actually that wasn't the point.
That was my point and I was quite explicit about it. Go back and read again...or not...suit yourself...
[quote = Hegel]
The bodily forms of those great minds who are the heroes of this history, the temporal existence and outward lives of the philosophers, are, indeed, no more, but their works and thoughts have not followed suit, for they neither conceived nor dreamt of the rational import of their works. Philosophy is not somnambulism, but is developed consciousness; and what these heroes have done is to bring that which is implicitly rational out of the depths of Mind, where it is found at first as substance only, or as inwardly existent, into the light of day, and to advance it into consciousness and knowledge. This forms a continuous awakening. Such work is not only deposited in the temple of Memory as forms of times gone by, but is just as present and as living now as at the time of its production. ... The conquests made by Thought when constituted into Thought form the very Being of Mind. Such knowledge is thus not learning merely, or a knowledge of what is dead, buried and corrupt: the history of Philosophy has not to do with what is gone, but with the living present.
...
Since the progress of development is equivalent to further determination, and this means further immersion in, and a fuller grasp of the Idea itself-that the latest, most modern and newest philosophy is the most developed, richest and deepest. In that philosophy everything which at first seems to be past and gone must be preserved and retained, and it must itself be a mirror of the whole history. The original philosophy is the most abstract, because it is the original and has not as yet made any movement forward; the last, which proceeds from this forward and impelling influence, is the most concrete. This, as may at once be remarked, is no mere pride in the philosophy of our time, because it is in the nature of the whole process that the more developed philosophy of a later time is really the result of the previous operations of the thinking mind; and that it, pressed forwards and onwards from the earlier standpoints, has not grown up on its own account or in a state of isolation.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpintroa.htm#A1a
Of course Heidegger has his own, often-gloomier version of this. Key point is that we are thrown into an inheritance, which we eventually pass on, having hopefully made a worthy improvement, correction, or addition. Our cultural world is especially 'mind'-created.
I claim that this evolving ontology articulates the world, manifesting an ideal perspective. A little personification will probably be alright, especially given that our implicit goal (those of us who are serious, anyway) is to achieve this ideal perspective (move toward it at least.)
It was intended as a defense of idealism from the outset.
Splendid Hegel quote. Just the kind of thing that Marx inverted.
Towards the end of his argument, he says:
It all goes back to disagreement, and what to do about it, how to think about it.
Given that people often say "This isn't real, it's all in your mind", there's clearly more to it.
I've been following this theme of disagreement throughout this thread, but with little success, apparently.
It's precisely disagreement, on various levels, that points in the direction that the mental is all we have to work with. Not that the mental is all there is. But that it is all we have to work with.
And traditionally, and in general, the way many people try to overcome disagreement (and to win verbal disputes) is to posit the existence of an external world of which they claim or imply to have special knowledge, and that anyone who doesn't think the way they do is wrong, bad, evil, or in some other way defective.
Traditional literary theory disagrees with you.
:up:
Since that went over well, I'll add some of Heidegger's updating of the software (of the software's self-articulation.) [I add a little emphasis here and there.]
I got this nice quote from @Joshs:
[quote=Gendlin]
The past is not an earlier position but the now implicitly functioning past....the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning.
[/quote]
For what it's worth, William James quotes psychologists that were aware of this already in his time. We meet the present as our entire past. Since I am mostly the 'generic human soul' of my generation (the 'who of everyday dasein' or 'the anyone'), much of this past is not personal but cultural. This includes inferential norms, which we experience as binding, as the condition for the possibility of a genuine psychology, and so never reducible to psychological contingency.
...
For you and anyone else, I commend Julian Young's Heidegger's Later Philosophy for its beautiful clarity. All killer, no filler. It agrees with Braver's take in A Thing of This World. It's a spiritual take but not a mystical take. It's all conceptually tight (to me a plus).
I think Mill's whole construal of "possibilities of sensation" is a non-starter:
This is subtly off. A substance is not a possibility of sensation. That is an accidental characteristic of a substance, not its definition. That characteristic is crucial to human epistemology, but that doesn't make it the definition. Further, no one actually thinks about objects in such a way. Objects are things that we encounter through our senses, not possibilities of sensation. This is the same reversal of metaphysics and epistemology that occurs so often in modern philosophy.
Quoting plaque flag
Mill is close to talking about a representation (sensation) rather than the object itself. He is defining the object in terms of sensation-representation.
In fact this sort of move is what strikes me as odd about so much of modern and contemporary philosophy. Again and again, a proper accident is mistaken for an essential property, and the error is always grounded in a shift towards the epistemic subject. The forlorn formal cause sneaks in through the back door, unnoticed and not critically attended to. In this case Mill has an epistemological problem before him, and as a consequence he ends up defining objects in terms of epistemology. ...So I suppose I am beginning to understand Kit Fine's modus operandi (link).
:up:
I'm thinking of using Rashomon and As I Lay Dying as explications of the nondual perspectivist position. Both narratives give us the-world-for-characters. We never get the External Aperspectival World, and I've been claiming that such a thing is a round square, a seductive empty phrase, for we all get the world only as such characters. The world we know is the-world-for-characters. But we dream of stuff that floats without a nose in the picture, because it's a useful dream, however incorrect in some other important sense.
Related issue. We only have belief, never truth. Or rather 'true' is a compliment we pay to claims we believe. It's no magic sauce. Young Wittgenstein was (impressively) already clear on this, somehow seeing right through the usual superstition, perhaps because he was perspectivist. { He didn't call himself that, but I'll defend a nondual perspectivist interpretation of key passages from the TLP. }
:up:
Of course. But most people aren't philosophers.
I see it in the way you see Kant, albeit much more subtle and less pronounced:
Quoting plaque flag
The non-sequitur is that, just because we know objects through sensation, it does not follow that objects just are possibilities of sensation.
I'd say you'd have to look into his 'deconstruction' of the self too. To be clear, I don't take Mill or anyone really as an authority. But Mill gets something right. It's what I was getting at with what I quoted above.
[i]The essential partiality of our view of things, he argued, their being given only in a certain perspective and at a certain moment in time, does not diminish their reality, but on the contrary establishes it, as there is no other way for things to be co-present with us and with other things than through such "Abschattungen" (profiles, adumbrations).
The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views. The object of perception is immanently tied to its backgroundto the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world.[/i]
In case it helps, I intensely agree with early Heidegger (famous KNS1919 lecture) that we get a meaningful world directly. We get tables and wigs and cats, not planes of color, etc. And this lifeworld is also profoundly cultural and historical, so I see a picture of Shakespeare and grasp the cultural significance immediately (though of course I can always look more closely, and so on ---for all is horizonal).
So I utterly reject crude sense-data understandings of the given. The lifeworld is the given. So the point for me is not sensation (though sense organs are involved) but perspective. The object is always situated in a field of vision, and we understand it in the first place as something that could be looked at.
As I've said, the issue is semantic. People sometimes worry about whether P is warranted. But they forget to check whether P is meaningful. Respectfully, you still haven't met my challenge, unless I haven't got to that part yet.
How do you understand the existence of physical objects ?
Also, I have always thought this would be an interesting study in itself. What does it mean for a philosopher to redefine a commonly used term? For instance, what does it mean when Mill comes along and redefines objects as possibilities of sensation? Is this not equivocation?
Presumably what he is trying to do is convince the world that an object is not what they suppose it to be, but this is too seldom explicit. My favorite philosophers are very careful to avoid this sort of redefinition.
Explication (unfolding) is not redefinition.
An "unfolding" which contradicts the previous notion is redefinition.
Come on though, that's presumption, as you say. Uncharitable. And Mill is dead. So please just try to understand me, and then defeat my position.
What previous definition ? People mostly use words like tools with pre-theoretical skill. We are concept-mongering practical primates. It's the worldly foolishness of philosophy and all that. Making it explicit is hard work. And most people just don't need such clarity.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
My own philosophical work is largely motivated by a sense that people don't know very well what they are talking about in the first place. And I don't think such ambiguity is ever completely reducible. Obviously inferences are important, but meaningless or insufficiently determinate conclusions are worthless.
I am explaining why I disagree with Mill. I don't know how closely you follow him.
Quoting plaque flag
The challenge of how to understand the existence of physical objects in a way that differs from Mill?
Quoting plaque flag
This seems pretty close to Mill. I think what we understand in the first place is a thing, and secondarily that the thing has perceptible properties, and then later that the thing likely has non-perceptible properties.
Quoting plaque flag
I think someone like Mill is saying, "Objects are this and not that. Your pre-theoretical view was mistaken." I don't think he is saying that "this" unfolds from "that", such that both are secure.
That's just a rephrasing, it seems to me.
Sure, we start in the world of things, not as philosophers. Then we learn to analyze, account for the subjects and objects. But I object to 'non-perceptible properties.' What's that supposed to mean ? Science finds patterns in perceptions. Or so I claim.
Right, and that's why I said it is subtle. I don't think anyone on the forum has grasped the point Kit Fine is making in that thread, largely because it is foreign to contemporary philosophy.
I would have to think about how to make it more apparent.
The point is an explication of the pre-theoretical view.
Note that most of the objects in the world are not currently perceived (by this or that single person). And I've never seen the Eiffel Tower, but I think I could see it, given certain conditions.
I don't think philosophers who try to reverse engineer the natural order of knowing end up being coherent.
Quoting plaque flag
Yes, I realize that. A power is an easy example. An apple tree has the power to produce fruit. It possesses this power, we can know this through inference, and nevertheless the power is not perceptible.
That power is possibility. I perceive an apple tree, and I understand the possibility of [ a future experience of ] fruit, given certain conditions. If I nurture the tree, if it's not cut down, then I can hope to enjoy fruit.
I could just say 'fruit' instead of 'experience of fruit' if I wasn't reacting against what I'd call the metaphysical fantasy of aperspectival reality.
Mill's point holds of every physical object. It is a proper accident. But it's not what objects are. Objects are not defined in terms of perception. From the book you cited in your other thread:
Quoting The Democracy of Objects, Chapter 1, by Levi R. Bryant
(link to book)
I can't recall the context, but I reject the speculative realists. I sometimes quote their presentations of correlationism, though, for it's one of 'em that gave me the handy term in the first place. But there's a huge gap between Kantian indirect realism and my own Mach/James inspired nondualism. So the speculative realists haven't clarified their opponent.
I don't think objects are very well defined. I think all people end up meaning...being able to find words for...is possibilities of perception. I haven't heard any good alternative yet.
Then perhaps this is the starting point for where we differ, which is probably rather subtle. I don't actually know very much about this view you are reacting against, but I am of course wary of defining objects in terms of perception.
Quoting plaque flag
I think my single sentence about the common opinion has ended up being a distraction.
Let's forget it then.
As you should be. The theory is interesting because it challenges some vague but strong sense of there being more to physical being than our actual and possible experience. It just 'sounds wrong.' But what then does one mean beyond such possible perceptions ? And ultimately beyond experience itself ?
To be sure, indirect realism needs some kind of Stuff Out There, because they have a Subject In Here. But Mach and James don't. It's all one stream (or, strangely, many perspectival streams of the 'same' world.)
It seems to me that people are generally smarter than they seem, and that what might look like ignorance is actually an act.
Given our fast-paced conversation, I would submit that an object is something like an existent thing (a wholeness or unity). Unperceived or even imperceptible objects are therefore possible.
For example, maybe someone believes in an imperceptible ghost or spirit that nevertheless possesses causal powers to influence the world which we are able to perceive. On my view this putative ghost is an object. For Mill it cannot be, having no possibility of sensation. (The notion at play here is object-as-causal-agent.)
This is exactly right, and it raises the point that Mill's definition of objects is parasitic in a problematic way. Usually when we talk about the possibility of perceiving, we are talking about the possibility of perceiving some object. Defining "object" as a possibility of perception thus throws this into confusion.* It would be like saying that there is the power-to-produce-apple-fruit apart from any tree or substance/substratum. Thus it is quite different to talk about objects as things perceived rather than as possibilities of perception. Talk of "[permanent] possibilities of sensation" elicits the question as to why these possibilities are permanent (or semi-permanent).
Your <quote from Hobbes> is a propos. It is precisely the object that impresses itself upon the sense organ. To talk about sensation apart from an object sensed is a very different approach to the senses and perception.
* On Mill's account the substantial and 'synthetic' claim that, "There is a possibility of sensing such-and-such an object," is reduced to the vacuous and 'analytic' claim that, "There is a possibility of sensing such-and-such a possibility of sensation."
:up:
I think you've found a weak part in Mill's account. At the very least, he did not go into detail about the experienced unity of the object, what Husserl calls its transcendence. Mill is still too much caught in sense-data empiricism of his time.
[quote=Mill]
the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more than allthey are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves.
[/quote]
But he dissolves the sensing self in a way that foreshadows Mach. The only way to have a world in common and no ['substantial' -- trans-cultural ] selves and no [ 'deep' ] matter is (as far as I can tell) perspectival worldstreaming --- first person 'consciousness' as [nondual, perspectival ] being itself. With the experiencer goes experience, with only being left behind, the simple it-is-there-ness of a radical plurality of entities.
[quote=Mill]
We have no conception of Mind itself, as distinguished from its conscious manifestations. We neither know nor can imagine it, except as represented by the succession of manifold feelings which metaphysicians call by the name of States or Modifications of Mind. It is nevertheless true that our notion of Mind, as well as of Matter, is the notion of a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it; a something which we figure as remaining the same, while the particular feelings through which it reveals its existence, change.
[/quote]
In case it's helpful for understanding my POV, I endorse this:
The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflectionan object that consciousness posits and grasps [ ] in the same act (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 801; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte
The discursive subject described by Brandom is a locus of responsibility. Our bodies are trained into becoming this kind of entity, a responsible who rather than a mere what. But I place this discursive subject in the world as our most fundamental tradition --- a crucial piece of technology, for we are cyborgs, vampires even, in the way we bind time. One is one around here. There is exactly one responsible agent-soul in your/my flesh. The rest is madness or sci-fi.
But to me this is still a worldly entity, an unreliable narrator completely enmeshed in a concept-structured lifeworld-from-perspective. The story is not separable from the narrator, as if somehow written in another language which is no language at all. 'Deeper' than this discursive subject is the 'pure witness' which is no longer a witness really but just the fact that the world happens to gather around the flesh that therefore seems to host it. And this world includes feelings and fantasies as well as fountains and fawns.
As Mach put it, we find functional relationships all the time between 'inner' and 'outer' things. This is the point of my Flat Ontology thread. It's all in a single causal-inferential nexus. I think this is Hegel's point, when he said no finite [ disconnected ! ] thing has genuine being. Things 'are' (to overstate it) their relationships with other things.
***
What Hobbes doesn't address is that those sense organs exist for other sense organs. So the being of matter in motion apart from all such organs is left indeterminate, hence Mill's attempted clarification, etc.
I still think possibilities of experience works in say Husserl or Sartre, but what catches my eye here is that elicited question. Now it is of course a good question, but, with my phenomenological cap on, I prioritize [merely ] clarifying the given, making it explicit. As Husserl put it, phenomenology is the genuine positivism (the point being its honesty about direct experience including prime numbers and 'transcendent' trombones --- and the horizonal lifeworld in general.-- as opposed to blind adherence to a sensedata tradition, etc.)
For context, I personally think there 'must' always be brute fact. At the end of any ascending chain of explanations there is 'just because.' If God did it, then why is God such as to want to do that ? If some physics formula is hyped as the final word, then why is the final word like that and not otherwise ? I agree with Wittgenstein that only impossibility is logical possibility, but that's a pseudo-proposition, a tautology if one understands it, perhaps an implicit definition of logical.
I think Mill was primarily just trying to make sense of matter, not limit all existence to sensation, but I'm not sure. This is an excellent issue in any case. Husserl tackles a related issue in his investigation of the meaning of the invisible entities of physics. For him, there's no problem though, because he acknowledges the reality of ideas. But it's crucial that such ideas are just part of the lifeworld. A table is not 'really' atoms or quarks. It is also atoms or quarks. The real table is not some gray shiny source code hidden 'behind' the one we sit at. We just 'look' at the table not only with our eyes but also with our entire mind and culture. Heidegger's historical-I is valuable here.
Note that your ghost, as entity in the conversation, already has some experiential content, and most ghosts will end up having a further role in the inferential nexus. 'The rain god is angry. So the rain will not come. But we will offer up a sacrifice.'
I think I addressed your object-as-causal-agent already [ Brandom's discursive/normative subject ] , tho I'd say object-as-responsible-agent. Such an agent is essentially temporal, a 'creature capable of making promises,' and held responsible for a coherent narrative, etc.
Yes, I think it's just natural human diversity. Can you imagine living in a society where everyone agreed about everything?
Quoting baker
The salient point about disagreement is that things, human experience, can be framed in various ways. Why should we expect there to be just one true way of framing things?
Quoting baker
Right, I said there is no way to demonstrate that there are objective aesthetic criteria, I didn't say that no one could think there were such.
https://ia903000.us.archive.org/33/items/ApolloHumanRightsBooks/36102337-17775771-Heidegger-Towards-the-Definition-of-Philosophy.pdf
You'll note at the end there a preview of what might be called existential or genuine or experiential space and time, which was also studied by Mach and James.
This is a related passage. The 'environmental' is developed throughout many lectures after this one before B&T arrives. Just noticing the environmental is hard for some of us brought up in a theoretical tradition that reality is 'really' [just/only] [the latest theoretical posit.]
This beautiful passage is also worth quoting:
But philosophy can progress only through an absolute sinking into life as such, for phenomenology is never concluded, only preliminary, it always sinks itself into the preliminary. The science of absolute honesty has no pretensions. It contains no chatter but only evident steps; theories do not struggle with one another here, but only genuine with ungenuine insights. The genuine insights, however, can only be arrived at through honest and uncompromising sinking into the genuineness of life as such, in the final event only through the genuineness of personal life as such.
Thanks for your responses and your quotes from Mill. They have helped clarify things. We seem to be pretty close, even though it would be possible to quibble over this or that. I am going to step away from this thread due to a shortage of time. I will keep an eye out for Brandom's work. Your quotes from Sartre have also been interesting. I wasn't aware of his "non-continental" work, so to speak.
Disagreement is fine, as long as it is about trivial things. It's not fine once your job or your freedom is on the line.
I'm not disagreeing. But my worry is that such an outlook makes a person unfit for living in the world where people typically take for granted that there is an external aperspectival world (and that they have intimate knowledge of this world).
One can dismiss all those "Well, that's just your opinion but not the truth" only for so long until getting in trouble with other people.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Leontiskos
I actually stumbled upon something that fills the historical gap. The sort of Occasionalism you are tending towards does have a premodern patrimony, but such an idea gained more momentum in the Islamic world than the Christian world:
Quoting Alfred J. Freddoso, Causality and Ontotheology: Thomistic Reflections on Hume, Kant, and their Empiricist Progeny
So although Hume came after Aquinas, in his own day Aquinas (and others) rejected the Occasionalism that Hume was reviving. This is not unrelated to the point that got Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) into so much trouble in his Regensburg Address.
Freddoso writes a fair bit on this topic (link).
I also found some correspondence in Leibniz' 'monadology'.
Quoting 3 Concepts from Leibniz
Okay thanks, that's interesting. You're right that Buddhism is a rather different question. I think Yog?c?ra could subscribe to something approximating Occasionalism with it's alternative notion of Sunyata, but the stricter Madhyamaka progeny could certainly not do so, nor the Theravada stream.
The question
Quoting Joshs
Introduces a passage from Husserl:
[quote=Husserl, Ideas II] Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.
In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual progression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains thinkable, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection. [/quote]
Here I illustrate some convergences between Mind-Created World and Husserl's 'phenomenological idealism':
He distinguishes subjective and phenomenological idealism:
As do I:
[quote=The Mind-Created World]...there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. [/quote]
Then he introduces the transcendental subject:
Which corresponds with:
[quote=The Mind-Created World] But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.[/quote]
The 'inextricably mental aspect' I am referring to is the transcendental subject.
My first impression is that for Husserl the empirical is the product of an intersubjective constituting process, which itself is built out of the constituting processes of individual subjectivities. So to say that something is empirically true is to refer to a relative product, which could be otherwise, of the concordant experience in conscious subjectivity. The reality of the Universe as independent of minds must also be considered a conclusion that is relative and could be otherwise. Put differently, the mind-independence of the external world is itself a product of a mind-dependent constituting process. Mind-independent empirical nature for Husserl is this relative product of constitution, a mere hypothesis.
Quoting Wayfarer
That could have come directly from the lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda in the other thread, 'The Indisputable Self'.
Hello, I come from the topic that talks about quantum physics and consciousness. I find what is said in the OP very interesting. My position is the following:
I would say that an impossibility of perception is not an impossibility of the perceived object. Think, for example, of a triangle. Think about the Pythagorean theorem which tells us something about a type of triangles. Now let's think about two people who have knowledge about that theorem and both people accept its universal truth. If the perspective adds something extra, this something extra cannot be the same for the two different perceptions and perspectives that each person has. And here comes the question: what does perspective add in each case? Does it add anything that would affect the theorem in its objective sense, to be different in each case?
Well, in both cases it doesn't add anything that we can say is a property of this type of triangle. With this example we can deduce that the objective properties of things, the being of things, is not reducible to subjective experience, whether understood as perspective. A judgment, therefore, if it hopes to be true, must exceed the order of perception and perspective.
Interesting question. But is the Pythagorean theorem subject to perspectives? In other words, how would an individual perspective or opinion be relevant to the Pythagorean theorem?
But there are many other kinds of matters where perspective might be relevant. Consider complex historical questions for example. There might be levels of complexity which a particular individual is familiar with and which result in their ability to arrive at a superior analysis of the subject.
Quoting JuanZu
I don't think I've claimed in the OP that the objective properties of things are reducible to subjective experience. What I'm claiming is that experience even of apparently mind-independent things has an irreducibly subjective ground.
As for the 'being' of things, it is an open question as to what kinds of entities are beings. I take it that organisms are beings in a way that inanimate things are not, although that is a different topic to this thread.
The Pythagorean theorem makes the two perpendicular lines of a square as in commensurable. This is known as the fact that the square root of two is irrational. Because of this irrationality we cannot conceive of "this type of triangle" as a real object, with real "objective properties". There is inherent within this supposed object, "this type of triangle", a fundamental irrationality.
You seem to have a restricted concept of a real object. It is also not clear to me how you deny that the Pythagorean theorem tells us anything [I]about [/I] right triangles. "Something about X" means that we are pointing out a property of X. In this case, an equality between the parts that constitute the object called "Right Triangle".
But doesn't the historian present himself in a clearly theoretical attitude? I mean, the historian tries to affirm something about some historical moment. Is it not a fortiori an intention of truthfulness? The historian carries out a judgment, which jumps squarely into the field of transcendental validation with a claim of superiority over other views and perspectives. He aspires to universality and the neutralization of his perspective as opinion (doxa) and finally establish an impersonal statement about a state of things.
I did not deny that the Pythagorean theorem tells us anything about right angle triangles. What I clearly said is that it demonstrates to us is that this type of triangle is not a real object. If you do not agree with the reasons I gave for this conclusion, then you could have simply said so.
Quoting JuanZu
The problem is that there is no such equality between the parts, hence the irrational ratio between the two legs. This irrational ratio is known as the square root of two. If the proposition states that the two legs are equal then the straight distance between the two defined points, known as the hypotenuse, is an indefinite distance, unmeasurable. It is said to be irrational. This indicates that in actuality there is an incommensurability between the two legs which are assumed to be equal, such that they cannot actually be equal. The proposition that they are equal, forces the logical conclusion that the hypotenuse is indefinite, irrational, therefore the proposition that they could be equal must be rejected as illogical.
But isn't that just for the case where the length of each leg is 1?
On the other hand, I would like to know what you mean by "Real Object."
That is the proposed equality. When the two legs are proposed as equal, the problem of incommensurability arises. Therefore I propose that we ought to conclude that they cannot actually be equal.
Quoting JuanZu
Let's say that a real object is something which has a description which is logically consistent. If a logical problem in the description of the object, such as contradiction, is evident, then the described object cannot be a real object. So the logical problem with the right angled object is the incommensurability of the two sides, as explained above. This logical inconsistency indicates that the object described cannot be a real object.
We find a very similar problem with "the circle". The square and the circle are two very distinct ways of representing two dimensional "objects", two straight lines at an angle, or a curved line. Both have a very similar logical problem. There is also another similar problem which arises from the distinction between a one dimensional line, and a zero dimensional point. What I propose is that what we ought to conclude is that the "dimensional" representation of objects is logically flawed, and therefore does not accurately represent "real objects".
Now I understand. In that case the equality would be rather an approximation between the value of the sum of the square of the legs and the value of the hypotenuse that connects them. As an asymptotic approximation, if it is valid to say so. This value of the square root of the sum of the squares of the legs would be closer closer than anything to X, with X being an irrational number.
On the other hand, you call a real object one that is logically consistent. I, however, regarding the case, would speak of a qualitative incompatibility in the objective nature of the right triangle as an object. Adding the term "Real" or "not real" would not make much sense once we consider it this way.
In my opinion you have this inverted. The value of the square root of the sum of the legs is something indeterminate, a number which cannot be expressed. We might signify this with X, but X then signifies a value which is impossible to determine, and therefore impossible to express numerically. That's probably why pi is called "pi" rather than expressed as a number. It cannot be expressed as a number. The irrational number is our attempt to express this value, which is close to what is signified by X, but not X.
Quoting JuanZu
It was not a matter of adding the word "real", it was a matter of describing what makes an object real what constitutes "realness", or "objectiveness". The issue was how do we get from stated properties, to the conclusion that the thing with those properties has real, objective existence. My proposal was that to be a real object the stated properties must be logically consistent. So the "qualitative incompatibility" you speak of would exclude the "objective nature" of the triangle, leaving it as something other than a real object.
Expressible... It is expressible. But in an anexact and generalized way. It is not a value that confuses or leads to ambiguity [If I want to determinate the value of the hypotenuse given the value of two legs, I obtain an specific value and not a random one [I]every time[/I] ]. It is not just any value and can be located on the real line. In Cartesian terms it is "clear and distinct." This X, however, is objective, since it is properly deduced from the relationship between two parts of a right triangle.
In my opinion the term "Real" has no place in the discussion because a thing like that, a thing like a triangle simply "gives itself" and presents itself to us as an object of study, without being able to be reduced to a psychological act. To say that there is an incommensurability in its being does not add to or take away anything from the fact that it is presented and given to our knowledge and has effects on it. That is why it is objective, since an internal relationship can be established, whether one of incommensurability, which tells us what a triangle like this [I] is[/I].
When it is disputed that a hypotenuse has a "real length", it is when geometric postulates are used to interpret Euclidean space in relation to a fixed Vector-space basis. The irrational points of a Euclidean space aren't extensionally interpretable unless the basis of the underlying vector-space is rotated so as to transform those irrational points to rational values, which also leads to previously rational-valued points to become irrational. So the problem of incommensurability is really about the fact that it isn't possible to represent all points finitely at the same time, which implies that Euclidean Space cannot serve as a constructive logical foundation for geometry.
The obvious alternative is to follow Alfred North Whitehead in 1919-1920, and abandon classical Euclidean topology for a 'point-free topology' that refers only to extensionally interpretable "blobs", namely open-sets that have a definite non-zero volume, whose intersections approximate pointedness . Then it might be possible to extensionally interpret all such "blobs" in relation to a fixed basis of topological description in a more constructive fashion, meaning that extensional ambiguity is handled directly on the logical level of syntax, as opposed to on the semantic level of theory interpretation.
This is what i disagree with. I think that any instance of the conception of a triangle actually does reduce to a purely psychological act. If you assume that it "presents itself" to us, you need to ask how it does this. Then you see that it is a matter of learning, the concept must be learned, and learning is a psychological act.
So, you might ask where did it first come from. There cannot be an infinite regress in time, of human beings teaching each other the concept, it must have come from somewhere in the first place. This is easily understood as a matter of creative genius. As is evident in all axioms of mathematics, they are clearly thought up by human beings, created by them. With modern math, we see a clear history of who created what, the history is very well documented. In ancient conceptions such as the right angle, the documentation is not there, but there is no reason to think that the process was any different in principle.
Quoting JuanZu
This claim of "objective" is unjustified. That the triangle is "presented and given to our knowledge" is supported only by the evidence of learning. And inter-subjectivity does not objectify. Furthermore, there obviously cannot be an infinite regress of learning. This is why Plato investigated the theory of recollection in The Meno. But this theory has its own problems, which Aristotle expounded on. Aristotle's solution was that the geometrical constructions only exist potentially, prior to being actualized by the mind of the geometer. But something which exists only potentially cannot be an "object", and potential cannot be said to be "objective".
Well, you can't. Since we are talking about an internal relationship that is deduced from elements of an object that differs in its identity from the mind. That is, in order to reduce it to a psychological act you would have to express the internal relationship in terms of a relationship of psychic elements. For example, if we assume that the psyche is nothing more than synaptic processes between neurons, your claim would have to be represented in the form: "this synapse is the relationship of equality between two elements, and it is also an incommensurability." Which is obviously doomed to failure.
It is for this reason that you cannot reduce knowledge to a creation of human genius, even if it has no other origin than humanity. Because knowledge is something like the relationship with something objective. In no case can it justify the objectivity of knowledge based on the particular psychological movements of, in this case, Pythagoras. You may say, but logic is the condition of objectivity Well, what you say about geometry (its reduction to psychological acts) you say a fortiori about logic.
What I say about geometry I say a fortiori about knowledge and knowledge as language. For example, you and I possess the meaning of a right triangle (or the identity principle of logic); If the meaning is nothing more than psychological acts... how can you say that it is the same meaning in each case if they are two different psychic phenomena? The particularity of each case denies its universal formulation, and is not able to justify why it is the same meaning and is repeated in different minds, different languages, different cultures, etc.
Very interesting post, although I don't have enough mathematics background to follow all of the details. Could you provide a link to a 'Blobs for Dummies' article?
Quoting JuanZu
Husserl analyzed the origin of geometry in terms of a historical genesis, imaging the proto-geometer as someone who needed to strive toward more and more abstractive forms out of practical needs.
What makes geometric idealities identically transmissible form person to person and culture to culture is their rootedness in the construction of numeration, in which we abstract away everything meaningful about a collection of objects except their identity as an empty unit, for the purposes of iterating the same thing different time. This empty enumeration at the heart of geometric idealities makes the latter ideal rather than real.
I have always found especially interesting that step to the limit that characterizes Husserl in the discovery of essences. Said step to the limit consists of showing how when crossing it the thing stops being what it is to be something else. For example, Husserl tells us about how, taking the limit of predicates, we cannot conceive a color without extension. Something like this would happen with geometric essences. Isn't the limit something that is imposed on us from the things themselves? (I.E. imagine a perfect triangle-square) We cannot impose that limit on ourselves at will, it is shown as something foreign to our will.
I do not reduce the psyche to synaptic processes, so I do not see how this reply is relevant at all. You have in no way addressed the points I made.
Quoting JuanZu
Furthermore, as I indicated, you have in no way justified your claim of objectivity in knowledge. And now you simply repeat your unjustified assertion that knowledge is "objective", and use this unsound premise to support your insistence that knowledge cannot be an artificial creation.
Quoting JuanZu
I do not claim that you and I ever associate the very same meaning with the same words. In fact, I think the evidence that different people associate different meaning with the same words is overwhelming, and ought not even need to be discussed. Simply hand two people the same sentence, or the same word, and ask them to write a very inclusive statement as to what it means to them, and compare the reports. You will see that even with very simple concepts like "circle", "square", or "triangle", they will produce a variance. The only time the reports will be the same is if the two people have memorized the same definition. But then they would just write a different interpretation of that same definition anyway. Two people referring to the same definition is the result of learning, which I addressed in the last post, and you seem to have completely ignored for some reason.
Quoting JuanZu
The point is that this idea, that "it is the same meaning and is repeated in different minds" is simply false. Each mind relates to the same words in ways exclusive, and unique to that mind. We might say that it is "essentially the same", but we cannot ignore the accidentals which actually make it not the same.
Maybe you think it's not relevant because you're not understanding it very well. For example, if you don't talk about neuronal synapses, you can talk instead about cognitive processes, or psychological acts. So what I have said about neural processes a fortiori is said of any theory that attempts to reduce (reductionism) one field to another.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did. As I have exposed an internal relationship between the elements of a closed field, in this case geometry. And not only that but also its ideality has been exposed (repetition in different cultures, different subjects, different psychological acts, etc. Or can u say that geometry theorems are different through different cultures? ). Then we have a field where an infinity, so to speak, of internal relations that is established from some constitutive elements. Just as we could compose the field of quantum physics from elementary particles.
Now, you will say "but geometry does not represent anything and is something created." Quantum physics is also something created, logic is too. But of course the fact that it is something created does not prevent it from being something objective (even if we follow ur argument no one can say that a computer or a sintetic chemical element is non-objective just because it's artificial) . Physics has its means of objective validation in technological operation and mathematic consistency (a field bigger of terms, relations, operations, etc) , while geometry has its validation in the internal relationships that are discovered through iterative operations) and demonstrated accurately in most cases.
Ur argument, if I understand correctly, is based on a sense of objectivity as representation wich grounds it. That is, as the correspondence between the theory and a referent wich is provided by the sensory system. But if we abandon that idea of ??objectivity as representation we also abandon what you say about geometry as something non-objective. And let me tell you: We have to abandon your sense of objectivity as a representation or as a necessary link between theory and an empirical reference that must correspond to. In the case of geometry it can be said that it is its own reference, and to the extent that we discover its internal relationships we discover things, regardless of the fact that it has no other origin than Humanity.
U can call this "objetive constructivism".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not false. You are pointing out particular accidents to say that we are not referring to the same thing. But obviously in the act of communication an identity and repetition must take place so that there is a minimum of understanding, this is the meaning. If you say to a Greek and an Egyptian to give you 5 units of that fruit and not 4, they will probably both give you the 5 units; Well, this fact is not a simple coincidence and must be explained. But obviously we cannot explain the same from what is different. We cannot explain, for example, why the Egyptian and the Greek acted in the same way based on the sound differences that each one heard, on their culture wich they belong, on their language, etc.
I still don't know what you are trying to say JuanZu. My point was that one is prior to the other, as the cause of the other. Minds are prior to ideas as the cause of ideas. Since ideas and minds are subjects of the very same field, there is no attempt to reduce one field to another here, and your supposed "a fortiori" assertion is irrelevant. You seem to be wanting to claim that ideas are prior to minds, so please address the arguments I've made, instead of attempting to change the subject and using that very change of subject as the basis for your claim of a fortiori.
Quoting JuanZu
Geometry is not a "closed field", there is no such thing as intelligible objects which exist in total isolation from others. So geometrical terms get defined by a wider field of mathematics, and concepts of spatial dimension. This issue is often addressed by philosophers, such as Wittgenstein in On Certainty, because it appears like it may produce an infinite regress of meaning, leaving no concepts truly justified as "ideal", in the sense of perfect, absolute certitude.
Quoting JuanZu
Yes, geometrical ideas have been very different in different cultures. All you need to do to find this out, is read someone like Plato, where it is described how the different geometrical concepts were derived from different parts of the world, Egypt and Babylonia for example, and from there the ideas spread to other parts of the world like Greece, and what is now Italy, where they were assimilated through the process of working out differences, inconsistencies and incompatibilities.
A more modern, and also very clear example, can be found in numerical systems. Currently we use what is known as "Arabic Numerals". This numeral system came to supplant the use of "Roman Numerals" in the western world. It is not the case that these two are simply different names for the same conceptual system, because these two conceptual structures were completely different, as is plainly evident from the absence of the zero in the Roman Numerals. I admit that this example is not specifically "geometry" but it is related, and it gives very clear evidence of how highly logical theorems very clearly vary through different cultures.
Quoting JuanZu
Why are you arguing against yourself now? You used "objectivity" as evidence that ideas are discovered, presented or given to us, rather than created by us. Now you claim "the fact that it is something created does not prevent it from being something objective", so you've just undermined your entire argument.
Quoting JuanZu
Remember JZ, you introduced "objectivity". I'm happy to go ahead without that term, as something irrelevant, but your claim was that being "objective" implies that concepts are not created, but discovered. You said that the reason why a right triangle is "objective" is because it gives itself to us, or presents itself to us as this type of an object. So you are very clearly saying that being "objective" is what implies, or justifies your claim that the right triangle is a discovered (natural) object rather than a created (artificial) object.
Quoting JuanZu
That is what you said.
Quoting JuanZu
With respect to the identity of an object, each accidental of that object must be accounted for, or else two distinct objects, with different accidentals would have the same identity, and therefore be the very same object. Therefore in any instances when the accidentals differ, as not being the same in each of the instances, we must conclude that the two objects are distinct objects and not the same object. This is derived from the law of identity.
Quoting JuanZu
In the case of the constitution of a real spatial object via the synthesis of perspectival adumbrations, passage to the limit never succeeds in fulfilling the idea of the object as a unitary identity. We strive for this fulfillment through our continued interest in the object , but the self-identical object always remains transcendent to what we actually experience. In the case of a geometric ideality like a straight line or circle, passage to the limit assures an exactitude because mathematical shapes are free idealities, whereas real spatial objects are bound idealities.
Mathematical idealization is free, unbound (within the strict limits of its own repetition); no contextual effects intervene such as was the case in the attempt to constitute a real spatialobject. Contextual change implies change in meaning, and a mathematical ideality can be manipulated without being animated, in an active and actual manner, with the attention and intention of signification. Such an ideality can be repeated indefinitely without alteration (passage to the limit), because its meaning is empty. In the case of a bound ideality, what repeats itself as self-identical returns to itself as `the same' subtly differently each time; the immediate effects of contextual change ensure that alteration is intrinsic to the repetition of an intentional meaning. Put differently, we impose the real unity of a spatial object via intention acts, but can never fulfill this intention. We likewise impose the ideal unity of an identically repeatable geometric shape through intentional acts. But in this case we succeed in fulfilling its exact and universal reproducibility because it is an empty , unbounded iteration.
Well, I precisely maintain that they are different fields, not only in terms of validation but in their terms, their relationships and operations. But you are assuming it is the same field (psychological acts) by simply repeating it, ignoring all the evidence I have presented to you and in no way refuting it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
you are saying that it is not a closed field but without giving any justification or argument. I, on the other hand, have given "evidence" that you have not even tried to refute: The internal relations between terms of the same type, their semantic difference with respect to the field that you believe is the same. For example, we have hypotenuse and legs, both are straight, both are two-dimensional, etc. I ask you to make an effort to argue more and spread fewer categorical statements.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And yet you continue to refer to both cases as "numerals". You have not yet understood that you cannot speak of the different as the same. That is, if you speak of two cases (Greeks and Arabs) as species of the same phenomenon (numbers) , you are only arguing against yourself. I say again, you do not explain the same thing by what is different.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is no contradiction. In fact, if I can alternate between creating and discovering it is because it is in a certain way undecidable. On the one hand it has human genesis; On the other hand, it has a structure in which terms establish and maintain autonomous relationships that are no longer reduced to human creativity (for example, the Pythagorean theorem).
What you see as a contradiction between creating and discovering is actually a difference between the pair of concepts called "genesis" and "structure." That is, the first geometer may have imagined a line, the first line in the world; However, this line was already the object of a length, and the object of union with other lines that formed a triangle. But then the lines autonomously maintain a relationship with each other, which, depending on the measurement or value of their length, is equivalent to this or that other value. The key here is autonomy and the internal relationship between a set of elements. This relationship between elements can no longer be thought of as a psychological act of the imagination. Why? Because these relationships are said of the elements and not of the imagination. That is why geometry is objective, created and discovered at the same time.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here I repeat the argument that I have presented in relation to your example of numbers.
So you're argument amounts to "I stipulate that these fields are different", and you think that this validates your perspective. That's called begging the question.
Quoting JuanZu
You've presented exactly zero evidence, only some blabbering about relationships between fictitious imaginary elements. On the other hand I've presented the example of learning, the problem with infinite regress if concepts are only learned, Plato's proposal of "recollection", the problem with this, and Aristotle's resolution to that problem.
Quoting JuanZu
I explained why no field is a closed field. You don't seem to know how to read Juan. Or do you prefer just to ignore evidence which does not support what you believe?
Quoting JuanZu
Yes, two very different instances of the same type of phenomenon. This implies a difference between the two specified things, and in no way implies that the two are the same thing. However, two different things may be of the same type, so your objection "that you cannot speak of the different as the same" is ridiculous. Two different things cannot be the same, yet they can and often are, said to be the same type. So, very commonly we speak of the different as the same, so long as we maintain the distinction between particular and universal, and recognize that "the same type" does not mean "the same individual".
Quoting JuanZu
What I saw as contradiction was that you said a right triangle is "objective" because it "gives itself" and presents itself to us. This was the alternative to my claim that the right triangle was created by us. Later, you said "But of course the fact that it is something created does not prevent it from being something objective."
Therefore we need to conclude that whether or not the right triangle is objective, is irrelevant to whether or not it "gives", "presents itself" to us, or whether it has been created by us. And all this talk about objectivity is just a ruse.
Quoting JuanZu
So your argument here is worthless. The "autonomy and the internal relationship between a set of elements" is no more likely if the triangle is natural than if it is created.
Furthermore, what you say about "the first line in the world", that " this line was already the object of a length, and the object of union with other lines that formed a triangle", is clearly false. If it is the first line in the world, it is contradictory to say that it is already a union with other lines, making a triangle. This would imply that it is not the first line, but that it coexisted with other lines. But this is impossible, because you described it as the first line in the world, created by the first geometer.
Quoting JuanZu
The argument which amounts to an ignorance of the difference between 'being the same thing', and 'being of the same type'?
In this regard, Husserl spoke that in iterative moments there must be a sedimentation in which the meaning is recorded to be "revived" by intentionality in different moments and places. Aren't these sediments language, writing, archiving, for example? An ideal object, to be ideal, must be available for the subject. In a certain sense consigned, registered, etc. These sedimentations, such as language, writing, archiving, computing, etc., are not precisely " "empty" until a living intention animates them? And yet they are necessary conditions for meaning to appear in iteration: in an interlocutor, in another culture, in another time, etc.
Not at all. I start from the assumption that we are talking about the same field, in order to take that assumption to the limit where it can be demonstrated that they are actually two fields that are irreducible to each other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Among the evidence is the impossibility of carrying out a process with the same results based on certain terms and operations. The terms and operations of psychology and geometry are radically different. The terms and operations carried out in geometry reveal internal relationships that you cannot discover by exchanging these terms for others in psychology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You didn't . The only thing you said is that geometry objects are not isolated objects. But that's assuming you can delimit the field of geometry from every other field, which is not the case, I assume you can't do that. On the other hand, I have exposed the incommensurability between one field (geometry) and another (psychology). Relative to the field of psychology the field of geometry is closed in the sense that none of its terms, operations and relationships can determine the nature of the field of geometry.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They are the same insofar as they are numbers, they are different insofar as they are different types of numbers. Have you ever read about being as equivocity, as univocity and as analogy? Well, it seems that you speak from equivocity (all things are different and none can be the same in any sense), but contradicting yourself by using the same numerical system sign. "Things are different in one sense, but in another sense They are the same". Thus, there is evidently no contradiction. Things can be the same as genres, bus distinct as species.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A geometric object is presented to us and given to us even though it is a human creation. But it is given to us as a set of internal relationships and meanings that transcends the acts of its creation. It is in this sense that it gives itself: Depending on its autonomy, a property of the object that emerges from relationships between the parts of that object that are discovered beyond our will. That is, when we talk about a property of triangles we are talking something about triangles, not something about imaginative acts. It is something that comes up from the thing, not from us. Thats why it presents itself.
We can say that it is something created and discovered for the reasons I have given (genesis and structure). A straight line could perhaps have been imagined once, or imagined by three different people at different times, or simply be an imaginary act repeated three times. That doesn't matter (and it's important that it doesn't matter), the important thing is when those lines entered into a relationship and crossed forming a triangle (three angles appeared). Something like a leg and a hypotenuse appeared and relationships emerged between these elements, regardless of how the lines were created.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Univocality, equivocality and analogy.
Thank you. I'll give a try to present that self-intro.
The field we are working in here is philosophy. We are discussing the reality, and objectivity of geometrical objects, that is philosophy. You have assumed that we are discussing two distinct fields, geometry and psychology, and this forms the premise for your argument which proves that these are distinct fields. That is called begging the question.
I really do not see how your other premise, "the impossibility of carrying out a process with the same results based on certain terms and operations" is at all relevant, or even how it is meant to be interpreted. Therefore you need a much better explanation of what you are talking about before this phrase can be admitted as "evidence".
Quoting JuanZu
Obviously you did not understand me, so I will repeat with explanation. I said: "geometrical terms get defined by a wider field of mathematics, and concepts of spatial dimension. This issue is often addressed by philosophers, such as Wittgenstein in On Certainty, because it appears like it may produce an infinite regress of meaning, leaving no concepts truly justified as "ideal", in the sense of perfect, absolute certitude."
To explain in a simpler way for you, all terms and conceptions get defined and understood by a wider context. There is obviously no assumption here that geometry is "delimited", as what is expressed is exactly opposite to that. I am saying that no concepts are actually "delimited", and this has been an issue for philosophers. Wittgenstein said in the Philosophical Investigations for example, that concepts have no inherent boundaries, though a person may create a boundary for a specific purpose.
This I assume would be the case when we define a term for the purpose of a logical operation, as a premise. The issue I am telling you about, is that the understanding, or interpreting of this definition takes us outside the boundaries which the definition is meant to create. So, for example, if we define "right triangle" as a triangle with one right angle, then to understand these terms, "triangle", and "right angle", we must go to a wider context. We can define "triangle" as a plane figure with three sides and three angles, and we may define "right angle" as the angle produced when two lines cross each other and have equal angles on all sides. To understand or interpret these definitions we need to go to a wider context. We need to define "plane figure", "sides", "angles", "lines".
As you can see, at each step of defining the terms, then defining the terms of the definition, and then defining the terms which define the defining terms, we move into a wider and wider context, with an increase in terms to be defined, and an increase in the possibility of ambiguity and misunderstanding. It appears to many philosophers that this need to continually place the terms into a wider and wider context, in one's attempt to understand, would lead to an infinite regress rendering true understanding as impossible.
Quoting JuanZu
This is exactly why what you are arguing is self-contradictory. First you say geometry cannot be delimited. This means that this proposed "field", geometry has no fixed boundaries. Then you argue that there is incommensurability between this proposed field, geometry, and another proposed field, psychology, and so you conclude that the two fields must be closed. Your conclusion contradicts your premise.
Do you apprehend the blatant contradiction? On the one hand you assume, 'geometry is not delimited. Then from here you say, 'but there is incommensurability between the terms of geometry and the terms of psychology'. So you conclude, 'relative to psychology, geometry is closed'. But this is obviously a fallacious conclusion. You do not have the premise required, which would state that there cannot be incommensurability within the same field. Furthermore, we have all sorts of evidence of incommensurability existing within the same field, which proves that such a premise would be false.
For example, within the field of mathematics there is incommensurability between real numbers and imaginary numbers. The use of imaginary numbers produces all sorts of complexities within the field, making the above mentioned concept of "plane" extremely difficult and complex. The use of imaginary numbers creates the need for a completely different definition of "plane".
Now, we can justly inquire whether the use of imaginary numbers is better described as a mathematical operation, or a psychological operation. We can look at this usage from at least two perspectives, what imaginary numbers actually provide for us within the field of mathematics, and also from the perspective of the psychology behind the desire to create such a thing as imaginary numbers. If there is incompatibility between these two, as you seem to assume, then we can conclude that imaginary numbers do not fulfil the purpose they were intended for.
Quoting JuanZu
OK, now the point is that there is incommensurability between the different types of numbering systems. And, this incommensurability exists within the same field. Therefore your conclusion that fields are closed to each other when there is incommensurability between them, is unsound. Furthermore, your argument that geometry and psychology are distinct fields is also unsound. And, we can conclude that your presumption that these two names are representative of two distinct fields is nothing but a prejudice which is presented a premise for a fallacious argument, due to the fallacy of assuming the conclusion, begging the question.
Quoting JuanZu
Did you not read where I explained the difference between "being the same thing", and "being of the same type". I'm really starting to think that you do not even bother to read half of what I post JZ.
Quoting JuanZu
Now you're finally saying something which appears possibly reasonable, which warrants a thorough investigation. You say that geometrical objects are created, but their meanings transcend their creation. Is that correct, and what exactly do you mean by "meanings that transcends the acts of its creation"?
Let's look at "meaning" to begin with, in its most simple and ordinary sense. When someone uses words, we say that the meaning is what is meant by the author, what the author intended with the words. Do you agree with that? If so, how would you say that "meaning" in this sense, "transcends" the act of creation, which is the act of the author thinking up, and giving physical existence to the conglomeration of words? Would you say that "transcends" is used here in the same way that we might say that one's intention "transcends" one's intentional acts?
If so, then we have your expression of "internal relations and meanings" as transcending the intentional act. But I defined "meaning" as what is given by the act itself, what is meant by the act. It appears wrong to say that meaning could transcend the act, because meaning seems to be intrinsically tied to the act. How could there be any meaning when the act which gives meaning is non-existent? We might be better off to say that "intention" transcends the act, and meaning is what is created by the intentional act, but intention is defined by terms which lead us in a different direction. It is defined by "purpose".
Let's say the "purpose" of the intentional act, or act of creation, transcends the act. And "purpose" implies a completely different type of "relations", which are not spatial relations at all, like what geometry works with. The relations implied by "purpose" is a hierarchy of values and priorities in relation to goals or ends. So, would you agree with me, that if there is a sort of "relations" or even if we might call it "meanings" which transcends the act of creation, these relations are "value" relations, which are distinct from spatial relations, being based in "priority". We might see that mathematics also is based in a type "value" system, and "priority" is paramount in the concept of order which is very important to mathematics.
Quoting JuanZu
Let's look directly at what I've identified as the relations which could possibly transcend the human, artificial act of creation, "priority", "order", and "value". If "order" transcends the acts which create mathematical axioms, is it possible, in mathematics, to have a set with no order, or no elements? Wouldn't such an axiom be necessarily false, therefore needing to be rejected as ontological wrong. However, mathematics does employ such axioms. Therefore it appears impossible, because of falsity, to argue that "priority|, "order", and "value" transcend the axioms of mathematics, because these axioms define what those things are.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, here you are talking about reducing the concept of a triangle to a pure psychological act. And this is where my refutation comes in. The processes that lead to the discovery of an essential relationship in a right triangle cannot be determined as psychological operations, since the difference between the terms and operations of both fields is necessary. You would have to make this reduction and explain it. But I know you won't do it, because it can't be done. Any attempt at something like that would only establish association relationships between elements. But association does not mean identity, much less identity in operations and relationships.
It doesn't matter if you want to include the larger geometry context where you can define primitive notions such as line or point. My point has been developed on that reduction that you have pointed out from psychology. If you want to do meta-theory or meta-geometry from the field of logic, that's fine with me. Better for this point, since logic is precisely a field that also transcends the psychological act.
The field of geometry is closed in relation to the field of psychology. You are not reading, you are assuming things and creating straw men. Saying that the field of geometry is closed with respect to that of psychology is only a necessary argument for the debate. That is, certainly the field of geometry is closed to a psychological approval that attempts to found and determine it.
The incommensurability between both fields is especially present in the methodological order: Association is not equivalent to identity or equality. At any point in the reduction that you propose, but do not justify or explain, it will happen that you will fall into a question-begging where the object you want to reduce (the terms of geometry) will need to only establish associations with terms (those of psychology). ) semantically different.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have said that they are incommensurable, but that incommensurability, as you treat it, if we follow your strange reasoning, since it evokes an absolute difference, you cannot speak of two numerical systems. You would have to talk about a numerical system and something else that can no longer be a numerical system. That is why you fall into a performative contradiction, because you are involuntarily assuming the same within what you try to express as different.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I read it and refuted it. Showing how your argument leads to the misunderstanding that would not allow us to talk about two types of anything. Well, I contrasted analogy with equivocation: that a thing be identical and different at the same time.
When I talk about "meaning" I am not referring to something that happens in language, or something from authors with intentions and purposes, or anything like that. I am talking about the sense of, for example, an internal relationship between the elements of an object called a triangle. They occur from the object itself and have a meaning that is contrary to our intentionality, in the sense that it affects us from the outside, so to speak. The meaning here is that of the thing itself, that which belongs to its being.
Otherwise the rest of your answer is based on introducing notions such as intentional acts (voluntary, with a purpose, with priorities and scales of value). But introducing these notions is wrong, in the sense that they are far from being able to describe the non-intentional and non-voluntary aspect that belongs to the thing that occurs as an internal relationship between elements of something like a triangle. Except for the notion of "order" which is referred to formalization of set theory then also transcends the psychological act. But I suspect that what you understand by order is rather referring to the human act of ordering things.
What I am saying is that there is no such difference, it is all psychological. You are merely insisting on a difference to support your ontological position. All the geometrical terms, points, lines, angles, etc., what you call the "elements", along with the relations between them, refer to things imagined by the mind. And things imagined by the mind are studied in the field of psychology. There, I have made the reduction and explained it.
Now, the onus is on you to support your claimed "difference". You refer to "the discovery of an essential relationship in a right triangle", but this makes no sense to me. Any supposed "essential relation" can be shown to be made up, fabricated, created by a mind, and that is why this act (as an act of the imagination), is reducible to being a psychological act. It is not an act of discovering something. An act of discovery could not be described as purely psychological, because there would be something independent of the mind, which would be what is "discovered".
There are two "essential" aspects of the right triangle. One is the right angle, which I described as two lines crossing with equal angles on all four sides, and this is completely imaginary. The other is the triangle, which I described as a plane figure with three sides and three angles. A "plane figure" is completely imagined, and not discovered, therefore this essential aspect is also reducible to being purely psychological. The relation between these two essential aspects, which is to put these two together, and create a right triangle is also a constructive act of the imagination, and therefore psychological. It is all imaginary, psychology, there is nothing here which is discovered.
Quoting JuanZu
You are only providing more evidence that you are simply begging the question with your claim: " the field of geometry is closed with respect to that of psychology is only a necessary argument for the debate."
What you appear to be saying, is that this premise is not made "necessary" by any real evidence, it is just necessary for your argued position. However, as I explained, it is the only way that you can support your conclusion, by starting with a premise which leads necessarily to that conclusion. Begging the question.
Quoting JuanZu
As I clearly explained, and gave very good examples to support what I said, incommensurability does not imply closure and a separation into two fields closed to each other. There is often incommensurability within the very same field.
Quoting JuanZu
This very poor logic. There is no "absolute difference" implied, even though I cannot say that I understand what that would actually mean. As I explained already, two things of the same type can be called by the same name. Two different dogs are both called "dogs". Two different numerical systems can both be called "numerical systems". And, the two incommensurable numerical systems can exist within the same field, mathematics. Your claim that only one could be called a numerical system, and the other would have to be called something else, is nonsensical and clearly illogical, as being not supported by any premise which would produce that conclusion.
And if you stated the required premise you would see how unsound it is. The premise would be "two incommensurable things cannot be of the same type". But, here we have two incommensurable numbering systems, things of the same type, which are also incommensurable. The required premise is obviously false.
Quoting JuanZu
Well, if you do not agree that two different things can be said to be the same type, then I believe this discussion is pointless. And I really do not see how you conclude that this would make it impossible to speak of two different types.
I think you need to show your arguments more clearly JZ. State your premises clearly and show the logic which leads to your conclusion. Simply making assertions that your conclusions are logical doesn't cut it. Look, you concluded that my way of looking at things would mean that there could not be two different numerical systems, without showing any premises or logical procedure which produces that conclusion. In a very similar way, you now claim that what i said leads to the conclusion that we cannot speak of two different types. Where are your premises, and logical procedure which produces these absurd conclusions?
Quoting JuanZu
This is all psychology, as explained above. The supposed "elements", lines and angles, along with the internal relations, are completely imaginary. These are all created by the imagination, and so is your supposed "object itself", a product of the mind. Your proposed "thing itself", the right triangle, along with whatever meaning is supposed to be associated with it, since it is all, in its entirety, a product of the imagination itself, is to be understood through psychology.
Regrettably in this case I have to agree with your opponent. That is the error of psychologism. Geometric shapes and numbers are not mind-dependent in that sense at all, even though they can only be perceived by the mind. As Bertrand Russell remarked of universals 'universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.'
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I imagine you're a steam train or a walrus, so it must be true, right? How could it not be, my imagination cannot err.
Yes, I already knew that you held this opinion. You like to portray the issue as a debate between nominalism and realism, and through that approach I've tried to get you to change your mind numerous times.
The principal issue which Plato pointed to, Aristotle elucidated, and Aquinas expounded on, developing clear principles to deal with, is that we need to maintain a real separation between "Forms" which exist independently from the human mind, and "ideas" which exist within the human mind, and are therefore dependent on it. A careful understanding of Plato and Aristotle will see this separation revealed in the usage of "idea" prevalent in Plato, and the distinct term "form" which Plato introduced, and became prevalent in Aristotle. (https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/77950/how-when-and-why-platos-ideas-were-changed-to-forms-in-english-translation). This separation is the only conceivable way that we can account for the reality of error in human ideas, and human knowledge in general.
Without the separation, we'd have to say that some human ideas are true, independent Forms, with eternal truth, while other human ideas are fallible. Then we would need some principles to distinguish which human ideas are properly independent Forms, and which are fallible human opinions.
So, we can proceed by examining the evidence available to us, which appears to us as the existence of human ideas, just like Plato did. Then we find through Plato's guidance, that there is no real identifiable difference between the very subjective ideas such as "love", "friendship", "beauty", "just", and the supposedly more objective ideas like "chair", "bed", and even the mathematical axioms. The difference between the two is the strength of the human conventions which 'fix' the meaning of the terms in what appears to be unchanging, eternal forms. We can also see that this strength, or fortification of the human idea through convention, is supported by usefulness.
This evidence, derived from the extensive and very thorough investigation and analysis into the true nature of human ideas is what leads to nominalism. But that is not the end of the story because now the fortitude of human conventions, along with the moral virtue and ethics which support these conventions, becomes the central issue. What the investigation and analysis of human ideas revealed to Plato, is that human ideas precede in time, the artificial things which the human beings bring into existence, in the sense of being causal. This is the formula which is applied in production, and this causal role he associated with "the good", what Aristotle termed as "final cause". The priority of the ideas is revealed in the cave allegory as what causes the shadows which most people think are the real things. You'll see in The Republic, that the carpenter works with an idea which is the formula for "bed" and this is supposed to be a representation of the divine Idea of "Bed". But the formula, as the idea in the carpenter's mind, is not actually the same as the divine "Idea", the perfection of the "ideal", which following Aristotle became known as the independent "Form", it is only as near to the ideal as the carpenter's human (less than perfect) mind will provide for.
Now we have the principles for the separation between the divine, separate Forms, and the human ideas, which are supposed to be a representation of the divine, but are really just the best that the individual human being's capacities will provide for through the means of the fortitude of human conventions. This separation is pursued by Plato in books like The Timaeus, and Aristotle in his Metaphysics, and the ensuing efforts of Neo-Platonists and Christian theologians.
I'm sorry but that is absolutely false. Even empirical evidence refutes it. For example, as children we do not imagine something like a "triangle" but rather we find it in books or in the virtuality of a screen. Only later can we imagine it with the help of memory and imagination. Remember it outside of a certain context. And even better is that we identify both things (what is brought from memory and what we find in a classroom) as the same.
Now, the reduction you are trying to make is done incorrectly. That is not a reduction, it is an association between elements. But there is no approach in which the terms, operations and relations of geometry are equivalent or can be replaced by other terms, other operations and other relations. That is why you can never start from psychological elements (assuming that something like that exists) to deduce the Pythagorean theorem, or the theory of relativity, which in this case would be the same thing.
Let me teach you something: When you say that something IS psychological and is reducible to the psychological, you are determining an identity, that is, you must necessarily determine it semantically as well, and go from that identity to a reduction that results in a replacement of terms, then of operations and then of relationships (since geometry is constituted, like any science, by these things). So assuming you have the terms of psychology you have to carry out a replacement, as long as you are talking about BEING X. If the reduction is understood as an identification then it is an eliminativism.
Now, you haven't been able to carry out this reduction and identification at the same time. That's why the only legitimate thing you can say is that there is an association between elements of psychology and elements of geometry. But we must remember that association is not equivalent to either identification or reduction
The principal point of my argument is that you should developed or presented a real reduction. But you didn't and just constantly repeat that something is psychological because geometry is something created by humans. That kind of statements need to be well explained and demonstrated. But that's not your case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not at all. That the field of geometry is closed to the field of psychology means that the geometric thing is not reduced to nor can it be identified with the geometric thing. Again, the relationships that are discovered, the semantics that are implicit, operations, terms, etc.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not all incommensurabilities act in the same way. Furthermore, we can take your example of the incommensurability between a leg and the hypotenuse. Well, when you say that both are incommensurable, you are saying that they are different natures, one is rational and the other must be irrational. Well, in the same sense it is said about geometry and psychology: they are things of different natures.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ask yourself why in both cases you call them "dogs." If you want to stay in a rational discourse you have to say that they are the same in one sense, but also different in another.
In fact that is precisely what I said. Things can be said to be the same in one sense and different in another. Now, when you choose equivocation you restrict your right to call two things the same way. Whether we're talking about dogs or number systems. I'm just taking your statements to the absurd (as they are more categorical statements than arguments, in my opinion).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, I think I've refuted those claims.
I would say that they are not even just imagined. That is, they have a historical appearance, through writing and through language. You find a triangle in a book or on a computer. In fact, I would say that they are more perfect in both cases than in the imagination. But the most important thing is that if someone says that the contents of geometry can be reduced to psychology, that person must carry out that reduction and show it (for example, just as we can reduce Newtonian physics to relativistic physics). That case has not occurred. And I think I have explained why any attempt is doomed to failure.
I already went through this. I called it "learning". But if every idea of "triangle" comes from learning, this produces the infinite regress I described. So we know as historical evidence indicates, that there must be a beginning to humans producing triangles in their minds. Plato tried to escape the infinite regress by characterizing learning as recollection. Please don't ask me to circle back and repeat what I've already explained, this gets us no where.
Quoting JuanZu
I don't see why you request that the terms be "replaced". That seems irrelevant. But if you insist, we could replace "triangle" with the Spanish "triangolo", or some other language. And operations differ as well, as the French do long division in a way different from the English. But, as I said, I really do not see the relevance. We could all use the same words, and the same operations, and all this would indicate is consistency in the teaching methods. It still does not demonstrate that the ideas are not humanly created in the beginning, that they are not artificial but discovered.
Quoting JuanZu
I gave you my method of reduction, the ideas of geometry are completely imaginary therefore the subject of psychology, as psychology deals with imaginary ideas which come to the mind. You have not at all justified your claim that replacement of terms is required so I'll treat it as a ruse, until you justify this claimed need.
Quoting JuanZu
As I said, "psychology" deals with things of the mind like ideas, and this includes geometrical ideas. I don't see that you have refuted this in anyway. Here's a passage from the Wikipedia entry on "psychology".
[quote=Wikipedia: psychology] Psychology is the study of mind and behavior.[1] Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences.[/quote]
It seems like our disagreement concerns what "psychology" refers to, not what "geometry" refers to.
Quoting JuanZu
I'm really not able to follow you at all JZ. What do you mean by "the geometric thing is not reduced to nor can it be identified with the geometric thing". Are you saying that contrary to the law of identity, a thing is other than itself?
Quoting JuanZu
If you refuse to even consider the role of intention in your representation of meaning and ideas, I don't see how this discussion could progress in an meaningful way.
Yes, but the judgement that that they may have an existence outside of any perspective is neither demonstrably false nor unintelligible. You seem to be trading on the obvious truism that all our judgements are mind-dependent to draw the unwarranted conclusion that all existence must be mind-dependent. Existence and judgement are thus unjustifiably conflated
Every judgement concerning what exists is indeed dependent on our intellectual and sensory faculties. I believe this is in line with Kant's philosophy, as is the OP on the whole.
I would assume that Wayfarer wouldnt deny existence outside of perspective. But as an exercise, try to imagine constructing a sentence describing such existence. To begin with, the subject-object grammar of language must be bracketed off, including any properties or attributes (location in space and time, size, weight, color, shape, etc) ascribed to said existence. Perhaps rather than unintelligible, one could say such existence would be profoundly devoid of meaning, given that the meaning of describable objects is tied to their use for us as prescribed by some sort of grammar.
Would you agree with the following?
Yes, quite right. :up:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
And for the New Materialist knowing the world is interacting with it and interacting with it is changing it.
I've been pretty careful about that point. The way I've put it is that any meaningful judgement about existence assumes a perspective, but that doesn't say that in the absence of perspective, nothing exists. Rather it is that both existence and non-existence are conceptual in nature. ON that particular point I appeal to Buddhist philosophy.
[quote=The Buddha]By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
I would not agree with that; the questions "what things 'in themselves' may be like" and "how could we know that things exist": are two different questions. We know things exist for us because we sense them, but we cannot know what things in themselves are like even though we know what they are like for us. So, we know how things appear to us and we have good reason to think things exist apart from our perceptions of them, because other animals, judging from their behaviors, sense things in much the same ways we do. We naturally come to the concept of "thingness", but this is a linguistically mediated concept. We can be fairly certain that things stand out for other animals as gestalts, but we cannot know if there is any prelinguistic conception of "thingness" as opposed to merely "a sense of things".
So, I see Nietzsche's statement as being too anthropocentric.
I don't agree with this, because we can impute mere existence without claiming, or being required, to know what the nature of that existence is.
Here I will transpose the conversation to Buddhist philosophy, although there are alternatives. But in Buddhist philosophy, there is a term for 'seeing things as they truly are', which is one of the attributes of the Buddha. One of the canonical early texts says, 'there is, monks, an unborn, uncreated, unmade. Were there not an unborn, uncreated, unmade, there would be no release from the created, the born, the made' (i.e. 'the conditioned'). There are parallels in Christian mysticism, 'wisdom uncreate', in the writings of Meister Eckhardt and some other sources, drawing from Platonism.
But I think this domain of discourse is pretty well ring-fenced off in contemporary dialogue, because of its seemingly religious connotations. I think, maybe, Heidegger attempted to approach it, in his oblique way, although I'm not too conversant with it. But it is the one subject where the dialogue with non-dual philosophy (Zen and Advaita) at least provides a kind of vocabulary.
and Happy New Year :party: :sparkle: :clap:
I can't see any distinction between this idea of a collective consciousness and the idea of "mind at large". What would you say is the difference?
Crappy Newt's Ear!
That 'mind at large' suggests an objective reality. That is the reification involved. A subtle but important point, discussed extensively in Buddhist scholastic philosophy and in debates with the Brahmins.
Oh, and Happy New Year to you, although it's already an old year, I copped a traffic radar booking on Day One. :fear: complete with double points.
What do you mean by "objective reality"? A mind at large in the 'God' or 'universal mind' sense is not an object, but if we want to say it is real, then we are positing it as an actuality, no?
Bad luck about the traffic fine...it appears that traffic radars have no conception of "happy new year".
That particular essay is attempting to stay within the guidelines of Madhyamaka philosophy - 'middle way'. When asked if the self exists or does not, the Buddha does not reply, but maintains a noble silence.
Yes, I understand that, but such silence does not constitute a philosophical position. That said, bear in mind that I am no advocate of holding philosophical positions, but the subject of the thread was as to what is the best argument for physicalism, and I stated that physicalism, understood as the idea that there are mind-independent existents, seems to me the most plausible inference to explain the world we experience.
I don't see a cogent distinction between the idea of an 'Alaya' or 'storehouse' consciousness and the notions of a universal or collective consciousness, deity or God; they all seem to me to be variations of the same theme with few differences between them that make a difference. The only difference that makes a significant difference seems to me to be the idea of a personal God.
Quoting Wayfarer
Too many times when science is challenged, it is on the basis that it is inadequate in some way that religious faith, for example, is needed to shore up the shortcoming of science to explain how the universe works.
But the inability of neuroscience to explain what we all experience in our respective consciousnesses (e.g., perceptions, pain) is not a shortcoming; its simply not the domain of neuroscience. Similarly, the fact that gravity does not rake leaves is not a shortcoming of gravity. Leaf-raking is not relevant to the concept of gravitation.
On the other hand, neuroscience does play a role in our conscious experience. As Ive written in another Forum discussion, I am unable to project my (conscious) feeling of pain onto a screen for you to experience even though I am able to project an MRI scan of my brain onto a screen, showing you certain neurological biomarkers that correspond to my feeling of pain. Although I can (scientifically) describe and explain my pain, I am unable to provide you with the experience of my pain. So neuroscience plays a role in all this just not the only role.
Your thought-experiment was brilliant.
Quoting Wayfarer
The blend of imagination, science and philosophy is both thought-provoking and great fun!
Meaningless to us, whose every thought is conditioned by our perspective. We are perceptive and limited creatures with central nervous systems, and as you point out perspective is deeply woven into the fabric of our understanding. But just because we cannot truly think beyond perspective, isn't it injudicious to thereby conclude that reality itself is incoherent outside of perspective?
What does 'coherent' mean?
Coherent
1. (of an argument, theory, or policy) logical and consistent - "they failed to develop a coherent economic strategy" Similar: logical, reasoned, reasonable, well reasoned, rational, sound, cogent, consistent, well organized, systematic, orderly, methodical, clear, lucid, articulate, relevant, intelligible, comprehensible, joined-up Opposite: incoherent, muddled,
2. forming a unified whole, "the arts could be systematized into one coherent body of knowledge"
Absent a perspective, how could there be coherence? As I said at the outset, we can imagine an empty cosmos, but that imaginative depiction still relies on an implicit perspective, or else there is nothing nearer or further, larger or smaller. The mind brings that order to any such depiction.
I also refer to a recent book I've mentioned a number of times, Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles C. Pinter (Routledge Feb 2021). Pinter, a mathematician who had an interest in cognitive science, shows in great detail how it is the mind that operates in terms of gestalts (meaningful wholes) and brings the order we perceive to the universe:
[quote=Introduction;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-50083-2_1]Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of lifeand the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.[/quote]
Are you conflating a frame of reference with a mental perspective? Nothing can be nearer or further, larger or smaller, independent of a frame of reference. But a frame of reference is not a mind, even though a mind can furnish one.
A boulder and a stump is not inherently nearer or further. But if I drive a stake in the ground, the boulder might then be nearer to it than the stump. Similarly, the stake might be taller than the boulder and shorter than the stump. But a stake is not a mind, merely a frame of reference.
It is clear that appearance is something created by minds. But shape? I struggle with that. Shapes unlike colors have properties that are mind-independent. Bowling balls roll by virtue of their shape, whether or not a mind is there to observe it.
Isn't positing 'a frame of reference' without their being a mind to conceive it, merely speculation?
It's difficult to convey Pinter's argument in a few sentences. But further on in the text, he notes:
[quote=Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter] We are misled by common sense to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects. In actual fact, the manner in which physical objects are related to one another and come together rests on an entirely different principle, called the Addition of Simples, which is explained above. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself. In a similar way, a photograph consists of a large number of tiny dots of different colors, called pixels. The little dots do not conspire together to give rise to Grandmas portrait. The portrait comes to exist in visual awareness when the whole of it is seen from an external perspective. The existence of an object as an individual whole is always something external to the object, not inherent in the object itself.[/quote]
In respect of the 'addition of simples'
I've had a few debates about this point with others here, and I agree it's a difficult point to convey. But what I think it means is that what we attribute to the world, as being the intrinsic property of objects, is actually an artefact of perception which is constructed from the (unconscious) tendency of the mind to construe objects as meaningful wholes. So what is thought to be 'inherent in the object' such as its perceived roundness, does not exist on the level of the primitive constituents of that object as described by science, but is imputed to it by the observer. And the reason that is difficult to see, is because we are accustomed to looking through that perspective, whereas here we're being asked to look at it. That's why I say at the outset of Mind Created World that the approach is mainly perspectival - that it requires a perspective shift (indeed, something very like a gestalt shift).
My essay ends with a quote (thanks to @Joshs for bringing it to attention):
[quote= Husserls Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy, Dan Zahavi]Ultimately, what we call reality is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world in itself and those parts of our beliefs that simply express our conceptual contribution. The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned [/quote]
Speculation? I don't see how. It takes a mind to mark something as a frame of reference. But it takes a mind to formulate a proposition at all. Does that imply that the truth of all proposition are mind dependent? In what sense would "the Earth is further from the sun than Venus" no longer be true when sentient life is gone?
How is it then possible for the picture to inform? Suppose I have never seen Grandma, and the portrait includes the hairy mole on her cheek. Now I know it is there. If there is no mind independent feature of the picture as a whole, how can it tell me something that was not previously in my mind?
Similarly I had know foreknowledge that you would reply to me exactly as you did. Now I know your reply. Does that knowledge come from me alone, merely my personal interpolation, when in truth the words on my screen are just assemblages of pixels?
Quoting Wayfarer
This division between "simples"/primitive constituents, and "Gestalts", seems to be doing exactly what this quote says is impossible:
For my part, I don't see why the roundness of the bowling ball should not be included among the " primitive constituents of that object as described by science". The roundness determines its Newtonian behavior, after all.
A frame of reference is clearly an artificial creation. From Wikipedia: "In physics and astronomy, a frame of reference (or reference frame) is an abstract coordinate system whose origin, orientation, and scale are specified by a set of reference points?geometric points whose position is identified both mathematically (with numerical coordinate values) and physically (signaled by conventional markers).[1]"
How do you think that something other than a mind could mark a frame of reference?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the sentence "the Earth is further from the sun than Venus" , the sun is the frame of reference in which the relation "further" operates. It takes a mind to formulate any proposition; in this one, the Sun is marked as a frame of reference, without which "further" would be meaningless. But does the proposition hold independently of minds, or not?
That is one example of an empirical fact. As I said in the OP I don't deny empirical facts. What I'm criticizing is the attempt to absolutize them as self-existent in the absence of any mind. The nature of the universe absent any mind....well, what can be said?
Kant, to whose philosophy I refer, was an empirical scientist as well as philosopher. His theory of nebular formation, modified by Laplace, is still considered scientifically respectable, even if superseded in many ways by subsequent discoveries.
In relation to empirical science, Kant believed that our scientific knowledge is valid within the realm of phenomena. He acknowledged the importance and validity of empirical science in understanding the natural world, as it deals with how things appear to us through our senses and rational faculties. His own work in the field of physical geography and the nebular hypothesis reflects this belief in the value of empirical investigation.
Kants philosophy essentially proposes a framework in which empirical science can coexist with transcendental idealism. Empirical science investigates and explains the world of phenomena, which is the world as structured by our sensory and cognitive faculties. On the other hand, transcendental idealism addresses the fundamental nature of these faculties themselves and the limits of what we can know, as well as the sense in which what we know is moulded or constructed by our knowing of it. Things conform to thoughts, not thoughts to things as it is sometimes said.
Likewise its important to understand that what I propose in the OP is not in conflict with empirical science.
Quoting hypericin
The mathematical description of a sphere in three-dimensional space is given by:
x[sup]2[/sup]+y[sup]2[/sup]+z[sup]2[/sup]=r [sup]2[/sup]
Here x, y and z are the coordinates of any point on the surface of the sphere, and r is the radius of the sphere. This equation ensures that every point on the surface of the sphere is exactly r units away from the origin.
What about that equation looks spherical? Rhetorical question of course but makes the point that a sphere can be perfectly described by an equation as can all of the primitive elements described by mathematical sciences without looking like anything. Its appearance as spherical is imputed by the observing mind - which is not to deny that it is spherical, but to recognise the constructive contribution of the observer.
But what this conceals or overlooks is that objectivity is a methodological axiom which is then taken for a metaphysical principle. That is the point at which it becomes metaphysical, as distinct from methodological, naturalism. Methodological naturalism can be, in fact should be, circumspect with regards to metaphysical questions, of which the role of the mind in the construal of experience is an example par excellence. But due to the generally dismissive attitude of modern culture to such questions, they are subjected to the Procrustean bed of empirical judgement, even though they transcend the bounds of empirical experience. This is what the OP is drawing attention to.
I'm not as forgiving as Wayfarer on this issue. The simple answer is no. No proposition cannot be said to "hold" independently of minds. Each proposition needs to be interpreted for meaning, and a judgement made concerning the truth or falsity of what is meant, in order to determine whether or not it holds.
It appears to me, like you have made that judgement concerning the stated proposition, and you conclude that the proposition is true. You also appear to believe that the proposition will continue to be true into the future, indefinitely, if at some time in the future there would be no minds to interpret it. I see two distinct epistemological problems here.
First, there is the matter of your judgement that the proposition is true. How can we know the correctness of this judgement? Even if all currently living human minds agree with you, a new way of understanding the reality of the solar system might demonstrate that this judgement of the proposition as true, was based in a form of misunderstanding. This is what happened when the geocentric model was replaced by the heliocentric. We really have no idea of how our understanding of spatial-temporal relations may change in the future. And, problems like quantum uncertainty, entanglement, wave-particle duality, wave-function collapse, and spatial expansion, demonstrate very clearly that change to this understanding is inevitable. Remember what happened to Pluto, it was a planet and now it's not.
The second problem is the issue of the indefinite continuation of sameness into the future, as time passes. This problem Hume elucidated in his discussion of causation and inductive reasoning. Things have continued through time, in the past, to exist in a very specific way, and this supports the supposed continuation of the truth of your proposition, into the future. However, we do not know or understand the true nature of passing time, so we cannot make the proposition required to support the claim that your proposition "the Earth is further from the sun than Venus" will continue to be true indefinitely into the future, even if it is true now. What we know is that the future is full of possibility and we only apprehend an extremely small portion of the magnitude of that possibility. Because the future is full of possibility and we only apprehend a very small portion of it, we ought not expect that true or false can be attributed to any statements about future conditions. This was covered by Aristotle when he discussed the conditions under which the law of excluded middle must be forfeited.
Could you please elaborate on the relationship between the two parts of the sentence? I am interested in hearing why.
[quote= Helen Yetter-Chappell] reality is a vast unity of conscious experiences, that binds together experiences as of every object from every perspective: a tapestry woven out of experiential threads.[/quote]
Chapter 11 is on Buddhist Idealism, which I've not started yet, but which is another influence on this OP.
//ps Meh. Read that Yetter-Chappell chapter, not *that* impressed by it. But it's good to know there are young up-and-coming academics defending idealism.//
By "solipsism" I understand ontologically, not epistemologically that only one mind exists and that all else are merely thoughts, ideas or dreams in that one mind. Thus, for the (ontological) solipsist, there is not any "non-mind" for her mind to be "dependent on". No doubt, however, this is not the case.
I see now.
Quoting Wayfarer
Is this not just indirect realism? We agree that appearance is mind-created. Here we also seem to agree that the appearance is a perspective on mind-independent reality.
But contrast with:
Quoting Wayfarer
Why is the equation describing the sphere mind independent, but the equations describing planetary orbits somehow dependent on there being minds?
Quoting Wayfarer
Sometimes I feel you vacillate between a kind of (weak?) idealism and indirect realism. An indirect realist would also emphasize the the role of the mind in the construal of experience, while acknowledging external reality. You do as well. Is the difference between your position and indirect realism just a difference in emphasis? An emphasis on the mind's role, and a deemphasis on the determining role of external reality?
Is that indirect realism?
To my understanding, yes actually.
Without minds, "Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now", but "Objects ... have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds."
That without mind, matter is not scattered about in space in any way at all.
Or maybe in your version, that reality is so bound up with subjectivity that there is nothing we can say about the matter?
Either way, these don't seem to correspond to the Pinter quote, which you nevertheless cite as an exemplar of your position. Hence my feeling that you vacillate.
So, you're saying that according to idealism, if there were no mind, then matter would not exist? (Sorry for being picky but really want to clarify this point.)
I think that is one version, which I call "strong". Which is not your version, as I pointed out.
In any case, thanks for you comments, appreciated.
Very possibly
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
Indeed i took a spot of advice and listened to five hours of Kastrup late last week. Id say my attitude is the same.
Quoting Wayfarer
:roll: :monkey:
There's a supporting quotation for this point in the original essay that the OP links to, from the Pali Buddhist texts.
[quote=The Buddha, Kacc?yanagotta Sutta]By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, non-existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
IN that respect, I acknowledge my indebtedness to Buddhist philosophy, and also a book which was crucial in my early philosophical education, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T R V Murti, which has extensive comparisons between Kant and the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy of Nagarjuna. That passage is one of the sources of Madhyamaka.
And this 'idea' is incoherent because it implies either (A) a Matryoshka doll-like infinite regress of minds-which-exist within minds-which-exist within ... ad infinitum (i.e. 'it's turtles all the way down) or (B) that "some mind" which "whatever exists for" is not ultimately "whatever exists". :sparkle: :eyes:
Well which "current science" is your non-scientific question referring to, Wayf?
I think you are giving idealism a realist interpretation, by interpreting " the mind" as a speculated theoretical object or posit, with your infinite-regress arguments resembling those used to attack indirect realism. Ironically, Berkeley's arguments against representationalist materialism were that he found it to be incoherent for reasons which are very similar to yours.
There is no "mind" posited in Berkeley's arguments for subjective idealism in the literal sense you assume, but only ideas referring to the thoughts and observations of the individual.
Nevertheless, Berkeley apparently remained uncommitted to the solipsism which many consider subjective idealism to imply, for although his arguments for idealism were based only on ideas, he was apparently open-minded with regards to the truth of the rationalist doctrines of causality and the external world. Like Malebranche and Hume, Berkeley didn't consider causality to be reducible to observations, for he understood observations in themselves to be inert, like the video frames of a movie. So if causality and externality were to exist, he argued that they must exist in some other mind that exists apart from one's ideas, namely in the mind of god, which ironically leads back to realism.
(I consider Berkeley to have shown that realism is ultimately a theological notion - the speculated existence of external reality in physicalism doesn't seem any less theological to me than Berkeley's mind of god)
What do you make of this?
Quoting Wayfarer
My understanding of Penrose, as influenced by Gödel, says that Incompleteness Theorem tells the mathematician that math proofs exemplify the consistency achievable within math-as-language morphology (math grammar), but that such internal consistency is not the whole story. Since a foundational set of axioms for a particular math will generate equations unprovable by their axioms, beyond consistent morphology, there lies the experience of understanding these changes of form by a person. Even in the face of math proofs there is judgment of computational consistency not itself computational. Generalizing from this insight, there is a consistent POV that is concerned with the aboutness of things rooted in the absence of its own aboutness.
I dont yet, however, go so far as to totally deny all objectivity of the self. This I say because, obviously, the self is aware of itself.
Non sequitur. My critique of @Wayfarer's Buddhist idea (re: subjectivity) has nothing to do with "Berkeley's argument".
Objection, your honor, the defense is being evasive. The question was not asking about any particular genre of science, but merely about a scientific rather than philosophical position. Please direct the defense to answer the question about Ultimate Existence.
A possible answer -- though not scientific -- would be "No Ultimate Existence, only Proximate" : right here, right now. Not acceptable, because the questioner requested an empirical scientific fact to ground whatever opinion is offered. And a scientific answer would have to account for the un-resolved state of knowledge about the origin of the physical universe. It is observed to exist, but how or why did everything emerge from the unknown? Thus, addressing the creation/existence problem raised in the OP.
Aside : At this point, a scientist would probably just punt, but a philosopher would go for it on fourth down. Pardon the American hand/football metaphor. :joke:
Stipulation
Ultimate : being or happening at the beginning or end of a process
Existence : the state of being real or participating in reality.
... which is why I asked for specificity.
I've no idea what you mean, sir, by "a scientific rather than a philosophical position".
(From my member profile) Existence is a brute fact radically contingent so whatever exists is contingent as well. No thing is "ultimate".
So you know things exist and you don't need a mind for knowing that?
Indeed. A proper idealist wouldn't care about politics or science, but Wayfarer clearly does.
:roll:
The point is this: being a mind that is 'aware of being-a-mind-among-other-minds' (ergo finitude) presupposes 'mind-independent nonmind'. In other words, to say that 'existence is mind-dependent' entails 'the nonexistence of mind' (via infinite regress: mind dependent on mind dependent on mind dependent on ...) which is self-refuting.
Wayfarer is a property-owning householder with material possessions and family responsibilities. So I probably don't fit into your stereotyped image of what 'an idealist' must be, whatever that is.
Quoting 180 Proof
Nevertheless, there seems at least some resemblance between this, and your
Quoting 180 Proof
How does mind dependent on mind....not conform to your description of it being 'radically contingent'?
(leaving aside the fact that if everything is contingent, then it is impossible to avoid nihilism.)
As I pointed out, "mind dependent on mind dependent on ..." is incoherent, thus meaningless and doesn't "conform" to anything.
"Nihilism" in what sense?
No. Existence just is the case (constituted, but not exhausted, by "the totality of the facts" ~Witty, TLP). An infinite regress precipates from a claim that some unjustified yet noncontingent Y justifies X; however, 'existence is contingent', that is, not necessary, or is unjustifiable literally nothing constrains existence (i.e continuing to be) from becoming nonexistence (i.e. ceasing to be) and therefore, in this sense, existence is also unbounded. By all means, Wayfarer, feel free to refute me by proposing a 'constraint on existence' that isn't also ... existence itself (ergo also not a constraint :smirk:).
And, again ...
Quoting 180 Proof
:chin:
Some philosophical sources:
Laozi (re: yinyang)
Epicurus (re: swirling atoms in void).
Spinoza (re: natura naturans).
Q. Meillassoux (re: hyperchaos).
Quoting Wayfarer
Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents. There are two understandings of nihilism: Nietzsche understood Christianity, and any notion of revelation, of received or imposed meaning, as being nihilistic in the sense that it nihilates the radical human capacity for creating meaning.
On the other hand, nihilism in the positive sense is simply the lack of received/ imposed meaning which grants to humanity a great freedom and creativity, The world itself, even apart from humanity, is replete with local contingent meanings, and there is no evidence for the reality of any global absolute meaning; a fact for which we ought to be most grateful, else we would be nought but slaves.
It is the fact that humanity has been mesmerized by a futile search for absolute meaning that arguably has led to the appalling neglect of this local world we share with all the other beasts and a functional sensible rational understanding of its needs.
From a perspective outside both, treating mind as an observed phenomena, which we can't actually do, as we're not outside it.
Quoting Janus
Nothing other than an expression of your own belief, or unbelief.
To say we are "inside" mind is to beg the question. We don't experience ourselves as being inside a mind, but as being inside a body which is inside the world. We don't experience our minds as being radically free or absolute but as being constrained and contingent upon our bodies, which are themselves dependent on physical resources: air, water, food, and conditions: principally gravity and light.
There are many things we cannot observe, simply because they are not observable phenomena; for example, digestion, respiration, metabolism and the precognitive interactions between body and world.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you look at the general history of human culture it is fairly clear that humanity has been labouring under the "aegis of tutelage", fixated by the idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver. The horrific crimes against humanity which such absolutism has given rise to are hardly questionable. although of course it is possible to bury one's head in the sand in denial.
We are outside the minds of other people. Do you think that we can learn about the workings of other people's minds by observation of their behavior? Doesn't your statement amount to saying psychology is impossible?
Not true, Wayf. You forget language each of us is always "outside" of each other's "mind" thus the emergent, grammatical-symbolic commons that both facilitates and obscures our shared mentalities, or this cultural media. Yes, we cannot get "outside" of our own minds, but, as a baseline, each of us unavoidably "observes" the effects of others' minds and lives responding accordingly to their activities.
Quoting Janus
:up:
Quoting wonderer1
:up:
Quoting Janus
:100: :up:
:scream: Dionysus versus the Crucified.
:fire: Amor fati.
Cognitive science and psychology are indeed ways of studying the workings of consciousness in the third person, but philosophy of mind is a different matter. With respect to the empirical sciences, I acknowledge that
But that mental aspect is not 'out there somewhere'. I don't depict it as a 'mind-at-large' or 'divine intelligence'. It's simply how the mind orders sensations, perceptions and experience in such a way as to sythesise a coherent whole, which is 'the world'. That is what we are never 'outside of' or 'apart from'. (See It Is Never Known But It Is the Knower, Michel Bitbol, Academia)
[quote=Michel Bitbol]As soon as you think about something that is independent of thought, this something is no longer independent of thought! As soon as you try to imagine something that is independent of experience, you have an experience of it - not necessarily the sensory experience of it, but some sort of experience (imagination, concept, idea, etc.). The natural conclusion of this little thought experiment is that there is nothing completely independent of experience. But this creeping, all-pervasive presence of experience is the huge unnoticed fact of our lives. Nobody seems to care about it. Few people seem to realize that even the wildest speculations about what the universe was like during the first milliseconds after the Big Bang are still experiences. Most scientists rather argue that the Big Bang occurred as an event long before human beings existed in the universe. They can claim that, of course, but only from within the standpoint of their own present experience
Ironically, then, omnipresence of experience is tantamount to its absence. Experience is obvious; it is everywhere at this very moment. There is nothing apart from experience. Even when you think of past moments in which you do not remember having had any experience, this is still an experience, a present experience of thinking about them. But this background of immediate experience goes unnoticed because there is nothing with which to contrast it.This was well understood by Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most clear-headed philosopher of the twentieth century. One of my favourite quotes of Wittgenstein's is this one: "[Conscious experience] is not a something, but not a nothing either! (from Philosophical Investigations)[/quote]
The perceptive reader will notice the resonance with Advaita Vedanta, and indeed Bitbol acknowledges this with a reference at the beginning of the talk.
Of course this is true, and also true of digestion, respiration, metabolism, abstraction, conceptualization, visualization and other bodily processes.
While still the human breaths the spectral homunculus looms forever...
Quoting wonderer1
There are approaches within psychology which argue that
mind is not an inside set off against an outside, but an inseparable interaction, a system of coordinations with an environment in which what constitutes the perceiving (the inside) and the perceived environment ( the outside) are defined and changed by their reciprocal interaction. Because as individuals embodied and embedded in the world we are already outside ourselves in this way, there is no radical distinction between perceiving ourselves ( we come back to ourselves from the world) and perceiving others.
Mind is thus treated no differently than organism , which has no true inside given they it is nothing but a system of interactions with an environment it defines on the basis of its normative way of functioning. But neither is there a true outside. So this modifies Wayfarers idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority.
This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that?
It has nothing to do with "stereotypes", but with considering the (practical) implications of an idealist stance.
It seems your stance would be more correctly described as psychological and ethical normativism, rather than an idealism.
From some two years ago:
Quoting Wayfarer
Have you looked into it?
For a puthujjana the world exists.
Wayfarer said:
Quoting Wayfarer
You're ignoring the bolded part.
Simply put, in order for there to be knowledge that something exists, a mind is needed. Knowledge of existence is a mental thing.
Quoting 180 Proof
And a mind is needed to make such a declaration.
This is a very common axiomatic claim.
What do you mean here by "normative"?
I ignore mere assertions (bolded or not) which lack argument or evidence to warrant them.
That seems ass-backwards to me, baker. "A mind" presupposes existence whether or not a "declaration" is made whether or not it's "known something exists".
Thats's because you _take for granted_ that
"Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents."
You work with _axioms_, but ignore/deny doing so.
Quoting Janus
Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events.
This is indeed a very common belief about how we exist, especially in Western cultures. It's how we are often taught to think of ourselves and to take such thinking for granted.
As if your're not fixated by this same idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver; it's just that your particular idea of this absolute authority or lawgiver is different than some other people's.
Not having such an idea would probably make one insane.
It's not an axiomatic claim but an inference to what seems to me to be the best explanation.
Quoting baker
No, not simply a common belief, but a reflection on how we (or at least I) actually experience things.
Quoting baker
I'm not fixated on the idea of an absolute authority or lawgiver, I'm simply commenting on what is uncontroversially the case regarding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of absolute authority.
Not having such an idea of absolute authority might make you insaneI can't comment on that except to say you should speak only for yourself or others who have confirmed your bias in reference to themselves.
If you are denying that we observe countless regularities and invariances in the world then I think you have your eyes firmly shut. If that is not what you are saying, then I have no idea what it is you do want to say.
I hold a somewhat similar view, however I'd say there is a lack of nuance to the following:
Quoting Joshs
I wouldn't use the adjective "radical", but there certainly are distinctions between our perceptions of ourselves and our perception of others. Furthermore, understanding the bigger scientific picture, allows us to recognize and take such distinctions into account in a more informed way.
Sticking specifically to perception, the way we hear own voices is typically through bone conduction. Similarly, the way we see ourselves is typically mirror imaged. Now of course these days we can take out our phones and record ourselves on video, and to a degree mitigate those differences between first and third person perception, but there are all sorts of such distinctions to be recognized.
Quoting Janus
I think what you mean by 'substantial' and 'substantive' is 'tangible' and/or 'measurable'. Those are the empirical criteria for what is considered to exist.
There are many things that could be said, but as the question originated in a thread about Descartes, it might be noted at the outset that the idea of 'substance' and 'substantial' in philosophy is not an empirical one. Rather it originates with Aristotelian/Platonic metaphysics, wherein 'substance' was 'a thing whose existence is independent of that of all other things, or a thing from which or out of which other things are made or in which other things inhere' (Brittanica. It is, of course, true, that the classical idea of substance has fallen out of favour except for with adherents of Thomism and perhaps other modern forms of hylomorphism, for which see this daunting index.)
That said, I think that the traditional notion of substance became associated with, or displaced by, the objects of physics, as a part of the 'Scientific Revolution'. After all, the hallmark of the 'new science' was (1) the identification of the 'primary attributes' of matter as the principle subject-matter of physics and (2) the supposedly universal scope of the new physics (i.e. Galilean-Newtonian) to all such objects of analysis. This leads to the paradigm that I also quoted in the thread from which this query originated:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36)[/quote]
I am proposing in this OP, that this amounts to more than just a theoretical paradigm - it's also a worldview, and one which is essentially the default view of secular, scientifically-informed culture. I also claim that an implicit assumption of this worldview is the 'subject-object' relationship - it takes for granted or assumes our status as intelligent subjects existing in a world of objects (and other subjects). Within that paradigm, 'objectivity' is the criterion for what is real or existent; what is 'objectively true' is what 'exists when you stop believing in it', as Philip K. Dick put it.
Here, this point is relevant:
Quoting Ludwig V
With which I agree. I take his main point to be a reference to the well-known 'observer problem' in quantum physics, which has undermined the whole idea of the 'mind-independent reality' of the objects of quantum physics, although I don't want to go into the whole 'interpretations of physics' tangle.
So what I was arguing in the other thread is that a consequence of Cartesian dualism is to depict mind (res cogitans) as something that exists within this subject-object paradigm, which is the scientific paradigm, and which is the only one we know or are confident of. The question becomes, how do you demonstrate or prove the existence of such a 'thinking thing'? Why, you can't! It's a specious concept. So what are we left with? The other half of Descartes' duality, namely, res extensia, extended matter, which Modern Science has proven so extraordinarily adept at analyzing and manipulating. (This is the sense in which I agree with Ryle's categorisation of Descartes' error as a category mistake, although I don't accept his remedy.)
Mind is not something that exists in this paradigm, except for as a product of the brain, an epiphenomenon, or an emergent attribute of what really does exist - which is the physical. That I see as the common-sense, mainstream view (which eliminativism takes to the most extreme, but also most consistent, position.)
This is why the argument in the OP says that an alternative to this view is a perspectival shift, a different way of seeing, which also turns out to be a different way of being. I'm pretty much in agreement with Bernardo Kastrup's analytical idealism in that regard, but it's really important to understand that this doesn't mean establishing that mind is something objectively existent.
And by 1788 we get Legrange's Analytical Mechanics boasting that it has no diagrams, only algebraic equations, because these involve less of the human sensory system in the understanding of mechanics and so are more objective. Ontic structural realism, things just being the math that describes them, seems like the terminus point for this trend.
I recall hearing a story about John Wheeler posing a question about "what do you get when you write down all the laws of physics, all the most beautiful equations we've discovered?"
"A bunch of chalk on a blackboard, not a universe."
Which I guess was his lead in for pitching "if from bit," and the participatory universe idea. The idea of the first concept being that you need some real ontological difference, not just math, to explain the world.
True - but that said, it is remarkable that the equations of general relativity can be captured on a single piece of paper. I don't think Thomas Nagel (or myself) wants to deprecate the astonishing reach of mathematical physics, so much as to point to what it assumes, and what it leaves out. Mind you, Wheeler's 'participatory universe' is one of the ways that these kinds of reflections became apparent from within science itself.
In the other thread I said this, which I think answers your question:
I wouldn't say they are "empirical criteria for what is considered to exist" so much as they are words denoting what is directly empirically available to us, that it is what it thus available to us and that the notions of real, actual, substantial and tangible denote this availability. How can we apply a term like 'real' to something which is not observable, at least in its physical or perceptible manifestations?
So, for example, mental activity (considered as being something distinct from neural activity) is not directly observable. but its; physical effects and correlates may be. So, I see no problem with saying that mental activity is physical, even though it is not a directly observable object of the senses. If we want to say that mental activity is non-physical or immaterial, I think we should first be able to answer the question as to what we could even mean by immaterial (beyond the obvious "not an object of the senses").
To say that mental activity is not physical, and hence does not exist, and yet is somehow real seems incoherent to me, because it seems impossible to explain what could be meant by that. In what sense could it be thought to be real if it truly is non-physical or immaterial?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I could be mistaken but my understanding of the term "ontic structural realism" is more in line with saying that what is real are the relations that are described by the math, not that those relations just are the math.
If those relations are energetic (which it seems all but the most abstract or merely conceptual relations must be) then the real can still be understood to be substantial, since energy is measurable.
I'm sorry I have ignored this for so long. It got swept away in all the other stuff that's going on.
Start with the 17th century:-
That's all fine. I'm not sure whether they realized that they were just kicking the can down the road. Mathematics can't explain colour and sound, so we'll classify them as subjective - just like the God of the gaps. OK. The tactic worked - in spades. The problem is that colours and sounds got lumped in together with hallucinations and dreams, beauty and goodness; and no-one troubled to analyze all this and draw proper distinctions. So now we are facing a "hard problem" that appears to have no solution. The framework that establishes the problem has to go.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, it was. But there's another aspect to this. When the physicists banished colour and sound from their theories, they forgot, or chose to ignore, the fact that their experiments and observations were conducted in the ordinary world in which colours and sounds are inextricably part of what we observe (and the point that Berkeley makes, that colour and shape (space) are inextricably linked.) If colours and sounds are not objective how can the science which proves them be objective? (Sense-data/ideas won't do the job. Ordinary common sense experience of independently existing objects in the objective world is essential.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't quite understand this; surely Descartes had no idea about the existence of his own mind? But there is something in what you say. We do tend to leave ourselves with no alternative but to "reduce" everything to physics (except the observer, of course). But when you define matter and mind in relation to each other, you cannot abolish mind without reviewing and reshaping matter.
(I'm resisting the temptation to chase your remark about Ryle. But I'm afraid it will prove too much for my head to contain.)
Quoting Wayfarer
I think the subject-object format has deeper roots than 17th century science. It is embedded in language (or at least the languages we are familiar with) but it is more than just a grammatical quirk; it affects everything we think. What we tend to forget is that every object can also be a subject, so that there is no logical gap, or gap of any sort, between the two. Most of the time, this is not particularly problematic. But it does get confusing when self-reference creeps in. That's why things get so hard when the observer becomes the observed.
Related to this is the idea of a point of view. A point of view is not included in the field of view, but defines the scope of what can be seen. It is an abstract concept - a location in space - which can be occupied by any observer (though not by all at the same time).It has geometrical existence, but not physical existence. It can be used in all sorts of metaphorical ways, many of which are helpful.
None of this connects to the subjective/objective distinction in the pejorative sense that "there is no disputing about tastes". It may connect to conceptual developments in the 17th and 18th centuries - the concept of the individual and so forth - but it doesn't connect in any way that makes sense to me to anything I've discussed so far.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quite likely. But there will be continuity as well.
I don't have much to add to this long-running discussion of Mental vs Physical priority. So, I'll just post a few thoughts stimulated by the OP.
BTW, my personal "perspectival shift" resulted, not from heart-felt religious motives, or rational philosophical arguments, or "hard" scientific evidence, but from the mundane paradigm shift of 20th century quantum theory. It was not a sudden "voice of god" conviction, but a gradual dawning of realization of the essential role of Sentience & Reason in our worldviews. Not to create a physical world from scratch, but to create a metaphysical model of the world that we sense (feel) and make-sense of (comprehend).
Some seem to think that Idealism means that Reality is imaginary, or that Subjective views are solipsistic, hence suspect. Yet my BothAnd perspective is wide-angle enough to see some truth in all of the above. Materialism is our common-sense perception of reality, but Idealism extends our sixth-sense of Reason, to construct a metaphysical conception of what lies beyond our enhanced physical senses, in the near-infinite Cosmic ceiling above, and the infinitesimal Sub-atomic foundation of reality. :smile:
The following is not a numbered argument, but merely foot-notes to establish a trail of my personal understanding. Quotes are from the Mind-Created World OP :
1. "The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or mind-stuff, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made,"
Note --- In my information-based worldview, Mind-stuff is not a material substance, but more like a causal force --- the power to transform --- in the sense of E=MC^2, where causal Energy is equated with massy Matter, by means of logical Mathematics. There are no aggregating atoms of Energy, only a continuous trend of change in both Space and Time.
2. "To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms that it either exists or does not exist is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether theyre perceived is mistaken."
Note --- Instead of a bi-polar view, my personal perspective is intended to be stereoscopic, wherein opposing views are merged & blended into a single model of Reality, inclusive of both Mind and Matter. The iffy existence of Ideal vs Real makes Being seem to be contingent on polar perspectives. That may sound like Limbo, neither saved nor unsaved, but undecided. Or like quantum Uncertainty, a state of subjective knowledge that is neither true nor false : indeterminacy.
But to me, it seems more like a Holistic state in which the parts are dissolved (like salt) into the oceanic system. Quantum Entanglement can be viewed as a Holistic state, in which the inter-twined component parts are unknowable (Uncertain) as separate entities. So, the "existence" --- that reality goes in and out of --- is also a state of knowledge (known/unknown), from the perspective of the observer. As postulated by Berkeley, only an omniscient observer would know all possible states of "existence" (being).
3. "Let me address an obvious objection. Surely the world is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not!"
Note --- According to Plato & Aristotle, "what is there all along" is Eternity, not ever-changing Space-Time. The Eternal realm is self-existent, not dependent on observers, whether subjective or objective. But the Contingent world, as demonstrated in Quantum experiments, is somewhat dependent on the perspective of the observer. For example, Einstein's Theory of Relativity divided reality into Special (particular) and General (universal). Only an omniscient view from outside of the material world could encompass all states of Being, in & out of space-time. Apparently, Einstein was trying to simulate a universal divine perspective, to "know the mind of god", as Hawking put it.
4. "This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth."
Note --- Science aspires to absolute Objectivity. But, in practice, only calculates the mean values of multiple subjective views. That computed average is supposed to cancel-out all extreme views, as well as personal emotional commitments, such as religious faith. Let's not deceive ourselves that physical Science actually achieves its noble aspiration of Absolute Objectivity, by eliminating personal biases, emotions, and false beliefs. It is still groping to meld isolated observations (experiments) into a singular summary of Truth. When physical science expands into philosophical territory, by studying Psychology and Sociology, the shortcomings of its matter-based methods become apparent.
5. "By creating reality, Im referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified worldpicture within which we situate and orient ourselves."
Note --- The individual human mind "creates" an imaginary model of reality. The scientific method merges multiple particular models into a collective consensus of verified Facts and acceptable Generalizations. Yet, even the consensual model continues to evolve over time, in evolutionary paradigm shifts. So, like chasing Infinity, we can only strive to come Closer to Truth. We don't create Truth, we learn it as best we can.
6. "By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it."
Note --- To "absolutize" is to generalize and universalize the various partial understandings of independent minds. The current generally-accepted scientific/philosophical model, a political consensus of many opinions, may be our best approximation to absolute Truth, at that point in time. So, a synergetic hypothesis of Reality may be as close to a "mind independent" worldview as possible. Yet, as philosophers, our job is to refine our received reality-model, to weed-out any remaining blind-spots, such as the various conventions & presumptions (-isms) that remain in circulation. Materialistic Scientism is one such metaphysical belief system, imagined as the final arbiter of physical Truth.
How so? Subjects are invariably sentient beings are they not? Tables and chairs and billiard balls are objects, but how are they subjects of experience? Isnt saying that a version of panpsychism?
Quoting Ludwig V
Precisely!
Quoting Ludwig V
What I meant was that Descartes, in dividing the two substances, material and mental, placed them side-by-side, as it were. And whilst any of us can see and interact with material substance, the existence of res cogitans is conjectural, and the proposed interaction between the two substances problematic. It sets the stage for the elimination of the mental, which is basically what subsequently developed, most directly expressed by eliminativism.
This criticism is not novel to me, by the way. As I mentioned in another thread, its also related to what Husserl said about Descartes, even while crediting him as the founder of transcendental philosophy.
Quoting Gnomon
Notice the duality you introduce between model and world.
The realization that prompted this essay is basically that of the primacy of experience - but unlike much empiricist philosophy, without bifurcating the domain of experience into subjective and objective. You and I have both read Charles Pinters book Mind and the Cosmic Order which I think supports a similar view.
I'm sorry. A misunderstanding. I thought your reference to the subject/object relationship was to subject and object in the general, grammatical sense. But, of course, I should have remembered that logic describes this in the more general format of subject/predicate. However, tables etc can be subject - of pictures, investigations, conversations, etc. They can also, in ordinary language, do things like blocking fire exits, squashing fruit, supporting vases, etc. Equally, a human being can stand in the object-place in a sentence, being looked at, rather than looking, being pushed, rather than pushing and in general being objectified. Self-awareness seems to screw this model up, but given how this all works, I don't see why one shouldn't simply say that self-awareness involves objectifying oneself, imagining one is looking at oneself.
Quoting Wayfarer
I thought the point of the cogito that was that is the one thing that we cannot doubt, and classical epistemology regards self-knowledge (which was always of the mind) was the only thing, apart from logic, of which we could be certain and which was therefore the foundation of epistemology.
From your original post:-
Quoting Wayfarer
That's certainly true, but a point of view is an abstract, context-dependent concept, not at all the same as a conscious person. However, "I" is more like "a point of view" in that it has no content, being constructed in the same sort of way as a point of view.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that is quite right. But "exists" doesn't really tolerate half-way houses, so we have to talk of modes of existence or maybe categories, which gives a pluralist world, which is much more appropriate than monist, dualist or any other set number.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't believe our world-view is unified, except possibly in the world-views of philosophers. On the contrary, it is the lack of unity that enables us to distinguish reality from perception.
"Generating" a world view is much more appropriate than "creating" it. Think of a VR kit that can give you a picture of the world around you as it is or a fantasy world. "Creating" the fantasy world is perfectly appropriate, but not "creating" the real world. "generating" is much better.
For practical purposes, I will admit to being a subject/object dualist. But for philosophical reasons, I am a substance monist : Causation/Information is fundamental, not Consciousness/Mind, nor Particulate Matter. However, since I am not a card-carrying Idealist, I don't identify Self with God/Universe/World-Mind. And I don't feel a visceral union of Self-Awareness with Primal Consciousness. So, I can't imagine that I am the all-powerful Creator of the complex & contradictory world that I experience via my physical senses. Instead, I merely accept that my split-brain (two hemispheres, two-eyes) somehow merges separate Information Processors into the single stereoscopic perspective of a physical/mental Self.
Kastrup argues that the human mind can split into two or more "alters". But I have no personal experience with that kind of "dissociation". So, I just have to take his word for it. I have never meditated to be point of dissolution of self into the cosmos. And never took psychedelic drugs to depress my self-identifying frontal lobes into an oceanic cosmic Self. Moreover, my religious upbringing was decidedly dualistic. But, I can understand rationally that the world we perceive is actually a concept : an internal imaginary model, constructed from minuscule bits of incoming information. So, Monism & Holism are intellectual notions, not visceral feelings.
As I noted in my previous post, I came to my current Holistic/Monistic worldview from a layman's grasp of 20th century science --- especially the nebulous foundations of physical reality on the subatomic level ; and the equally-hazy open-ended origin-story of the Big Bang. I have no formal training in metaphysical Philosophy. And I never personally knew a Buddhist practitioner, or Hindu guru, or New Age hippie. Consequently, I remain an outsider from those perspectives. So, I hope you will forgive me for clinging to my innate & cultural dualistic worldview, even as I experiment with holistic ideas as a philosophical dabbler. :smile:
Thanks for the clarification, but still not quite the point I'm seeking to make. Tables, or any objects, can be subjects of a sentence, or subjects of an investigation, or subjects in a catalog. But they are not subjects of experience. So there's there's an equivocation of the word 'subject' at work there. To be a subject of discussion is not necessarily to be a subject of experience.
Humans may indeed be objectified, or treated as objects, and even legitimately so, by, for example, demographers or statisticians or epidemiologists. Or, I suppose, a gunman, if the subject in question is a combatant or an intended victim. But we generally recognise that humans are subjects of experience by use of the honorific 'you' or personal pronouns, 'he or she', rather than 'it' (and leaving aside all of the politically-correct gender neutrality business.) I say that this is because we recognise humans as beings, and we recognise, at least tacitly, a distinction between beings and objects or beings and things.
Quoting Ludwig V
On the contrary, I take the subjective unity of experience as apodictically certain as Descartes' cogito ergo sum. When I feel a pain, or an emotion, or a sight, I don't learn this at second-hand from organs of perception of sensation. Although I agree with Buddhism that no soveriegn unchangeable self can be identified, nevertheless I accept the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental unity of apperception. Also, I think the argument can be made that something like a 'principle of unity' can be discerned in Aristotle's description of the soul - again, like my criticism of Descartes, not a 'ghost' or 'ethereal spirit' but the organising principle of De Anima (granted I've never done the studies of De Anima to back that up, but it seems to be presented in many of the secondary sources.)
The thing I find with your posts is that you're such a long way down the path of your own syncretic combination of ideas, that I often feel we talk past each other. I see merit in some of what you say, and agree with you in the rejection of mainstream physicalism and in other ways. But then I also see that you interpret many of the things we both read in ways very different from my own. There's nothing I need to 'forgive' on that account, although there are some aspects which I think - how to say - could be refined. (Although doubless that is also true for me, which is what we're doing here, I hope.)
These are all pretty subversive ideas from a western cultural viewpoint. Not for nothing was Timothy Leary's first book called The Politics of Ecstacy, which I read around the time of the corresponding psychedelic experiences. But I can assure you the experience of 'the unitive vision' is a real thing (a great Aussie psychedilc rock song from those years was called The Real Thing). Not that I would ever encourage consumption of hallucinogens.)
In any case, Kastrup's dissociated alters theory, despite its eye-rolling reception, has a philosophical basis, rather similar to a popularised version of Advaita Vedanta (and I listened to a dialogue between him and the resident minister at Vedanta Society of New York, Swami Sarvapriyananda.) Recall that Kastrup is obliged to say that if matter is not the fundamental reality, then that role must be assigned to mind - not my mind, or yours, but to what he describes as 'mind-at-large'. And on that note, one of my Medium essays is a friendly critique of that concept.
I don't doubt that the Cosmic Unity or Oceanic*1 experience seems real. But I remain skeptical of the philosophical/religious doctrines associated with that feeling. From a more materialistic perspective, the perceptual/conceptual distinction between Self & Other has been experimentally traced to the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)*2 . . . . among other brain modules. Presumably, when the operations of that module are depressed by neurotoxins (e.g. alcohol), the person may begin to act "intoxicated". Which, in some cultures, has been identified as a sign of spiritual possession (inspiration). Perhaps, due to the "out of the mouths of babes" effect*2{note}.
Since I have never been intoxicated with chemical or heavenly "spirits", I have no experience with the associated "unitive vision". So, I have to take the word of others (e.g. enraptured mystics) for what it's like to become One with God. I also have no idea about how deep meditation could produce a similar physical effect. But it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy (non-self state), or a form of self-induced depression of PFC. Some Buddhist monks have claimed to be able to control various sub-conscious bodily function via deep meditation.
Therefore, while I take your word for the "reality" of the Unitary way of viewing/experiencing the Cosmic Self, for me it remains an instance of Chalmers' "what it's like" problem of consciousness/awareness. :nerd:
PS___In the final chapter of Kastrup's Science Ideated, he distinguishes between traditional Reason, and "True Logic" as a means to discriminate "between reality and deception". I suppose that means my feeble philosophical attempts to make sense of the world, according to the conventional rules of reasoning, are in vain. He criticizes Western Reason for its lack of a role for the "divine". So, he concludes : "to serve the divine requires 'a deeply religious attitude' ". In my personal experience, that attitude was labeled "Faith". Unfortunately, my sojourn with Western religious Piety makes it seem to be a case of Self-Deception. Is an attitude of open-minded Creedence necessary to experience "the Unitive Vision"? Again, I apologize for slipping back into old dualistic habits of thought. It seems that, for me, Self is the sole reality, and Other is merely a plausible hypothesis. :cool:
*1. Oceanic Feeling :
"the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to "a sensation of 'eternity'", a feeling of "being one with the external world as a whole", inspired by the example of Ramakrishna, among other mystics." ___Wikipedia
*2. Which part of the brain is most associated with our self concept?
Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex.
https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2012/08/roots-human-self-awareness
Note --- The Prefrontal Cortex provides the so-called "Executive Function" of the body. This is supposed to be "Self/Soul", who is in control of all conscious bodily functions. When that function is disrupted by toxins, or even internal neurotransmitters, it may begin to malfunction. That's why a person intoxicated from alcohol, begins to act like a young irresponsible child, and may eventually lose its grip on some semi-conscious functions, such as bladder control.
So "conscious subject" is full of hidden implications, the principle one being the physicalist idea that the person's actions, and perceptual apprehension of the world in general, are simply a response, or reaction to the world, as the person is subjected to one's environment. That is the determinist perspective, which commonly inheres within the notion of "subject". This is the alternative to representing the person and the person's perceptual apparatus as acting agent.
We were talking about Bernardo Kastrup's 'dissociated alters'. Kastrup's analytical idealism suggests that the ground of existence is experiential, rather than material, and that the universe is ultimately a single, universal mind. As discussed previously, there are convergences between that and schools of ancient Greek (nous in neoplatonism) and the Brahman of Vedanta (not to mention more recent schools of idealist philosophy). The model of the self as a "dissociated alter" originates from this. In this understanding, individuals are like "alters" (a term borrowed from dissociative identity disorder in psychology) of this larger consciousness. These alters are local 'dissociated' centers of awareness within a broader field of universal consciousness.
Kastrup uses this framework to account for individual subjectivity, as well as mental disorders, and even paranormal occurrences. He argues that what we consider our individual minds are in reality dissociated segments of a larger consciousness that encompasses all reality. This perspective places individual human experiences within a larger, interconnected framework of consciousness that transcends individual boundaries. It also provides an interpretive model whereby insight into the universal nature of consciousness provides the means of liberation from or transcendence of the limited ego-centred mind, which might be compared to what Richard M. Bucke called 'cosmic consciousness' in his 1901 book of that name.
Quoting Gnomon
The expression 'the unitive vision' is a catch-all for various diverse expressions of divine union or theosis in different cultures. As a matter of interest, the expression of an 'oceanic feeling' which you mention is associated with Freud's attempt to interpret mysticism, which however was vitiated by his overall 'scientism'.
Maybe the reason you associate that with credence and religious faith, is a consequence of the long association (or subordination!) of these ideas with ecclesiastical authority and downtown religion. (I recall a remark by British philosophical theologian Dean Inge, that were Christ to return, there would be some Christians who would be the first to crucify him again.) The case can be made that these ideas were coralled into the confines of religion as a means of social control in the first place (although that would be a massive thesis requiring voluminous argument). But I would venture that the influence of dogmatic religion in your earlier life has prejudiced you against these ideas, so that you tend to view them through those spectacles.
The key point is that popular religion cannot traffic in high-falluting ideas of cosmic consciousness and the unitive vision. 'Believe and be saved' is much nearer the mark. While I'm coming around to the understanding that those who really do practice charity, empathy, self-control and agap? really may be 'saved', I'm in complete agreement that much of what goes on in the name of religion is ignorance personified.
Quoting Gnomon
This is quite well-documented, actually - and not only Buddhist monks, but yogis, generally. But those skills, that level of self-discipline, are practical impossibilities for most of us, they have been developed in seclusion under strict regimens and high levels of discipline. There's a lot of popular mythology about these kinds of yogic skills but its fruits are incredibly hard-won. (Hence the popularity of popular religion!)
Incidentally, here is a rather good presentation from Bernardo Kastrup, about ten years ago, differentiating his analytical idealism from panpsychism, among other matters. Again my understanding of idealist philosophy is very much convergent with what he says.
Nice summary of Kastrup.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a good point and wherever anyone says this I think, yep that's true. Unfortunately in reducing spirituality to such a simplistic or 'dumbed down' terms (the Magical Mr God) I wonder how useful/meaningful it is. It seems awfully easy to turn this into a tool of oppression and Calvinist-style retribution.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which would include most secularists, I'd imagine. David Bentley Hart makes the point that universalism was central to the early Christian tradition. We are all 'saved', regardless.
I'm not sure what 'saved' means however, once you articulate this in more sophisticated spiritual terms. Liberated? Moksha? Any thoughts? Saved seems so binary and one suspects a more nuanced vocabulary is required.
I don't know for certain, but I'm sure that 'saved' does mean something. (That's what puts me on the religious side of the ledger. I had a kind of anamnesis of my own aged about 13, although such realisations are generally impossible to convey to others.) What does it mean? I still hark back to Alan Watts' title 'the Supreme Identity' even while acknowledging Watts' shortcomings. The idea that the being realises his/her true nature as something beyond death. (There's a Princeton philosopher who wrote a book on this, Surviving Death, Mark Johnston, which I personally couldn't relate to, but it's written in the mode of analytic philosophy to appeal to that audience.)
Here's one point. The Indian traditions have a much more expansive outlook. Hinduism can accomodate Christianity more easily than vice versa, as Jesus is seen as an avatar, without detracting from His divine nature. That is anathema to doctrinal Christianity, but figures such as the Venerable Bede Griffith presented a kind of integral path synthesising Vedanta and his native Christian faith. (I saw Father Bede lecture in Sydney towards the end of his very long life.) I suppose the kind of view I'm advocating is universalist, although I don't want to fall into a kind of one-size-fits-all syncretism. But related to that is the religious cosmology common to both Hinduism and Buddhism, of the eternal caravan of rebirth (sa?s?ra) and liberation from it (mok?a, Nirv??a). Once aware of that, the linear cosmology of traditional Christianity seems more difficult to entertain, although the longer I live, the less certain I become.
That's a plausible hypothesis, and somewhat similar to my own emerging worldview, both of which are unprovable in any objective sense, and moot for any except philosophical purposes. My personal philosophical thesis is "grounded" mostly on modern scientific discoveries, instead of traditional/cultural religious doctrines. It concludes that the "ground" of physical existence is Causal, not Material, nor Experiential. As far as we can tell, 99.999% of the universe, until recently, lacked subjective Experience. Instead, most inter-communication involved exchanges of Energy, without personal meaning. Parallel to my own critique of Materialism, I can agree with Kastrup in his skeptical analysis of Panpsychism : it "implies universal consciousness, and fails to explain our own personal subjectivities". My own view is closer to Platonic Idealism, which postulated an eternal source of Abstract Forms with the Potential for both embodied Material things and Mental ideas. But he avoided anthro-morphing that unknown & unknowable abyss of Possibility, along with the myriad religious rules that arise from human interpretations of divine Will.
I too have toyed with the notion of a "Universal Mind". But, lacking direct revelation, I don't know if that Form Source is aware of anything in our world. What human science tells us is that Sentience eventually emerged, after eons of insentience. For all I know, the Source could be more like a mindless Multiverse with eternal Causal/Creative powers. Everything my biblical source-of-information told me about the Eternal Universal Deity of the Hebrews came from human philosopher/prophets, using their observation & imagination to make sense of the ever-changing material world with spooky invisible causal forces labeled "spirits". Today, we call those forces "energy", but its only scientific property is causation of material change. Unlike the biblical Holy Spirit, Energy is assumed to be random and insentient. And, except for a historical tendency toward complexity & consciousness, I have no evidence to prove otherwise.
I can understand Kastrup's analogy of "dissociated alters", but I find that abstract notion difficult to convert into an empirical "fact" of reality. Likewise, I am probably better informed than most westerners about eastern philosophy, but I'm not persuaded that the religions based on that grounding are any closer to ultimate Truth than the Judeo-Christian religions ; which are splitting like atoms into nit-picking sub-atomic interpretations of interpretations of what is and what must be. Therefore, I must remain agnostic about philosophical Universals (e.g. Divine Deities) rationalized from a few specific bits of information. :nerd:
Quoting Wayfarer
Due to years of reflection on my own back-to-the-bible decentralized priestless written-scripture-based Protestant religion, I can admit to being post-judiced against some of its essential ideas, ironically based on faith in the Roman Catholic Bible, but not its pope & priests. In Science Ideated, I was going along with Kastrup's "cunning" arguments against competing philosophical & religious belief systems. But then, the last chapter, in defense of Analytical Idealism, began to sound a lot like a faith-based religion. Jesus warned his disciples about Spiritual Blindness, and admonished them to be "wise as serpents". Now, Kastrup describes how we may break-out of the western "illusion" by means of "cunning wisdom". He says : "true logic must come disguised as reason". This notion of Parmenidean True Logic is distinguished from the presumably False Logic of Aristotle, which defined the reasoning process for western Science. Years ago, I abandoned Faith Wisdom in favor of Evidential Reason. Now he wants me to go back, to take a leap of faith into eastern wisdom???
Having dismissed the scientific worldview as illusory, he quotes Kingsley : "to serve the divine, requires 'a deeply religious attitude, the sense that it's all for the sake of something far greater than ourselves". Strangely, that "something" else is just as mysterious as the invisible immaterial deity of the ancient Hebrews, who seldom spoke publicly to ordinary men, but always through a human mouthpiece. Yet, he quotes Kingsley as advocating "a kind of cunning wisdom that can be used to trick, enchant, or persuade". Sounds like Donald Trump to me. Then, Kastrup suggests a ploy "to use pure, strict, sharp reasoning to undermine reason itself". To replace Greek reason with Hindu devotion or Buddhist hyper-subjectivity? That's when alarm bells go-off in the once-burnt mind of someone prejudiced-by-personal-experience against Faith ; not against Divinity per se, but in skepticism toward the cunning spokesmen for an absentee deity. For now, I prefer to remain Agnostic, and to let the unknown Creator speak to me through the public evidence of the knowable Creation. :halo:
Quoting Gnomon
:rage:
Sorry, if I came on a bit strong in that previous post. All through Kastrup's book, I was nodding in agreement, since it sounded like rational philosophical arguments against non-idealist worldviews. But, in the last chapter, his arguments began to sound irrational and polemical. Kastrup himself introduced "cunning" religious arguments, intended to "undermine reason" and to "trick, enchant or persuade" unbelievers. That's the kind of argumentation that I identify with religious and political campaigns. However, I didn't have to characterize the chapter as a "religious argument", because Kastrup did it for me : "to serve the divine, requires 'a deeply religious attitude".
In that final chapter, Kastrup seems to be advocating, not just philosophical Idealism, but also religious mysticism. He was more specific about his ineffable experience of "the Other" in a previous book : The Idea of the World. As a child, my own religious experience was mostly toward the passionless rational end of the spectrum. So, I have always looked at mysticism as an outsider. I once attended a "holy roller" service with my parents, and experienced (objectively) individuals who would stand up, gesticulate, and speak in tongues (not human dialects, but angel language). That was about as close to mysticism as I came, during my impressionable years.
Years later, curiosity motivated me to deliberately investigate the "other side" of religion. I learned a lot from Evelyn Underhill's (1911) Mysticism : The Development of Humankind's Spiritual Consciousness. I suppose her background was Catholic theology, because she seemed highly educated and fluent in Latin. Like Kastrup, she was also skeptical of fake spiritualism : "Mysticism has been misunderstood . . . . has been claimed as an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics." In her first chapter, she discusses various alternative worldviews. After dismissing Realism/Materialism, she says "the second great conception of being --- Idealism --- has arrived by a process of elimination at a tentative answer to this question." The question was "whence comes the persistent instinct which --- receiving no encouragement from sense experience --- apprehends and desires this unknown unity, this all-inclusive Absolute, as the only possible satisfaction of its thirst for truth."
Lacking a talent for ecstasy, I have attempted to quench my own thirst for truth by using Western philosophical methods. Which Kastrup is also very familiar with, but uses its own logic to "undermine" its rational conclusions. Throughout the years, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions have used rational arguments to justify their institutional power over the hearts & minds of men. So, they have attempted to suppress the mystical "instinct" of those who prefer to go directly to the source of all authority : the "absolute". Hence, esoteric religious trends have always been marginalized by the mainstream institutions. Yet, I have unintentionally minoritized myself, by straying from the Doctrinal mainstream, without reaching the opposite shore of Spiritualism.
Although accuses me of being a New Age mystic,my personal non-religious philosophical worldview is a sort of blend of Realism & Idealism, with no mystical aspects. I assume that there is a physical world out there sending signals to my senses. But I am aware that my internal model of that world is a figment of my own imagination and reason. Is it possible that The Absolute is also a figment? :cool:
Actually I do have that book. I had started it, but I was irritated by the fact that many of the chapters are simply re-published essays from his blog site and other places. It is overly polemical in many places, and I am finding that reading too much of Kastrup is tiresome even though Im basically in agreement with him. Agree that chapter on Peter Kingsley was weak (Kingsleys book Reality is on my shelf awaiting attention but it has not, as it were, drawn me in.)
Quoting Gnomon
Underhill is described as anglo-Catholic. Theres a stream within English Anglicanism which incorporates many elements of Catholic mysticism. Dean Inge was another.
Quoting Gnomon
Only when we talk about it. The way that can be named is not the real way.
//
At bottom the kind of idealism Im advocating, if indeed idealism is what it is, is based on the realisation that the observer is inextricably foundational to reality. Whereas all our scientific knowledge is objective in nature - which not a flaw or a fault by any stretch but it has existential implications which are themselves not objective in nature. I think existentialist philosophers also recognise that, but then the whole issue becomes entangled with their cumbersome literature and varieties of opinion. But it is from that objective point-of-view that the Universe appears as a collection of objects obeying physical forces, as the subject has been deliberately excluded from it at the outset. And then that initial move, that starting position, is forgotten and neglected, and becomes baked in to our worldview, as if it is an ultimate fact. Its like being confined to a locked compound, throwing the key over the wall and then declaring theres no way out.
When discussing the unitive vision I found an article from Father Richard Rohr. Hes a Franciscan friar who spoke at the Science and Non-duality Conference. So hes quite radical and hip in his approach, a lot of Catholics complain about him but I believe hes been judged orthodox by Catholic authorities. In any case, this snippet:
[quote=Centre for Action and Contemplation; https://cac.org/daily-meditations/unitive-seeing-2016-12-12/] Living and thinking autonomously, separately, or cut off from the Vine (John 15:1-5) or Source is what Paul means by being foolish and unspiritual (1 Corinthians 1:20-2:16). Living in union is what I like to call knowing by participation. Spiritual things can only be known from the inside, never as an object outside ourselves, or we utterly distort the perception. We must know subject to subject (I-Thou), not subject to object (I-it).
Separateness and objectification is unfortunately the chosen stance of the small self. From this place we have a hard time thinking paradoxically or living in unity. Instead, we more readily take one side or the other in order to feel secure. The ego frames everything in a binary, dualistic way: for me or against me, totally right or totally wrong. That is the best the small egotistical self can do, but it is not anywhere close to adequate for Gods purposes. It might be an early level of dualistic comparison or intelligence, but it is never wisdom or spiritual intelligence, which is invariably nondual.[/quote]
But then, atheists will roll their eyes and say thats just religion - which is objectively true, but also completely beside the point. It is about transformation to a different way of being, a different cognitive mode. And what we understand and describe as religion often, in fact usually, completely fails to understand and convey that understanding, and then becomes part of the problem.
As it happens, Rohr often rolls his eyes and says 'that's just religion' too.
Although my personal philosophical worldview assumes, as an unprovable axiom, an original universal First Cause of some kind, I don't go so far as to label that unknown Source as "The Absolute". And I am not aware of any personal benefit from Worshiping, or attempting to "unite" with that cosmic principle. I guess that's because I am lacking the political & religious gene for submissive behavior in the presence of great power. For me, The Unknown is intellectually compelling (a mystery to be solved), but not emotionally attractive (a mystical force to be worshiped or appropriated).
I am in sympathy with highbrow & holistic Eastern philosophy in general, but not with its popular & emotional religious forms. I don't tremble in contemplation of the mighty Absolute's power to strike me down as an unbeliever. So, my dispassionate demeanor is more appropriate for Stoicism than for Mysticism. I am not cowed into quaking awe at the concept that I am an insignificant insect in the eyes of the all-seeing Almighty. So popular rule-based Religion, and less popular euphoria-based Spiritualism, do not appeal to me. Also, mystical & arcane Kabbalah-type "secret wisdom" is not the powerful lure for me that it is for some seekers. Is there any hope for me, as an aspirant of mundane Socratic wisdom? Do I need to be "transformed" in order to escape the modern/western hell-bound herd? :nerd:
PS___Other than an antagonistic attitude toward human Reason, mystical religious practices seem to have little in common. Some use deep awareness meditation, some hallucinogenic drugs, and some physical Yoga or whirling dances to achieve union with the Divine. I am at a loss in all of those avenues.
:chin:
What, in this passage, suggests something like that?
Quoting Centre for Action and Contemplation
I was not referring to "this passage" but to "the deeply religious attitude" in general. I don't think Kastrup is promoting any particular traditional religion in his books, but merely the philosophical worldview of Analytical Idealism. However, his last chapter uses quotes from Peter Kingsley to illustrate some of the concepts he's trying to convey in order to "break down" our rational defenses. Kingsley is described as a Sufi mystic, which emerged from within the rule-bound Islamic religious traditions. The primary belief of Sufism is that "unification with Allah" is the most important goal of an individual's life. That sounds like extremely "submissive" behavior to me, turning egoistic self-conscious rational humans into egoless mechanical robot/slaves. Is that an unfair assessment? Would I be wise to transform into a "whirling dervish"? Would I then "know the mind of God"?
Kastrup's final chapter is focused primarily on breaking down the rational defenses of the self-centered Western mind. And it uses some of the same mind-bending "tricks" that Roman Catholic theology employs to make counter-intuitive notions, like a unitary/triune deity, seem plausible to the mortal mind ; as-if viewed from a higher perspective. He deprecates Greek Logic & reasoning in favor of what he calls "true logic" --- what I might call "religious reasoning". But the path to that divine perspective seems to require --- like all "true" religions --- a leap of blind faith : "true logic must come disguised as reason ; it must entail embracing the illusion fully". He seems to be suggesting that we voluntarily blind our rational minds in order to allow a divine "illusion" to dispel a mundane mirage. As Kastrup puts it, with no sign of irony : "transcending reason through reason".
Kastrup says that "it's critical that we first bring down our defenses . . . . because the intellect is the bouncer of the heart". Yes, but the skeptical intellect is also the shield against BS. My early religious training also insisted on lowering our shields in order to allow a higher Truth to penetrate the hardened heart. Once our intellectual defenses are down, we are prepared to accept whatever irrational religious doctrine is poured into our open un-defended heads. And that is why, as I reached the "age of reason", I chose to keep my mind open, but "not so open that your brains fall out".
In the sub-chapter labeled Beyond Idealism, he describes the Western worldview as a "hoax". In place of that fake-reality, he describes the True Reality of oneness with God-Mind : "everything is one, whole, motionless". Ironically, Einstein posited a similar mathematical Singularity-universe in his eternal timeless placeless "Block Universe" thought experiment ; perhaps to illustrate the concept of Relativity by contrast to Absoluteness. As an as-if metaphor, he didn't expect us to take it as a physical Reality, but only as metaphysical Ideality --- something to think about, not to lay hands on. Kastrup goes on to assert that "it is true that reality is constructed out of belief". But that's all the more reason we should be very careful about what we believe.
He goes on to explain that, from the perspective of Idealism, "the only way for things to feel real is if consciousness tricks itself into believing that its own imagination is an external phenomenon. Consciousness's prime directive is to trick itself, for if it doesn't, nothing is left but a void". So, he seems to be saying that we must learn to distrust our own senses, our only physical contact with external reality, in order to get in touch with what Kant called the unknowable ding an sich. I suppose that's the essence of pure Idealism. Which may be why my own worldview is an impure amalgamation of pragmatic Realism and intellectual Idealism. Can I have my Ideality and eat the cake too? :wink:
None of which has much to do with blind faith, has it? Bernardo Kastrup has completed two doctorates and written a dozen books, containing a great deal of rational argumentation. He debates against all comers, religious, non-religious, scientists, philosophers.
He also makes the point of disagreeing with Kingsley' contention that Western culture has irredemiably failed (although also noting that this claim itself might be a gambit); he's not going all in on Kingsley.
Quoting Gnomon
Right! And then immediately says that in isolation, this is bound to be misinterpreted and dismissed.
The full quotation is:
[quote=Science Ideated]For instance, it is true that reality is constructed out of belief; pure belief, nothing else; if there is no belief, there is nothing. But if one is to make this statement and leave it at that, one is bound to be misinterpreted and dismissed. For we will fall and die if we jump off a building, even if we believe we can fly; the world doesnt seem at all acquiescent to our beliefs. The point here, however, isnt that reality is constituted by personal, egoic beliefs; the foundational beliefs in question arent accessible through introspection; they underly not only a person, not only a species, not only all living beings, but everything. They arent our beliefs, but the beliefs that bring us into being in the first place.[/quote]
But to try and contextualise what I see as a basic issue in this conversation: there's a piece of terminology I encountered in a scholarly article in Buddhist Studies, and which is also found in phenomenology - namely, 'egological'. It's not the same as 'egocentric', which is a personality disorder. Rather it pertains to the way the ego constitutes experience of the objective world into a coherent, subjective stream of consciousness related to the ego or self; it characterises what Husserl calls 'the natural attitude'. Husserl explores how conscious acts are related to the ego, which is not an object in the world but a central point of reference for all experience and meaning. But the usual state is unawareness, or taken-for-grantedness, of the ego's role in the way we construe the world. That is very closely related to this whole discussion. The Buddhist Studies article I mentioned is about the legendarily paradoxical Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, and says, in part:
[quote=The Logic of the Diamond Sutra;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09552360020011277]...the material object, the object of external sensory perception and the object of mind are all egologically constituted, where I understand the term egological to mean an oppositional, discriminatory attitude issuing from the ego-consciousness of the subject that is driven by an unconscious desire. ...We will conclude, then, that because of this egological constitution, the `seizing and `attachment to the object of cognition occur. It is this egological constitution that the Sutra admonishes to negate and avoid, i.e. it encourages us to go beyond the egological constitution of internal and external objects which `foolish, ordinary people habitually `seize upon in their everyday standpoint.[/quote]
What Kastrup, and Kingsley, and such arcane texts as the Diamond Sutra are pointing to, is the necessity to transcend the mentality which invests the objective domain with an inherent reality which it doesn't possess. That is not at all easy (and something in which I don't claim any accomplishment whatever, save the insight that it is something real that I don't know.) And, of course, ego will resist, as it is subversive.
Quoting Gnomon
"egoless mechanical robot/slaves" would indeed be an unfair assessment. Would it be wise for you to engage with Sufism? Probably not, given your background. I only know anything of Sufism through readings, and am unlikely to ever encounter a Sufi master - but I don't hold it in such negative esteem; also noting that Sufism has often been a persecuted minority within Islam, as the mystical elements of religions have often been outcast by the majority.
The way I read it, Kastrup is not saying to 'mistrust our own senses', but to recognise, as I say in the OP, the way in which the mind creates (or generates, or manifests) the world, which is then accorded an intrinsic reality which it doesn't possess (thereby overlooking the role of the subject in the process). This has been subject of comment by many more notable scholars than myself: that the Western mindset has defined itself in such a way that there's no place in it for the Western mind! Which is pretty much what Kastrup is arguing. The fact that you can only interpret any of this as 'religious dogma' seems to me, and pardon me for saying, a consequence of the views you bring to it. (The long shadow of Reformed Theology, I would hazard. )
This is going too far. It is true that the way we perceive the world is conditioned by the ways in which our sentient bodies and brains are constituted. The suggestion that the mind creates the world, rather than merely interprets it seems absurd and wrong.
This is not to say it is not a logical possibility, but just that all our experience speaks against it. It is a logical possibility, a mere logical possibility with nothing cogent to support it as far as i can tell. Why should we believe something simply on the basis that it an imaginable possibility? That we should believe things just because they seem intuitively right to us is exactly the mindset of conspiracy theorists.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I maintain that this is basically in conformity with Kant's philosophy, insofar as Kant maintained that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are not in conflict (per these excerpts.)
So, do you believe that if there were no minds in existence there would be no reality or actuality? I don't think Kant believed that I think he would say the in itself would nonetheless be.
As I understand the reason that empirical reality and transcendental ideality are compatible is because the transcendental can never be more than ideal, that is can never be more than ideas, for us.
The very idea that the empirical is real, and thus more than merely mental or ideal, speaks against the notion that reality is mind-constructed, rather than merely brain/body-interpreted.
Quoting Wayfarer
If by that you mean the transcendental is only ever a product of the mind, then I believe that is mistaken. It is better characterized as that which must be the case in order for us to think and reason as we do.
Well, accept it or not, he does actually say it:
Quoting Critique of Pure Reason, A383
Bryan Magee says:
[quote=Schopenhauer's Philosophy, p107]The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper. This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood, so that these statements appear faulty in ways in which, properly understood, they are not. ...We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy.[/quote]
The primary problem with this statement is your use of "interprets". What is present to the mind, is just a representation which is created by the mind. The thing represented is supposed to be "the independent world". But the relationship between a representation and the thing represented cannot be called an "interpretation". An "interpretation" would be an explanation of the representation, which may attempt to describe that relation between the representation and the thing represented. But we cannot truthfully say that the relation between the conscious representation and the supposed independent world is anything like an interpretation.
Furthermore, if we proceed to a deeper level in our analysis, and attempt a true interpretation of that relation between the representation and the thing represented, we find a secondary problem. If we look at what is actually represented by the conscious mind, when it creates its representation which is supposed to be a representation of the independent world, we see that what is represented is just the information which the subconscious part of the mind, along with the sense organs and neurological system, provide to it. Now we have a distinction between the conscious part of the mind which creates what we know as the representation, and subconscious part (the neurological system), which creates the raw material which is being represented by the conscious representation.
Therefore it is really correct, and not at all absurd or wrong, to say that the mind creates the world, even though this may seem extremely counter intuitive to you. The conscious mind creates a representation of "the independent world", but what is actually represented here is just something created by the subconscious part of the mind. The analysis I provided above shows that the conscious mind creates something which is a representation of what is supposed to be "the independent world". However, what that representation really represents is the information provided to it by the subconscious part of the mind, and this part of the mind produces that information through the various acts of sensation. So what is really represented by the conscious mind's representation, which is claimed to be "the independent world", is just something created by the subconscious part of the mind.
I read that as making the point, since the empirical world appears to us, that without us it would not appear (that is it would not appear to us but it would to other animals). It is not to say that that which appears to us, as distinct from its appearances to us, would not exist without us.
To "interpret" is to bring out, or explain the meaning of. To "represent" is to stand for, signify, or correspond to. In no sense are the two the same thing. As I explained, one can interpret a representation, but a representation is not an interpretation. This is because representation is meaning without the requirement of understanding, whereas interpretation requires understanding.
So, in relation to your prior statement, we can only interpret meaning, which we find in the representation of the world. We never actually interpret the supposed independent world, only the representation of it. Therefore the world which we interpret is just an artificial representation, a creation. And when we analyze the representation process, we find that the representation is always a representation of a further representation, in what appears to imply an infinite regress. This is why skepticism cannot be ruled out.
Our interpetations are constrained by the nature of the world including ourselves, so it's not right to say that we create the world.
How do you make that consistent with what you said earlier:
Quoting Janus
If, "already interpreted" is a prerequisite of there being such a thing as "the world", and minds do the job of interpreting, how would you dismiss the proposition that the mind also creates the world, being prior in time to the world? Since a mind is already necessarily prior to the world to perform that interpretation which is already done in order for there to be such a thing as the world, it seems very likely, rather than absurd, that a mind also creates the world.
Quoting Janus
If the world is always already interpreted, then an interpretation is prior in time to the world. Why would you think that the interpretation which is prior in time to the existence of the world, would be constrained by the world? As is the case with cause and effect, the posterior is constrained by the prior, not vise versa.
The bodymind interprets what is given to it precognitively. It doesn't create what is given, at least I find it most plausible to think that it doesn't. There are two senses of 'world' here.
You're missing the point. The act, which is called "interpretation", "to interpret", requires a relationship of representation of some sort. This is commonly understood as the relationship between sign and what is signified by the sign. It could also be understood as information and what the information says. To "interpret" is to bring out the meaning which is apprehended as being inherent within this relationship between sign and signified. So any act of "interpretation" requires these two aspects, with this relationship. For simplicity we could say these two are signs and what is signified, representation, and what is represented, or, the information and what the information says, or means.
So if the body/mind "interprets what is given to it", then what is given to it is the signs, information, or representation. But we still must consider the separation between the representation given to the body/mind and what is represented by that representation, or, the separation between the information given, and what the information says, signs and what is signified.
In the act of interpretation, "what is represented", or, "what the information says", is something created by the mind of the interpreter. The interpreter looks at the representation or information, and produces (creates) what is thought to be the meaning of it. "What is represented", "what the information says", "what is signified by the signs", is a creation of the interpreting mind.
Therefore, if "the bodymind interprets what is given to it precognitively", as you say, and what is given to it is a representation, sign, or information (as implied by the concept "interpret"), then what is represented by that information which is given to the mind precognitively, is something created by the mind in this act of interpretation. And so, if "what is given to it precognitively" is determined to be a representation of "the world", or information about "the world", then the world as what is determined as being represented, through the act of interpretation, is something created by the mind which interprets the representation, signs, or information.
The "blind faith" was snuck into the book only in the final chapter, after many chapters of "rational argumentation" against commonsense Materialism, and even Kingsley's version of Idealism. So, how am I to interpret "transcending reason through reason" except as a "rational" choice to close the eyes to "objective" Reality, and take a leap of faith into extrasensory subjective Ideality*1? :smile:
*1. Eyes of Faith, not Reason :
He has said "He who has eyes to see, let him see, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear." This whole concept of the Lord coming to make someone blind or giving sight to those who cannot see is hard to visualize (no pun intended).
https://www.dneoca.org/articles/eyestosee0794.html
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm aware that Kastrup's language could be "misinterpreted" by those who are alien to egoless Eastern maya-based*2 worldviews. But my own personal experience, with mostly Western religions, taught me to be on-guard against those who use Maya/illusion concepts to undermine confidence in my personal reasoning abilities. Christianity uses the image of deceiving Satan for the same effect : to make believers dependent on "seers" & "prophets" for their knowledge of paradoxical Truth. So, my problem is not prejudice against Kastrup's idiosyncratic Idealism, but of the necessity for making his esoteric ideas fit into my own personally experienced model of reality, that has outgrown some Western religious beliefs, by means of philosophical reasoning. Even as I try to keep an open mind to unfamilar ideas, I remain unable to access those hearsay "foundational beliefs . . . . underlying everything". :cool:
*2.What does Maya mean spiritually?
Maya originally denoted the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion. By extension, it later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. I am aware that my "ego's role" in construing the world is an obstacle to the Buddhist goal of "non self" (i.e. perfect objectivity or God's view of the world). I suppose, if "god" wanted us mortals to "become like God" (Genesis 3:5), then s/he wouldn't allow Satan/serpent/Maya to deceive us with the apple of Egoism. Does it make sense to sacrifice the Self (soul) in service to an anonymous/imaginary Cosmic Concept? To me --- in view of recorded human history of religious warfare*3 --- it seems like a choice between self-control and other-control. {image below} :gasp:
*3. Divine Dharma & Karma Yoga :
To set the stage, the Bhagavad Gita begins with Arjuna and his family about to go to war with one another. Not wanting to shed his families' blood, Arjuna refuses to fight. Ironically, this is where the god Krishna steps in and tries to convince Arjuna it is his duty to kill his rebellious kinsmen.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-bhagavad-gitas-story-of-arjuna-krishna-the-three-paths-to-salvation.html
Quoting Wayfarer
"Everyday standpoint = common sense?? If so, I suppose I am one of those "foolish ordinary people" who put their trust in personal reasoning, in order to defend against exhortations to take some sacred ideas on ego-blinded faith*4. Most doctrinal religions encourage their "ordinary people" to submerge their egos into a faith community, a single-minded union of believers : "being in full accord and of one mind" (Philippians 2:2). I'm OK with unbiased-universal-perspective as a philosophical concept, but not OK with religious exhortation to extinguish the ego. I'm wary of becoming a remote-controlled robot, subject to centralized orders from high command {image below]. Do Islamic terrorists submerge their egos, and sacrifice their bodies, in order to serve their omnipresent-but-invisible Allah? :chin:
*4. Eye of Faith reveals unseeable Allah :
"Well, HE is invisible for those who do not believe in HIS existence."
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Allah-is-invisible-If-yes-then-why-did-he-ask-the-polytheists-to-show-their-Gods-knowing-that-Gods-are-invisible-How-can-non-Muslims-subscribe-to-Islam-when-its-God-say-such-meaningless-things-Or-is
Quoting Wayfarer
My hybrid matter/mind-based philosophical worldview accepts the subjectivity of its own "reality" model. But my BothAnd bridge-between-worldviews allows me to imagine that hypothetical divine objective perspective, even as --- in the absence of divine revelation --- I make-do with my innate subjective view of the outside world. I can accept the natural world of the senses as the "inherent reality", while labeling the metaphysical model of that world as an as-if ivory-tower artificial reality : i.e. Ideality. One "reality" has physical Properties (possessions), while the other has metaphysical Qualities (attributes). Like Infinity, we can aspire to perfect Objectivity, but our attempts, on an asymptotic curve, miss the ultimate goal :nerd:
Quoting Wayfarer
How would you fairly assess the ego-less faith of Islamic terrorists (as one example among many of faith-motivated extremists)? Would it be more appropriate for me to "engage" with a Christian Mysticism that is closer to my own background? The peaceful Quakers (or Islamic Sufis), for example. They "believe that all people are capable of directly experiencing the divine nature of the universe". But they don't seem to be violent or robotic to me. Perhaps because their individualized experiences of divinity are not easily translated into centralized directives. "Spirit led" is a nice theory, but dogmaless Ego interpretations tend to keep them quiescent, instead of aggressive, in practice. Their unorthodox religions were persecuted in the early years, but their institutional passivity eventually allowed them to co-exist with non-mystical Christians, who had more threatening fish to fry. Do these egoless exceptions to the ego-driven rule fit into your Mind-Created World picture? Would I be advised to join them in their direct access to Divine Mind? :chin:
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, you imply implacable prejudice against doctrinal religion due to its restraints on ego-serving Reason. It's true that my religious upbringing involved minimal mystical elements, but it also had no official creed, so each believer was expected to interpret difficulties in the received scriptures according to his own "reasoning". Like the Quakers, it had few doctrinal rules, apart from the admittedly ambiguous New Testament record of early Christian beliefs. Hence, we didn't have any creedal or papal justification for burning infidels at the stake.
In retrospect, it seemed almost like non-dogmatic Buddhism*5, due to its "rational, individualistic, and democratic spirituality. So, my individualistic interpretations ("views") of Christian traditions were tolerated, as long as I didn't make an issue of it. My label of "religious dogma" was intended only in the sense that most sects have a few basic rules (doctrines) that establish their position in the plethora of religious interpretations "views" of their belief community. I have no animus against practical rules (doctrines) for governing religious communities. I do, however, have a skeptical philosophical attitude toward unquestioning Blind Faith as a condition of membership. :smile:
*5. Buddhist Doctrine (dogma) :
Buddhists believe that the human life is one of suffering, and that meditation, spiritual and physical labor, and good behavior are the ways to achieve enlightenment, or nirvana.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/buddhism/
Note --- Compare Zen Calvinism
EGOLESS CENTRALLY-CONTROLLED ROBOT ARMY OF GOD
Quoting Janus
:100: :up:
The Gnomon quote is how I understand the phrase "a mind-created world". But the Wayfarer quote seems to imply that my individual ego-driven Soul/Self/Mind does create, not a separate simplistic subjective model-world, but the actual all-inclusive complex objective world of physical bodies and metaphysical minds, from the whole cloth of unlimited imagination. That would be a good trick for a god {image below}, but could a very limited mind like mine pull it off? The duality is a distinction between one man's imagination, and the one real world of space-time, or perhaps a Cosmic Mind's Maya illusion.
Kant's Transcendental Idealism*1 seems to imply an unbridgeable (dualistic) gulf between imperfect & incomplete (i.e. evolving) physical Reality, and a perfect & unchanging metaphysical Platonic Ideality. The human ego produces an imaginary (ideal) world model, limited in scope & detail by our inborn or learned assumptions and associations*2. At least, that's how I interpret his notion of a transcendent ideal world*1. Other than divine magic, does your concept of a Mind-Created World agree with Kant, or a more radical sense of "created"? :smile:
PS___The NETFLIX movie Freud's Last Session, provides a fictional encounter between Sigmund Freud, a famous atheist, and C.S. Lewis, a former atheist who converted to a personal (non-Catholic) faith in "Mere Christianity"*3. Their gentlemanly give & take discussion reminded me of our dialogues, even though I am not an angry Atheist, and you are not a non-denominational Christian.
*1. Kant's Mind-Created World :
Kant's transcendental conditions of knowledge portray the mind not as creating the physical world, but as necessarily structuring our knowledge of objects with a set of unconscious assumptions; yet our pre-conscious (pre-mental) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical.
https://philarchive.org/archive/PALKPS-4
Note --- Are those "unconscious assumptions" the prejudices you see in my dualistic worldview?
The "causal nexus" may be another term for my own EnFormAction hypothesis.
*2. Kants Perspectival Solution to the Mind-Body Problem :
[i]Kants Critical philosophy solves Descartes mind-body problem, replacing the [b]dual-
ism[/b] of the physical influx theory he defended in his early career. Kants solution, like
all Critical theories, is perspectival, acknowledging deep truth in both opposing
extremes. Minds are not separate from bodies, but a manifestation of them, each
viewed from a different perspective. Kants transcendental conditions of knowledge
portray the mind [b]not as creating the physical world, but as necessarily structuring our
knowledge of objects with a set of unconscious assumptions[/b]; yet our pre-conscious
(pre-mental) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely
physical. Hence, todays eliminative materialism and folk psychology are both
ways of considering this age-old issue, neither being an exclusive explanation. A
Kantian solution to this version of the mind-body problem is: eliminative materialism
is good science; but only folk psychologists can consistently be eliminative material-
ists. Indeed, the mind-body problem exemplifies a feature of all cultural situations:
[b]dialogue between opposing perspectives is required for understanding as such
to arise[/b].[/i]
https://philarchive.org/archive/PALKPS-4
Note --- The "perspectival" solution to opposing worldviews may be similar to my own BothAnd methodology.
*3. The Most Reluctant Convert :
His faith changed his direction from self-scrutiny to self-forgetfulness.
https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-most-reluctant-convert/
Note --- Could "self-forgetfulness" be a form of non-self egolessness?
Vishnu Dreaming Worlds into Existence
The first footnote in the Medium version of the essay refers to Kant, as does the first quotation from the Charles Pinter book Mind and the Cosmic Order, which I understand you're familiar with. I would hope overall not to stray too far out of the bounds set by Kant.
Of course it is true that Kant is extremely difficult to read and comprehend and I don't claim to have a comprehensive understanding of his writings, only of some of the salient points of the CPR. I first encountered him through a book called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism by T R V Murti. Murti was a mid-twentieth century Indian scholar - he had very much a kind of cosmopolitan Oxford outlook. This book is nowadays criticized for its perceived eurocentrism and tendentiousness. However when I did my MA in Buddhist Studies ten years ago, my thesis supervisor endorsed it. It was central to my spiritual formation, such as it is. (An example can be found here.)
The book comprises an analysis of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy of N?g?rjuna who is a principle figure in the development of Mah?y?na Buddhism. Throughout the book Murti compares Madhyamaka with Kant, Hegel, F H Bradley and David Hume, as well as other forms of Indian philosophy, specifically Advaita. Murti claims that N?g?rjuna's dialectic, the M?lamadhyamakak?rik? (MMK) is 'the central philosophy of Buddhism' centered around the Buddhist principle of ??nyat?. This is misleadingly often presented as 'nothingness' and the MMK as nihilistic, both by friends and foes of the religion, although it is not actually that. It arises, he says, from the inexorable conflicts within reason itself - hence the comparisons with Kant, in particular, a detailed comparison of Kant's antinomies of reason, and Buddha's 'unanswerable questions' (avy?k?ta). The origins of the madhyamaka can be traced back to those passages in the early Buddhist texts where the Buddha declines to answer whether there is a self or not, and other such questions, both affirmation and negation being incorrect responses (and the Buddha's lack of response being customarily described as a 'noble silence', see for example Ananda Sutta).
Like phenomenology, Buddhism is grounded very much in 'observation of what is' - paying very close attention to the nature of experience (which is really what 'mindfulness' means, aside from its pop-cultural references). It discourages metaphysical speculation, although that ought not to be interpreted as a kind of early naturalism or positivism. It is a religion although it is based on a completely different belief system to the Biblical religions. But because it's a religion, we generally fall back on the cultural religious tropes we've become accustomed to in order to understand it (and I'm aware of that tendency in myself.) But I'm trying to stay within the bounds of philosophical discourse in all of the above.
I've never attempted to read Kant's "difficult" works, so I only know the Wikipedia version. But I have read Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order. Both of those explanations of the Mind/World relationship are easier for me to identify-with than the Hindu/Buddhist texts. In my blog book review*1, I found Pinter's western-oriented analysis of the Real vs Ideal question to be mostly compatible with my own.
For example, in order to make sense of the Buddha's "??nyat?", I would have to picture its "emptiness" in terms of the void or nothingness (absence of matter) that presumably preceded the Big Bang of modern Western cosmology. In my own worldview, I imagine the logically necessary First Cause as existing eternally in an un-real im-material meta-physical state of Nothingness, that we westerners call "Potential". Perhaps, when my Ego is "extinguished" in death/nirvana, my self/soul will return to the void/sunya from whence it came. It's just speculation, but, for a Materialist, even that secularized de-personalized implication of matterless existence might be as unrealistic as any religious heaven.
The Nothing vs Something notion of Shunyata is itself a dualism. But then, the only way to eliminate Dualism in philosophy is to avoid rational analysis of whole systems into more digestible parts : e.g. M?lamadhyamakak?rik? vs 'Root Verses on the Middle Way'. For most of us, the first step toward understanding is to differentiate This-from-That, or Real-from-Ideal. Besides, without analytical Reason, we would have nothing to talk about, and this forum would have to communicate directly and wordlessly via mind-reading. :smile:
*1. Creative Mind and Cosmic Order :
The traditional opposing philosophical positions on the Mind vs Matter controversy are Idealism & Realism. But Pinter offers a sort of middle position that is similar in some ways to my own worldview of Enformationism.
http://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page10.html
That is how it is nearly always (mis)interpreted. Your interpreting it as 'nothing as opposed to something', or the 'cosmic void'. It's not that, but don't feel as though you're alone in seeing it that way, it is an almost universal misunderstanding.
But for an introduction to its meaning in practice see this short article, What Is Emptiness?:
[quote=Thanissaro Bhikkhu]Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether theres anything lying behind them.[/quote]
Please note, and without any pejorative intent on my part, the contrast with your imaginings of what might happen in the event of death, or what existed before the singularity. It's not found in imaginings or projections (hence the discouragement of speculative metaphysics!)
My take on 'emptiness' is that it is the seeing through of automatic projections - thought-patterns - associated with objects, situations and experiences. These manifest as identification- this is me! I am that! This is mine! together with the associated feelings of pride and shame, gain and loss, and so on. Obvious examples would be pride of ownership, status, the esteem of others, and the like. Recall Buddhism was a renunciate religion, and though we obviously aren't and probably won't ever be actual renunciates, that helps to understand the rationale and background.
'Emptiness' is 'realising what is' once all of those associations and attachments are in abeyance and they no longer hold sway over the passions. Notice the resemblance to Stoicism and other schools of pre-modern philosophy. The habitual tendencies and projections we have are sa?sk?ra, 'thought-formations': 'a complex concept, with no single-word English translation, that fuses "object and subject" as interdependent parts of each human's consciousness and epistemological process. It connotes "impression, disposition, conditioning, forming, perfecting in one's mind, influencing one's sensory and conceptual faculty" as well as any "preparation, sacrament" that "impresses, disposes, influences or conditions" how one thinks, conceives or feels.' (Wiki)
:up: Good review of Pinter's book. Again, I hope nothing here is incompatible with that.
Apparently, the Buddha's "emptiness" is supposed to be taken metaphorically instead of literally. The Bhikkhu quote describes it as a "mode of perception", which I would interpret as an attitude of "open-mindedness". And which, as described in the link below, should be essential for the practice of philosophy. But religious Faith would seem to be the antithesis : to hold stubbornly to "one's favored beliefs". Long ago, I gave-up my childhood faith, and have not found any ready-made off the shelf belief system to replace it.
That's why, over many years, I have been reviewing a variety of alternative religious, scientific, & philosophical beliefs, as I gradually construct a customized bespoke physical/metaphysical worldview of my own. I try to keep an open mind*1, but retain the truth-filter of skepticism*2 to weed-out any true-believer BS. Since I have never experienced anything Mystical or Magical, I am not predisposed to accept paranormal or transcendental beliefs that require a prejudicial "eye of faith".
The C.S. Lewis quote in my post above noted that "His faith changed his direction from 'self-scrutiny' {introspection?} to 'self-forgetfulness' {dissociation?}". {my brackets} Hence, as an adult he was transformed from dour Irish Anglican upbringing, to death-dispirited Atheist, to liberal non-denominational Theist. Does that sound like a case of "emptiness" or "open-mindedness" or "no self" to you? Obviously, he created a new personal worldview, but did his mind create a new world, in the sense of the OP? :smile:
*1. Open-mindedness is the willingness to search actively for evidence against one's favored beliefs, plans, or goals, and to weigh such evidence fairly when it is available.
https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/newsletters/authentichappinesscoaching/open-mindedness
*2. Skepticism is derived from the word skepsis, which means inquiry, examination, or investigation of a perception. More specifically, scientific skepticism refers to a method of systematic doubt used to objectively examine a premise, usually on the basis of empirical evidence, wherever possible. It is about cultivating critical habits of mind to weigh evidence. Scientific skepticism is a balance between being open to new ideas and being skeptical of claims that lack supporting evidence.
https://www.intelligentspeculation.com/blog/skepticism-not-cynicism-for-a-world-dependent-on-intellectual-inquirynbsp
Emptiness, the most misunderstood word in Buddhism?
The first meaning of emptiness is called "emptiness of essence," which means that phenomena [that we experience] have no inherent nature by themselves." The second is called "emptiness in the context of Buddha Nature," which sees emptiness as endowed with qualities of awakened mind like wisdom, bliss, compassion,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/emptiness-most-misunderstood-word-in-buddhism_b_2769189
Not exactly. It's more concerned with paying close attention to the nature of experience. As I said above:
Quoting Wayfarer
That is not really 'open-mindedness' in an 'anything goes' sense.
As far as scepticism is concerned, there's a proposed link between a school of ancient Greek scepticism founded by Pyrrho of Elis and Buddhist philosophy. The theory is that Pyrrho travelled to Bactrian India (likely the Swat Valley straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan) which was then a Buddhist cultural center, and sat with the Buddhists. From this, he got his 'suspension of judgement', which resembles the Buddhist 'nirodha', or 'cessation'. That is the origin of scepticism, but it's nothing like today's armchair scepticism, which challenges claims to any kind of knowledge. Again it's more concerned with awareness of the disturbing patterns of thought and emotion rather than establishing a dogmatic truth claim. (Rather an interesting blog post on that can be read here.)
Quoting Gnomon
Need to be careful about what the meaning of 'creating' is in this context. An observation I have read is that the etymology of 'world' is an old Dutch term 'werold' meaning 'time of man' (ref), meaning that the connection with humanity is intrinsic to it. Whereas it is natural nowadays, with our modern awareness of the vastness of time and space, to see ourselves as transitory phenomena, 'mere blips' as the saying has it. But what the OP is pointing out, is that the vastness of time and space is unintelligible in the absence of perspective, and perspective can only be brought to bear by an observer. That's the central conflict I'm pointing out. (It's also a realisation that has dawned on physicists.)
//
There's another difficult point I want to make. The above connection between Buddhism and scepticism seems counter-intuitive - Buddhism is a religion, so how can be it also sceptical? This apparent conflict stems from a largely Western interpretation of what religion entails. In the West, particularly in post-Enlightenment contexts, religion is mainly associated strictly with codified beliefs and doctrines, something in turn heavily influenced by the doctrinal nature of Christianity (and especially protestant Christianity with the emphasis on salvation by faith alone). This differs markedly from religions like Buddhism, where practice, experience, and a phenomenological approach to understanding mind and reality are central, rather than the adherence to orthodox beliefs. The idea that skepticism is antithetical to religion is born out of a culturally-condition view of religion. Buddhism exemplifies how a religious framework can coexist with, or even promote, a skeptical approach to understanding nature (see the Kalama Sutta). It does not commit to a dogmatic worldview but instead encourages inquiry and direct personal experience as paths to enlightenment. This is, of course, why it is often said that Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy, although that is also not quite true, as it's ultimate aim is liberation from worldly existence, which is clearly a religious one.
This highlights how deep-seated cultural assumptions can influence the interpretations of non-Western philosophies and religion. But it's also inevitable, to some extent, because of the role of belief in faith is often viewed as both a gift and a response to God's grace. It involves an assent to the doctrines taught by the church and a trust in God's promises. This framework can lead to an understanding of religion as essentially a belief-based system, where the right belief is the key to spiritual fulfillment and salvation. In contrast Buddhism place a greater emphasis on practices such as meditation, moral living, and the direct experience of insights about the nature of reality. Significant that the first item on the Buddhist Eightfold Path is 'right view' (samma dhitthi) rather than 'right belief' (orthodoxy). That's not to say that faith is not also important in Buddhism, as it is, but it is also counter-balanced by an existential perspective which is often missing in dogmatic religions.
I've heard it said that Zen Buddhism is a "practice" not a religion. But it is a "practice" with specific beliefs and group requirements or expectations. Years ago, at a hippie-like alternative church deep in the US "bible belt", I experimented with Alpha-Theta meditation, which omitted the associated Hindu/Buddhist beliefs, and focused solely on reaching a "deep, meditative, hypnotic-like state". An EEG machine was used to verify the brain-wave status during meditation.
Was that too quick & technical to qualify as a "practice"? Anyway, I enjoyed the waking-sleep relaxation, but never achieved any remarkable insights or feelings. I guess I didn't practice enough, but EEG readings are not the kind of feedback that would keep me coming back. Repetitive Practice requires emotional commitment to some personal goal, and belief that the goal is achievable. Probably, my intellectual curiosity was not sufficient for devoting my life to the practice of "wasting time". :smile:
Buddhism is variously understood as a religion, a philosophy, or a set of beliefs and practices based on the teachings of the Buddha,
https://tricycle.org/beginners/
"As the old joke goes, a tourist asked a New Yorker how do you get to Carnegie Hall. And the answer was: Practice! Practice! Practice!"
Buddhist Metaphysics :
Although mainstream Buddhism is a form of mystical idealism, the author says that its actually a heady mixture of four quite distinct and contrasting metaphysical systems : Common-sense Realism ; Theistic Spirituality ; Phenomenalism ; and Mystical Idealism.
https://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page21.html
Why Buddhism is Enlightening :
This book is not recommending conversion to one of the various Asian religions that evolved from the Buddhas teachings. Instead, he sees secular Meditation as a viable technology for taking command of our lives, and for avoiding or alleviating the psychological suffering mostly Freudian neuroses that plague many people today.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page51.html
How To Practice Stoicism :
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. N.N.Taleb
https://mindfulstoic.net/how-to-practice-stoicism-an-introduction-12-stoic-practices/
Note --- Although it's closer to my own Western worldview, I don't consciously practice Stoicism. Perhaps because I'm not aware of any personal neuroses that need to be "transformed" into more positive behaviors.
@Tom Storm @Banno
Your reading will instantly affect my state ;-)
:nerd:
[quote=Phillip Ball]What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value any meaning in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
Every scientific theory (at least, I cannot think of an exception) is a formulation for explaining why things in the world are the way we perceive them to be. This assumption that a theory must recover our perceived reality is generally so obvious that it is unspoken. The theories of evolution or plate tectonics dont have to include some element that says you are here, observing this stuff; we can take that for granted.
In the end, if you say everything is true (i.e. every possible outcome has happened), you have said nothing.
But the MWI refuses to grant it. Sure, it claims to explain why it looks as though you are here observing that the electron spin is up, not down. But actually it is not returning us to this fundamental ground truth at all. Properly conceived, it is saying that there are neither facts nor a you who observes them.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI if taken seriously is unthinkable.
Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am.[/quote]
As I understand it - and I think I do understand it - the entire genesis of Everett's theory was the simple question: what if the wavefunction collapse doesn't occur? What would that entail?
According to an article in Scientific American, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett (referring to a biography of him by that name).
And what problem does this daring adventure in fantasy purportedly solve? Why, that would be the metaphysical issue implied by the so-called 'wavefunction collapse'. At the expense of avoiding the apparent 'woo factor' involved in the measurement problem, we simply declare that it doesn't. At a considerable cost.
I wonder what David Deutsche's (probably unconscious) metaphysical commitments are, such that he views anyone who questions MWI with about the same scorn Richard Dawkins saves for creationists. Of course, I know he's one of the Smartest People in the World, but still, I can't help but think that something is seriously amiss here.
Listen to the discussion in the first youtube video I posted where Deutsch makes it clear he is a scientific realist (i.e. anti-antirealist ... anti-instrumentalist). The genesis of Hugh Everett's thesis is scientifically irrelevant and I lost interest immediately with Phillip Ball's idiotic / disingenuous first sentence "What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all." Again:
Quoting 180 Proof
This makes perfect sense. But the following does not:
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to contradict the bolded portion of the first quote. I could grant that a subjective perception of some aspect of reality exists only if it is perceived, but this doesn't account for your statement of [i]neither existing nor not existing".
Quoting Wayfarer
Fair point. We do need to take our subjectivity into account. But this doesn't preclude our determining some objective truths about reality. You seem to acknowledge that the universe exists. This is an objective truth, even though the words in the statement rely on minds to give them meaning.
[Quote] This oversight imbues the phenomenal world the world as it appears to us with a kind of inherent reality that it doesnt possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.[/quote]
I don't understand this. Truth is not subjective, although there are truths about subjective things. Objective truth: "The universe exists". Truth about something subjective: "The images of the 'Pillars of Creation' produced by the Webb telescope are beautiful".
Quoting Wayfarer
I can accept this if "unseen realities"=The subjective perspective of something in the world.
Agree it's a difficult point to make. I'm saying that there is an implicit subject in every statement about what exists, including what exists in the absence of any observers. It is true that we can model the universe as if there were no observers in it on the practical or methodological level but it's not ultimately the case, because that model is mind-dependent. The universe exists for the subject - as you say, that doesn't preclude the discovery of objective facts about it, but their objectivity is not absolute or stand-alone.
You acknowldge that we can discover objective facts about the universe. Isn't "the universe exists" an objective fact?
I can buy into the notion that all of our knowledge is grounded in ourselves. We individually develop language because we interact with the world, perceiving that world in our uniquely human way. But my point is: there is an actual world that we are perceiving.
My argument for denying solipsism is related to this, so I'll describe it.
We innately believe there exists a world external to ourselves. This is a basic, non-verbal belief- it's not derived logically from other beliefs. Importantly, it is a properly basic belief because it is a consequence of the way the world actually is and of the necessity of interacting with that world for our survival. (If you've read Alvan Plantinga, this will sound familiar. He argues that belief in God is rational - if there exists a God who instilled within us a sensus divinitatus).
Even a properly basic belief could be false. It's possible solipsism is true, but that mere possibility doesn't defeat the inherent belief that we have. I also acknowledge that IF solipsism is true, our belief in the external world is irrational. But that possibility doesn't worry me in the least, because my belief in the external world is so strong - I literally have zero doubt.
This is not an argument that proves solipsism is false. Rather, it shows that belief in an external world is rational, if it is true that there is an external world that produced this innate belief of ours. It is rational to maintain a belief that has not been defeated.
So, irrespective of what anyone else may believe, I am justified in believing there to exist a world external to myself, which I am a part of. If this belief is true (as I am convinced), it is an objective fact, not a subjective fact that is only true for me. It is an objective fact even if everyone else holds a false belief in solipsism.
It seems to me, this basic objective fact, that there exists a world outside the mind, is a reasonable starting point to derive additional objective facts about the world.
I have taken pains to word the essay we're discussing in such a way as to avoid solipsism and subjectivism.
Quoting Wayfarer
To quote from Schopenhauer:
Where I take issue with physicalism is that it accords the objective world with an inherent or supposedly mind-independent reality, so that it would remain just so, regardless of whether any being perceives it or not. Within that framework, the mind is considered a consequent fact, a faculty which owes its existence to the vast prior period of material and biological evolution that preceeded it. But this is dependent on viewing the mind as an object among other objects, so it is a judgement that is implicitly made from a perspective outside of the mind. Which is, of course, an impossibility - the inherent contradiction of materialist theories of mind.
For heuristic purposes, we can behave as if the external world is mind-independent and exists just it would without us. But that is a methodolical axiom, not an existential fact. The error arises from regarding the contingent facts of scientific inquiry as possessing a form of absolute veracity which they don't have. In Husserl's terms:
[quote=Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p144]In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sensethis would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effectbut rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousnesss foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl (PRS 85; Hua XXV 13). Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental oneone which, in Kantian terms, focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge....[/quote]
I don't follow this argument. I can see that the judgement that "all such supposedly unseen realities" exist relies on an implicit perspective. What I don't see is that the existence of whatever relies on any perspective. There is an unexplained and seemingly unwarranted leap there from judgement of existence to actual existence.
When you say "What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle" you are treating only what that existence is ( or is not) for us. Of course something outside of any perspective is indeterminable for us. It doesn't follow that there is no existence outside of our perspectives or any perspective at all. You seem to be conflating experience and judgement with existence. We cannot say anything at all about anything that might exist beyond our possible experience and judgement including that it could not exist. All the evidence points to the fact that something did exist prior to our existence or the existence of any percipients.
Any comment or criticism of the above snippet about Husserl?
I don't see that as inconsistent with the fact that from the perspective of phenomenological inquiry what is fundamental for us is what we are and can be aware of. I don't agree with the kind of thinking that counts what is fundamental for us as being fundamental tout court. Such thinking is too human-centric for my taste. I view it as a conceit.
It is naturalism (or physicalism) that is human-centric. Why? Because of having excluded the subject from consideration of what is real and declaring the measurable attributes of objects the sole criterion for what exists, as if that has philosophical significance, independently of any perspective whatever (something that the measurement problem has made explicit.) Phenomenology, following Kant, is intellectually humble, in that it acknowledges the role of the subject in science, thereby overturning the conceit implicit in the presumption of a view from nowhere. And I continue to refer to The Blind Spot of Science, by Thompson, Frank and Gleiser, because I think its an important book that makes a case very similar to that I have given in the OP. Its not an appeal to authority, it is an acknowledgement of a similar line of argument from recognised scholars.
"Supposedly" a mind-independent reality?! Do you really doubt there exists a mind-independent reality? I read the following statement as indicating you agree there is a mind-independent reality:
Quoting Wayfarer
Which implies you agree with the "judgement" that this is the case, even if you don't make that judgement on the same basis. The question of whether or not there exists a mind-independent reality does not depend on physicalism being true.
Quoting Wayfarer
I know that, but I was explaining why I believe there is an external world: it is necessarily the case that our perceptions provide some access to this world that is at least functionally accurate.. So, even though your are rejecting solipsism, you seem overly skeptical that we can know something about the external world. I fully accept that our image of the world is rooted in our human perspective, but that fact doesn't imply our understanding is false or even suspect. I think it just means we need to take ourselves, and our perspective, into account when seeking objective facts about the world.
[quote=Schopenhaurer]Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being,[/quote]
Taken literally, I think this is absurd - it contradicts my view that there is an external world, that we have a functionally accurate image of it through our senses, and that this provides a foundation for learning objective facts about the world.
But maybe he's using "the whole world" to refer to our human concept of the world. That's a bit more palatable, but it still seems to imply we're too detached from it to discern object truths about it. If I'm correct about this, why would anyone believe this? This seems like unjustified skepticism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why think this is not an existential fact? Why think our inherent belief in a world external to ourselves is false or completely inscrutable?
Why are you calling the facts of scientific inquiry "contingent"? Is it because they can't be rigorously proven and theories are necessarily falsifiable? That doesn't preclude getting some things right, nor of getting many or most things at least partly right. I just don't understand why one would have such a pessimistic view.
I completely agree with this statement, because "meaning" is a term that pertains specifically to conscious beings.
Dualism could be true. We could be descended from ancestors who were directly created by a God, and it doesn't change anything: there is still an external world and our senses deliver a functionally accurate understanding of it. Why doubt that? You seem to either deny it, or at least doubt it. Why? It's not dependent on physicalism.
I acknowledge that we'll never understand much about the mind through a physical analysis of brain structure. Does this quoted statement have broader implications?
Naturalism consists in the idea that the natural world is not dependent on humans for its existence. Your view, counterpointing naturalism, is that the natural world does depend on humans for its existence. It is obvious which view is human-centric.
The central idea of The Blind Spot of Science is trivially true. Of course science only exists on account of humans. I've challenged you before to explain how the human subject is to be incorporated as an integral part of the theory of astronomy, geology, chemistry, natural science or any of the non-humanistic sciences.
Of course you can never answer the challenge because its a ridiculous notion. We are already there in those subjects as the investigator, but we don't appear in the subject itself just as the eye does not appear in the visual field. Those disciplines study their respective subjects as they appear to us. How could it be otherwise?
I do, but this is qualified by declaring that the world is not ultimately or really mind-independent, insofar as any judgement about its nature presupposes, but then 'brackets out', the observer.
The error I'm calling out is the 'absolutisation' of objective judgement. There's an Aeon essay (now a book) I frequently refer to, The Blind Spot of Science. It says, in part:
[quote=The Blind Spot;https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience]Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.
This doesnt mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. Youre nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that theres nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If physical reality means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science including biology and computational neuroscience doesnt include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesnt include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if physical reality means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.[/quote]
Quoting Relativist
In line with the above, it's true in one way, but not in another. The very first thing any organism has to do is establish and maintain a boundary between itself and the environment. It is a basic condition of existence. And from a common-sense (or naive realist) point of view, we're indeed all separate people and separate from the world. But this is illusory in the sense that reality itself is not something we're apart from or outside of. One of Einstein's sayings, often put on posters, captures it:
[quote=Albert Einstein, Letter of condolence sent to Robert J. Marcus on the death of a son]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.[/quote]
Quoting Relativist
It matters for materialist theories of mind, such as D M Armstrong's and others, surely. They all proclaim the identity of brain and mind.
Again, the thrust of 'mind-created world' (and it might have been better called 'mind-constructed') is in line with cognitivism, the insight into the way the mind synthesises sensory data with inherent faculties of judgement so as to generate, construct, or create the sense of the world within which science and all else is conducted. It's not as radical as it might seem, but it is definitely a challenge for physicalism, which is the context in which we're discussing it.
My issue with dualism, in the Cartesian sense, is that it tends to reify consciousness, treat it as a spiritual 'substance', which is an oxymoronic term in my view. I think some form of revised hylomorphic dualism (matter-form dualism) is quite feasble, one of the reasons I'm impressed with Feser's 'A-T' philosophy. I'm impressed by many of his arguments about the nature and primacy of reason, such as Think, McFly, Think. But he is critical of Cartesian dualism, at least as it has come down to us, and I think the 'Cartesian divide' is the source of many of the intellectual ailments of modernity.
True - but not trivial. That is an insight I claim you will never find called out in mainstream Anglo philosophy. It challenges the point of physicalist philosophy of mind, which is to explain the nature of the subject in objective physical terms.
Even a "hard" science like geology is not understandable (even if it were possible it would be an immensely cumbersome task) in terms of quantum physics.
No, it doesn't. Hurricane behavior is not best understood in terms of particle physics, but there's no reason to doubt that it is fundamentally due to the behavior of particles.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not defending physicalism here, I'm defending the existence of the external world and that we are able to determine some truths about it.
Quoting The Blind Spot
Do you deny that science can tell us much about the real, mind-independent world? Are elementary particles and genes pure fiction?
Is the mind your sole focus? I'm happy to discuss that further, but I need to understand your perspective of everything in the world BESIDES minds.
Quoting The Blind Spot
Why does this matter? No metaphysical account of the mind is without flaws, and none can be proven as true. A person could practice psychology without a metaphysical account of the mind. On the other hand, neurology depends mostly on the physical - but often relating it to the "magic" of behavior (both physical and mental). But even here, a metaphysical account doesn't contribute to the practice of the discipline.
No, but they're also not understandable outside the scientific context within which they were discovered.
I've said, I don't deny the reality of there being an objective world, but that on a deeper level, it is not truly mind-independent. Which is another way of saying objectivity cannot be absolute.
Quoting Relativist
As for whether you're defending physicalism, the link to this discussion was made from this post in another thread in which you claimed to be 'representing David Armstrong's metaphysics'. I see the above arguments as a challenge to Armstrong's metaphysics. As I'm opposing Armstrong's metaphysics, this is why I think it matters.
Quoting Janus
You put a lot of effort into disagreeing with something you actually don't disagree with.
This clearly shows a confusion between judgement and what is being judged. Of course judgement is mind-dependent, but there seems to be little reason to think that the Universe could be human mind-dependent given that all the evidence points to its having being around for about seven thousand times as long as humans have been. I don't think this is a hard fact to grasp, but surprisingly you seem to have much difficulty understanding (or is it perhaps accepting?) it.
If you address the actual argument, I will respond.
I think you missed "under a certain conception". Under the intuitive conception people commonly have of the mind and consciousness and the subject a physical explanation is obviously impossible. Under a physicalist notion of the subject (that is that the subject is the living body) a physical explanation may indeed be possible.
You assume that the subject cannot be physical and then criticize physicalism for not being able to explain it. Can't you see that is tendentious thinking?
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy] Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.[/quote]
If you think this is wrong, say why.
I think the idea of a mind-independent reality is really incoherent. Reality is something which minds create, as pointed out by the op. If you try to imagine the world as existing without any point-of-view, from no perspective at all, it becomes completely unintelligible, so it cannot be imagined. That's because "reality" as we know it, is point-of-view dependent. So the idea of a mind-independent reality really is incoherent.
I don't understand why you say that. Please elaborate.
[Quote]I've said, I don't deny the reality of there being an objective world, but that on a deeper level, it is not truly mind-independent. [/quote]
These two clauses seem to be contradictory. If there is an objective world external to ourselves, then it exists independent of our minds.
[Quote]Which is another way of saying objectivity cannot be absolute.[/quote]
It seems obvious to me that there are objective facts about the world that we know or can come to know. It is objective fact that we live on the third planet from the sun, which we orbit. How is this anything other than an absolute fact?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's fine, and we can discuss it, but do you agree it has no practical significance? That's what I meant.
I'm willing to defend Armstrong's metaphysical theory against alternatives, so I need to understand what alternative you propose. I don't claim it's necessarily true; I simply think it's the best explanation for what we know about the world -broadly. It's conceivable that everything in the world is physical, except for minds.
Is his theory of mind the only thing you object to, or do you think there are flaws that are unrelated to his account of mind?
FYI, when we get to specifics of Armstrong's theory of mind, I won't be limiting myself to Armstrong's specifics, but I will stick with physicalism in general.
In the meantime, I need to better understand your position. If you don't believe we can know truths about the world, that seems more significant than whether or not the mind can be adequately accounted for through physicalism. I don't see how you could propose a superior alternative with such a background assumption.
If you think the idea of a mind-independent reality is incoherent, then you can't believe there exists a mind-independent reality. I believe there is. Can you give me any reasons to change my mind? Understand that I acknowledge that physicalism could be wrong, but the belief in a mind-independent reality isn't dependent on physicalism being true.
If what is addressed by the term reality (I presume physical reality which, in a nutshell, is that actuality (or set of actualities) which affects all minds in equal manners irrespective of what individual minds might believe or else interpret, etc.) will itself be contingent on the occurrence of all minds which simultaneously existand, maybe needless to add, if the position of solipsism is utterly falsethen the following will necessarily hold: reality can only be independent of any one individual mind. As it is will be independent of any particular cohort of mindsjust as long as this cohort is not taken to be that of all minds that occur in the cosmos.
Which is to say that reality will be independent of individual minds in a so-called mind-created cosmos (just as long as its not solipsistic).
That mentioned, I agree that the sometimes tacitly implied notion of physical reality being somehow metaphysically independent of the individual minds which, after all, are aspects of itsuch that physical reality could be placed here and minds there without any dependency in-betweenis a logical dud. A close second dud is the attempt to describe minds, and all their various aspects, as purely physical (such that, for one example, all ends one can conceive of and intend are all physical in their nature).
Quoting Relativist
Just say this quibble between you and @Wayfarer. As I've just tried to illustrate, the quibble can be resolved by differentiating "mind" as generality (which occurs wherever individual minds occur) and "mind" as one concrete instantiation of the former (such that in concrete form minds are always plural and divided from each other) ... this in the term "mind-independent". Physical reality is not mind-independent in the first sense but is mind-independent in the second sense, this in any system of (non-solipsistic) idealism wherein the world is contingent upon the occurrence of minds.
That doesn't address the issue I raised.
I believe there exists a world (AKA "reality") independent of minds. I also believe nearly everyone agrees with me. That doesn't mean we're right, of course, but I'd like you or Wayfarer to give me reasons why I should reject, or doubt, my current belief.
If you re-read what was my initial reply to MU, you'll see that I also believe there exists a world independent of individual minds, and so I too agree with you on this count - even if, as the case is, I simultaneously believe this same world is contingent on the occurrence of mind as a generality.
So I'm not sure how to further reply.
Read the op, and what I said in my last post. Only minds provide a spatial-temporal perspective, and without assuming such a perspective, all these supposed mind independent things, the world, the universe, even "reality" itself, are completely unintelligible.
Quoting javra
I really can't understand what you are saying here javra. Perhaps you could rephrase it?
The question was about elementary particles and genes. These are part of scientific models.
It is well known that the nature of the existence of former, in particular, is rather ambiguous, to say the least. Although I don't want to divert this thread too far in this direction, this is where the Copenhagen interpretation of physics is relevant. This says that physics does not reveal what nature is in itself (or herself, some would say) but as how she appears to our methods of questioning. So these 'elementary particles' are not mind-independent in that sense - which is the implication of the observer problem. They only appear to be particles when subjected to a specific kind of experimental setup. This is part of why there is a tendency towards philosophical idealism in modern physics (e.g. Henry Stapp, John Wheeler, Werner Heisenberg, Bernard D'Espagnat, Shimon Malin, can all be said to advocate for one or another form of philosophical idealism. The latter's book is called Nature Loves to Hide.)
As for genes, and whether these comprise a fundamental explanatory unit, again, the emergence of epigenetics has given rise to an understanding that genes themselves are context-dependent. That is not downplaying the significance of the discovery of genes (or quantum theory, for that matter) but the role they are both assigned by physicalism as being ontologically primary or fundamental.
Quoting Relativist
I don't know how you could come to that conclusion. We know all manner of things about the world. I'm not denying that scientific knowledge is efficacious. What I'm questioning is the metaphysics of materialism, which posits that 'Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary' (The Blind Spot). Armstrong's physicalist philosophy would maintain that exact view, would it not? That the mind is 'the product of the brain'? What else could 'materialist theory of mind mean? And I think it can be questioned, without saying that nobody knows anything about the world.
I think I can see the point you're having difficulty with (and please don't take this to be condescending.) Philosophical idealism is nearly always understood as the view that 'the world only exists in the mind'. I think that is how you're reading what I am saying, which is why you believe that for me to acknowledge the reality of objective facts will undermine idealism. But what I'm arguing is that this is a misreprentation of what is true about idealism.
To get a bit technical, it's the difference between Berkeley's idealism, and Kant's. Kant acknowledges the empirical veracity of scientific hypotheses (empirical realism). After all, he was a polymath who devised a theory of nebular formation, which, adapted by LaPlace, is still considered current. But transcendental idealism still maintains that in a fundamental sense, the mind provides the intuitions of time and space, within which all such empirical judgements are made. I know it's a really hard distinction to get. Bryan Magee says 'We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counter-intuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.'
Quoting javra
I have read about Bernardo Kastrup's idea of 'mind at large'. At first I was sceptical of it but I've come around to it, if it is understood simply as 'some mind'. Not yours or mine, or anyone's in particular but as a genre.
Fair enough. I'll try. First, we all know in our heart of hearts that solipsism is false. Therefore, ours is not the only mind that currently occurs in the world. Given this fact, we then entertain the metaphysical reality/actuality that there can be no world in the absence of minds (in the plural).
Via one convenient though imperfect analogy: We all know that an ocean is not one single drop of water. Given this fact, we then hold the conviction that there can be no ocean in the absence of individual drops of water from which the ocean is constituted.
So the physical world is itself here taken to be determined from the constituency of a plurality of individual minds - without which there can be no physical world. In rough parallel, an ocean is taken to be determined by the constituency of a plurality of individual drops of water - without which there can be no ocean.
Then, just as the given ocean will continue to occur independently of any one individual drop of water from which it is constituted, so too will the physical world continue to occur independently of any one mind from which it is constituted.
Take all individual drops of water away and no ocean remains. Take all individual minds way and no world remains. But adding or removing one drop of water from the ocean does not alter the ocean in any meaningful way. In like enough manner, adding or removing one mind from the physical world does not alter the physical world in any meaningful way.
The ocean is then drop-of-water-independent when it comes to any one individual drop of water from which it is constituted (or even from a relatively large quantity of individual drops of water - say as can be added by a hurricane or else removed by evaporation, etc.) - this even though the same ocean is drop-of-water-dependent in the sense that no ocean can exist in the complete absence of such.
In a roundabout way, the same can then be upheld for any non-solipsistic idealism: the physical world is mind-independent when it comes to any one individual mind (or any relatively large quantity of minds) - this even thought it is mind-dependent in the sense that no physical world can exist in the complete absence of minds.
This explanation via analogy is less then ideal by my appraisal, but it does I think adequately enough illustrate the necessity that in a non-solipsistic idealism (wherein the physical is thereby dependent on the psychical) the physical world will be independent of, say, my mind or your mind ... or any other individual mind or non-global-cohort of such for that matter.
As one possible summation of this, within any non-solipsistic idealism, there will necessarily be an external world that occurs independently of me and my own mind.
The very notion of a perspective entails having a mind. We are sufficiently aware that we can recognize the fact we even have a perspective.
We obviously perceive space and time, so why doubt that this is an aspect of the actual world? The mere fact that we have a perspective does not entail that this perspective is an illusion.
What we can conclude from the assumption that solipsism is false, is that there must be something which separates one mind from another, some sort of medium. But we cannot exclude the possibility that the medium is an illusion, or mind-created, as a sort of deficiency in minds' ability for direct communication with one another.
Quoting javra
This one doesn't make sense to me. What is a "drop of water"? Why can't we say that the ocean is a single drop of water? And to me, "a drop" is an isolated quantity of water, so it makes no sense to talk about a body of water as if it is made of drops. If a number of drops put together makes an amount of water which is more than a drop, so that it cannot be called a drop, the entire amount exists without any drops within it, as a drop of water is an isolated thing. If a number of creeks coming together creates a river, it doesn't make sense to conclude that a river consists of a bunch of creeks.
Quoting javra
Sorry javra, I just cannot understand what you are saying here. This is what I get from it. If there is a complete absence of minds, then there is also the complete absence of a physical world. In that sense there is no mind-independent word. However, if there is so much as one mind (or a multitude of minds), then there must also be a mind-independent.
So how does the existence of a mind (or multitude of minds) necessitate the existence of a mind-independent world? If it is the existence of a mind, (or minds), which necessitates that world, how can it be a mind-independent world?
Quoting javra
I don't deny that there would be something outside my own mind, what I called the "medium" above. But why conceive of this as "a world", or "a universe", or even "reality", as all these refer to mind dependent things, if you want to think of the medium as mind-independent? But, since I believe in the reality of numerous minds, there is nothing to persuade me that the "medium" is not something inside another mind, therefore not mind-independent at all.
Quoting Relativist
I don't think so Relativist. Kant names these as intuitions which are the necessary conditions for the possibility of sensory perception. So from that perspective space and time are prior to perception. Another type of ontology would hold that space and time are logical abstractions, posterior to perceptions. We deduce from our perceptions, the conclusion that there must be something which we conceive of as "space", and something we conceive of as "time". But there is no indication that we actually perceive whatever it is which we call "space", or "time".
Not to dispel the question you've posed, but only to observe that the way in which it is posed the issues are lot more complex than not.
Our perception of time sometimes drastically differs from that time we commonly deem to be objective, with the latter being measured via use of objective/physical tools, by which I mean anything from sundials to clocks. As one example of this, when we are forced into an event we are bored with time will slow down (relative to objective time) and when we find ourselves engaged in an event we are enthralled by time will speed up or fly by (relative to objective time).
So our time perception is not necessarily an adequate representation of the time that occurs in the actual world.
This can then go in any number of different ways - but please note that I am not by this denying the reality of an objective time as previously addressed (which for me is another can of beans altogether (especially since I take objective time to be relativistic)). Nor am I by this then claiming that that aspect of reality we can term objective time is not of itself ultimately dependent on the co-occurrence of a plurality of minds.
And, at minimum, part of the medium you address has to be physicality, aka physical reality - that same physicality of which our brains are made up of and which when damaged disrupts the functioning of our minds. In an Eastern train of thought wherein all but either the atman or the anatman (depending on philosophical perspective) is maya and hence illusion (i.e., "a magic trick"), yes, all aspects of this medium with partitions awareness into discrete parts (e.g., me and you, etc.) can be deemed mind-created illusion - including all of physical reality. But so entertaining goes far deeper, I believe, than claiming physical reality to be on par to something one hallucinates or else can imagine at will or so forth. As individual first-person points of view we are all bound to the physicality that surrounds, and our very lives are dependent on there being a sufficient degree of conformity to it. This even if it is to be considered pure maya (i.e., pure illusion in the sense of a magic trick).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As I've already acknowledge the analogy was imperfect and less then ideal. Still, a drop is typically understood as that amount of liquid which might remain intact and maybe fall as such from a stick which had been placed into the liquid. Place a stick into the ocean, lift it up, and one will remove drops of water from the ocean. But yes, it was and remains, again, a very rough analogy. Sorry to hear it didn't make any sense to you.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yea, the "how does a plurality of minds necessitate an objective world which is constitutionally determined by them" part is not that easy to tersely express. But importantly, if no solipsism then, necessarily, the world can only be brought about by a multitude of minds - and not by a sole mind. If there are a plurality of minds which constitute the world, then the disappearance/death of any one mind from the world will not entail the disappearance/obliteration of the world itself - for there are yet other minds from which the world remains constituted. So the world occurs in manners not dependent on any one particular mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To be clear, are you then saying that if the so-called "medium" of physicality in total - to include my physical body and its brain - is not something that is an aspect of my own mind it would then need to be something the occurs as an aspect of some other individual mind?
As to the initial question, (I take it that) there is an actuality, or set of actualities, which affects all observers equally irrespective of what the observes believe, perceive, imagine, want, interpret, etc. This I then term the objective world (objectivity can well mean impartial, and this set of actualities in being as just described would then be literally impartial in complete manners to all observers which are thereby subjected to experiences, i.e. to all sentient beings as subjects, aka as subjective beings).
Do you deny there being actualities which occur irrespective of what any one individual sentient being intends, believes, and so forth?
I'm guessing at the end of the day we'll end up disagreeing. but I'm still honestly curious to hear your replies so as to better understand your point of view.
The fact that models makes successful predictions demonstrates that we know something about the nature of physical reality, and that's really the basic thing I'm defending.
Quantum mechanics indeed shows that reality is not identical to that which we directly perceive, but this fact is itself a relevant truth about reality. Re: the "observer problem", don't jump to a conclusion consistent with your confirmation bias. No interpretation of QM is verifiably true, but it's a near certainty that reality actually exhibits the predictible law-like behavior that we observe.
Quoting Wayfarer
So you aren't denying that genes exist. You're pointing to the fact that there are other factors that influence growth and development. So once again, genetics does tell us something about life: more objective facts.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sorry I didn't understand, but that's how it sounded to me. Glad we could clarify that you agree scientific knowledge is efficacious- so I assume you agree that we indeed have some knowledge about the world external to minds.
But you're making an error if you think materialism requires these scientific models to be correct depictions of reality. The metaphysics does not depend on these models to correspond to reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
I completely agree with this; it makes perfect sense. My issue has been that these intuitions don't preclude discerning aspects of reality.
So, what does it depend on, then?
Absolutely! The fact that we (i.e..Einstein) developed a theory that transcends the "human perspective" of time is a testimony to our ability to transcend our own perspective, and endeavor to be objective.
Physicalism = the thesis that everything that exists is physical. It is false only if there exists something non-physical. It depends only on this being true.
But you say:
Quoting Relativist
Sure it does. But what about this requires that the fundamental constituents are actually physical? What does 'physical' mean, when the nature of the so-called fundamental particles is ambiguous, as has been discussed? It's entirely plausible that 'physical' is a concept only applicable to composite objects, but not to their fundamental constituents. After all Neils Bohr said 'Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real'. You could substitute 'physical' for 'real' in that sentence and it would still parse correctly.
And as for something non-physical, the wavefunction ? is an ideal candidate:
Quoting The Timeless Wave
Why would we have these intuitions, if they aren't consistent with reality (i.e. true within the scope of our perceptions).
[Quote]Another type of ontology would hold that space and time are logical abstractions, posterior to perceptions. We deduce from our perceptions, the conclusion that there must be something which we conceive of as "space", and something we conceive of as "time". But there is no indication that we actually perceive whatever it is which we call "space", or "time".[/quote]
Why think our abstractions about space and time are false?
Special relativity demonstrates that our perceptions of space and time aren't universally true, but it also explains how it is true within the context in which our sensory perceptions apply.
I acknowledge that our descriptions (and understandings) are grounded in our perspective, but we have the capacity to correct for that.
What one hallucinates, and what one imagines at will, are very different concepts, and ought not be classed together in this context. This is because we need to maintain some kind of division between things created by the mind which are not created consciously by will, and things willfully created. This is necessary to allow for the reality of the mind's subconscious activity in creating things like sense perceptions, images etc.. And when we allow that sense perceptions are creations of the mind, this enables us to properly understand things like dreams and hallucinations. But it also exposes the fact that what we know as "physical reality" is just a creation of the mind.
The fact that our lives are jeopardized by this force (I'll call the medium "a force" in this context) which we know as physical reality does not imply that our lives are dependent on it. Those are two different concepts. Our lives are dependent on that which gives us life, whatever it is which throws us into this situation of jeopardy, but the force which jeopardizes us is not necessarily the same as that which we are dependent on.
Because of this, it is incorrect to say "we are all bound to the physicality that surrounds". The reality of free-will indicates that this boundness is not real. It is an illusion which we have created. The illusion has been created (part of it subconsciously through evolution and instinct, and part of it consciously through education and science), because it assists us in understanding and dealing with "the force" in our actions. The important point to understand here is that this force is power, and as much as power is a force which can appear as if it restricts and binds us, it can also be harnessed and used to enhance one's freedom. But in order to use the force in this way, we need to understand it, and to understand it we represent it in the determinist model which produces the illusion that we are bound by it.
Quoting javra
This is incorrect. You are simply defining "drop" as a quantity, for the purpose of your analogy, when "drop" is really not commonly understood as a quantity. My OED has as the first definition "a small round or pear-shaped portion of liquid that hangs or falls or adheres to a surface". Notice that the shape and activity of the thing, as an individual object called "a drop", are the principal features. The quantity is secondary, and is simply stated in the relative term of "small". "Small" does not indicate any specific quantity.
Quoting javra
You are not getting the important point. The judgement of "no solipsism" may be only the creation of a mind. So we cannot produce the necessity required for your conclusion. "The world" might still just be the creation of a lonely mind, which likes to have other minds to keep it company. Once we accept that the subconscious part of the mind is engaged in creating (as evidenced in dreams and hallucinations), we cannot claim that just because the other minds are not willfully created by my conscious mind, they are not created by the mind in an absolute sense. The other minds might still be created by the subconscious part. The conclusion of "no solipsism" might be just a tactic (evolutionarily produced or something) which is allowing the mind to better deal with the force.
Quoting javra
I mentioned that as a possibility. The issue here is that we do not know, and we cannot exclude anything as impossible until we do know, because that could mislead us.
Quoting javra
This cannot be true, we can almost exclude it as impossible. We know each person to have a distinct perspective, and this necessitates the conclusion that the so-called "set of actualities") does not effect observers equally. The "distinct perspective" necessitates the conclusion of unequal effects. The equality you refer to is a creation of the mind. We create equality to understand each other.
Quoting javra
What you call "actualities" is I believe, what I called "force". The problem with your question is that the force is understood as relative to the agent, so it does not make sense to ask about its existence independent of the agent. It is only a force relative to the thing which wants to move. We can only understand it in its relation to us, because that's the only existence which it has to us. It appears to us as "a force" because of our living tendency to act, but without that tendency to act, it may be nothing at all. So what appears as "the force", the independent reality, may actually be nothing, in the purest sense of the word. That's why I say questions about an independent reality are really incoherent.
It seems uncontroversial to stipulate that the objects of our ordinary experiences are physical. It seems most reasonable to treat the component parts of physical things as also physical, all the way down to whatever is fundamental.
Quoting Wayfarer
A "wave function" is a mathematical abstraction. I see no good reason to think abstractions are ontological. So I infer that a wave function is descriptive of something that exists.
My definition of the physical: the ordinary objects of experience, and everything that is causally connected, through law-like behavior, to these ordinary objects of our experience.
Quantum systems fit this.
I may misunderstand, but it sounds also bit like you're suggesting that we should reject physicalism if physics doesn't have a complete, verifiable description of reality.
How can an external world exist independently of human minds AND be contingent upon human minds?
Being contingent upon entails a dependence, does it not?
OK, thanks for your reply. We disagree in multiple ways. But, since I don't much feel like argument at the moment, I prefer to leave it at that.
Quoting Relativist
Yes "contingent upon" entails "a dependence" but your fist question equivocates what I have been proposing. With the equivocation taking place between the notion of "all elements from a multiplicity of elements of type X" and "one (or some) element(s) from a multiplicity of elements of type X - but not all". As an added example of this:
The presence of a heap of sand will be contingent upon, and hence will depend on, the presence of a multiplicity of sand particles in general - which are structured in a particular way. But it will not of itself be contingent upon the presence of any one particular sand particle, such that the heap of sand will remain present even if individual sand particles are taken away or added to it. No one sand particle on its own produces, or else equates to, the heap of sand. And so the heap of sand will occur independently of (i.e., will occur without being contingent on) any one individual, particular sand particle that partakes of the heap of sand. Take that one sand particle away and the heap of sand remains. The heap of sand can then be said to exist independently of any one individual sand particle from which it might be composed but, simultaneously, will be dependent on the occurrence of a multiplicity of sand particles in general. One could then incrementally replace each and every particular sand particle in the given heap of sand with the heap of sand persisting to occur unaltered throughout - even though it becomes constituted by utterly different sand particles. And the larger the heap of sand is, the less any alteration in its particular sand particles will make any meaningful difference to the identity, or else properties, of the heap of sand itself.
Replace "heap of sand" with "the physical world" and "individual sand particles" with "individual minds". The same relations will hold. This can thereby lead to the logically valid affirmation that, in a non-solipsistic mind-created world, the physical world occurs independently of me and my own mind, even though it will be dependent on the occurrence of a multiplicity of minds in general.
OK, I think I understand. But as I said before:
Quoting Relativist
When I say "independent of minds", I mean that the world at large exists irrespective of the presence of any minds at all. I believe the universe is about 14B years old, and there were almost certainly no minds within it for quite a long time. Can you give me a reason to reject or doubt this belief of mine?
Reasons such as these?:
Quoting javra
Yes, I can provide them, but I don't think reasons will here much help. We are all typically attached to the notions we are habituated to hold, in this case that there was physicality long before there was any type of awareness, ergo physicalism.
My reply to this will be that of panpsychism - this in the sense that awareness pervaded the cosmos long before life evolved into it (i.e., in the sense that the physical is, was, and will remain dependent of the psychical). This conclusion for me, though, is only a deduction from the premise of a non-solipsistic [s]mind[/s] awareness-created world. And I do not claim to have any great insight into how panpsychism works - nor into any metaphysically cogent explanation for how life evolved from non-life (the physicalist explanation that "it must have" doesn't much console me either as far as metaphysical explanations go - I find it just as comforting as the explanation of "God did it").
Quoting javra
No. You expressing your judgement is not a reason for me, even with a vague allusion to some questionable assumption that it seems based on.
Quoting javra
I may agree that we're "habituated" to hold the view that there exists a mind-independent reality.
If we're a consequence of evolutionary tendencies, then we would necessarily have the implicit belief that there exists a world external to ourselves. How we then think about this (e.g. that this external world exists independently of ourselves) could be a cultural habituation. I'm willing to entertain an alternative, if there's a good enough reason.
Quoting javra
You're indicating panpaychism is a logical step beyond the "premise of a non-solipsistic mind awareness-created world." I'm just asking why should entertain that premise.
Quoting javra
If your answer is that this feels right, and/or provides you comfort, I have no objection. I'm not trying to convince you that you're wrong. I'm just seeking my own comfort- I'd like to know if there are good reasons to think I'm deluding myself with what I believe about the world.
There's a strong component of common sense realism in it, buttressed by the polemical and rhetorical skills developed by centuries of philosophical argument.
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics (p6). ]what we regard as the physical world is physical to us precisely in the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions. The aspect of the universe that resists our push and demands muscular effort on our part is what we consider to be physical. On the other hand, since sensation and thought dont require overcoming any physical resistance, we consider them to be outside of material reality.[/quote]
Thats physicalism in a nutshell.
Quoting Relativist
It isn't so easily dismissed. The ontology of the wave function in quantum physics is one of the outstanding problems of philosophy of science. Realists argue that the wave function represents something real in the world, while instrumentalists may view it as merely a predictive tool without deeper ontological significance. Treating it as only an abstraction is one option but it is far from universally accepted. The point is, claiming that everything that exists is physical becomes problematic if we cant definitively say what kind of existence the wave function has, as in quantum mechanics, the wave function is central to predicting physical phenomena. If we take its predictive power seriously, its hard to ignore the question of its ontological status without leaving an unresolved gap in the theory.
Quoting Relativist
As I said before, as a materialist, D M Armstrong believes that science is paradigmatic for philosophy proper. So you can't have your cake and eat it too - if physics indeed suggests that the nature of the physical eludes precise definition, then so much for appealing to science as a model for philosophy!
Quoting Relativist
Perspective is not the same as bias.
Quoting Relativist
I wouldn't put it in personal or pejorative terms, but I do believe that philosophical and/or scientific materialism is an erroneous philosophical view.
Quoting Wayfarer
But there IS this unresolved gap in our physics. We really don't know. Therefore one can't claim it's inconsistent with physicalism.
Besides this, nothing you said is a refutation of my position as to what I consider physical.
Quoting Wayfarer
It sounds like I had it right: you think physicalism should be rejected if physics doesn't have a complete, verifiable description of reality.
Armstrong's model is consistent with what we do know, so it's not falsified. A stipulation that the wave function is non-physical would technically falsify physicalism, but if the wave function behaves in a law-like manner, why make that stipulation? It would still be a coherent metaphysical model, save for using "physical" as a qualifier. That's why your objection seems forced: "let's label the wave function as non-physical (or just say it may not be physical) so we can dismiss every physicalist metaphysical theory".
Quoting Wayfarer
My position is that Armstrong's theory is not necessarily true, but it's superior to other theories in terms of explanatory scope, parsimony, and ad hoc-ness.
The fact that it's consistent with what we know about physics is a point in its favor, while the fact that there are gaps in our understanding of physics is irrelevant. It's irrelevant because a theory can only be expected to account for what we know: that's the nature of abductive reasoning. Abduction entails comparing explanatory hypotheses - and what needs to be explained are the agreed facts. Unknowns do not constitute facts that need explaining.
That physicalism should be rejected, if the thesis is that 'everything is ultimately physical' while what is physical can't be defined.
Quoting Relativist
If it hasn't been falsified by quantum physics, it's not falsifiable. So again, it appeals to science as a model of philosophical authority, but only when it suits.
I posted this comment some days ago, do you think it has any bearing on the argument?
Do you see the point of this criticism of philosophical naturalism? Because, if you don't, then I think I'll call it a day.
Hmm. Physicalism can be defined as entailing that everything which does or can occur can only be physical in its nature. (In keeping with part of @Wayfarer's latest post:) There's a question which Darwin's Bulldog, the Agnostic who first coined the term "agnostic", Thomas Huxley, once placed which is to date yet unanswered: what is "the physical" (or else that "matter" from which one obtains materialism) defined as, exactly **. Yet, in overlooking this very awkward lack of coherent reasoning in affirming the stance of physicalism:
Mind in part consists of thoughts. How are thoughts physical? One can of course state that the thoughts of a corporeal sentient being would not be in the absence of the respective corporeal body. But this does not entail that the given thoughts - say of a unicorn or of Harry Potter - are of themselves physical. I can get that that objective rock over there is physical, but how is my concept of a unicorn (which I can mold, make appear, and make disappear at will, and which might not be significantly similar to your concept of a unicorn) of itself physical?
Or, by extension, we perceive physical realities, but then - given the entailment of physicalism - how is a bona fide hallucination of itself physical? Say, for example, someone hallucinates seeing a burning bush; is the burning bush which this person sees physical?
But if not everything that does or can occur is physical, then physicalism so defined can only be false.
Then there's the definition of physicalism where everything supervenes on the physical. Which carries its own multiple philosophical problems. But I'll leave it at that for now. All this just intending food for thought. I have little interest in convincing you to reject or doubt your beliefs - and currently far more interest in properly justifying my own.
Quoting Relativist
a) If non-solipsistic idealism is true, this then entails that everything is ultimately dependent on psyche in one way or another. My own stance is that of an objective idealism wherein there occurs an objective world of physicality as effete mind that itself evolves - which, ultimately, would not be but for the occurrence of disparate psyches.
b) If we are to trust the information which the empirical sciences present us with regarding the objective world - which, in short, is an extension of our trusting our own empirical senses - then there indeed was a time when the cosmos existed in the absence of all corporeal, biological life.
If both a) non-solipsistic idealism and b) the occurrence of a world in the absence of all life are taken to be true premises, then it becomes entailed that the occurrence of psyche is not dependent on the occurrence of biological life. This while the occurrence of multiple psyches - else of psyche in general - is yet requisite for any physical world to occur (this as per (a)).
This entailment then can be labeled panpsychism (all-psyche-ism) - which, I'll argue, is a modernized rebranding of animism ("anima" being Latin and "psyche" being Greek for the same thing: in a word, "soul" - with the Latin "animus" and the Greek "nous" being used to address "mind"), from which one can obtain concepts such as that of the anima mundi, among others (hence, an anima mundi that occurred long before biological life came into being)
Quoting Relativist
:grin: I wasn't being fully literal, but, all the same, at the end of the day yes: we all seek some sort of comfort in that which we search for and end up holding onto. A different topic for a different thread, but all reasoning can be said to serve this underlying purpose. If we search for truths for example, we are discomforted by not finding them, or else by finding reason to belief that what we stringently endorse as true is in fact not true (at which time we might welcome the pain of the catharsis which grants us greater awareness via better understanding). To harshly paraphrase David Hume: reason-derived conclusions are always enslaved to the intentioning volition's drive of obtaining emotive satisfaction. In this sense, reason is then always a slave to passion. Which, in a way, can work its way back to the motif of this thread: all that occurs is ultimately dependent upon psyche. The very reasoning which psyches utilize as tools for the purpose of obtaining what is wanted included, or so I will uphold.
---------
** In fairness, T. Huxley, the staunch agnostic that he was, held the same complain against materialism that he held regarding an adequate definition of "spirit" from which one obtains the notion of "spirituality". Here's a quote from him to this effect:
I was going to suggest to @Relativist whether he'd ever encountered 'constructive empiricism', associated with Bas Van Fraasen.
[quote=AI Overview]Constructive empiricism is a philosophical view that science aims to produce theories that are empirically adequate, rather than true. It was developed by the 20th-century Canadian philosopher Bas van Fraassen and is presented most systematically in his 1980 work The Scientific Image.
Constructive empiricism differs from scientific realism, which holds that science aims to provide a literally true story of the world. Constructive empiricists believe that science aims for truth about observable aspects of the world, but not unobservable aspects. They also believe that accepting a scientific theory involves only the belief that it is empirically adequate. [/quote]
I think this is a framework which is not antagonistic to science while leaving the question of the ultimate nature of reality an open one.
Quoting javra
Thoughts are widely considered to be neural events or processes. That they do not seem to be such to the thinker is no guarantee that they are not such. There is no guarantee that physicalism is false. Nor is there a guarantee that it is true. The real issue as I see it is what does it matter? Why should we mind whether physicalism is true or false?
If youre not, no explanation will move you.
Federico Fellini
Hmm, because of its implications.
There a bunch of other reasons, but as one significant gripe I have with it (here placing its inconsistencies aside), if physicalism is true, then this will easily lead to - if it does not directly entail - moral nihilism. And it certainly does away with any possibility of an objective good.
... For example: Given phisicalism, everything sentient then necessarily ends in nonbeing wherein all suffering permanently ends upon their own corporeal death (we're atheists so this for us is a good thing to uphold - lest we suffer the encroachment of that diabolical theism crowd with their concepts of an anima mundi and such). Ergo, enduring the suffering of life with as much grace as possible when things get rough is stupid - and there is no ultimate good to aspire toward, well, other than one's personal death when life gets a bit too much. The abused, the tortured, etc? They too obtain this same salvation from all suffering via their own physical death to this world ... so when one places a bullet through a child's head under the cover of war one in essence is blessing the child with eternal peace and an absolute lack of suffering. Is so murdering a child right or wrong? Within systems of physicalism, there is no one right answer - either due to moral nihilism or to moral relativism.
... Kind of thing. And I say this as one who sometimes longs for the days when I used to believe that my corporeal death to this world meant my absolute nonbeing.
There's concrete shitty stuff happening in the world right now that bothers me, at times galore. And so the issues addressed tend to matter to me, in large enough part for this very reason regarding a proper grounding for ethics. ("God does everything" also not being anywhere near any such proper grounding.)
All this written a bit tongue in cheek, but I hope it might still get the general point across.
BTW, if it doesn't matter to you (as you sort of insinuate), then why bother replying to my post to begin with?
Quoting javra
Physicalism being false does not entail non-solipsistic idealism being true. It just means idealism is logically possible. I already acknowledge it is logically possible.
Regarding your claim, you seem to be reifying an action. Engaging in thought is an activity of the brain- a behavior. It often results in the establishment of a new belief-a disposition. Having a belief makes us apt to behave certain way.
Quoting javra
Our perception of our physical surroundings establishes a complex belief (a disposition) about those surroundings, which will influence how we behave within those surroundings. An hallucination is a non-veridical belief.
Quoting javra
Sure, but physicalism can be false and idealism still be false. You've provided no reason to think it's true. I'm somewhat agnostic as to a metaphysical theory. I tentatively embrace physicalism because it explains the most and assumes the least. I could switch my allegiance if there were an alternative that bested it. You haven't given one. You would have to defeat my belief in an external, minds-independent world.
That's a bit confrontational to me. And, as I previously expressed, I'm not interested in so doing.
As to your other replies, they sidestep the questions asked without providing answers. E.g. are non-veridical beliefs of themselves physical? BTW, to the person hallucinating X, the physical reality of X will be a veridical belief ... this up until the time reasoning might intervene (it doesn't always). The movie "A Beautiful Mind" makes a good point of that, for one example.
But I'll leave it at that.
It's not confrontational. The term "defeater" is just standard epistemology. A defeater=a reason to give up a belief. It's shorthand for what I've previously asked for.
I hope you understand why it's relevant. I absolutely believe there is an external world that exists independently of minds. I can't possibly accept idealism unless I drop this belief, and that would require a defeater (not just the mere possibility it is false).
Quoting javra
I was defending physicalism, so I didn't see the need to state that it entails the claim that beliefs are physical. Indeed, establishing a belief would entail a physical change in the brain. More specifically, it is a change that will affect behavior.
[Quote]BTW, to the person hallucinating X, the physical reality of X will be a veridical belief ... this up until the time reasoning might intervene (it doesn't always). [/quote]That's not what it means. A verdical belief is one that is actually true, i.e. it corresponds to an aspect of reality. If a person believes X, then he necessarily believes X is true.
If the protagonist in the movie had hallucinations that he believed were false because his psychiatrists convinced him they were false, then the belief in their falsehood was an undercutting defeater of the (seemingly true) hallucination.
[I]...the most powerful argument in favour of scientific realism is the no-miracles argument, according to which the success of science would be miraculous if scientific theories were not at least approximately true descriptions of the world. While the underdetermination argument is often cited as giving grounds for scepticism about theories of unobservable entities, arguably the most powerful arguments against scientific realism are based on the history of radical theory change in science....
...Structural realism was introduced into current philosophy of science by John Worrall in 1989 as a way to break the impasse that results from taking both arguments seriously, and have the best of both worlds in the debate about scientific realism.
...
According to Worrall, we should not accept standard scientific realism, which asserts that the nature of the unobservable objects that cause the phenomena we observe is correctly described by our best theories. However, neither should we be antirealists about science. Rather, we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves to the mathematical or structural content of our theories. Since there is (says Worrall) retention of structure across theory change, structural realism both (a) avoids the force of the pessimistic meta-induction (by not committing us to belief in the theorys description of the furniture of the world) and (b) does not make the success of science (especially the novel predictions of mature physical theories) seem miraculous (by committing us to the claim that the theorys structure, over and above its empirical content, describes the world).[/i]
I believe I've stayed faithful to this approach in all my replies to you.
Are you then in search for infallible proof. I've none to give ... regarding anything whatsoever.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, I know what it means.
Quoting Relativist
This is not always the case in real life applications, most especially when it comes to beliefs regarding future facts. If John believes his team will win the game then he might bet accordingly while nevertheless having a great deal of doubt regarding this same belief. Here, a person believes X without necessarily believing X is true. To claim otherwise is to try to force-feed all real life instantiations of belief into a somewhat limited understanding of the term's denotation.
Quoting Relativist
The movie was based on real events. And he wasn't convinced by psychiatrists but by inconsistencies in the hallucinatory people he was observing and interacting with (namely, they were not ageing over time as they ought to have).
The point made seems to however not have been grasped: Until inconsistencies appear, no one has reason to believe that what they observe as an aspect of the physical world is in fact a hallucination - say, for example, a cat that one sees running across one's path. Which however does not entail the necessity that the last stray cat one saw was therefore not a hallucination (... hence being a non-veridical experience and belief regarding what is real). The only means we hold for discerning what is and is not veridical is justifications, which tend to not hold when inconsistencies are present.
The question again was "are hallucinations physical?". So if a person hallucinates a stray cat running along their path, is the hallucinated cat physical?
As to perceptions being this and that in the brain, this will include all veridical perceptions just as much as it will include all non-veridical perceptions. So claiming that the hallucinated cat was caused by the brain does not resolve whether or not the hallucinated cat was physical as a hallucination per se.
I don't know if it does that. The term 'anti-realist' often gives the impression of someone who denies the reality of science or regards scientific findings as somehow illusory or insubstantial. This isnt what van Fraassen advocates at all. Instead, hes deeply committed to the empirical success and practical validity of science but questions whether we should interpret scientific theories as giving us a literal account of an objective, mind-independent reality. At issue is the nature of the fundamental constituents of reality and whether they are physical, as physicalism claims.
Another basic point in this context is the distinction between reality, as the aggregate or sum total of observable phenomena and the objects of scientific analysis, and being, as a description of the existence as experienced by human beings. This is where I think physicalism over-values scientific method, for which physicalism may be an effective heuristic while being descriptively accurate within its scope. But many of the questions of philosophy may not be amendable to scientific analysis. Unless you're a positivist, that doesn't make them meaningless.
Quoting Relativist
which also implies distance from physicalism.
Intuitions are not formed to be consistent with reality. According to evolutionary theory they are shaped by some sort of survival principles.
Quoting Relativist
There is much reason to think that our conceptions of space and time are false, spatial expansion, dark matter, dark energy, quantum weirdness. Anywhere that we run into difficulties understanding what is happening, when applying these abstractions, this is an indication that they are false.
Quoting Relativist
Well sure, these conceptions are true in the context of our sensory perceptions, that's how we use them, verify them, etc.. But if our sensory perceptions are not providing truth, that's a problem.
Quoting Relativist
How would you propose that we could do that? How do we verify that our sensory perceptions are giving us truth?
No.
Quoting javra
Then he doesn't have a categorical belief that his team will win. Rather, he believes it probable that his team will win.
I'm not big on that distinction. For starters, as a falliblist, upon analysis all my beliefs are graded (probabilistic or else comparable) - this even though I will typically address them in the categorical "yes/no" format. Do I believe the sun will rise again tomorrow? My answer is "Yes," this barring the odd improbable occurrence, such as of a large meteorite hitting the Earth before then in a manner that makes the Earth shatter, or some such (this such that I will hold this one graded belief with a probability assignment - say of 99.999% or thereabouts). All this then makes the distinction between categorical beliefs and graded beliefs artificial, to my own ears at least.
All the same, the initial point you made was:
Quoting Relativist
My point was that this is not always the necessary case. Graded beliefs, when so dichotomized from categorical, being beliefs all the same.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The "intuitions" in question are relevant to survival. If there is a world external to ourself, it would be necessary to have a functionally accurate view of that world. If there is not such an external world, what would explain this false intuition?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I was referring to our primitive (pre-science) abstractions of space and time. As I said, they are valid and true within the context of our direct perceptions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it's not. Our sensory perceptions aren't oracles that magically know truths beyond what we could possibly perceive. Further, the error has not prevented science from learning more precise truths- such as a more precise understanding of space and time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
See my prior comment.
Sure, but then you have some loose epistemic probability in mind, and a more precise statement of your belief would identify this. So it is not strictly true that the guy believes his team will win. Rather, he believes it more likely than not that they will win, or that it is a near certainty, or some other probabilistic qualification.
If "Joe believes it more likely than not that the Columbus Spinsters will win on Saturday" then "Joe believes it is true that it is more likely than not that the Columbus Spinsters will win on Saturday". This is the "equivalence theory" in theory of truth.
I will note here my conviction that time has an inextricably subjective element, which is a specific example of the more general observation in the OP, that perspective is an irreducible element of what we perceive as external reality. Theres an interesting Aeon essay on this point, about Henri Bergson and Albert Einsteins meeting and debate about the nature of time, n Paris, 1922:
[quote=Evan Thompson] Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state the current time is what we call now. Each successive now of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks dont measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.[/quote]
Bergsons critique aligns with Kant in suggesting that time is not merely a succession of isolated moments that can be objectively measured, but a continuous and subjective flow that we actively synthesize through consciousness. This synthesis is what lets us experience time as duration, not just as sequential units. It is our awareness of the duration between points in time that is itself time. There is no time outside that awareness.
By this account, Bergson is challenging Einsteins emphasis on clock-based measurement, pointing to the irreducibility of subjective experience in understanding times nature. Kants notion of time as an a priori intuition parallels this because he saw time as essential to organizing our experiences into coherent sequences. Its not a feature of objects themselves but rather of our way of perceiving thema precondition that shapes experience.
This highlights how understanding what exists inevitably involves interpreting it through something that only a perspective can provide. In both Kant and Bergsons views, the subjective experience of time is foundational, suggesting that any scientific or philosophical statement about existence must, knowingly or not, rely on this element of lived experience.
Using the same reasoning, then you'd claim that "it is not strictly true that I believe the sun will rise again tomorrow", this because I believe it more likely than not that it will, or that it is a near certainty, or some other probabilistic qualification. Being a fallibilist, then, I do not hold any "strictly true" beliefs. Yet, despite all this, the fact remains that I do believe the sun will once again rise tomorrow, as can be evidenced by my behaviors and preparations in relation to this belief - despite my not holding this belief to be certainty, but to instead hold a probabilistic qualification, such that it is, in technical jargon, more likely then not.
I suppose it all depends on how one qualifies belief. Still, in ordinary life, when a guy is asked, "do you believe your team will win?" or, as a different example, "do you believe she'll say 'yes'?", the guy might well honestly answer with a categorical, "Hell yea!" (rather than with a, "well, it depends") ... yet without being foolish enough to presume that this honestly held belief is in a full blown correlation to a not yet actualized future reality. But I get it, this to you would not be a "strictly true belief".
Quoting Wayfarer
:up:
It's a false dichotomy that a scientific model is either literally true, or it is merely empirically valid. Structural realism is a middle ground.
Quoting Wayfarer
Reality = everything that exists; observable reality is a subset. Empirical science is limited to the observable; theoretical physics stretches this limit by extrapolating. If there is more to existence than what science can possibly discover or extrapolate, how then can it be discovered? If there exists a God of religion, then perhaps by praying or dying, but I personally see no reason to believe such things exist.
I just don't understand why you think metaphysical physicalism overvalues the scientific method. The scientific method is an epistemological method, and it seems to me to be the best epistemological method possible for developing knowledge about the physical world. If true, that's an objective fact irrespective of whether physicalism is true. A physicalist metaphysics does no more than provide the framework that scientism lacks. What sort of facts do you suppose this omits? What alternative methodology can do better?
Quoting Wayfarer
No, it doesn't. Physicalism is consistent with, but not identical to, scientific realism.
Regarding Armstrong's theory: he explicitly stated that he believed spacetime comprises the totality of existence, that it is governed by laws of nature, and that physics is concerned with discovering what these are. As far as I can tell, he doesn't make assertions about specific laws of physics that he regards as true and real. He accommodates QM, but I don't think he explictly claims it is real. His reference to spacetime suggests he may have been a realistic about general relativity, but given his deference to physics, I can't imagine that he'd deny more exotic theories (eg a "Many Worlds" cosmological theory, that entails multiple space-times) if they became accepted physics.
Philosophical analysis requires more precision than ordinary language often delivers.
Quoting Wayfarer
Special relativity shows that time is relative to a reference frame. That a sort of subjectivity, but you seem to be suggesting it's mind-dependent. OK, but I see no reason to think so.
Quoting Wayfarer
To understand anything will necessarily entail relating it to our human perspectives. This doesn't preclude expanding our perspectives when it is demonstrably deficient.
Quoting Wayfarer
I gave you a definition.
Quoting Wayfarer
I explained that it is consistent with QM. Metaphysical theories generally are not falsiable in a scientific sense. All we can do is examine them for coherence, explanatory scope, and parsimony. It is falsified if it is incoherent or cannot possibly account for some clear fact of the world. It ought to be rejected if an alternate coherent theory provides better explanations and/or is more parsimonious.
Quoting Wayfarer
I see the point, but it depends on assumptions I find questionable:
"consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place." - what's the basis for this assertion?
"Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousnesss foundational, disclosive role."
Consciousness IS part of the world at large. If consciousness is immaterial, then the world includes this immaterial sort of thing.
"consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge"- consciousness is the vessel of knowledge, and understanding entails relating elements of knowledge.
You may recall Descartes famous meditation, cogito ergo sum. This takes the reality of the thinking subject as apodictic, i.e. cannot plausibly be denied. One of Husserls books is Cartesian Meditations, and I think the influence is clear.
Quoting Relativist
Which is naturalism or physicalism in a nutshell. I do understand that.
Quoting Relativist
I think weve gone as far as we can go. Thank you for your comments and especially for your evenness of tone.
Whatever it is that kills people would be the explanation here. It doesn't have to be "the world". We call whatever it is, that seems to be not a part of oneself, "the independent world", and we have a conception of what "the world" means, including the intuitions of space and time. If the conception of "the world" is wrong, then it is not the world which kills us but something else. That "a world external to ourselves" kills us would be false. The intuitions are false.
Quoting Relativist
What does "more precise truths" mean? Either a proposition is true or it is false, the idea that one truth is more true than another doesn't make any sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is the issue with Zeno's arrow paradox, which supposedly demonstrates that motion is impossible. The problem was analyzed extensively by Aristotle, as sophistry which needed to be disproven. The analysis, along with other examples, resulted in the conclusion that "becoming" is distinctly incompatible with "being", and this in part leads to the requirement of substance dualism. The other required premise is that they both are real.
Any measurement of time requires a beginning point and an end point. Determination of these points requires the assumption that there is a describable "state-of-being" at such points. The "state-of-being" is describable as how things are, at that point in time, so it is necessarily assumed that no time is passing at that point when there is a state-of-being. Therefore the "point in time" has no temporal existence or reality, it is removed from temporal existence which is existence while time is passing. If we allow that time is actually passing within a point in time, then the "state-of-being" is lost, because change will be occurring within the point in time. Consequently, precision in measurements of time will be forfeited accordingly. But in order that we have any capacity to measure time at all, it is necessary that the "state-of-being" is to some extent real.
This is what Einstein's special relativity does, it allows variance, or vagueness within the point in time, by assuming that simultaneity is relative, consequently any "state-of being" is relative. By accepting this principle we accept that it is impossible to make precise temporal measurements, because there is necessarily variance in the state-of-being at any point in time due to the relativity of simultaneity, making any proposed state-of-being perspective dependent. This means that there is no real, independent state-of-being, consequently no independent "world". The "state-of-being" is still a valid principle, making temporal measurement possible, but it is perspective (frame) dependent. When the different perspective-dependent states-of-being are compared they are reconciled by the assumption that the only real existence is activity (becoming), one motion relative to another with no absolute rest. The activity (becoming) which is occurring gets a different description dependent on the perspective.
There are ways around this problem, but they are all very complex, and conventions tend to follow Ockham's principle. As Aristotle and Plato both demonstrated, reality consists of both becoming and being, This produces the premises required to make substance dualism the logical conclusion. But understanding the nature of time, and why it imposes on us the requirement of dualism, takes more than a casual effort.
Survival also depends on what sustains us (food, water, keeping warm...), and enables us to procreate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm referring to beliefs that are approximations and/or limited in scope. This is why I referred to "functionally accurate": sufficiently close to the truth to enable survival. It's not necessary to understand general relativity to an understanding of gravity sufficient to avoid falling off a cliff. One could have a magical view of the nature of medicinal herbs that are truly efficacious, and what matters for survival is just their efficacy.
Then I would reword it to:[i]
consciousness is precisely the reason why [s]there was a [/s]we believe there is a world there for us in the first place.
This is starting to overly deviate from the threads theme, but since you here invoke what philosophical analysis ought to consist of with a broad stroke in a manner that could insinuate my own deviation from this ideal:
Sure, good philosophical analysis should strive for more precision than ordinary language provides, but to what effect?: When you say a strictly true belief, via the correspondence theory of truth, what you are technically specifying is some given, some X, that strictly conforms to the reality of what a belief is and which, thereby, is a genuine belief.
If you meant something other by the term true then please let me know.
So, then, ought a strictly true belief conform to a) the reality of a human concocted understanding of what beliefs are or b) the reality of belief as it occurs in the real world, fully including as it is expressed in ordinary language?
Seems to me that option (a) is a lousy way of doing philosophy, for it here can easily become thoroughly biased to certain humans convictions rather than being as impartial (i.e., as objective) as possible - whereas philosophy ought to properly address in as impartial a manner as possible that which the real world consists of and, hence, in this particular case, that which was given as option (b).
In sum, what actuality/reality ought a strictly true belief conform to? To that actuality of certain humans abstractions regarding what beliefs are which exclude certain real-world applications (which can thereby be in keeping the No True Scotsman fallacy) or, otherwise, to that actuality of its various occurrences in the real world which encompasses all its applications, fully including the term's use in ordinary language? This, again, as regards proper philosophical analysis.
The approach I myself aspire toward is the latter rather then the former.
IMO, the best thing to do is to transform one's informal statements of belief into something precise, so the formalism can be applied.
Out of curiosity, how do you deem any of these generalities you mention to touch upon the philosophical analysis of what beliefs are and are not - this in manners that don't make use of the No True Scotsman fallacy?
---
Here, in parallel to your anticipated answer, my own philosophical appraisal of what belief in general is as presented in more precise terms:
- To believe X = via conscious, unconscious, or both means simultaneously, to impart or else endow the attribute of reality to X; i.e., to trust that X is actual and thereby real (where trust is itself understood as confidence in or dependence on)
- A belief = an instantiation of the process of believing just specified.
To my current comprehension, this definition of belief encompasses all possible instantiation of what can be referenced by the term "belief" without overgeneralizing. For one example, in the believe-that / believe-in divide this denotation will apply to all cases: e.g., To believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth is to endow reality to (and thereby uphold the reality of) extraterrestrials having visited Earth, whereas to not believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth is to not endow reality to this very same claim. In contrast, to believe in, for example, John's ability to pass the test is to endow reality to the future even of John's having passed the test via his efforts. It accounts for tacit beliefs just as much as it does for explicit beliefs. And so forth.
Hence, if (any degree of) reality is imparted to X by a psyche A, then X is believed (in due measure to the degree of reality one endows it with) by A. If no (degree of) reality is imparted to X, then X is not believed by A.
As such, beliefs need not be complete or absolute but can well be partial.
Does you precise definition of belief in general fair any better?
-------
@Wayfarer, my bad for this diversion from the thread's theme, but I don't have the time to create a new thread with this subject matter in manners where I could significantly participate.
However, for the sake of this thread's topic, I'll further tweak the above so as to emphasize that all beliefs - and hence anything that we can in any way take to be real - will be dependent on the occurrence of psyche. The physicality of our brains included, for one example.
--------
Edit: For improved clarity: by "degree of reality" I in the above strictly meant a shorthand form of "degree of likelihood and, hence, of probability that something is actual and thereby real". I'll leave this correction here rather than apply it to the body of this post.
"Belief has often been represented as a state available to introspection with a certain relation to a present image or complex of images. I believe that P means that I have an attitude of acceptance toward P."
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it as:
the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true.
Which seems equivalent (setting aside the fact that the 2nd definition lacks a definition of "true"). You're more detailed definition is subtly different because you conclude:
Quoting javra
I think your point is that you can believe X, but not be fully committed to it or completely certain of it. This is the way the word "belief" tends to be used in common conversation. We commonly hear people expressing certainty as "I don't just believe it, I know it", implying that "belief" means something less than certain, and "knowing" = absolute certainty.
But why force this vague concept into a philosophical analysis? It seems to me you can analyze your belief (colloquial sense of the word) and rephrase it to use the more precise definition of belief and still correctly convey the attitude you have toward the proposition. That's what I did when I recast a person's (less than certain) belief in the future outcome of a game.
Am I wrong? Do you think there's something about belief (colloquial sense) that isn't translatable in this way?
By "inconsistencies" I take it you mean that physicalism is not consistent with our "normal' intuitions about the nature of mind and consciousness and the subject?
Anyway you've left those aside so are you saying that because (many or most?) people need to believe that moral laws are given by a higher (necessarily non-physical) power, physicalism in denying the existence of such a law-giver will lead to moral nihilism?
I don't think the idea of an objective moral good depends on a law-giver. I believe there are objective facts about human flourishing and suffering and social needs and social harmony which support the most basic and significant moral injunctions (usually proscriptions).
Quoting javra
What about the idea of living a good life. improving the lives of others. Do you believe that it's all pointless if there is no afterlife? It may be for you but I'm sure there are many people who don't think this way. Thinking this way is after all only a particular attitude or disposition not a reflection of objective truth.
There a rather long enough post in which I explained, to which you did not directly reply. What does philosophical analysis address? The real world or manufactured bubbles?
Quoting Relativist
Um, no, not "absolute - hence infallible - certainty". But it does mean that the belief can be justified without inconsistencies, thereby evidencing both its truth and that the knower can thereby confirm the truth of the belief.
Hell, we disagree galore on epistemology then. As I've previously stated, I'm a fallibilist. And since it's now evident that you are not, I now take it that you will uphold the possibility if not actuality of infallibility.
We differ significantly in this regard. I'll leave it at that.
No. I mean that phisicalism has internal inconsistencies of logical reasoning - mostly having to do with awareness.
The last unaddressed example I made in this thread was:
Quoting javra
Quoting Janus
No. Reread what I've stated more attentively before replying and you might see how this assumption is unwarranted. All the same, thank you for putting it in the form of a question.
Quoting Janus
Yea, ditto.
Quoting Janus
And on what is this notion of what a "good life" is itself grounded, philosophically speaking within systems of physicalism? I'm not here addressing dispositions. I'm addressing logical reasoning.
The hallucination is a neural process and hence physical. Of course it is not a physical (real) cat. I see no inconsistency there but rather a conflation between the hallucination and what is hallucinated.
Quoting javra
I read it attentively the first time and I can't see what in a non-physicalist model the objective support for morality could be other than a lawgiver or else some kind of karmic threat of having to pay for transgressions. And again, I don't see how any of that could work absent the assumption of an afterlife.
Quoting javra
It would be grounded on human flourishing and social harmony. Of course there will be inconsistency if you presume that those things are not grounded in our physical embodiedness. Absent that assumption I see no inconsistency. In other words on the physicalists assumptions there are no inconsistencies even though there may be on yours.
The philosophical analysis I was referring to was epistemology, so not directly related to "the real world or manufactured bubbles" - which is metaphysics.
Quoting javra
You're demonstrating that the colloquial use of the term "belief" leads to quibbling about what each individual means. All the more reason to use the formalisms.
Quoting javra
Do we? It sounded like you were just defending the use of a definition of belief that differs from that of standard epistemology.. I am a fallibilist: empirical beliefs can't be proven with certainty. That is a separate issue from the definition of belief that is standard in epistemology.
You sound pissed off, like when you (falsely) accused me of making a confrontational statement. I've simply tried to address things you've brought up, as honestly as I can. If my views piss you off, there's no point continuing.
How is a distinction between the perceived physical cat and the perceived non-physical cat to be made when both are equally "neural process and hence physical" as perceptions?
Quoting Janus
There is here a warrantless conflation between lawgiver and afterlife. See, for example, Buddhism. I said "no" to your assumption of there being a deity (a law-giver) which ordains an objective good.
Quoting Janus
And, within physicalism, why are these to be deemed "good"?
The hallucinated cat is not a cat at all. The perceived cat is a cat.
Quoting javra
I'm not conflating lawgiver and afterlife. I'm asking how physicalism could undermine the idea of there being consequences for immoral actions. I'm wondering how non-physicalism could support morality in any way that physicalism cannot, since that seemed to be your contention. You haven't attempted to address that question.
Quoting javra
Because they are generally important to people, and because a society with moral principles that promoted general disharmony and suffering could not last long. It would necessarily be despotic.
Epistemology is not directly related to the real world? I disagree.
Quoting Relativist
I really dislike the idea of "absolute/infallible certainty" being something that anyone can hold. You affirmed that:
Quoting Relativist
Which to me is not a position that a fallibililist can hold.
Quoting Relativist
No, not pissed off, just in a rush. I appreciate your replies, but I've learned that there are certain impasses do discussions/debates. The discussion of what fallibilism is and entails can present itself as one such. To put it differently, unequivocal fallibilism devoid of exceptions is modernized terminology for Ancient Skepticism - which is contrary to Cartesian Skepticism. A long story that doesn't seen to belong on this thread. But, in this vein, I can well affirm that, "I fallibly know that in infallibly know nothing." If that makes sense to you, great.
On what grounds if both percepts are physical in the same way via the functioning of the brain. (To better drive the point home, I'll specify that the observer of the cat is not surrounded by others - and that he observes a cat which he has no reason to presume is a hallucination even though it is.)
Quoting Janus
Via examples, the Platonic / Neoplatonic notion of the Good can only be a non-physical ideal - one that is nevertheless the ultimate reality. But please note: no law-giver created or else decreed the Good in either system of understanding. And such objective good requires an non-physicalist metaphysics. Wtih the occurrence of such an objective good then also is entailed an objective morality.
Quoting Janus
I acknowledge the sentiment, but none of this is a rational grounding for what is good. Slavery was once generally important to people, for example. Would that make slavery morally good? And on what grounds would an Orwellian 1984 not last long? Besides, why is lasting long a good to be aspired toward within physicalism?
Of course it is, but the definition of "belief" and the practices used in the discipline of epistemology doesn't depend on any particular theory of that connection.
Quoting javra
Irrelevant to the point I was making about the terminology, and the problems of using any colloquial definition of belief.
Quoting javra
I expect we could agree on a definition of fallibilism, if we could agree on the terms (like belief) that it is based on.
I really don't like to debate semantics, where people argue what a word really means. The objective ought to be to communicate. My reference to a "standard" definition was aimed at trying to avoid potential communication problems. If we use the word "belief" differently, we won't be able to have a meaningful discussion.
Maybe I jumped the gun a bit. Do you take a categorical belief to be absolute? Granting no such thing as infallible beliefs, what would an absolute belief then entail? So far, it seems to me that if a belief is not infallible, then one is aware that the belief might be wrong - and this irrespective of how well justified it might be so far. Which in turn seems to me to necessitate that all fallible beliefs are graded beliefs upon analysis, even when staunchly addressed in terms of yes/no.
In the case of the real cat there would be light reflected from it which enters the eye, etc. You know the story. In any case I have never had such a realistic hallucination, even during my extensive use of hallucinogens. I don't know anyone else who has either. I'm not saying such a thing is impossible, but if it is possible the level of delusion would be extreme.
Quoting javra
How would the objective morality in such a belief system be enforced other than via people believing in it? If it is non-physical how could such a thing exist if not in some universal mind. Goodness is a value and as far as I can see values can exist only in, be held by, minds. You seem to be gesturing at something, but it lacks coherent detail.
Quoting javra
Why is it not a practical rational grounding? If you want a well-functioning society that fosters human flourishing and harmony why would you not want the most significant moral principles to govern? Slavery is a moral failure to be sure. It is pre-rationally normal for humans to care predominately about their own welfare and the welfare of those close to them. I don't believe the abolition of slavery depended on any higher principle. It depended on people having compassion and coming to count those who were previously thought to be of no significance to be of significance after all. We see the same thing happening today (although not enough to be sure) with animal welfare. Physicalism does not seem to be an impediment to such sentiments.
Oppressive dictatorships cannot last. Oppressed people will eventually become fed up and revolt. Humans may not have achieved much in the way of harmoniously living together but that lack of achievement has chiefly occurred in societies where people have believed in a higher good or deity. From a purely rational perspective there is no reason to grant one person more rights or privileges than another. So slavery itself can only be supported by practical reasons, and those reasons are not good ones because they promote disharmony.
The world contains no immaterial things, according to materialism. An 'immaterial thing' is an oxymoronic expression.
The difficulty of devising a naturalistic account of the nature of consciousness is precisely the subject of David Chalmers' 'hard problem of consciousness', the essence of which is that no objective description can truly depict the nature first person experience (ref). There are many active threads on that topic, but suffice to say here, the issue is again one of perspective. Consciousness is not an objective phenomenon, because it is that to which phenomena appear - it is not itself among phenomena. Mind, as such, is never an object in the sense that all of the objects sorrounding you are, including the screen you're reading this from. Husserl's point is precisely that the attempt to 'naturalise' consciousness as an object on the same ontological plane as other objects is erroneous as a matter of principle. (This is why it is essential for Daniel Dennett that it is eliminated, as there is no conceptual space for it in his materialist framework.)
Quoting Relativist
It is very clear, although to provide a detailed account would occupy many hundreds of words. I will default to one of the passages I often cite from a critique of philosophical materialism, Thomas Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos:
This is a very succinct statement of a very broad issue which is the subject of many volumes of commentary. But suffice to say this provides the background assumed by physicalism, a background in which Descartes' 'res cogitans' is deprecated and naturalistic explanations sought solely in terms of 'res extensia' or extended matter, which is manipulable and measurable in a way that 'mind' could never be. This is why physics is paradigmatic for physicalism. It is this, which Husserl's critique of naturalism has in its sights.
Quoting Relativist
It was at this point last night (in my time zone) that I thought I should chuck it in, on the basis that we're 'talking past' one another. But in the light of day, I will try and compose a response.
In his history of philosophy, Frederick Copleson observes that due to the outstanding achievements and presence of science and technology, that the temper of 20th century philosophy:
Quoting A History of Philosophy, Vol 11, F. Copleston
Although Armstrong would not describe himself as a logical positivist, I still think this description fairly depicts Armstrong's philosophical perspective.
So the point of all this is as follows: both Kantian idealism, and Husserl's phenomenology, are concerned, not with the objects of knowledge, as discovered by natural science, but with the nature of knowing, from a first-person perspective. So it's not as if they have access to some vast repository of information not known to science, but they are occupied with different kinds of issues than are the sciences. However it's true from the rather 'scientistic' perspective of materialist philosophy of mind, those issues may well be invisible to science, hence not considered suitable subjects of investigation (although they are very much on the agenda for philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi.)
Quoting Relativist
I wouldn't doubt that, but it also has the effect of interpreting the various materials and sources I'm presenting against that perspective, which is why I think we're 'talking past' one another. However, reviewing that SEP source on Structural Realism, I do notice a paragraph on Kantian ESR which might be congenial to my overall outlook (although I haven't absorbed it yet.)
In any case, the crucial point is the perspectival distinction between idealist and phenonenological stances, and the 'objectivist' stance of Armstrong et al. I hope the foregoing has brought that into a sharper focus.
I'm running out of steam and getting short on time. I still don't get why you defend physicalism against the possibility of non-physicalism when you so clearly expressed that:
Quoting Janus
I've provided this explanation, if not in full then in part: there can be no objective good - and hence no objective morality - within any system of physicalism.
You can, of course, evidence me wrong by pointing out any physicalist system wherein there can be coherently maintained an objective good.
But I'd like to know: why does all of this matter to you?
Firstly I'm not defending physicalism but refuting the claims of its supposed inconsistency.
Quoting javra
You haven't explained why there can be no objective good under physicalism. I gave you examples to show that there can. You also haven't explained how there could be objective good under idealist or antirealist systems without positing a lawgiver apart from appeals to human flourishing and harmony etc which don't depend on any particular metaphysics.
Only the ethical and the aesthetical matter to me and I don't see those as being dependent on any particular metaphysic, and that is why the debate between materialism and idealism doesn't matter to me.
I am merely interested to see if proponents of idealism can show that such values are only or at least better supported by idealism (absent a lawgiver). Apparently that cannot be shown, at least not by you or anyone else I've encountered.
Thanks for trying anyway.
You're welcome.
Do you not consider 2+2=4 a categorical belief? Is it a fallible beliefs? Are you "aware that it might be wrong?"
Regarding beliefs that are clearly not categorical, I agree we have degrees of belief. I'm also fine with a fallibilist saying "I believe X", even though he knows it's at least logically possible he's wrong.
What is our area of disagreement? I think we went down this road because you denied the principle of equivalence:
[I]"I believe X" [/i]is equivalent to "I believe X is true"
I don't follow why fallibilism would make these statements unequivalent. It's just a semantic equivalence, a claim related to the meaning of truth.
I'm fallible, so I acknowledge that my belief X could be false, but that doesn't negate the semantic equivalence. My degree of belief in X is equivalent to my degree of belief that X is true.
My statement was not based on a premise of materialism. I was making a semantic claim about the meaning of "the world" in metaphysics: it is the totality of existence.
You responded to this: Quoting Relativist
...by elaborating on objections to this assertion:
[B] all that can be known can be known by means of science[/b]
You demonstrated that there are truths that science cannot uncover, which is a point I agree with. But it doesn't answer my question: what truths can be discovered outside of science?
Is it solely negative truths, like "physicalism is false"? I don't have a problem with that, but that statement tells us nothing about the way reality actually IS. Can positive facts about the world be discovered outside the parameters of science? If so, then describe the methodology.
You noted that science cannot discover God. I agree 100%. My question is: is God discoverable through some alternative, objective means? What about other aspects of reality that are beyond the reach of science ?
There are domains other than that of objective fact. I will only say that Armstrong's style of philosophy is to assume that science provides the only valid perspective.
So then, do you agree that there are no alternatives to science for discovering objective truths about the world?
What I infer is that you are defending or promoting world-views which do not depend exclusively on objective facts. Am I right?
I'll go back to your first response to this thread:
Quoting Relativist
I will try again to re-state the idea. Another way to explain it is to observe that reality contains both the observer and the observed - the subject who observes, and the object of observation. Reality is the totality of that, the total situation of human existence. And philosophy seeks to find reason and meaning in that context.
The objective sciences by contrast begin with an act of exclusion. They narrow the focus to only and precisely those elements of experience which can be measured and quantified with exactitude. That is the point of the Thomas Nagel passage I quoted here, a 'mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them'. So this means that even if science considers everything on every scale, from the sub-atomic to the cosmological, already there's an implicit perspective, it considers all of those matters in those terms. So you're asking, what other 'terms' are there? To which the answer is, practically the whole of philosophy other than science. Ancient and pre-modern philosophy, Eastern philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology. There are many. But if they are looked at through the perspective of 'what is "objectively true" in what they say', then most of what they say will be missed.
Quoting Relativist
You seem to be tacitly agreeing, since you proposed no alternatives and instead said:
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you're saying that limiting our perspectives (our world views) to objective facts is too limiting; it leads to rejecting some philosophies that can be valuable.
Sure, I'd go along with that. But it's the tip of a large iceberg!
I believe these philosophies and religion can definitely be valuable for the individuals that embrace them. I would not try to talk anyone out of them, even if that were possible. Nevertheless, I do not find them personally valuable. What I find valuable is to be grounded in objective facts. I don't just mean grounded in an epistemological sense, but also grounded in my outlook on life and my relations with others.This has worked well for me - it's a perspective that makes it easier for me to accept whatever happens and to make realistic decisions on how to react. It's not for everyone. Nothing is.
Thanks for an interesting discussion.
To answer your questions: Yes, I consider 2 + 2 = 4 a categorical belief (for the degree of reality I endow it with is extreme). Yes, it is a fallible belief. Yes, I am aware that it might be wrong.
My reasoning for the last two answers:
I cannot find any way of demonstrating that for all time yet to come in what remains of this cosmos no sentient being (one possibly unimaginably more intelligent than any human is, was, or will ever be) will ever find a justifiable alternative to the proposition of "2 + 2 = 4" which, being a justifiable alternative, might in fact be the right interpretation of the proposition - this while I am simultaneously unable to find any infallible justification for this very same proposition. Thus, this proposition is not infallible and could in principle potentially be wrong, if not in full then at least in part.
More importantly to me, I hold the very same reasoning for the affirmation that that me (more properly, that "I") which is aware of this proposition of "2 + 2 = 4" in fact occurs while simultaneously so being aware of said proposition. That said, this affirmation that "I as a first-person point-of-view am while in any way aware of anything whatsoever" is nevertheless the strongest fallible certainty I am currently aware of.
If you or anyone else can evidence the aforementioned reasoning erroneous, more power to you. I'm however hedging my bets that no one can.
Thus, a position of global, else radical or absolute, falliblism - one which duly grants various degrees of certainty, as pertains to both psychological certainty and to epistemic certianty, and which is in no way contingent on the occurrence of doubt. I, for example, do not currently doubt anything which I've just expressed.
How could 2+2=4 be wrong ? Our mathematical knowledge is more certain than any philosophical argument you can bring against it. If a philosophical view requires us to doubt 2+2=4, then I would rather abandon that philosophical view, than allow uncertainty into mathematics.
Why would you create duality between subjective & objective means ? If God does exist, then his being qua being would both be nondelimited prior to manifestation and delimited via manifestation in the mental & physical world (assume both categories are relative to one another).
The trick is to stop looking for God and understand he has not only always been with you but he is identical to your reality. People seem to think God is like a pseudo object which exists apart from the universe, which is just superstitious & baseless. If you want to know God, you just need to think differently of him, or to put it more succinctly, you need to stop thinking of him, as he is beyond concepts and experience as well.
This I believe is the key phrase toward understanding javra's position on this matter. We must consider "2+2=4" to be a sequence of symbols requiring interpretation, to abstract meaning. And, there is always some degree of subjectivity which enters that process of interpretation. So, when two different people produce two different descriptions, (interpretations) of the meaning which they each abstract from the phrase "2+2=4", we can judge one as a better interpretation than the other. And, if we leave the possibility open, that we can always find a better interpretation, then the question of "the right interpretation" remains unanswered.
Langauge and the rules of interpretation in semantics don't make any sense unless you have something to fix them beyond your mental states. So "goodness" , like "rationality" isn't just a value inside your mind , it's meaning and truth conditions are determined by both your mental states and that which is external to it (other minds, universals, particulars, God etc)
This is why if someone comes up to me & claims murder is good because that's how he imagines it inside his head, then I would have no problem explaining to him why he has made a mistake here. That's not how we understand "goodness". If he still doesn't get it, then we will just consider him to be suffering from some mental impairment, just as we would for someone who claims 1+1=3 , despite repeated efforts to correct this mistake.
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet we live in a world where some people, some more fervently than others, believe that a certain 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 (often termed the Trinity) and that it is only due to this state of affairs that the proposition of 2 + 2 = 4 can possibly hold true. Put a philosophers or a mathematicians hat on and one might see a blatant logical contradiction here. At any rate, I take this world where the Trinity is taken to be factual (and hence were a certain 1 + 1 + 1 does equate to 1, rather than to 3) to be one such possible world.
Quoting Sirius
I've already given reasoning for 2 + 2 = 4 not being an infallible proposition. What you're here addressing is not the reasoning but the conclusion and how you'd react to it. But, as to the conclusion, that there is a possibility - irrespective of how minuscule - of X being wrong in no way entails that X is in fact wrong. Furthermore, just because X can be rationally evidenced fallible rather than infallible does not in any way warrant that one then doubts X. What reason is there to doubt X when X exhibits no inconsistencies - this despite X being fallible nevertheless?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it certainly is pivotal to what my argument for global fallibilism consists of.
But, again, I find no reason to doubt the truth of 2+2=4 in the absence of inconsistencies. And 2+2=4 is certainly consistent.
I understand. Although don't we here then embark into areas of faith, rather then those of belief which can be justified.
Quoting Relativist
Yes, I can agree, hence why I consider my belief that 2+2=4 to be categorical - despite it yet being, technically when philosophically appraised, fallible rather than infallible.
The subjective/objective difference is simply that an objective means is demonstrable - it can be shown to be true to others. If someone believes they've personally experienced a God, that can help justify his belief to himself, but it has no power to persuade anyone else.
Quoting Sirius
I hope you understand that this statement can't possibly persuade anyone that a God exists- and that's because it depends on the premise that a God exists.
[Quote]People seem to think God is like a pseudo object which exists apart from the universe, which is just superstitious & baseless.[/quote]
IOW, you don't consider the God of your belief to exist apart from the universe. OTOH, I see no reason to think that anything like a "God" exists in any objective sense. I'm fine with you embracing your belief. I'm certain I couldn't possibly convince you you're wrong, even if I wanted to (which I don't). I hope you are sufficiently open-minded enough to understand why I don't share your belief.
[Quote] If you want to know God, you just need to think differently of him, or to put it more succinctly, you need to stop thinking of him, as he is beyond concepts and experience as well.[/quote]
I admire your passion. I hope your belief helps you to do good.
There is more to truth than consistency, there is also the matter of correspondence with reality. This is why interpretation is pivotal. To judge whether 2+2=4 is consistent we need a statement to determine 'consistent with what'. The "what" here forms the basis of the supposed reality which we will judge correspondence with.
So for example, in basic arithmetic we might interpret each "2" as signifying two objects, the "+" as signifying an operation of addition, the "=" as signifying equivalence, and "4" as signifying four objects. But more sophisticated mathematicians might interpret "2+2" as signifying an object, and "4" as signifying an object, and "=" as signifying "is the same as". The "reality" which "2+2=4" corresponds with (is consistent with), making it true, is determined by the principles (axioms) which the interpretation is based in.
Thanks for that, and I by this am not in any way disagreeing with your reply.
In the part I've just quoted: I find consistency and correspondence/conformity to reality to be deeply entwined. This in so far as reality, whatever it might in fact be, can only be devoid of logical contradictions (for emphasis, where an ontological logical contradiction is a state of affairs wherein both X and not-X both ontically occur simultaneously and in the exact same respect). For example, if reality is in part tychistic then truths will conform to this partly tychistic reality in consistent ways - thereby making some variant of indeterminism true and the strictly hard determinism which is currently fashionable among many false.
It's a whopper of a metaphysical claim that realty is devoid of logical contradictions - although I so far find that everyone at least implicitly lives by this conviction. But, in granting this explicitly, then for any belief to be true, in its then needing to conform to reality to so be, the belief will then necessarily be devoid of logical contradictions in its justifications (which, after all, are justifications for the belief being conformant to reality, or else that which is real). So if a) reality is consistent (devoid of logical contradictions) and b) truth is conformity to reality then c) any belief which is inconsistent will not be true.
As to the truth of numbers, their relations, and what they represent:
If physicalism, maths can only represent physical entities and their possible physical relations (otherwise it wouldn't be physicalism). If non-physicalism, then the numbers made use by maths could in certain situations represent incorporeal entities, such as individual souls or psyches. In the here very broad umbrella of the latter, one could then obtain the proposition that "one incorporeal psyche added to another incorporeal psyche added to another incorporeal psyche can via assimilation converge into one possibly grander incorporeal psyche" - thereby holding the potential of producing the 1+1+1=1 proposition, which will contradict the 2+2=4 proposition IFF the numbers of both equations are taken to represent the same corporeal and hence physical objects. Otherwise, within at least some non-physicalist worldviews, the question which is so easily ridiculed from physical vantages can emerge: how many individual incorporeal beings, such as angels, can fit onto the tip of a pin? With the answer being indeterminable due to the very incorporeal nature of individual beings addressed - creating a deep equivocation of sorts.
The basic general point to all this tmk being in general agreement with your post
So as to not overly focus on Chistian beliefs, I should maybe add that the non-physicalist understanding of numbers as Ive just outlined it pervades popular culture at large: from the notion that (non-physical) being is one (as in the statement, "we are all one," or the dictum of "e pluribus unum") to the notion that in a romantic relationship the two can become one. With all such beliefs being disparate from the stance that 1+1 can only equal 2 in all cases.
But none of this is to deny that in physical reality 1+1 can only equal 2 - and, by extension, that 2+2 thereby equals (and can only equal) 4 when it comes to physical entities.
The point I was trying to express, is that reality is what we make it to be, as in the the op, mind created world. So to correspond with reality means to be consistent with the principles we state as being those which describe reality. This puts logic in a sort of awkward place. We might say that reality is such that it is devoid of logical contradictions, but what this really means is that this reality which is devoid of logical contradiction is the product of a desire to maintain the law of non-contradiction. Ontologies have been proposed in which the law of non-contradiction is not necessarily true. This would mean that these principles give us a different reality.
Quoting javra
So this is where things get difficult. Let's say that we assume a reality which allows for logical contradictions. Then, logical contradictions may be consistent with reality. Therefore a true belief may be logically inconsistent. But remember, we create reality by naming the principles which describe it. So if we think it's a better reality, we can insist that contradictions be avoided. Aristotle for instance saw a need to allow for violation of the law of excluded middle to create a reality including potential and possibility, but he insisted on maintaining non-contradiction.
Quoting javra
This is sort of what Platonism does. A numeral represents an object known as a number, so one object plus one object equals one object. However, the objects each have different values, and the value is represented by the numeral, so we do not have 1+1=1.
Quoting javra
Platonism pervades mathematics. We learn in school the difference between a numeral and a number. The numeral "2" signifies an object, which is the number two. Then what is important is the value assigned to the object. So two really does become one, but that one has a distinctly different value from what the other two each have. And in a fundamental way it is consistent with the physical approach in the sense that the values indicated are the same. However, there is a non-physical object which is added in.
I have thought again about your objections since you raised them again recently. I don't believe they actually refute the points made in the original post. As it is a defense of idealism, I'll refer to Schopenhauer and Berkeley.
Schopenhauer would argue that both shape and color belong to the realm of representation (Vorstellung), which is inherently conditioned by the subject. Shape, while less obviously subjective than color, still relies on spatial and causal relations that arise from the minds structuring of sensory data. A boulder rolling into a canyon is a phenomenon, an appearance - and, as such, dependent on the forms of perception (space, time, and causality) that the mind imposes on the raw data (which Schopenhauer designates 'will'). When we say the boulder "has dimensions that are such and such," this statement itself relies on a conceptual framework one that includes notions of measurement, spatial relations, and causality. A boulder, after all, does not possess or conceive of its own dimensions. It is we perceivers who bring to it the ideas of "shape," "size," or "falling into a canyon." As said in the essay, take away all perspective, any awareness of shape, size and position, and what exists? Again, to point to the so-called 'unperceived boulder' is itself a mental construct, relying, as I said, on an implicit perspective.
As for the universes existence prior to minds, Schopenhauer would agree that the world exists as Will, but he would deny that the world as we can ever conceive it as an ordered totality of objects in space and time could meaningfully exist without a subject. To speak of such a universe is to again to reintroduce the forms of representation. The universe prior to life, in Schopenhauers terms, would be an undifferentiated striving will, not the structured cosmos we now perceive.
Berkeley would agree that minds can know real properties but would reject the assumption that these properties exist independently of the perception of them. What you call "realism" the belief in mind-independent objects requires positing an unobservable substratum that supports properties like shape. Berkeley would argue that such a substratum is unnecessary and unintelligible; all that we perceive occurs to us as ideas, and these ideas are dependent on perception. Berkeley doesn't deny that objects behave and appear to be material in nature, but emphasises the 'appears to be', and denies that they exist in some sense externally to that.
None of which is to deny the empirical fact that boulders will roll over cracks and into canyons, and even fetch up in places where Samuel Johnson will be able to kick one of them. ;-)
Really good post, but one point Id add is he did have Platonic forms in there too as objectified Will. From how I have interpreted it, the subject is basically the Fourfold PSR, and the forms impress upon the subject. Subject and object, however are two aspects of Will. You might have a different interpretation. Either way, what you write is a good summary of Schops position.
Quoting WWR p38
Bolds added.
Points to note - even though Schopenhauer and Kant are categorised as idealist philosophers, therefore 'anti-realist', here Schop. clearly acknowledges the reality of evolutionary development from inorganic to vegetative to sentient etc. He clearly has a realist view in empirical terms. His criticism is aimed at the hidden assumption of empiricism, not at its veracity in its operative domain. That's why I think the term 'anti-realist' needs to be carefully understood. Schopenhauer's approach bridges the empirical and metaphysical without reducing one to the other. His critique of materialism doesn't reject empirical science but reveals its limits: it describes the world of appearances while remaining silent about the thing-in-itself. This distinction ensures that his idealism is not a denial of the empirical world but a profound analysis of its deeper ground.
The point is that Schopenhauer's so-called 'anti-realism' is better understood as a critique of naïve realismthe assumption that the empirical world exists as ontologically independent and self-sufficient. This critique underscores why I stated in the OP that 'existence' is a complex idea. It rests on a conceptual foundation that has been built and refined over centuries, shaped by philosophical reflection and inquiry. In contrast, the 'mind-independent' stance typical of realism assumes the existence of objects to be unconditional and self-evident, often finding itself perplexed by any challenge to this assumption.
You have to admire Schopenhauer's writing here. Clear, but insightful. This eye opening passage is one I have pondered a lot before, as it is one of the hardest concepts to wrap your head around. We tend to think of the world as somehow independent, but yet Schop's notion is "object has always needed a subject" -object does not precede subject. Thus, as you indicated, all collapses to a unified Will that is fundamental to all of it. There's a lot to unpack, but as far as I see the subject-for-object simply is Will. Perhaps I am mistaken, but one way his view is anti-theological (though certainly speculative and not material), is that Will is not, as far as I can tell, some "primary" force, but is simply the unified concept of the principle behind the subject-for-object. In other words, "denying the Will", is not the same as achieving "some fundamental state". Rather, it's the ultimate negation of all states (thus denial of Will not achievement of Will. Will is what one is negating, not "going back to in some fundamental state".
But the bigger philosophical point here is the naive realism that Schop decries. It is simple to fall into the notion that what is perceived is what is the case "out there", without humans. I always use the example of "scale" to make this point. At what scale would a universe be without perspective? Is it the atomic level? Is it the universal-all-at-once level? Is it the sub-atomic level? That is to say everything then seems to both collapse and encompass everything all at once. You can say that it's "relational" in some way, or "processional" in some way, but what this really "means" without a subject or a knower, is hard to imagine. And to assume otherwise, is indeed the "naive" in naive realism, I suppose.
This is why I keep referring to the recent essay and book on the blind spot of science. The blind spot essentially arises from the emphasis on objectivity as the sole criterion for what is real. It is the attempt to discern what truly exists by bracketing out or excluding subjective factors, arising from the division in early modern science of primary and secondary attributes, on the one hand, and mind and matter, on the other. So that looses sight of the role of the mind in the construction (Vorstellung) of what is perceived as 'external reality', along with the conviction that this alone is what is real.
(Personally, my way into Schopenhauer and Kant was via a book I often mention, T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. It contains detailed comparisons between Kant and N?g?rjuna, the seminal Buddhist philosopher often described as the 'second Buddha'; see reference. I've been chastized on the Buddhist forum for praising this book, as it's nowadays regarded as euro-centric and romanticized, but making the connection between insight meditation (vipassana) and Kant's constructivism opened my eyes. In practice, vipassana cultivates direct awareness of how sensory input, mental formations, and perception interact to create what we experience as 'reality.' But that's not as dramatic as it might seem. As I said in the OP, it requires a perspectival shift, something like a gestalt shift. This intermediate realizationseeing how mind creates worldis echoed in Schopenhauers world as representation and Kants 'epistemological limits'. It's to do with enlightenment, although realizing it doesn't make you an enlightened being. )
I don't understand this because I see no reason why materialism necessarily eliminates the subject. The subject and subjective experience can be considered to be material without losing either, Subjective experience is just as real as anything else, but it is obviously not an object of the senses. Why should that make it any less material or real? That is what I don't see any argument for either coming from you or in general. To me it simply seems like some kind of category error.
You've been telling me you don't understand it, ever since I first posted an OP on it, linked to the Aeon essay in 2019. Maybe you should review the essay and quote some passages and spell out why you think it doesn't make the case that it's claiming to make. Otherwise, I will conclude that the reason you keep saying you don't understand it, is because you don't understand it.
[quote=The Blind Spot]When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we dont tend to see the experiences that underpin them. We do not see how experience makes their presence to us possible. Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that bestows absolute knowledge of reality, independent of how it shows up and how we interact with it.[/quote]
It's Phenomenology 101.
In other words, I would like you to tell me why you think your attitude to the nature of the subject and subjective experience, to whether it is material or immaterial, is crucial to your understanding of the human existential situation and the mindful living of your life. Does it have something to do with the idea of afterlife, with this existence not being "all there is"?
OK, I've gone back and looked at your response to when I first linked that article. You said you can't see any point to it at the time, whereas I still think it was an important article. It was associated with a conference on the topic at Dartmouth at which the authors and others spoke, and is now published as book by MIT, which I found to be an excellent book. But, hey, maybe we should just agree to disagree on that.
Looking at the question you raise above:
Quoting Janus
Subjective experience is certainly real, but how can it be considered material? I don't understand how you can think that.
If I was to connect this to some modern theories, I guess one can relate back to informational theories. The divide, crudely, is between "inside" (subjective), and "outside" (objective). Scientific-pursuit in regards to consciousness, at its broadest philosophical import, is about how the "objective" can sufficiently become a persistently recursive enough set of events to "become" subjective.
To parse this out though is tricky:
"Recursive" would be doing heavy-lifting here. How does it not fall into the homuncular fallacy trap?
What is this "becoming subjective" as opposed to prior to becoming subjective?
Cells differentiate into specialized organs of sensory input and nervous system that seems to both specialize and become generalized in its processing. If Gerald Edelman is right, the neuro-processes work in a neural darwinistic fashion, not too dissimilar to how antibodies form.
The problem is always the same though. It's what Schopenhauer laid out about the first eye opening. That is to say, these materialist accounts of correlation of neuronal activity with subjective experience, presupposes the very subjective experience, and it's hard to get out of that loop, and hence, the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is persistent and hard to shake.
:up: To be fair though, I must acknowledge I haven't read the book, only the article.
Quoting Wayfarer
These are just words, just definitions. I could say that subjective experiences are not something different than neural events in the body. even though they may seem to be different. Even in their seeming they are felt as changes in the overall state of the body and the perceived world. In another sense they are material insofar as, being real, they matter, even if they don't seem to matter, no experience is immaterial in the sense of not mattering. And I cannot imagine any other sense in which I would want to say they are immaterial.
From the original essay
The footnote reference is to the problem of the subjective unity of experience, part of the neural binding problem. That problem is how to account for the way in which the brain combines disparate kinds of information, such as size, shape, location and motion into a single unified object. While a lot is known about the various sub-faculties that perform each of the specialised tasks, no faculty can be identified that can account for the unified sense of self. That paper acknowledges that this inability corresponds to Chalmer's 'hard problem' and Levine's 'explanatory gap', meaning that at this time, how the brain does this remains 'a scientific mystery'. This has been interpreted by theistic philosophers of evidence for the soul, although I wouldn't frame it that way, as again it tends towards treating the soul (or mind or self) as an object, which it never is.
I don't know if you recall, but the other week I was wondering if the self might be understood in terms of Terrence Deacon's absentials. I ran that by ChatGPT and got the following response:
[quote=ChatGPT] Thats a fascinating connection! Indeed, Deacons concept of *absentials*things defined by what is absent or by constraints rather than by tangible, present entitiesapplies beautifully to the Neural Binding Problem and the elusive nature of subjective unity. In Deacons view, *absentials* represent phenomena that arent located in specific material structures but emerge through relational patterns or constraints, shaping the outcomes without being directly observable.
The sense of subjective unityour coherent, integrated perception of the worldis a perfect example of this kind of phenomenon. Neuroscience, for all its discoveries, hasnt pinpointed a single place or mechanism where this unity resides because it isnt a material structure that can be isolated or mapped. Instead, it arises from the intricate coordination of separate processes, without a single, stable neural correlate. In Deacons terms, the sense of unity is an *absential*: its defined by the coherence that emerges from the absence of a unifying, tangible structure, relying on how different parts of the brain constrain and synchronize each other to produce a seamless experience.
This interpretation enriches the Neural Binding Problem by suggesting that the solution may not lie in identifying a specific thing responsible for unity but rather in understanding how the lack of a centralized structure itself creates the conditions for unity. Just as Deacons absentials can shape the dynamics of complex systems, the brains fragmented but synchronized processing generates the unity that we experience subjectively. This approach also reinforces the limits of purely material explanations, as this unity exists in the relationships and constraints between parts rather than in any specific brain region.[/quote]
I have to say, this maps pretty well against both Schopenhauer and the Buddhist 'anatta' (no-self).
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Since we are embedded within these bodily and neural processes of which our conscious awareness and discursive understanding are only tiny fragments, I see no reason to believe that we should ever be able to achieve an overview which is more than a more or less vague sketch. Just as even the most complex computer models of the weather are still vastly less complex than the actual weather systems.
From this our position of radical uncertainty I see no justification for any conclusions about unity in any sense beyond the acknowledgement that there must be coordination in a system too complex for us to understand except in part and in terms of parts.
What could it mean to say that our subjective experience could be disunified, uncoordinated? What could it even mean to say that of the overall weather system.is not unified, coordinated. These are human, all too human concepts.
That's what Colin McGinn says, 'mysterianism'.
Quoting Janus
Which conflicts with the fundamental dictum of Socratic philosophy, 'know thyself'.
I'm not familiar with McGinn. Our experience is intelligieble to us, just as theirs presumably is for animals. Is that not enough?
Quoting Wayfarer
Our experience is intelligible I to us, so I don't see a conflict with Socrates. For me self-knowledge is about coming to understand the patterns of thought that we have unconsciously fallen into which lead to suffering and learning to let them go as much as possible. That is self-knowledge and even that is rare enough.
I'm not sure how emergence is understood. As I said in a previous post, at what scale does the universe take without a perspective? What are events without perspective? Indirect realism would have it that, everything is in a way "map". But what is it when everything is pure "terrain"?
That's the spirit, and really not that remote from what I want to convey.
Quoting schopenhauer1
That seems like one of the antinomies of reason, doesnt it? In a practical sense, we cant think outside thought. I think that's the same point that Schopenhauer makes with 'time has no beginning but all beginnings are in time'. Events absent any observer aren't simply non-existent, but neither are they existent, as 'an event' has to be delimited in time and space, comprising some elements and excluding others. Of course, from our perspective, we can discern untold events that happened prior to our own individual and species' existence. But that's still from within a perspective.
Even this betrays a sort of biased proto-experiential view of things. As if the event itself is the knower. Not this either.
Probably our differences lie more in the conceptual detailsabout what can be counted as knowledge and what faith. Other than I've always thought we are not so far apart.
I've found an extract from Husserl's Critique of Naturalism, copied from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology. I was sent that as a .pdf a long time ago, early days on the other Forum, and reading this excerpt, I realise that it comprises most of what I know about Husserl, and also most or all of my own 'critique of naturalism'.
[quote=Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, p139] The critique of naturalism
Soon after writing the Logical Investigations, as we have seen, Husserl came to the view that his earlier researches had not completely escaped naturalism. After that Husserl constantly set his face against naturalism, but his most cogent critique is to be found in his 1911 essay, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Husserl thinks that all traditional philosophy, including Descartes and Kant, had treated consciousness as something having a completely natural being, a mere part of nature, and a dependent or epiphenomenal part at that. Even Kant had misunderstood transcendental psychology as a psychology. Husserl regards naturalism both as the dominant theoretical outlook of his age and also as deeply embedded in our ordinary assumptions about the world surrounding us. In other words, our pre-theoretical engagement with the world has an inbuilt bias towards naive naturalism. This is fine in our ordinary practices in the world, but when naturalism is elevated into an all-encompassing theoretical outlook, it actually becomes far removed from the natural attitude and in fact grossly distorts it. Husserls critique of naturalism is that it is a distorted conception of the fruits of scientific method which in itself is not inextricably wedded to a naturalist construal.
Husserls conception of naturalism relates to his understanding of the projects of John Locke, David Hume, and J.S. Mill, as well as nineteenth century positivists, especially Comte and Mach. Naturalism is the view that every phenomenon ultimately is encompassed within, and explained by, the laws of nature; everything real belongs to physical nature or is reducible to it. There are of course many varieties of naturalism, but Husserls own account in his 1911 essay more or less correctly summarises the naturalistic outlook:
"Thus the naturalist sees only nature, and primarily physical nature. Whatever is, is either itself physical, belonging to the unified totality of physical nature, or it is, in fact, psychical, but then merely as a variable dependent on the physical, at best a secondary parallel accomplishment. Whatever is belongs to psychophysical nature, which is to say that it is univocally determined by rigid laws."
As naturalism has again become a very central concept primarily in contemporary analytic philosophy, largely due to W.V.O. Quines call for a naturalised epistemology, it is worth taking time here to elucidate further Husserls conception of naturalism. Indeed, precisely this effort to treat consciousness as part of the natural world is at the basis of many recent studies of consciousness, for example the work of Daniel Dennett or Patricia Churchland. Compare Husserls definition with that of David Armstrong for example:
"Naturalism I define as the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single all-embracing spatio-temporal system."
In Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, Husserl explicitly identifies and criticises the tendency of all forms of naturalism to seek the naturalisation of consciousness and of all ideas and norms. Naturalism as a theory involves a certain philosophical absolutising of the scientific view of the world (Ideas I § 55); it is a bad theory regarding a good procedure. Certain characteristic methodological devices of the sciences, chiefly idealisation and objectification, have been misunderstood such that their objects are thought to yield the natural world as it is in itself, for example that nature is treated as a closed system of physical entities obeying laws, and everything else is squeezed out and treated as psychical, possibly even epiphenomenal. Indeed, a new science of psychology, with laws modelled on the mechanical laws of the physical domain, was then brought in to investigate this carved off subdomain, but it was guilty of reifying consciousness and examining it naively. Husserl constantly points out that such a division of the world into physical and psychical makes no sense. For Husserl, naturalism is not just only partial or limited in its explanation of the world, it is in fact self-refuting, because it has collapsed all value and normativity into merely physical or psychical occurrences, precisely the same kind of error made by psychologism when it sought to explain the normativity of logic in terms of actual, occurrent psychological states and the empirical laws governing them. The whole picture is absurd or counter-sensical in that it denies the reality of consciousness and yet is based on assuming the existence of consciousness to give rise to the picture in the first place (Ideas I § 55). Or as Husserl says in the 1911 essay: It is the absurdity of naturalizing something whose essence excludes the kind of being that nature has."
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sensethis would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effectbut rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousnesss foundational, disclosive role. [/quote]
@Relativist - note the reference to D M Armstrong.
Here I'm drawn to a Buddhist perspective (and there are Buddhist references in the original post.) The awareness of the world-creating activities of mind is actually the salient point of vipassana, insight meditation. The Dhammapada begins with a line something like 'our life is the creation of our mind'. Throughout the early Buddhist texts, the point that is repeated over and over is awareness of and insight into the chain of dependent origination which gives rise to conditioned consciousness. In this context, It's not so much a matter of 'getting behind' those patterns, as of seeing through them - which is an arduous discipline.
There is an unequivocal statement in the Suttas 'there is that which is unconditioned, that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated' (ref). But in Buddhism, that is not a matter of faith, like 'faith in God' in the West, but one of insight. It does require faith, in that one has to have faith in it in order to take on such a discipline. But Buddhism is generally critical of dogmatic views (d???i) one way or the other. That is why mindfulness is compared with the Husserlian epoch?, 'bare awareness' of the qualities of consciousness. The connection between Buddhism and phenomenology is quite well documented nowadays. There's a wiki entry on Husserl's readings of Buddhism.
Regrettably the usual reaction is 'oh, you mean religion'. An attitude that I think is very much a product of our specific cultural history and what religion means to us. The answer has to be yes and no - religious in some respects, but not in others, as it has been defined very specifically as to what is included and what isn't, in Western cultural history.
Well, I'm not going to call woo on this. I'm just working through the ideas. I guess my point, at the risk of repetition, is that in a sense, the act of positing transcendencewhether it be metaphysical, epistemic, or existentialmay be just another layer of the constructivist project, a narrative that we generate rather than an actual escape from our contingent realities. Yet, theres a paradox here: the very recognition of our cognitive limitations seems to point to a desire to grasp something beyond them. Does this suggest an innate tension in human thought, or is it simply a reflection of the inherent constraints of our perspectival existence?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, that's my understanding as well, though I come at it from a much less theorised perspective. It strikes me that nearly every other post here delves into the idea of uncovering the deeper reality behind reality we inhabit. Its fascinating how often discussions circle back to the notion that humans dwell on the surface of something and that there are ways to dive beneath.
The former. The 'world-knot'. My feeling is that due to the 'instinctive naturalism' that Husserl calls out in the post above, we've not only lost the connection to 'the unconditioned' but we've forgotten that we've forgotten. Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being'. Phenomenology and existentialism are both concerned with that.
(There's a well-known anecdote about Heidegger, that one day a colleague found him reading D T Suzuki (who at the time was lecturing at Columbia University and was well-known in the academic world.) Heidegger looked somewhat abashed, but said, 'if I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings'. Of course it would be overly simplistic to say that he was in any meaningful way Buddhist or would adopt Buddhism. But I think both sources have a sense of the existential crisis of modernity. )
Like they say, follow the money.
If you look at why in particular someone wants to "grasp something beyond" themselves, the motivations are mundane. People are looking for money, power, health, and when they can't get them, they feel "at the end of their wits". This is a recognition of one's cognitive limitations. But it's all for mundane purposes, not because of some profound yearning for "something more" or "beyond".
It seems to me that full-blown constructivism is not a plausible hypothesis, given that experience shows us unequivocally we and even some animals see the same things in the environment. We see the bees seeing the flowers just as we do, but apparently, they can see colours we cannot.
The element of truth in it is that the way we see things, not what we see, is conditioned by the nature of our sensory setups.
We can only guess at the cause and significance of the common human propensity to think transcendence. What is undeniably true is that altered states of consciousness are possible, both via chemical interventions and certain practices.
Quoting Wayfarer
Note you say "my feeling". This is why I always say it is a matter of affect, of feeling, of faith. We cannot help living by faith. Philosophy itself in its metaphysical dimension is faith through and through. Even aesthetics and ethics cannot be sciences in the sense of "objective science".
Constantly interpreting these questions as an appeal to faith doesnt do justice to them. Husserl was committed to a scientific approach.
This is a fair comment. But I wouldn't argue that humans do not share some similar points of reference to animals. It's just that the meaning of what we see is clearly different and located in cultural and linguistic practices, which animals certainly don't share. Once we step away from bees and flowers and consider how we make sense of our environment and how we derive values and meaning, it's another world entirely.
The fact that we and the animals all share the same world and see the same things at the same times and places shows that what we perceive is not only determined by the mind but is also constrained by the physical nature of the senses and what is "out there".
Constructivism applies to the ways in which we see things but not to what we see. The only way around that for any mind only constructivist thesis would be that all minds are somehow connected. If there are not things which are seen by all (albeit in different ways when it comes to interspecies comparisons) then how else to explain the fact that we will agree on the exact details of what is perceived?
The questions are matters of faith because there is no possibility of logical proof or empirical confirmation regarding the question of whether the world is fundamentally physical or mental. So we choose the view that seems most plausible to us individually, or else it may even come down to what we each want to believe for various reasons.
I don't think constructivism denies that, nor do I in the OP - as I said I acknowledge there are objects unseen by any eye. I think you're still seeing both constructivism and idealism as stating that reality is 'all in the mind'.
Contructivism's core idea is that knowledge is a construction created by the mind, based on experience and prior knowledge, which provides the conceptual framework into which experience is incorporated. Radical constructivism stays neutral about the mind-independent world. It says, "We can't know reality as it is; we only know how we construct it."
It's more concerned with how we learn, think, and know than about making metaphysical claims. It is applied to fields such as education, cognitive science, and systems theory. "Reality is like a map you create as you navigate a territoryyou can't claim the map is the territory itself." But the important thing to note is that it is largely epistemological, concerned with knowledge.
Analytical idealism accepts these premisses, but then goes a step further in proposing a metaphysic in which reality is mental in nature.
But as said in the OP, my main focus is not proposing a substantial metaphysics. In some way, my own approach is more aligned with constructivism. But they're both opposed to metaphysical realism. But it doesnt mean dismissing reality or saying 'reality doesn't exist' it's that both constructivism and phenomenological idealism recognize the importance of subjective experience as a fundamental structure of experienced reality. And it's just this subjective element which is 'bracketed out' by objectivism. The critique of metaphysical realism (drawing from Kant) is that it fails to notice how the mind actively structures reality through establishing conditions of subjective experience. Realism assumes that the world is 'just so' independent of the observer, yet overlooks how much of what we take as real is mediated by this subjective structuring process.
Which is exactly what the passage about Husserl states:
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So this is not a 'matter of faith', and I think the reason you keep saying that over and over again is because you're not seeing the point.
(Incidentally the above info about constructivism was gleaned from Constructivist Foundations. Information about analytical idealism can be found on Essentia Foundation.)
That is not the question, thoughthe question is whether there are is anything independent of the mind, which determines what we seethe things we refer to as "objects"and in affective interaction with our sensory setups, how we see them.
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to be conflating knowledge with what we have knowledge of. I guess it depends on what you mean by "knowledge". Knowledge by aquainatance can be equated with bare perception, but discursive knowledge also incorporates judgement regarding what is perceived.
Quoting Wayfarer
The truly radical position would be to admit that we cannot be certain about whether perception tells us anything about how things are in themselves because we have no way of comparing. We cannot be aware of the process of the coming-to-be-of-the-world-for-us. It simply appears, and we cannot "get behind" our perceptual experience to investigate what is really going on. We can only use our perception and prior knowledge to study our organs of perception and build a hopefully ever more coherent picture of how they function. That picture should be consistent and cohere with the rest of our scientific knowledge. It is the total body of coherent and consistent scientific knowledge that lends credibility to hypotheses, but we can never be certain.
Quoting Wayfarer
LOL, it's not that I don't see the point, but that I disagree, and that is the point which you seem to be incapable of seeing. Have you considered the possibility that you may have a scotoma?
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem I see with that, as with any unconsidered and simplistic meme, is that it may lead to a radical relativism and contribute to the post-truth chaos which seems to be growing every day.
Right back at ya! :-) (I mean, from what you say, I can't see what it is you're taking issue with.)
Constructivism (and my position in the OP) does not deny that objects exist independent of perception. The key point is that our knowledge of such objects is mediated by subjective processesexperience and prior knowledge shape how those objects appear to us. This does not negate their independent existence but highlights the active role of the subject in any knowledge of them.
I keep emphasizing that there are two distinct meanings of 'mind-independent': a practical meaning and a metaphysical meaning, the latter corresponding to metaphysical realism.
The practical meaning refers to the fact that many thingstrees, mountains, other peopleexist independently of your mind or mine in the sense that they do not rely on our individual perceptions to exist. This is uncontroversial and consistent with everyday experience.
Metaphysical realism, however, illegitimately extends this practical sense to claim that the world-at-large exists entirely independently of all mind, as if it is fundamentally separate from the act of perception or any cognitive structuring. This leap goes beyond what can be demonstrated and assumes what it needs to prove, ignoring the role that mind plays in shaping the world we experience. Recognizing this distinction is key to understanding why metaphysical realism is not as secure as it seems.
This distinction between the practical and metaphysical meanings of 'mind-independent' is consistent with Kant's insight that empirical realism is compatible with transcendental idealism. We can acknowledge that objects exist independently of our individual perceptions in the practical, phenomenal sense while also recognizing that this does not mean they exist as they are 'in themselves,' apart from the structuring role of mind.
Quoting Janus
I agree that knowledge and what we know are distinct. However, my argument is about the relationship between the two: what we know is dependent on our cognitive and rational faculties.. Even bare perception, which you equate with knowledge by acquaintance, involves a structuring process, if any object it to be identified - even to know what it is requires that it be identified..Cognition is thus always mediated by sensory and cognitive abilities.
The fact that different subjects see the same objects doesn't vitiate constructivism. Shared experiences arise because we inhabit a shared world and possess similar sensory and cognitive apparatuses, leading to intersubjective agreement. However, this does not prove that the world is 'mind-independent'only that our minds process shared inputs in similar ways.Furthermore different subjects can see the same objects in competely different ways, depending on what preconceptions or prior knowledge they bring to what they see.
Quoting Janus
If deciding whether reality is 'physical' or 'mental' requires a leap of faith, then realism is in no better position than idealism. Metaphysical realism claims that the world exists independently of the mind, but it cannot justify this beyond an appeal to reasonan appeal that idealism and constructivism also make. The difference is that idealism and constructivism openly recognize the unavoidable role of the mind in structuring experience, making them more consistent with how knowledge actually operates. In doing so, they are forthright about their reliance on reason rather than claiming a privileged metaphysical certainty.
I agree. My adventures with the Art of Dreaming were across the spectrum from elemental lucidity to a strong reality, an awareness, more pronounced and sharp than anything I have ever witnessed in normal everyday experience. Here is where degrees of reality has a possible measure. I's unfortunate that achieving these states is so happenstance. For me it was like a second nature.
One of Stephen King's novels has a brilliant description of the central character awakening in a field and smelling growing onions and freshly overturned earth a mile away.
Exactly! However, I personally find realism the more plausible. Since there is no definitive criterion of plausibility, I admit that it is, in the final analysis, still a matter of faith. I have faith in my own sense of what is the more plausible given what I know about science whereas I consider personal intuitions and experiences of altered states (of which I have enjoyed many) to be devoid of any reliable discursive justifications for ontological or metaphysical claims. In other words, if there is anything that could give grounds for such claims, in my opinion it is science.
That said, of course i don't believe science can ever explain everything about human life and experience. I think that is a separate question altogether. I also don't think the question is of much importance, and I bother myself with it only in the interest of conceptual clarityit's a personal foible.
Ironic, considering how much time you've devoted to arguing about it.
Still, at least that has the consequence of making me clarify my argument, which is a plus.
The general impression I get from you is that you have decided the ways things are and are only interested in hearing what supports your forgone conclusions. I know you won't agree, but that is my honest view, and I don't really mind what your views are anyway. In the final analysis I just don't think it is of much importance. So, no irony.
Apologies if this is a forced intervention, but you brought up something interesting.
Isn't this the case with most of us? We have a certain view and after having read and thought a lot about something, we choose an option. We will tend to defend that view, unless a very strong reason is given as to why one's view is flawed.
No I understand the responses very well and in fact once thought very much as you do. Now I find the arguments for idealism unconvincing. I'm not really a realist either. In fact, I think the whole dichotomy is wrongheaded.
Quoting Manuel
Sure, and I have changed my views over the years. And several times at that. Previously I did tend towards idealism, now I tend more to realism and materialism. I am open to changing my mind again if I encounter a good argument. I am yet to encounter one. So, in my exchanges with @Wayfarer I have been just honestly explaining why I don't think the arguments for idealism are well-founded. He prefers to think that I don't understand them. Oh well...
Ah. Fair enough. To be clear "idealism" covers a lot of ground, as does "materialism". It's a matter of what one emphasizes, it seems to me.
From this it follows that prior to the advent of mind nothing could have existed. Everything known to science seems to contradict this. But then the idealist will say that lived experience is prior to science, which of course for us it is. But it does not follow that experience is ontologically fundamental tout court, so I see that idealist conclusion as being based on flawed reasoning.
So what do we have to guide us in trying to decide what is ontologically fundamental apart from science? Our imaginations, intuitions, feelings, wishes? Or...?
But as I say I don't think the question even really matters for human life, unless you are religious and believe in the possibility of some kind of salvation/ redemption which must involve belief in a life beyond this one in order to make any sense at all. I believe that is often the unacknowledged premise.
I agree, for the most part. I would even venture to say that experience itself is not ontologically different from matter and energy, but epistemologically different. I don't think we can make metaphysical distinctions. Descartes could, given the state of knowledge back then, but we know more than he could have dreamt.
Yes, I am also a realist in so far as I think science tells us what belongs to the world (mostly physics). But apart from that, I think ordinary objects, so called, trees and apples and river and laptops, are mental constructions. And how much of science is a construction is tricky.
Physics seems to be much more grounded than biology, one could make a case that a different species might have a different biological science, but it's hard to imagine them having extremely different physics.
As to why science works - who knows?
Yes, some versions of idealism do lend themselves for religious/spiritual matters. But it need not be exclusive to one's personal philosophical beliefs, though it often is.
This would be where we differ. I think the fact that we all see the same things and can agree down to the smallest detail as to what we see and that our observations show us that other animals see the same things we do, suggests very strongly that these things are not just mental constructions. I think the most plausible conclusion is that they are mind-independent ontic structures. That said I think the ways things are seen may well differ according to interspecies, and to a lesser extent intraspecies, variations in the designs of sense organs.
Quoting Janus
I have addressed this objection many times, both in this thread and elsewhere. Of course it is true that h.sapiens is a recent arrival in evolutionary and geological terms. That is an established fact and not in dispute. But it is also not the point at issue in this argument. The starkest illustration of the point at issue is the exclamation by Immaneul Kant, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, 'If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.'
So I'm not disputing the empirical facts of science. In the OP, I say
So appealing to objective fact does not constitute an objection to the OP.
Quoting Janus
That is a point made from outside experience. It is viewing humans among other phenomena, as paleontology would do, or as anthropology would do.
Quoting Janus
Yet I am accused of arguing tendentiously on the basis of religious motivation, when it seems clear to me that, as you can't understand the argument, and believe that it contradicts common-sense realism, then the author must have religious pre-conceptions. Which speaks to preconceptions of your own.
Speaking of 'smallest details', there's a long (and not very entertaining) video interview on Essentia Foundation's website at the moment (Essential Foundation being Kastrup's idealist philosophy publishing organisation.) It comprises an interview with three European physicists who have won a prestigious award in physics for experimental demonstrations of the so-called 'Wigner's Friend' argument. The abstract goes:
This is in line with QBism - that observations in quantum physics have an ineluctably subjective element, so that each observation is indeed unique to a particular observer. Of course it is also true that observations tend to converge within a certain range - it's not as if the observation will yield a frog or a tree, so it's not entirely random. But it's also not entirely objectively determined.
[quote=Christian Fuchs, founder of QBism]The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains.[/quote]
Note the resonance with the Kant quotation.
As I see it there is no evidence or logic to suggest such a thing. Those things would not be perceived to be sure, but it does not follow that they would vanish. You are conflating not being seen with not existing.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, it is a point made from inside experience as all points are. I understand the arguments very well, I just don't happen to agree with them. In fact, I used to make the very same fallacious arguments myself, but I came to understand their fallaciousness. You don't seem to be able to understand that.
Can they? Do dogs see trees? They see something for sure, they don't have the concept "tree", nor do we know how they individuate objects. When it comes to other animals, one could assume some of them don't individuate things at all.
There's no necessary law that states that the way we pick out a blade of grass is the way it must be. One can easily imagine another species or an alien not being able to individuate a blade of grass as one thing, but rather several parts.
That we all agree down to the smallest part on how objects appear to us, simply tells us we are all human beings.
Based on what you quote here, I agree with a lot of it, maybe most.
I was no intending to defend you or attack Janus, it's just that the point he made was interesting to me.
As I said I think most of us have thought hard about our positions, and we'd only be willing to change them given extremely strong arguments and even then, it's not a guarantee.
Yes, I think Kantian (or Neo-Platonic) perspectives are very much headed in the right direction. I only add that we must take into account that Kant literally shaped his Critique around Newtonian natural philosophy, which stated that space and time were absolute.
That's a massive reason why Kant says that they are a priori forms of sensibility. This is very frequently overlooked.
Now we know that there is such a thing as time and space absent us, which are quite different from our intuitive understanding of them.
So, it's tricky, as I see it, but it's an important issue in general.
They don't bump into them, and they lift their legs and pee on them They don't try to climb them although they may use them to stand on the back legs and look up to see what's up there making a sound they are intrigued by. Cats climb them and birds land and perch in them. The dog sees and chases the ball when I throw it. He doesn't attempt to walk through walls, and he climbs the stairs just as I do. bees go to flowers not to piles of dung and flies go to piles of dung, not to flowers. There is untold evidence that animals see the same environment we do, albeit not in exactly the same ways when it comes to smaller details like colour. There might be a universal mind of which we and the other animals are all part that determines all this, but unless that is posited idealism is utterly implausible as far as i can see. I'm open to other views if they are supported by convincing arguments. I am yet to encounter any.
Quoting Manuel
Nothing inside of us could determine the smallest details of what is seen. What is actually out there determines what is seen. Otherwise, you would have to posit that our minds are all somehow connected.
Quoting Manuel
How do we know that and yet do not know that there are structured configurations of energy which appear to us as objects? Wayfarer won't agree with you about the human-independent existence of space and time by the way.
Quoting Wayfarer
How do we know that, by the way?
That is not a valid distinction in my view. It's a difference that makes no difference. Mere wordplay.
They don't bump into something; we conceptualize that something as a tree. Cats "climb" something (as opposed to go up? or latching on?). Yeah, they surely do stand on something. We conceptualize it as a tree - we have that linguistic and alongside that, conceptual capacity to apply the label "tree" to this thing animals react to.
Quoting Janus
We are the same species - so we will have the same concepts.
Just as dogs are their own species. As birds belong to birds.
When neurologists study a brain, they assume that what holds for that single individual's brain, applies to all of us, minus abnormalities.
When vision scientists study how we see, they assume that the person's eye they are studying, applies to all people - again, barring abnormalities.
Quoting Janus
We know that because mathematics, somehow, seems to apply to mind independent reality. What physics studies are the simplest systems in nature, somehow, we are able to develop theories that describe regularities in nature.
That was Einstein's comment about the most surprising thing about science (physics) that it works at all.
If Wayfarer thinks this is problematic or wouldn't agree with me here, then I'd disagree with him here.
I don't deny mind-independence. I only think it becomes overwhelmingly complex above physics.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well Eddington confirmed that space and time were actually one thing, spacetime, experimentally confirmed in the early 20th century.
[quote=Who Really Won the Bergson-Einstein Debate; https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time]Henri Bergson insisted that duration proper cannot be measured. To measure something such as volume, length, pressure, weight, speed or temperature we need to stipulate the unit of measurement in terms of a standard. For example, the standard metre was once stipulated to be the length of a particular 100-centimetre-long platinum bar kept in Paris. It is now defined by an atomic clock measuring the length of a path of light travelling in a vacuum over an extremely short time interval. In both cases, the standard metre is a measurement of length that itself has a length. The standard unit exemplifies the property it measures.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson argued that this procedure would not work for duration. For duration to be measured by a clock, the clock itself must have duration. It must exemplify the property it is supposed to measure. To examine the measurements involved in clock time, Bergson considers an oscillating pendulum, moving back and forth. At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state the current time is what we call now. Each successive now of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks dont measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.[/quote]
The following makes the same point:
I mean, either the universe is 13.7 billion years old, or it is not. That's a factual statement.
If we never arose, there would still be something there. It must be assumed otherwise how could we exist at all? Something had to happen that led to us, which did not depend on us.
In order to come to conceptualize ^tree^ we must first be able to see one. Then we can conceptualize all the others. Of course other animals don't think 'tree'. That is not the point at issue. Their behavior shows us that they see roughly the same structures that we do.
OK. Good.
We see something, right? This something triggers a reaction in our minds such that we call it a "tree". We don't see a tree first and then label it as a tree. We see things which we then interpret as so and so.
Their behaviors suggest they are interacting with something which is "concrete", something that can be touched and not passed through.
What does "structure" cover for you? Does it cover the shape of a thing or it's qualia or what? That's a bit unclear to me.
I really do understand the perplexity here. The issue is, as soon as you say 'something', then you're bringing your mind to bear on the question. In the OP, I'm careful to say that I'm not claiming that, in the absence of an observer, things literally become nothing. It's rather that the mind provides the framework within which the whole concept of 'existence' is meaningful - including the units of time by which it is measured (13.7 billion years).
It is in this context where I reference a quotation from the Buddhist texts (not in support of a religious argument!):
[quote= Kacc?yanagotta Sutta]By and large, Kacc?yana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, non-existence with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, existence with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
But the Buddha is not referring to the geological origin of the world. It's a reference to the 'world-making process' which the mind is involuntarily engaged in at each successive moment. The 'origin of the world', in Buddhist terms, is the process which gives rise to that world-making process ('the chain of dependent origination'.) The 'cessation of the world' is the ending of that process, namely, nibbana (in the Pali texts.)
What I'm relating that to, is the insights of cognitive science (ultimately traceable back to Kant) about how 'mind creates world'. It does not create the objective world, but then, what is 'objective' without there being the subject or observer for whom it is an object? It's interesting that in many of the early Buddhist texts, you will encounter the expression 'self and world', as in, 'the self and world arises' or 'the self and world exists'. That is why Buddhism has been phenomenological from the outset. That is also why there is a convergence between Buddhist philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science, which we see in books such as The Embodied Mind.
This is why I say at the outset that grasping this point requires a perspectival shift, a gestalt shift.
This, , is Waif's strong doctrine. If you press it's logic, he will deny it, stepping back to some merely transcendental reality.
The world. The actual world. The hard thing to tease out is what belongs to it absent us. That's a hard question. I think the evidence indicates that atoms, protons and so on existed prior to us. So, did planets and several other things.
But I will grant you that qualia did not exist absent a subject. I grant you that we give "meaning" to things. I grant that we individuate objects, and I also grant that we don't reach things in themselves. But I do not follow you in so far as denying objectivity without a subject.
Notice I understand the radicalness of what you are proposing. But I don't think it's true. Not to that extent.
One could be even more radical like Arthur Collier and outright deny that anything exists absent us and be perhaps the only full-blown idealist I know of. And it is very radical. But it's also not convincing.
Radicalness is not an indication of correctness. Not that you claim so, but it's worth pointing out.
That doesn't mean I don't see massive obstacles in making sense of these things. These are hard questions.
I'm not denying it, if you read carefully. I hadn't heard of Collier, but perusing the Wiki entry, he seems a kindred spirit!
Quoting Banno
Cognitive scientists who understand the fundamental role of an observing mind. Notice the cameo by Richard Dawkins muttering incredulously about 'a conspiracy to deny objective reality.'
It's a general idea of form or configuration. Not qualia and shape is kind of abstract whereas structure suggest concreteness and boundedness (however loose). It could be thought of as a localised intensity of energetic bonding in a field that gives rise to chracteristic functions and interactions.
A transcendental reality which us poor sods, lacking the necessary insight, could not hope to understand. :wink:
Are they saying that it is not the case that "reality is real"? Do they deny the reality of neurones? How do they reconcile that with their day job?
Would they agree with you that "'...the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves... cannot exist in themselves, but only in us".
That phrase they use... 'underlying reality".... what's that, then? How does it fit in with your creed?
Hint: has to do with the original post.
What?
It is unfortunate that the title of the OP "The Mind-Created World" gives impression, that you are not perceiving the world as is, but you are perceiving the world with your own added imagination and emotions which could distort the accuracy of your perception.
The world is not mind-created, but it is given as is to the mind. Mind must see the world as is without adding anything to it. Heidegger says, the world presents itself to us. We have no option but be presented with the world, and you must face the world without any added prejudice.
Quoting Janus
As Berkeley keenly demonstrated, materialism is swiftly reduced to idealism. This is due to the fact that matter, or energy, whatever term you choose, signifies only an idea. So Berkeley demonstrated that we can have a completely adequate understanding of the external world without employing the idea of "matter". What is actually the case, is that the idea of "matter" is just a substitute for the idea of "God". Each of these two words signifies the concept of an imperceptible (yes matter is imperceptible as what we perceive is the form) aspect of reality, the existence of which is assumed by us human beings, to account for the temporal continuity of the world. We assume the world to continue its existence independent of human perception, and we posit "matter", or "God", to account for this..
What is important to note though, is that materialism is reducible to a form of idealism, not vise versa. This assigns logical priority to idealism over materialism. Materialism, through the choice of "matter" as the base idea, which supports the reality of an independent world, is a distinct form of idealism from theology which holds the choice of "God" as that base idea.
Quoting Janus
This is a very faulty argument. If we take two people, point them to the horizon in a particular direction, in an active situation, and ask them to make a sentence about what they see, they will undoubtedly make different statements. The fact that we can agree is attributable to the power of suggestion.
"Do you see that tall red thing straight ahead?" "Well, it looks more rusty orange than red to me, but sure, I see it". "See what's going on to the right of that, I call it 'X', do you agree?" "Sure, I'll agree to call it that."
The fact that we agree to use the same words in the same situation is indicative of a desire to facilitate communication, it provides no evidence that we see the same things. Nor does it prove that the names are not applied to mental constructs rather than supposed independent things.
Quoting Janus
This as well, is not true at all. We produce all sorts of conceptualizations of things not yet seen or experienced in any way. This is the basis for Kant's a priori. As a simple, but very powerful example, consider the reality of prediction. Predictions are exactly that, conceptualizations of things not yet experienced, and this capacity in its basic form is commonly known as "imagination". The dual capacity of that faculty, to produce images of things not experienced, as well as images of things experienced through sensation, indicates that this faculty of imagination produces, or creates, the images, and is not dependent on sense experience in its creations.
I took the time to generate a transcript (with some comments).
Not a facta mere assumption.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That people notice different things in a vast or complex environment is no valid objection. If one notices something, ask the other if they also notice the same thingthat would be a proper test. Take two people and ask them to point to tiny marks or blemishes on the surface of a table, for example, and they will point to the same things.
But put them in a physics lab.....
If experience comes from organized matter, then it comes from the brain of certain organisms.
I don't see these terms as polar opposites. I'm a scientific realist and a manifest idealist: I believe the ordinary everyday world of tables and chairs are mind-dependent. I don't think physics is, despite it being formulated through minds, it still exists absent us.
The only way a strict separation is possible is if you assume that matter cannot be mental in any respect, or that mind is above matter, which is not coherent until someone says what matter is, and where it stops.
Quoting Janus
A number of others have already addressed that - we're equipped with the same senses and inhabit a world of shared definitions, so we tend to see things the same way. But not always. People can reach radically different conclusions when presented with the same evidence.
I tried to explain before the distinction between empirical and metaphysical realism, which you dismissed as 'wordplay'. It really isn't.
Sorry I overlooked this. I am not following.
Quoting Janus
So, some microphysical thing?
You are putting words in my mouth. I don't say that at all. Almost everything we know is known by direct observation and science is just an augmenting extension of that.
Quoting Wayfarer
This does not explain the problem. Seeing things in the same way and seeing the same things are not the same. We can see the same things in different ways.
Quoting Manuel
Why not a microphysical thing? Must the physical be different than the metaphysical other than definitionally?
I was not evaluating your comment, I was asking if this structure is what you think is the same for all creatures - as I did not understand your specific description.
I can explain how "matter" is merely a conception. It is something that is assumed to underlie the reality of sensible objects, which accounts for them apparently maintaining their similarity as time passes. In the physics of motion, matter is represented by inertia.
Now, it's your turn to explain how you believe that "matter" signifies something other than an idea.
Quoting Janus
As I said, that is explained by the power of suggestion. I guess you didn't read the rest of my post. That we agree to call what we see in the same situation, by the same name, does not prove that we are seeing the same thing. We readily agree about things like that simply because it facilitates communication.
Quoting Manuel
I believe that when a person develops a good understanding of the concept of "matter" it is inevitable that mind will be understood as above matter. This is because "matter" is assumed as a principle, to represent things which we do not understand, about the way that we perceive the world. So "matter" represents something peculiar and fundamentally unintelligible about our perceptions. And this is very significant, because as fundamentally unintelligible, it does not fit into our conceptions of an independent world. Matter transcends the supposedly independent world, and this evident even in the most vulgar conception of "matter" as that which the world is made of. But it is only that way because the mind makes it that way, simply because the mind needs that principle. So the mind creates the idea of something which transcends the world, matter, but it's just an idea.
Tell me, what does this simple, deceptive phrase do?
What sort of thing is the world as it is?
I've often said before that there is a convergence between cognitive science and idealism (or constructivism) insofar as the former recognises the centrality of the mind in the construction of understanding. So it differs from empiricism in recognising that the mind is not tabula rasa, and reality not something that exists just so, independently of it. But ultimately, the question you're asking is a very deep question indeed. Isn't that the subject matter of the Parmenides, and much of the philosophy that followed it? It's easy to make glib statements about it, but it's really not so easy.
Quoting Janus
But the point is, physics itself, which one would expect to have the most definitive answer to that in the general sense, cannot arrive at a conclusion as to whether there is any fundamental thing which is the same for all observers.
I thought you were asking me to speculate as to what the structures we perceive as objects might be. It seems animals will not conceptualize structures in the ways we do or even conceptualize them at all. Perhaps I don't understand your question.
'Matter' is an idea. If it signifies anything it signifies something that is not an idea.
That's not true. As I explained, "matter" signifies the reason why perceived things maintain similarity, from prior time to posterior time, as time passes. This principle of temporal continuity provides the foundation for the conception of an independent world, as well as being the basis for "inertia" in the physics of motion. As "the reason why", "matter" signifies an idea.
I thought you were saying that all creatures had access to same basic structure. If so, then I was going to reply by saying what you just said "animals will not conceptualize structures in the way we do...".
If so - then I think we are on the same page on this specific topic. Which may be good or maybe it's problematic, I dunno. :cool:
But that is a stipulation that mind is above matter. What does that mean? Why can't mind be a specific configuration of matter? Is there a principle in nature that prevents mind from arising from certain combinations of matter? Not that I know of.
I agree that, in very crucial respects, we don't know what matter is. We only know a very specific configuration of it - the rest are postulates to make sense of the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why would that be? We experience matter in an almost infinite variety of forms including our own bodieswhy would you say we can have no idea of what we experience?
Quoting Janus
I'm using the word 'idea' in the philosophical sense that anything that we recognise and perceive is 'idea', something we can form a concept of. So if you perceived something but have no idea what it is, then how could you know it was material in nature? In order for to be recognisable at all, it has to have some [i]form[i].
Quoting Manuel
Ive been reading Hans Jonas and Evan Thompson on the phenomenology of biology. Theyre dense and complex, so I wouldnt claim mastery, but one idea stands out: life and mind might be isometricthat is, wherever theres life, theres also something like mind, even if its not conscious or sentient in the way we think of it. This is because organisms, by their nature, maintain themselves and distinguish themselves from their surroundings; without this, theyd just be subject to the same physical and chemical forces as everything else. This is evident even in the most rudimentary forms of organic life - they're in some basic sense, intentional, in a way that, crystals, say, cannot be.
Which raises an interesting possibility: could this self-maintenance be the earliest appearance of mind, even if in a rudimentary form? If so, then complex minds in higher organisms wouldnt just be the product of mattermind could also be understood as a causal factor. The fact that mind is not something that can be identified on the molecular level is not an argument against it - as everyone knows, identifying the physical correlates of consciousness is, famously, a very hard problem ;-) .
That's fine. I call the stuff that the world is made of "physical stuff" or matter, you can call it "energy" or "idea" if you wish. It could cause terminological issues down the line, but content wise, there's not much of a difference.
Quoting Wayfarer
They could be correlative - maybe.
Yeah, the "hard problem" (which is misleading, imo) is real. Because our understanding is just way too to know how matter could lead to mind - Locke pointed that out many years ago, quite correctly as I see it.
It's something akin to asking yourself does a dog understand itself? Well, not very well. We know more about dogs that they do about themselves, as it were, and we still don't understand completely at all - far from it.
To understand how brain leads to mind would require exponentially more intelligence than we have. I just don't see why I have any reason to deny that experience comes from modified physical (world, immaterial, neutral, whatever you want to call it) stuff.
We say 'the things we perceive are not ideas' because we instinctively think of ourselves as separate from the world. We see the apple or chair and think the 'idea' of it is something that occurs internally in the mind, distinct from the external object itself. This is the outlook of John Locke's representative realism: external objects cause ideas in our minds, and perception is the mental awareness of those ideas.
But Kant and Schopenhauer challenge this. For Kant, the object as perceived is not the thing-in-itself but a phenomenonwhat appears is a product of the minds structuring activity. The 'idea' is not something separate from the act of perception; the perceived object is itself the idea, or more precisely, a phenomenon shaped by mind.
Schopenhauer takes this further, describing all perceived objects as representations (Vorstellungen), inseparable from the perceiving subject. Thus, the apple or chair is not a separate 'thing' causing an internal idea; it is a perceived idea, always within the phenomenal realm. This dissolves the divide between external objects and internal ideas that representative realism assumes.
Those kinds of themes are greatly expanded and explored in later phenomenology and existentialism.
Quoting Manuel
On the contrary, it's a difference that makes a difference!
Quoting Manuel
Because it's materialism, and I reject materialism.
Because you equate it with scienticism. It does not need to be so equated.
If you reject the scientistic association, then many problems go away. The only remaining issue then, would be if matter came before mental properties, or if mental properties came before material ones.
You simply cannot address the objections I make to your position. You don't even try...you just keep intoning the same mantras and citing the same "authorities". I'm done with responding to you...it's a waste of time.
It's not a stipulation. What I explained is that it is the result of, a conclusion drawn from understanding the concept of matter.
Quoting Manuel
The concept of matter is not compatible with the concept of mind, to allow for this. That is because matter is a principle assumed to account for the apparently deterministic aspects of the world, i.e. temporal continuity, while mind and free will are things requiring exception to that, i.e. temporal discontinuity.
Matter cannot be configured in a way other than what is allowed for by determinist causation. This I believe is the importance of understanding the relation between "matter" and Newton's first law. Newton assigns to matter itself, a fundamental property, which is inertia, and this renders all material bodies as determined. So mind, which has the capacity to choose, cannot be a configuration of matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
What I do is separate "mind" from "soul", in the way described by Aristotle. Soul is the base, so that all the potencies, capacities, or powers of the various life forms (self-nourishment, self-movement, sensation, and even intellection), are properties of the soul. This allows that mind, or intellect, in the human form, as a power of the soul, can come into existence through the process of evolution. But soul itself is prior.
The power to choose, to select from possibilities, which is very evident in human free will, may well be the most basic power of the soul. It appears to be required for all the basic living capacities. In this way, what you call here "the earliest appearance of mind", or the "rudimentary form" of mind, is the capacity to select form possibilities. And when we understand what it means to select, or choose, we see that intention is necessary for this, as that which causes one possibility to be actualized rather than any other. So this puts intention (final cause) as the basic property of the soul, as what is required for that basic power, the capacity to choose.
It seems we are an impasse here for the time being. I propose to park the conversation here and we can pick it up in some other thread, maybe by then we could understand each other better,
But I suspect we agree on something like 70% of the main topics, that is, if you still maintain some agreement with some version of Kant (albeit modified), if not then we may have drifted apart, which is fine.
I'll leave the proposal for you to decide.
Who understands matter? What we have are theories of physics about matter in microphysical states. Once you enter biology, our understanding of matter decreases exponentially - we don't understand how matter could have the properties we experience in everyday life. That's lack of understanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you mean matter as in physics or matter as in everything that is? Because physics does not show determinism, it at best suggests probabilities, which are very foreign to our debates on free will.
If there is emergence - brute emergence, "magical emergence" - which I believe happens all the time, then there is no problem in mind arising from matter, any more than anything else arising from it.
Newtonian laws are deterministic, and they still play a large role in modern physics, especially when mass (matter) is being dealt with.
I do address them, and you object to my objections. I'm not lecturing you, just making my case. You don't like, fine. You can't say I don't make an effort.
Quoting Manuel
I think it's rather deeper than that, but I'll leave it at that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I could go along with that. I always find the translation of 'On the Soul' as 'D'Anima' very suggestive of that - an 'animating principle.
I thought we were in agreement. It's not clear to me where you think we are still not in agreement.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, I'll try one more time. You say the fact that have the same sense organs can explain why we can see the same details down to the smallest visible scale. The example I gave was the surface of a tablelet's say it's a wooden table with little knots and patterns of figuration. We will agree on the exact locations of the knots and the patterns, and we can confirm this by pointing to them. Now if there were nothing there determining the positions of those details on what basis could we explain our precise agreement?
Don't say it is because we see things in the same way. As I already pointed out seeing things in the same way and seeing the particular things are not the same. We know we both see the particular things in their precise positions and patterns, and we know we see them roughly the same way in terms of colour, and tone and size, but we have no way of determining whether we see them in precisely the same way in terms of the latter qualities.
Don't give me a lecture about the history of ideas or Kant or Schopenhauerjust try to address tis simple point in your own words.
As I understand, I asked what you meant by structure you told me:
"It's a general idea of form or configuration. Not qualia and shape is kind of abstract whereas structure suggest concreteness and boundedness (however loose). It could be thought of as a localised intensity of energetic bonding in a field that gives rise to chracteristic functions and interactions."
I replied by saying that I did not understand this as stated but guessed you could have meant a "microphysical structure".
Which you replied by asking: "Why not a microphysical thing? Must the physical be different than the metaphysical other than definitionally?"
I said I was not evaluating your claim in any manner, but merely wanted to know if the structure was microphysical. This then brought up a problem to my mind, namely that if we say there is a microphysical structure that exists which is common to all creatures, then there is a tension, which you anticipated by saying:
"I thought you were asking me to speculate as to what the structures we perceive as objects might be.It seems animals will not conceptualize structures in the ways we do or even conceptualize them at all. Perhaps I don't understand your question."
I agreed with this bold part, and I thought this meant we agreed on there being real microphysical things in the world.
But then I got confused when you said:
"OK cool it seems we agree. I think we and the other animals have access to the same basic structures."
Because for reasons you gave previously, animals can't access this microphysical structure.
In short, using Sellar's terminology, I am a realist when it comes to the "scientific image" (with important caveats), but am an idealist when it comes to the manifest image.
I don't know what part of idealism you know think holds true - if any of it. It seems to me you think qualia and other facets of the world are ideal, but others are real.
That's how I see it anyway.
But I don't deny the fact that there are real objects external to us. I will try one more time:
Quoting Wayfarer
So I'm not denying that there are objective facts (and therefore the existence of objects). What I said was
Quoting Wayfarer
And 'absolutizing it' amounts to metaphysical realism:
'Metaphysical realism is the idea that the existence and nature of things in the world are independent of how they are perceived or thought about. It's also known as "external" realism.'
That's what I think you're defending, and I'm criticizing. And that criticism is in line with:
Furthermore I've pointed to the fact that physics itself has not arrived at an unambiguously objective entity at the most fundamental level. The experiments I referred to previously are about that very point.
So please stop telling me I'm not addressing the question or evading the issue. I'm really not. I know it's a contentious issue and a difficult problem - not a simple point! - but I'm not being evasive about it.
Fair enough, we can pick it up some other time. I still think our areas of agreement are far more interesting than those areas we disagree.
Few people here have the respect and are merited by innate ideas after all. :cool:
I didn't mean to say that animals have conceptual access to microphysical structures, but that we know by observing their behavior that animals have perceptual access to the same things we do and if things are real microphysical structures then it follows that animals have perceptual access to microphysical structures, This does not mean that we or the animals have perceptual access to microphysical structures as microphysical structures but we both have access to them as macrophysical appearances.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, if you agree there are external objects that are real independently of human perception and that their characteristics determine what we see and where and when we see it then how is that not consistent with realism?
Realism does not deny that the ways we see things are also determined by our uniquely human sense organs, so that the bee or the bird will see the same flower we do but presumably not in the same way.
Come on, this is standard science of perception. Neither science nor the realist claim that we all see things exactly the same way or that we see things the same way that other animals do. It is uncontroversial that some humans are colourblind, that dogs can only see a couple of colours, that bees can see colours we cannot and so on. I know you will see the same things at the same times and places as I do, but I don't know and can never know whether they appear exactly the same to you as they do to me because different individual's' perceptions cannot be compared with one another for obvious reasons.
I agree than neither we, nor other animals have access to microphysical structures. We have the advantage of "seeing" them through sophisticated experiments, or at least important parts of these structure.
We are stuck on the macrophysical issue. I don't think we have access to the same things. We, through concepts and perception do attribute identity to things - which require linguistic capacity (at least).
I don't think animals attribute too much to objects (not saying that you say they have concepts like we do). I think evidence suggests higher mammals can convey when there is prey, food or when it's mating season and the like.
But I don't see evidence that suggests they see the world in a similar way than we do, it seems to me based on what we know, they have very different experiences of the world - each subject to species-specific brain configuration.
Quoting Janus
But I don't agree and it's not what I said. I said there are external objects, but
Quoting Wayfarer
And that is definitely all out of me for the time being.
As I said before we see cats climbing trees not brick walls, birds perching in trees, not stopping and attempting to perch in midair. We see dogs trying to open doors, we see crows using sticks as tools to retrieve food and getting out of the way of oncoming vehicles. We don't see animals trying to walk through walls or birds flying into trees. There are countless examples. I don't know what else to say other than to ask why you don't think the examples I give suggest that we see the same things animals do.
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you claiming the science of perception does not tell us what I said it does? Are you claiming that the bee does not see the flower we see it collecting nectar from and pollinating. Are you claiming the dog does not see its food bowl where we see it, or does not see the ball we throw for it?
https://www.bing.com/search?q=animals+see+the+same+things+but+not+the+same+ways+we+do+according+to+the+scinece+of+percption&form=ANNTH1&refig=44e31eef9eb549d882fc9a5dd4e18d66&pc=HCTS
Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing I've said is inconsistent with that and nor is science or realism. I know you don't agree "that there is 'mind-independent substratum' behind all of those different meaning-worlds" but you don't know that there isn't and nor do I know that there is. I'm just pointing out that the evidence of our senses and observations of the behavior of other animals suggests there is. The other explanation is that this is all going on in a universal mind we and the animals are all connected to. I don't deny that possibility, but it seems to me by far the least plausible explanation. And it seems you don't want to even posit that, which makes your position seem to be completely lacking in explanatory potential.
And I keep replying that we are attributing walls, trees and brick walls to animals' cognition, WALLS, TREES and BRICK are concepts, not mind-independent things.
The fact that dogs try to come indoors or that cats walk on walls is nothing else than our attempt to make sense of what they do. Dogs push (or pull) something, they don't know it's a door. Cats walk on something; they have no concept of a wall.
The examples you suggest seem to me to be an anthropomorphizing of animal behavior.
I grant that there is something like concreteness or not being able to pass through things. But tress, doors and walls aren't things animals interact with, it's what we in our umwelt, interpret them to be doing.
Hey, that would require knowing the One Mind. And I don't claim to know the One Mind. I'm just tracking the footprints.
Quoting Manuel
Totally :100:
Maybe you would have better luck if you were to say that all animals observe the same reality instead of saying they observe the same "things", since to @Wayfarer and @Manuel that seems to necessarily imply that other animals conceptualize reality in the same way we do (which is clearly not your intended meaning).
Is there any term you would accept as referring to what we observe prior to generating propositional knowledge? Like "pre-conceptual reality", for example?
You may be attributing that, not me. I say they clearly see the things we call walls and trees, I'm not saying they see them as walls or trees.
Quoting Manuel
Right, and I haven't said or even implied any such thing. Dogs do know they can go out when the door is open, and they usually don't attempt to go out when it's closed, so they know that much.
Quoting Wayfarer
You don't know if there is one mind and nor do I. You could favour that as an explanation for why we and some animals clearly see the same things, but it woiuld be an inference to what you considered the best explanation.
If we go further, and posit the capacity to choose as the fundamental property of the soul, therefore final cause as the basic act of the soul, this is very consistent with the way that quantum mechanics understands the micro-scale. However, to conceive of this capacity to choose, requires a peculiar understanding of "the passage of time" common in mysticism, within which the world is understood to be created anew at each moment, as time passes. Accepting the reality that we can choose freely, produces the need for a discontinuity of "the world", between past and future, which breaks the determinist continuity.
This perspective produces the need for a completely different way of understanding the relationship between the small and the large. The small is understood as the "internal", and the large is understood as the "external", the subject has created for itself, a somewhat arbitrary boundary between these two, which you describe as the boundary which the subject has created between itself and "the world" . I believe it is important to understand that there is also a boundary between the subject and the internal. In this case, "subject" indicates the consciousness. The internal is all the nonconscious activity of the soul, producing sensations, desires, emotions, etc.. The "subject", as consciousness has a pair of soul-created boundaries, one to the external, and one to the internal, and this is known as the conscious perspective.
Since the internal is what is responsible for our capacity to choose, and to move freely in the larger expanse, we need to conclude that the activity of "the passage of time", which is really a series of events which constitutes the world being created anew at each moment, is directed from the internal to the external. In speculation I can say, that when the world is created anew at each moment of passing time, it is an extremely rapid internal to external event, an "explosion", like a mini 'big bang' at each point in space, at each moment of passing time.
This interpretation is supported by our observations of "spatial expansion", when a framework of two dimensional time is adopted. Assume that there is a succession of these internal to external "explosions" which constitutes the passing of time. Each explosion is the world being created anew at each moment. And, each one is similar to the last, but not exactly the same, and this constitutes the orderly change we observe in the world. The activity of "the explosions" requires the second dimension of time to understand, the breadth of the present.
The subject has been given, by the soul-created boundaries, a specific place in the explosion, somewhere between the very small and the very large, by means of the somewhat arbitrary boundaries. The boundaries are very precise though, because the position within the explosion must be extremely consistent from one explosion to the next, to produce the appearance of temporal continuity. The identity of a particular thing, object or individual, is its continuity of position between one explosion and the next. Notice the degree to which a living being has freedom to alter its own physical continuity. When we extrapolate from our sense perspective (our precise location on the explosions), to extend our observational capacity over a large duration of time (many many explosions, or "moments"), we see "spatial expansion" as produced by the discrepancy in the position of those boundaries.
Quoting Janus
I don't think you understand what is being claimed. The argument is not that there is "nothing there", but that whatever it is that is there, may not be anything even similar to how it appears to us.
Consider the nature of language for example. Language consists of symbols which do not necessarily appear to be anything at all similar to what they represent, yet they are extremely useful. In fact, by making a simple symbol represent complex information, we increase the efficiency of language. Some biologists like to extend this symbol/information model through all levels of living activity, as semiosis and semiotics. If we extend this type of understanding, we can see that what is created by the mind as a "sense image" is just a symbol, which represents some information gleaned from "external activity". The symbol represents information to be interpreted, it does not actually represent "the thing" which is being sensed. The sense image is a symbol created to represent some complex information, in a simplified way, much the same as "word" represents some complex information in a simplified way.
So, with respect to your criticism, agreement and pointing to the exact same places, does nothing to indicate that what we each see as "an image", is in any meaningful way, "the same". We have simply created a system of communication which allows us to understand each other, by representing complex information with simple symbols. It may be the case that the personal images are as different as the same word in different language. The languages are compatible but by no means the same. And, since the information is extremely complex, and each individual person has a distinct spatial-temporal location as perspective, it is highly improbable that the information represented, is in any reasonable sense, "the same".
They see something. What properties they attribute to these things we do not know.
So, it doesn't make sense to say - even if you admit that they don't see them as wall or trees - that this thing they see is in fact (mind-independently) a wall or a tree. It's not a mind-independent fact for us that walls and trees exist.
Close, but not quite what I am saying. I am saying that each animal species (ants, birds, tigers, whatever) interpret the world the way each species does: ants will interpret the world in a certain way, birds in another manner, tigers the way tigers do, etc.
And of course, bats. Can't forget about them. :)
They interpret the same world in different ways, in other words?
Yes. That's the working assumption.
Yes, the claim should be trivial: reality can be (and is) conceptualized in different ways.
But no to the suggestion that matter can be observed without any conceptualization at all.
So you believe non-human animals are all engaged in conceptualization? Or that they do not observe anything?
They very likely have some primitive concepts. I don't think it makes much sense to postulate a creature having perception absent some minimal amount of conception.
But these are very very dark waters. We are quite in the dark as to the nature of animal concepts.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The dog sees the ball as something to chase, the doorway as something to walk through, the wall as something not to walk into, the tree as something to piss against, the car as something to get excited about going in.
So the 'somethings' have roughly the same characteristics for the dog as they do for us. "Wall, 'tree'. 'doorway'. and 'car' are just names, but the things they name certainly seem to be real mind-independent things with certain attributes.
Seems, being the key word.
The OP criticises metaphysical realism defined as follows: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the worlds nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.' - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I won't re-state all of the points made in the original post and associated Medium essay. But in respect of animal cognition and the ideas of 'umwelt' and 'lebenswelt', and indeed in phenomenology generally, the key idea is that the world and the observing creature, be that human or animal, are co-arising. The kind of world the creature perceives is inextricably intertwined with its cognitive system, largely determined by evolutionary adaptation. Over and above that, humans are the 'symbolic species' , able to reflect on and analyse themselves, their environment, and their own cognition of it, through meta-cognitive awareness (awareness of awareness) which provides dimensions of understanding generally not available to other species. But for both animals and humans, the world is not an objective given but a relational construct shaped by the interaction between the observer and the observed. This is the basis of the phenomenological critique of realism/naturalism, which assumes the world exists independently of the way it is perceived and that the role of science is only ever to expand and make more comprehensive the knowledge of that already-existing world.
The original post draws considerably on a largely unsung book called Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles S. Pinter. Pinter was a mathematics emeritus who published that book at the end of his very long life. The book's sub-title is 'How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics'. He lays out his case in great detail, drawing on cognitive science, philosophy and physics.
[quote=Abstract]The books argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing that the meaningful connectedness between things the hierarchical organization of all we perceive is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures. [/quote]
(I say it's an 'unsung', because Pinter's other publications are all in mathematics - some of our mathematical contributors knew of his books in that discipline. But as he's not recognised in cognitive science or philosophy, his last book wasn't reviewed in the usual media, and went largely un-noticed by the profession. Which is a pity, because it's a very insightful book. Details can be found here.)
An interesting point: the word 'world' is derived from an old Dutch word 'werold' meaning 'time of man' (ref). The implication is that 'world' and 'planet' are not synonyms. A world is lived, it is inhabited. In that sense, there can't be 'unseen worlds', even though there may be trillions of unseen planets. For it to be a world, the planet must have inhabitants, beings (see blog post, Schopenhauer: How Time Began with the First Eye Opening.)
I think that is a very strange claim, why are the use of concepts necessary for perception? I would not invoke conceptualization for any reason other than to describe the use of syntactic language, which is an ability only humans and arguably one or two other animals have.
Thank you for such an extensive write-up. My question is, do you not believe there is some component of the world/reality that, even if it is not captured in some particular concept, is still singular and shared across all these "constructed worlds"? And if so, wouldn't that also make you a kind of metaphysical realist?
'Seeming' is the essence of experience. How else could what is real and what is merely imagined be assessed. but by comparing what seems to be real to all, even dogs, with what are the wishful fantasies of a few?
As Peirce said: " "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts".
I don't see your point. We all evolved from the same source according to evolutionary theory. Most our DNA is the same as the dog's. Human beings and dogs create their mental "worlds" in similar ways. There is nothing here to produce the conclusion that the way the independent reality is, is anything even remotely similar to our perceptions of it.
Consider my example. Millions of people can look toward a pointed at place, and agree that what is pointed at is a "dog". This in no way indicates that the word "dog" is in any way similar to the real thing pointed to. This is simply the nature of "representations". There is no necessity for the representation to be similar to what is represented. Why should we think that sense images are any different? Sense images are "representations".
For example?
Quoting goremand
Growing up, I loved the Time Life books on evolution and biology. In one of them, they showed an experiment in which a bird-like shape was flown above a nest of young geese. When towed in one orientation, with an apparently long neck and short tail, the goslings wouldn't respond to it as it looked goose-like. But turn it around, to it appeared to have a short neck and a long tail, and they'd all duck for cover, as it looked like a goshawk. I think that amounts to a kind of illustration, doesn't it? Goose-gestalt vs goshawk gestalt, in Pinter's terms. An illustration of the idea of a 'meaning-world'.
The names of things is not the issue. The issue is their existence independent of humans or any percipients. This is not to say that their microphysical existence is the same as their macrophysical existence.
Notice the C S Peirce quotation at the top of the Medium version of the original post:
[quote=C S Peirce, Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives.] to decide what our sentiments ought to be towards things in general without taking any account of human experience of life, would be most foolish[/quote]
Like you, I believe altered states are a real thing, but unlike you I draw no ontological or metaphysical conclusions about what they are showing us. Fiction or reality? I don't really care because what is of primary importance is the enriching effect on present experience and imagination.
OK. Well, a few pages back you said
Quoting Janus
I will draw upon your expertise in these matters to comment on the following passage from Merleau Ponty which seems close to the point that I'm pressing:
[quote=Phenomenology of Perception, p456]For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousnesses? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each one of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which could not be seen by anyone, might be. Laplaces nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world.[/quote]
.
That is not the issue. I don't think anyone here is questioning the existence of the independent reality. The question is whether that independent reality is as we sense it or not. Once we recognize that sense images are creations of the living system, created as representations, then we can understand that the independent reality need not be anything like the sense images, just like the word "dog", as a representation, is not anywhere similar to what it represents.
Plainly.
When we leave our house in the morning, we take the objects we see around us as simply real, factual thingsthis tree, neighboring buildings, cars, etc. This attitude or perspective, which is usually unrecognized as a perspective, Edmund Husserl terms the natural attitude or the natural theoretical attitude.
When Husserl uses the word natural to describe this attitude, he doesnt mean that it is good (or bad), he means simply that this way of seeing reflects an everyday or ordinary way of being-in-the-world. When I see the world within this natural attitude, I am solely aware of what is factually present to me. My surrounding world, viewed naturally, is the familiar world, the domain of my everyday life. Why is this a problem?
From a phenomenological perspective, this naturalizing attitude conceals a profound naïveté. Husserl claimed that being can never be collapsed entirely into being in the empirical world: any instance of actual being, he argued, is necessarily encountered upon a horizon that encompasses facticity but is larger than facticity. Indeed, the very sense of facts of consciousness as such, from a phenomenological perspective, depends on a wider horizon of consciousness that usually remains unexamined. Any individual object, Husserl wrote:
Is not merely an individual object as such, a This here, an object never repeatable; as qualified in itself thus and so, it has its own specific character, its stock of essential predictables which must belong to it if other, secondary, relative determinations can belong to it.
Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple essential species, or essential structures of consciousness, and everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too [/quote]
This aspect of Husserl influenced Heidegger, even though the latter criticized some aspects of his mentor's philosophy. Husserl emphasized that all instances of being are encountered within a broader horizon of meaning, one that includes but surpasses the empirical. This horizon reflects the structures of consciousness, which condition how any entity can appear as meaningful. For Husserl, facticity (the empirical givenness of things) is always embedded within a context shaped by the transcendental structures of consciousness. (This is exactly what I meant in the OP, where I said that every statement about what exists contains an ineluctably subjective element that is not available to empirical observation.)
Heidegger took this idea further by situating the horizon of meaning in Dasein's existential structurethe way human beings are always already engaged with the world and interpreting it. Heidegger reinterpreted this in existential terms, arguing that Dasein is not just a passive observer but an active participant in the disclosure of Being. Heideggers notion of Being-in-the-world builds on Husserls insight that Being is never encountered in isolation but always within a lived context.
I don't think we will proceed much here. We going to keep going in circles.
Quoting goremand
I think there has to be a minimal intellectual component in terms of memory, otherwise I don't see how a creature could perceive without constantly forgetting.
What could that mean? Taking sight as the primary sense involved in describing things, are you asking something like whether the things that appear to us look the same when they are not being seen?
Quoting Wayfarer
You asked me to comment on the MP passage, I did that and you didn't respond. Do you have a point of issue with my answer. If so, do tell.
Quoting Manuel
I don't see that we.ve been going in circles other than that you have been misinterpreting some of what I have written. Do you disagree with my last post addressed to you? If not, we agree, if so, please explain. Or if you don't want to that's fine.
I am asking in what way might the representation (the visual image) resemble the thing being represented (the independent reality)? And, I am answering, that it is not necessary for there to be any resemblance whatsoever, as indicated by my example of words.
The appearnce could only resemble the thing that appears when it is not appearing if the thing that appears is an appearance when it is not appearing, which is a contradiction. So I think the question is ill-formed, incoherent.
Quoting Janus
Let's minimize human attributions to animals. The dog chases something, walks through something, pisses against something, etc.
What characteristics of something makes us chase it? Is it the roundness, the colour? Surely not, for then we would be chasing globes or round candy. We don't do that. These things are round (to us), but we don't chase them.
What characteristics of something causes us to urinate on it? Dogs urinate on other things as well.
We don't know if a dog experiences a ball as an object which is separate from the environment. It looks that way to us, but that doesn't mean it's something like the dog picking something up in a continuous stream of stuff or things. Maybe some things trigger the dog to go chasing and other peeing.
That doesn't mean there is a specific property that resembles anything we have that causes them to do what they do. They chase things that are thrown. They pee on things that make them mark territory.
That does not mean they chase something because it is like a ball or pee because it is something like a tree. It's a disposition in the dog to act a certain way given certain environmental cues. Maybe motion triggers the running, not the shape, maybe scent triggers the peeing. You can say ah, yes, but the scent is given off by trees, maybe, maybe it's the earth or concrete or anything else.
I think your reply is ill-formed, irrelevant, and unintelligible. First, "the appearance" and "thing that appears" seem to refer to one and the same thing. So it makes no sense to talk about one resembling the other.
All that is irrelevant and a poorly formed reply, because I was talking about a representation and the thing represented, not any "appearance".
The representation is the sense image, which a person has within one's mind. The thing represented is the independent reality. The question was, in what way might we assume that the representation would resemble the thing represented. And the answer was that it need not resemble it in any way. Therefore we ought not assume any resemblance between the sense image and the independent reality.
We know we cannot walk through tress or walls, but we can through doorways. We know we can chase balls but not walls or trees and so on. We can observe that dogs see the same things we do, and additionally there is a consistency there between how we see things and how dogs see things which is demonstrated by their behavior towards those things. I don't see how that can reasonably be denied. That's all I'm saying, and what I'm saying has nothing to do with the names of things.
OK. You said:
Quoting Janus
It is not at all what Merleau Ponty said or meant. It wouldn't even be worth stating, it would just be common sense. And how does that square with:
A commentary on that passage is that:
Do you at least see some convergence between this line of argument, and that of the original post?
If the world is mind-created, why is there so much misery in the world?
Well it's impossible to give you a specific example of pre-conceptual reality, because that itself would involve conceptualization. But I think it is necessary to invoke the idea of a shared reality to, for example, explain how we're having this conversation.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I don't think it's necessary to invoke the idea of conceptualization in geese in order to explain the behavior you're describing.
Quoting Manuel
Of course animals have intelligence and memory, but how does that necessitate the use of concepts? Memories are just impressions made by particular events, for example an animal doesn't need the general concept of a "child" in order to remember that they have children to feed.
Bingo. You win the lucky door prize. I have no objection to there being a shared reality, in fact, I think consciousness is collective in nature, even though each of us only ever experiences it in the first person.
Quoting frank
Because of ignorance, of not seeing what is real, and being attached to what is unreal. And that goes for me as much as anyone else.
How did you rule out that the world just is a miserable place?
For me, the world is not a miserable place, I quite enjoy it. That some see it as miserable is strong evidence against what Janus says, that we all see the same thing.
Janus' argument is deeply flawed. That a number of people can point to the same place, and agree to call what is at that point, at that time, by the same name, is not proof that we see the same thing. Such a conclusion involves an equivocation in the meaning of "the same thing" which is based in the well known category mistake of confusing the particular with the general.
"We all see the same thing" is asserted by people like Janus, as a general statement. What is really meant by that general statement is "we all see the same things". The problem though, is that this proposition would obviously be false. There is very significant variance in what two different people see when looking at the same 'scape. So the people like Janus, who argue this point, compose the general statement as "we all see the same thing", where "thing" (singular) is a generalization representing a multitude of things (which we do not all see the same of), and is sometimes just called "the world". Then, as supposed proof, or justification of this general principle, they refer to instances where a number of people will point to "the same thing". In this case, "the same thing" refers to a particular. In other words, a multitude of "things" is presented as a "thing" (the world) implying generalization, or inductive reasoning.
So, the category mistake based equivocation is very evident. What is asserted is that "we all see the same thing", where "thing" is a generalization of the multitude of all things, known as "the world". But what is argued as proof of this, is that "we all see the same thing", where "thing" means one particular within the multitude. If we deny the equivocation as constituting an invalid argument, what we are left with is a very faulty generalization, faulty inductive reasoning. Particular instances of a number of people seeing the same particular thing, are used as evidence to support the general principle "we all see the same thing". Clearly, if "the same thing" is argued as a generalization of all particular things, as is the case when "the same thing" means "the world", it is a faulty generalization.
We do not all see the same "world", as each person perceives, is interested in, and apprehends, very different particulars. We are all unique and different in the things which grab our attention and pique our interest. Therefore, perception, and understanding of "the world", is unique, and specific to the individual. This is very evident in threads like this where we do not get any agreement as to what "the world" signifies. And that is also very good evidence that each person's mind creates one's own "world" which I believe, is the argument of the op.
Is this a Buddhist take on it?
Of course, it would make sense for us we are analyzing the world through our human-centric perspective. One cannot help but see dogs chasing balls or peeing on trees, it absolutely makes sense for us to interpret animal actions in a way we can understand. It would be quite impractical (in everyday life) to attempt to "be a bat", to use Nagel's phrase, because we aren't.
The point is not the words, it's the animals experience. My point is not that dogs chase balls, but rather that dogs chase movement. You can throw any object you wish and most of the time the dog will chase it.
Likewise with peeing, we experience it as a dog peeing on a tree. The dog might experience it as marking territory in this place because of particular smell or an ingrained propensity to do this.
Quoting Janus
It can be reasonably denied if you assume, as I believe is correct, that dogs have a different experience of the world. This consistency we see with our interpretation of the dog's behavior does not mean that we are accurately describing what dogs actually do, it does describe how we experience dogs.
I should add, that going through a door and chasing a ball at best shows that concrete stuff (stuff you can't go through) is a real thing - concreteness exists. But this says very, very little about animal experience. That's why we need to do animal science, to try to understand, to the extent we can, why they do what they do.
But isn't that a form of metaphysical realism? And is this "collective consciousness" how you conceptualize reality? If so, what does it signify? Is it like Bernardo Kastrups "Cosmic Mind"?
True. I should have been more careful. I don't know if animals have concepts per se, maybe they have some sort of pre-conceptual awareness.
But they have representations unique to them. The issue I wanted to highlight is that I think it's kind of hard to imagine having perception without some minimal intellectual capacities, because then it seems to me it would be hard to retain the perception.
Examples of animals suffering from abuse and being fearful of humans for a while seem to suggest some degree of association, which goes slightly beyond "mere" perception.
Quoting goremand
Stanford Encyc's description of metaphysical realism: 'According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the worlds nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do.'
My take on collective consciousness more akin to Hegel's 'geist', which describes the way geist (usually translated as mind or spirit) manifests collectively in culture, history, and shared institutions. While consciousness is realised individually, Hegel argues that this individuality is always part of a larger, evolving reality as an expression of geist (indeed the lovely word 'zeitgeist', spirit of the times, is something from Hegel that has filtered through to popular culture.) Unlike metaphysical realism, this view sees reality (or Being) as inseparable from the processes of mind and meaning. And yes, it is convergent in some respect with Kastrup. I've listened to and read quite a bit of Kastrup.
The collective nature of consciousness shows up in the way humans as a species and culture, inhabit similar (although never identical) meaning-worlds. Our senses are overall similarly adapted and we operate in a framework of shared meanings. That is what makes inter-subjective agreement and scientific discourse viable. Hence philosophical idealism is not incompatible with science but it's also not limited to what can be objectively established by science. The SEP entry on idealism says 'the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.' That includes the reality of numbers and universals in my view (although that is not something explored in the original post.)
Quoting frank
It is.
What is the difference between a representation and an appearance according to you?
Quoting Wayfarer
I didn't claim that what I said was an explanation of what MP was saying. What do you think MP means in his comment there about Laplace's nebula? It seems to me only to refer to the phenomenological context, and in that context I agree with it. But the phenomenological context is from a particular perspective, so I don't see it as being discordant with what I said. Where we seem to disagree is that you seem to think we can only meaningfully speak from the "for us" perspective, whereas I think we can bracket that and speak meaningfully from a context that conceptually excludes us.
This shows that what I said is not at odds with MP.
This is just stating the obvious, and you should know I have never disagreed with it.
This is contentious. I don't believe that we carve up the world arbitrarily but that the ways we carve it up are constrained both by the nature of our sense organs and the nature of the world we are sensing. Of course I can't prove that any more than anyone can prove the obverse. No empirical observation can prove either case and neither case is logically self-evident. It comes down to what you think or feel is most plausible.
This I agree with because it presents both the 'for us' and the 'absent us' perspectives.
Quoting Manuel
If I throw a chair I doubt the dog will chase it. I'll try it when I get back home from my holiday and report the result. I have tried throwing sticks too large for the dog to pick up. Or bricks. He will chase them but as soon as he realizes it is too big or hard to pick up in his mouth he loses interest straight away. In any case when you say the dog chases movement it seems you agree that the dog and I both see something moving at the same place and time and in the same direction and the same distance.
Quoting Manuel
I have never denied that the dog has a different experience of the world. I have no doubt he experiences the things I experience differently, but the difference is not all that radical and can be made sense of by considering the differences between my constitution and the dog's constitution. The dog sees his food bowl as 'to-be-eating-from' and his bed as 'to-be-laying-in' and given the way I experience those things in terms of size, shape and hardness the dog's behavior towards those things is consistent.
Well, that's where we differ, and I think also where you differ from phenomnology. I agree we can see the world as if there is nobody in it, for specific purposes, but when that is taken to be a true account of the nature of being, then it goes too far.
Quoting Janus
It's not arbitrary, but it is contingent, both on what there is to see, but also on how we see it.
Representation: an instance of standing for, or corresponding with, something else.
Appearance: a form as perceived.
The difference therefore, is that "representation" implies something else which is being represented, while "appearance" has no such implication.
So when you said "The appearance could only resemble the thing that appears when it is not appearing if the thing that appears is an appearance when it is not appearing...", you have no distinction between two things, like "representation", and "thing represented" does. And this renders your phrase unintelligible. Like I said, there is no distinction between "appearance" and "thing that appears". These refer to one and the same thing, "appearance" is a form as perceived, and "thing that appears" is also the form as perceived. So it makes no sense to talk about whether one resembles the other, they are the same.
I'm not saying it is a true account of the nature of being (whatever that might mean), but rather merely, leaving aside our personal interests, a natural, hopefully unbiased, account of things as they appear to us.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have never disagreed with that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is often said that our perceptions are representations of that which affects our senses. I would prefer to speak of "presentations". In either case something is either repsented or presented is implied. It is also common to hear that our perceptions consist in what appears to us and that what we perceive is determined by whatever affects our senses.
In either way of speaking the things which affect our senses are not themselves representations or appearances, If we are perceiving we are perceiving something, and the question as to whether the perception resembles what the thing that is perceived is like when it is not being perceived seems to be an incoherent question. I hope that clears it up for you.
"Heidegger argues that scientific objectivity is grounded in a specific metaphysical framework: the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. This framework presumes that the world is composed of objects existing independently of the observer, available for detached study and measurement. Consequently it overlooks the more fundamental ways in which humans encounter the world as being-in-the-world (Dasein). Scientific objectivity reduces things to mere "present-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit), stripping away their richer modes of existence as they are experienced in the lifeworld.
Heideggers overarching concern is that science forgets or obscures the question of Being (Sein). By focusing only on what can be measured or quantified, science neglects the broader ontological context in which things appear as meaningful. This leads to an impoverished understanding of reality, where the richness of Being is replaced by a narrow focus on instrumental utility or efficiency."
I don't believe that science and ordinary observation, of which science is an augmented form, are impoverished understandings of realitythey merely present a different perspective than the "zuhanden" perspective (which itself does not succeed in transcending the subject/object dichotomy in my view. I don't believe any discursive understanding can transcend duality because our language itself is inherently dualistic. No experience at all is possible without the primordial distinction between self and other.
Okay, and do you also agree with this:
Quoting Leontiskos
You cite Schopenhauer and Berkeley. Are you agreeing with them in toto?
The problem with "presentation", as with "appearance", is that this denies us any intelligible relation to the independent reality. In fact, without something represented, the mind might just produce presentations and appearances without any external "thing" at all. So, to recognize the reality of the external world, and that there is some kind of relation between it and what the mind produces, it is common to understand what the mind produces, as a representation. This is what allows that the external world is in fact, real.
Quoting Janus
That what we perceive is "determined by" what affects our senses, is proven to be wrong by hallucinations, delirium, even dreaming. So, despite the fact that it is "common" to hear this, it is common in the sense of vulgar and uneducated. This is the result of a determinist attitude which trickles down from scientism, and the awe which common people have for the great power unleashed by the scientists' application of determinist principles. Scientism inclines people to believe that "determined by" is applicable to living systems.
Notice your choice of words. You say the perception is "determined" by what "affects" our senses. To affect something is to have an effect on it, to influence it. So if the sense organs are "affected" in their function, and their function is intermediary between what is sensed, and the mind which holds the perception, we cannot conclude that the perception is "determined" by what affects the senses. We have a relation of influence (affection) between the thing sensed and the sense organ, and we might assume a similar relation of influence (affection) between the sense organ and the perception in the mind. But this is far from what is required to say that the first "determines" the third.
Quoting Janus
That clears it up, but it shows you misunderstood. The perception is the representation. The thing being perceived, i.e. what is represented, is what is said to have existence regardless of whether it is perceived (independent existence). That is what independent existence signifies, that it exists whether or not it is perceived. Now, the point is that this thing which has independent existence ( has existence regardless of whether it is perceived) does not necessarily have any resemblance whatsoever, to the perception of it, while it is being perceived.
Schopenhauer, more than Berkeley. Where I part company with Berkeley, is his dismissal of universals - his nominalism, in short. I think it leaves many gaps in his philosophy. But whenever I read his dialogues, I'm reminded of how ingenious a philosopher he was.
Schopenhaeur likewise - I'm almost totally on-board with his 'world as Idea', but the major issue I see with his philosophy of will is that, if will is 'irrational and blind', then how come the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences? I think Schopenhauer has blind spots of his own, much of them attributable to his hatred of Christianity. But he's still brilliant in my view - 'the last great philosopher', I'm sometimes inclined to say.
I will add, I've learned a ton of stuff about all manner of subjects since joining this forum, and including Husserl and Heidegger, about whom I knew next to nothing when I joined. I would like to think my overall approach is maybe nearer to a kind of phenonenology than to idealism per se.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to deny animals even a minimal amount of intelligence. I have to stress I don't believe that conceptualization is some amazing special ability. The amazing ability here is syntactic language, conceptualization is merely a part of describing language-use.
Quoting Manuel
The thing is, if you go down this road of "creating associations always involves the use of concepts" I believe you will end up attributing powers of conceptualization to very simple organisms, including machines.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have to agree with you that this is too much baggage, I think the concept of reality/the world is a necessary primitive, but I don't know if it has to be conceptualized in terms of objects, properties, relations etc.
But do you not make a distinction between disagreements about how the world ought to be conceptualized and disagreements about how the world actually is? When people speak of mind-independent objects is believe I understand and agree with their meaning, even if I realize their conceptualization of reality is not the be-all end-all.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kastrup is my go-to example because his is the only version of idealism I believe I've somewhat managed to understand. I certainly don't understand Hegel. One thing I particularly like about Kastrup is his immense commitment to parsimony.
Although I know very little about medieval philosophy, I get the impression that the debate between Realism and Nominalism would be pertinent to the topic of a Mind-Created World vs whatever the alternative might be : a Self-Existent Material World?
Contrary to the definition below, I naively assumed that Realism could be summarized as "what you see is all there is". Which would exclude Universals & Abstractions & Qualia, and Universal Mind, that are knowable only as ideas. Please comment on those alternative worldviews. Thanks. :smile:
Nominalism
The theory that only physical particulars in space and time are real, and that universals are only names or labels for groups of things or events. Nominalists believe that the mind cannot create concepts or images that correspond to universal terms.
Realism
The theory that universals exist in addition to particulars, and that all entities can be categorized as either particulars or universals. Realist philosophies include Platonic realism and the hylomorphic substance theory of Aristotle.
Nominalism and realism were two major theoretical positions in the later Middle Ages, and were particularly important to theological scholars. For example, Thomas Aquinas was a prominent realist philosopher who argued that essence and existence were distinct. William of Ockham was a prominent nominalist philosopher who argued that universals were psychological labels.
___Google AI overview
Ok, so we can guess that what initially gets them going is motion associated by a gesture you make which is related to "play time". Once the reach the object, maybe they try to life it up, maybe they get confused for a moment and then they look at you or ignore the object.
Here's the issue: why don't they pick up the object? Is it because they experience its structure as being too big and then retreat? Or is it an innate predisposition that makes them realize that this thing is too heavy (not related to structure) ?
I don't know. I think we can agree that the best we can do in the human case, which is the case in which we have the most data, is to try to understand a little why people do what they do - and even that is very hard very frequently.
When it comes to other animals, we are effectively guessing. Maybe they don't pick it up because they perceive a structure that's too big, maybe it's an innate response related to heaviness or pain avoidance.
Quoting Janus
Here is where we disagree, and I don't see a remedy. I think the experiences are, in large part, very different. Sometimes there can be overlap - no creature is going to run into a fire or jump from a large distance. But whereas I think you are attributing this to shared structure, I think it's an innate response (not conscious) related to survival.
How much we share is very difficult to ascertain, but I think we could be misleading ourselves if we take ourselves to be reliable narrators of things outside us (the world, including other animals). It was no until we began to doubt our shared experiences, that modern science arose.
Also, one should mention dogs are the creatures which we have most co-existed with out of all animals, making them particularly misleading, imo.
That's interesting to me. I think conceptualization of any kind is quite remarkable, even proto-conceptualization. But language is a unique instance, so far as we know, so it is, in a sense, more "special".
Quoting goremand
It's tricky to know where the cut-off point between explicit consciousness (such as elephants or monkeys) stops and mere reaction kicks in, maybe a fish or an oyster. But I do believe there is such a point.
To talk in this manner about machines, is to play with words, it's not substantive as I see it. So, we agree here.
That is a very perceptive question, and the precise point at issue in another current thread on metaphysical realism and anti-realism (there's a lot of crossover between the two threads). As I'm generally advocating an idealist approach, then I'm in the anti-realist camp, although the term bothers me, because I am still acutely aware of many real things that have to be dealt with on a daily basis. ('Life is like a movie, but with actual pain'.)
My spontaneous response is that I think classical philosophy had the insight that we do not, by default, know what anything actually is. If you go back to Parmenides, his fragmentary prose-poem says outright that most human beings are ensnared in an illusory domain where they entertain opinions about unreal things. And come to think of it, in today's hyper-connected and social-media-dominated world, that really doesn't seem so far-fetched. Wisdom is not being deluded, but then, delusion is ubiquitous. Not necessarily to the point of gross delusion and actual mental illness, but in the middle of the bell curve of normality. So we tend to look to science and objective judgement as the arbiter of what is real and the antidote to delusion, but the problem with that is that science is largely quantitative and arms-length. Actual life is too close to bring such an approach to bear. But the effect of that belief is to form the notion that reality is what already exists, and we gradually expand and enhance our knowledge of it. That is what is generally understood by realism. So in that context, 'mind-independent' means objective, not a matter of opinion, the criterion of what is actually so. I copied some scrapbook lecture notes on Heidegger above which address this point.
'Heidegger argues that scientific objectivity is grounded in a specific metaphysical framework: the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy. This framework presumes that the world is composed of objects existing independently of the observer, available for detached study and measurement. Consequently it overlooks the more fundamental ways in which humans encounter the world as being-in-the-world (Dasein). Scientific objectivity reduces things to mere "present-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit), stripping away their richer modes of existence as they are experienced in the lifeworld.
Heideggers overarching concern is that science forgets or obscures the question of Being (Sein). By focusing only on what can be measured or quantified, science neglects the broader ontological context in which things appear as meaningful. This leads to an impoverished understanding of reality, where the richness of Being is replaced by a narrow focus on instrumental utility or efficiency.'
I've only read a little of Heidegger, but that diagosis makes perfect sense to me.
Quoting Gnomon
In Aristotelian philosophy, the mind is united with the forms of particulars by the understanding. That prevents the sense of separateness or 'otherness' that haunts modern culture. That's a big topic.
But is it not most reasonable to think they are responses (whether innate or not) perhaps to survival, or perhaps to enjoying themselves or whatever, to different things in different situations? And when we observe them do not those responses make sense to us in terms of what we see those different things in different contexts to be?
I mean you seem not to want to admit that the dog sees a ball, and yet you say the dog sees me making a gesture or movement. So my dogs see me and I'm an object in the environment. My dogs recognize meof that there is no doubt. Now they may well not see me in the same way as people do (but then different people may not see me in exactly the same way either).
Also you say that dogs will not jump into a fire or from a high placeso it follows that they perceive fire and high places. They also do not bump into trees or walls (unless they are blind which was the case with my mother's cocker spaniel when I was a kid). They behave differently and consistently towards different things in the environment and that behavior makes sense in terms of how we perceive those objects. I don't know what else to say. If you remain unconvinced then I have nothing further to add.
Of course, there is no doubt, they react to things and are often happy with humans and other dogs, sometimes even with other creatures.
Quoting Janus
You seem to want to say that you know what dogs see. I don't claim to have that level of epistemic access, that is why Nagel wrote and people debate "what it's like to see a bat".
Let me speak in your terms, yes dogs see certain balls they play with. How they see it and most importantly, if it is similar to the way I see it, I cannot say - it's not possible to say because we are not dogs.
I am not denying they see things and play with things. I just think you are claiming to know more than what is possible for us to know. Maybe I am wrong - I freely admit that. Maybe dogs do see balls very similarly to the way we do and maybe dogs see you in a way that other people do. I would be extremely skeptical.
When you say other people don't see you in the exact way - well, I mean - if you mean "exactly the same way" for other people is somewhat akin to a dog also seeing you as other people do, but in a slightly different way, then I don't know what to say here. These seem to be astronomically different.
And again, no bullshit or false modesty or anything, I could be completely wrong. I only say that I just don't find it convincing.
Quoting Janus
They do not jump from high places or don't go into fire as soon as they are born! If that is not innate, I don't know what is. So, they don't do something before they even develop into a mature animal. Clearly, they do many things at the very moment they perceive the world, there is no time for "learning from perception" here, it's at first instance.
And that goes for many animals, turtles racing to the ocean as soon as they hatch, birds reacting to mother giving them worms before they can see, etc, etc.
Now, if dogs see fire and high places like we do, again, I don't know. Maybe.
Sure, again, they don't run into concrete things, no animal does that I know of. I am not saying they don't see a world and react to it. But that it makes sense to you (or me, or any other human being alive) says very little about how the dog actually experiences the world, that's a massive leap into claiming knowledge about a different creature.
Ending on a point of agreement, I hope: they may have some basic "ideas", such as play, prey, anger, protection, the basic things all animals need for survival. In so far as we also have these basic notions, there is some overlap, sure. Clearly food, mating, danger and like basic emotions we also have, beyond that, I don't know how they see and experience the world. I can guess, but that's the best we can do.
The way I see it conceptualization per se is not even an ability or a behavior, it's an abstraction that only makes sense in a particular context. It's like the "ability" to make a move in chess.
Quoting Manuel
I really do not believe there is such a point, and I don't think consciousness is relevant to the issue at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
This doesn't exactly answer my question. What I want to know is if you substantively disagree with the realist worldview or if you merely dislike the way it frames or conceptualizes reality (or maybe, just the fact that it's been privileged with a kind of conceptual hegemony).
To use Kastrup as an example again, I am convinced that he substantively disagrees with mainstream physicalism. He doesn't just look at the same things in a different light, he has a radically different worldview. So are you like him in that respect?
As do I, for reasons I have given in the original post, and defended in numerous subsequent entries.
I'm sure that's true, but it isn't obvious to me from the OP or from what I've read in your other posts. The proposition that "reality is created by the mind" at first seems like an attack on physicalism/realism (whichever term you like), but when I look at your explanation in detail the term "reality" instead seems to refer to "our particular conception of reality", which is amounts to a rather humble claim, not really an attack at all.
Please pardon my intrusion. Yes, is not the type to make arrogant or aggressive attacks on debatable philosophical positions. He's usually more subtly nuanced. And his "humble" approach may seem less impressive than the more arrogant assertions of Scientism.
For example, his stated position in the OP does not deny the physical "reality" (science) that we all sense, but his interpretation also includes some aspects of Idealism (philosophy). I can't speak for Wayfarer, but this thread has been going on for over a year. Yet, some posters still can't reconcile his "proposition", that harks back to the ancient origins of theoretical philosophy, with the Physicalism/Materialism/Realism of modern pragmatic science. Each has it's own purview, but Philosophy specializes in inferred generalizations, not observed details. For philosophers, the "mind-created world" is a Cosmos, not an aggregation of particles. Just keep that distinction in mind.
FWIW, Marc Wittmann Ph.D. --- research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany --- recently wrote an article in Psychology Today magazine entitled Physicalism Is Dead*1. It's less an attack on Physicalism/Realism than a presentation of alternative views of the Mind/Body relationship. It's not about specific scientific facts, but about the philosophical interpretation of general principles. :smile:
*1. Wittman's key points are :
# The reductionist physicalist position entails that phenomenal consciousness does not exist.
# Scientists increasingly realize that phenomenal consciousness can't be explained by the workings of the brain.
# For idealism, subjectivity undeniably has primacy when it comes to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
# For dual-aspect monism, consciousness and the brain are two different aspects of a same underlying reality.
Note --- Phenomenal Consciousness is the Mind that we experience subjectively, not the Brain that scientists study objectively.
"Yes, phenomenal consciousness is the subjective aspect of experiencing the world. It's the rich, first-person experience of what it's like to be you, including your thoughts, memories, and internal biological processes." ___Google AI overview
Physicalism Is Dead :
Alternative views on the mind-body problem are becoming increasingly popular.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sense-of-time/202411/physicalism-is-dead
How do you get outside the human conception of reality to see the world as it truly is? That is the probably the question underlying all philosophy. And one aim of the original post was for me to present idealism in a way that isn't understood to mean that the world is all in the mind or the product of the imagination. And it's not an attack on 'realism' per se. It's a criticism of the idea that the criterion for what is real, is what exists independently of the mind, which is a specific (and fallacious) form of realism.
:up: The times certainly are a'changing.
The dog's behavior shows that he sees me and the ball and many other things in the environment. His behavior towards different things I see him reacting in different ways to is consistent with the qualities I perceive in those different things. That's all I'm claiming. I am not claiming that he sees things exactly as I do or that I can eneter his mind such as to know what he sees with certainty.. I am not even claiming that I can enter your mind and know with certainty that you see things exactly as I do. But if we are looking at an object and I see various small and subtle details on that object I can be fairly confident that if I point to them and ask you what small and subtle details you see there that your account will accord pretty much with mine. That suggests that what is there is real independently of us. Unless of course our minds are connected in some way unbeknownst to us and we are somehow sharing in a collective dream.
Quoting Manuel
They wouldn't react that way if they were blind and felt no bodily sensations, though, would they? If not then we can conclude that they feel the heat and sense the height just as do. I don't know if this is universally true, but it is said that dogs already react instinctively to snakes when they are very young, but would you expect them to do that if they could not sense the presence of the snake?
Quoting Manuel
Again, I'm not claiming exhaustive knowledge or certainty about how dogs experience the world, but I think observing them react to things in the environment in ways consistent with the qualities we perceive those things to have, plus the fact we know they have sense organs and bodies not all that different to ours give us reason to believe that they at least see the things in the environment that we see, and that those things exist independently of us and the dogs, whatever the ultimate nature of those existences are. So, I don't see that I'm claiming anything which is not consistent with our experiences. That said of course we cannot be absolutely certain of anything.
I don't think that is the most important question in philosophy by any stretch because the simple answer is "You can't get outside of human conceptions of reality". (There are human conceptions of reality, not just one conception).
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course the criteria (there is not merely one criterion) for what is real do not exist independently of the mind that asks the questionthat is true by definition. What is real though most plausibly does exist independently of the mind or at least that part of reality which is dependent on the mind is only a part, the part we can know. The rest is forever out of reach, and I think we have every reason to think that is so.
Yes. It strikes me that much of the argument provided by can also be used to support a robust skepticism of the transcendent. Since we can't access reality, how do we know there is a reality beyond the reality we know? Perhaps it's perspectives all the way down. :wink: English philosopher Hilary Lawson makes similar arguments to Wayfarer, but is led to skepticism rather than mysticism - mysticism being just one more mind created reality and futile project to arrive at Truth.
Well, consider the role of not knowing, of intellectual humility, of all I know is that I know nothing, of he that knows it, knows it not. Accessing reality sounds like something you need a swipe card for.
Maybe that's were we've been going wrong. It might even be an app...
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm pretty satisfied not knowing.
Insofar as it is mind-created it is delusory. Mysticism proper is seeing through what the mind creates. Theres a term for that in Buddhism, called prapanca, meaning conceptual proliferation, detailed in a text delightfully called the Honeyball Sutta.
I think skepticism is the right position, philosophically speaking. The transcendent can mean nothing to us, philosophically and that's why I say it is not the most important philosophical question. But the fact that we can have a feel for the transcendent is, I think of philosophical, of existential, importance. That feeling just is the mystical. The mystical cannot yield discursive knowledge, it just gives us a kind of special poetry. It can be life-transforming, and that transformation does not consist in knowing anything, but in feeling a very different way. Not everyone responds to that, and ultimately, I don't think it matters.
Yes, I am familiar with the belief and I was involved in these sorts of pursuits many years ago.
Quoting Janus
That's an interesting way of putting it. I guess something similar to Wittgenstein's, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
As for the rest, I can take it or leave it, but generally the latter.
There is nothing arrogant about advancing clear arguments. And I ever said his approach was humble, I said his claim was humble. Meaning: trivial, uncontroversial.
Quoting Gnomon
What a shame. I'd love to read an attack on physicalism, especially of the eliminativist variety. Though I wouldn't expect much from an article that quotes Galen Strawson, the lamest critic I've ever read.
Quoting Wayfarer
In other words, it is a claim that is compatible with some forms of realism.
Maybe, but it is far from demonstrable that you're correct on this. How would we know? (That's rhetorical, not needing a lengthy explanation of metaphysical answers.) view here seems entirely plausible and legitimate. What we simply have here is a disagreement about how the world may be. You both are aware of the same accounts, but your inferences take you to different conclusions. I tend to favour skepticism myself.
Sure. Thats a very broad category. Im not nihilist.
Which is fine. But why would you expect otherwise? What epistemic access do you have to compare your view to something else's? So of course, you will interpret the world and other creatures' behavior, in a way that makes sense to you.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, it would make sense for them to perceive threats for survival. Otherwise, we wouldn't have dogs, which would be bad.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, I am not denying that the use experimental medication on mice, then they move on to humans.
But we should be cautious in paying to much attention to outer features (eyes, organs), with inner experience.
If the philosophical approach of the OP is "trivial, uncontroversial", then why has it evoked polarized controversial arguments for over a year? Apparently, the relationship of material Reality to mental Mind touches a nerve for some posters on this forum.
The only thing unclear about the OP is that it is not a simplistic Either/Or argument, but as I see it, a sophisticated Both/And position of complementarity*1. Few philosophers would deny that the Real world includes both Matter and Mind. The debate is about how to reconcile that apparent Cartesian duality within a general worldview. Strawson has one solution, and another. What's yours? :smile:
*1. Complementarity is the realization that a single thing, when considered from different perspectives, can appear to have different, or even contradictory, properties. Complementarity alerts us that answering different kinds of questions can require radically different approaches.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-expanding-power-of-complementarity/
Quoting goremand
Apparently, you like nice neat Either/Or dichotomies. Did you interpret Strawson's position as an attack on Physicalism? Ironically, he claims to be a proponent of Physicalism*2. But how, then, can he say that "physicalism entails panpsychism"? Maybe his position is complementary*2, which you interpret as "lame". :grin:
*2. Is Galen Strawson a physicalist?
As a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical, and I am happy to say, along with many other physicalists, that experience is 'really just neurons firing', at least in the case of biological organisms like ourselves.
https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf
Note --- The subtitle of the linked article is : "Realistic Monism : Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism"
Quoting goremand
Yes. I think Wayfarer's notion of Mind/World is "compatible" with Realism, in the sense that Mind & Matter are complementary, not oppositions : not one to the exclusion of the other. But it's difficult to articulate that subtle inter-relationship in terms of our matter-oriented language. For example, to say that mind is immaterial, could be interpreted to mean that "mind doesn't matter" : i.e. trivial. :nerd:
DEATH EATER : gluttonous gourmand or moderate-idea consumer?
I can observe other creatures' behavior towards things in the environment. It's not a matter of interpretation. I can see that their different behaviors towards different things and I know those behaviors are in accordance with how I understand those thingstrees, walls, doorways, balls, fire, high places, and cars and so on.
Anyway I've said all I have to say. Anything else will just be repetition.
Quoting Manuel
It seems you missed the point entirely. The point was that innate or not they would have to perceive those threats, which would mean they would have to have functioning sense organssense organs not so different from ours.
Quoting Manuel
I don't even know what this means. If it means you think we should not make inferences from the similarities of other animals' sense organs and bodies to ours to similarities between the nature of other animals' experience and ours, I don't see why not. I think those structural similarities along with the intelligibility of other animals' behavior towards things in the environment give us very good reason to make such inferences. What else could we possibly have to go on?
If it means we should not feel absolutely certainty about the soundness of such inferences I agree, but I see little reason to doubt it. I don't think we should feel absolutely certain about almost anything in any "ultimate" sense. Science itself remains forever defeasible.
Anyway, I'll repeat that I have nothing more to say on this. If we still disagree then I'm fine with that, even if I can't understand why it should be so.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, I think this is exactly right. Some proponents of different views seem to think it is self-evident that their opponents are being inconsistent or incoherent and hence wrong by default. I don't think that and go only with what seems most plausible to me or else suspend judgment. If anything, I'd say my most basic position is skepticismI just don't think we know or even can know all that much.
I have a long history of posting critical comments about Daniel Dennett, who is the main representative of eliminative materialism.
Bernardo Kastrup is strident in his criticism of materialism, with titles such as Materialism is Baloney. But hes not well-regarded on this forum either, the consensus being in threads posted in years past that hes dismissed as an eccentric or a crank. I dont in the least agree with that description, but I also mention him only sparingly from time to time.
Yeah. Let's leave it there for the time being. It was still an interesting chat. :up:
I can't speak for other people but I found it quite provocative at first glance, and to his credit @Wayfarer still gives substantial responses to other posters which I'm sure helps keep the thread active.
Quoting Gnomon
I wouldn't call myself call myself an eliminativist, but substantively I'm close enough to resent Strawson calling it "absurd", "great silliness", "dumbest thing ever", etc.
Quoting Gnomon
Yes.
Quoting Gnomon
No, you tend to overinterpret what I write somewhat. I only know Strawson as a critic of eliminativism, and that's the role he plays in the article.
Quoting Gnomon
In the game I think he ate souls or something. I was twelve when I came up with this handle.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that he essentially was, although he never admitted it himself. But do you believe I can find in your critical comments something more insightful than the willful non-engagement I've found in Strawson, Nagel, Searle, etc.?
Quoting Wayfarer
I like him fine, but to my knowledge he never took eliminative materialism seriously either.
They're all different. We've had debates here about Strawson's panpsychism, which I've never agreed with. I think he tries to rescue materialism by injecting matter with some kind of 'secret sauce'. The same goes for Philip Goff. (Actually, Goff once signed up for this forum, purely to respond to my criticism of one of his articles, which I was chuffed by.) Searle, I've only ever read the Chinese Room argument, but I think it stacks up. As for Thomas Nagel, he's been a pretty vociferous critic of Dennett. But the best overall take-down is The Illusionist, David Bentley Hart, in The New Atlantis, in which he says some of Dennett's arguments are 'so preposterous as to verge on the deranged' (although a close runner-up would be The God Genome by Leon Wieseltier, a review of one of his books).
But this is exactly what I mean, harsh words to cover up the lack up substance in the reply. There is no need to argue anything if you can just insist that your thesis is "obvious" and the other is "absurd", "ridiculous" and "preposterous". Strawson is the master of this approach, utterly shameless in my opinion. At least Chalmers used polite words like "counterintuitive".
Dennett didn't do this situation any favors either by being so willing to play word-games with mental concepts, always saying "I don't doubt X, I just don't think X is what you think it is", as if that's not substantively the same thing.
This is to say every reply or critical review of Dennett's books have been a disappointment to me, and that includes the two you posted, which I read long ago.
I don't know anything about Eliminativism, beyond the Wikipedia article that discusses both sides of the argument. But my first impression is that both Materialism/Eliminativism, and Mentalism/Positivism --- or whatever the opposite theory is called --- are metaphysical conjectures, not scientific facts. So, lacking slam-dunk physical evidence pro or con, the argument could go on forever, as in this thread. Therefore, the contrasting views seem to be based on a personal preference for one kind of world or another : tangible, physical stuff vs imaginary, metaphysical*1 concepts.
The Mental world has been interpreted in terms of Souls & Spirits and Ghosts & Goblins ; but also in terms of Intelligence & Information. On the other hand, the Eliminativist position seems to be lacking any notion of a mechanism by which conceptual Qualia, such as Redness & Love could emerge from perceptual Matter by natural means. Hence, your preference for "clear" Black vs White dichotomies seems doomed to frustration. Unless of course, you simply believe one or the other based on Faith. Is that an "overinterpretation" of your Either/Or position? :smile:
*1. Metaphysical : relating to "the essentially metaphysical question of the nature of the mind"
___ Oxford dictionary
Note --- Is Mind something that can be dissected by scientists with scalpels, or a holistic function of a material brain, that must be inferred by reason?
A preference that can't be justified has no place in a discussion. In this case the justification for eliminativism would be parsimony.
Quoting Gnomon
But of course. Qualia is the very thing to be eliminated, there will be no Love and no Redness. That is not the problem but the solution.
What you're describing (qualia "emerging" from matter) is called emergentism and is an altogether different view.
No experience at all?
How do you justify a preference for parsimony? Does it allow you to summarily eliminate the entities you don't like?
Qualitative Experience can't be dissected by scientists, so simply eliminate it as immaterial. But then, Metaphysics is all about immaterial ideas, so eliminate Philosophy : yes/no? :smile:
Because it can lack firmness and consistency when applied to complex ideas or phenomena, Occam's razor is more commonly seen as a guiding heuristic than as a principle of absolute truth. ___Wikipedia
Quoting goremand
Perhaps the most parsimonious way to eliminate Qualia is suicide. :joke:
But unless one is enlightened, one cannot talk about these things with any kind of integrity, nor demand respect from others as if one in fact knew what one is talking about.
What so often happens in discussions of transcendental and mystical topics is that people admit to being unenlightened, but then they still tell others how to become enlightened, and then they take umbrage at other people not being impressed or convinced.
It's not that those others are too materialistic, or have too much of the proverbial dust in their eyes. Their negative reaction to unenlightened people teaching about enlightenment is perfectly normal and justified: it's only normal not to want to take lessons from someone who admits to not having realized them.
(Notice how it is a rule for Theravada monks not to teach people other than in a few specific situations.)
This is what a realist says, yes.
My reference to Buddhism was in respect of a glossary term in Buddhist lexicon which was relevant to the question. Im not offering teachings or putting myself up as enlightened. This is a philosophy forum, and this thread a discussion of a philosophical topic, if it makes you uncomfortable then perhaps you shouldnt involve yourself.
Duh. Oh, please. I'm trying to explain to you why you often get the negative reactions you do and how come there is so much bad blood between you and some others.
Despite what some Westerners like to believe, Buddhism is not a philosophy and is not intended to be discussed at philosophy forums, in the manner of Western secular academia.
What you're experiencing is a case of grasping the snake of the Dhamma at the wrong end, at the tail, and thus getting bitten. But you don't seem to understand that, and instead blame your opponents.
Even positing no qualitative experience seems wrongheaded, let alone positing no experience at all. Don't some experiences feel good and others bad? It seems superfluous to say that we experience a quality of experiences over and above the experiences. I think 'qualia' in its subjective sense as opposed to its 'sense data' sense is a kind of reification, and maybe the latter is too.
We don't perceive red quales we perceive red things. Just different ways of talking I guess, but one seems less parsimonious. Is there any fact of the matter I wonder? It seems redundant to say we experience the quality of beer, for example, rather than just saying we drink the beer. Sure, the beer has a taste, but that is not separate from its fizziness and its coldness, and they are all just a part of drinking it.
Right, we all (hopefully) say what seems most reasonable to us personally. No one knows for sure so we are stuck with what seems most plausible. Of course that varies depending on one's starting presuppositions.
Quoting baker
I tend to agree with this, although I would say not only "unless" but "even if". I don't know what it means to be enlightened, or even if there really is such a state, but I'm quite sure it does not mean discursively knowing the answer to all kinds of philosophical questions.
If you believe being enlightened is a real thing, what leads you to believe it, presuming you are not yourself enlightened?
Says you, who just this minute has pasted an entire paragraph from the Pali texts into another thread.
I dont see any bad blood. Hostile reactions are only to be expected when peoples instinctive sense of reality is called into question. I know mine is a minority position but that in itself gives me no concern.
Yes, that's what I mean. That's why it's not redundant. My experience of it is something extra. Something on top of just drinking it.
I haven't seen any hostile reactions. I've seen some impatient and frustrated ones.
Quoting Patterner
You can think of it like that, but really your experience of it is nothing over and above your drinking of it, except as an (unnecessary) idea.
Sure we enjoy drinking the beer or whatever, sometimes more sometimes less consciously. Drinking the beer may initiate feelings in the body that we can be more or less aware of. I don't see any reason to think machines have such experiences. The redundant feature is that these feelings are reified as a kind of entity we call qualia, which are over and above the drinking of the beer or whatever.
Everyone has a preference for parsimony, until it's their turn to put something on the chopping block.
Quoting Gnomon
I'm starting to suspect you're not taking me entirely seriously.
Quoting Janus
I always thought that was the whole point, if qualia does not refer to something with its own ontology above and beyond the physical process of an experience there's really no use to the word at all.
, I'm not sure I understand what you think is redundant. I don't mean that in a smartass way. I mean I'm not sure what you're saying.
I guess what they are saying is that ideas are redundant in a material world. Only the senses of vision, hearing, touch & smell are important for Materialists. Even a blind mindless mole can find a worm without imagining it.
What you experience subjectively in the Cartesian Theatre is immaterial, hence not useful (i.e. redundant). What they are implying is that you are mistaking your abstract mental feeling for a concrete material object. But I'm sure that's not how you feel about it. What is a Philosophy Forum for, it not for sharing subjective Ideas & Feelings encapsulated in artificial words? Do they have a mechanism for sharing Sense Data over the internet?
Since they view Qualia as non-existent, or even superfluous, I assume they don't have any use for the redness or the sweetness of a rose, as long as they can see & smell it. Those qualitative words (and their associated ideas) in our common languages are redundant in a physics lab. All they need is the data. So, when you insist that the rose smells sweet, it's as-if you are reifying an idea. But, really all you are doing is experiencing the sensation.
The bottom line here is that you are speaking a different language (Empirical vs Experiential) from the Materialists. But apparently your attempts at translation have fallen on deaf ears. :wink:
"Yes, "qualia" is a philosophical idea that refers to the subjective, qualitative aspects of conscious experience"
"Reifying an idea is the act of treating an abstract concept as if it were a concrete thing".
___Google AI overview
After I wrote the post above, I read this statement in a National Geographic magazine article about Artificial Intelligence. Under the title : Do we have to accept that machines are fallible?, it says "That's a big issue facing AI right now --- these evolving algorithms can hallucinate, a term for what happens when a learning model produces a statement that sounds plausible but has been made up. This is because generative AI applications . . . work functionally as a prediction program".
Most definitions of AI "hallucinations" describe it as "false" data. But if you think of it as "anticipation", it could be useful information for entities that encounter rapid change, as in modern human cultures. The human brain seems to have adapted to deal with complex social networks, in which the ability to anticipate behaviors, or to read other minds would be beneficial.
I suspect that is critical of a crucial function of General Intelligence : that it goes beyond the facts, the raw data, to infer something that is not-yet-real ; maybe even ideal. An imaginary inference exists only as an immaterial idea. Even though it is embodied in a machine or brain, the idea (prediction ; conjecture) is not meaningful or useful except for another predictive intelligence. For a digital computer, not-yet-real data is erroneous information. For AI and human Intelligence, that data may be useful for anticipating future or possible situations. Yes, human brains are fallible, but they are also surprisingly adaptable to evolving realities. :smile:
I haven't spoken with ChatGPT in more than a year. But back then, it was making mistakes. I pointed out factual errors occasionally, and it apologized, saying I was correct. It never gave me an answer as to how it made such an obvious error. It has all the information instantly available, but gives the wrong answer?
Quoting Patterner
An ontology is something we posit. If something is real in the physical sense it has effects on and relations with other physical things. What effects do you think our (purported) experience of qualia has over and above the effects of the neuronal and bodily processes which seem almost unquestionably to give rise to it?
I'm not saying that our feelings and creative imagination have no value but that there seems no substantive reason to believe they are not real, physical, neuronal, endocrinal and bodily processes. That from a linguistically mediated "perspective" (which is really just another neuronal process) it doesn't seem that way would seem to be just a quirk of language.
I don't deny that for us the most important things are the emotions and the creative imagination. They enrich life. I see no reason to think of them in some unknowable sense as "non-physical" as if that would somehow impart greater value to them. I think it is only a concern with something transcendent which is imagined to come after this life that leads people to be concerned about a purported disvalue inherent in the thinking that takes things to be just material/ physical. If you don't have that need for the transcendent then what difference does it make if you think things are all physical or functions of the physical?
All that said, I don't think it really makes any difference if people want to have faith in something transcendent if that is what they need and as long as that thinking doesn't negatively impact significant issues in this life on account of them being thought to be of lesser importance.
Ultimately, it's a personal matter and I don't think it really has much place in useful philosophical discussion because it just comes down to personal preference. And yet it seems to be one of the issues that fire people up the most. Could be something to do with the religious conditioning of our thinking which I think we are all subject to even when our upbringings are secular. It still permeates the culture, and it would be interesting to see how things differ if and when religion completely loses its hold. I don't think that day is too far away, but I probably won't see it in my lifetime.
The bottom line for me is that the belief that the world is created by the mind is religiously motivated in a mostly unacknowledged way.
Ditto. It seems to confabulate.
I could say something to you right now which would raise your blood pressue and affect your adrenal glands. And in so doing, nothing physical would have passed between us.
That's just not true. If you are talking about what you write on the computer, then I would be looking at shapes (letters, words and sentences) on a screen which means the light from the screen enters my eyes and stimulates rods and cones, causing nerve impulses which travel to the brain and cause neuronal activity which in turn may or may not raise my blood pressure and affect my adrenal glands.
Quoting Patterner
Well, just for a lark, I asked ChatGPT about whether it is possible to detect the physical correlates of emotional states, such as anxiety, and whether it might be possible to devise an AI system which could derive such results all by itself, both of which questions it answered in the affirmative. (You can review the interaction here.)
You've made two responses in a single post, the top seems to be your original work and the bottom is entirely chatGPT. I believe this is against the spirit of the prohibition while satisfying its letter.
Anyway - the point is made, I'll remove the text and refer to the link.
I'm afraid I still disagree. Intentional activities, interpretations and affects can all be understood to be neuronal processes. Of course we don't interpret things in terms of neuronal processes, that would be to commit a category error, but it doesn't follow that interpreting is not a neuronal process. Same for impatience and frustration. You say they are not physical states, but I believe they are neuronal, endocrinally mediated states. although I would use 'process' instead of 'state'.
I believe it is reasonable to think that meaning is understood because of activation of pre-established neuronal networks in the brain. An example would be learning a language. Learning a language sets up neural networks, which are activated when reading or hearing someone speak the learned language. If one has not learned a language at all no understanding is possible.
Well, as you never tire of telling me, people tend to believe what suits them. And just because something can be described as 'neurological' doesn't mean that it's wholly physical, unless you're into neural reductionism, which you may well be.
I have no emotional investment in believing what I believe. It is simply what I have come to think most plausible. And for the record I say that people generally believe what they think is most plausible. That said, some people are more affected by what they want to believe than others areI think there is little reason to doubt that.
Quoting JanusI thought I was following you, even if disagreeing, until this paragraph. What impact does that thinking have over and above the effects of the neuronal and bodily processes which seem almost unquestionably to give rise to it? If that's all there is, then how [I]can[/I] it have any impact? I see you responding to Wayfarer, saying his (his?) ability to say something to you which would raise your blood pressue and affect your adrenal glands amounts to physical interactions. What if he does, indeed, raise your BP, affect your adrenal glands, and whatever other things. In that state, you might, say, react violently when someone you love does or says something you don't like a few minutes later? Is it not just the physical interactions taking place, having nothing to do with your experience of the sum of all those interactions? What does "as long as" mean in this context?
Right, and furthermore, as you also often say, it doesnt matter anyway.
I don't question the idea that we experience things.
In response to your question about people being emotionally affected by things that are said to them or by things they believe; I don't deny any of thatI just think it is all physical processes. So, I'm not understanding your puzzlement. I'm not totally wedded to believing that it is all physical processes, that just seems to me the more plausible option. I don't believe there is any determinable fact of the matter about all this.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't see the point of this comment. Is it meant to be some kind of criticism? When I say it doesn't matter what I believe I mean that I cannot help being convinced by what I am convinced by, and I also believe that is the case with all of us. We don't choose to find most plausible what we do find most plausible, we just find it most plausible. Although maybe some people are more motivated by what they want to be true than by concerns about plausibilityI don't deny that..
Different people may be more or less free of confirmation bias, but it doesn't follow that they have any choice in the matter of whether or not they are affected by it. People don't always understand their own motivations. I don't deny the possibility that I don't understand my own motivations. I am always willing to change my mind, which I have done a few times in the years since I've been participating in philosophy forums, as well as prior to that, ever since I began thinking about these things and reading philosophy. I wonder if you have ever changed your mind. I've seen no evidence of it.
Do you believe that all materialists have forgotten themselves just because Schopenhauer said so?
Quoting JanusAren't you saying the equivalent of, "I don't think comets make any difference, as long as they don't crash into us and negatively impact significant issues"? If we are just the sum of uncountable physical events, then no feelings or beliefs that result from that sum make us any more able to not negatively impact anything than a comet is. Some of us will end up with the feelings and beliefs that don't negatively impact things. But those that end up with the negatively impacting feelings and beliefs are just comets caught in the gravity well. No?
What is 'physical event'? There's not much use saying that it's neural or neurological, because there's no reason to believe that neuroscience ought to be necessarily physicalist. Some well-known neuroscientists, including Wilder Penfield and John Eccles, have published books against it. One of the canonical books on the subject,The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Hacker and Bennett, comes out strongly against materialist philosophy of mind (and Bennett was a neuroscientist, Hacker being a philosopher). Besides, in what sense is the brain a physical organ? It's an object of study for neuroscience, but the brain in situ is embedded in an organism, in an environment, in a culture. What does it mean to say that it's physical? That it falls at the same rate as other objects if you drop it? Other than that, it simply means commitment to materialism as a philosophy or metaphysic.
'Physical events', then, ought to be considered as those events that can be described in terms of physics and arguably chemistry. That's what materialists are committed to defending. But
[quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness; https://consc.net/papers/facing.html]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
It's not even clear what Janus is arguing about. For instance:
Quoting Janus
Here, it is acknowledged that machines don't have 'such' experiences, although really a machine doesn't have any experiences, and nowadays we have machines that are smart enough to tell you that (as I've already demonstrated).
But then:
Quoting Janus
So, here, 'real' is said to be physical, neuronal, endicronal. We can take it that all of those are metabolic processes. But again, that is no answer to Chalmer's challenge - he would not deny that feelings have physical correlates or give rise to metabolic processes, as I've already acknowledged. But that as they occur within or to subjects as qualities of experience, then no objective description of metabolic processes can capture their first-person nature. And that is indeed a 'substantive' reason.
Quoting Patterner
:up:
I'll add that the reason that this argument can even be entertained, is because being - the being that you are, and I am - is never an object of consciousness. You can never find it in the natural world, nor in the discoveries of the natural sciences, because it is that which discovers, it is the subject of experience, not an object of analysis. It can be debated only because we ourselves are beings. But if asked to prove or show what being is, then we cannot, for those very reasons.
I have the feeling, from what small amounts of Heidegger I've read, that this is something he would concur with, as he wrote extensively on the 'forgetting of being', and I think this is what he was talking about.
I think it is mighty presumptuous of you to think that people have "forgotten themselves" just because they think the physicalist account is the most plausible. Seems to me that attitude refects nothing other than your own prejudices.
Quoting Patterner
No, I'm not saying anything like your 'comet' analogy.
What we believe will be determinitive of what we do, broadly speaking. I just don't conceive of our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires as being non-physical or immaterial (in either sense). In fact it is on account of their physicality that they can be causally efficacious. Otherwise we would be looking at dualism which comes with the interaction problem.
Never! :yikes:
A better analogy might be flight as the product of a spinning wheel. Again, both are physical. But flight is a process, as is consciousness. But, as I've quoted before, Brian Greene states the problem nicely in [I]Until the End of Time[/I]:[Quote=Greene] And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a headwhich is all that a brain iscreate impressions, sensations, and feelings?[/quote]While consciousness is the subjective experience of physical things and events, there is no hint of the physical about it. Let's say very intellectually and technologically advanced beings from another galaxy, who are made of very a different mixture of elements than we are made of, found one of us, and could study us completely at any level, even down to watching every individual particle in us. What is there about the many physical structures and processes that would would suggest to them that we are conscious? Why would they think we are more than robots? Consciousness is surely the subjective experience of physical things. But the physical things don't hint at the subjective experience. Something is happening in addition to the physical things.
I don't think it's a matter of demonstrating that it's not a product of physical events. I think it's a matter of demonstrating it is. Everyone I've read who believes physicalism is the answer says we just need to wait until the physicalist answer is figured out. But that's not evidence that physicalism holds the answer. Neither is physicalism's amazing successes in many physical pursuits. Neither is the fact that we've only found physical things with our physical sciences.
Yep, I get it. I'm not sure we have coherent explanation of the material or the immaterial, whatever that could be. I believe both are held up by a scaffolding of biases. I don't have enough expertise to commit any particular account of subjective experince and recognize that the experts don't really know yet either. Can I do a Chomsky and be a Mysterian? I find it enjoyably ironic that it might be the case that we lack cognitive ability to determine why we have cognitive abilities.
All of Greene's books, of which I've read The Fabric of the Universe, consist of paper and ink. Is that all they are? How does the meaning they convey arise from the combination of ink and paper?
The 'all it is', is physicalist reductionism (i.e. 'it's nothing but....') Even worse, Greene, a physicist, knows that it's not even strictly correct to describe atoms as 'particles'. They are particles in some contexts, and waves in others. In others again, they're described as the excitations of fields, and the nature of fields is far from obvious.
Indeed thats the current model. Will we ever finish arriving at tentative theories? Theories that to some extent peg out a version of reality and allow us to make predictions, until the next one comes along?
This frame probably has special appeal to those who are idealists or religiously inclined.
Quoting Patterner
Well, some might go as far as to call that a clue. But for me the idea that everything is waves when understood from a particular perspective seems a fun notion. When will waves end up being something even more elusive?
It sounds like what you're looking for is a poetry circle. The point of a philosophy forum is solving philosophical problems through cooperative effort and communication. This can only happen given a basis of shared understanding, which in turn means your "subjective ideas" only matter insofar as you can justify them to other people.
Quoting Tom StormI imagine so. But also to people like me.
The meaning arises as a brain (containing neural networks trained to recognize the written language the book is written in) detects patterns in the writing which are associated by that brain with the meaning that arises.
What alternative explanation would you propose? Or even better, how could you falsify my explanation?
I bolded and bolded/underlined the category errors. On one end you have a physical process, on the other hand another thing going on, more associated with mental process (meaning). The explanatory gap between the two, is generally the (hard) question at hand.
The observer being assumed is the slippery homuncular fallacy.
What said is true, but what you interpreted is not what he meant. The "shapes" on a computer screen are indeed physical, but it's their meta-physical*1 meaning (forms) that might affect you : first intellectually, and then emotionally, after the threat to your belief system registers in the brain, and causes a series of physical responses to combat the metaphysical threat. Wayfarer is not going to attack you physically, by sending bullets over the internet. Instead, he could affect you metaphysically, by causing you to believe that you have been psychically injured (offended).
Of course, Wayfarer is much too genteel to resort to such underhanded tactics. Ironically, non-physical verbal attacks on odious beliefs are often used by the Physicalist trolls on this forum to counter-attack those who have offended their mentally-constructed non-ideal worldview. :smile:
*1. By "meta-physical" I don't mean the study of reality, but merely "non-physical" in the sense of "mental" Ideality*2. Ideas instead of Objects. Forms instead of Shapes.
*2. Ideality :
[i]In Platos theory of Forms*3, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
# Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of virtual particles in a mathematical field, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind]
# Some modern idealists find that scenario to be intriguingly similar to Platos notion that ideal Forms can be realized, i.e. meaning extracted, by knowing minds. For the purposes of this blog, Ideality refers to an infinite pool of potential (equivalent to a quantum field), of which physical Reality is a small part.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Note --- Quantum Fields are accepted by scientists as accurate depictions of reality (reified), even though they are immaterial mathematical constructs, and cannot be detected by human senses or instruments, but only known by philosophical inference. They seem to be a scientific version of Plato's Forms, or what I call Ideality.
*3. Theory of Forms :
a theory widely credited to the Classical Greek philosopher Plato. The theory suggests that the physical world is not as real or true as Forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
Note --- Materialism is a belief system that rejects this theory of an immaterial Potential Source (or Field), from which our sensory perceptions of physical Shapes are constructed into the conception that we call Reality. Plato inferred that the intellectual Meaning (definition) of those Shapes is ultimately more important than their physical instantiation. This idealized notion may apply only to sentient creatures capable of inferring abstract meanings from concrete objects. For philosophers, the Potential Source of Forms is also merely an imaginary Idea, not a sensable thing. It's the meaning that matters, not the substance.
Quoting GnomonHeh. I hadn't thought of that. :up:
Some people --- writers, artists, designers --- will get more riled-up if someone steals their Intellectual Property*1 than some tangible physical property. Again, it's the meaning that matters to them. But lawyers have to be very creative to convince a jury, using materialistic language, that something of value has indeed been stolen. How do you think the (hypothetical ; intangible) creator of a Mind Created World would feel about h/er creatures denying the value of h/er most important creation : the human intellect? :joke:
*1. Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. It's a reflection of someone's creativity and can be found in many things, including: computer games, films, cars, and miracle drugs. ___Google AI overview
Intellectual property rights are the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds.
https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel1_e.htm
Correct. To physically affect someone would be to give them a drug or injure them, as you say. But if you say something that annoys them - I do this a lot! - then the causation is on the level of meaning. 'Why did he say that?' 'How could he think that?' These are active on the level of meaning, but which may have physical consequences. It's an example of top-down causation. (I often think about the placebo effect in this context, another example of top-down causation, as according to physicalism, it really ought not to happen.)
Quoting wonderer1
'Arises' from what, exactly? What is the nature of the causal relationship? If meaning arises purely from physical causation, as described by physical and chemical laws, how to account for the gap between these deterministic processes and the open-ended, adaptive nature of life? Even rudimentary organisms exhibit an agency and intentionality absent in inorganic matterthe ability to heal, reproduce, evolve, and maintain homeostasis. From the moment life begins, biological systems exhibit a kind of semiotic agency that transcends the deterministic causal nexus of physics and chemistry. Life doesn't defy physical laws, but requires principles that can't be reduced to that level of explanation. Recognition of this is one of the drivers behind the emergence of biosemiotics, and of the connection between information and biology, none of which is strictly physicalist, although it falls within the ambit of an evolving naturalism. That's the sense in which biology is evolving beyond physicalism, as physics did with the advent of quantum mechanics. And all the same questions apply to the relatonship of neurobiology and semantics.
refs: From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning, Steve Talbott
What is Information?, Marcello Barbieri
I am affected physically by what is said (sound) or what I read (light) and this causes changes in the body and the brain, and those changes are my interpretation of the meaning of what I have heard or seen.
You might not agree with this picture of what is happening, but nothing is missing, except of course complete understanding, which shouldn't be a surprise since we don't completely understand anything.
If it is not the meaning of the words that affects you in a certain way, could random words affect you in that same way?
It seems reasonable to think that when we learn a language we learn not only words but the logic (grammar) which determines how words may be grouped together in sentences. If, having learnt a language we have established neural networks that embody that learning then the words, or better sentences and passages, activate these networks and result in the apprehension of their meaningan interpretation.
Now of course I'm not absolutely certain that is how that works but it seems most consistent with the findings of neuroscience. What else do we have to go on? Do you think our vague intuitions that meaning cannot be physical are reliable sources of understanding and knowledge?
Let's say the semantic and the neurological are not separate at all. We don't understand how they go together, so our first pre-critical thought is that meaning cannot be an attribute of physical (neuronal) processes. Perhaps we just don't understand the physical well enough. What's the alternative? Posit the existence of another realm?
A pretty poor post, I have to say. Just because something can be attributed to neurobiology, doesn't necessarily mean it can be understood solely through a physicalist lens. As you kind of admit, the problem is that to question the physicalist account is to open the door to - well, what, exactly? That's why I mention Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. Fear of religion drives a lot of this conversation, whether that's acknowledged or not. As if the door has to be slammed shut on anything that's not 'scientific' or 'neurobiological' or else.... :yikes:
Take the time to read that Steve Talbott essay. It's philosophically solid and doesn't appeal to anything supernatural. But, as I also said, even biosemiotics, which I learned about from Apokrisis, is not physicalist in the reductionist sense (although some of what Apokrisis writes is also driven by that fear). But as soon as you start considering intentionality, sign recognition, and semiotics, then none of that is really physicalist in my view.
Arises from interactions within the brain which contains the neural networks trained to process written language, in response to the outputs of those neural networks signaling recognition of linguistic elements in the writing.
[Note 'arises' is the word you chose, and I ran with. Not a word I injected into the discussion.]
The nature of the causal relationship is physical.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's an impressive load of red herrings you have there, but how about sticking to this
original question?
Quoting Wayfarer
Or did you not actually want people to give serious consideration to the matter?
I agree. What may be missing from the picture you see is the Interpretation or Understanding of its meaning. Your dog may see the same symbols on the computer screen, but they won't have the same "affect"*1 that they do on you. The effect is physical, but the affect is metaphysical (mental). Your dog may be emotionally affected by images of other dogs on the screen, but words in the English language will have no affect, because they are abstractions of intellectual ideas, not concrete objects.
Your use of the word "affect" may reveal the "missing" element that distinguishes mental ideas or feelings from physical effects. For example, the letters on your computer screen have a physical effect (Percepts ; changes in Rhodopsin chemical) on the rods & cones in your eyes. But only the meaning of those abstract symbols --- how it relates to you personally --- can affect your mood or feelings or Concepts*2. The science of Semiology is focused on the meanings of signs --- how they are interpreted --- not just their physical shapes. The word "rose" refers to a flower ; but unless that textual symbol elicits a mental image in the mind, its meaning will be missing. :smile:
*1. Affect :
[i]a. to put on a false appearance of (something) : to pretend to feel, have, or do (something) : feign affect indifference affect surprise.
b. Affect can be used as a noun in one particular situation: when referring to a display of emotion.[/i]
*2. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Meaning in a brain emerges from systematic Holistic interactions, not linear Reductive operations. A more Holistic term for "arise" would be "emerge"*1. Your description sounds mechanical, but it doesn't answer Chalmers' Hard Question : how does a mechanical process convert physical inputs into mental outputs? In philosophy, to equate mental with physical is a category error. :smile:
*1. Emergent properties are qualities of a system that are not present in its parts, and are a result of holism. Holism is the idea that the properties of a system are greater than the sum of its parts, and that the system as a whole determines how its parts behave.
___ Google AI overview
Note --- Ideas, feelings, concepts are not properties of Matter, but of Mind. By what means do they arise? What are the mechanical steps between Matter and Mind? Mind is a meta-physical function of Brain, not a physical organ or neuron.
Brandolini's law:
Philpapers Survey
So you say.
Along with the majority of philosophers of mind.
Quoting wonderer1
What about this causal relationship is physical? How is it explainable in physical or molecular terms? How do physical interactions cause or give rise to semiotic processes? Those are the precise questions that the quotes you referred to as red herrings are seeking to address.
:rofl: Nice try, but I'm not biting. Desperation breeds denigration it seems.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I haven't anywhere said that it definitely can or that it definitely cannot. One thing I know is that the way perceptual experience might seem to us cannot be explained in terms of a mechanical model of physicality. @Apokrisis always said it can be understood in terms of a semiotic model of physicality, if I read him right. I don't have the background to properly assess the soundness of Apo's posts, and I freely admit that.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you wish to question the neurological account, which is a physicalist account insofar as it looks for explanations in terms of neural patterns and activity, then you need to come up with a compelling alternative.
That is what you have constantly failed to do. Instead, you say proponents of physicalism are suffering from fear of religion. Your view is so skewed that you cannot see the possibility that other find religious explanations simply uncompelling.,
Your anachronistic mechanistic model of physicalism is merely the pet strawman you love to keep knocking down. I know all the kinds of arguments you marshalfor years I used to deploy them myself against physicalism. Eventually I came to see that those arguments are merely reactive, not constructive. They don't proceed from a desire to know the truth, but from a need to destroy what threatens to undermine what you wish to be the case.
It really is a staggering irony that you want to dismiss physicalist's arguments by attempting to denigrate them as being psychologically motivated by a fear of something which you obviously desperately need, and need to justify, and they don'tnamely religion. Your arguments are motivated by a fear of letting go of religion. I have an open mind, which you obviously do not.
I'm saying the neurological account is not necessarily physicalist. It's a leap from saying that there are neurological processes involved, to materialist philosophy of mind.
Quoting Janus
Because you often express it. You said it in the post I responded to - 'what are we to do, believe there is "another realm?"
Quoting Janus
So get this clear - you believe that to question physicalism requires positing of another realm? You said it: do you believe it?
It deals with the brain, which is physical and uses physical methods to study it.
Quoting Wayfarer
So what? I have no fear of other realms. I love imagining them, but I don't count such creative imaginings as anything more than fiction. What's wrong with fiction? Nothing in my book.
However, if we are to be justified in thinking that such imaginings are anything more than fictions then we need some substantive evidence or compelling reason for thinking so. That is just what you apparently cannot provide.
Being personally convinced of something does not constitute any good reason for others to believe what you do. You apparently find that hard to understand. It actually seems to be a kind of narcissism, when it blinds you to the fact that others can disagree with you while understanding your position. I don't see you understanding that. It's a shame.
I learned a lot from Apokrisis, including the whole field of biosemiotics, which I've read quite a bit about by now. But I also learned that he tended to dismiss the idealistic philosophy of C S Peirce on the grounds of him being 'a man of his times' and obviously not able to benefit from later scientific discoveries. After many earnest and open discussions with Apokrisis, I believe he too expresses a certain fear of religion. It means that if you question the naturalist account with its physicalist underpinnings, then you're opening the door to ideas associated with religion or philosophical idealism, which no self-respecting scientist should admit.
Quoting Janus
[quote=Richard Lewontin, Review of Carl Sagan 'Candle in the Dark']Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [/quote]
Quoting Janus
I dispute that the brain is physical. The human brain, in context, is the most complex natural phenomenon known to science, with more neural connections than stars in the sky.
Quoting Janus
See the original post.
There is a leap from any empirical account to any metaphysical claim. We really ought to suspend judgement in the absence of any firm metaphysical ground at all. If we wish to make a leap it ought to be what is considered to be the inference to the best explanation. Of course for whatever reasons we are not all going to agree what is the best inference. I'm merely telling you that if I am pressed to say which I think is the best inference, then I'll choose physicalism, but I'm not wedded to it. My natural inclination is to suspend judgement and in my day to day life that is just what I do, because the issue is of little or no importancelittle relevance to how I live my life.
Quoting Wayfarer
Physicalism is the claim that the fundamental nature of everything is energy. Physics understands matter and energy to be one and the same. What is the other alternative to the realm of the physical? I would say it is the realm of the mind. But we know nothing of mind beyond our own introspective intuitions about our own minds. Of the physical we know a whole world which, being investigated, has yielded a vast body of coherent and consistent scientific knowledge.
Science tells us the universe existed long before humans. I see no reason to doubt that. If that is so, then mind cannot be fundamental unless something like panpsychism is true, or there is a god or universal mind that keeps what appears to us as the [physical world in place. I just don't find those explanations rationally compelling, although I am attracted to them in an imaginative way.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, I've read some of Salthe and some of Deacon and some of Hoffmeyer and others over the last ten years or so since first encountering Apo. But I don't count myself as an expert. I can understand the arguments, but I don't have the background to assess their veracity. so I maintain an open mind. I don't recall any of them questioning naturalism or physicalism. If you can cite some passages from those writers or others that do then I'll certainly consider them.
What is the alternative to physicalism to explain the fact that we share a world with each other and the animals other than the old "universal mind" model? Nothing else works, even Kastrup admits that. I am not completely close-minded to the possibility of that, but I honestly do see it to be of much less plausibility than naturalism. I'd actually rather believe in the universal mind model, but unfortunately, I just don't find it compelling enough.
To me the Lewontin passage is tendentious babblenothing substantive to be found there.
Quoting Wayfarer
The criterion of what is physical is that its activities have measurable effects. The brain ticks that box. I get that our experience doesn't intuitively seem to be physical. Intuitive understanding is not always a good guide to the nature of things,
Quoting Janus
Quoting Wayfarer
I read it before, and I just looked at it again, I know all those arguments like the proverbial back of my hand. They are trivial truismsthey simply say that without the mind, without percipients, there would be no world appearing. How could I take issue with such a tautology, other than to point out its vacuity.
If you think that because no world would appear to humans if humans didn't exist that it follows that human consciousness is fundamental to reality, I can only wonder what has happened to your critical thinking skills. Maybe they have become buried beneath your confirmation bias.
I like that. It reminds me of an injunction sometimes attributed to Mark Twain and other times to George Carlin (roughly paraphrased): " Never argue with a fool because they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience".
Speaking of BS. Your interpretation of my post was based on a Category Error. I was talking about Philosophy, not Science ; Meta-physics, not Physics.
The Category Error I referred to is not Descartes' notion of two different "substances"*1, but the relationship of a physical system and it's metaphysical function. A mathematical "function" is the output X that is dependent on the numerical values in the equation. None of those math values is physical, nor is the function. The function of your automobile is transportation, which is a concept, not a physical object. The function of your computer is Information Processing, not just displaying letters on a screen.
The function of a brain is control of "thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger and every process that regulates our body". All of those are immaterial Functions, not material Organs. And a Process is a logical step by step procedure, not a substantial object. Yet, each function is typically associated with an organ : as Brain is associated with Thought, Emotion, Memory, etc. None of which is a substantial, tangible, massive material object. What is the mass of an Idea? To Associate : "connect (someone or something) with something else in one's mind."
In Aristotelian terms, the categories I refer to are "Substance" and "Essence or Form"*2. In this case, the Substance is matter (neural tissue of brain), and the Essence is the meaning or referent (rose), but the Form is the symbolic Idea (roseness), a Qualia that colors both Essence and Substance. The material Substance is tangible, but immaterial/intellectual Form & Essence are only inferrable & intelligible by reasoning minds. Are you familiar with those subtle philosophical distinctions? :smile:
*1. Cartesian Mind/Body distinction :
This means the clear and distinct ideas of mind and body, as mutually exclusive natures, must be false in order for mind-body causal interaction to occur. Hence, Descartes has not adequately established that mind and body are two really distinct substances.
https://iep.utm.edu/descartes-mind-body-distinction-dualism/
*2. Theory of Forms :
[i]Essence is what makes a thing that particular thing. In other words, essence is what makes that chair.
Substance is what makes a thing a general thing.
Form is what makes the idea of a thing, without which the thing would not be intelligible. In other words, form is what makes that idea of a/that chair.[/i]
https://o-g-rose-writing.medium.com/essence-substance-and-form-81c2b707c0d8
We can measure things about physical processes. Like how far something moves, and how long it took to move that distance. We can measure how things change speed and direction when moving. We can measure the speed of light.
We can measure how much energy something uses to move, or grow. We can calculate what percentages of particles are moving at what speed, given the temperature of a cylinder of air. We can measure events that take place in a millionth of a second. We can tell the age of things by how much of a radioactive isotopes it contains.
All of these things can be seen to be the result of the physical properties of the particles that make up everything.
Not a word of any of that applies to consciousness. It has no physical aspect, despite the fact that the examples of it we are aware of exist within a physical medium. And everything we know of the properties of particles "seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience."
That's a little more substantial than "vague intuitions."
Some of us suggest the possibility that our physical sciences cannot answer every question about reality.
Or think of energy itselfit can only be measured in terms of its effects. If it cannot be directly observed and measured, will you say it is non-physical?
Quoting Patterner
I agree if by science you mean physics. I think there are many questions about for example human and animal behavior that cannot be answered by physics. Different paradigms. But questions about animal behavior can be answered by ethology and questions about human behavior can be answered by anthropology, sociology and psychology and even chemistry. Do you think of those as sciences?
Just as a matter of interest do you care whether consciousness is physical or not? Personally, I'd rather it wasn't physical because then there might be some hope that this life is not all we get. I've made my peace with the idea that this life is most probably all we get, but whatever the case is, I don't think it matters what I think about it. What will be will be.
Beyond those kinds of concerns do you think the answer to whether consciousness is physical or not could matter for any other reason?
Hes :100: right.
Quoting Janus
You say it doesnt matter, but you sure as hell love arguing about it. The question @Patterner is asking is a perfectly valid one - how can we be affected by the meaning of words when meaning, itself, is not physical. That is the central question of Terrence Deacons book Incomplete Nature, which you mention. He certainly doesnt question naturalism but extends it to account for what he describes as absentialsthings that have no material existence but have causal roles in all sentient life. Its an intriguing argument, though not one Ive fully mastered.
Quoting Patterner
Are such properties inherent in objects or are they the products of historically formed ways of organizing our relation to the world? Heidegger has argued that we never just see a hammer with its properties and attributes. We understand what a hammer is primordially in what we use it for and how we use it, and in terms of the larger associated context of relevance. The hammer as a static thing with properties is derived from our prior association with it as something we use for a purpose.
Husserl showed how the empirical notion of object that youre describing emerged in the era of modern sciences with Galileo. The Egyptians and Greeks first developed the concept of a pure ideal geometric form (perfect triangle, circle, square, etc) as the modification of actual interactions with real , imperfect shapes in nature. Armed with such pure mathematical idealizations as the straight line and perfect circle, it occurred to Galileo that the messy empirical world could be approach using these ideal geometries as a model. Now everything we observe in the actual world could be treated as an approximation of a geometrically describable body.
The notions of scientific accuracy and calculative measurement were made possible by thinking of actual things as imperfect versions of pure genetic bodies. The point Im making is that the physicalism youre describing (self-identical things with mathematically describable properties and attributes) is not a product of the world as it supposedly is in itself. It is a human invention that depends on ignoring the contribution of subjective practical use and relevance to our perception of the world.
Once we recognize this it is no longer necessary to posit a distinction between an outer world of mathematically measurable things and an inner world of subjective consciousness. And the subject here is not to be understood according to traditional idealism and an internal realm The subject is just as much produced though pragmatic interaction in an environment as the objects of the world it interacts with.
Quoting Janus Neural activity is electrical and chemical signals moving along the neurons. That is consciousness? Photon hits retina, rhodopsin changes shape, concentration of ions changes, signal is sent along optic nerve, (skipping a thousand other steps), signal arrives in specific area of the brain. That is a description of my subjective experience of red? That, presumably added to other signals hitting the brain, is a description of my brain's awareness of itself?
Quoting JanusEnergy is particles in motion. We know which particles move in which medium. We can measure how fast they move. It's all physical.
Quoting JanusIt all reduces to physics. We can't follow every particle of air. But we know what they are all doing statistically, and can think of the total in terms of the laws of thermodynamics. But the laws of thermodynamics do not exist exactly as they are for any reason other than the way particles Interact.
The same is true of the way oxygen works in our cells. Electron shells, electron sharing, etc. Everything reduces to physics.
I have not heard an explanation for how consciousness reduces to physics.
Quoting JanusIt's ironic that you think consciousness is entirely physical, but would like it to be otherwise in the hopes of an afterlife, while I think consciousness has a non-physical component, but don't want an afterlife. But, of course, you're right. What will be will be.
Quoting JanusYou ask this in a philosophy forum?? :grin: Knowledge for knowledge's sake is reason enough for most anything, imo. But the true nature of our Selves, and the explanation for how various chunks of matter can subjectively experience, be aware that they are subjectively experiencing, and be aware that they are aware that they are subjectively experiencing?? That's freakin' fascinating beyond anything else!
Everything. Words are patterns of physical vibrations propagating through the air, or physical text. Neural networks in your brain which recognize words and their semantic associations are physical. The semantic elements in your stream of thought are physically detectable.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is an enormous amount of science to study to reach a complete account at the molecular level. Can you be more specific about what it is that you don't understand?
Quoting Wayfarer
Reading Peter Tse's Criterial Causation might provide a clue. Before reading Tse, I used an analogy of locks and keys, where in the scenario of reading written language, letters, words, phrases, etc. play the roles of keys, and neural nets trained in written language recognition play the role of locks. Of course I don't expect that to make any sense to anyone so unwilling to consider physicalism charitably as yourself.
Quoting wonderer1
Does Tse discuss complex dynamical systems approaches
to free will and causation? Im thinking of Alicia Juarreros Dynamics in Action:Intentional Behavior as a Complex System.
I'm not familiar with Alicia Juarreros perspective, but what I've gathered from looking at the Amazon page for her book sounds generally compatible with Tse's thinking. FWIW, I searched my Kindle copy of Tse's book for any citation of Alicia Juarrero, and didn't find any. I'm planning to borrow a copy of Juarreros book, so perhaps I can let you know more later.
I too, prefer the label "Physicalism" (cause) to "Materialism" (effect) as the ultimate Reality. Matter is merely the clay that Energy shapes into the things that we perceive with the eye and conceive with the mind. Descartes imagined the material aspects of reality as one realm, and the mental aspects as a separate realm. But I view the world holistically, as one reality with several different departments. {see Triad illustration below}
FWIW, my personal worldview equates Energy (causation) with Mind (knowledge of forms), in order to explain how mental functions*1 could emerge from eons of material evolution. So, I agree that Energy (EnFormAction)*2 is the fundamental "nature" of everything. But, for human philosophers, Meaning is more important than Matter. My thesis and blog go into scientific details to support the conclusion that everything is EnFormAction. :smile:
*1. Mental Functions :
The most important cognitive functions are attention, orientation, memory, gnosis, executive functions, praxis, language, social cognition and visuospatial skills.
https://neuronup.us/areas-of-intervention/cognitive-functions/
Note --- "Gnosis" is the Greek word for the ability to know, to conceptualize what we sense. We know by informing the physical brain into a cognitive mind.
*2. Energy :
[i]Scientists define energy as the ability to do work, but don't know what energy is. They assume it's an eternal causative force that existed prior to the Big Bang, along with mathematical laws. Energy is a positive or negative relationship between things, and physical Laws are limitations on the push & pull of those forces.
So, all they know is what Energy does, which is to transform material objects in various ways. Energy itself is amorphous & immaterial. So if you reduce Causation to its essence of information, it seems more akin to mind than matter & energy. Energy is Causation, and Form is Meaning. Together I call them : EnFormAction : the power to give meaningful/knowable form to malleable matter.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*3. The fundamental triad of energy/matter/information :
This essay is based on the thesis that information is as fundamental as matter and energy in the fabric of reality,
https://www.researchgate.net/
Note --- The image below is just some scientist's illustration of how he conceives the interrelationships of Energy & Matter & Mind. Don't take it too literally. ResearchGate is a social network site for scientists and researchers. I may not agree with all of their publications. I have my own illustrations on my website.
That is the question. It's not how we intuitively think of consciousness of course. Hence the conundrum. We know what consciousness feels like. But that is a different question than what it actually is. Probably cannot ever be definitively answered.
Quoting Patterner
We cannot see particles, we can only measure their effects. We don't even really know excatly what electrons are. Are they what constitutes fields or are they merely excitations of a field? How will we find out?
Quoting Patterner
If consciousness is neural activity, then it reduces to physics or at least chemistry. How can we ever be sure about that? It doesn't seem possible, because there is no way to observe consciousness being reducible to physics. So we are left with inference. Much of science is like this. You no coubt know the well worn Humean point about causation itself being impossible to directly observe.
Quoting Patterner
I don't want an afterlife. I just want as much of life as I can get. I also think one measure of a good life is being able to die well. Clinging to anything is not a good idea. I don't cling to the idea of consciousness being physical, it just seems the most likely to me. Somone earlier mentioned Peirce's "matter is effete mind". He nonetheless believed that the universe existed prior to humans. He was basically a kind of panpsychist. I don't think that position is incompatible with thinking that consciousness is a physical phenomenon.
Quoting Patterner
Philosophy is defined as love of wisdom. Is it wise to simply accumulate knowledge for its own sake? That almost sounds like accumulating money for its own sake. What is the point of knowledge you cannot use?
The original claim was:
Quoting Wayfarer
The point I am making is not that ink and paper aren't essential to the physical nature of the book but that semantic content exists on a different level from its physical form. Words may be encoded as sounds or written letters in various languages, yet the same information can be encoded in entirely different symbolic systemswhether in different languages, Braille, or even Morse codeand still retain its meaning. This demonstrates that semantic content is independent of the specific physical medium in which it is expressed.
A book 'contains meaning' only insofar as it is read and understood by a subject capable of interpreting its content. Furthermore, different readers may interpret the same information in diverse ways, highlighting the subjective and contextual nature of meaning-making. The meaning is not an inherent property of the physical text itself but arises through the interaction between the symbolic representation and the mind of the reader.
So language has a physical aspect, but it can't be accounted for by physical principles alone.
The reason I introduced biosemiotics to the conversation is because a similar principle is operative at every level of organic life. Biosemiotics depicts the operations of cellular life as language-like rather than machine-like. I mentioned it, because it too challenges physicalism on a fundamental level.
[quote=Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?]The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm[/quote]
That in essence is the materialist view. However the author goes on to say:
That is consistent with Norbert Weiner's oft-quoted aphorism, 'Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.'
Quoting wonderer1
Physicalism is a proper methodological principle but philosophical materialism is a different matter.
At issue is the claim that a brain is 'nothing but' atoms, or that life can be understood in solely physical or chemical terms, or that living beings are 'simply' organisations of the elements of the periodic table and no different in kind from inorganic matter. There are other levels of meaning and organisation - not a mysterious 'something else' as any kind of vital spirit or secret sauce, but higher level organisational principles that appear throughout organic life that are not reducible to physics. That is the point of From Physical Causation to Organisms of Meaning. But I don't expect that to make sense to anyone so unwilling to consider challenges to philosophical materialism as yourself.
Quoting wonderer1
[url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/opinion/sunday/do-you-believe-in-god-or-is-that-a-software-glitch.html?unlocked_article_code=1.g04.xgxn.TY5RJDI5v3XG&smid=url-share]Do you believe in God, or is that a software glitch?
Of course. Different neural networks will interact with books in different ways. Why would you expect it to be otherwise? Even different LLMs produce their own unique and unpredictable thoughts, and they are not even conscious in the way we naively think of ourselves as being conscious.
The thing is, your 'point' is a mystification of what is a relatively simple and clear physical picture.
There is no need for a 'different level' for semantic content to exist on. Semantic content is attributed to linguistic media (letters, Braille, Morse code, etc.) by neural nets which have been trained to attribute semantic content to such media. Such attribution of semantic content to linguistic media is a function of the physical state of systems capable of doing such decoding.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right. This is completely consistent with the straightforward physical picture outlined above.
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet you rely on LLMs. :roll:
If you actually understand that language has an aspect that can't be accounted for by physical principles, I'd expect you could come up with a way of falsifying any physicalist account of language. That would be a serious philosophical achievement. Go for it!
It is not. It is well-accepted science which your physicalist blinders won't allow you to ackowledge.
Quoting wonderer1
Neural networks which are created by humans to fulfil their requirements according to specifications. There are no such systems existing spontaneously as a consequence of physical causation.
Quoting wonderer1
I use them as a reference source and I see no incongruity in so doing. I'm not a Luddite.
Quoting wonderer1
What do you mean by physicalism? What are you arguing for? I've presented a couple of sources that call the physicalist view into account, you won't even acknowledge them, so what's the point of continuing?
I will circle back to this earler comment, because I think it underlies a lot of what is being said. Objectivity was crucial to the emergence of early modern science, which distinguished it from the intuition-based, introspective theorizing of the medieval and ancient world. So it is not coincidental that the first uses of the word 'objectivity' began to appear in the early 1600s. This emerged alongside Galileo's new physics, and his conceptual division between the primary and secondary qualities of objects?-?the primary being figure (or shape), size, position, motion, and quantity, while the secondary included color, taste, aroma, and sound. Descartes further entrenched this model with the separation of mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa), set against the backdrop of a universe devoid of teleology (action for a purpose). Right knowledge becomes the mathematically precise description of data in space-time.
In effect this divides the world into separate realms. There's the physical domain - objective, quantifiable, tractable to empirical analysis - and the subjective domain - the inner world, personal and private, the domain of values. We respect the right of individual conscience and the importance of values but they're not real in the same sense as objective facts. You yourself say this frequently. So you're saying there's the scientific view, maybe it's not perfect, but it's all we have, but to question that is to 'posit the existence of another realm'. And that's because the Cartesian division is implicit in 'the grammar of our worldview'. That's how it has been set up for us. We see the external, material, real world, and the private, ineffable, knowing subject as separated realms.
See these episodes of John Vervaeke, 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' for a detailed analysis.
Ep 20 - Galileo and the Death of the Cosmos
21 - Martin Luther and Descartes
22 - Descartes vs Hobbes
I will conclude for now by making the observation that nothing is 'purely' or 'only' physical. That has been made abundantly clear by physics. It is not an appeal to 'quantum woo', as I've studied the issue closely, from a philosophical perspective. It is beyond dispute that at the most fundamental level, we can no longer conceive of reality in terms of particulate matter, of energetic particles obeying deteministic laws. Determinism went out the window with the uncertainty principle, and it's not going to be revived. Particles are now understood to be excitations of field states. And what field states are is far from obvious.
But nothing about that statement vitiates or calls into question science. I'm in awe of science, technology, computers (where I've made a living for the last two decades as a technical writer) and medicine. It's constantly evolving and endlessly fascinating. What I reject is the leftover view that the world and everything in it can be understood on the basis of physical principles and physical causation.
The reason physics is paradigmatic in modern thought, is because it encapsulates the very idea of scientific certainty and precision. In creating the Cartesian vision, physics excludes whatever can't be described and predicted by the mathematical laws of bodies and forces. But it has to be recalled that all of this rests on three fundamental steps: idealisation (i.e. the 'ideal bodies' 'ideal planes' etc), abstraction (i.e. abstracting away all of those attributes that can't be predicted according to physical principles) and objectification. Because of the immense prestige and success of physical science over the last two centuries, this is extended to serve a paradigm for life and everything it entails. But it cannot be that.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos; https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/]The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order our structure and behavior in space and time but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience how it is from the point of view of its subject without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory.[/quote]
From this I have formed the view that as soon as life appears then you have the appearance of something which is not reducible to physics or chemistry. Because it is the beginning of the appearance of perspective, and, as argued at the outset, without perspective nothing can be said to exist (see How Time Began with the First Eye Opening.)
And with that, bye for now. :party:
Quoting Janus
I think this is sensible. I personally can't rule out idealism, but I have no good reason as yet to accept it as true. But who here actually has any expertise in this matter? Are we just unsophisticated yokels sounding off about ideas we find most appealing emotionally?
Quoting Wayfarer
It's a case well put. But how do we rule out a different approach and model all together? Does it have to be physicalism versus idealsim? Is dualistic thinking all we have to resolve our biggest quesions? I'd be interested to hear more from a rigorous, post-modern perspective assessing the foundational axioms or presuppositions that may be propping up our confusions. And if the world is entirely mind created and contingent, how do we know anything for certain about either metaphysical position?
Yes, absolutely, knowledge for its own sake. Do you use every bit of knowledge you attain? Do you even try to? Of course not. It's impossible. Have you ever read about something you were not planning to use? I would imagine so. Probably most of the things any of us learn about the topics here. How many of use make a living with such knowledge?
Learning is one of the defining characteristics of our species. The drive to learn is another. We [I]can[/I] learn. It's inconceivable that we not bother. All of us not attempt to learn anything that doesn't have a practical purpose?
What's the point of gazing out over the world from the top of a mountain, or the Grand Canyon, or watching an aurora borealis? What's the point of listening to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos or Beethoven's string quartets? What's the point of reading Dune or The Malazan Book of the Fallen? What's the point of Monet, Michaelangelo, or Escher? What's the point of learning?
It's all joy.
As to the question of the nature of consciousnesswe have the scientific studies on one hand and the naive "folk" understanding on the other. As to which to rely on, I will choose the former because I don't think intuition is an especially reliable guide to understanding the nature of things. But that's just meothers will make up their own minds, hopefully being as free from confirmation bias as possible.
Just when I thought I was out......
I explained above the 'Cartesian divide' and the source of the mind-matter division. Ever since, Western philosophy has vacillated between materialism (the objective is real, everything arises from matter) and idealism (the subject and mind alone is real). You're right in saying that is a dualism, but there are many layers of meaning. Bernardo Kastrup points out that materialism - that the basic constituents of reality are material in nature - and idealism - that reality is experiential in nature - are incommensurable types of explanations. It's not a contest between different kinds of constituents, but a completely different perspective. Idealism, in the way that I intend it, and I think in the sense in which it is meaningful, is not about what 'things are made of'. It is about the nature of reality as experienced. It's not positing 'mind' as a kind of building block or constituent in the way that materialism did with atoms. It is pointing out that whatever is real, is meaningful only insofar as it is meaningful for a subject. Materialism attempts to arrive at certainty with reference to an ostensibly mind-independent physical reality. Idealism as I understand it points out that this is an oxymoronic conception, as whatever is known of matter, is known by the mind through perception of objects. So the idea of a mind-independent object is self-contradictory.
But it's very important not to make an object out of 'spirit' or 'mind'. Nishijima-roshi puts it like this:
[quote=Three Philosophies, One Reality;https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/Nishijima-s-Study-3-Philos-1-Reality.pdf]The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit.
I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing (physical) exists outside of matter. Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.
So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word "spirit" is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.[/quote]
Compare:
[quote=Wittgenstiein]The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value existsand if it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.[/quote]
//
Quoting Patterner
Quite so. 'Man desires to know', said Aristotle. Philosophy is the pursuit of an understanding that is worth having for its own sake.
Yes. I can see this. And I like this more sophisticated framing of the idea.
Quoting Three Philosophies, One Reality
Cool. Noted.
Fuck, there's a lot to remember is this caper...
Have a restful break.
Quoting Wayfarer
Kant correctly recognized that taking a strictly materialist stance depends on an idealism, since the very notion of a mind-independent object covertly smuggles in all the subjective apparatus needed to have an object appear before a subject. So realism and idealism are not opposites but versions of the same subject -based thinking. With regard to a Buddhist claim that there is something else besides matter, I cant see this as anything other than a reformulation of a dualist idealism.
if you want to get beyond the realism-idealism, fact-value split, you have to be able to see value WITHIN matter , not separate from it and alongside it. Chalmers tries to pull the former trick by starting from spirit and matter as separate entities and then mixing them together like ingredients of a pie (panpsychism). To arrive at a thinking which transcends the traditional ideal-realism binary, you have to turn to phenomenological and poststructuralist perspectives.
Quoting JoshsNo matter how anyone views these matters, people were measuring and altering stone and wood to make buildings and bridges long before Galileo.
Quoting JoshsI've read this a few times. I'll keep trying. I just don't see how this changes the fact that physical things are measurable in various ways, but consciousness is not. In what physical terms can we discuss consciousness? What is its speed? How much does it weigh? What are it's physical dimensions? Does it have mass or charge? We can say an awful lot about the physical world with our physical sciences, but our physical sciences can't say anything about consciousness.
For the purposes of my philosophical thesis, I make a distinction between "physical" (the study of nature as a system) and "material" (the study of matter as an object). So, measurements of "neural activity"*1 are observing the material effects of energy exchanges, not invisible Energy*2 per se. Therefore, "if it cannot be directly observed and measured" I would say that the "activity" is immaterial, not non-physical. Hence, "neural activity" is a process-of-change in a material substrate, not a material object itself.
That distinction is based on current scientific evidence that Energy is causal*3, not material ; the agent of change, not the substance being changed*4. When a sculptor (the causal agent) molds clay into a statue, his inputs are both intentional and energetic, and the output is a new material shape. :smile:
*1. Neural activity is the electrical and chemical signals that occur in neurons, the brain's primary cells, and is vital for brain function. ___Google AI overview
Note --- Signals (semiology) are communications between minds, not the material substrate that is used to make the signals sensable. For example, Indian smoke signals are the meaning, not the smoke.
*2. Yes, energy is invisible; you cannot see it directly because it is not a physical object, but rather a concept describing the ability to do work, and its presence is only observed through its effects like movement, heat, or light. ___Google AI overview
*3. Yes, in the context of physics, energy is considered causal, meaning that the transfer of energy between objects is generally seen as the mechanism behind a cause-and-effect relationship; where the "cause" is the application of energy, and the "effect" is the resulting change in the system due to that energy transfer. ___Google AI overview
*4. Energy is potential for form-change in Matter. The Matter/Energy Equivalence of E=MC^2 is a mathematical relationship, knowable by logical inference, not an object knowable by physical senses. Reference : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence
AGENT AND EFFECT
Quoting Patterner
You can only measure dimensions and weight of something which is presumed to remain qualitatively the same over the course of the quantitative measuring and weighing. Any calculation of differences in degree presupposes no difference in kind during the process. Otherwise one is dealing with a new thing and has to start over again. The world doesnt consist of objects with attributes and properties which remain qualitatively the same from one moment to the next. We invented the concept of object as a qualitatively self-same thing so that we could then proceed to perform calculative measurements. Obviously, this works out well for us, but it doesnt mean that physical objects exist out there in the world rather than in the abstractions that we perform on the continually changing data we actually experience in our interactions with the world.
Right, but it is obvious that value and meaning are felt, in their various ways, by sentient beings. No one can sensibly deny that fact. We might be deterministic organisms, but we will never feel ourselves to be so, and it what we feel about ourselves and our lives that counts when it comes to quality of life.
Also we don't know and can never know the truth about whether or not we are deterministic beings, so the question is of little importance except perhaps in the moral domain. In that connection itt can be argued that the libertarian model of free will leads to unnecessary and unwarranted feelings of guilt and pride and blame and a desire for revenge against those who transgress moral codes
Quoting Patterner
I'm not dismissive of them. I've read both years ago. I just don't find their arguments as compelling as I once did. Wayfarer wonders why I spend time arguing about things I say "don't matter". What I'm arguing against is the idea that the truth of idealism is obvious and that physicalism is inconsistent or incoherent. Such facile attempts to dismiss opponent's views and the lack of ability to recognize that others can be totally familiar with the same arguments as you are and yet disagree about what they demonstrate is what I argue against. And what often goes together with that attitude: the assumption that if the other disagrees then the other must not really understand the arguments, is also what I continually argue against.
Quoting Gnomon
I wouldn't use that terminology, but I don't disagree with what I take to be the thrust of what you are saying.
I think you may mis-interpret 's arguments. He doesn't say that "physicalism is inconsistent" as a scientific approach. But that it is incomplete as a philosophical approach. For example in his quotation from " Three Philosophies, One Reality", the point seems to be that the "something else", traditionally called "Spirit", is our mental evaluation of material reality : an Idea or mental model or mode of thought, or Reality as conceived by a Mind. This is the same observation that the Quantum Physics pioneers found strange-but-undeniable in their attempts to study the foundations of material reality*1*2*3. The "something else" or "missing element" in pre-quantum physics was the observing Mind : the "mental evaluation". :nerd:
*1. "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning".
___ Werner Heisenberg
*2. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. ___ Erwin Schrödinger
*3. Dear Schrödinger, You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of realityif only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with realityreality as something independent of what is experimentally established. ___ A. Einstein
Quoting Janus
What terminology would you use in place of "immaterial" or "non-physical" on a philosophy forum? Spiritual or Mental or Ideal or???? I've been looking for a less-prejudicial term for years.
How would you phrase the "thrust" of what I'm saying, regarding The Mind-Created World? :smile:
Non-reductive and/ or non-eliminative physicalism are not incomplete, any more than any metaphysical hypothesis is incomplete. The Churchlands argue consistently and extensively for eliminative physicalism, and they are professional philosophers, so it cannot be ruled out as a philosophical approach either. The reality is that we don't and can't know what the case is when it comes to metaphysics,
It's no different than referring to commonsense realism as "naive realism". I think naive realism is the default pre-critical attitude which we all have to the world. At the same time, I think naive idealism ( in the sense of anti-physicalism) is the default pre-critical attitude we all have towards the nature of mind and consciousness. Probably people are pre-critically naive dualists in that they hold to naive realism about the world and naive idealism about the mind. It is only once critical thought is brought to bear on that unexamined dualism that the "interaction problem" gives us pause.
Quoting Patterner
This is only so as long as you hold to the naive understanding of consciousness. Once you admit, even though consciousness does not intuitively seem to be a physical phenomenon, the possibility that it might nonetheless really be nothing more than that, then you open your mind to possibilities other than what simply seems intuitively obvious.
All that said, the real problem is that we have no way of testing any metaphysical hypothesis, whether that be physicalism or idealism or whatever. We have no way of determining whether any of our hypotheses have any real bearing on the ultimate nature of reality, or even whether the very idea of questioning the ultimate nature of reality is coherent given that a determinable answer seems to be impossible in principle.
So, perhaps we are reduced to just trying to address what is the most useful or interesting way to talk about things. How do you imagine we might go about finding out whether consciousness is non-physical or not? Do you believe there is some fact of the matter we might one day discover?
Quoting Patterner
Sure there has. You just have to read phenomenology.
Here's a problem:
Consciousness is a natural thing. Anything in the universe is natural. The problem is the belief that there cannot be any aspect of the universe that is not in the purview of our physical sciences. As Nagel says in [I]Mind and Cosmos[/I]:
How have we concluded that we have so great a grasp of things that we can rule out any possibility that something exists outside of that understanding? The last sentence should be:
"If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-physical property of the world."
Not being willing to consider that possibility means never attempting non-physicalist methods. So, if the answer is outside such methods, it will never be found.
In any event-Quoting JoshsI don't see any suggestions of physical characteristics of consciousness in your quote. I'm not suggesting there is a spacial element. Consciousness is not an object. But we can discuss physical properties of other processes, and see how they come about due to the physical properties of particles. Electron shells explain redox reactions, which are a vital part of metabolism. What can we say about consciousness?
If we don't see such a thing, it could be we simply haven't seen it [I]yet[/I]. Which is the same thing I often hear from physicalists, on TPF and elsewhere.
I agree that consciousness is a natural process, but understanding this natural process can give us a new way to understand the concept of the natural that bypasses the limitations of traditional physicalism. For instance, recent scientific models of consciousness see it as a synthetic organizing process which is not strictly in the head , but consists of exchanges and reciprocal activities that move between the brain, the body and an environment , which is itself co-defined by the patterns of interaction between it and the organism. Understanding consciousness in this naturalistic way allows us to see how intersubjectively formed concepts developed in a social community on the basis of real discursive and material interactions in a human-built environment have led to theories about the nature of the world such as physicalism, the idea that there are such things as properties of the world independent of our conceptual interactions with that world, and we have direct, unmeditated access to such properties. Such a theory has been quite useful for technological progress, but it is a woefully inadequate theory when it comes to explaining the organization of living systems, consciousness and human cognition and affectivity.
There are competing approaches to naturalism, and the underlying assumptions guiding what we now call the physical sciences dont remain static. I assume that within a generation or two physics, which has already in the past 125 years substantially altered its concepts of the physical, will come closer to where the biological and embodied cognitive sciences have arrived on this issue.
I was not familiar with those terms. But based on the definitions below*1, I assume that and I would generally agree with such inclusive concepts. However, there might still be some variation in how the role of Mind is conceived*2. Specifically, A> the notion that a human mind creates its own mental world (a worldview), or B> the more extreme possibility that our temporary cosmos (The World) was actually created from scratch by a pre-cosmic Mind. The latter idea could be food for further argumentation. Although, as you said, "we can't know what is the case"*3, as philosophers, not scientists, our job is to speculate & conjecture & rationalize about what might be the case. What if Mind, not Matter, is the explanation for everything in the world? :smile:
*1. [i]Non-eliminative physicalism is a metaphysical view that all things are physical, but some aspects of the mental are not reducible to physical states. . . .
Non-eliminative physicalism is a way to preserve physicalism while still acknowledging that mental phenomena can't be reduced to physical phenomena by scientific laws.[/i] ___ Google AI overview
Note --- That all material objects (things) are physical is not controversial. But some eliminative-materialists (is that an actual position?) might disagree with the "not-reducible" part. I suppose, because non-reducible Mind could knock all-powerful Matter off the metaphysical throne as the creator of our world.
*2. Metaphysical materialism is a philosophical view that all mental, emotional, conscious, and philosophical states are a result of the physical or material world. This means that everything can be explained by looking at matter, or "the real world". ___ Google AI overview
*3. In philosophy, "the case" refers to a specific, detailed scenario or situation presented as a thought experiment to explore a particular philosophical concept or problem, often designed to elicit a judgment or reaction from the reader about the situation, thereby illuminating the underlying philosophical issue at hand; essentially, it's a hypothetical example used to analyze a philosophical idea. ___ Google AI overview
Note --- "The Case" is a hypothesis, not a verified fact. We can Believe, but not Know for sure, what is the absolute case. But when has that ever stopped philosophers from deducing from the available evidence what seems to be the all-inclusive Case/Truth?
Quoting Joshs
Nathan Widder offers an interesting account of overcoming the gap between physical things and consciousness. He considers Deleuzes interpretation of Nietzsche.
While mechanism correctly locates knowledge in quantity, through its uncritical assumption
of unity (the atom), it reduces quality directly to quantity and establishes an absolute division
between knowledge (what can be objectively quantified) and value (the subjective
interpretation or assessment of this objective reality). Units enable counting and calculation,
but they also abstract away constitutive relations. Thus on a concrete level where no unities
or things pre-exist their relations, quantity cannot be a number but only a relation. As
Deleuze declares: Quantity itself is therefore inseparable from difference in quantity. This
difference in quantity is intensive, an ordinal relation of more or less. Nietzsche calls it an
order of rank, which is also an order of power, of strength and weakness. As an intensive
difference, it cannot be measured along a fixed numerical scale that could reduce difference
between forces to equality: as Deleuze maintains, to dream of two equal forces is coarse
and approximate dream, a statistical dream in which the living is submerged but which
chemistry dispels. Difference in quantity thereby designates a fundamental heterogeneity
within force relations. However, although the world of forces is one of differences in quantity that are only later organized into unities, Nietzsche maintains that this quantitative difference is never
experienced as such, but instead is felt in terms of quality. Our knowing limits itself to establishing quantities; but we cannot help feeling these differences in quantity as qualities we sense bigness and smallness in relation to the conditions of our existence with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations between magnitudes as qualities (Widder, From duration to eternal return)
This quote means that our values are inseparable from our qualitative evaluations of relations of forces. On the other hand, relations of forces and their evaluations are embedded within our procedures of quantitative measurements. While qualities remain heterogeneous to quantities, they are not merely subjective interpretations of an objectively independent reality. They compose an integral part of the perspective plane of the will to power.
In 's post above, he quotes from a talk on Buddhism :
"So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word "spirit" is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively". Three Philosophies, One Reality
Traditionally, in most world cultures, their philosophies & religions used terms like "spirit" to distinguish the material world from our mental models of it. Some of those models involve Ghosts as reified dead people, but for moderns the "spirit" is obviously a production of the observing mind (apparition or hallucination), not an actual person. That's why I try to avoid a term that is offensive to some on this forum, who have a low opinion of religion in particular, or philosophy in general. For example, I use "Self" in place of "Soul". But what substance is a Self made of?
The notion of walking spirits is based on the ancient philosophical concept of the Mind or Consciousness or Soul of a person, as something meta-physical (non-physical or mental) that can be known only by inference or imagination or sixth sense, not by physical senses. Therefore, the "something other" we call Spirit is our mental evaluation of material reality, in which Mind matters and Intellect makes sense. Reality as conceived by a Mind, not as perceived by the visual organ. :smile:
Note --- Even those who believe that there is life beyond the grave, are aware that this second life is immaterial or semi-material. That's why ghosts are portrayed as wispy or translucent. And they have even invented a semi-material substance, ectoplasm, to serve as a semi-scientific term for something that is real but not material. Would "Ideal" be a more philosophical term for that neither-fish-nor-fowl meaning? Do you have a better idea of term for a conceptual object?
I agree. But why should anything about physical properties and the laws of physics suggest subjective experience? They are different areas of investigation. I don't believe physics or neuroscience will ever be able to explain how the physical gives rise to experience, because experience cannot be rigorously observed together with observing neural processes. We cannot observe neural processes in vivo, we can only measure their effects via fMRI and EEG technologies etc.
To me the lack of explainability of experience in physical terms is not a central criterion in deciding whether experience and consciousness of that experience is just a manifestation of physical processes . QM shows us physical phenomena which are not explainable in terms of our macro physical concepts, and it just isn't the right tool for explaining something like consciousness beyond underpinning neuroscientific investigations of the physical properties and functions of the brain.
The real question is as to what else consciousness could be if not physical. You can say it's mental, but then does not the mental as far as we know supervene on the physical? We can imagine the logical possibility that the mental is somehow completely independent, but that is just a logical possibility we seem to have no evidence to believe in. And that logical possibility seems vacuous unless mind is posited as another substance, and then we have dualism.
If we posit one (neutral) substance that manifests both physical and mental attributes that might make more sense. But to assert that mind is ubiquitously inherent in or alongside matter from the beginning doesn't eliminate the problem of imagining what that mind looks like. It could not be anything like the intuitive introspectively derived notion we have of our own minds. The problem I've always had with panpsychism (such as Strawson postulates) is that I can get no idea of what it looks like.
Leaving aside the possibility that such a mind is an omniscient, omnipotent God who will judge us and accordingly determine the nature of our life after this one, what difference do you think it would make to how we live our lives?
Agree. I've often said that idealism really doesn't change anything. There is nothing I do now that would change.
That said, for others there seem to be at least two reasons for change. For some folk, this idea appeals to their vanity. 1) They want to know more about this 'secret' ontology and be special in some way. 2) They believe that a judgement is coming, as you say - [quote="Janus;953617" that such a mind is an omniscient, omnipotent God who will judge us[/quote]. Then people might fall over themselves in a vain attempt to anticipate how they might be judged.
I find it interesting that some secular philosophers, like AC Grayling, have left behind the word physicalism these days and use the term naturalism. Any thoughts on this word? The problem for me is that how do we draw a distinction between a natural and a supernatural world if physicalism isn't a distinguishing factor? If idealism is true than this is part of naturalism?
But critical idealism will recognise that in a way that metaphysical realism, like most here, would not. Acknowledging the unavoidably subjective nature of knowledge is in direct contradiction to metaphysical realism. And also Bernardo Kastrup questions that idealism and materialism are opposites at all. Idealism is not positing 'mental stuff' as a constituent of reality, in the way that materialism does. Materialism attempts to explain the primary datum of experience (consciousness) in terms of inferred, abstract constructs (matter). This makes materialism dependent on a speculative leap that is ungrounded in direct experience.
Quoting Joshs
Idealism is perfectly compatible with realism, but not scientific or philosophical materialism. But I agree that Husserl and Heidegger performed a valuable service by returning to the 'things themselves' and the actualities of embodied existence which is not found in Kant.
Quoting Gnomon
I should say something more about that. Gudo Nishijima was a S?t? Zen master, who died about 12 years ago. He was not a monk, he had a career in the banking industry in Tokyo. He elaborated a philosophical system based on the teaching of Dogen who was the founder of S?t? Zen. His 'three philosophies and one reality' can be summarised as follows - human understanding unfolds through a dialectical process involving stages.
Idealism: This stage corresponds to subjective and theoretical thinking. It represents abstract ideas and the way humans interpret reality through their minds. However, idealism alone leads to suffering due to the inability to reconcile these ideas with the material world.
Materialism: This is the objective view focusing on the material, external world. It considers reality purely in terms of physical phenomena and disregards subjective experience. This perspective, while useful, obscures something fundamental to human existence.
Realism (Synthesis): This phase integrates the subjective (idealistic) and objective (materialistic) views, forming a more balanced and practical understanding. It emphasizes the role of action and experience as a way to unify these perspectives.
Reality Itself: The ultimate stage transcends philosophical frameworks. It is the direct experience of reality through practice, particularly Zazen (sitting meditation). Dogen highlights that reality cannot be fully captured in words or intellectual concepts; it must be lived and experienced.
All this is laid out in his book To Meet the Real Dragon.
[I]If you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?[/I]
Excellent saying.
Of course, it applies to quite a few topics around here. But here we all are. :grin:
Deleuze grapples with the issue of the relation between an implicit creative dimension of sense and an explicitly logical, extensive field of actuality by proposing to think the two aspects together in a transcendental-empirical synthesis.The transcendental dimension is represented by an anonymous, pre personal field of reciprocally interacting differences from which emerge singularities and intensities. These structures are actualized on the empirical dimension as wholes and parts, qualities and extensities. Deleuzian intensities are external to actualized extensity and quality as their generative cause and impetus of transformation. Intensities affirm the paradoxical, the heterogeneous, the singular, the incompossible, the Eternal Return of the different, the indeterminate, the non-sensical, the roll of the dice within sense, the object=x as difference in general, the virtual event of sense as intensity, the verb underlying the sleight of hand of the axiomatic , converging, referential functions of actualizing predication. Deleuze(1987) aligns his intensive-extensive duality with Bergson's distinction between duration and the empirical multiplicity of magnitude.
In Deleuzes distinction between the unseparated implicit multiplicity of the transcendental field and explicit logical patterns, the latter are generated within the former but are heterogeneous to it and outside of it. Logic and extension by degree are developments and explications (secondary degradations) of the implicit (Virtual). The illusion is confusing the implicit and the explicit , the intrinsic and the extrinsic. For Deleuze, the implicit intensities (Eternal Return) generate the logical , conceptual, theoretical, lawful principles for empirical domains, and then are held steady in the background, beyond the reach of the conceptual and logical patterns, which cancel them by freezing and isolating them.
Idealism or Deism would make no material difference in your life. But it might make a philosophical difference. What difference does your participation in a philosophical forum make in how you live your life? Personally, I have no ambition to change the world, just myself . . . . to change my mind, and the meaning of my life. :smile:
Karl Marx
Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_Feuerbach
Difference is understood to be constitutive of both meaning and identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_(philosophy)
How to make a distinction between natural and supernaturalit seems to come down to the idea that over and above the natural visible world is an invisible spiritual world. I have long wondered whether the latter is imagined on account of dreams. The standard story seems to be that the invisible world of the supernatural (gods, demons, spirits and other immaterial entities) is imagined as an explanation for what would have seemed to the early humans to be invisible forces, and that idea seems reasonably plausible too.
If the supernatural is an invisible world, then it seems to follow that it can be accessed (although modern thinking would say peopled) only by the imagination. Being imagined as an invisible world would seem to lead to the idea of immateriality as well. So I think you are right. The association between a natural visible world and physicalism, and the association between a supernatural invisible world and ant-physicalism both seem natural.
Should we follow our intuitions, our natural imaginative inclinations in deciding what is a valid and/ or plausible ontology? Or should we apply critical thought and the correctives of logical and empirical knowledge to our pre-critical inclinations? That is the question, and the further question is ' does it matter?'.
When people take their own ideas, what seems self-evident to them, too seriously it seems that culture wars are looming. For some on both sides this is can become a moral crusade. To my way of thinking that is definitely a negativeit is social consequences that matter, and divisive thinking is that last thing needed toady IMO.
Quoting Janus
Indeed, binary or dualistic thinking like this is certainly responsible for many unnecessarily conflicts.
I have often thought that one of the reasons people are attracted to superphysical ideas is their aesthetic appeal. It perhaps seems more harmonious to imagine that there is a transcendent realm, something grander and more meaningful beyond the physical world. I have noticed how often advocates of the transcendent describe the physicalist position as an ugly worldview - stunted, disenchanted, devoid of mystery, limiting.
I think this is right. The aesthetic appeal is important. I'm reminded of the sublime aesthetics of the great cathedrals and Christian rituals.
I don't view the physical world as ugly, disenchanted or devoid of mystery, though. I think it is beautiful and enchanting in its diversity and complexity of form, and full of mystery. And when you think about it the beauty of the cathedrals and rituals are themselves physical beauty. It's a beauty that seems to point beyond itself. to be sure, but I think all beauty does that, insofar as we don't really know why or how it is that things can be beautiful. I wonder some animals experience beauty. The ritual nest-making and extraordinary plumage of some birds seems to suggest that they do.
Nice saying! I think we are all here on account of the magnitude (apart from the sciences, and even there) of human ignorance. Hopefully we are all here to learn and change our ideas when we encounter ideas that explore deeper and make more sense than what we might presently believe.
Quoting Gnomon
To me the only different participating in a philosophical forum could make would be to sharpen and clarify my ideas and also lead me to be more open to alternatives to my own thinking. I have changed my mind on metaphysical matters several times since first participating on philosophy forums, when I have encountered ideas that seem to go deeper and be more plausible.
Indeed, although I dont much like cathedrals. They are striking rather than beautiful. I think ideas can also seem ugly or beautiful. For instance, the idea of a world where there is nothing after death, where limitations are imposed by natural laws, and where there is no transformative reconciliation with the ground of being, may feel ugly to some people - much the way a painting by Francis Bacon might unsettle or alarm some.
I'm just repeating myself...
Whereas I think it is an open question, subject to constant revision as our conception of nature is constantly changing. There are strong lines of argument that rationality itself is not subject to naturalistic explanations.
As to the natural vs. the supernatural/transcendental:
If nature consists of that which is visible and measurable in quantifiable ways, then is the mind and, more specifically, that which we address as I-ness which is aware of its own mind and its many aspects (thoughts, ideas, intentions, emotions, etc.) not natural? For the latter is neither visible nor measurable in quantifiable ways. Hence notions such as that of the transcendental ego.
As to the difference between physicalism and non-physicalism:
I so far find that far more important than any sense of the esthetic is materialisms/physicalisms seeming entailment of nihilismin so far as this stance is that wherein no intrinsic meaning occurs in anything whatsoever.
While I dont find non-physicalism to be univocal in what is upheld as an alternative to physicalism, physicalism does in all its variants entail nothingness in the sense of non-being upon mortal death, as well as before the commencement of life. Such that all life thereby culminates in this very nothingness. (Can there be any variant of physicalism that doesnt directly necessitate this?)
How, then, can physicalism be understood to allow for the possibility of a meaningful cosmos, hence a meaningful existence, and, by extension, of a meaningful life (be it in general or in particular)?
And this for many is indeed a differentiation that makes for quite a substantial differenceones individual aesthetic appreciations aside.
Which is an idea I personally find quite lovely. To me this is meaningful. We have one life, make it work.
Quoting javra
Meaning is a human term which is the product any number of contexts and we area sense making creatures - we can't help ourselves.
Deleuze changes his strong emphasis on Eternal Return and the privilege of the virtual.
Nietzsches aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return. This is much as to say that the fascicular system does not really break with dualism, with complementarity between subject and object unity is thwarted in the object, while a new type of unity triumphs in the subject. (A thousand plateaus, pg.6)
To avoid a strong opposition between virtual and actual modes of difference, Deleuze moves toward the phenomena of consolidation. While focusing on describing singular assemblages, he offers a much more elaborated approach to a complex mode of interdependence between the actual and the virtual. Now, he designates the phenomena of becoming a line of flight. At the same time, the actualized individuation and the tendency to organization are expressed through the concepts of the molecular and molar lines. Together, they compose an open whole, which is indeed a paradoxical concept. However, the emergence of something qualitatively new cannot be explained exclusively by the means of logical, dialectical or semiotic transition. This obstacle makes any totality simultaneously impossible and necessary, a place of an irretrievable fullness. Deleuze theorizes reality in terms of eventuality and discontinuity. He follows the principle that the nature of elements does not predetermine them to enter one type of arrangement rather than another. Therefore, totality, an open whole, should be conceptualized afresh, depending on a considered problematic field. There is not the same transcendental-empirical synthesis, that Deleuze applies again and again. This vision sets in motion the productivity of the creative construction of Deleuzian philosophy.
OK, sure. For what its worth, personally, I too for my own reasons find the notion of nothingness after this life more appealing than any other (nice and interesting to be here, but enough with the metaphorical headaches after one entire lifetime of them has gone by). All the same, whether there is or isnt something for us after our death to this world is not something derivable fromor even necessarily in tune withour affinities, or else that which we emotively find most comforting. Rather irrational to assume that it is.
The issue I here responded to was of a difference that makes a difference between physicalism and non-physicalism. Nothing of your statements dispels the apparent reality that physicalism entails nihilism whereas non-physicalism does not. And to most people out there, this logical difference between the two is both sharp and substantial ... as well as bearing some weight on the issue of how one ought to best live one's life.
I find some cathedrals (for example Chartres) beautiful and many others merely impressive. St Peters I found to be a mixture of beauty and impressiveness (due to the sheer scale) .Perhaps when it comes to the natural world it's the vision of dissolution and death that disturbs some people.
Quoting javra
I think you are talking about theism because even if the world were simply non-physical and/ or held in some universal mind, that does not on its own lend it an overarching meaning. You need to add a God that cares for us, has a purpose for us, and the promise of a better life to come and personal immortality to give that overarching universal meaning.
Also I don't agree that physicalism leads to nihilism. Ironically I think it is religion that leads to nihilism by positing one meaning for all and thus nihilating the creative possibility that people have to find their own meanings by which to direct their lives.
Quoting javra
Energy itself is not measurable except by gauging its effects. If you accept the idea that consciousness is not anything over and above neural activity, then its effects are measurable. The transcendental ego is arguably merely an idea. Even if it were more than merely an idea we could have no way to tell.
As with most versions of Buddhism for example, I strongly disagree.
Quoting Janus
Playing footloose with what the term "nihilism" signifies. For my part, I've already specified what I intended it to mean in this context. Basically, that of existential nihilism: the interpretation of life being inherently pointless.
Quoting Janus
A can of worms that, so I'll leave it be.
Quoting Janus
We can have no way of discerning the difference between a) the self/ego which knows (aka the transcendental ego) and b) the self/ego which is known by (a) (aka the empirical ego)? And this even in principle?
In virtue of what logic do you affirm this truth? And this contra to what Kant, James, and Husserl affirmed as a known.
When people for example say "I am tall (at least relative to ants or some such)" we know ourselves to be tall but also know that we as the consciousness/awareness or else mind which so knows cannot of itself hold the property of tallness. Whereas "my body is tall (therefore I am tall)" can be cogent, "my awareness/mind is tall (therefore I am tall)" can't. Or is this something we could have no way to know about as well.
So you think Buddhism gives life meaning? In virtue of what? Rebirth? Karma? Even if those, what guarantors their universality? Merely learning to let go of attachments cannot be an overarching meaning to life itself, since there are very good personal reasons for attempting to do this.
Quoting javra
Pointless according to who? Is not the idea that life is basically pointless not merely a subjective opinion? What about such things as enjoyment, interest, creativity and even survival? Is there no point to any of those just because life is thought to be a merely physical phenomenon? And even if life were basically mind (whatever that could mean) rather than basically matter or energy, how would that fact alone give it more point? These are the same questions I already asked that you did not even attempt to answer.
Quoting javra
Why? Because you cannot come up with a response?
Quoting javra
Of course we can and do make conceptual distinctions between empirical and transcendental notions of the self or ego. My question was as to how we could possibly know that the transcendental ego is anything more than an idea.
Quoting javra
I don't see how that argument, which merely gives an example of a category error, show us anything. It would be a category error to say that my farts are tall, or my breath is tall, or my digestion is tall. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Quoting JanusI don't imagine the mental is completely independent of the physical. I don't think we can remove mass or charge from particles, and I don't think we can remove proto-consciousness from them, either.
Mind you, my thoughts on all this are just speculation. I don't think physical properties can account for consciousness, so there must be something else at work. I've tried to work out this idea. But it's not even a theory, since I can't imagine how it could be tested. And, no, it really doesn't matter. Again, if you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make. But the search for understanding is fascinating. At least imo.
Quoting javraEverything in the universe is natural. If there is anything in the universe that is non-physical, invisible, and unmeasurable in quantifiable ways, it is still natural.
No, it says that the inability to explain something in terms of physics does not entail that the thing to be explained is non-physical.
Quoting Patterner
Mass and charge are detectable in particles. Proto-consciousness in particles is purely speculative ,and in fact we don't really have any idea what it could look like.
Quoting Patterner
You don't think consciousness could evolve in a merely physical world? You don't believe it could just on account of the fact that it seems to be inexplicable? Have you considered the possibility that it is not mind and matter itself which are incompatible, but just our conceptions of mind and matter which seem incompatible,
As you acknowledge there is no way to test the idea that they are not compatible anyway. Even if you could somehow confirm that mind could not possibly have evolved from physical matter, what difference would that knowledge make to your life as lived?
In virtue of Buddhism being a soteriological school of thought.
Quoting Janus
If life sooner or later necessarily result in nothingness, what is its point in its occurrence to begin with? Its not an issue of opinion but of logic. Something with a point has a purpose. (Unless we play footloose with terms again). The point of life is ... ?
Quoting Janus
1) I stated that non-physicalism does not entail nihilism. Not that it necessarily results in purpose. and 2) Try not to bullshit so much, please. You asked me no such questions. As is blatantly evidenced here:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
No. Because it is a can of worms. Why do you respond this way? Other than to insult.
The notion of energy stems from Aristotle. Energy/work without purpose/telos as concept is thoroughly modern, utterly physicalist/materialist, and it need not be. But then to you energy would then be one of those transcendental issues that wouldn't be natural. And so forth.
Quoting Janus
You never posed a friggin question. You affirmed a truth, and this as though it were incontrovertible. As per the quote above.
As to how do I know that I as a transcendental ego am more that a mere idea: I am a subject of awareness that can hold awareness of, for example, ideas - farts as another example - thereby making my being as subject of awareness more than an idea.
Very much agree.
So the meaning of life lies in an afterlife or in nirvana (is it eternal life or extinction?).
Quoting javra
Why are you so ready to feel insulted. The aim is to question and challnege not to insult. Are you not comfortable with your ideas being questioned and challenged?
Quoting javra
I'm not concerning myself with ancient conceptions of energy. Energy is what does work, work that might be either purposeful or purposeless. In science we have the four fundamental forces (energies). I see energy as entirely immanent; in fact, I can make no sense of the idea of transcendental energy.
Quoting javra
I did not affirm a truth, I posed the question as to how we could ever know that the transcendental ego is more than merely an idea. When I said that it merely an idea, I meant that it cannot be anything more than an idea for us because there is no imaginable way to test whether it is more than an idea. There is no need to get angry or offended. we are just here discussing ideas, so what's the problem?
I don't understand your answer above. It just sounds stipulative rather than being any kind of means to knowledge.
Quoting JanusYou believe it [I]could[/I] just on account of the fact that it seems to be inexplicable?
Quoting JanusI have considered the possibility. Can you give me any specific thoughts along these lines?
Quoting JanusThat is correct.
Quoting JanusI was taking about proto-consciousness when I said it's not a theory because it's not testable.
Quoting JanusI just said:
"[I]And, no, it really doesn't matter. Again, if you can't tell the difference, what difference does it make. But the search for understanding is fascinating. At least imo.[/I]"
I think it's the most fascinating topic of all. As I recently said, I don't need a reason to delve into the subject any note than I need a reason to listen to Bach, read Dune, or look at the view from the top of a mountain.
But there's also this. Two quotes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Hope you know who Data and Dr. Crusher are.
1) Data made a daughter, named Lal.
2) Data and Dr. Crusher:
Or, as Jung said:
Quoting javra
And as to:
Quoting Janus
Simply because your question directly insinuates that my reply was pompous charlatanry - thereby taking a serious jab at my character. And in this, I stand by my right to feel insulted. Only human, don't you know. There a difference between being thick-skinned and being thick.
I haven't claimed there is an overall point to life. In fact quite the oppositeit is up to each of us to decide what the point of our lives is. Or else simply live your life, enjoy it and follow your interests and passions; I suppose that would be a point in itself.
Quoting javra
You are projectingmy question insinuated nothing, I was simply trying to get a clear answer from you. Anyway, if you are going to take exchanges of ideas on a philosophy forum personally, then I think it's best to stop.
OK. I have no more questions for you.
:rofl:
Quoting Janus
And "I am projecting", this because you say so.
Gaslighters are as gaslighters do. (This statement doesn't insinuate anything. :chin: )
Yea, you gave me a good laugh.
Quoting Janus
If you say so.
No, you are projecting because you are imputing motivations to what I said which were not there. It seems obvious you cannot carry on challenging conversations without becoming offended. That's why I said it's best to stop. I have no desire to hurt your feelings.
You have a way of psychoanalyzing - and it's often as erroneous as hell to boot. But that your are imputing motivations which are not there is, well, it can't be projecting.
Quoting Janus
How nifty of you. Don't worry about my feelings though so much as about the substance of what is said. This without assuming such psycho-babbles as that I'm posturing in my answers because I'm unable to come up with a response. Or that my feelings have been hurt by you.
Just in case we run across each other again.
You believe it could just on account of the fact that it seems to be inexplicable? My point being, it supports my position more than yours. What supports your position?
I have considered the possibility. Can you give me any specific thoughts along these lines?
My position is that, considering the current state of science, as far as I am familiar with it, it seems most plausible that mind evolved in a physical world. I don't imagine that mind came from anywhere else, and the panpsychist idea seems unintelligible.
Naively, we think about things in intuitive ways. Hence animism was common to early forager societies. Likewise it is natural for us to naively think that the mind and body are different. After all, one observes the other. And I don't deny they are different. I see mind as a function of the body. It is obviously not an object of the senses as the body is. As I said earlier energy is not an object of the senses either and nor is causation.
So I believe the mind is, despite how it might seem, a physical process or function, and I don't believe that because the way the mind seems to us intuitively is not explicable in terms of physics. On the contrary I think it is more likely that the way the mind seems to us is a kind of illusion.
I have said it doesn't matter anyway, but the reason I engage in this discussion is that I think the fact it doesn't matter does itself matter. If we are attached to the idea of the mind being this way or that it will cloud our judgement because confirmation bias will have taken hold.
I believe it only matters to those who think physicalism destroys any hope of there being more to our beings than just this life. I don't see anything wrong with believing that provided it is acknowledged to be an article of faith. When people start imagining that it is an objective truth, then fundamentalist thinking looms, and I think that is most dangerous to societal well-being.
I also object to the idea that physicalism is self-evidently false, because that conclusion is always based on a strawman model of physicalism. I don't say that idealism is self-evidently false just that it seems to me to be the more plausible of the options. I don't object to others thinking idealism is the more plausible, and I'm happy to leave it at thatagree to disagree, even though I think that conclusion is most likely wrong.
Quoting JanusI've always had trouble understanding this position. The way the mind seems to itself... The mind is an illusion being fooled by itself. Illusions fool the viewer. The audience. But, in this case, that upon which everything else is built, the viewer and the illusion are the same thing.
I agree about Idealism. I don't understand why minds wouldn't exist as their true selves in their true realm/setting, but concoct a setting nothing like it in which to exist, where they cannot act or interact according to their nature.
-----
1. This grounds the connection between physical causation and logical necessity.
2. "The very idea of science from the usual point of view is to take out everything to do with human subjectivity and see what remains. QBism says, if you take everything out of quantum theory to do with human subjectivity, then nothing remains" ~ Christian Fuchs
3. Hence, 'mind-created world'.
Since I have no formal training in philosophical language and methods, some of Schopenhauer's argument against Materialism is lost on me. For example, the notion of "givenness", begs the question "by whom?". Are the ideas he calls "given" merely his personal preferences and assumptions, or Axioms generally accepted by experts in the field, or divine revelations?
Since unresolved debates between Materialism and Idealism are common on this forum, it might help to clarify our language, and the ideas that each side takes for granted. Will you take the time to summarize his argument in your own words? That might help me to resolve my own ambiguity about the obvious material/physical nature of nature, and the less obvious meta-physical essence of philosophical argumentation about Reality. Thanks. :smile:
Excerpts from the Schopenhauer quote :
[i]# "Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is immediately given us by what is given us indirectly."
# "materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea"
# "To the assertion that thought is a modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the knowing subject, as its idea."[/i]
What he's saying, is that the 'idea' of the object, which is its appearance to us in consciousness, is 'immediately given'. That applies to every characteristic of the object - how it feels, how heavy it is, etc, all of which are ideas. The key phrase is 'it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and active in time'. He's *not* saying that we have the idea of the object on one hand, and the actual object on the other - everything that appears to us, appears as 'idea'. Whereas materialism attempts to explain this unitary experience with reference to something else altogether, namely, 'matter', as a theoretical construct existing apart from or outside the experience of the object, and which is somehow more fundamental than the experience itself.
I recall you've read Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order - the resonances with that book ought to be clear. For example:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics (p. 6). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition. ]In fact, what we regard as the physical world is physical to us precisely in the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions. The aspect of the universe that resists our push and demands muscular effort on our part is what we consider to be physical. On the other hand, since sensation and thought dont require overcoming any physical resistance, we consider them to be outside of material reality. It is shown in the final chapter ('Mind, Life and Universe') that this is an illusory dichotomy, and any complete account of the universe must allow for the existence of a nonmaterial component which accounts for its unity and complexity.[/quote]
That 'nonmaterial component' is not, however, external to the mind itself, but the activity of consciousness which integrates sensory and intellectual data into a meaningful whole - Kant's 'transcendental unity of apperception'. (Ref. Pinter doesn't mention Schopenhauer but there are numerous references to Kant.)
So, Schopenhauer is agreeing with Kant, that we can "not" know the true reality (ding an sich), and must make-do (improvise) with an imitation simulation : a virtual reality (immaterial experience)? But stubborn Materialists insist on getting true, authentic Reality, even if they have to take it on theory/faith? In that case, is natural Matter their substitute for belief in a super-natural Ideal realm?
I guess what Schopenhauer means by "given" is the knowledge (appearance) presented to us, effortlessly, by our understanding (interpreting) minds. Most of us take that mental experience for granted as real-enough (given), even though lacking in stuff with material properties. Yet some think it's the brain that does the "hard work" of bringing the exterior world inside the interior experience.
However, the "hard question" remains : by what physical process does a brain construct a worldview? What are the physical/material stages/steps between object and subject? I suppose the easy answer is to just take the experience as a "gift", given by the brain. But hard-to-please Materialists grudgingly accept the gift as an artificial substitute for the real object. Their policy is, "accept no substitutes" for the true ding. Hence, they rudely look a gift-horse in the mouth, to determine its true reality. :smile: :wink:
Note --- Quantum physicists constructed theoretical models of matter in empty space, that serve as place-holders for the ding an sich. Their theory of fields requires some "thing" to occupy each point in space, and to jump around (fluctuate) as they absorb virtual photons. Are such Fields real or ideal? Is that kind of matter True or Apparent?
A "virtual particle" is a temporary, theoretical particle that arises from the quantum field theory concept of "empty space" not being truly empty, . . . . ___ Google AI overview
Buddha's "Self"
His extraordinary insight was that appearances, properly understood as impermanent, interdependent, and unsatisfying, are also devoid of the ontological underpinnings we are used to ascribing to everything in our world. All of it, without exception, is utterly devoid of self.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/appearance-and-reality/
Note --- Is "self" the Buddhist version of matter or stuff or ding an sich?
Unknown
Quoting Gnomon
As I've said earlier in the thread, the process was one of elimination: first posit 'the world' as comprising extended matter and non-extended mind; then show that there is no feasible way for the latter to affect the former; then declare that latter non-existent, leaving only the former. That's the predicament leftover from the 'Cartesian division'. It's still very much active in the grammar of the Western worldview.
Quote from the link to : The Neural Binding Problem :
" In Science, something is called a problem when there is no plausible model for its substrate. So we have the mindbody problem (Chalmers 1996), but not the color problem, although there is a great deal of ongoing color research."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3
how does the brain create consciousness
[i]"The brain creates consciousness through a complex interplay of billions of neurons, and there are multiple theories about how this happens"
"The creation of consciousness is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy"[/i]
___Google AI overview
Note --- "Multiple Theories", but none with a step-by-step process from Sensation to Meaning.
Have you noticed that I am not discussing Buddhism in the manner of Western secular academia?
You don't say. I have to take breaks from this forum, as I feel downright metaphorically bespattered with blood.
What a spiritual take on the matter!
While many people say such things, I doubt many people mean them. It seems to me that people are far more sure of themselves, far more certain than you make allowance for.
Why the "even if"? Why couldn't one talk about enlightenment with integrity even if one is enlightened?
I am aware of the standard definitions of enlightenment. Whether what those definitions say is "real" or not I can't say, given that according to those definitions, one would need to be enlightened oneself in order to recognize another enlightened being.
But I certainly acknowledge a strange pull that I feel towards these topics and a desire to reflect on them.
Quoting JoshuMaybe you are already enlightened, and didn't know it. :grin:
According to Early Buddhism, such is impossible, because an enlightened person knows they are enlightened, they have no doubt or confusion about it. Everyone who is enlightened knows they are enlightened.
I'm just kidding around. If you put on a robe and eat rice, you might be enlightened. :halo:
It is irrelevant that past scientific theories have been shown to be wrong, or at least not as adequate as some later theory. That fact does not guarantee that any present theories will be proven wrong. Also, that is all we have to work with.
I haven't said consciousness doesn't seem to be a physical process per se. From a neuroscientific perspective it does seem to be a physical process. From the naive intuitive point of view, it may seem not to be physical to some. From my perspective it seems neither determinably physical (in the sense that it is not a physical object, but an activity) nor non-physical. It certainly doesn't seem otherworldly to me and this world definitely seems physical through and through.
Quoting Patterner
You continue to misinterpret what I'm saying. I haven't said the mind is an illusion, I've said that what it may seem to us may be an illusion.
Quoting baker
It doesn't matter whether people acknowledge that what they believe about matters which are not either logically or empirically determinable, is determined by what they think most plausible, which in turn is determined by which starting assumptions they are making.
It is also possible that in some, perhaps many, cases people believe what they want to believe.
I haven't failed to make allowance for people feeling certain at all. But there is a clear distinction between being certain (which is only possible in cases where what is believed is empirically or logically verifiable) and feeling certain, which is possible in all kinds of cases, including self-delusion.
Quoting JanusAs it's in this world, it's obviously not otherworldly.
Quoting JanusSince there is no physical explanation for consciousness, it's possible consciousness is not physical through and through.
Quoting JanusThe physical is certainly an essential ingredient.
Thanks for the conversation.
But if you're done, perhaps others will give their ideas. A thread dedicated to any physicalist explanation would be great. Of course, every thread begun to explore any particular approach to the issue soon turns into a debate. I wonder if there's any chance mods would enforce rules for such a thread.
Although I might be the only person who thinks such a thread might be valuable.
I think it's probably a knot which cannot be untied. Taking sight as an example, we see things just as animals do. But we are reflexively self-aware that we see things. So we conceive of ourselves as "having experience". Do non-symbolic animals have this reflexive self-awareness or is it just an artefact of language?
The idea of things going on "in the dark" may be an incoherent idea. Do things go on in the dark for animals if they cannot be self-reflectively aware? Are we really self-reflectively aware or are we just playing with language? How can we answer these questions? If there is a way to answer them, what could that be but science?
So maybe there is really no subjective experience at all and it is all just an artefact of languagea kind of confabulation or fiction. Or if there is some spiritual, non-material, non-physical element in play and our intuitions tell us that (which has seemed to be the case historically) then maybe those intuitions are right, but we have no way of demonstrating that and must just have faith in them and stop trying to prove or disprove it. In other words, just accept our feelings and intuitions and enjoy their enrichment without trying to come to any ontological conclusions because to do so is an impossible project.
We don't and can't know why we are here or where we are headed, or even whether there is any reason we are here, or whether we are headed anywhere at all, but there's no harm in exercising our imaginations and enjoying the ride while it lasts. Anyway, that's pretty much where I'm at for what it's worthI like to think about these questions but I'm content with uncertainty, with the thought that these questions cannot be definitively answered.
I was going to ask you about your response to the decomposition problem, but, in re-reading the OP, it doesn't sound like your view is a form of ontological idealism....
I would say epistemic idealism is any metaphysical theory which posits primacy to the mind insofar as how we understand reality; whereas ontological idealism is any metaphysical theory which posits primacy to the mind in reality (over matter).
Classical ontological idealism arguably started with good 'ole Berkeley and is still prominent in the literature today (such as with Kastrup). Although I am not as familiar with the lineage of epistemic idealism, I would imagine it starts with Kant.
Your view seems to be a form of transcendental idealism, which is about how we understand reality fundamentally through mental ideas (and cognitive pre-structures) and thusly is a form of epistemic idealism---not ontological idealism.
Re-reading your OP, I think this is supporting by your claims like:
Although I think one could go the objective idealist's route and just say that all is in mind, but there is an objective reality because there is one universal mind maintaining the ideas of reality (e.g., God); your response to basic objections to idealism seems to be to go the transcendental idealist route; viz., to admit that there is a mind-independent world but that we can say nothing meaningful about it independently of the modes by which we cognize it.
A position, like Kant's, that admits of reality being fundamentally mind-independent (ontologically), is not a form of true idealism; that is, ontological idealism. Classically, by my understanding, 'idealism' is a short-hand for 'ontological idealism' which posits, like Berkeley, that reality is fundamentally mind-stuff: not physical-stuff.
Why is this important? Well, because I was going to ask you about the most difficult problem for idealism (IMHO)--the decomposition problem--but you don't seem to believe that reality is fundamentally mind-stuff; so that isn't a problem for you like it would be for a classical idealist.
The decomposition problem is how a universal mind, which is the fundamental entity ontologically, can "decompose" into separate, subjective, and personnal minds which we are. Sometimes it is denoted as how a Mind (with a capital 'M') 'decomposes' into a mind (with a lowercase 'm'). It seems like, for an idealist, the Mind which fundamentally exists for the world to be objective is toto genere different than the minds which inhabit it; and there's not clear explanation (that I have heard) of how a mind like ours would arise out of mental stuff happening in 'the Mind'.
Scientific theories, or any knowledge, or even any concepts about either experience or topics like "being" and ontology cannot tell us about "stuff" or what "stuff" is independent of limited perspectives that we don't usually identify with the "stuff" we are talking about - apart from experiences. Obviously we have direct aquaintance with experience; regardless of limitions of our concepts about experience, it is hard to deny that we experience. But I would argue concepts of experience play a similar role in naturalistic scientific knowledge as any other scientific concept as does concepts of "being". And ultimately there is no self-sustaining foundation for these things independent of enactive roles within perspective.
What actually is experience metaphysically? There is no criteria for what is and what is not an experience. There is no criteria to give that question the meaning that we want it to either - what does "metaphysical" mean? Just another concept we use, and (albeit) within experience too. But again, any coherent metaphysical generalization of our direct aquaintance is impossible.
To say the world is made of experience in the same way as houses are made of bricks also doesn't avoid the hard combination problem. The strong emergence involved in stacking layers of experience on top of each other.
Talk of any fundamental metaphysics is on some deeper level a enactive game as any other knowledge - it will always be found lacking in the sense that when we talk about fundamental metaphysics we are wanting something deeper than say the mathematical descriptions that make science superficially effective. Obviously no strict dividing line between science and metaphysics (or philosophy of science I guess) though. Best we can do is have concepts that make things coherent. Does saying the world is made of experience make things coherent for me? No, because experience is something deeply tied to my personal perspective which I may share with others in virtue of being organisms.
What I can say is my experience is some coarse-grained structure in the world undergirded by finer structures.
I have been thinking all scientific paradigms are united by notions of causality.
Steven Frank:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=5393718917133646068&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16974184348648837789&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
We cannot access anything else but causal relations between "things" on different scales.
If I make the assumption of equating my aquaintance with experience as ontology (whatever this means), then it suggests reality should be conceptualized as scale-free.
Reality is just causal structures all the way down (and this is akin to scientific statement with all the limitations of our physical theories that cannot tell us what the physical is - theories of reality cannot tell us the nature of reality intrinsically):
e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33286288/
We cannot arbitrarily make more fundamental some causal structures over others even if they arise from coarse-graining over others. We can only at most make the distinction that finer-grained structures carry more information about reality. Insofar as causality is like communication, that is how we may relate it to minds - information and statistical physics are two sides of the same coin. There is a weak emergence aspect of information in the sense of scaffolding causal structures on top of each other. But also a strong emergence aspect in information when we look at how structures can detect or distinguish other causal structures in a "brute" way - almost like with our own phenomenal experiences.
I cannot tell you anything else about reality other than causal structures existing that can in some sense be construed as communicating information - what does "causal structure" mean? Again there is no non-circular foundation to this concept. Maybe we can talk about cause in terms of non-redundant temporal structure? These concepts bottom out in spatio-temporal structure.
But this talk about causal structure is not distinct from how when you dissect physics, what is fundamental is things like energy and work - which are just ways of quantifying how things change, or their propensity to do so - i.e. causality.
Is there a "bottom" to reality? What would that actually mean. Don't know. Maybe cannot know.
On the otherhand, does it make sense to say experience is what it is like to be some kind of causal structures in reality? Maybe. Could we then go on to say that all structures are just experience? Maybe. But the vacuousness of this makes it almost like a personal choice.
My personal choice is not to because it brings so many other connotations that complicate the naturalistic picture of reality, sometimes not making as much sense to me. If experience is another way of just talking about information (personal to, accessible to me) then the most fundamental notion in all this is something like causality. Reality is not made of blobs of "stuff" arranged or stacked, but causal structures instead. Maybe reality should be seen in terms of blobs of "stuff". But we cannot talk about intrinsic "stuff" in a way that does justice to the word "intrinsic". We can talk about causal structure, information...
... Insofar that causal structures relate things that are sensible to us... we don't need to think about it in terms of cause as some "intrinsic" things... things too may be talked about or given meaning in terms of relations to other things.... relations all the way down another way of saying causes all the way down? Or perhaps structure.
A kind of structuralism. I have generally pushed back from Ontic structural realism in the past. I think my thoughts are closest to Otavio Bueno's empirical structuralism I think he calls it. (Or perhaps structural empiricism). Imo ontic structuralism is kind of empty or trivial -
[perhaps anti-realism too insofar that I think questions of realism may be subject to similar indeterminacy as scientific theories themselves - debates about theories being right or wrong, how right or wrong (or which bits) and in what sense right and wrong mean (e.g. Newtonian physics could be right or true in the sense of describing some of our data approximately, it could be wrong if you take it as the general principles of the universe).
Can we justify theories being correct in contexts of pluralism and empirical adequacy? Is there even a discrete dividing line between theories insofar that you can deconstruct, change them, throw bits out, retain others. Theories can be right (or useful) in some ways, wrong in others, often idealized. The significance may depend on perspective - as said before once, scientific anti-realists and realists often accept the same facts about science in terms of underdeterminism and losses with theory change.]
- while we only access structure through enactive perspectives. I guess it in some ways boils down to what you think "right" means. If you have a loose or indeterminate standard for what "correct" or "true" means then theories may seem more "real" compared to someone in which "true" requires stronger standards.
But ultimately, many theories are idealized and go on to be rejected - its always an open question how long things will be rejected or accepted for. At the end of the day, the story I use about scientific theories is an enactive one, truth too. So there is a strange loop aspect - debating about whether theories are true when you have already decided that uses of truth is nothing more than an enactive process in a real world of structure. One could try and clear this up with a simpler picture of separating subjective from objective, real from non-real - but a clearer picture comes at the cost of greater idealization. And here we see there is an element of personal preference in selecting meta-theoretical views where you trade off clarity and precision or complexity and accuracy in the context of model selection. But I think regardless of meta-theoretic views of what "truth" or "correctness" means I always endorse notions of knowledge fundamentally in terms of enaction, idealization and agnosticism of future acceptance (to various degrees of subjective certainty depending on what we are talking about - and even then, graded certainty has an arbitrary relation to acceptance or rejection in the sense that someone may have higher standards of certainty to which they accept something compared to others - belief and justification always have some kins of normative aspect in general: i.e. its not strictly about whether something is true or false but whether I ought to believe it and why. Induction may not be the best argument in general, deflating enactivism better so).
Good analysis Bob.
As for the decomposition problem, Kastrup does address that through his theory of 'dissociated alters'. He proposes that reality comprises a universal consciousness ('mind at large'.) This universal mind is analogous to a field of subjectivity, from which all individual experiences arise by dissociation.
Dissociation: Individual conscious beings, like humans, are seen as dissociated "alters" of the universal mind. Just as alters in dissociative identity theory are partitioned segments of a single psyche, the individual consciousness is a localized expression of the universal mind, dissociated from its broader unity.
This is very similar to the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which Kastrup has acknowledged in dialogues with Swami Sarvapriyananda, the head teacher of the Vedanta Society of New York. And a similar idea is expressed by Albert Einstein, of all people.
[quote=Albert Einstein, Letter of Condolence]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.[/quote]
But I would add the caveat that the whole concept of 'mind at large' is problematical if it is conceived as something objectively existent in a way analogous to matter or energy. (I wrote an (unpublished) Medium essay on that topic which can be reviewed here.)
Quoting Apustimelogist
If you read the OP carefully, you will note that I discuss that problem in paragraph four. I emphatically do not posit any conception of 'mind stuff' or 'spiritual substance' which i regard as an oxymoronic conception, to wit:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Quoting Wayfarer
All due respect, you're viewing the issue in the wrong register. As I say at the outset, the approach is perspectival, it is not an essay about what 'things are made of.' That is a job for physics and chemistry. But the nature of our own first-person experience is real on a different level and the question of its nature has to be approached in a different way. That's what I mean by 'perspectival'. I know from reading your post here and elsewhere, you view the issue through a certain perspective, and that challenging one's assumed perspectives is difficult. But the philosophical perspective the OP advocating is of a different kind or order.
Aha I wasn't responding to the OP - I was just puttung down thoughts. I think most people probably don't disagree with the OP at its core, but some people emphasize the points more than others.
The form of idealism you advocate doesn't seem to posit anything at all, which leaves it looking totally vacuous.
I am aware of Kastrup's view, but his solution seems utterly implausible to me. According to his logic, people conceiving a baby is somehow an instance of the Universal Mind disassociating from itself thereby creating an alter.
I was curious what your take is on it, but, again, you don't have this problem (I don't think).
But how does that work? How is sex an external representation of a mind disassociating with itself?
From that comment, I think you have an incorrect picture of what Kastrup means by 'dissociated alter'. From a glossary entry on Bernardo Kastrup's terminology:
This plainly bears comparision with the Plotinus' philosophy of 'the One' as well as with Advaita Vedanta. For a detailed account, see The Universe in Consciousness.
Unfortunately, I don't see what part of my analysis is incorrect. Kastrup believes that a dissociated alter is akin to an alter in a person with a multi-personality disorder, and that each of us are external representations (i.e., images) of a dissociated alter of that one consciousness. It thusly follows that when a new consciousness is created, such as in childbirth, that this creation is an external representation of whatever processes produced the One to disassociate into another alter---no?
Given that cosmic consciousness is likely to be viewed as wildly implausible by many people, what in particular about this aspect of it is particularly implausible? It jibes with the ancient tropes of the descent of the soul.
For our discussion, I am just focusing on one: the implausibility of the sex being an external representation of the disassociation of a mind. Don't those seem unrelated? How would that make any sense?
If we think of it akin to personality disorder, which Kastrup does quite often, then we would expect trauma to cause a disassociation (i.e., an alter) or at least something significantly violent or powerful; but, because we know sex produces life, Kastrup must hold with consistency that sex somehow is the act that forces the Mind to disassociate from itself. Sex, simpliciter, is not violent; it is not traumatic; it is not particular powerful; etc. What I would expect if Kastrup were right, is that something powerful about the Mind's psychology would 'traumatize' it into splitting into multiple minds (alters). The problem is that Kastrup admits the analogy cannot be stretched this far (as I am doing) because the universal consciousness is a basic, primitive consciousness for Kastrup (so it doesn't have the psychology that a person with a personality disorder would have). However, it still produces a meaningful question: "why would we expect sex to produce alters of a universal Mind?".
Of course it is true that the psychiatric disorder is often the product of trauma or mental illness, but I think that is not essential to Kastrup's point. He introduces it as an analogy to explain how a 'universal consciousness' can come to appear as instances of individual consciousness. Kastrup posits that cosmic dissociation occurs at the level of living organisms rather than that of elementary particles. He references metabolic processes and empirical findings to support this view, emphasizing that organisms boundaries are physically and phenomenally distinct from those of inorganic matter. Reproduction, whether sexual or asexual, involves the establishment of new boundaries that separate one organism (or alter) from another. In Kastrup's framework, this 'boundary formation' is the physical manifestation of dissociation within the universal consciousness. The boundaries of living organisms are unique and distinct compared to inanimate matter, as they encapsulate metabolic and phenomenological processes. So, as said above, while I quite understand why you might think the entire idea is implausible, I don't really see why sexual reproduction in particular poses a challenge to it.
If all the mental abilities I have that a mouse doesn't were taken from me, making me the equivalent of a mouse, mouse-me would surely not remember what it's like to be human-me. Mouse-I wouldn't have the capacity for the thoughts and memories, or any conception, of human-me.
But when my human capacities were restored, would I have any recollection of what it was like to be the mouse? Even a vague impression? Surely more than what I would have if I had been a rock.
Quoting JanusI don't understand how this works. If we program computers to play with language in this way, if ChatGPT does it, would it falsely believe it is self-reflectively aware? It seems like pretending to be conscious.
Does it just mean that the animal feels something then?
Quoting Patterner
ChatGPT doesn't play with language in the sense I mean. It is programmed to sample vast amounts of relevant language and predict the most appropriate sentences to any question as I understand it. It doesn't claim to be self-reflective either.
Quoting JanusI don't know enough about ChatGPT to know if it's a good example of the idea that's only half-baked in my head. I'm wondering what you mean by "playing with language". How does that come about? Can we program a computer to do that? If so, does that mean it's self-reflectively aware? Even if it doesn't claim to be? If it needs to claim to be, but doesn't, what is it about us that makes us claim to be, despite the fact that we aren't? What extra programming would we have to give the computer?
We will just have to agree to disagree then :wink: .
Quoting JanusI believe that's what Nagel means. I think "There's something it's likes to be a bat" means "There's something it feels like to be a bat." But not a physical feeling. At least not only physical feelings. Do you have a feeling of your own existence aside from your physical body? Yes, we feel when our skin is torn. But we have a feeling about pain. We feel different ways about different people. We feel a certain way about one genre of music, but differently about another. We have feelings about specific pieces of music. I have very strong feelings about various instrumental works be Bach, Beethoven, and others. The last half of [I]Layla[/I], by Derek and the a Dominoes is a good example. We feel certain ways about political issues and moral issues. We feel love and hate. Many different feelings and types of feelings. And it all combines into what it's like to be me.
Animals don't have feelings about political issues. I doubt they have moral concepts. What about music; food; being chased, or hugged, by a human? Which animals is there something it is like to be? Which are self-reflectively aware?
I think the obvious but un-stated point in David Chalmer's famous paper, Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, is about the nature of being. Consider the central paragraph:
'Something it is like to be...' is actually an awkward way of referring to 'being' as such. We are, and bats are, 'sentient beings' (although in addition h.sapiens are rational sentient beings), and what makes us (and them) sentient is that we are subjects of experience. When the term 'beings' is used for bats and humans, this is what it means. And the reason that 'the nature of being' is such an intractable scientific problem is that it's not something we are ever outside of or apart from, and thus it can't be satisfactorily captured or described in objective terms.
I don't think it has anything to do with those conditions. It's just different interpretations is all.
I didn't mean those conditions specifically. I just used them as things that are sometimes very different from one person to another. You and I are not always simply interpreting things differently.
We have much in common physiologically speaking. I seems to me that the greatest divergence consists in the ways we each interpret the general nature of experience.
Hmm, interesting observation possibly.
I think it's a vague way of approaching the issue, and I think it has to be. Part of what Nagel was saying is that we can't understand what it's like to be a bat. We're too different to even pretend we can imagine being a bat.
But we can still consider whether there's anything it's like. As opposed to what it's like to be a rock. There's nothing it's like to be a rock. Who thinks a bat's subjective experience is as absent as a rock's?
If you cannot do that, then we are very different.
It's not vague. As David Chalmers says, 'It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience.' And subjects of experience are generally referred to as 'beings', while minerals are not. Chalmers goes on to sketch what would be required for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, but in my view he doesn't wrestle with the question of ipseity, the nature of subjective awareness as such. That is more a topic of consideration in Evan Thompson's Mind in Life. But the question of the nature of being is the subject of philosophy.
Again, thanks for your comments on the OP. Here I would like to clarify the key points where my claim goes further than a cautiously realist reading would allow.
The main divergence lies in what we take for granted about the independence of the world as it isthat is, the world assumed to exist apart from all modes of disclosure, experience, or intelligibility. While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognitionsupplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we knowthey would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge.
My position is closer to what might be called a phenomenological form of idealism: it asserts that there is no reality outside of some perspective, not in a merely epistemological sense (i.e., that we only know from a point of view), but in a deeper sensenamely, that the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic actthe perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing that makes any world appear in the first place. (Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'time of man'.)
To make this clearer, consider the example you cite of Neptunes pre-discovery existence. The realist insists: It existed all alongwe simply didnt know it. But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what it was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. The fact that it might be accurate doesn't undercut that.
I'm not arguing for solipsism or Berkeley's idealism. Im not saying nothing exists unless I think it. Rather, Im arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. Its not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. (This is the aspect that is specifically phenomenological.)
This is why, when I write that what we know of its existence is bound by and to the mind, I do not mean this as a mere limitation of our faculties, but as a disclosure of something fundamental: that intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world.
The critique that the world exists anyway misses this crucial nuance. Of course, something is there. But to designate it as the world, or even as something, already presupposes the categories of thoughtform, object, existence, and so on. The realist mistake, in my view, is to treat these categories as transparent labels for things that are "there anyway", failing to recognise the way the mind categorises and situates them, without which they would be unintelligible.
Regarding form: Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participationform is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. I agree with that, but add a post-Kantian refinement: the intelligible world is not merely a cross-section or partial view of some greater realityit is the only world we encounter. To speak of things as intelligible independently of any mind is, I believe, to risk incoherence. Intelligibility is not something that can be separated off from consciousness and remain intact. As our empirical knowledge of the universe expands, it becomes incorporated into the intelligible body of knowledge that consitutes science.
So in sum: my position is not that mind is just one actor among others in an otherwise mind-independent world. It is that there is no world at all without mindnot as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real.
And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subjectthe observerfor whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Lets not forget our role in that.
Can you explain what you take that to mean, if you are implying something beyond "A world that does not depend for it's existence on any or all minds"?
Quoting Wayfarer
It couldn't have been "indeterminate" if by that you mean indeterminable, because otherwise it could not have been discovered. If "indeterminate" it you means something more that "undetermined' or "indeterminable", then please explain what that additional meaning is.
Quoting Wayfarer
How can the scientific view be "from the outside"? Perhaps you meant "of the outside". Surely all human views of the external world are, by definition "from the inside" (if you want to speak at all in terms of "outside" and "inside"). It's more accurate to say that all views of the world, including human ones, are views of what lies outside the skin of the viewer.
That we are, as far as we know the "only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science" is a simple truism. I'm puzzled as to what you think the import of these trivial factoids, acknowledged by anyone who thinks about it for a minute, are.
You have noticed that I am cautious. Thats true (most of the time). So, with due caution, that looks like something I can accept. Apart from deleting the word fully in fully real and determinate. I dont know what that commits me to and suspect it may be a bit rhetorical.
Quoting Wayfarer
Im clear that intelligibility is something that is constituted (created?) in the interaction between mind and world. However, our understanding of the world tells us that it has not changed in any radical way since we appeared and that many of the processes now going on must have been going on long before any sentient or intelligent creatures appeared. So is it not reasonable to infer that the world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone around to understand it? (Note that this is a counter-factual, not a blunt assertion.)
Coherence Im less sure about. But I do understand that order is not really a mind-independent phenomenon. For this reason. If I have a pile of books, there will be an order in which they happen to be piled up. But there will be nothing special about that. There are many arrangements of them that can be called an order, and some that we would call disordered. But how should I put it - nothing in the nature of the books has any special intellectual privilege in this.
I don't really understand what the "noetic act", just on its own like that, means. I have to reduce it to a large number of such acts done by almost everyone from time to time. So, for me, if there are no sentient or intelligent creatures about, there will be no noetic acts to create intelligibility.
Quoting Wayfarer
I love etymology and the history of words (and concepts). It is important in its way, and sometimes is relevant to philosophical understanding. But words change their meanings over time. So the relevance of etymology is always in need of demonstration. Im afraid that, in this case, I dont think that the etymology is particularly helpful.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is indeed something very odd about the concept of "an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure".
Im hesitant about the word possible there. One does expect that any unknown unknowns can become known under the right conditions, except for some facts at quantum scale, which are a special case. The thing is, I wouldnt want to make the existence of unknown unknowns conditional on their potential to be discovered. That would be verificationism and, as Wittgenstein says, truth-conditions are important, but they are not everything.
However, I have no problem with saying that anything that we might say about them is an extrapolation or projection, or, sometimes a purely imaginative construction. Extrapolations are not necessarily irrational, and the borderline between rational extrapolation and imaginative construction is very hard to discern. Perhaps only the outcome will tell us which is which.
Quoting Wayfarer
Im all for co-arising of reality as it shows up at all. Reality is a different matter. Much of reality has not shown up yet. Yet it is true that we expect our ways of understanding the world as we know it to apply to the bits of the world that we do not yet understand or even know about. If perchance our current ways of understanding the world turn out not to yield what we expect, we work out new ways of understanding in the process, we are prepared to abandon what seemed to be important parts of our existing understandings, extract whatever we can from the data and work out new ways of understanding it. So what it would take for us to acknowledge that we do not, and cannot ever, understand some new phenomenon, I cannot imagine. (Im thinking of quantum physics and relativity, of course. But the Galileo/Newton revolution was, in its way, very dramatic indeed its just that weve got used to it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, what we know is bound to the mind. How else could it be known? But one of the things we know is that there is much that we dont know; it is reasonable to think that what we dont know is not bound to the mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
If something is there, it must be part of the world. It certainly will be when we find out what it is. On the other hand, form, object, existence and so on are certainly not transparent labels (any more than world is, especially since recent developments in physics). Anyone who looks carefully can see that. (Philosophers dont always look very carefully they are too often in a hurry to get to some huge vista or other.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, form is what makes something intelligible. On the other hand, I think that Aristotle calls the form what it is to be something (a.k.a. essence) and believes that whatever it is is mind-independent and yet is required if things are to be intelligible.
I mostly agree with the rest of the paragraph.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, yes. We cant meaningfully call anything real if we dont exist. That does not justify saying that there is no world at all without mind.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree that the subject, the observer (and, sometimes, intervener) should not be lost sight of and that the vistas disclosed by science are astounding. Youll think that Im a bit of a heathen, but Im just not convinced that scientific knowledge and still less, physics - is the whole of knowledge or that science has a monopoly of astounding vistas.
Yes, it is reasonable: but the point is, there was not! What I'm arguing against is the idea that our picture of the world, as we imagine it to be without any observer, still relies on perspective, on there being a viewpoint, which is implicit in the picture of the early universe before life evolved. It is an empirical fact that there is and was the universe before h.sapiens evolved and outside the conception of any human being. But empirical fact still relies on an implicit perspective, which we have tended to absolutize in such a way that we believe it to be 'the way things truly are'.
As this is such a central point, I'll elaborate it at length. There's a post on the philosophy blog Partially Examined LIfe, about this issue, seen through the perspective of Schopenhauer. The introduction says:
So this is the problem you've identified. Schopenhauer's analysis is that:
(Here Schopenhauer demonstrates a grasp of evolution, which is interesting in its own right as he published World as Will and Idea decades before Darwin published Origin of Species. But German 'naturphilosophie' anticipated the general idea through Goethe and Lamarck.)
He goes on:
This is where the claim becomes radical - but it's also the argument in the OP. The argument is, that 'existence is a compound or complex idea.' Whatever we think of as 'existing' is already embedded in a complex of supporting ideas, concepts, practices, and so on. This is so, for anything we can know or identify as an existent.
You may recall the role of antinomies in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The antinomies show how reason, when it tries to grasp the totality of the world beyond possible experience, runs into contradictions. Each antinomy has a thesis and an antithesis that are both logically valid but mutually exclusive. Kant uses them to demonstrate the limits of pure reason and to argue that certain metaphysical questions (like whether the world has a beginning in time) cannot be answered by reason alone.
So:
The counterfactualthe world would have been intelligible if there had been anyone there to understand itis indeed reasonable in everyday thought. But it conceals an important ambiguity. It implies that intelligibility is somehow already in the world, lying in wait for a knower, like treasure waiting to be found. What Schopenhauer shows is that intelligibility is not merely discovered; it is co-constituted by the subject. That is why our picture of the pre-human universe still bears the marks of perspectiveit is our rendering of what must have been, shaped by our cognitive categories, spatiotemporal intuitions, and causal frameworks. It is intelligible because it is already a reconstructionours.
Schopenhauers inversionthe world only begins with the first eye that opensis not a denial of evolution or cosmology but a metaphysical clarification: that the world-as-known, the world as idea, is dependent on consciousness, even while consciousness is, in turn, causally embedded in that world. This reciprocity, this antinomy, reflects the limits of our faculty of reason when it tries to grasp the world in itself.
So yes, we may speak of a pre-human world, and science can rightly describe its conditions. But this remains, necessarily, a retrospective construction. The error is to mistake this picture for something that exists independently of any condition for its appearanceas if meaning and form could simply hover, unperceived, in the void. That, I believe, is the illusion of realism, and why the universe and the mind are truly 'co-arising'.
Must the world be understood in order to be intelligible (able to be understood)? As an analogy, must something be seen in order to be counted as visible?
Quoting flannel jesus
First you have to determine which group is having the easier and which the harder time defending their positions. What're the criteria? Which ones do you think are which, and why?
In answer to the second question, the short answer is no. In order to count something as visible it is only necessary to demonstrate that it is capable of being seen. However the best, and arguably only conclusive way to demonstrate that something is capable of being seen is to see it.
On the assumption that "intelligible" means "capable of being understood", is the analogy a good one? Showing that one understands something is a good way of showing that it is capable of being understood; that's a parallel with "visible". But there is also a difference. Seeing something can be completed - one can reach a point at which one has actuallly seen whatever it is. But understanding is (usually) incomplete - there is almost always further that one could go. Usually, we settle for an understanding that is adequate for the context and do not worry about whether our understanding is complete.
So the answer is (as it usually is with analogies) the parallel is partial. Yet it is somewhat strange that we also use "see" to describe understanding as well as vision. So perhaps there is more to be said.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. This is very like the argument that Berkeley calls his Master Argument, because he says he will rely on that argument in favour of his idealism above all the others. There's no easy way to crack it. Suppose I protested to you that I do not imagine the dinosaurs without any observer. On the contrary, I imagine myself there as an observer. Does that help?
I'm not quite sure that I know what you mean by "absolutize". But I admit that retrospectively applying knowledge about how things are now to times before there were any sentient beings is a risk. What I'm doing is supposing that the absence of perceivers did not make a significant difference to the way things were. There's no evidence to the contrary (saving quantum physics and relativity), so is it not a reasonable inference?
What do you mean by "the whole world exists only in and for knowledge"? I certainly don't think that's true of the insensate world; it's not even true of people.
The world is not entirely idea. It has all sorts of other things in it.
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to be claiming that the moon, for example, is "embedded in a complex of ideas, concepts and practices". That's true, in a way. But clearly false in another way. The ideas, concepts and practices that you are talking about are the ideas, concepts and practices of human beings about the moon. The moon, in fact, is an element, not a participant, in those activities; human beings are participants. But neither human beings nor moons are only or merely embedded in complexes of ideas, concepts and practices.
One could say that idealists (the eye) mistake the reflection of the moon in a lake for the actual thing. They need to look up, or perhaps out. That is what the eye is designed to do.
Where are the embodied minds (a.k.a. people) in all this? Do our bodies only exist as an idea?
Idealism is all very well, and I don't think that an old-fashioned argument in refutation is available. It's a way of seeing things. The problem with it is that it ignores the message that ideas and concepts and practices quietly and persistently send - that there exists a world beyond them. Ideas are ideas of something that is usually not an idea. Ditto concepts. Our practices involve things that are not ideas.
OK, so you acknowledge that, in a way, with your talk of a kernel (which I'm taking as equivalent to Kant's noumena), you accept there is something that escapes ideas etc. But for you (and Kant) the excess escapes our knowledge. For me, it only means that there is always more to discover.
Quoting Wayfarer
I accept that there are boundaries to our knowledge. But these boundaries, like boundaries everywhere are also opportunities to go further. Our knowledge is never complete, finished. Every answer we find generates more questions. We push at the boundaries of what we know and expand what we understand. From time to time, we find that simple expansion is not enough. We find phenomena that do not fit our ideas and concepts - and this is where the unknown and unthought reveals itself. But we don't stop there. We develop new, more comprehensive, ideas that enable us to understand the new anomalies and puzzles, or at least to extract from the data as much understanding as we can. Then, the boundary moves on.
Quoting Wayfarer
The picture is one thing, the universe is another. Isnt that obvious? There are some issues there, but that is something of a starting-point for sorting this out.
Co-arising could do with some cashing out, I think. There is a common sense account which says that the universe/world existed long before humans, so it seems absolutely clear that the universe arose first, and produced human beings later, so it seems absolutely clear that the mind arose later. But there is interaction between the two. Whats wrong with that?
True, meaning and form do not hover, unperceived, in the void. Im not sure that I know exactly what you mean by form, but Im clear that meaning arises from the interaction between universe and mind, but does not exist independently of the mind. If form means how we think of things, then, of course, it only arises when there are people to think.
I'm far from satisfied with this, but it will have to do for now.
That's relatively simple it means taking the reality of the world to be as it appears, or as it is presented to us, without recognizing the interpretive framework involved in that presentation. This is what is generally intended by realism. Scientific realism, in particular, tends to treat the world as an object of scientific analysis as if it is simply given. That is what Edmund Husserl called 'the natural attitude' (explanation here.)
Quoting Ludwig V
Its not necessarily something we do consciously. Of course, we can imagine or re-create the world in which they lived. But more crucially, it takes an observersomeone with the interpretive framework and expertiseto locate the fossils, determine their significance, and reconstruct the story. The observer isnt just a passive witness but an active participant in making that world intelligible. (Mind you, the amazing video reproductions we have nowadays, also really help make the subject come alive.)
Quoting Ludwig V
Theyre not my wordsIm quoting Schopenhauer. But its important to clarify: he doesnt mean idea in the everyday sense of I have an idea. Rather, hes using idea (or Vorstellung) in the philosophical sense of representation. Everything you see when you look aroundthe tree, the computer, the room, the world as you experience itis already synthesized through your cognition. Its all representation, not in the sense of illusion, but in the sense that it is always grasped as idea, for the subject.
Quoting Ludwig V
The aim of this whole exercise is to point out that it is not! That is the picture given by 'representative realism' - there is the actual world, which exists independently of any mind; and here, a representation of the world, a picture of the world, that is in my mind. But that picture is also in your mind - it is a mental construction. What is happening is your magnificent hominid brain is constantly synthesising this world-picture, Schopenhauer's vorstellung, 'representation' - which both you and your world-picture are 'inside'.
Thats what co-arising means: there is no world without a subjectbut equally, no subject without a world. As phrased in The Blind Spot (from Maurice Merleau-Ponty) The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.
I do understand how difficult this point is, and I genuinely appreciate the seriousness and patience with which youre engaging itby now, most people would have thrown up their hands and walked away. But I still hold to the fundamentals of the argument. If theres a shortcoming, it lies in my own inability to explain it more clearly.
Well, if a difficult philosophical point is not worth spending time on, what is?
I could not persist unless you were prepared to persist with me - so I also appreciate your patience. Fact is, I have got a bit fed up with walking away from insoluble disagreements. It keeps everything at a shallow level.
That said, there will be a pause before I actually respond to this. The wheels have to be kept on what we like to call real life.
An afterthought. If christening the baby changes the baby herself, who did we christen, the baby before the act, or the baby after the act? The parents will be very interested in the answer.
I'm not very well-versed in Phenomenology. But it points to a key difference in worldviews upon which many of the contentious posts on this forum pivot : Realism vs Idealism. The notion that our world is actually an idea in the Mind of God (world mind), may be unintelligible, not just to secular scientists, but also to many spiritual religionists. It just goes against our intuition of Self vs Other.
Which, I suppose is the point of the Buddha's "non-dual unstructured awareness". Personally, I can accept it intellectually, but not experientially. However, the Matrix and Tron movies gave me some imagery by which to imagine a local mind within an encompassing non-local Mind. :cool:
Substance metaphysics and phenomenology represent distinct, yet sometimes intertwined, philosophical approaches. Substance metaphysics, particularly in the Aristotelian tradition, focuses on identifying and defining the fundamental, underlying realities (substances) that exist independently and support properties. Phenomenology, on the other hand, prioritizes the study of conscious experience and how things appear to us, often questioning the possibility or necessity of grasping underlying substances.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=substance+metaphysics+vs+phenomenology+
In philosophical idealism, the "mind of God" refers to the idea that the ultimate reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, and that God's mind is the source and sustainer of all existence. This concept is central to many forms of idealism, particularly subjective idealism and objective idealism, where the perceived world is seen as existing within the mind of God or as a manifestation of divine consciousness.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=idealism+mind+of+god
I've read a bit, and I think I understand some basic points. There's a mixture of ideas in your post, but I'll start by saying realism v idealism is precisely the dichotomy that phenomenology seeks to avoid.
The passage your Google search surfaced puts it like this:
Quoting Gnomon
But it hardly conveys the real gist of the phenomenological method. The starting point for phenomenology was Franz Brentano's studies of intentionality and 'about-ness'.
[quote=Wiki]Brentano defined intentionality as the main characteristic of mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the desired. ... The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychological phenomena and physical phenomena.[/quote]
Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as founder of phenomenology, attended Brentano's lectures, and elaborated on these ideas. His works are dense and formal. (Most of what I know comes from his last book, published posthumously, The Crisis of the European Sciences, and the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran, and Phenomenology, an Introduction, Dan Zahavi, among others.)
Phenomenology re-introduced the 'primacy of awareness' and attempted to break out of the subject-object divide that had haunted Western philosophy since Descartes (on whom Husserl wrote extensively.) Situatedness, context and intentionality are all fundamental principles in phenomenology.
A relevant passage from the Routledge Introduction:
Which is exactly what the original post is about.
Quoting Gnomon
That is only true of certain strains or schools - Bishop Berkeley's being one, but then, he was a Bishop. The approach in the Mind Created World is epistemological rather than ontological - about the nature of knowing rather than about what the world is made from or of. I said 'The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although Im well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).' Also notice the word 'spiritual' does not appear in it.
Right, so we know that the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, otherwise there never would have been any percipients.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'd say there is always more to be seen in the seeing of anything, more and finer detail and also different ways of seeing as per the different ways, for example, different species see things.
When the OP says "a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind", what could 'determinate' mean in a world containing no perceivers? How could something be determined when there is no one there to determine it? Percipients do determine their objects. If they could not do that they could not survive. It seems to follow that things were determinable , just as they were visible and understandable, but obviously not seen, understood or determinate, prior to the advent of percipients.
One of the key functions of transcendental critique is to resist the tendency to absolutize appearances (which is what becomes 'scientism'.) Scientific knowledge gives us real and powerful insights into nature but those insights are always shaped by judgement, concept, and perspective. When we forget this, we turn empirical knowledge into a kind of metaphysical absolute: what begins as methodological naturalism silently morphs into metaphysical naturalism, the belief that only science can show us what is.
The OP is not metaphysics in the dogmatic or speculative sense. What Im doing in line with Kantian principles is laying bare the assumptions that science itself rests on. What does it mean for something to be observable? What is the status of space and time? These arent speculative metaphysical questions they are conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge itself. Ignore them, and you dont avoid metaphysics you fall into it unwittingly. 'No metaphysics' ends up becoming a particularly poor metaphysics.
I think your Epistemological approach is more appropriate for a philosophy forum, than the Empirical methods that some advocate. Besides, the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Physics seemed to open the door to Epistemological discussions. But injecting Philosophy into Physics often raises objections of Mysticism and Woo-woo. So, we typically avoid using the fraught term "spiritual" when referring to Mental, as opposed to Material, essences & causes. Does Phenomenology successfully bridge over the spooky abyss of Spiritualism? :smile:
Husserl was never overtly 'spiritual' (whatever that means) but some say his emphasis on the transcendental aspects of phenomenology became somewhat too idealist later in life. Many of his successors, specifically Heidegger (with whom he had a somewhat fraught relationship) were much less sympathetic to that dimension of Husserl's thought, and more concerned with being-in-the-world.
One of the online articles I've found informative is The Phenomenological Reduction (IEP).
The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself.
Don't feel bad.
That's an interesting take. Instead of oneself being a small part of the Universe, the Universe must instead be seen as being a small part of oneself.
It must also be a need to have everyone agree with oneself, given that the rejoinder to any disagreement is always predictably "if you don't agree then you must not have understood" coupled with some attempt to cast aspersions on the others' level of education. It's a sorry spectacle...
Quoting Jamal
No, he really ought to feel bad.
But you clearly don't understand. Your arguments don't display a proper grasp of the issues. I've tried for years to explain ideas to you, to be met first with incomprehension, then with invective, and then with insults. So I generally ignore your remarks, a practice I will now resume.
Jack adopted this form of life. To be fair, when a kitten he was hit by a car or bike and lost for a few weeks, only to be found emaciated and wounded. He was eating the maggots on his legs.
After that he ate everything.
Returning to his goatish essence.
This reminds me there's an ongoing discussion on woke thats been a curious read, but its easy to forget how much the concept operates across all fields and orientations; as orthodoxy, as sets of axiomatic principles, often justified by universalising principles like equality, solidarity or reason, and sometimes by something closer to faith.
I'm not including you in this, although sometimes you do seem a little dogmatic for my taste. But then I'm reminded that you have a strong countercultural leaning, which I dig.
I think theres room on this site for a different kind of discussion, where perhaps a third person helps facilitate a conversation between two members who dont agree and seem to be talking past each other. I often wonder, with you and @Janus (and I probably align a bit more with him), whether a productive shift could happen with the right kind of facilitation.
What I think I see is that conversations on the forum often get stuck around 1) the justification of axioms, 2) accusations of misunderstanding or bad faith, 3) acrimony. Its as if were hard-wired for conflict over difference. The worst offenders seem to call others liars and sophists when they are challenged by difference.
My interest on this site is probably trying to understand positions I dont necessarily agree with, it's hard to do because one often ends up trying to defend one's own views on something along the way. The price we often pay for conversation.
Curious. I'm in a discussion about the present nadir of quality threads. In desperation I even contributed to the Shoutbox.
As far as being dogmatic is concerned, please be so kind as to indicate where you think this shows up in the OP.
Of course not every thread and every contributor is an opportunity for learning, but overall and for a public forum, I think thephilosophyforum.com has a good reputation.
These are good points Tom. I think people often forget that what they are presenting is merely one perspective. If they react defensively it seems to indicate that they have so much invested in their particular hobbyhorse that critique feels threatening. Hence the accusations of misunderstanding and lack of education.
The irony with the situation between Wayfarer and myself is that I am very familiar with all the arguments he presents, I used to present such arguments myself (and he knows this but does not want to admit it), but I have come to think there is very good reason to question the soundness of the presumptions upon which those arguments are based. He seems to take my critiques as personal attacks, when all I'm doing is expressing genuine objections.
Never said they were. I'm pointing to something I've noticed about the ones that are.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not going to spend valuable time seeking out examples. And I said "a little", besides, I'm not saying it's your modus operandi. It's just my take on the way you sometimes talk, for instance, about Dennett, physicalism, and people who don't buy into idealism. You seem to put them down, almost Bentley Hart style. It's clear you believe idealism is true and that materialism is demonstrably false. Having said that, I greatly value your contributions and read almost everything you post as I consider you the most clear and scrupulous proponent of idealism and higher consciousness studies here.
Yes, it often happens amongst members here. Sometimes watching is like a slow motion car crash.
There's no doubt in my mind that @Wayfarer is driven fundamentally by an agenda, but I'm in two minds about whether that's a bad thing. On the one hand, it leads one to avoid proper engagement with any philosophy that cannot be weaponized; on the other hand, a completely neutral approach to philosophy is really boring.
Yeah, it didn't look like you were attacking him. I just took the opportunity to say something about agenda-driven philosophy, cos it's interesting.
And...far be it from me to defend @Wayfarer
Well, I want to get this straight. You've heard them many times, but I say you don't understand them. Take this latest exchange - it began with:
Quoting Janus
This is a misrepresentation. The reason you say this is 'repetitive' is because you (and many others) misrepresent what is being said over and over again, to which I try and respond. In this case, I copied a couple of paragraphs from the original post, and then added commentary to the effect that it is not being argued that there was no universe prior to observers. So we get to:
Quoting Janus
I say: We can't say what existence means apart from mind.
And you interpret as:
Nothing existed before minds.
The question Im raising is not whether the universe existed, but what it means to say so. That is: what conditions make such a claim intelligible at all? When you say the cosmos was visible prior to the advent of percipients, you're smuggling in a category visibility that only has meaning within the context of experience. Thats the point I keep returning to.
You dismiss this as a confusion with a truism that only minds can know. But this isn't about knowledge in the empirical or factual sense. It's about the conditions for meaningful discourse the structure that allows us to form concepts like universe, visibility, or existence in the first place. Im not making a deductive claim about what did or didnt exist. Im making a transcendental claim about what makes it possible to talk about existence at all.
To be clear: Im not arguing that the universe didnt exist before percipients. Im arguing that the very concept of the universe including any claims about its being is bound to the framework of cognition. Thats not speculative metaphysics. Its critical philosophy and it was precisely this confusion that Kant sought to untangle.
The actual existence which you say must have pre-existed observers is exactly whats at issue. Im not denying the reality of the universe prior to observation Im saying that what it is, apart from any possible mode of perception, conception, or representation, is not something that science can tell us, because science already presupposes intelligibility, structure, and observation. That is Kant's 'in itself' - to which I add, it neither exists nor doesn't exist. Nothing can be said about it.
Of course we can reconstruct the early universe. Im not contesting any of that. But all such reconstructions take place within the space of reason and inference theyre appearances, structured by theory, observation, and mathematical representation. Thats not a flaw its the condition of knowledge. But it does mean that the thing-in-itself the actual existence prior to appearance remains transcendent with respect to what science can access.
Thats the critical point: science gives us knowledge of appearances, not of reality unconditioned by perspective. When we forget this distinction, we turn methodological naturalism into a metaphysical doctrine and mistake the limits of our mode of knowing for the limits of what is.
So this is not an unfortunate deductive error. Its a position foundational to a great deal of contemporary philosophy, especially in European traditions, though less so in the Anglo-American analytic stream.
Theres an online journal, Constructivist Foundations, which is an international, peer-reviewed e-journal dedicated to the study of constructivist and enactive approaches across philosophy, cognitive science, second-order cybernetics, neurophenomenology, and non-dualizing thought. I dont have the academic credentials to make the cut in a journal of that kind, but Id suggest that the core argument of Mind-Created World would be regarded as fairly stock-in-trade in that context not a mistake, but a well-recognized philosophical position.
So I'd appreciate it if you might acknowledge that I'm not 'repeating the same mistake ad nauseum', as I don't think I am.
I don't have an agenda - I have an interest in recovering what I think is the meaning of philosophy proper, which is not at all obvious, and very difficult to discern. I say that philosophical and scientific materialism is parasitic upon philosophy proper. But the times, they are a'changin.
Well yes, and it's part of postmodernism too. Our frameworks, and reality are a contingent product.
Quoting Wayfarer
How woudl you say this isn't an agenda, or at the very least a project?
So, you agree there was a universe prior to observers. What then are we disagreeing about?
Quoting Wayfarer
It's obvious what it means to say there was a universe prior to observers...it means, if true, that there was a universe prior to observers.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's a lame point though, and nothing is being "smuggled in" because it is simply a truism that everything we say only has meaning within the context of human experience and the judgements we make on the basis of experience. Since it obviously applies to everything there is no point bringing it up. As to visibility, we know what it means for something to be visible, and the idea doesn't depend on it being seen. Similarly we know what it means for something to exist, and it doesn't depend on the existence of humans.
Quoting Wayfarer
The fact that we exist and possess language makes it possible to talk about existence and anything else. As to "meaningful discourse", what makes sense to each of us may differ depending on our preconceptions and assumptions. You speak as though there is a fact of the matter regarding what it could be meaningful to say, but that is simply not true.
You are entitled to say that the idea of existence independent of human experience makes no sense to you, but you cannot justifiably pontificate about what should or should not make sense to others. It is that kind of dogmatic assumption that leads you to think that anyone who disagrees with your stipulations must not understand.
Quoting Wayfarer
The irony is it seems that it is you that wants to restrict "what is" to what humans can know. I allow that all the things we experience have their own existence and had their own existence before there were any humans.
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps...I tend to doubt that, but in any case so what?...that there are others who might think as you do doesn't mean much. There are others who think all kinds of things, and the majority of intelligent well-educated people seem to be metaphysical realists. I'm not going to find appeals to authority convincing.
Quoting Wayfarer
The very idea of "philosophy proper" is dogmatic. There is no fact of the matter...it cannot be anything more than your opinion.
.
A neat point. I'm not sure how convincing it would be for a true idealist. I think you might find that they might argue that since the cosmos was not seen (and could not be seen) before percipients appeared, there is no proof that it was visible. We won't be impressed, of course.
Quoting Janus
Oh, I don't mean to suggest that seeing is not more complicated than it might seem. One difficulty is that the borderline between seeing and understanding is, let me say, a bit moot. Arguable, you will have some description for what you see, which implies some level of understanding. If I see a smudge on the horizon on Monday, and it turns out on Tuesday, when the ship arrives in port that it is a Russian oil tanker, did I see the tanker on Monday, (but did not see that it was a Russian oil tanker) or did I see a smudge on Monday, which turned out to be a Russian oil tanker on Tuesday. I think seeing is achieved on contact, so to speak, whereas understanding is never complete.
That sets a simple context. Different ways of seeing are another complication. So, I'll just agree that there is not a sharp line between seeing and understanding, which does not mean that there is not a distinction to be made.
Quoting Janus
I could pick at the wording. But I broadly agree. The issue arises in "Percipients do determine their objects". "Determine" and "determinate" are more complicated than they seem. An idealist would take "determine" in that sentence in the sense that a law-maker determines the law. A realist would take it in the sense that a scientist determines the level of pollution in a river.
I think that may be common ground. The issue may be what the implications are. I think we have also agreed that our knowledge of how the world was before evolution kicked in, or percipients or homo sapiens appeared is a matter of extrapolating or projecting what we know (present tense). I've suggested the format of these exercises is a counter-factual conditional. If there had been observers, this is what they would have observed. (Berkeley accepts counterfactuals as compatible with his idealism, so I am not presenting it in the way of refutation.)
Quoting Wayfarer
This is where the distinction between Cambridge changes or relations and non-Cambridge changes or relations kicks in. For me, the "mental aspect" of reality is a Cambridge relation, that is, that the world before percipients and observers was constituted by objects and their relations.
There's an additional divergence between us. You have denied that the mental acts required to establish our perspective on reality need to be carried out by any particular people. I get the impression that the "noetic act" needs to exist, but its existence is independent of actual people. I just don't get that.
Quoting Wayfarer
I can just about get my head around "conditions of the possibility of knowledge". I've never had a firm grip on what metaphysics is supposed to be. My philosophical education was most remiss about that.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's all fine, until we get to the "it neither exists nor doesn't exist". It is true that nothing can be said about "unknown unknown", except that nothing can be said - or known - about them. Very little, but not nothing, can be said about "known unknowns". I would say, however, that we know that both exist.
In real life, we discover both kinds as we go along. The existence of these is one of the things that tells me that there is more to the world than what we think about it. But it's not a category - it's a process. We incorporate them into what we already know, and we know that it is very likely that we will come across more as we go on.
Quoting Wayfarer
Now, here's another point of divergence. In the 17th century, scientists foreswore the hidden realities of the (Aristotelian) scholastics. The function of science was to understand the realities that we actually experience - except those things that we experience that were not amenable to mathematical treatment - but that was treated as a marginal note. So science was about reality as it appears to us - so about appearances. This got confused by philosophers with their idea of appearances as curious phenomena that hid reality from us. So you remark about "knowledge of appearances" is ambiguous. For science, there is no distinction between appearance and reality. The idea that there are two distinct categories of - I'll call it existence - appearance and reality, is a philosophical invention. In reality, appearances are real and reality is what appears to us. So, the distinction between appearances and reality unconditioned by perspective is a chimera.
Yes, of course appearances are not reality because they are misleading. Truth is, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. Philosophy wants to forget the former, but we ought to remember it. This is important to us and to our discussion, because it is the misleading appearances that enable us to identify the limits of our mode of knowing.
Yes, according to modern cosmology, the physical universe existed for about 10 billion years without any animation or "cognition" : just malleable matter & causal energy gradually evolving & experimenting with new forms of being ; ways of existing. So, you could say that the universe was not awake or aware until the last 4 billion years : the fourth trimester. Could that pre-conscious era be described metaphorically as Gestation : the period between Conception and Birth?
The book I'm currently reading is entitled, The Sapient Cosmos, by James Glattfelder. It's published by Essentia Books, which produces "scholarly work relevant to metaphysical idealism". The author was trained as a physicist, and practiced as a mathematician. But he now goes beyond the pragmatic limits of both professions, to explore the world philosophically ; which is to say "meta-physically". He refers to his methodology as "Empirical Metaphysics". What he finds most interesting is the emergence of Meaning in a material world.
Greek "Cosmos" simply means orderly or organized, but it also seems to imply some Teleological Purpose. The Latin root of "Sapient" means, not just cognitive, but also "wise". At this 1/3 point of the book, I'm not sure if the appellation is intended to apply to the physical universe or to the Organizer, whose purpose is being implemented in material & mental forms. As far as I can tell, the author is simply presenting "brute facts", if you can call philosophical deductions factual. And he is not presenting "institutional facts" under the auspices of Science or Religion. Yet, the question remains : did cosmic Mind exist before the emergence of embodied personal Minds? Or, as some postulate, did our accidental (fortuitous) collective human minds merge into a Cosmic Mind?
Personally, I am not inclined to worship a sentient world, or the implicit Inventor of a "mind-created world", nor to join a social group centered on a relationship with a Cosmos that doesn't communicate or correspond with me. I'm just exploring the wider world to satisfy my own philosophical curiosity. Am I missing some deeper meaning here? :smile:
The point of the Galilean method was that it was defined in terms of primary and secondary attributes of matter, instead of Aristotelian (meta)physics and its 'natural tendencies'. As well as being inextricably connected with the geocentric cosmology. This is all history, of course.
Galileo's primary qualities, also endorsed by Locke, were those attributes of matter such as mass, force, velocity, inertia and so on - which were amenable to mathematical measurement and representation. That was the essence of the 'new physics' that represented a complete break from the earlier model.
For Galileo, how things appeared, on the other hand - color, taste, scent, and so on - were assigned to the mind of the individual. So here was a dualism of a completely different kind to what you're suggesting - between the measurable attributes of bodies, understood as objectively real, the same for all observers, as opposed to how they appeared, which was assigned to the individual mind, and so 'subjectivised'. This is the genesis of the 'Cartesian division' which has been subject to much commentary. Thomas Nagel put it like this:
[quote=Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
Quoting Ludwig V
I understand that. I was introduced to Kant via an unorthodox route, through a 1950's book called The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T.R.V. Murti. It has extensive comparisons with the European idealists and the 'Middle Way' (Madhyamaka) philosophy of a semi-legendary figure called N?g?rjuna (memorialised as 'the second Buddha', living in around the first century C.E. although dates are unknown.) Murti's book as fallen out of favour for being overly eurocentric (Murti having been Oxford-trained.) But it was one of those books which for me was a profound part of my spiritual and philosophical formation. It enabled me to see the link between meditative awareness and Kantian idealism.
Buddhism has always been aware of the way the mind creates (or constructs) our world. That is why there has been extensive consultation between contemporary Buddhist scholarship, psychologists, and neuroscience (see The Mind-Life Institute). But Buddhism doesn't rely on scientific apparatus to attain its insights - it relies on highly-trained awareness to discern these insights about the constructive activities of the mind although, that said, neuroscientists have devoted resources to exploring the effects of meditation on the mind:
Mingyur Rinpoche participating in experimental analysis of meditation
An AI-generated description of the parallels between Kant and Buddhist philosophy:
I know there's a lot to take on there - both Kant and N?g?rjuna's texts have engendered huge volumes of commentary - but the key takeway is that both analyse the role of cognition in the construction of experience.
From the reactions to this OP, I'm realizing that it's a very difficult argument to present clearly. Broadly speaking, it's a transcendental argumentthat is, it begins not with claims about what exists, but with an analysis of experience and cognition, and then asks: what must be the case for such experience to be possible? (This is why it is epistemological rather than ontological.)
One of the key implications is that we are not passive observers of a pre-given world, but active participants in the constitution of the world as we know and live it. To grasp this, we have to reflect on the role our own minds play in shaping the structures of experienceour world of lived meanings. This is precisely where phenomenology enters the picture, since it offers a disciplined way of examining experience from within, rather than assuming it as something merely external or objective. Hence the requirement for a changed perspective, not simply the acquisition of some propositional knowledge.
But that's a larger discussion. I've said enough for now.
Quoting Gnomon
Where does the measure 'years' originate, if not through the human experience of the time taken for the Earth to rotate the Sun?
It could. The question would be what impact would that have on how one thought about that process. I'm very suspicious of the idea that we, or the universe, are progressing anywhere - though I know full well that things are always in the process of change. Everything changes, except change itself.
Quoting Gnomon
I can't think of a Cosmic Mind except as a huge version of the collective mind that seems to emerge in crowds.
Quoting Gnomon
I feel much the same - especially about worshipping anything. You may be missing a deeper meaning, but at least you are not pursuing chimeras.
Quoting Wayfarer
My main point is to push back against the view that what we call science reveals reality, and replace it with the view that it is based on a "construction" of reality which is not, philosophically at least, any different from any other. (That's not quite right.) The historical changes were the result of a changed methodology - everything revolves around that; that was the hinge, if you like.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the dualism of a completely different kind; all I was trying to do was to puncture a balloon - or undermine a claim to special status. I'm in pursuit of a more nuanced approach to reality vs appearance.
That's well expressed. This conception seems much less exceptional when it is spoken of as a conception and by implication one possibility among others. But then, no-one, I think, could say that it was not worth developing, even if there were downsides. On yet the other hand, it has morphed several times since then and seems in the process of morphing again.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. I have a lot of time for the diagnosis that Buddhism proposes. But I get stuck on the idealism. I think there is a problem about the idea that the mind "constructs" the world; it's somewhat better when it is our world or the lived world. But that leaves the world simpliciter in the shadows, which seems wrong, somehow. I realize we can't simply say that the mind reveals the world, but I don't think it is really meaningful to say that the mind constructs the world, either. It's obviously not mean literally.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, it certainly is difficult. I think I have a sort of understanding what "transcendental" means or might mean. But I don't really understand the form of this analysis, except in a confused and intuitive way.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I take that. I don't say I altogether understand it, but there are things about it that make some sense. But how does this fit with Buddhism and meditation?
Quoting Wayfarer
There are lots of fascinating complications, starting with the obvious point that a year on Mars or Venus is different, and a year on the moon is different again and differently conceptualized; then one wonders how long a year would be on the sun. However, I take your point, in a way. Yet I also find myself reflecting that there must be something real - not constructed, but recognized - about the Earth's orbiting the sun, no matter how we conceptualize it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm afraid I'm prone to afterthoughts. Our problem can be thought of as a kind of antinomy. Our language seems to me to point beyond itself, over and over again. Which seems to be impossible.
We learnt from Wittgenstein's discussion of ostensive definition that pointing is not self-explanatory; it has to be interpreted, and that requires a framework (Wittgenstein says that we need to know "where the word is stationed in the language"). What if it were the case that the existence of a mind-independent world to which we have some sort of access must be the case for our language (and perception, not to mention action) to be possible? Would it be possible for phenomenology that has "bracketed" the external world to recognize that?
Obviously, the human mind is doing the measuring in terms of locally conventional increments. But the point is that the physical universe existed long before metaphysical minds. So, logically, the mechanisms of Physics must have had the Potential (the "right stuff") for mental functions all along. Apparently, it just took Time to evolve mental mechanisms (thinking organisms) from the raw materials of Matter & Energy, wondrously produced by the explosion of a long long long ago Black Hole Singularity. Something from What-thing?
Yet, where did that un-actualized pre-bang Potential come from? Is that unknowable Source of Probability (creative power) temporal or eternal? Is it Mathematical (statistical) or Mental (ideal) or Spiritual (G*D)? How and why did the evolving universe of mostly simple hydrogen atoms assemble simple holons (parts) into complex wholes that can self-reflect, and can imagine countless balls of radiant energy (stars) as a living & thinking Cosmos?
Some scientists are now exploring the notion that the Cosmos is a computer*1, processing Information (raw data) into complex Forms with novel functions, such as Thinking & Feeling. But who or what is the Programmer that set-up the system to pursue a Teleology leading to observant & reflective Minds? How do those mindful brains create an ideal mental world within the real physical world? :smile:
PS___ Which came first Mind or Potential?
*1. The idea that the universe is a computer is a fascinating and complex concept explored in digital physics and simulation theory. It suggests that the universe operates based on fundamental principles of computation, where physical laws and processes can be understood as algorithms and information processing. While not universally accepted, this idea has gained traction, particularly with the development of quantum computing and the exploration of the universe's computational capacity.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=universe+is+a+computer
The point I'm pressing is the distinction between the empirical facts of science, which I'm not disputing in the least, and the grounding of these facts in the philosophical and scientific framework through which we understand them. That argument is that our knowledge of the physical universe (world, object) is not knowledge of the universe as it is in itself but of how it appears to us.
Western culture has a preoccupation with finding the primary ground or fundamental state, being or thing, but nowadays conceived as first in series of material and efficient causes. I'm not pursuing an understanding of a first cause in that sense (whether scientific or theistic).
Thats why Ive referred to Kant, and to Husserls critique of the natural attitude. What Im exploring isnt an alternative physical theory its a philosophical inquiry into the possibility of meaning, including the meaning of physical theories. And also an argument against the sense that science sees the world as it truly is outside any perspective.
Quoting Ludwig V
Precisely! A couple of pages back I quoted a long passage from Schopenhauer which says exactly that (this post).
Quoting Ludwig V
Because a major point of mindfulness is to understand how the mind creates your world. This is a snippet from an essay on 'emptiness' in Buddhist meditation. It means, among other things, empty of presuppositions or inferred meanings.
Ultimately in the Buddhist analysis the cause of suffering is clinging or holding to possessions, sensations, ideologies - attachment, generally speaking. This is an incessant mental activity. Notice also the similarity to the phenomenological epoch? or suspension of judgement.
Quoting Ludwig V
As am I! The main point being that in the early modern scientific worldview, the division of subject and object was fundamental but also concealed. Kant and later, phenomenology, seeks to make explicit this division and to re-instate the role of the subject in the construction of knowledge.
Quoting Ludwig V
There is a school of Mah?y?na Buddhism (the form of Buddhism common to Tibet and East Asia, distinct from the Theravada schools of southern Asia) called Yog?c?ra or Vijñ?nav?da. This is usually translated as 'mind-only Buddhism'. It is by no means universally accepted in Buddhism (and not at all by Theravada Buddhism). But it is philosophically rich and many comparisions have been made between it, and Berkeleyian and Kantian idealism. You can find the Wikipedia entry here.
According to the concept "universe", there was a universe prior to observers. But many aspects of that concept indicate to us that it is a misrepresentation of reality. It's really a false premise. So it doesn't mean a whole lot, that the implication of that false premise, is that there was a universe prior to observers.
Quoting Janus
This is highly doubtful. "To exist" is very clearly a concept structured around human experience. If you think otherwise, I'd be interested to see a good explanation of "existence" which wasn't based in human experience. And a simple definition which begs the question would not qualify as a good explanation.
Obviously. Consequently, we are inescapably part of the universe that we observe and interact with. There is an understanding of this that says that our waking up was actually the universe waking up. I think that's over-doing it a bit, but it is better than the idea we are alien visitors. Yes, we are thrown into it. But that doesn't mean we don't belong. If we were not adapted to survive and thrive in this universe, we would have disappeared long ago.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not sure why you say it was concealed. Surely everybody knew about it, and everyone (except, possibly, for a few marginal eccentrics) accepted it. On the other hand, it's true that the 17th and 18th centuries were not terribly conscious of the process that goes on to enable us to perceive and reason, so the turn of the 19th century in focusing more on the subject was indeed needed.
That does sound like a phenomenological project, though the motivation is not theoretical in the sense that phenomenology is. The cessation of desire and the pursuit of truth are not the same.
But the language here confuses me. The first sentence is ambiguous. Experience can even be understood as common sense experience of shoes and ships and sealing-wax. The second sense introduces raw data. I don't believe we ever experience raw data; the uninterpreted experience is a mirage. Interpreting the last sentence takes us on a long, familiar journey without a destination.
An excellent example of distracting questions is the question of idealism, which is presented front and centre in the previous quotation. Now, I can make sense of this as a variant on "kicking away the ladder" exemplified in the Tractatus. But it seems a side-issue beside the real project of abandoning attachments, such as possessions and ideologies; I can't see why that requires accepting idealism even temporarily.
Quoting Wayfarer
I get quite confused about whether the aim is to end mental activity or give up one's attachment to it and in it. Both of these are hard to distinguish from ceasing to live. As to the epoche, it is clearly a cousin or something. You see, presented with this relationship, my first thought is to clarify the differences, and there are plenty of those.
You probably want to say "Shut up and meditate". I think I may be unusually attached to realism because I was brought up to believe that the material, physical universe is an illusion. I woke up as I grew up, but it was an important process in my teen-age life. Most people, I think, are allowed to grow up as naive realists, so their reaction to idealism may well be different.
... and here's my afterthought. I can understand "emptiness" as meaning something like the idea that things and events do not, in some sense, have the significance or importance or weight that common sense attributes to them. That would enable one to abandon desire. (That would be a parallel to the stance that Western scientists and phenomenologists attempt.) But the difficulty with that is that it makes compassion hard to understand.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't see how the idea that there was a universe prior to observers is a misrepresentation of reality.
What I said is that the concept "universe" is a misrepresentation of reality. There is much evidence to support this claim, things like spatial expansion, and dark matter, demonstrate that what we think of as "the universe" is not an acceptable representation.
Under that representation, there was necessarily "a universe" prior to observers, and so that is a valid conclusion. However, "universe" is clearly a false concept, in the sense of correspondence, so the conclusion ought to be dismissed as unsound.
The expansion of space and dark matter are indeed among the many issues that seem likely to change what we know about the universe. But there is not, so far as I know, any actual reason to think that the universe only began when observers evolved. At present, the evidence says that it began long before that happened, so I'lI stick with that conclusion until some actual evidence against it turns up. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It's not a matter of changing what we know about the universe, it's a matter of "the universe" being a false conception. There is no such thing. For analogy, consider ancient people who saw the sun, moon, and planets orbiting the earth. What you say here, is like if someone back then said "indeed, retrogrades are among the many issues that seem likely to change what we know about the way that these bodies orbit the earth". Do you see how this is the wrong attitude? It is not the case that we "need to change what we know about the universe". The whole conception needs to be changed from the bottom up, like a Kuhnian paradigm shift, but even more radical.
Personally, I have a very parochial view of the world. Except for four years in the navy, my body, with its sensory organs, has seldom experienced the wider world beyond my location, within a radius of a few miles, on the North American continent. Since I live in a small city, I seldom see any stars, except for Venus. So, my "knowledge of the physical universe" is not "as it is in itself", but as reported by humans who have made it their business to explore parts of the universe beyond my ken.
Presumably, those reports --- from scientists, philosophers, explorers --- describe the universe "as it appears" to them. From those varied accounts, I have stitched together a worldview of my own. But, it's still a patchwork, and not knowledge of the world "as it is". And Kant concluded that Ultimate Reality (noumenon) is fundamentally unknowable to humans. He seems to be implying that philosophers are just ordinary humans, who have made it their business to guess (speculate) about non-phenomenal noumena.
And yet, mystics, shamen, prophets, psychonauts, etc, have claimed to see beyond the limits of human senses, with introspection, or extra-sensory perception, or drugs that dull the left brain (rational mind). Should I take their reports as descriptions of what the world is really truly like --- or as it "appears to them"? :wink:
In a sense, I already think that there is no such thing as the universe. The "universe" overlaps with "the world" and "the cosmos" and does not mean anything concrete except "everything that exists". That doesn't make much sense to me. But people will keep using it and continually protesting to deaf ears is boring to me and others. So I go along with it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm clearly not as excited as you are about these things. But I don't understand what is going on, except that there is a lot of controversy which I do not understand and cannot understand, I'm told, unless I have at least two degrees in physics. Forgive me if I am more laid back about it than you are.
But you are missing my point. Take your analogy. Suppose someone had said to us just before Copernicus published that everything that we think we know about the sun, moon and stars is wrong. No reaction. Compare someone saying to us in 1690, after Newton's Principia was published, that everything had changed. I would pay attention. Same here. Give me answers that I can get my head around in language that I speak, then I'll pay attention.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, I don't see what is wrong with my attitude. You aren't telling me anything. You are promising that you will be telling me something at some point in the future. Back in the day, a Kuhnian paradigm shift was the most radical change possible, and the scientific revolution was precisely a change in the whole conception of the universe and the place of human beings in it. So I understand it will be quite something. I'm waiting. In the mean time, life goes on.
Its more a question of intellectual humility - no matter how much we know theres still a sense in which we lack insight into how things really are. Human knowledge is necessarily incomplete, in that sense.
Quoting Ludwig V
I've given up on meditation. I attempted to practice it for many decades, having a disciplined routine of getting up an sitting in a customary 'zazen' position for anything up to 45 minutes (which was often excruciating, but then that's part of it.) About five years ago, the practice just fell away, and besides, I was never a disciplined yogi. My lifestyle remains pretty 'bougie' (a word I picked up from my adult son). I've tried to return to it a few times, but I can no longer assume the customary posture, and just sitting on a chair seems lacking. Due to books like 'The Miracle of Mindfulness', it's presented as a panacea, the end to all woes. But if you read the original text of mindfulness meditation, the Satipatthana Sutta, you will see that in context it is a very exacting discipline, conducted as part of a regimen of discipline and lifestyle (in which mindfulness, sati, is one leg of a tripod, the others being morality, sila, and wisdom, panna.)
All that said, something remains. My initial discovery of meditation involved a confluence of reading and practice which really did trigger some epiphanies. I used to see visiting teachers some of whom really did precipate awakening experiences. I was enrolled in comparative religion and studying what I understood as the enlightenment vision, and I really do believe that this is real. (Believing that is not necessarily the same as believing in God.) I have always had the sense of having, in some very distant past, an understanding which was the most important thing in life, the only thing that really needed to be understood. I came to understand this as an intimation of what Vedanta calls self-realisation although I make no claim to have realised a higher state. More like a glimpse or what Plato calls an anamnesis, an un-forgetting of something vital once known.
Quoting Ludwig V
Excellent insight and completely true. That is why Mayahana Buddhism stresses that emptiness (??nyat?) and compassion (metta-karuna) are like the two wings of a bird - the bird needs both to take flight.
Scientific objectivity started, in Medieval thought, as a form of philosophical detachment, but it diverges from it, due to the emphasis on the 'primacy of the measurable', which we've already discussed. That is the subject of one of my Medium essays Objectivity and Detachment.
Here's the difference between you and I then. You won't go anywhere unless someone, who has already been there, points the way to you, (and gives you answers that you can get your head around). I'll find my own new direction without anyone showing me the way, simply because I apprehend the conventional as wrong. Someone has to be first or no one will ever go. It will not be you.
If you take a bit of time to consider the true nature of time, you'll come to realize that current conceptions of "the universe" have it all wrong.
Quoting Ludwig V
You are not paying attention. I'm not promising to provide for you something new, in the future. I am telling you that what others are providing for you today, and in the past, is wrong. That's it, that's all, no promise concerning the future. I expected that you are capable of crafting your own future. But now you demonstrate that you'll only go where someone else has already been, and this casts doubt on that expectation.
Quoting Ludwig V
I see, you like to wait and let life go on. You are not prepared to take the bull by the horns are you?
It depends on the bull.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
OK. Enlighten me.
So have I. I'm not sure why. I certainly lacked the total commitment that seems to be expected in the literature. There's a hint (which I think that those who write about it would reject) that one needs to abandon everything else to do it properly, but I thought that the point was to do everything else properly. I read quite a lot about Zen, which I discovered through Alan Watts and Thich Nhat Hanh. The value of that was that it gave me a counter-weight to the idea that it is essential to get one's ideas sorted out before anything else, i.e. philosophy. (It is obviously needed. Otherwise, one has to face the question how to live while working out how one should live?)
Quoting Wayfarer
I've never studied comparative religion systematically, so I try not to pontificate about it. My founding texts were Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy" and William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience". I know enough to know that there are varieties of the enlightenment vision. It seems at least possible that there is a core experience, which can be interpreted differently in different intellectual contexts. (Yet one its features is the down-grading of the intellect.) Whether the "core" experience itself is the same in all contexts or not seems unclear to me. A common element is that it is self-certifying. I'm extremely sceptical about that. For me, validation of the experience comes back to ordinary life and its effects on that.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. I suspect that the suggestion that one can just simply sit and wait for something to happen is unhelpful. Something probably will, in the end, but there is no telling what it will amount to. There needs to be a mind-training as well, and that implies a community around one. I've never found that. Things might have been different if I had.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think that "detachment" is univocal, although we often speak as if it were. The detachment of a judge in court is different from the detachment of a scientist or philosopher, is different from that of a Buddhist (or a Hindu) sitting in meditation and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't see any way of breaking out of the dilemma between idealism and realism, so I think we ought not to treat that distinction for granted, but articulate it more carefully so that the antimony doesn't arise. I'll try to articulate more later.
Quoting Wayfarer
Afterquestion. What does "bougie" mean?
Quoting Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V
bourgeois
It means to be inclined toward luxury
Thanks.
I'm sorry I annoyed you so much. There's little I can do about, except to refuse to engage in order to avoid escalating your annoyance.
I just came across a quote in the book I'm currently reading, after the author discussed Aldous Huxley's notion : "that our entire perception of reality is a hallucination". That's a strange way to think about the "reality" philosophers have striven to understand rationally for 3000 years. He then quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman :
". . . . what we call normal perception does not really differ from hallucinations, except that the latter are not anchored by external input. . . . . . Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it."
That's a big exception for rational thinkers. But does the notion that humans "actively construct" their worldview resonate at all with your concept of a Mind-Created World? :smile:
No apology required, I wasn't annoyed at all. How did you get that idea? I was just alluding to lesson #1 in reply to the request you made:
Quoting Ludwig V
First lesson in learning about the true nature of time, do not accept determinist, fatalist bullshit like 'wait and see', 'que sera sera'. You can cause real change.
Some secular scientists describe the universe as simply wandering, with no apparent direction or goal. Yet, Theologians tend to take for granted that the world has a goal : A> to produce worshipers that will stroke the imperial ego of the supreme Lord on his heavenly throne ; and/or B> to save those faithful servants from the wrathful destruction of his own imperial Garden of Eden (obviously, Noah's Flood didn't finish the job). Although I was indoctrinated, as a child, with various versions of those options, as an adult, those self-defeating plans don't make any sense to me . . . . except as a capitulation to the win-lose Game of Thrones against a demonic anti-god, with humans as expendable pawns.
However, my own 21st century worldview, acknowledges the Progress that has been made in space-time since the Big Bang : from a dot-like Singularity --- doorway to infinity? --- beginning with nothing-but World-creating Energy & Natural Cosmic Laws to a near-infinite-yet-still-expanding universe full of countless blazing stars, and at least one blue planet of thinking & feeling & philosophizing meat entities. I had come to that conclusion long before I discovered that a 20th century genius had beaten me to it : A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality*1. :smile:
*1. Evolutionary Process and Cosmic Reality :
Process Metaphysics vs Substance Physics
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page43.html
Quoting Ludwig V
My own notion of G*D*2 in a participatory universe is similar to the concept of Group Mind, except that it must also account for a First Cause of some kind to program the Singularity with enough Energy & guiding Laws to produce an evolving sphere of Actualizing Potential. That's where the Mind & Matter potential of Information Theory comes in. :nerd:
*2. G*D :
[i]An ambiguous spelling of the common name for a supernatural deity. The Enformationism thesis is based upon an unprovable axiom that our world is an idea in the mind of G*D. This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to LOGOS. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshiped, but appreciated like Nature.
# I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. Thats because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html
Of course! That's what the whole thread is about. (Maybe I should have called it 'Mind-Constructed World'). It's about how cognitive science validates philosophical idealism. The realisation that what we think is the external world, is constructed, ("synthesised" to use Kant's terminology) by the magnificent hominid forebrain. It's not an hallucination or an illusion, but it does not possess the inherent reality that we accord to it. It arises as a result of the interaction between mind and world.
One of the videos I refer to in the references is Is Reality Real? featuring neuroscientist Beau Lotto (who looks like a Californian surfer), Donald Hoffman (whom we've discussed) Alva Noe, and others. (Richard Dawkins makes a cameo, talking nervously about some 'plot against objectivity'.) I discussed this video with various contributors who couldn't see the point (i.e. 'What do you think it means...?' It means what the OP is about! :grimace: )
All our science is consistent in indicating that there was a universe, galaxies, star systems, planets and on Earth many organisms, plants, creatures long before there were humans. I see no reason to doubt the veracity of that conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"To exist' is a human concept, as are all other concepts. There is nothing about that concept that necessitates it being confined to the human. Given that we all and some animals manifestly perceive the same environments and things in those environments there is no reason to consider that the concept applies only to what humans have experienced. You seem to be conflating two different things?that 'existence' can be understood to be a linguistically generated concept and the range of the application of that concept.
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Consistency doesn't imply truth. We can make very consistent fictions. And even when the story is consistent with empirical sensations, truth is not necessitated. "There is a ghost in the other room" is consistent with something going bump in the night.
Quoting Janus
Well then, give me an explanation of what it means to exist, which is not based in human experience, or simply begging the question.
Quoting Janus
Sorry, I don't understand what you are accusing me of.
My point is very clear. Human beings have experience. Whether or not other animals have similar experience is irrelevant. Human beings have produced a concept "existence", which is based on their experiences. Any attempt to explain accurately what "existence" means will necessarily reference human experience. That is why I said it is highly doubtful that what it means for something to exist does not depend on human existence. It's very clear to me, and it ought to be for you as well, that "existence" refers to the specific way that we perceive our environment, and nothing else. "Existence" is defined by experience.
I haven't said it is necessarily true that a Universe of things existed prior to humans existing. I've said that all the available evidence points to its having existed. You seem to be conflating logical necessity with empirical evidence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To exist is to be real, actual as opposed to imaginary. There are two logical possibilities?either the Universe existed prior to humans or it didn't. Neither is logically provable, since both are logical possibilities. We are left with what the evidence points to?which is that the Universe did exist prior
to humans.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is not, in my experience, how 'existence' is generally understood, and it is certainly not how I understand it?it is merely your own idiosyncratic, tendentiously stipulated meaning. There is no reason why others should share your prejudices. If you want to live in your own little echo chamber that's up to you.
Well sure, but my point is that the thing referred to here as "it" is a fiction. Therefore all that evidence does nothing for you. It's like pointing to a whole lot of bumps in the night, and telling me that all the evidence points to there being a ghost in the other room. And you can go right ahead and dismiss any logical arguments which go against what you've concluded through the "available evidence", because you prefer evidence over logical necessity.
What I dispute is the concept of "the universe", I think it's a fiction, like the ghost in the other room. Of course the narrative which supports "the universe" is going to make it look like all the evidence points to the truth of "the universe". And if you neatly ignore all the logical arguments against "the universe", insisting that empirical evidence is more important then logical necessity, you'll be restricted to believing in your fictitious story because all the available evidence points that way.
Quoting Janus
This definition is based in human experience. You define "exist" as what is not imaginary. So you base the definition in imagination, and say whatever is not imagination, exists. But that's self-refuting, because your definition is itself imaginary, you are imagining something which is not imaginary, i.e. exists, but by that very definition, it cannot exist. So what you say "exists" cannot exist, by your own definition, because you are just imagining something which is not imaginary. The proposed not-imaginary thing is nothing other than something imagined. This gets you nowhere fast.
Quoting Janus
You haven't paid attention to what I've said. What I dispute is the truth of "the universe". So your two logical possibilities are irrelevant. It's like saying either you've stopped beating your wife or you haven't. Well, obviously we have to validated the initial proposition first. I readily agree, that under the conception of "the universe", it existed prior to humans. What I disagree with is the truth of "the universe".
So, what we need to determine is whether that conception is an adequate representation of reality. And, I've argued that it clearly is not. There is much evidence like spatial expansion, and dark matter, to indicate that "the universe" is a failure as a concept.
This is why the subject of the thread is very helpful. It can help us to understand that all these concepts like "existence", and "universe", are just constructs derived from our experience. They may be completely misleading in relation to the way reality actually is.
Quoting Janus
Well, I am waiting for someone to explain how "existence" could be understood in any other way. I've provided no "idiosyncratic, tendentiously stipulated meaning" so that charge is false. I've just challenged anyone to provide a description or definition which isn't based in human experience, or simply begging the question, because i strongly believe that is impossible. Your proposal above obviously fails miserably. It provides no basis for any sort of understanding whatsoever, of what "existence" means, only self-contradiction, which is incoherency. So it narrowly avoids begging the question, but only by being incoherent.
'Universe' just means 'the sum of what exists', so it refers to everything that exists, and is thus not a fiction at all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is very confused. What are the "logical arguments against the universe" exactly? Do you perhaps mean that there is no universe apart from the collection of all existing things inclduing spacetime? If so, I haven't denied that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is just playing with words sophistically. Of course the definition is based in human experience, everything we say is, so your "point" is without a point. The definition of 'existence' is not based in imagination, it is the counterpoint. 'To exist, to be real', only gets its meaning in distinction from 'to be imaginary, to be unreal', just as 'to be imaginary, to be unreal' only gets its meaning from 'to exist, to be real'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What are you disputing? It's far from clear. Are you claiming that nothing existed prior to humans?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
On what basis do you claim that spatial expansion and dark matter indicate that the idea of a universe is a "failed concept". What do you mean by "failed concept"? Did spatial expansion and dark matter exist prior to humans according to you?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, it can obviously be said that every concept is derived from experience, in which case noting that is pointless. All our concepts "may be completely misleading in relation to the way reality actually is", but then what could that mean? "Concept', 'misleading', 'in relation to' 'the way reality actually is' are all concepts which we might equally claim to be somehow in error. But then what could that "being in error' even mean and where would that leave us?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yet you have failed to give any argument for why we should agree with you. What's your argument? So far you are just looking like a blowhard.
That looks very naive to me. If reality includes more than just what exists, then this part of reality is not part of the universe. How would we establish a relationship between the universe, and that part of reality which does not exist?
For example, you seem to imply a separation between what exists and what is fiction. The fictional cannot be part of the universe, by your definition, but we still must afford it some kind of reality which i assume would be somehow outside the universe. What kind of reality does the fictional have, when it is outside the universe?
Quoting Janus
As I said, I am disputing the concept of "the universe". By that concept, it is correct and coherent to say that the universe existed before there was human life. However, I believe that concept is faulty, and does not provide an accurate representation of reality. Therefore the conclusion that the universe existed before there was human life is unsound, because it is derived from a false premise, that "the universe" provides an accurate representation of reality.
Quoting Janus
There is much evidence that reality extends beyond what is known as "the universe". If "the universe" is intended to refer to all that is, then the evidence indicates that it is a failed concept.
Quoting Janus
It means that we must go beyond experience if we desire to understand the nature of reality. Since many people believe that truth is limited to what can be known from experience (empiricism), but others do not believe this, then it is very important, and not pointless to note this distinction.
So, if you insist that "every concept is derived from experience", then we need to look beyond conceptualization to understand why those people do not believe in empiricism. The reality though, is that not everyone believes that all concepts are derived from experience. Therefore, the fact that "it can obviously be said" that every concept is derived from experience is what is pointless, because people can say whatever they want.
Quoting Janus
Yes, I'm blowing very hard, just like the wind. Be careful, the wind can be dangerous. But I'm still waiting for a definition of "existence" which would prove that I am wrong. Unless you can provide me with one, I think that's a good argument for why you should agree with me.
:rofl: You seem more like a sailor whose ship is stuck motionless on a windless sea. You have a set of oars which would give you enough purchase to get you moving, but you don't realize it and instead stand in front of the sails futilely blowing at them.
At least I recognize that there is a problem, and I'm acting toward resolution. That's a lot better than you, doing nothing, thinking that everything's fine. Eventually I'll find the way out, through my trial and error, while you'd be still sitting there thinking everything's fine, until your dying day.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You contradict yourself. You say definitions are based in human experience and then go on to say we must go beyond experience, while saying that something beyond human experience cannot exist. This is hopelessly confused.
By what faculty other than experience could we know anything (apart from what is logically necessary) ?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Find your way out of what? Do you mean life? If so, you'll find your way out of that on your dying day. Far better to worry about how to live in the meantime.
Clearly then, you misunderstand me.
Quoting Janus
Experience is not a faculty. And, we are born with knowledge, it's known as intuition. This is why you can't understand me, and you think that I contradict myself, you have presuppositions which make no sense. Those nonsense presumptions make it impossible for you to understand some things, rendering some statements in the appearance of contradiction.
My claim in the OP is that cognitive science validates at least some important aspects of idealist philosophy - that what we perceive as the external world is, in an important sense, mind-dependent, because what we know of it is constantly being assimilated and interpreted by the mind.
And that therefore empiricist philosophy errs when it seeks a so-called 'mind-independent object', as sense objects are, by their very nature, only detectable by the senses (or instruments) and cannot be mind-independent in that way.
Being aware of the way mind constructs world is more a matter of self-knowledge and self-awareness - something with which phenomenology and Eastern philosophy (and indeed Greek philosophy) is much more familiar with than science or much of modern philosophy.
Each of the five senses are perceptual faculties, as well as interoception and proprioception. All together they constitute the faculty of experience, not of particular experiences, but of being able to experience.
So-called intellectual intuition does not give us reliable knowledge, it consists mostly of imagination applied to ideas derived from experience.
You are still just blowing hard, and getting nowhere.
[quote=God 4.0 - in the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience called God, Robert Ornstein, Sally M. Ornstein;https://amzn.asia/d/9OsYwB6]The book explores how our "everyday" mind works as a device for selecting just a few parts of the outside reality that are important for our survival. We don't experience the world as it is, but as a virtual reality a small, limited system that evolved to keep us safe and ensure our survival. This system, though essential for getting us safely across a busy street, is insufficient for understanding and solving the challenges of the modern world. But we are also endowed with a quiescent "second network" of cognition that, when activated, can dissolve or break through the barriers of ordinary consciousness. We all experience this activation to some degree, when we suddenly see a solution to a problem or have an intuitive or creative insight when we connect to a larger whole beyond the self. By combining ancient teachings with modern science, we have a new psychology of spiritual experience the knowledge to explore how this second network can be developed and stabilized. ...they emphasize the need to reflect on and explicate, both individually and collectively, the functional value of virtues such as generosity, humility and gratitude, and of service. These attitudes and activities shift brain function away from the self and toward an expanded consciousness an experience of the world's greater interconnectedness and unity and an understanding of one's place in it.[/quote]
Which seems thoroughly compatible with the ideas expressed by the O.P.
We can say that because things have their own existences independent of our perceptions, their own existences will not be the just the same as our perceptions and judgements. But you are wont to say that they don't even have their own existences, which makes your position look extremely confused.
You alternate between saying that it's obvious, and that it's absurd. Wrong on both counts, but then I've noticed your inveterate tendency to regard your own educational limits as binding on the rest of the community here.
Exactly what have I said is both obvious and absurd? Try engaging with others' responses for a change?you might come to understand what they are actually saying.
Thats like taking a picture of something and calling it a "camera-dependent object". I don't know why you keep phrasing it as if the object is dependent on your mind when you should be talking about what you see or perceive. It just makes it much clearer for everyone else to talk about it in that way.
I would say that sure all our perceptions are in the context of the structure of a brain which, in the context of the whole universe of intelligent things, can be very diverse with different levels of capabilities. At the same time, I would say that they are all picking out or extracting information about structure that exists out in the world independently of us. Different brains, different perceptual apparatus give us different purviews, different informational bottlenecks, and affect our ability to extract this information effectively.
Obviously a lot of the time we are wrong about a lot of things; but, I think my point is that there is no kind of mysterious intrinsic barrier between perception and some way the world really is. All of the information we could want, that there is to know about the world, is available to any information processing system that can interact with the rest of the universe in the right way. Unfortunately, we are just naturally extremely limited, even wuth technology. I don't think the notion of some kind of serene, "objective", platonic, God's eye picture is required to have real information about the world. Information is effective; Can I predict what happens next? There is nothing more than that. And if I can't do that, its not due to some mysterious noumeno-phenomenal barrier, but because I don't have all the information I need or there is stuff I haven't seen.
I simply express what I think, make the criticisms that I think need to be made. You could try actually engaging the counterpoints and critiques for a change. You might actually learn something. Or if you can successfully refute my objections I will concede as much.
I don't see you engaging with anyone on these forums who disagrees with you.
I see you are offering much the same kind of critique as I have. Let's see how @Wayfarer responds.
You're still missing the point of the critique, which isnt about denying that there is some kind of reality independent of our particular perceptions (no one here is advocating solipsism), but about the structure of knowledge itselfspecifically, that so-called sense objects are only ever known as appearances within a framework of consciousness.
The analogy you offeredof calling the photographed object camera-dependentactually illustrates my point rather well, if unintentionally. A photograph is an image produced by the optical and mechanical structure of a camera. No one confuses the photo with the object, but neither is the photo the object as it is in itself. Its the object's appearance as mediated by the particular structure of the apparatus. Likewise, our perception is not of the thing in itself, but of its appearance as structured by our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. A dog won't recognise a photo of itself because it can't smell it.
What you describe as information about the world presumes precisely what is at issue: that the world is available to us as it is, rather than as it appears under our particular modes of access. This is the very presupposition that transcendental arguments (like Kants, and many idealist successors) call into question. The point is not to deny that there is something that gives rise to experience, but to insist that what we experience is never raw reality but always reality as structured by mind.
Your appeal to prediction and effective interactionif it works, it's realsimply substitutes pragmatism for ontology. That's fine if your goal is engineering, which is where I think your actual interests lie. But it's not a rebuttal to the philosophical question: what is the nature of the reality we claim to know? Youve asserted that theres no mysterious barrier between perception and the worldbut thats not an argument; it's a declaration of faith in the transparency of perception, which is precisely whats being contested!
As I said, you have presuppositions which make no sense. How do you propose that the senses are united into a single faculty called "experience", or "being able to experience"? Your proposal, that we have a single faculty known as "being able to experience" is nonsense.
Your position entails that we cannot know anything at all about reality "in itself" and I agree with that as far as it goes.. So, we are left with what we know of reality as it appears. We don't know with certainty what appearances tell us outside the context of appearances and I've never claimed otherwise. We simply deal with what seems most plausible.
We certainly do have the faculty of being able to experience.
Pictures taken by the camera.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but so what. If I want to know more about the object, I take more pictures, I use other tools to investigate.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well you have to explain why the world would not appear to us "as is". When I see a tree, is there not something about the shape of that tree which veridically represents how it is? What would you mean about how the shape of the tree appears to us that is different than how it really is which isn't trivial? Sure, I can't see everything about the tree, I don't know everything. But in what way is the stuff I do see not capturing some enduring structure in reality that is consistent? If different modes of access just means that some perspective can access information that others do not, and vice versa, then to me that is just different organisms capturing actual structures in the world that happen to be distinct. A snake might be able to sense heat or infra-red light, or whatever it is, in a way that I cannot. I might be able to hear in a way that a snake cannot. Nonetheless, we are both picking out information regarding events in the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
Its not necessarily just that as if it were purely pragmatics, but the fact that there is nothing more to knowing about stuff than the observable interactions that they have with us, or in principle could have with us. The idea that there is something out therr that in principle cannot interact with anything or make its presence known is nonsensical, grounds for reasonable disbelief and perhaps not even intelligible. Reality as it really is must be effective, must have consequences. All understanding really does reduce to 'what happens next?' in some sense because thats how brains work, thats how state-of-the-art artificial intelligence works.
Quoting Wayfarer
In what way should I be skeptical?
This passage chimes with me, I have found that there are thresholds or veils in the mind, which blind us to what, what possibilities, are beyond. That it requires a creative means of circumventing, or dissolving these barriers to progress to a broader perspective and recognition of other architecture and possibilities.
I can illustrate this by a description of formal philosophy. It has a rigorous and refined structure which has been developed over a long period. Into which the aspirant is introduced, trained, tested. Taught how to use the architecture, to develop their own architecture, do a PHD. This leaves the aspirant who masters this knowledge a master of critical and analytical thought. But it also results in them finding that in ordinary life these ideas go over the head of their friends and family and in a way they are isolated and have to find other masters of the same art to converse with about these matters.
Now there is another formal architecture of mind out there running parallel to this using a different system. But with different bases, presuppositions, techniques. Which is based more around lifestyle, self realisation, and deconstruction of conditioning. Followed by a rebuilding of mind and being assembled around a spiritual, mystical, or religious architecture. Rigorously developed over millennia, which similarly leaves the student a master of this approach to life and similarly isolated amongst their friends and family.
I would suggest that this is the root of all this sparring and it is incumbent on us to bridge this divide in some way. To circumvent this veil so that we can converse in a more meaningful way.
Reminds me of that word, proof.
I gave up at:
Quoting Apustimelogist
Here's the problem. You describe the unity of the five senses as the faculty of experience, defined as "being able to experience". And, you attribute knowledge to this faculty. But the ability for something does not necessitate its actual existence. Therefore your descriptive terms "the faculty of experience" cannot account for, or describe, the actual existence of experience, nor can it account for the actual existence of knowledge.
So you propose an "ability to experience", which supports the ability to sense, but all this amounts to is a meaningless, nonsensical, interaction problem. By your terms, human beings have the capacity to experience. That in no way accounts for the reality of actual experience. I, as a human being have 'the capacity' to do a whole lot of different things, but having 'the capacity' does not account for why I do some and not others. Therefore your proposition makes no sense as a proposal to account for the existence of knowledge. Knowledge is active in the world. It blows very hard, regardless of whether it gets anywhere or not.
Quoting Janus
The question was " By what faculty other than experience could we know anything (apart from what is logically necessary) ?". "Intuition" answers that question. It's "reliability" is relative, and context dependent, so your dismissal is just an attempt to avoid the reality that it answers your question, regardless of whether answering your question gets us anywhere or not.
You are simply leading our discussion in a meaningless, nonsensical direction, so that my replies to your questions can be met with "just blowing hard, and getting nowhere".
If you want to get somewhere, then let's go!
Quit limiting the discussion to the ability to do something, and address actually doing something, if you want to get somewhere. Obviously though, you don't want to get anywhere, because that would require breaking free from your nonsensical presuppositions, which produce an interaction problem.
_____________________
Quoting Wayfarer
I would have put some of the detail slightly differently, but broadly I agree with that. It seems to me incontestable.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
But could you explain to me what you mean, exactly, by the bolded phrases?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I realize that's standard way of putting it and I would love to agree with you. But the problem is that a representation implies an original. So to know that a given representation represents the original, we have to examine the original and compare it to the representation. Which we cannot do.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Do you really want me to trot out the bent stick, mirages and Macbeth's dagger, or perhaps quantum mechanics and relativity?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I agree that "what happens next?" is important. Whether that's the whole story is another question. Could you explain what you mean by "reduce to" and "in some sense"?
Quoting Punshhh
I had never put things together in that way. Fascinating. You could be right that there must be common ground. At least they agree in rejecting common sense. But it isn't obvious to me that the two approaches are compatible. Have you found that it is?
CertainlyI'll try to explain.
The idea is that a photograph presents the appearance of an object as mediated by the cameras optical and technical structure. Its not the object itself, but an image of the objectstructured by the mechanics and limitations of the device. In this conversation, the photograph was being used as a metaphor for perception itself. Just as a photograph is a camera-dependent image, so our perception of the world is mind-dependent, shaped by the structure of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus.
This is one of the central themes in Kants Critique of Pure Reason. He distinguishes between the appearance of thingshow they present themselves to usand the thing in itself (das Ding an sich), which is how things are independently of how they appear. Now, this idea has been the subject of extensive debate, and there are many interpretations. But one sympathetic reading is to see the thing in itself as a philosophical placeholder: it marks the limit of our possible knowledge. It also preserves a sense of mystery that no amount of empirical or conceptual inquiry can dissolvethe mystery of what reality is in itself, outside of its appearance to us. In this way, Kant's philosophy continues the classical distinction between appearance (what seems) and reality (what is).
If you look again at the original post, this ties in with the quote from Charles Pinters Mind and the Cosmic Order, where he describes how the gestalts or objects we perceive are not merely given but are assembled through the interplay between sense data and cognitive interpretation. The kind of world we experience depends on the kinds of senses we haveand, in our case, also on the concepts and structures we use to interpret them. This doesnt mean the world is illusory. But it also doesnt mean it exists independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it. Thats what I meant by saying it lacks the "inherent reality we accord to it." The reality we perceive is not free-standing in the way objectivist realism assumes; it is co-constituted by the perceiving mind.
Heres another way to put it: try to imagine the Universe as it would be if there were no living beings anywhere in it. You cantnot really. Whatever you imagine is still ordered by a perspective. What youre visualizing is a Universe as if there were no observersbut the very act of visualizing already imposes a kind of structure, a standpoint. That unknowable, perspective-less universe is what I refer to as the in itself. And as mind evolves within that background, the Universe begins to take formnot merely physically, but in terms of meaning, appearance, and coherence. There's a sense in which we are the universe coming to know itself (an idea which is by no means original to me.)
Well, we don't necessarily need representation in that kind of way. All that we do is predict what happens next. All that we have to be able to do is know how to navigate. If something unexpected happens, the structure of my navigational "map" was wrong. Clearly, the shape of trees represents part of our navigational maps that is quite consistent and enduring. I don't understand in what sense this could not be veridical. It becomes very apparent usually when that fails. I don't need to know everything about trees or everything at exact precision. But I have a pretty good understanding of tree shape, leaf shape that seens consistent.
Quoting Ludwig V
I've already said we can be wrong, but when we are wrong, its usually intelligible why we are wrong in terms of not having the right information. In principle one can understand ehy information processing in the brain produces illusions regarding things in the world we understand well physically. My view of quantum mechanics is realistic. I don't think relativity really has the same problems as the alleged difficulties in quantum theory.
Quoting Ludwig V
I believe it is because thats all that neurons do, thats all that state-of-the-art A.I does. Obviously what I am saying must be some kind of simplification but I think it fundamentally characterizes intelligence, to make distinctions and recognize things.
Quoting Wayfarer
To me, this muddles the idea of "world" a bit. As you say, a world without perceivers, a world of noumena, is a kind of "placeholder world," granted as necessary but by definition unknowable in itself. The world we experience -- let's call it our world -- is not illusory, but nor is it the world of noumena. But when you say, "[the world] doesn't exist independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it," you're talking about our world. The noumenal world does exist independently. So, if I may:
"This doesnt mean that our world is illusory. But it doesnt exist independently of the properties and meanings our minds contribute to it; that sort of world, the noumenal world, does have such an independent existence."
I only bother with this because otherwise is tempting to read the position as saying that there is no independent reality, which I don't think is what you mean. "What reality is in itself" may be a mystery, as you say, but it is not an empty phrase. We can't jump from the inevitable fact that our world is co-constituted, to the conclusion that our world is all there is. But you know this.
But 'exist' is precisely the wrong word! 'To exist' is to be apart, to be separated, to be this as distinct from that. Which is why I say in the original post that the in-itself neither exists nor does not exist (if existence is the wrong description, then non-existence is the negation of something which doesn't apply.) So to think of 'the noumenal' or the 'in-itself' is already to designate it as an intentional object, a 'this here' or 'that there'. Hence the 'way of negation', neti neti or wu wei.
It's against my religion to dispute about how to use the term "exist". :wink: I'll just point out that if the world neither exists nor does not exist, then to say "our perception of the world is mind-dependent" is a bit of a puzzler. How can I perceive something that transcends the category of existence? It's hard enough to perceive things that don't exist! Unless -- as I was trying to suggest -- "the world" and "the in-itself" are not the same. This was the distinction I was drawing between "our world" and "the world of noumena."
If there are things in themselves (noumena) which appear to us as phenomena, then we do perceive things in themselves, but we do not perceive them as things in themselves (and this is so by mere definition). It there are noumena then by any ordinary definition of 'existence' they can be said to exist.
@Wayfarer wants to insist that his own idiosyncratic definition of 'existence' is the correct one, which is absurd given that the meanings of terms are determined by (predominant) use.
If possession is nine-tenths of the law, then defining existence is nine-tenths of philosophy.
Youre right that if the world neither exists nor does not exist in the ordinary sense, it cant be perceived as an object in the way phenomena are. Thats the point: the in-itself isnt something to be retreived from beyond appearances. As an old Buddhist adage puts it, the end of the cosmos isnt reached by travelling somewhere, but is found within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, where the arising and ceasing of the cosmos can be known. World and perceiver arise together in the same field of lived experience which is exactly what co-arising means in phenomenology and enactivism.
But I also believe this is broadly compatible with the phenomenal-noumenal distinction. The problems arise when we try to 'peek behind the curtain' to see what the in-itself really is. That is what the 'way of negation' that is found in various forms of apophatic practice is intended to ameliorate.
This is not really the case. In most instances the goal is to create what happens next, i.e. we want to shape the future, not predict it. The ability to predict is just a means to that further end.
Quoting J
This is exactly the wrong attitude. By giving the name "world" to the noumenal, you imply that what exists independently is in some way similar to our conception of "the world".
There is no need to assume that what exists independently is in anyway at all, similar to how we represent it. For example, the word "world" is in no way similar to the concept we have of the world, yet in some way, that word signifies that concept. Likewise, our conception of the world might be in no way similar to the independent reality, yet it could still in some way signify it. There is no reason to believe that the signifier is in any way similar to the thing represented by it. This means that if the concept "world" represents an independent reality, there is no reason to believe that the independent reality is similar to that concept which signifies it.
Quoting Janus
Hmm, seems like the same accusation was leveled against me. That indicates that the person making the accusation is really the one with the idiosyncratic definition.
Let's grant for the sake of argument that (intellectual) intuition sometimes might give us an accurate picture of the nature of reality ("reality" here meaning something more than mere empirical reality, that is not merely things as they appear to us, but rather some "deeper" truth metaphysically speaking). How do we tell when a particular intuition has given us such knowledge?
I won't respond to the rest of your post as it seems like either sophistical nonsense or inaccurate speculations about my motives.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, you and Wayfarer share an idiosyncratic definition, and surprise, surprise! you are both idealists. As I said, if we want to say 'there are noumena' that amounts to saying 'noumena exist' under any ordinary understanding of what the term 'exist' means. We would be saying that noumena are not merely imaginary entities, but are real.
We would be saying that noumena are not merely mind-dependent or perception dependent entities (phenomena) but are mind-independently real entities. Saying, as Wayfarer does, that they neither exist nor do not exist may have some evocative or poetic point, but in a discursive context, it is just nonsense, because in its contradiction it tells us nothing.
Good, agreed. That there is a distinction is all I insist on.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can be more precise, terminologically, if that suits you. I have no stake in what's called a "world" and what isn't. Again -- what I care about is the difference, not what terms we use for it. I don't think attitude has much to do with it. We can call the "noumenal world" the in-itself, and "our world" . . . well, whatever you'd like, that you believe would be less misleading. No arguments here.
This can be framed in terms of prediction, inference, model construction. It is called active inference, a corollary of the free energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
So there is no conflict imo. At the same time, all these things like desire still work via neurons that are effectively prediction machines.
It's not a matter of intuition giving us an accurate picture of reality. That's not what I have been arguing. I have been arguing that the picture given by empiricism, the supposed "empirical reality", is incorrect, false and misleading. When we can point out inconsistencies, problems, failures, in the "empirical reality", as I do repeated throughout this forum, then intuition provides us with the conclusion that there is a deeper metaphysical truth which is not provided by the "empirical reality".
So, as I mentioned earlier, the nature of time can be taken as an example, or even the primary specific or "particular intuition". The empirical model is based solely on the past. Only the past has been sensed or experienced in any way. From this, we project toward the future, and conclude that we can predict the future, and this capacity to predict validates the determinist perspective. However, the intuitive perspective knows that we have a freedom of choice to select from possibilities, and this negates the determinist perspective. Unless we deny the intuitive knowledge, that we have the capacity to choose, the difference between these two perspectives indicates that the relationship between the past and the future is not the way that the supposed "empirical reality" supposes that it is.
Quoting Janus
Idealism is the predominant metaphysics in western society. Surprise, surprise!
Quoting Apustimelogist
Did I discuss this with you before, or was that with someone else who referenced the same woefully inadequate model?
That seems to be factually incorrect at least when it comes to philosophers: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I haven't seen any argument for that conclusion. Can you briefly state what " inconsistencies, problems, failures" are to be found with empiricism? Be concise, no hand-waving.
No clue what you're taking about
In common speech existence is defined as the fact or state of living or having objective reality. Generally speaking, exists and real are taken as synonymous.
In philosophy, however, the meaning of 'existence' varies within different frameworks:
C. S. Peirce also distinguishes reality from existence. Existence is actuality in the here-and-now, the mode of being of things that act and react in time what he called brute facts (Secondness).
Reality is broader: it is the mode of being of that which is as it is, independent of what any actual person or persons may think it to be (Logic of Mathematics). This includes mathematical truths, laws of nature, and possibilities things that are real but not existent in the same way as physical objects (hence the distinction!) Peirce also held to a form of scholastic realism accepting that universals are real (which is not to say they're existent!)
So in Peirces framework:
That last point raises the sense in which possibilities are real: a possibility is of something that does not exist, but might. The "realm of possibility" is real, but none of its members yet exist. "Real" here means having a determinate nature independent of what anyone thinks; exist means having actualised presence here-and-now. Possibilities are real in virtue of what they could become, but until actualised they have no existence.
The reflexive, everyday attitude is that what exists is out there somewhere. Empiricism conditions us to expect that what exists can be found in nature, grounded in natural processes, and potentially discoverable by science a disposition that obscures nuanced philosophical distinctions.
I have no complaint about all this. But you have a worrying tendency to slip from "our perception of the world is mind-dependent" to "the world is mind-dependent".
I take the point about the metaphor. In fact, I think that the the fact that we have technologies of representing the world as we see it is a huge influence on how we think about it. But not necessarily a helpful influence...
If it is a metaphor, it follows that the photograph is not the same as our perception of the world. So we should chart the differences, so that we do not get misled by it.
The most important difference, I think, is that the camera does not perceive what it photographs. You might well say that it records the appearance of what it photographs, but that depends on how we interpret the picture. That's something the camera cannot do. The bone of contention escapes the metaphor.
But it does seem to me that the metaphor gives us grounds for saying that appearances are an objective reality. If they were not, the camera could not record them.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. Let's think about this.
The sun rises in the morning, moves across the sky through the day, and then sinks below the horizon. The sun appears in the morning and disappears in the evening. What happens between the evening and the following morning is hidden from us. This is appearance as disclosure or revelation - as presence (or absence). But this is different, because it is the same object that appears and disappears. (You know how we know that!)
We might complain that the sun, despite appearances, doesn't move. The illusion that it moves is created by the movement (spinning) of the earth. Now we have the distinction between appearance and reality, and it is created by our misinterpretation of what we see. But there is nothing hidden here.
When we collect mushrooms, we have to be very careful. A mushroom can appear to be tasty and nutritious, but be exactly the opposite. A quicksand can appear to be solid ground, but give way as soon as we step on it. People pretend to be (and appear to be) what they are not. These are the appearances the best fit Kant's model. Here, appearance (and not misinterpretation) does hide reality.
Yet perhaps Kant is justified in developing a philosophical, technical, use of "appearance" and classify all appearances together and all realities together. I think not, because appearance and reality are intertwined. There is no binary opposition here. "Appearances" and "realities" are not two different (groups of) objects.
Quoting Wayfarer
Marking the limit of our knowledge would be something I could understand. There are indeed unknown unknowns - and, notice, they are presumably what they are independently of anything that we say or do. But I resist the idea that the boundary is fixed. We find that calculating what happens at a molecular level in the macro world is too complex to be a realistic project. So we resort to statistical or probabilistic laws. They work pretty well for us. When we encounter the astonishing phenomena at sub-atomic level, we do not walk away - we wring from the phenomena what conclusions we can.
You rightly emphasize perspective, point of view, as inescapable in all that we know, and, if I've understood you, say that a view of things without any perspective is impossible. I agree. We can characterize a view from a perspective as an appearance, so this becomes an interpretation of what Kant is doing.
So here's Kant trying to make sense of the idea of a view of things outside any perspective. So now I ask, is a view without perspective possible, or not?
If it is possible to say anything that was true of all possible perspectives, that might do as saying something about how things are in themselves, I suppose. (I gather that is one of the strategies that Einstein adopts in the theory of relativity.)
As for the sense of mystery, that could well be one of the motivations. Idealism as denial of the reality of the common sense world, has a very long history, going all the way back to Plato. I am sure that there is something going on here that ordinary philosophical discussion does not touch.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a version of Berkeley's argument, which he is very enthusiastic about. It is a good one. But if you rule out the possibility of an unknowable, perspective-less universe, what does it mean to refer to it? Is saying of something that it is unknowable true independently of all perspective? I think not. What was unknown can become known - perhaps is already known as soon as we say it is not known.
Quoting Wayfarer
Perhaps I should be taking Peirce (and Meinong) more seriously. "Modes of being" such as "things that are real but not existent in the same way as physical objects" is right up my street. There's much about this approach that I like very much.
I mentioned what I called the "primary" example:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Apustimelogist
I conclude that it was someone other than you then.
Im very careful about the wording:
Quoting Wayfarer
Epistemological, not ontological.
More to come
We have a number of candidate construals, including what you're calling "common speech." (Also Quine's "To be is to be the value of a bound variable."). Is there a way of determining which is correct?
I think not. An understanding of how to construe "existence" can be more or less helpful, more or less perspicuous to a given framework, more or less flexible as it may apply to different cases, but beyond that . . . we have yet to discover the Philosophical Dictionary in the Sky that can answer such questions.
I agree that, for instance, there are good reasons for sometimes distinguishing "exist" and "real," such the numbers example. But I'm sure you wouldn't maintain that it is true that numbers are real but not existent. We can go so far as to say that drawing such a distinction illuminates something interesting and important about numbers. But that something -- the distinction itself -- does not depend on our use of "real" and "existent" to describe it. Arguably, two invented technical terms would do even better.
I thought so. Now I'm very worried. We'll see.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. I'm not sure what difference it makes, but maybe...
For what its worth, the dictionaries seem to cite that "real" as a definition of "existent". But it seems pretty clear that "real" in most of its uses does not mean exists and "non-existent" is not an antonym for "unreal", not is "unreal" a synonym for existent. What the dictionaries seem to miss is that the meaning of both "real" and "exists" depends on the context - on what is being said to be real or exist.
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe there are many cases in which one would want to say that something real didn't exist, even though it is quite normal to accept that something unreal does exist - under a different description. A toy car is not a real car, but it is a real toy. A painting may not be a real Titian, but it is a real forgery. &c. One needs to bear in mind several close relations like actual, authentic, genuine, and so on.
It is pretty clear that are used in different ways in many contexts. So I'm afraid that I don't understand what you mean by "But that something -- the distinction itself -- does not depend on our use of "real" and "existent" to describe it."
In practice, take the number example: Would you agree that there is an important ontological difference of some sort between a number and a rock (or the class "rock" too, perhaps, but let's not overcomplicate it)? Does it really matter whether we say, "Rocks are real, numbers exist," or "Numbers are real, rocks exist"? What is actually being claimed here? As far as I can tell, the purpose of such formulations is to highlight a distinction. And the distinction often seems to have something to do with what is basic, essential, grounding, etc. But which term is supposed to be "more basic", and why? How would we find out? Might it not be better to formulate the distinction precisely, say exactly what properties an item must have in order to belong to one or the other or both categories, and leave it at that? How does the choice of "real" vs. "existent" add anything, other than a muddle stretching back thousands of years?
In his own somewhat unsatisfactory way, I think this is what Quine was trying for by equating existence with what can be quantified over.
Well, I'm not opposed in principle to specialized or technical terms. I guess that since you think that there is a distinction out there, in reality, so to speak, you would want the new terms to capture it. But we would need to describe it accurately to do that.
I think it is only difficult for philosophers because they don't seem able to accept that the meaning of the terms depends on their context of use. They expect them to have a univocal meaning. ("Good" is another example, by the way.) If they could accept that, the problems would be, I think, much easier.
However, there is something fundamental about the idea of a concept being instantiated or a reference succeeding. Perhaps that's what we should look at.
Quoting J
Actually, I oscillate between thinking that they have different modes of existence and thinking that they are different kinds (categories) of object. Either way would do, I think.
Quoting J
Well, I thought that idea, together with the idea of domains of discourse, that would define what a formula quantified over, (numbers, rocks, sensations &c.), would work pretty well. I know that some people have gone off it now, but I'm not clear why.
Yes. I'm not implying that this is some easy task that philosophers have inexplicably shirked!
Quoting Ludwig V
It certainly is. I'm not sure how much "univocal" covers, but the problem is partially that these terms are thought of as natural kinds, somehow.
Quoting Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V
Yeah, I think it's one of the most useful frameworks available. As long as we promise not to claim it's the right way to define "existence"! What quantification gives us is an ordinary, unglamorous way to capture a great deal of the structure of thought. This effort, I believe, is roughly the same project as trying to understand what exists.
OK. This deserves to be taken seriously.
It occurred to me, while I was thinking about all this, that we have under our hands an example of an attempt to coin technical terms for the purposes of philosophy. Heidegger, Dasein present-to-hand, ready-to-hand &c. Sartre has similar concepts, but was channeling Heidegger; the differences may be important. Both have a certain currency amongst philosophers, but I don't think they have penetrated ordinary language (yet). I don't find them particularly exciting, though.
I'll need to think about this overnight.
Quoting Punshhh Sorry I previously missed this response of yours. I'm not getting what you are getting at.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, the various meanings and associations of 'real', 'existing' are context dependent. We can say that numbers are real in that they have properties that no one can sensibly deny. We can say that they don't exist, however, because no one has ever seen a number.
On the other hand it could be said that number exists as perceptible quantity. We can see the difference between two oranges and eight oranges, for example. What I object to is the idea that is, at least implicitly, in the OP that there is some absolute "higher" distinction between the terms that only the "illuminated ones" can fathom. Such claims are nothing more than dogma.
Well, that's right, technical terms are kind of a drag to use, especially when they don't originate in English. The Continental stream you point to is one example, but so is the analytic-phil tradition, actually. Or maybe I should back that up and say: The minute you place logic at the forefront of philosophical inquiry, you're going to get what amounts to technical, non-English terminology for a homely concept like "existence."
I frankly don't think my proposal to abandon terms like "existence" or "reality" will work, because thus far we don't have a ship to jump to. Unless you're in the Heideggerean tradition and are willing to adopt that very difficult vocabulary, or you want to do more with the Anglophone logical apparatus. (I've often said that Theodore Sider is really good on this.) For our purposes on TPF, I'd just like to see less contention about "the right definition" for a Large philosophical term, and more attention to the conceptual structure the term is meant to describe or fit into.
I'll be interested in your overnight thoughts!
Certainly. The thrust of the essay isn't that there's not an objective reality, but that reality is not only objective, it has an ineliminable subjective aspect. This is not solipsistic, because as we are subjects of similar kinds, we will experience the objective attributes of reality in similar ways.
Quoting Ludwig V
Agree. To think of the appearance and the in itself as a set of two non-equal things is a mistake. I take the gist of Kant's argument is that we don't see what things really are, what they are in their inmost nature, but as they appear to us.
'Epistemological' is the nature of knowing, 'ontological' is on the nature of what exists. I make it clear at the top of the OP that the primary concern is epistemological.
Regards Berkeley, I have an essay on him which I might publish here at some point.
Quoting J
On the contrary, it is a fundamental distinction which is almost entirely forgotten or submerged in current culture. Universals, numbers, and the like, are real relationships that can only be grasped by the rational mind. They are the essential elements of reason. Numbers dont exist as do objects of perception; there is no object called seven. You might point at the numeral, but that is a symbol. A number is real as an act of counting or as an estimation of quantity. In either case, it is something that can only be known to a rational mind. Hence the interminable debate about Platonism in philosophy of mathematics. Speaking of which:
[quote=Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics;https://iep.utm.edu/indimath/]Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible.
Mathematical objects are...unlike ordinary physical objects such as trees and cars. We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses. It is not obvious that we learn about mathematical objects this way. Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could use our senses to learn about mathematical objects. We do not see integers, or hold sets. Even geometric figures are not the kinds of things that we can sense. Consider any point in space; call it P. P is only a point, too small for us to see, or otherwise sense. Now imagine a precise fixed distance away from P, say an inch and a half. The collection of all points that are exactly an inch and a half away from P is a sphere. The points on the sphere are, like P, too small to sense. We have no sense experience of the geometric sphere. If we tried to approximate the sphere with a physical object, say by holding up a ball with a three-inch diameter, some points on the edge of the ball would be slightly further than an inch and a half away from P, and some would be slightly closer. The sphere is a mathematically precise object. The ball is rough around the edges. In order to mark the differences between ordinary objects and mathematical objects, we often call mathematical objects abstract objects. ...
... Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalists claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies. [/quote]
Bolds added. The point is, if our 'best epistemic theories' can't acknowledge the fundamental role of rational insight in the grasping of numbers, then how good are they? :brow: It's a consequence of what Jacques Maritain describes as the cultural impact of empiricism (but then, he was Aristotelian Thomist, so not obliged to bow to naturalism.)
We're constantly relying on mental constructs, whenever we use language. They are the constitutuents of the lived world, the lebensweld, which is the actual world, as distinct from the abstract domain of theoretical physics.
Well, aren't you special.
Philosophers make up a very small percentage of the population. So your proposed facts are irrelevant.
Too true. But, perhaps, for our purposes, we could use the natural language translation.
Quoting J
It's not a realistic project, I agree. But it gives me something to hold on to when the water gets choppy and I fear drowning in all the different views.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you just mean that we can know what things are like, I can see the point. I can even accept that there are distortions in the way that we discover and think about reality. But the question is whether those distortions affect reality. I think that they do not - saving exceptional cases.
Quoting Wayfarer
OK. I'm not unsympathetic, but I think that Kant misrepresents knowledge, because he doesn't recognize the process that generates it. My version would emphasize the dynamism of our knowledge. Our knowledge is always partial, always finding new questions. But we work on those questions and work out answers, which generate more questions. Complete and final knowledge seems like the terminus of that process, but it will never be actually reached. I would suggest that it is a "regulative ideal", but I really am not sure what complete final knowledge would be.
Quoting Wayfarer
I take the point. It may be my problem, rather than yours. But there is a catch. If knowledge is true, then surely, there is a connection with ontology, isn't there?
Quoting Wayfarer
I find him fascinating. It's a beautifully constructed argument, with all the right definitions in place. But he keeps taking back what he seems to have said - in the most elegant way and without ever admitting it. His patronizing remark that it is fine for people to go on thinking and speaking in the old way, but he prefers to think and speak with the learned. But the learned, in his day, were mostly the schoolmen, whose ideas he has been consistently rubbishing for page after page. And so on.
Quoting Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics
This is odd way of putting the problem. There's no doubt that we are capable of rational thought, at least some of the time. So it can't be incompatible with "an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies." I think that this dilemma is at least partly resolved by the fact that we now have reasoning machines.
Here's a possible way to approach the problem: Is "real" more like a name, or more like a description?
Compare "donkey". We point to an individual and say, "This is a donkey," by which we mean that the word "donkey" names, but does not as a name further define or describe, that individual. If someone asked us, "But what does 'donkey' mean? By virtue of what property can we determine that the individual is a donkey?" we would explain how to do this. And if we were further asked, "But why 'donkey'? Why call it that?" we would be a bit puzzled, and reply that there is no particular reason.
I'm suggesting that "real" is more like "donkey". (The analogy isn't perfect, but bear with me.) We examine "conceptual space" and discover that, let's say, "Universals, numbers, and the like, are . . . relationships that can only be grasped by the rational mind." (Notice that for the time being I omitted your word "real".) If this is true, then we've learned something important about a category of being which we encounter.
My challenge is, What is added to our knowledge by describing this category as "real"? Is there any non-circular, non-question-begging way of teasing out more information from "real"? Moreover, what is lost by using "real" can be considerable -- we lose clarity and context, because of the enormously diverse history of that word's usage. We are pulled almost irresistibly into trying to justify our use of "real" to describe the ontological category we've discovered.
Suppose instead -- and this part is fantastical, I know -- we said that universals, numbers, and the like, are Shmonkeys. We can also point out, "In many cultures and traditions, Shmonkeys are equated with what is real, but it is unclear just what that means, apart from being a Shmonkey." And we can go on to give names to other elements of ontology -- perhaps including names for ways of existing. (Quantification!) We'd end up, ideally, with a clear and organized metaphysic that can still speak about grounding, structure, and epistemology, thus covering what most of us want from terms like "real" and "exist," but without the contentious, ambiguous baggage.
To anticipate your response, what this picture leaves out is the idea of "a fundamental distinction which is almost entirely forgotten." I think you're wanting to say that there used to be a correct way of talking about what is real, about what exists, but we no longer remember how to do this. Part of me is sympathetic with this, but not the philosophical part. I think our talk of Shmonkeys can be just as correct, and can reveal the same important properties that (some uses of) "real" is supposed to do, including, as it may be, a fundamental grounding function.
But cant you see that this seemingly straightforward statement already assumes the very point in dispute? Youre picturing reality as something fully formed, existing apart from and unaffected by any observer, and then treating our perceptions as merely imperfect copies of it. That is precisely the realist model under debate. The whole issue is whether such a realityone entirely independent of observationis anything more than a theoretical construct. We have [s]no direct access to it, only to[/s] direct knowledge of it, only to the appearances mediated through our perceptual and cognitive faculties. To claim that reality is there anyway is to slip in, unnoticed, the conclusion you are trying to prove.
Quoting Ludwig V
:roll: The entire point of the Critique of Pure Reason is about the processes that generate knowledge.
Quoting Ludwig V
Surely, but what we believe exists is very much conditioned by what we think we know.From the OP: Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting J
What is real, the quest to understand it, whether we can understand the real or not, are surely central questions of philosophy.
Quoting J
Youre aware that scholastic realism was a very different animal from modern scientific realism. Scientific realism, as its commonly understood, is rooted in an exclusively objective and empirical framework that sidelines or brackets the subjective elements of judgement, reasoning, and conceptual insight. Scholastic realism, by contrast, affirmed the reality of universalsforms or structures apprehended by the intellectand saw them as essential to the very architecture of reason.
From the modern empirical-naturalist perspective, this older view is almost unintelligible. Universals are, at best, treated as convenient abstractions from sensory data, not as ontologically basic realities. That is why scientific realism, operating on a one-dimensional ontology of what exists, is predisposed to misconstrue or dismiss the reality of universals.
Hence you get statements like this, in a popular essay on the topic of What is Math?:
The Smithsonian passage is a textbook illustration of this mindset. Browns suggestion that we grasp mathematical truths with the minds eye is, to me, utterly unproblematicindeed, its the most natural way to explain how mathematics works. We have the nous! Yet the objections read almost like expressions of alarm. The worry is not really about mathematics, though; its about the metaphysical implications. If we admit that certain truths are accessible through intellectual intuitionoutside the mediation of the sensesthen we reopen the door not only to a Platonic account of mathematics, but potentially to ethical, metaphysical, or even theological knowledge. That is precisely what modern naturalism, with its post-Enlightenment suspicion of anything outside space and time, has worked so hard to keep shut.
Richard Weaver saw the origins of this historical break with clarity:
[quote=Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver]Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture...[/quote]
OK.
This is an important moment - when the arguments run out or when there is no fact of the matter that will settle the dispute. Let's suppose that we have here two different ways of thinking about - interpretations of - the world, which are self-consistent and incompatible. Yet we seem able to communicate, so there must be some common ground. This is why Wittgenstein writes in that maddeningly elusive way. I'm not Wittgenstein and it would be absurd to try to imitate him. All I can do is try to present an account of my ideas that you can recognize as, in some sense, possible. The same applies to you. Mutual understanding would be success, I think. Agreement would be a pleasant surprise.
Quoting Wayfarer
Isn't reality something that is what it is, ... existing apart from and unaffected by any observer" an important, if not fundamental assumption of science? How is science possible without observation and experiment that do not affect the data?
Your picture of my picture is not quite accurate. Some, but not all, of "reality" exists apart from and unaffected by any observer. (I shall go on to talk of reality without qualification. It simplifies some explanations) It's not necessarily fully formed, whatever that means. Our perceptions are not copies of it. There's a great risk of reification here. Perceiving is an activity, not an entity. Thermostats are a contol system. They respond to events and control machinery. There is no need for any images. (What would an image of temperature or pressure be like?) Our senses are part of a complex system and provide information to enable us to function. Images would just get in the way.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, there is the awkward fact that reality was there long before we were. I've accepted (perhaps not very clearly) that reality is, let us say, observation-apt and was observation-apt before there were any observers. On the other hand, some would insist that the only reason that reality is observation-apt is that our senses have evolved to take advantage of certain facts about reality in order to provide us with information about it; that idea is the result of our observations and theoretical constructs. I don't think you really reject them.
Theoretical constructs can be true, can't they? I'm not sure you really accept that. I get very puzzled whether you are saying that we don't know (epistemology) whether the earth goes round the sun or vice versa or not. There is the additional interesting question whether you accept that the earth goes round the sun or not. But perhaps that would be ontology.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think there's a slip somewhere there. I had the impression that you did not think that "direct knowledge" was any more possible than "direct access". Indeed, I rather think that they stand or fall together. I thought we had agreed on this. I also thought that your distinction between epistemology and ontology meant that you accepted that reality existed - the problem is about our knowledge of it.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm sorry. My remark was badly written. I knew it at the time, but couldn't think of a clearer way to explain. If I think of a better way to explain it, I'll come back to it. But it may be just a muddle.
Truly excellent question! I agree that science depends on the working assumption of a reality that is what it is, independent of us. Thats the stance of objectivity, and its indispensable for observation, experiment, and prediction. But that stance is methodological, not metaphysical. Its a way of working, not a complete account of what reality is.
The point Im making and which I explore further in a follow-up essay, Objectivity and Detachment is that the independent objects of empiricism cannot be truly mind-independent, because theyre objects. An object is always an object-for-a-subject, constituted within a perceptual and conceptual framework. Our sensory and intellectual systems have a fundamental role in defining what counts as an object at all.
Phenomenologists like Husserl showed that even the most rigorous scientific observation is grounded in the lifeworld the background of shared experience that makes such observation possible in the first place. This doesnt mean reality depends on your or my whims; it means that what we call objective reality is already structured through the conditions of human knowing. Without recognising this, science risks mistaking its methodological abstraction for the whole of reality.
So yes, objectivity is crucial. But it is not the final word its one mode of disclosure, and it rests on a deeper, irreducible involvement of the subject in the constitution of the world - a world in which we ourselves are no longer an accident.
Quoting Ludwig V
I do address that in the OP:
The point isnt to deny that the Earth existed before humans of course it did. The point is that when we talk about the Earth 4 billion years ago, we are still talking within the framework of human spatio-temporal intuition and conceptual categories. As Kant put it, time is the form of our intuition we cannot picture a pre-human past except as a temporal sequence ordered in the way our minds structure it. The scientific account is entirely valid within that framework, but it doesnt erase the fact that the framework itself is ours.
Quoting Ludwig V
In this case, my entry was badly written and I edited it a few minutes after I wrote it.
Quoting Ludwig V
Caution needed here, though. Again there's a sense in the back of that of the 'there anyway' reality, which will supposedly carry on regardless. But that too is a mental construct, vorstellung, in Schopenhauer's terms.
When you emphasise the sovereignty of what is, I agree theres an important sense in which the real can be seen in a completely detached way. But there are two very different ideals of vision here. Scientific objectivity brackets out the subjective to measure and describe the world in quantifiable terms, the same for all who measure them. The sages detachment, by contrast, transcends the personal without excluding the subject it is a unitive vision that includes the qualitative and existential dimensions of reality, not only the measurable ones. Its the difference between the physicists analysis of light and the lived experience of seeing the light.
[quote=Meister Eckhart, On Detachment;https://www.theculturium.com/meister-eckhart-on-detachment/]Now you may ask what this detachment is that is so noble in itself. You should know that true detachment is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honour, shame or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind.
You should know that the outer man can be active while the inner man is completely free of this activity and unmoved Here is an analogy: a door swings open and shuts on its hinge. I would compare the outer woodwork of the door to the outer man and the hinge to the inner man. When the door opens and shuts, the boards move back and forth but the hinge stays in the same place and is never moved thereby. It is the same in this case if you understand it rightly.[/quote]
Again, thank you very much for such perceptive and probing questions, I value them. :pray:
I don't think it is the case that science depends on the "assumption of a reality that is what it is, independent of us". I believe that idea is a misunderstanding of the true "objective" nature of science. Experimentation involves human action, and what we are looking for with this activity, is a reaction from our environment. So the experiment, being derived from hypothesis, is directed by the hypothesis.
This implies that any assumptions about a reality which is independent of us, are hypotheses dependent. In many cases, of scientific experimentation, the implied assumption is actually the opposite of that. This is clearly evident with the use of relativity theory in the creation of hypotheses. Relativity theory is based in the assumption that if there is a reality about what is, independent of us, this reality is irrelevant to our modeling of observed activities. In other words, the premise of relativity theory is that we can produce an adequate understanding of activities without assuming "a reality that is what it is, independent of us".
So, our attitude toward "a reality that is what it is, independent of us", need not be one of affirmation or negation, when we engage in scientific experimentation. And, I would say that this attitude, be it relativistic or non-relativistic, greatly influences the type of experiments which we design. Notice in the paragraphs above, the experiment is directed by the hypothesis, and the hypothesis is directed by the underlying assumptions or attitude.
Quoting Wayfarer
According to what I wrote above, "reality" to a large degree does depend on the whims of individuals. That is the whims of the scientists devising the experiments. Of course these whims are shaped by the social environment, and the ideology which informs the scientific community. Notice the modern trend, which is greatly influenced by the relativistic perspective, is toward metaphysics like model-dependent realism, and many-worlds. These are ontologies which deny "a reality that is what it is, independent of us", or perhaps could be described in the contradictory way of, 'the reality that is what it is independent of us is that there is no reality which is what it is independent of us'.
Actually, there's a surprising amount of consensus about the "categories" of being, amongst those philosophers who have ventured into this territory. Meinong, Peirce, Popper all come up with three categories - the physical, the abstract, the mental. There are variations, but there's a lot of overlap and the surrounding framework differs. But the overlap is significant.
One reservation I have is that this arrangement can be characterized in different ways. It can be characterized as "categories of being" or "modes of existence" or as "categories of objects" or categories of language. It may be that this is less important than the approach.
Quoting J
I've been thinking about this a lot. The same word is used, so there is a great temptation to give a general characterization of all the uses. There may not be one, in which case we simply designate the word as ambiguous. "Bank" as in river and "bank" as in financial institution and "bank" as in "you can bank on that" is a stock example. However, in the case of real, I wondered whether we could say that "real" is the concept that enables us to distinguish between misleading and true appearances.
I have busy days (again) tomorrow and Tuesday. So I doubt if I will reappear here before Wednesday.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's right, and the philosophical structure that results from this is intricate and, for me, often persuasive. My beef, if I have one, is with terminology. I'm looking for ways to talk about these things that promote mutual insight rather than disagreement over what words to use. The scientific realist and the scholastic realist disagree -- but about what, exactly? Is there a way to frame their disagreement without each insisting on one view about how to use the word "real"?
I'm trying to be careful, and not say ". . . about what is real." I'm arguing that there isn't a fact of the matter here; all we have is more or less useful ways of using the word. That doesn't cede any ground to either camp. Clearly there's something important that the scientific realist is pointing to, by drawing the line where they do. Equally clearly, that's the case for the scholastic realist as well. What can we do to encourage conversation about what might lie on either side of that line, without having to call the line "the boundary of reality" or some such?
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. Again, the wrangle over how to name the elements of the arrangement -- what counts is the approach, the arrangement itself.
Quoting Ludwig V
That's a good way to use "real." And if we adopted it, notice what would follow: A disagreement about whether an appearance is misleading or true would be settled, if it can be settled at all, on the merits. We would not be looking in the Great Dictionary under "real" and saying, Ahah, this appearance over here is real, because it's true. Rather, we'd examine the conceptual territory of "misleading" and "true," make what determination we can, and then, having decided that "real" is a good word to use for the true appearances, we use it. If someone doesn't like that use of the word, no big deal: What we want to be talking about is misleading and true appearances, not "reality."
Yes, yes, our concept of reality is our concept - who else's would it be? In the same way, our concepts of a unicorn or a swan are our concepts. Whether such creatures exist is another matter. More accurately, our concepts are not arbitrary, but the result of a negotiation with Reality, with how the world is. Actually, it's not really a negotiation because the world doesn't do give-and-take. It's more a question of trying a suite of concepts on to see if they fit with what we want.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is one of the moments that I think we may agree about at least some of this. The catch comes in when I want to say that framework is what reveals the world to us. You seem to have difficulty with that.
Quoting Meister Eckhart, On Detachment
We talked about this. I do think that the door/hinge analogy is more helpful.
Quoting J
I'm not at all clear what you mean by scholastic realism. Can you explain, please?
I'm more familiar with idealism vs realism, but I'm pushing at the same door. At the very least, even if actual agreement can't be reached, mutual understanding would be deepened.
Quoting Ludwig V
I can live more easily with any of these than with Being or Existence or Objects or Language.
Quoting J
Absolutely.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's perfectly true. But what makes the system work is that the experimental results are not directed by the hypothesis - it wouldn't be an experiment if they were. So what are they directed by? Reality or Nature or the World - take your pick. That's what I was trying to say. I'm sorry if I was not clear.
I was picking up @Wayfarer's term -
Quoting Wayfarer
I thought it might be something like that. "the reality of universals" is the litmus test for platonism.
But it really is a debate about the nature of realityand also about the corresponding change in consciousness that follows from how we draw that line. Universals are fundamental to how the mind 'constructs' reality. Thoughts are realbut not because they are brain activity (as perhaps 90% of the participants here would have it). They belong to a different order - one that due to these historical changes, is no longer recognized.
Historically, nominalism shifted the sense of what is real from universals to particulars, from ideas to objects, and thence the presumption that the sensable world is real independently of the mind. Whereas, as we've seen, the perception of material objects is necessarily contingent on sense-perception (per Kant). But principles such as those of geometry, maths, and logic which are constantly deployed to fathom the so-called mind-independent world are themselves things that can only be grasped by a mind. The result is, as Bob Dylan put it, 'there's too much confusion' ('All Along the Watchtower').
The empiricist tendency is to think about ideas as if they were objects, but that is to confuse what is intelligible with what is perceptible. And if the question is asked, in what sense are they physical? the answer will be that as theyre grasped by the mind ? the mind is the brain ? the brain is physical ? therefore ideas must also be (or supervene on the) physical. But the claim mind is brain is itself conceptual. It relies on the conceptual architecture of science.
Everything is ass-about and upside down.
Quoting Ludwig V
One of the books I read just as I began posting on forums was The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Allen Gillespie. 'Gillespie turns the conventional reading of the Enlightenment (as reason overcoming religion) on its head by explaining how the humanism of Petrarch, the free-will debate between Luther and Erasmus, the scientific forays of Francis Bacon, the epistemological debate between Descarte and Hobbes, were all motivated by an underlying wrestling with the questions posed by nominalism, which, according to Gillespie, dismantled the rational God / universe of medieval scholasticism and introduced (by way of the Franciscans) a fideistic God-of-pure-will, out of a concern that anything less than that would undermine divine omnipotence'.
Nothing I've seen since has caused me to doubt his account. Not that it's the final word but it set the direction for my subsequent research.
It all depends on your perspective. For the physicalist the claim "mind is brain" is physical, as reasoning is a physical process. Concepts themselves (as conceived) are hypostatized physical processes for the physicalist.
The problem for you is that you think there is a "slam dunk" way of debunking physicalism. There is no slam dunk way of debunking physicalism or any other metaphysical view because everything depends on what assumptions you begin with.
With metaphysics the best you can hope for is consistency and plausibility, you are not going to get any proof.
I'm very sceptical about that. But I don't know enough to argue the point properly. Nominalism was clearly part of what was going on, but something as complex as the Renaissance/Reformation must have involved many interacting factors. The idea that a single part of the movement caused everything seems highly implausible to me. I also suspect that our problem was not really a problem for pre-Enlightenment philosophy. The explanation I'm looking for is how the problem originated. I don't recall Aristotle worrying about our problem. Plato's philosophy is more complex, but still doesn't align with our debates, IMO. Yet, there were important ideas in the older philosophy. It should not be dismissed wholesale.
Quoting Wayfarer
It sounds like a very good read and might fill in some of the many blanks in my historical understanding. Yet - No spark setting off an explosion. Many factors combining in a storm.
I'm really interested in the information that there was a real (!) theological concern behind to the development of fideism. I had the impression that it was simply a resort of the faithful under the assault from the Enlightenment. Thanks for that.
Quoting Janus
I would go further and suggest that there are no "slam-dunk" arguments anywhere in philosophy. If there were, they would demolish ideas without understand them properly, and in metaphysics all ideas deserve a proper understanding .There is something in all of them that deserves our respect and attention.
However, your argument proves too much. It is always the case that conclusions depend on what assumptions are made at the start. But that applies to good arguments as much as to bad ones.
I do agree that there is no fact of the matter that will determine the truth or falsity of any metaphysical view. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all views are equal. I think of them as alternative ways of looking at, thinking about the world and our lives in it. What I don't yet know is how to evaluate them. Yet, I can't help having views about some of them.
It's not a single issue, though. Of course there are many interacting factors involved but the decline of Aristotelian realism really was a momentous shift in culture. That's what Gillespie's book is about, as well as an earlier book called Ideas have Consequences, Richard Weaver. (He was an English professor who's book became an unexpected hit in the post-war period. )
Quoting Ludwig V
That's what is motivating this study: the decline of Platonic or Aristotelian realism. Lloyd Gerson's most recent book addresses a similar area: Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy. 'Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world. and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy.' And the 'intelligible world' is precisely the domain of universals and Platonic realism, generally.
Quoting Ludwig V
The other thread I've posted 'Idealism in Context' talks about this very point. It is that modern philosophical idealism beginning with Berkeley, began with the decline of the 'participatory realism' of scholastic philosophy.
How is this relevant to the original post? It is because I see 'ideas' in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense as essential to the structure of reasoned inference - theyre formal structures in consciousness . 'As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body. That intellectual activity -- thought in the strictest sense of the term -- is irreducible to sensation and imagination is a thesis that unites Platonists, Aristotelians, and rationalists of either the ancient Parmenidean sort or the modern Cartesian sort' ~ Ed Feser. So not surprisingly, the advocates for scholastic realism are mainly Catholic, as they're mainly Thomist.
This exchange gives us a good view of the issue, I think. (And thanks for hosting the discussion, and being so willing to hear how it strikes others.)
My position is that there can't be a debate that "really is" about the nature of reality, because "reality" and "real," when used in this kind of philosophical context, don't have definitions or references that can be clearly agreed upon, outside of some specific tradition. Your position is (and of course correct me if this is wrong) that we do know what "reality" refers to, or at least we know what we mean when we use it in this context. This knowledge is tradition-independent. Thus, a philosopher can be right or wrong about what is real, and can be shown to be so.
I'm further saying that we can still talk about all the topics we want to talk about -- structure, grounding, primacy, causality, knowledge -- without insisting first on agreement about what is real, or how to use the terms "real" and "reality."
As a next step, I think that it's appropriate for me to ask you how you're using "reality" when you say that we can have a debate about the nature of reality. Is it something close to @Ludwig V's suggestion?: "'real' is the concept that enables us to distinguish between misleading and true appearances." Perhaps even more importantly, can you tell us why you believe that your use is correct?
That's right, it is just one thread within the whole tapestry. The attempt to characterize nominalism as 'where we went wrong' is a tendentious, "just-so" story. There are many points in history, right back to the advent of agriculture and land ownership where it could be said we "went the wrong way". The polemic between nominalism and realism of universals is a minor philosophical issue which is of concern only to (some) of the intellectual elites. There are also more nuanced views which avoid this very polemic.
Quoting Ludwig V
Right, I'm obviously not going to disagree (except that you are "going further") since I said as much myself in the very passage you are responding to.
Quoting Ludwig V
It is strange that you seem to think you are disagreeing with me somehow, when I have already said pretty much what you are saying here. Recall that earlier I said it comes down to what seems most plausible. Of course I agree that there are good arguments and bad arguments, and assuming that we are referring to consistent (with their premises) arguments, then evaluation must comes down to plausibility. It is a little like aesthetics?we all know there are good and bad artworks, but a precise and determinable measure of aesthetic value , just as a precise and determinable measure of plausibility, is not possible.
Lets go back to the starting point. The world we see, with objects arrayed in space and time, is constructed by the brain on the basis of sensory inputs received by our cognitive apparatus in light of existing knowledge and conceptions (synthesised in Kantian terminology). This is something which has been validated by subsequent cognitive science (per the example of Charles Pinter Mind and the Cosmic Order) . It does not mean that the world is all in the mind, a figment, or an illusion in a simplistic sense. It means that cognition has an ineliminably subjective aspect or ground, which has generally been ignored or bracketed out by science. (This ignoring is subject of the hard problem of consciousness and the blind spot of science arguments.) Awareness of the subjective ground of experience is the starting point in phenomenology.
Hence the argument of the OP that this validates some insights of idealism. It also challenges what Husserl describes as the natural attitude. According to Husserl, this is our everyday, unreflective stance toward the world in which we simply accept the existence of objects and facts around us without questioning or examining the underlying structures of consciousness that make such experience possible.????????????????
Becoming aware of these processes is meta-cognitive insight - to be critically, self-reflectively aware of cognition. Awareness of the way that the mind constructs its world, on the basis of its dispositions, faculties, and so on, is, as I see it, fundamental to philosophy proper, as implied in the maxim know yourself.
The second part of this thread began with the argument about the history of ideas and the decline of classical metaphysics. Im of the view that the Greek philosophers were critically self-aware in the sense described above, but of course this wasnt (and couldnt be) expressed in the modern idiom. It was expressed in terms appropriate to that (now very distant) cultural milieu. The tradition of classical metaphysics arose out of the meta-cognitive insights of the founders of that tradition (subject of a book not mentioned in the OP, Thinking Being: Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric Perl).
These metacognitive insights in one form or another were conveyed or preserved in Aristotelian philosophy and also in the other elements of Greek philosophy which were absorbed by subsequent culture and are part of our cultural grammar. So it was with the ascendancy of nominalism and the subsequent ascendancy of empirical philosophy, that these foundational philosophical insights were lost or submerged. They have been preserved to some extent by modern Thomists - mainly Catholic, (although Im not Catholic and am not making these arguments as a covert appeal to Catholicism). It is more that I see in Aristotelian-Thomism a strain of the [I]philosophia perennis. [/i]
Quoting J
I believe theres validity in the concept of the philosophical ascent - that there are degrees of understanding, lower and higher, and that these have been traversed and described by philosophers and sages (and not only in the West.) I think it is reflected in the Allegory of the Cave and the Divided Line of the Republic. In that allegory, the vision of the Sun as an allegory of the ascent from the cave symbolizes the noetic apprehension of the real. The hoi polloi, representing those uneducated in philosophy, are prisoners in the cave, entranced by shadows.
All of this has to be interpreted, of course, which is the role of hermenuetics. But that's the general drift of the second part of the argument. Idealism in Context is another facet of that.
The fact that 'real' and 'reality' don't have 'agreed upon definitions' is actually symptomatic of the cultural problem which the OP is attempting, in its own way, to address.
You mean the "problem" that we don't all think the same, that we can have different viewpoints?
You would have us all return to living "under the aegis of tutelage"?
How conservative, how dogmatic, of you.
Consider the phrase "my truth". You cannot discuss with someone who claims this phrase. They are not open to discussions of what is real. They are hung up (almost literally) on their sense of self-hood, to the point that other considerations beyond "what I think right now" are not relevant.
Those of us who reject this are now in a different world it seems. That's a massive problem that faces anyone from any walk of life, if instantiated in their interactions with the world. The charge of this being conservative is unsubstantiated and possibly self-serving, me thnks.
So, what do the theists mean when they say that God or Heaven is real? Mostly when we say something is real, we mean empirically real, that is that it is part of the shared environment of things, processes and events.
When it comes to metaphysics, if one wants to occupy a position, "my truth" is all that can be had. I've said elsewhere that the only criterion for veracity of metaphysical claims is plausibility. Good luck trying to get everyone to agree on what's plausible.
Wayfarer specifically has metaphysics in mind (although he might also have in mind the different ethics that might be thought to accompany different metaphysics), and if we all agreed on what "is real" meant in that context, then I can't see how we would not all be agreeing not merely on the meaning of the term but also as to what is real.
In the past in the West let's say for argument's sake everyone believed in God (or at least paid lip service to the belief out of fear). Can you imagine any context other than an authoritarian one, where everyone would agree (about abstruse as opposed to merely everyday matters?
I am speaking outside an area in which I feel any confidence. My own feeling is that some were doing something close to "critical" philosophy - misleading because it suggest people like Descartes and Hume weren't "critical".
But the little I understand was not, for example Aristotle asking what is a house? That was posed as a serious question as to what kind of things are houses in the mind-independent world. He argued that it was a combination of matter and form.
Today, a house is just overwhelmingly complicated to define in anything remotely like metaphysics. We have trouble with atoms, never mind houses. So you'd say that Aristotle was critically self aware like say, Kant or Hume?
I agree. But there's no easy solution. It's part of living in a pluralistic culture with innummerable perspectives, views, opinions and cultural backgrounds. But we can at least discuss it. It is natural, in the secular world, to regard science as the arbiter of fact, but when it comes to values and the search for meaning, it isn't so clear cut.
It is true that exponents of the 'perennial philosophy', which I referred to, are often conservative to the point of being reactionary. One of the better books on the intellectual clique of that name is called Against the Modern World (Mark Sedgewick.) I'm not 'against the modern world' but I understand the rationale. While the modern world has brought untold benefits and improvements to the human condition it also has its shadow side. The technological culture which has provided so much can also destroy us. This is exemplified daily in the many crises of addiction, alienation, loneliness, and depression which plague modern culture.
I was discussing with my learned friend Chuck the fact that there's an inherent tension between Platonic or traditionalist philosophy and liberal political philosophy. This is why Karl Popper called Plato an enemy of the open society. Liberal thought, especially in its modern egalitarian form, places a premium on equal dignity, autonomy, and the right to participate in discourse. This tends to deprecate any perceived intellectual hierarchies because if truth is dependent on purportedly superior insight, then those without it may be depicted as less capable or qualified. Theres also a cultural wariness about allowing claims of higher truth to serve as justifications for social or political domination - echoes of aristocracy, theocracy, or authoritarianism. We see that demonstrated egregiously in some Islamic theocracies. But then, there are populist autocracies appearing in the West.
In contrast, much of the pre-modern and classical traditionfrom Platos knowledge of the Forms to Aristotles sophiaassumes that there are degrees of cognitive and moral refinement. They see philosophy as a transformative discipline: you dont just have an opinion, you become the sort of person who can apprehend deeper truths. The idea of a higher truth here isnt about exclusion but about cultivationrequiring moral and intellectual virtues to access. (One definitive recent text on this is The Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic thomistic philospoher, and one on the left of the political spectrum.)
Accordingly in a liberal setting, saying that an understandingor insight can be qualitatively better can sound like an assault on equality. But in the older model, its almost definitional that philosophy involves progression from superficial opinion (doxa) to deeper knowledge (epist?m?), with not everyone at the same place on that path at the same time.
Liberalisms strength is inclusiveness and the prevention of abuses of authority. But Its blind spot can be a reluctance to acknowledge that some perspectives are not just different, but genuinely more coherent, integrated, or profound.
I don't think that's quite true, anymore. I will resile, though, as I have given ample reason to take that seriously ("my truth").
Quoting Janus
When I've asked, they mean what you go on to posit: it is an empirically real place one's soul ascends to after death (or, God, similar pseudo-physical terms get used). Not all, but that's the most common response I get.
Quoting Janus
I posit that thre is still going to be a 'pregnant middle'. Think of a balloon - pinch opposite sides, and stretch. The top and bottom tapers are those who hold views outside of what most consider reasonable, rational or indeed 'real'. That middle section (pregnant middle) is most people. I agree that getting everyone to agree is a fools errand. That doesn't mean that we can't at the very least, sort out which sense we mean to use the word in, and then discuss, based on that, whether we are making reasonable assertions. I do, also, agree, it's going to end up with "Yes, that's plausible" or not. This is a problem.
Quoting Janus
I presume the following was to indicate you want to ask about abstract, esoteric matters rather than "is gasoline running my car". I can. I can imagine a society in which there are less variant views generally. This is simply a temporal issue. in 2000 B.C it was probably quite easy, without force, to instantiate certain abstract beliefs in others, if you had a streak to do so. By that, I mean you are energized, articulate and willing to engage, no that you want to force yourself on others.
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems empirically wrong. As I see, and seems to be playing out, Liberal thought in it's modern, egalitarian form places a premium on equal outcomes and any disparity in outcome is automatically considered a result of unequal opportunity (this seems the 'woke' take though, so perhaps you're purposefully trying to shunt that off for discussion purposes. If so, that's good. Sorry I've wasted time).
Quoting Wayfarer
Definitely. Epistemic injustice is real, despite my extreme discomfort in ever applying it to a situation's description.
Quoting Wayfarer
You've hit the nail here. I think the problem is that there are dumber, and smarter people. Those dumber people who might actually be precluded from employing the mental techniques required for this type of refinement are going to argue that they aren't dumber, and it's you (whoever, whatever) who has prevented their achieving success. This is patent nonsense, but goes to the issues i'm speaking about I guess: If they think "real" means what they interpret their Lot as, then we can't argue with them. There's no refinement to be had.
Quoting Wayfarer
I see you covered that already. :sweat:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. I think further, though, it lends itself to not just not acknowledging this, but actively resisting any type of discussion which might describe, in rational terms, why it is true.
The idea that punctuality is racist, as an example. Fucking - no - arrive on time. Bigotry of low expectations seems the order of the day, for this particular mode of activity.
Ive noticed that.
Quoting Manuel
The Platonic tradition was itself critical the Dialogues show Plato testing every proposition from multiple angles, leaving many questions unresolved. Theyre not a compendium of answers so much as of questions. In that sense, philosophy has always been critical not just of others views, but reflexively aware of its own assumptions.
By the late Middle Ages, however, much of Aristotelian philosophy had ossified into scholastic dogma. In the first philosophy of science lecture I ever attended (Alan Chalmers What is this Thing Called Science?), the lecturer recounted a story of monks debating how many teeth a horse has. They consulted Aristotles works, found no answer, and threw up their hands ridiculing the one monk who suggested checking an actual horse. Anecdotal perhaps, but also quite likely true.
The Enlightenments philosophes rebelled against that mindset. (Remember the famous trial?) Their motivation was to look at nature with fresh eyes, stripped of inherited authority. That turn is the beginning of modern science as we know it but in rejecting the scholastic framework wholesale, something else was lost: the kind of critical self-awareness about the act of knowing itself that we see in Greek sources.
That question re-emerges in the 19th and 20th centuries. Franz Brentanos doctoral work on Aristotles On the Several Senses of Being seeded his concept of intentionality, which in turn became foundational for Husserl. Heidegger, who lectured extensively on Aristotle, re-engaged the question of Being from a different angle. And Husserls Crisis of the European Sciences can be seen not as a nostalgic return to pre-modern metaphysics, but as a re-interpretation of those ancient questions in light of modern science, and as a critique of the unexamined naturalism that has become the default. Thats also why its central to the OP
How so? I mean Descartes was responded to the reigniting of Pyrrhonian skepticism, trying to find an objective foundation for knowledge, but Descartes was always clear that our ideas were constructions of sense data, not objects themselves.
Hume took Pyrrhonian skepticism to its limits. Both were very much critically self aware about the act of knowing.
Unless you have something more specific in mind, which you probably have, as I've said, it's not an area in which I have a lot of confidence yet.
Quoting Wayfarer
He is very tricky though. I mean you can read him as being critical, but you can also read him as not being critical, because by being critical philosophy lost touch with being, or something like that.
I've also struck theists who think that way. But it's not really defesnible since 'emprical' refers to the shared world of phenomena.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, esoteric matters. I did say I think there is general agreement about the nature of the perceived world. I even think there is general agreement when it comes to the "serious" moral issues like murder, rape, theft, assault, exploitation and so on. Admittedly some of the "agreement" may be lip service only.
That there would have been a greater degree of agreement in authoritarian and theocratic societies is no surprise I would say.
Quoting AmadeusD
I can't agree with you here. Of course there are smarter and dumber people, but if we allow that philosophers in general are among the smartest people, the great degree of disagreement among them when it comes to metaphysics at least shows that what people believe is more driven by emotion and upbringing than by intelligence.
Expertise is far easier to determine in science, technological pursuits, trades and crafts, and even in the arts technical expertise, if not aesthetic quality, is relatively easy to determine.
As to agreement about the meaning of 'real' I haven't seen a good definition emerge from the context of idealist and anti-realist metaphysics. For example when Platonists say universals and numbers are real, they cannot explain what they mean, because the usual understanding of what is real involves physical existence somewhere and/or the ability to act on other things. So when asked as to where the numbers and universals are to be found if somewhere other than in human thought, no answer is forthcoming.
This is a critical point so often overlooked,
It's not a matter of 'locating' them. That depiction is only because of the inability to conceive of anything not located in time and space. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences and the abilities that it provides to discover facts which otherwise could never be known, indicate that numbers are more than just 'products of thought'. They provide a kind of leverage (that also being something discovered by a mathematician, namely, Archimedes). Which lead to many amazing inventions such as computers, and the like, which all would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago (as previously discussed.)
Quoting Manuel
Among other things. But Descartes was taught to me as 'the first modern philosopher', and the point was stressed about his efforts to free himself from the scholastic authorities and Aristotelian dogma. Hence the whole exercise of locking himself away and forgetting all that he had been taught so as to arrive at his apodictic insight cogito ergo sum.
Quoting Tom Storm
Something often stressed by Fooloso4.
In any case, in the context, I am trying to make the argument for philosophical insight as a means to a higher truth, which is often depicted as 'an appeal to dogma', for the reasons I've tried to explain above.
What follows is an excellent summary of the epistemological story, and how it has changed over time. You really do have the gift of concision. And . . . not once did you use the terms "real" or "reality"! Was this deliberate? I rather hope not, because it demonstrates, better than any persuasion on my part, that those terms really aren't necessary in order to say what we want to say, philosophically.
Quoting Wayfarer
I know you do. I was asking why -- and specifically, how we could determine whether the concept is valid or not.
Again, how can we examine this idea? If you say, "What is real can be apprehended noetically," and I say, "What is real is strictly physical" (which I would not!), what are we disputing about? Are we disagreeing about how to use the word "real"? How does that sort of disagreement get resolved, philosophically? Or are we disagreeing about a fact of the matter, not just the terminology? In that case, don't we need to investigate and analyze the characteristics of (in this case) noetic apprehension and physical sensations, in order to learn how they differ, and whether one might indeed be more basic, or reliable, or grounded, etc.? Having done this, what additional work do we want the word "real" to do?
Quoting Wayfarer
This is a very interesting point. The implication, I think, is that "real" could have a definition, in philosophy, that is just as solidly based as, say, "elephant". Indeed, such a definition was in place for the Classical philosophers, and its disappearance is a cultural problem. That makes sense, if we did indeed have a piece of knowledge that has been lost.
I wonder whether there's a way to describe what happened, culturally, that doesn't require this set-up. Another account might be something like: "The Greeks and Scholastics had a view of what constituted the 'real' or 'reality,' and this view was widely accepted, leading to a relatively unambiguous use of the term. But then challenges began to be posed to this view, with the result that, today, there are competing understandings of how to use and interpret 'real'."
On that account, what happened was not a "problem." Rather, it was found that the Classical view of reality could be questioned, and that rich philosophical questions and viewpoints resulted from this questioning. At a minimum, philosophers found themselves forced to do analysis, to discover what these competing versions of "reality" actually entailed. It could even be the case that this movement away from the agreed-upon definition of reality was an improvement, a benefit, freeing us from a frankly incorrect or inadequate understanding -- not so different from what happened in the physical sciences.
I don't exactly think this account is correct, because I think there are ways of knowing that are outside the scope of philosophy. I'm continuing to urge us, as philosophers, to think twice about "dying on the hill" of what is real and what isn't.
Quoting Janus
This is important. "Real" is perfectly clear and useful in most contexts, because we know how to use it.
This is where I think the problem lies. They will say "I have direct knowledge of this, as do other Christians" (or whatever sect). You and I would largely reject this, but we also do not know their phenomenal experiences. Maybe they have... (this is unserious, but hopefully illustrates).
Quoting Janus
Yeah. Even then, I think there are some good reasons to reject this position (meaning, it seems more people are serious about it). There are, on many reliable accounts, billions who do not find rape, murder, child abuse etc.. objectionable, when posited by a religious doctrine (or, rather, required by it). I suggest this is probably more prevalent than most in the West want to accept (and here we also need take into account the types within the West who perhaps feel these ways. We have enough abusers around for whom the Law is not a deterrent it seems).
Quoting Janus
If this is just a claim to an average, I think it's empirically true. I do not think your next claim follows. Among the 'smartest' people, you're likely to get more disagreement as each can bring more nuance and see different things in the same sets of data (or, different relations). I don't think this has much to do with feeling, though I am not suggesting we can avoid feelings when deciding on theories, for instance. But assessing theories is the job of the minds which can move beyond feelings into "whether or not the feelings are reasonable" type of assessments. Plenty of people appear to be incapable of this. But we may simply have different expectations here. I'm unsure there's an answer.
Quoting Janus
Huh. I've had several give me what I think is a satisfactory answer. Something like:
"real" in relation to Universals obtains in their examples. The same as "red" which is obviously real, "three" can exist in the same way: In three things. Red exists in red things. I don't see a problem?
Quoting J
I think this is an assumption based on a curse of knowledge type thing. What is 'real' is hotly debated socially (if you have a diverse social group, anyway). That's my experience, and my experience in the online world too. I think more and more people think "metaphysically" when assessing 'the real' these days. Not very good fundamental education anymore.
Clearly I need to improve my social group! :wink: It's been a long time since I've been part of a debate about "what is reality" that didn't involve green leafy substances. But I take your point. The usefulness of "real" waxes and wanes, but the idea that something is real if it's genuine and not real if it's a fake is robust. This idea will work fine in a lot of situations, and children learn it quickly.
I think that's true, but uses of genuine and fake are various. I know you've taken my point, I just want to be clear that these concepts are not as cut-and-dried as they may seem to all.
Thank you. I have been a tech writer but I don't know if that career has any mileage left in it. Also I realised the other day (somewhat gloomily) that I've probably well and truly done my 10,000 hours on philosophy forums. I'm closing in on 25k posts on this one. I think I'll change my avatar to Sisyphus.
Quoting J
Real is authentic, not fake, the real deal. Reality is distinguished from delusion, illusion or duplicity.
Following on from the point about the Enlightenment rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics. When the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thinkers pushed back against the Churchs intellectual monopoly, they werent just rejecting theology they were also rejecting the philosophical apparatus that had been co-opted to support it. Historically, that included most of what was best about the broader Platonic tradition, which provided much of the philosophical framework of Christian theology,
In the polemics of the time, metaphysics became associated with religious dogma. The fact that Aristotles physics was outdated made it easier to dismiss his metaphysics as likewise obsolete.
Naturalism then positioned itself as a clean break methodologically bracketing or excluding anything that smelled of theology, which meant also sidelining large swathes of classical philosophy.
The Enlightenment liberated science from theological oversight but at the cost of severing the link between natural philosophy and questions of meaning, purpose, and being. This is the origin of the meme of life as a kind of cosmic fluke.
Much of the critical self-awareness discussed earlier the Greek insights about the conditions of knowledge was lost in the rush to rush a purely empirical and mechanical worldview.
All these factors are still evident in almost every discussion on this forum.
I don't see that this is a problem. If you weren't suggesting so, sorry. It seems so..
There is an influential school of thought or philosophical undercurrent, that natural science has done away with the Biblical creation myth and with it, any idea of purposefulness or inherent meaning in the Cosmos (subject of another thread On Purpose.)
If we cannot coherently conceive of something being real without it existing somewhere at some time or everywhere at all times then that tells against your position.
If you want to say that the effectiveness of mathematics in science tells us anything about more than just how the world appears to us, then you are supporting the idea of a mind-independent reality. It seems obvious that number is immanent in the nature of things?once you have difference, diversity, structure then you have number. Time and space are quantifiable. But if you don't believe that difference, diversity, structure are mind-independently real or that time and space are mind-independently real?are you then
going to say that number is?
Quoting AmadeusD
Right, but religious experiences (which I of course would not deny that people do have) are not shareable, because they are "inner" experiences, not experiences of an "outer" "external" shared world. People may also experience hallucinations, and they are not considered to be empirically verifiable?if they were they would not be classed as hallucinations.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think most people are against rape, murder, child abuse etc., when it comes to their own communities, to those they consider to be of their own kind. The word 'kindness' holds this implicit notion of kinship. People find it possible to accept violence against others if the others are understood to be enemies. But even then, look at the general disapproval of "war crimes'. The ideal would be if all people considered all others to be of their kind?humankind unbounded by religious bigotry and cultural antipathies. I don't deny that there are sociopaths, those lacking in normal human empathy, who don't have a problem with violent crimes.
Quoting AmadeusD
I agree with you that it doesn't always predominately involve feeling (in the sense of wishing that things are some particular way) but I think in may cases it does, especially among the religious-minded. And remember I also said it can involve the hold that upbringing may have (although I guess that too might be counted as a kind of feeling?of for example attachment). Beyond that of course there will still be disagreement based on what different people find plausible when it comes to those matters the truth of which cannot be empirically determined (notably metaphysics and ontology).
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, but as I have said in this thread and many times elsewhere, I think number is found everywhere, which would mean it exists in the empirical world. Those who advocate for the reality of universals and number in some transcendental sense are the ones I had in mind?they are the ones who cannot say in what sense number could be real and yet not exist. (of course numbers considered as discrete entities, as opposed to number, are not encountered in the empirical world (except as numerals and of course they don't count because they are not themselves numbers, but are symbols of numbers).
Quoting J
:up: Yes, and the interesting point seems to be that to agree on the meaning of 'real' would be to agree on what is real. The difficulty I have with those who posit the reality of transcendent things is that they are unable to say what "real" could mean in that connection.
Empirical objects do have the appearance of being mind-independent they confront us in space and time as separate objects but that appearance is conditioned by (dependent on) the structures of perception and cognition. They are never given except as appearances to a subject. That is the main point of the mind-created world argument, as it pertains to 'the world' as the sum of sense-able particulars.
Mathematical truths are of a different order: they are independent of any individual mind in the sense that theyre the same for all who can reason but they are only accessible to mind, not to the sensory perception (hence the subject of dianoia in Platonist terms, so of a 'higher' order than sensory perception.)
Quoting Janus
As for time and space, theyre not mind-independent containers but, as Kant said, forms of intuition the necessary preconditions of any experience. They are objectively real for the subject, in the sense that all appearances to us must be ordered in temporal sequence and spatial perspective. But thats not the same as saying they exist as things-in-themselves apart from all possible subjects.
My point is not that the world is all in the mind, but that the only world we can speak of or investigate is the world as it appears through the conditions of human knowing and that this doesnt deny, but rather presupposes, that there is a reality in itself, although it lies beyond our possible experience.
That is uncontroversial?of course appearances are mind-dependent, or body-dependent?however you want to frame it. It simply doesn't follow that what appears to us as objects in space and time are themselves mind-dependent ?you just don't seem to be able to understand that. They might be mind-dependent in themselves or they might not, and that is the question we cannot answer with any certainty.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again that is completely uncontroversial? if objects appear of course they appear to subjects (subjects being defined as percipients). Do the things which appear to us have their own existence independently of appearing to us? For me the answer would be "most likely they do". Of course I don't know for sure, but that seems to be the most plausible answer given everything we know about the world as it appears to be. If you don't think that is the most plausible answer, that's fine?you are entitled to that view, but don't pretend that there is a provable truth of the matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
Mathematical truths can be understood as possible logical entailments of the basic rules of number, and number can be understood to exist everywhere in the empirical world. It is a bit like chess?once the very simple rules of chess are established the possible series of combinations of the pieces are virtually infinite. We could say that there are a far greater number of those possible sequences of moves that have never occurred than those which have occurred. Do they exist out there somewhere? Or think of the simple iterative function which generates the Mandelbrot Set.
You've lost me once you start speaking of "higher order" because there can be no explanation of what it might be. We can have a feeling or sense of a higher order, but that is a different matter?it cannot be coherently subjected to analysis and discourse.
Quoting Wayfarer
That time and space exist only for minds is itself not demonstrable, just as is the case with "things". That Kant said it is so does not make it true. I'm sorry but Kant is not my guru, I prefer to think for myself. That said I have read him and about him quite extensively so I'm well familiar with all the arguments. I know just where and why I part company with Kant.
I agree with Schopenhauer's critique? that there cannot be things in themselves if space and time exist only in relation to perception. Of course I don't accept that space and time exist only in relation to perception, because I find the idea that a completely unstructured undifferentiated "world in itself" could give rise to an unimaginably complex perceived world completely implausible? implausible as do I also find Schopenhauer's "solution" of a blind will. (And yes, I have fairly comprehensively read, and read about, Schopenhauer's philosophy? certainly enough to be well familiar with its central ideas. So I do understand his ideas, but I just don't agree with them).
I think you believe the world is an idea in some mind, not your mind or my mind, but some universal mind, probably not the mind of the Abrahamic God. If that is not what you believe then I confess I don't know what you are arguing.
I have to say, I'm not so sure. Billions in communities outside the West see, for instance. Honour killings as a requirement, morally. All but the victim will agree. Just an example, but its these things I'm speaking out (while trying not to target religious thinking). This may ultimately not be all that important, though.
Quoting Janus
I agree. But even within communities who see each other as 'kin', horrifically violent actions take place with support of the law, and one's family, all the time. The femicides in China/Japan, the constant and unbearable mutilation, rape and murder of women in both Muslim and Hindu societies, the belief among certain sects of immigrants that these notions should be important to the West among other things tell me we could probably count more people OK with rape and murder than not, on a principle level. We would, obviously, disagree with them - but there are billions, as I understand. The death penalty for apostacy or atheism in seven countries seems to speak to this also... I do hope I am just a little over-alert to this, but I fear I am actually under playing it. We in the West tend to assume people share our moral outlooks, when that's probably one of the biggest areas of global disagreement and disharmony. We cannot co-exist with countries that deny women education, for instance, and still be 'moral' by our own lights.
Quoting Janus
Unfortunately, I think a quote from Sam Harris bears repeating: There are good, and there are bad people. Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But to get a good person to do bad things, you need religion. Ah fuck, now I'm just bashing religion. Perhaps I shouldn't be so reticent. It is poison.
Quoting Janus
We see it among that which can be, though. I'm unsure its particularly reasonable to presume everyone accepts "empirical evidence" as actual evidence. Those of us who understand what you're saying will do, but plenty (perhaps most) do not. They are skeptical of 'evidence' unless it agrees with their feelings. You and I would want to jettison this, and assess it against the claim, rather htan our feelings. I suggest this is far more common, and far more obvious than you are allowing here.
Quoting Janus
Nothing to quibble with here. I guess I just don't understand why the response I get isn't satisfactory. I don't know that anyone claims numbers exist outside examples of number. Or that colours exist outside examples of color (though, perhaps Banno would).
That said, you may be interested in one of my profs work
I'm not moved by it, but if you're wanting to maintain some form of purpose or fundamental meaning to existence/the universe, he's good some good ideas. I just don't see why we would be pushing for it, if we can't see it already.
Why do you say that?
I can very easily conceive of something being real without existing somewhere at some time, or everywhere at all times. However, if explained to you, you dismiss such writing with phrases like "that passage reads like nonsense".
Do you recognize that this may indicate that you are in some way mentally handicapped? Or is this an attitudinal problem, a refusal to put in the effort required to understand such conceptions? Are you by any chance determinist, thinking that effort is not required to understand, believing that either the universe will make you understand, or not understand, as fate would have it?
Possibility for example, doesn't exist anywhere, at any time.
Ok, you're right that "honour lkillings" are an exception. I guess if people are understood to have seriously transgressed in a context of very strict dogma, then they may become "othered" so that killing them then is seen as a duty.
But in such cases it would not be seen as murder, but as execution. It is also interesting to note that honour killing sometimes happens to women who have been raped?as though it must have been their fault and they are now forever defiled.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes such things of course do occur, but they are generally motivated by dogmatic religious views which effectively dehumanize the victim.
Quoting AmadeusD
I see no harm in individuals holding religious views of all kinds, provided they admit to themselves that they do not conflate faith with knowledge, that they understand that their faith is for themselves and should never be inflicted on others. So, it is institutionalized religion that is the problem, not the religious impulse perse, as I see it.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yeah, I agree that many, I don't know about most, people are motivated by confirmation bias rather than the attempt to establish what is true or most reasonable to think. Some people just cannot accpet the idea that life may not be as they wish it to be.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think there are those who think numbers and universals are real independently of the particulars that instantiate them, well certainly if you can take them at their word they do. I cannot speak for @Banno but I suspect he would say that it depends on how you define colour. If you define it as a subjective experience then it would only exist as such. But if you allow that different wavelengths of light reflected from things are colours then they would be thought to exist independently of percipients.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, because I know my command of the English language is such that I would be able to understand any coherent explanation. It doesn't follow though that I would necessarily agree with it. Are you one of those who think that you are so right that if anyone disagrees with what you write, they must therefore not understand it?
This response to this thread stands:
Quoting Banno
We'll continue to use "colour" as we long have, regardless of peculiar and idiosyncratic stipulations of those on Philosophy forums.
Who here thinks honour killings are... honourable?
I certainly don't?there can be no reasonable justification for them?they are despicable, as are genital mutilation and foot-binding.
I am not sure these are 'exceptions'. I rather think the Western, Enlightened model is the exception. That may lead to digression, so I'll just note that disagreement.
Quoting Janus
This is a particularly pernicious thing which only recently changed, even in the West. Marital rape was legal until like the 90s.
Quoting Janus
I agree, but that is considered a morally astute and respectable way of dealing with such things. *sigh*.
Quoting Janus
This seems to me, a personal impulse and not institutional thing - the most wild of our religion offenders tend to have broken with orthodoxy and instead look to the scripts themselves. The 'old testament' types, that is (or, the Wahabis). Another issue is that the increasing, and somewhat aggressive attitude of religious immigrants is that the society into which they go should accommodate their beliefs - this, to me, being a matter of taking advantage of religious freedom (or misunderstanding it, i guess).
Quoting Janus
I think they are used in both ways, but the answer to "What is red" is never a frequency. Largely because that's an unsupportable answer... Describing an experience is fine, but that's not something that 'red' can be, in this context. It is the weird stipulations of philosophy that has us calling a bundle of seemingly un-causally-related facts about perception, the world and our bodies "red" (notice, I need not enter into the discussion about perception for this oddity to become clear).
100% repulsive, both in reasoning and action. Utterly barbaric.
So what's all this about?
The discussion stemmed from talk of what is 'real'. Some hold these views (possibly, most). We cannot ignore it. I find your response above emotionally satisfying, but essentially unhelpful and lazy. It happens and we should grapple with it (I think, obvs lol - do what you wish). I think this came directly from the idea that some religious will argue that Heaven is empirically real. The argument would run similar to that round hte fact that I have never seen x but rely on reports of it. I should do the same with their reports of Heaven. I rejected that this is a good way to determine real, but that it is clearly showing us that there is no universal acceptance of how to categorise things as real or unreal.
I am out of time, but I just want to address this; the frequencies are in the science of optics referred to as being of different colours?the colours of refracted light we can see plus colours we cannot see, but some other animals can, and certain instruments can detect?ultraviolet and infrared.
We then have 'light' as a descriptor of varying intensity and other things (speed, concentration etc..). We then, third, name the experience 'red' (in certain contexts). These are tenuous relationships to the word red.
I also understand that in optics, frequencies are not considered colors. They are considered causes of colors. They are considered a physical property of light which our brain interprets to be color x. Other animals may have totally different phenomenal experiences of the same wavelength (it seems we know they do).
"The Role of Human Perception
It's important to remember that color is a psychological and physiological phenomenon, not a fundamental physical property of light itself. Light waves have frequencies and wavelengths, but they don't have color until they are processed by the human eye and brain. Our eyes contain specialized cells called cones that are sensitive to different ranges of frequencies. When a mix of frequencies enters our eyes, our brain interprets the signals from these cones to create the perception of a particular color. This is why mixing different colored lights (additive mixing) or pigments (subtractive mixing) produces different results."
This can go awry, showing that color is a phenomenal experience. Calling frequencies colors is mere convenience for the lay-person.
Sure, but they are wrong. So what's "unhelpful and lazy" might be allowing them to go ahead unopposed, or allowing their wrong ideas to decide what we do.
Not following your argument, but then I did miss a bit.
Quoting AmadeusD
Notice that we - you and I - do not share a perceptual system? We have one each.
What is it that we do share?
Edit: Sorry mate, I hit submit by accident way before I was ready. Not trying to be sneaky or anything.
Quoting Banno
According to you (and me, to be clear). And we've been there. In any case my point is that ignoring them is how you get invaded by barbarians. So, i agree with what you've said at the top there (but subjectively), but I don't think waving it away as 'wrong' is going to help anyone. I find it lazy and somewhat irresponsible. If its so reprehensible, we should probably be aware and even possibly activated by its globally significant presence and more particularly the small incremental attempts to move these sorts of thinking into Western societes in the name of inclusion or religious tolerance.
Ill reply to the below comment on it's own to avoid the ridiculousness of chronologically out of place discussion.
So we both report that some thing is red, despite having different perceptual systems.
We share a 'direct of best fit' type of organ-based perception. We are aware that others can have aberrant structure or detail within this system. So those people don't share the same system, and they don't see what we report to be Red.
We don't always report the same thing, either.
Yes, as did I. The structure of your occipital lobe is very different to mine.
Leave it.
'Different world under every hat'
indian proverb.
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about "real" at the moment. So I hope you won't mind if I suggest that statement needs to be modified. I agree that there is no established way of categorising Heaven as real or not. But there is pretty much universal acceptance about how to categorise some other things as real. Unicorns, for example, forged paintings, dramatic performances. There is no single way of categorizing things as real or not. It depends on what kind of thing you are talking about. The same applies to questions of existence (which is what the issue of Heaven comes to). Numbers don't exist in the same way that tables and chairs do.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, yes, that works for many, perhaps most, contexts, as I was discussing with @Janus and @AmadeusD, above. But would you import it into a consideration of numbers, for instance? It seems like a bad fit. My contention is that, the more we enter metaphysics and epistemology, the less useful "real" is. I believe it's a placeholder or term of convenience for various other characteristics that can be more precisely stated. And to make matters worse, those other characteristics vary from tradition to tradition, while "real" remains constant, as if it could cover all of them.
But, as we've said, my view depends on there not being a story in which "real" did have a correct usage, which it lost. This is a specifically philosophical objection. Other uses of "real" observe different constraints.
Quoting Janus
And the question is, in what direction does the justification go? Do we discover a knowledge or nous of a certain sort of thing, and say, "This is real", based on what "real" means? Or do we have a term, "real", which we then attempt to match with certain sorts of things in order to discover what it does or could mean?
Would that be because metaphysics is generally considered archaic by modern philosophy?
I've posted an excerpt from Bertrand Russell on universals in the Idealism in Context thread which can be reviewed here:
[hide="Reveal"][quote=Bertrand Russell, The World of Uhiversals] ]Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ... But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.
This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation ["north of"] exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something [real].
It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.[/quote]
Russell makes a simple but important point about universals: things like the relation north of or the quality whiteness are real, but theyre not located in space or time, and theyre not just mental events.
Heres the gist of his argument in four steps:
[1] Independence from mind The truth of Edinburgh is north of London doesnt depend on anyone thinking it; it would hold in a mindless universe.
[2] Non-spatiotemporal status North of isnt in either city, and its not in space or time like physical objects are.
[3] Act vs. object of thought Thinking of whiteness is a mental act in time; whiteness itself is not the act but the object of that act.
[4] Universality preserved If whiteness were just a thought, it would be particularized (your thought now, my thought then), and couldnt be the same across different thinkers and times.[/quote][/hide]
I'll go back to the original contention: that numbers (and other abstracta) are real but not existent in the sense explained by Russell. Empiricism attempts to ground mind-independence in the empirical domain - situated in space and time, instrumentally detectable and measurable. But the reality of such objects are still necessarily contingent upon the act of measurment and the theories against which they're interpreted.
And furthermore, the ability to even conduct such observations itself depends on the grasp of intelligible relations which is itself a noetic or intellectual act. Whereas empiricism, with its equation of mind-independent with detectable by instruments, then treats the faculties which enable these abilities as if they are derivative from the processes they're investigating. And this, against the background of the methodological bracketing of the knowing subject and the structures of understanding. We end up with worldview that literally uses universals constantly (in mathematics, definitions, logical inferences) while denying their ontological standing.
So if we don't use that construal, which one should we use? The schema you're laying out makes sense, and can clearly be useful in dividing up the conceptual territory, but would you want to argue that it's the correct use of "real" in metaphysics? That's what I'm questioning. I don't think metaphysics is the least bit archaic -- it's one of the most exciting areas of contemporary philosophy -- but I'm suggesting that we now have better terminology than an endless wrangle about what counts as "real."
And BTW, I think (most) universals are every bit as mind-independent as you do. But there we are: "mind-independent" is a property or characteristic we can get our teeth into. Adding ". . . and real" seems unnecessary.
At first I thought you were suggesting that we might have a noetic intuition as to what's real and then define 'real' according to that intuition. then I wondered whether you were using nous in the modern sense of know-how.
Then I noticed that you were not suggesting defining "real' in terms of the nousy intution, but saying the nousy intuition might be thought to be real or not based on the meaning of 'real'.
Your second idea seems to make more sense, anyway. We can cite examples and say whether they qualify as real or not. It would really just be using examples to illustrate how the term is commonly used in various contexts. We might discover that some examples qualify as real in one context and not in another.
I think the takeaway is that we cannot hope to get a "one-size-fits-all" definition of 'real', or 'existent'. It seems the best we can do is hone in on a somewhat fuzzy sense of the term and hopefully sharpen that sense up a bit.
Quoting J
And in turn that begs the question as to what we might mean by "mind-independent'?a term that seems to be much more slippery than 'real'.
Sorry my remark about metaphysics was prompted by many of the comments made here about it, but you're right, it is a field that has made a comeback in current philosophy.
Consider this graphic from John Wheelers essay Law without Law:
The caption reads what we consider to be reality, symbolised by the letter R in the diagram, consists of an elaborate paper maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of observation.
The R of reality is not given, but built from the accumulated record of acts of observation each a scrap in the paper-mâché construction of the world.
My point about universals is that they are fundamental constituents of this R. I think Wheelers simile of paper maché is a little misleading, as the tenets of physical theory are rather more solid than this suggests. But regardless the elements of the theory are real in a different sense to its objects. They comprise theories and mathematical expressions of observed regularities.
And it is now a field very different from "traditional" metaphysics.
Your replies are indicating that you do not understand what I write. They are not indicating that you do not agree with me. You say things like "that passage reads like nonsense", and "Gobbledygook".
The obvious conclusion is that either you are incapable of understanding me, or unwilling to try. Either way, to me, it appears as if you have an intellectual disability. I apologize for saying "mentally handicapped". Google tells me that this is outdated and offensive, and that I should use "intellectual disability" instead.
Do you recognize that replies like that would indicate to me that there is some sort of intellectual disability on your part?
Or, is it really the case, that you just disagree with me, but you are incapable of supporting what you believe, against my arguments, so you simply dismiss my arguments as impossible for you to understand, feigning intellectual disability as an escape?
Thanks for taking the time to parse my rather terse "which direction" question! I could try to say it again, better, but your takeaway is pretty much where I was going with it. We can either adopt a definition of "real" and go on to discover things that fit our definition, or we can take a look at what I've called the "conceptual landscape," see how the various denizens relate, and then decide that "real" would be a good term to use for one of the denizens, based on how it's been used in some respectable tradition. But either way, it's a pragmatic effort, in the best sense. As you say, we aren't likely to come up with a "one-size-fits-all" definition. But it may well be the case that something like @Wayfarer's schema, for instance, can do excellent philosophical work for us, without requiring us to pin "real" down to some fact of the matter or some correct usage.
Works for me. What would be interesting, then, would be to investigate the ways in which the elements of the theory are different from its objects. If I understand Wheeler's conception, that can be done without further talk about "real."
Quoting Janus
Yes, it's slippery, but it lends itself more easily to some kind of investigation than "real" does. I simply don't know how I could tell if a philosophical object is real or not. Depends what you mean! Whereas with "mind-independent," the ground is a bit firmer. If I claim that universals and abstracta have no existence apart from minds, I'm saying they lack the property of mind-independence. If I further claim that my thought of "If p, then q" is dependent on my thinking it, whereas the proposition "If p, then q" is not, that's another way of talking about mind-independence.
You may feel there's not much difference in clarity between "mind-independent" and "real," and I agree it's not a huge categorical difference; I just find myself knowing a little better what I'm thinking about, when I think about what "mind-independence" means. This could be because "real" has so many contexts and usages, whereas "mind-independence" is rather technical, and not as widely connotative.
Yes. I keep getting myself into arguments that leave me wondering what definition of independence is in play. A lot of people seem to think that anything in one's mind must be mind-dependent. I think that only things that are created and maintained in existence by the mind are mind-dependent. That makes for quite a short list.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sorry. What, exactly, is their ontological standing? Are we talking platonism here?
The fact that the theoretical constructs are an essential constituent of what is considered real, while they're not themselves existent in the way that the objects of the theory are.
In your description of how the term, "real" can be compared to the term, "mind-independence", I am reminded of your attention given to Rödl awhile back. He argues for abandoning the ground being sought by either lexicon:
Yes, this conception seems to be trivial and have no interesting consequences most of the time which is why I think Wayfarer's crusade is largely vacuous and pointless. If something that we perceive clearly has a consistent mapping to something in the outside world, maintains a certain invariance (or perhaps covariance), then thats something that is genuine information about somrthing that exists independently of our minds.
Whereas from my perspective that is a fair description of your responses to it, but lets not get involved in mudslinging.
Quoting Ludwig V
That would be the mainstream understanding. The point of philosophical analysis is to see through it.
I don't think Its mudslinging because I have made responses to your perspective befote where I have basically said that. I don't think there is any meaningful, actionable content to this mysterious noumenal-phenomrnal divide.
No. That would be taking for granted that we are given the means to compare "our" necessity with what is not "ours"; Which was the original complaint of Kant against Hume. Rödl is arguing that Hegel's argument nips that stuff off out at the root. The 'idealism" is not an explanation.
There are many other responses to Hegel. I am just trying to focus upon what is called out in Rödl's language.
There are broad differences between interpreters of text in the language of "idealists".
Sorry, it was a bad choice of words on my part, I was irritated. To say it more philosophically: I read your responses to this OP as specious because I dont think they demonstrate any grasp of the point being made. It is one thing to rebut an argument by showing faults with it, but not seeing the point of an argument is not a rebuttal, and nothing youve said indicates that you see the point of the argument.
The work is difficult. At the same time, it is painfully simple. It relies upon very few arguments. repeated ad infinitum.
I don't read it as a replacement for other advocates.
Hegel is well known for being an advocate for this or that. Rödl is doing something different.
I think not seeing the point is a rebuttal. If something doesn' have any interesting consequences then I don't see a reason to uphold it.
Is this on the right track?
I read Rödl to not saying we could know the limits of "logical" principles. If we cannot know their limits as the basis of "experience", we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact.
Yes. Again, I have issues with those particular terms but that's irrelevant to the point you're making, which I think is extremely important.
Quoting Paine
I'd like to hear more on this. (Did I edit your 1st sentence correctly?) I'm not sure I understand the part about "we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact."
I conclude that your position is somewhere in platonist territory, and that you think that nominalism amounts to denying their existence. I don't agree with either conjunct. In my book, there is no doubt that universals exist. The argument is about their mode of existence or (what comes to the same thing) what kind of object they are.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't get that. I thought you believed that our concepts and perceptions were all constructs.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. The point of philosophy is to weigh up mainstream and fringe opinions and decide which are satisfactory and which are not.
Yes, that is what I meant.
As for what can be taken as verification, this passage from iek helps me see different ways to read Hegel that bears on what may be referred to as "mind-independence:
Quoting Slavoj iek, Less Than Zero, chapter 5
I understand Rödl to be standing with Gérard Lebrun's reading of Hegel here. The question of the "real" is not a place in a schema. The limit of the "natural" is not pointing to its supersession.
I still don't think you'll get a particularly clear criteria unless its contextually baked in. I think conceptually, its really hard to say one way or the other on any example.
I cannot say I am surprised at how quickly you got off the boat. A shame, because it is quite obviously a silly line of thinking.
I offer this far more simple excerpt from the Nishijima-roshi, a S?t? Zen priest who died in 2012, in respect of the real and the existent:
[quote=Gudo Nishijima-roshi, 'Three Philosophies and One Reality'] The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes. Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit.
So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit. I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.
Buddhists believe in the existence of the Universe. Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.
So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.[/quote]
Compare with Terrence Deacons absential:
Also Wittgenstein's aphorism:
The decline of Platonist realism is well-established intellectual history. The constellations of attitudes which Lloyd Gerson designates 'Ur-Platonism' (the broader Platonist movement including but not limited to the Dialogues of Plato) is realist about universals (see Edward Feser Join the Ur-Platonist Alliance). But to say that, is to invite the question, 'if they're real, where do they exist?' The usual response is to say that they're the products of the human mind, and so of the h.sapiens brain, conditioned as it is by adaptive necessity and so on. This is the 'naturalised epistemology' route. The neo-traditionalist approach is that the ability to perceive universals and abstract relations is the hallmark of the rational intellect which differentiates humans as 'the rational animal'. It doesn't take issue with the facts of natural science, but differs with respect to the interpretation of meaning.
Quoting Ludwig V
One of the central questions of philosophy is what, if anything, exists sui generisindependent of constructionand what relation our mental constructs bear to it.
By presenting the readings concerning different ways to understand idealism in Kant and Hegel, I was not trying to challenge your views regarding the role of materialism in present and past cultures. I am suggesting that what concerns Rödl does not support either side of what you have framed as the choices available to us.
I will try to answer your question in the next few days. I have work to do.
On the other hand, we have exchanged words for many years now regarding how to understand what has been written about such things. Shall I write as if none of that ever happened?
Your question about choices is a fair response to my challenge. I will think about it.
I get that an old thread may not be the best place to respond. Maybe J's thread on Rödl would be better.
Okay. I will try to show up there with something.
I see no difference between the two terms. Anyway either way I'm not offended, so no need for apology. I found your saying that rather amusing.
I can understand your words easily enough, but they seem irrelevant and thus pointless, so I think our starting assumptions are probably so far apart that the effort required for me to unpack what you might be getting at seems to be not worth it.
Cheers J, it seems we agree about the "takeaway".
Quoting J
The problem I see is that it's not clear what we mean by "mind" and even less clear what we might mean by "mind-independence". For example Wayfarer says that because it is us thinking about the time before we existed that the time before we existed must be mind-dependent. On that stipulation everything we think about must be mind-dependent, as opposed to merely the way we think about it. He'll say that physicalism is incoherent because it is a concept we invented, and concepts are not physical, therefore physicalism cannot be true. I think that is tendentious nonsense.
Quoting J
Pretty much all I see in Wayfarer's posts is the attempt to explain (away) modern philosophical positions and dispositions in psychological terms?the rise of science has caused us to become blind to something important in traditional "proper" philosophy, modernity has lost its way, "blind spot in science", physicalism could not possibly be a coherent position, blah.
I don't find any of that remotely convincing, worth taking seriously or even interesting, so you must be seeing something there I don't.
Quoting J
That's fair enough?we probably all carry different sets of associations with these terms?which of course is part of the problem with the attempt to mint clear and precise definitions. One thing I think is not needful of precise definitions in order to be clear to me?if I say I can think about a mind-independent reality, say whatever existed before there were any percipients and someone says "but you're not really thinking about a mind-independent reality, because you're using your mind to think about it", and then i point out the conflation in such an argument between what is being thought about and the act of thinking about it, and that falls on deaf ears, then my respect for the one making that argument falls, because I start to smell an unpleasant odor of confirmation bias at work.
Quoting Ludwig V
Right, and the words you used show the ambiguity that is traded on "anything in one's mind must be mind-dependent"; on one construal this is true by definition of course anything in one's mind must be mind-dependent, but if you say 'the objects I have in mind are not necessarily mind-dependent, even though the thoughts I have about them are" that, for me, clears up any confusion.
This mis-states my view. I am not saying that because we think about a time before we existed, therefore that time must be mind -dependent. That would indeed be a trivial claim. What I have argued is that the concept of a time before we existed is only ever available as a thought. The point isnt that the past did not exist independently, but that whatever we say about it is mediated by concepts. That is very different to how it's been paraphrased above.
Furthermore, a concept is not a physical thing you cant weigh it, touch it, or locate it in space. Yet concepts are indispensable to how we make sense of the world, including what is meant by 'physical' (which, incidentally, is something that is constantly being reviewed.) This doesnt mean concepts are unreal; it means they belong to a different order of reality than the physical objects that they are describing. If physicalism ignores that, then it risks undermining its own claim to be coherent, since the doctrine itself is articulated in concepts. The 'standard model' of the atom is itself a mathematical construct, and whether there is any ultimately-existing point-particle which is material in nature is, shall we say, a contested question.
Quoting Janus
This is the subject of the book The Blind Spot of Science, by Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser, and Evan Thompson.
What the book says that science is blind to, is the role of the subject, or more broadly, subjectivity, in the way that it construes knowledge. A précis of some of the elements laid out in the introduction:
1. The Bifurcation of Nature
Claim: The world is divided into real external objects (light waves, particles, forces) and mere subjective appearances (color, warmth, taste, etc.).
Blind spot: This division sidelines lived experience as illusory, even though its through experience that science arises in the first place. (This phrase is associated with Whitehead.)
2. Reductionism
Claim: The smallest entities (elementary particles) are most fundamental, and everything else can be explained by reducing it to them.
Blind spot: This kind of reductionism assumes that wholes are nothing but their parts, ignoring emergent structures and relationships that cant be captured at the micro-level.
3. Objectivism
Claim: Science offers a Gods-eye view, revealing reality exactly as it is, independent of human perspective.
Blind spot: In practice, science is always done from within human contexts, perspectives, and methodsso the Gods-eye stance denies its own conditions of possibility.
4. Physicalism
Claim: Everything that exists is physical, and the list of physical facts exhausts all facts (chemical, biological, psychological, social).
Blind spot: Treating this metaphysical thesis as self-evident erases the distinctiveness of meaning, mind, and culture, which dont straightforwardly reduce to physics.
5. Reification of Mathematical Entities
Claim: Mathematics is the true language of nature, and mathematical structures are the universes real architecture.
Blind spot: Elevating abstract models as if they are reality risks forgetting that they are human constructions grounded in lived experience.
6. Experience as Epiphenomenal
Claim: Consciousness is just a user illusion, like a desktop interfaceuseful but not fundamental.
Blind spot: Reducing experience to an illusion undermines the fact that experience is the very condition by which anythingincluding scienceappears at all.
For those who don't think it is 'blah', details can be found here.
As I read it the first underlined sentence in your response says essentially the same thing as the quoted sentence from me above it. Perhaps you could point out an essential difference between the two. The second underlined sentence in your response is also a trivial claim? of course it is true that if discourse is always conceptual, then anything we say is "mediated by concepts".
If you agree that a world, a universe, of things existed prior to the advent of humanity, then we have nothing to argue. I must say, though, that it puzzles me that you continue to think we are disagreeing about something despite the number of times we have gone over this.
I know about the 'blind spot' book and the prior article, the latter of which I read. I thought it was a pointless argument. because most of the natural sciences have no way of including the subject in their investigations. It is certainly true that what the various sciences investigate are the ways that different phenomena appear to us, and how they appear to function.
The question about whether or not science tells us anything about the "world as it in itself" is strictly undecidable. We can makes inferences about whether science does tell us anything about the in itself, but we cannot be sure.
For example, it seems highly implausible that a totally undifferentiated in itself could give rise to a perceived world of unimaginable differentiation?so we might find it plausible to think that differentiation is a real feature of the in itself, even though, since we can, by mere definition, only observe things as they appear, we obviously cannot certainly demonstrate such an inference to be true. That view also makes more sense of the fossil record, and astronomical observations.
The truth doesn't matter to me, because it has no real impact on how I live my life. I can understand that for those who long for there to be more than merely this life, the idea that what exists independently of humans is a world of physical existents lacks any appeal. It doesn't matter to me what you think, what motivates me to respond is that you always seem to be pushing the idea that there is a certainly determinable truth of the matter, rather than it being instead a matter of what seems most plausible. I see a kind of dogmatism in that view, and I am not a fan of dogmatic thinking.
:up:
I very highly agree with this, as a 3p. You both seem to accept that things existed before human minds. That's enough.
Of course I don't deny tout court that there are determinable truths, it is a denial that there is any certainly determinable truth of the matter as to whether our science and our experience in general gives us any knowledge of the in itself. Do you agree that it can only be assessed in terms of what seems most plausible or not. If not, why not?
:cool:
Quoting Wayfarer
And here is the nub of the conflation you continually make. It is not the existence of such realities that relies on an implicit perspective, but our thinking of such an existence. If you disagree with this what seems to me most obvious point, then please explain your disagreement.
You said you dont care abut the truth, makes no difference to your life, and it doesnt matter to you what I think. Youre verging on trolling and Id appreciate it if you desisted.
For you, everything is either a matter for science, or a matter of subjective opinion. But when this is reflected back at you, you complain about it, even though its your frequently stated view.
All I ask is for coherent arguments and coherent responses to the questions I am posing in good faith, which is something which you seem to lack.
You try to distort everything I say in order to wriggle out of answering straightforward questions.
You don't really believe I'm a troll, that's just another deflective tactic, or if you do believe that then you are an idiot with no insight. The fact of the matter is that you apparently just don't have any answers.
You said:
Quoting Janus
Done here.
It's all about context, which is something you apparently don't understand, or choose to ignore when it suits you tactically.
I believe you know perfectly well I was referring there to the truth regarding that particular issue (the nature of the in itself). And you know perfectly well that what I meant is that the question has no certain answer, and that it therefore has no real bearing on how I live my life. Talk about lacking charitability and good faith!
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, you're "done here " without actually having done anything.: roll:
You can of course say that space, time, and causality existed before humans, but before is itself only meaningful within the framework of space, time, and causality. The transcendental point isnt that time and space began with us, but that these forms belong to the structure of experience itself, not to the world as it is apart from any observer. They are conditions of appearance, not attributes of whatever reality might be outside all appearance.
So when you say of course discourse is mediated by concepts, you take me to be making a trivial claim about how language operates. But the transcendental point is deeper: the very possibility of there being objects in space and time at all is conditioned by the structures of sensibility and understanding. Thats not just mediation, its the constitution of the world as we actually experience it. Even the view from nowhere, which purports to describe the world as it would be without an observer, still relies on perspectivefor scale and for temporal order.
Quoting Janus
Youre conflating the empirical and the transcendental again. The point isnt that, because we only ever observe appearances, we cant be certain about what lies behind them. I'm not talking about what lies behind them. Thats an empirical framing or speculation. The transcendental point is that differentiation itself is already one of the conditions under which anything can appear to us in the first place. So the claim is logical, not empirical: its about the structure of experience, not about what we can or cant infer about the in-itself.
Quoting Janus
So, you thought it pointless. Is that an argument? The fact that you 'can't see the point' of that book says nothing about its content. I think it's an important book, about philosophy of science, cultural history, nature of mind, and much else besides. Its also very much in the vein of this OP although their presentation is vastly more comprehensive (but then it was written by three professors.)
I know you have said we've discussed this time and again, but then you keep asking the same questions again and again. The mind-created world is not saying that there was not a time before h.sapiens, which is what you keep thinking that I'm saying. When I clear that up, you then say 'well what are we arguing about, again?' This has happened a number of times in this thread, I've said all that need be said. So if it is a demand for yet another explanation I'm afraid there won't be any more forthcoming.
An excerpt from Schopenhauer WWI which lays out the case with clarity:
[hide][quote=World as Will and Idea]We cannot understand how one state could ever experience a chemical change, if there did not exist a second state to affect it. Thus the same difficulty appears in chemistry which Epicurus met with in mechanics. For he had to show how the first atom departed from the original direction of its motion. Indeed this contradiction, which can neither be escaped nor solved, might quite properly be set up as a chemical antinomy
We see ever more clearly that what is chemical can never be referred to what is mechanical, nor what is organic to what is chemical or electrical. Those who in our own day are entering anew on this old, misleading path, will soon slink back silent and ashamed, as all their predecessors have done before them Materialism even at its birth, has death in its heart, because it ignores the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, no object without a subject, is the principle which renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them, and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless.
On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.
Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kants phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different sidethe side of its inmost natureits kernelthe thing-in-itself But the world as idea only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.
Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing.[/quote] [/hide]
That's how it was meant, amusement. However, we must be careful with our use of such, because making fun of another is a form of amusement which is mean, and I don't mean to be mean.
Quoting Janus
OK, so you express the second option, rather than an intellectual disability, you have an attitudinal problem which discourages you from making the effort to understand.
Let me remind you of the issue, just so that you can see for yourself, that it is not a matter of what I say being irrelevant, but a matter of your attitude. You had refused to accept the importance of intuitional knowledge, claiming that only observation experience could provide reliable knowledge, i.e. empirical knowledge.
Quoting Janus
The problem with your attitude, exposed here, is that any knowledge we are born with must be intuitive. And, a certain basic knowledge is required even to support the human being's observational capacity. Note, that to observe is to take notice of, and this requires that your attention be directed by your intention, at the thing to be observed.
The basic foundational knowledge, which a person is born with, provides the substance, through this form of direction, upon which all observational (empirical) knowledge is constructed. Therefore it is impossible that the observational knowledge is more reliable than the intuitive knowledge, because the intuitive knowledge is what supports the observational knowledge. Your attitude demonstrates that you would believe that a logical conclusion is more reliable than the premises which it is drawn from.
I'll leave that to you and @Wayfarer, but my 2 cents is that Wayfarer is saying something a bit different. Your general point, however, is that "mind" and "mind-independence" are not terms with universal consensus, and that's quite true.
Quoting Janus
On this particular topic, what I find interesting is his use of "real" and "existent" to refer, respectively, to universals and physical stuff. I'm way oversimplying, but his idea is that we could therefore speak about numbers as being real, while not "existent" in the same way that a squirrel is. As you know, I'm not fond of those particular terms, but it shouldn't blind us to the distinction W wants to make, which I believe is a valuable one. There is a metaphysical or ontological difference between a number and a squirrel, and I understand why some philosophical traditions would want to characterize it as W does. But rather than bickering about the labels, let's say more about the details of that difference, the respective properties of numbers and squirrels, etc.
If it is real, does that mean it is all loaded in at once, in one big containment; and if it is fake, does that mean it's load is efficient, such as by having local systems load in and far away systems not loaded in?
Some people believe it's just Earth that's loaded in. That would be a very fake view. I'm more for the idea that other planets and stars exist, but only as signals until you reach their locale and they load in fully.
I have no more time today, so I'll have to leave it there for now.
[quote=Kant CPR, A42/B59]We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all the constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the case with objects in themselves and abstracted from all this receptivity of our sensibility remains entirely unknown to us. We are acquainted with nothing except our way of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which therefore does not necessarily pertain to every being, though to be sure it pertains to every human being.[/quote]
Kants point is that the world we know is not reality as it exists in itself, but as it is constituted through the forms of intuition* and the categories of understanding. Space and time, along with all empirical relations, are not independent features of things but conditions of appearance, inseparable from the way our sensibility is structured. If the human subjector even the subjective constitution of the senses in generalwere removed, the whole edifice of appearances would vanish. Yet this does not imply a solipsistic dream-world: the structures through which the phenomenal world is constituted are the same for every human being, which is why the world of appearances is shared, lawful, and communicable. This pertains to every human being, although not necessarily to other kinds of beings.
Different kinds of beingsanimals with other sensory endowments, artificial intelligences with architectures unlike our own, or even extraterrestrial intelligenceswould inhabit worlds structured in ways not reducible to ours (recall Wittgensteins remark: If a lion could speak, we would not understand him). Their phenomenal worlds would not be the same as the human world, though they would be no less real for them. Kants formulation thus anticipates the idea of a plurality of possible mind-created worlds, each bound to the conditions of cognition proper to a type of subject. What we call the world is, then, always the world as it manifests for beings like usnever the unconditioned reality in itself.
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* Kant defines intuition at the very outset of the Critique of Pure Reason: In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition (CPR, A19/B33). Intuition, for Kant, is the immediate givenness of objects to the mind, as distinct from concepts, which mediate and organize what is given.
I think that our concept of "the universe" is a useful fiction.
I understand that is what Kant and Schopenhauer contend, but the salient question is as to whether they are also more than that. Kant says space and time are "the pure forms of intuition"?I don't know about "pure" but following Kant's usage of 'intuition' we can say that perception comes in spatiotemporal form. Reflecting on experience in a phenomenological way we can say that all perceptions are spatiotemporal, even that all perceptions must be spatiotemporal.
If you then go on to say that there is no space and time absent perception an argument is required, and that is just what is not to be found. It doesn't follow deductively that if space and time are forms of intuition they therefore cannot exist outside of that context. It also doesn't follow inductively, because all our science tells us there must have been space and time prior to humans or even percipients in general.
Quoting Wayfarer
And here it is again?a claim without an argument to support it. It's true that those forms "belong to the structure of experience" but it certainly doesn't follow deductively or inductively that that is all they are. So, just what is the actual argument?
Kant allows things in themselves, which Schopenhauer takes him to task for, because it is inconsistent with his claim that space and time are only forms of intuition and have no other existence, and you can't have things without differentiation, space and time. Schopenhauer then posits that there can only be a 'thing in itself', and that this is a consequence of Kant's own contentions.
But an amorphous 'thing in itself', undifferentiated (as it must be absent space and time) seems to be a highly implausible candidate for being able to give rise to the almost infinitely complex world we find ourselves in.
Quoting Wayfarer
And here is the same unargued framing again. I don't accept that the world, that nature, is bifurcated into "empirical" and "transcendental"; that framing merely assumes what is to be demonstrated.
I don't deny that differentiation is one of the conditions under which anything can appear to us in the first place. I agree with that. You then say it is a logical claim not an empirical one?I would say it is neither, that it is a phenomenological claim based on reflection on the nature of experience. In any case, to say it again, that is not the point at issue?the point at issue is whether it follows logically from the accepted fact that differentiation is required for perception to occur, that there is no differentiation absent perception. And that claim simply does not follow logically. That there must be differentiation for perception to occur rather suggests, to me at least, that it is plausible to think that differentiation is in the nature of the pre-conceptual, pre-cognitive, world. Of course I acknowledge that that conclusion is also not strictly logically necessitated. It is an inductive or abductive claim, and we all know none of those are certain. Nothing in science is absolutely certain.
Quoting Wayfarer
I have already said at length why I think it is pointless. I think it is pointless because the natural sciences cannot deal with the subject. How would you include the subject in the disciplines of chemistry, geology, astronomy, paleontology and so on? Only the human sciences and ethology can bring in the idea of the subject, and the latter only the non-human subject.
Quoting Wayfarer
None of that is at issue?I have never denied that human experience is different from (most) animal experience. I say "most" because the experience of some kinds of animal seems to be much closer to human experience than that of others.
I always thought that Wittgenstein quote to be somewhat silly. If a lion could speak the same language as we do, then we should be able to understand it. If the lion could speak, but is speaking "lionese" then of course we could not understand it, just as we don't understand any other unfamiliar language. We could learn lionese if the lion could learn our language and then translation may be possible. "It takes two to tango".
While is true that the perceptual experience of different animals is very different form ours on account of the different nature of the sensory organs, observation shows us that animals inhabit the same world we do. This is shown by the consistency of their behavior. Lions prey on gazelle, wildebeest; animals small enough for them to effectively bring down. We don't see them trying to bring elephants or rhinoceros. So they must be able to assess the size of animals in ways that make perfect sense to us. They have to eat, mate, sleep, defecate and they play and show affection to one another in ways similar to how we do. So they are not all that far apart from us.
Finally, there isn't much point quoting Kant, since I am well familiar with his philosophy, and since I've already said many times that I don't agree him on some central points. Are you wanting to appeal to authority by quoting him (and others)?
I want to hear an actual argument for why space, time, differentiation, form, matter and all the rest cannot exist beyond the context of perception. And I should note, I acknowledge that if there is space, time, differentiation, things in general outside the context of perception, we should not expect them to be just as we experience and understand them. That would be naive realism, and I'm not arguing for that. I have in mind something along the lines of Ontic Structural Realism.
The appeal to all our science actually illustrates my point. Science already presupposes space, time, and causality, because its subject matter is empirical appearances. Thats why science cant speak to whether those forms belong to the thing-in-itself it only ever investigates within them.
Quoting Janus
There is indeed an argument. The kind of argument at issue isnt inductive or deductive but what Kant calls transcendental. We begin with the undeniable fact that we have coherent experience of objects ordered in space and time and governed by causal laws. The question then becomes: what must be true for such experience to be possible at all? Kants answer is that space and time must be a priori forms of intuition conditions of possibility for experience, not attributes of things-in-themselves. Without them, there could be no experience of a world in the first place. And this is based on analysis of the nature of experience and reason - not of the observations of the natural sciences.
This is why its an error to object that all our science tells us there was space and time before humans. Of course science presupposes space and time, because its subject matter is appearances; but that doesnt show that space and time belong to or are caused by the in-itself. It only shows that empirical science is silent on the very question transcendental philosophy is raising. Which is as it should be! Natural science assumes nature as the object of its analyses. It is not engaged in this kind of analysis.
Similarly, to say that the thing-in-itself must somehow give rise to the complex world is to misapply the category of causality beyond its scope. Causality, like space and time, is one of the forms of appearance it structures phenomena but has no application beyond that. Kant was adamant on this point: the in-itself is not a hidden causal agent behind appearances, but simply a limiting concept marking the boundary of experience. Schopenhauer departs from Kant when he identifies the noumenon with Will, but he does so knowing this goes beyond Kants strict prohibition (which is a separate issue.)
Quoting Janus
The whole point of The Blind Spot is not to complain that chemistry or astronomy fail to include the subject, but to highlight what happens when the methods of natural science are misapplied to questions of philosophy. Natural science quite properly takes its object to be nature understood as appearances, measurable, predictable and law-governed. The problem arises when that methodological 'bracketing of the subject' is turned into a claim about reality as a whole, as though subjectivity were a negligible illusion.
Thats why I see the book as supporting my OP. On the one hand, you appeal to all our science shows us that but at the same time dismiss the very critique that The Blind Spot points out namely, that science cannot, by its own terms, adjudicate questions about the conditions of appearance or the role of the subject.
Quoting Janus
You want an empirical argument, and there isn't one.
Quoting Wayfarer
How can anything be deduced about the in itself from "the nature of experience and reason"? I cannot see how anything could come from such a phenomenological analysis other than insights into the nature of experience. As I see it this is the weakness in Kant's system?on the one hand it concludes that nothing at all can be said about the in itself, and he proceeds to make claims about it, for example that it could not be spatiotemporal, differentiated and so on.
You still haven't outlined any actual argument to that effect. You say the argument is not inductive or deductive (or I imagine abductive) and that it is "transcendental". Merely labelling it tells me nothing, I want to see the argument laid in whatever terms are appropriate.
That said, all arguments are either deductive or inductive. Deductive arguments are based on premises which themselves are not demonstrated within the arguments themselves. Inductive arguments are inferences to the best explanation?but there province is the empirical, so that won't do according to your own standards. Is the argument merely stipulative?
Quoting Wayfarer
As I said, I simply want any kind of argument clearly laid out that demonstrates that space, time, differentiation etc. must be confined to the world as cognized. I'm still waiting.
Quoting Wayfarer
The existence of anything we can imagine presupposes space and time, and you are right that doesn't demonstrate that space and time exist beyond perceptual experience, or that they are caused by the in-itself. But it also doesn't demonstrate that they cannot belong to or be caused by the in itself.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think it a matter of the methods being misapplied to questions of philosophy, so much as the knowledge given by science being applied to questions of philosophy. Science has given us a very different picture of the nature of the world as it is experienced than the medieval or the ancients had. We simply don't know how different the philosophies of the greats of antiquity and medieval times would have been if they had been around today.
It all depends on what you mean by "philosophy". Science may not be of much use to phenomenology, for example, although that said the phenomenology of a modern individual will not be the same as that of a medieval or ancient. Gadamer argues that we can only approach an understanding of those times via the texts we have access to hermeneutically.
When it comes to metaphysical speculation, I can't see how we have any better, or even other, guide than science. Science doesn't prove anything metaphysical (or even empirical for that matter) but for met at least, when it comes to questions which are undecidable, because no logical or definitive empirical purchase can be gained on them, science remains the source of knowledge that informs decisions about what is most plausible. As I've said many times, though, what seems most plausible will vary from pone individual ot another, and there is no definitive criteria for what is most plausible.
The direct analysis of knowledge and experience is precisely the subject matter of philosophy. Kant is not making positive claims about what the in-itself is; he is showing what cannot be said of it without misusing our own concepts. To say space and time are forms of intuition is not to ascribe a property to the world in itself, but to mark a limit: we only ever encounter things in those forms, so they cannot be applied beyond them. If you read that as a claim about what the in-itself is like, youre projecting your own belief in a reality behind appearances back onto Kant.
Quoting Janus
Transcendental arguments are about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. Thats why they dont fit the ordinary deductive/inductive scheme: theyre not stipulations, and theyre not empirical hypotheses. Theyre analyses that show why we cannot so much as conceive experience without already presupposing the framework of space and time. To then ask if those forms belong to the in-itself is to misapply them beyond their scope. Deduction (a priori) and induction (a posteriori) are both central to Kant, but transcendental arguments are a different mode of analysis: they begin from the fact of experience and ask what must be presupposed a priori for it to be possible. For that reason, they dont fit neatly into the deductive/inductive scheme so much as transcend it.
Quoting Janus
If you want an argument framed in the empirical or inductive terms you're demanding, then youll need to keep waiting.
Quoting Janus
You have something in mind when you say that.
I disagree. If Kant is saying that space and time or differentiation could not exist in the in itself then he is making a positive statement about it. To be sure he is defining the limits of certain knowledge?we cannot be certain that space and time and differentiation exist in the in itself, but nor can we be certain that they do not. There is no such thing as any definitive "misuse of concepts". That is purely stipulative. There are no "concept police"?we each decide for ourselves what makes most sense to us. It is just here that I see dogma creeping in?in notions of "philosophy proper" and "misusing concepts" and "cannot be applied beyond them".
If someone doesn't buy the empirical/ transcendental bifurcation of nature (a bifurcation which is certainly not a given) then they will obviously have a different take on what can sensibly be said than someone who does buy that bifurcation. When it comes to philosophy it's a pluralistic world, and all the more so in modernity than ever before. Perhaps you deplore that...in any case I celebrate it.
As I see it, the problems we, as a species, face are not philosophical so much as they are practical. Materialism in the consumerist, not the philosophical, sense is one of the main problems. It's apparent that loss of religion is not much of a contributing factor.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, as I said all I want is any actual reasoned argument that isn't mere stipulation.
Quoting Wayfarer
So what? I can acknowledge that what I have in mind may have no bearing on the nature of nature?the nature of reality in any absolute sense is something about which we can only speculate. I don't accept stipulative limits on what I may or not speculate about, or what I may or may not find most plausible.
It's a way of thinking about things, about how we can imagine they might be, but I find other ways of thinking more convincing. What I'm arguing against is the notion that the distinction is somehow necessarily true, as opposed to being merely a possible way of thinking about things.
So, I'm fine with others holding to the distinction and organizing their thoughts accordingly, but it's not for me.
I agree. And we have the question: "from whence these structures?" You cannot make an appeal to natural selection, or human biology, or physics, because these all only relate to the phenomenal.
I think the culprit here is the deflated notions of causality Kant is working with, particularly Hume's influence on him. On such a view, causes are indeed mere phenomenal constant conjunction. But in the broader sense of causality, to say that the noumena have no cause is to say they occur for no reason at all, and are in a sense not intelligible or actual.
The appeal to transcendental argument doesn't decide things here because the arguments for the prior actuality of what is in the senses and received by the intellect is of the same basic type, and its only real assumption is that the world is intelligible and not arbitrary (and thus appearances cannot be arbitrarily related to what they are "appearances of" without ceasing to be appearances of anything, and merely being sui generis actualities that occur of themselves, a violation of the premise of intelligibility and the idea that things don't spontaneously move themselves from potency to act "for no reason"). I'd argue that Kant actually oscillates between accepting these premises to make some points and then denying them for others.
You can see this tension throughout the First Critique, where Kant seems compelled to write things like:
This comes a few sections after denying that causality applies here. And he is here speaking about what he knows about the "unknowable." In the Transcendental Aesthetic he is acutely aware that appearances must be appearances of something, but I am not so sure he secures that his are.
Nevertheless, Kant's starting point and problems are still very popular in modern empirical philosophy, so he at least functions as a solid diagnostician for where certain assumptions lead.
According to Kant's assertions. But from the initial response by his peers there has been the question of if he actually leaves himself any grounds for claiming this, or if his system implies the opposite. Kant's letters show he was acutely aware of a "subjective idealism problem."
I dont see what belief has got to do with this, surely if something is cogent, its not a question of belief.
It wouldnt be a unique situation, as a human is a colony of cellular organisms. And a beehive, a termites, or ants is a colony of colonies of cells. Each cell, while being alive, has no idea (pretending that a thinking being was able to experience the life of a cell) that it is part of a larger being, or how that would work. Likewise a human would have no idea of the larger colony (that they are a part of) as an entity, including through all knowledge discovered in our world.
I suspect you're reacting to a sense of a God-shaped hole - an expectation that the noumenal ought to be, in fact, the numinous (which despite the apparent verbal similarity is an entirely different concept.)
As far as subjectivism is concerned, Kant was indeed concerned to avoid the charge of subjective idealism, but thats why the Critique insists that the forms of sensibility and categories of understanding are not personal idiosyncrasies but universal structures of human cognition. Theyre what make possible a shared, lawful, and communicable world in the first place. He says that objectivity itself arises from these common faculties. So while later critics argued about how secure this deduction was, Kants own position was clear the phenomenal world is not appearing within a self-enclosing solipsism, but is the necessary correlate of common cognitive structures
Of course Kant was wrong about that. We all have unique brains and it is the regularities to the world and language use that allow our idiosyncratic brains to be (somewhat) on the same page.
Differentiation need not be spatial nor temporal. We have differentiation of meaning, intention and value. This is the basis of "order", "hierarchy", a differentiation of value. Spatiotemporal differentiation is dependent on, and derived, from this more basic form of differentiation based on value.
Quoting Janus
If the one is required for the other, and the other is not required for the former, then we can conclude that the one is prior to the other. In this case, since differentiation is required for perception, and perception is not required for differentiation (as explained above, differentiation may be based purely in order), we can conclude that differentiation is prior to perception.
Quoting Janus
Above is an argument as to why the act of differentiation exists beyond the context of perception. It is prior to perception. This act of differentiation is intentional.
Quoting Janus
Differentiation is necessarily an intentional act. It involves selection. Understanding what "differentiation" means is all that is required to demonstrate that it is confined to "the world as cognized". Differentiation is an intentional act carried out by cognition. Furthermore, differentiation in its basic form (order) as explained above, is necessarily prior to spatial or temporal differentiation. Therefore cognition is prior to spatiotemporal differentiation, and perception in general.
Quoting Janus
We can be certain that these things, space, time, differentiation, do not exist "in the in itself". This certainty is supported by an understanding of what it means to differentiate, and subsequent form, "differentiation". To differentiate is an intentional act. Any attempt to portray it as something other than this ought to be immediately arrested. I am a self-declared member of the "concept police", and I hereby give you warning that you are in serious violation of the 'dogma of philosophy proper'. Without stipulation, dogma, any field of study loses all dignity. Without stipulations as to how words will be used, logic is impossible, and discussion rapidly degenerates into nonsense.
If you refuse to uphold a proper definition of "differentiation", as an act which requires selection, just so that you may equivocate, then you make philosophical discourse impossible.
But that's precisely what critics say he is doing, and I think they have a point. If an appearance is not caused by what it is an appearance of, if it bears absolutely no intelligible relationship (even a hidden one) to what it is an appearance of, then in virtue of what is it appearance an "of" anything? Even if Kant isn't strictly speaking denying any intelligible relationship between noumenal reality and appearances (a point of contention) that this relationship is wholly unknowable would itself imply that Kant has absolutely no grounds for claiming that appearances are appearances of anything prior to them (particularly since he seems to deny that appearances are posterior to noumena in any coherent way). In virtue of what then does he claim positively know that appearances are appearances and not realities themselves? To simply say, "well to be appearances, they must be appearances of something," is simply begging the question here. What is the evidence that supports that they are appearances?
This is precisely Hegel's charge in the Logic, that Kant is a dogmatist who has dogmatically presupposed that phenomena are "appearances of" noumena. On Hegel's analysis, when Kant dismisses the whole of past metaphysics as "twaddle" he appears to be a very charred pot pointing out that a kettle is black.
But this is also problematic in that Kant does appeal to the noumena for many things. He hides free will in there for instance. But if this freedom has never, will never, and can never relate to experience as cause, it's completely meaningless. Indeed, I find it questionable to posit an existence at all and then to claim that, strictly speaking, it bears no clear relationship to anything that is conceivable. Which of course, Kant doesn't do. Instead, he oscillates on this (I am pretty sure that "cause" in the prior passage is "grund," or "ground"). A more charitable reading is that he is engaged in something like apophatic theology, but this doesn't hold up. Apophatic theology works because the transcendent isn't absent from what it transcends. The super rational is not arational. But Kant has denied himself the understanding by which apophatic theology is anything more than simple contradiction.
Ok, and how does he support that this is true for all minds? "Kant says it is thus," is not a particularly convincing rejoinder to the accusation of solipsism. Kant, by his own admission, knows absolutely nothing about other people in-themselves. Any appeal to shared biology or culture is an appeal to the phenomenal to explain a noumenal connection by which discrete phenomenal perspectives are the same. You said earlier that other species might have different minds. But I don't think Kant can say this. "Other species," and "species," or even "individuals" which can have different minds, all exist only in the phenomenal world, or at the very least are only ever known as phenomenal, which says nothing about the noumenal. Indeed, as critics have often pointed out, Kant has no grounds for supposing noumena, plural (the application of quantity and measure) in the first place. Of course he says, "but thus it is so,' but the criticism is that his epistemology has cut away any warrant for claiming that other minds exist or must be the same as his mind. He can only know the appearances of other minds (or apparent other minds). Other mind's experiences are private, and so the fact that they are "phenomenal" does nothing to resolve this problem. All that can be known is that other minds appear to exist and that they appear to work similarly to ours. But when the solipsist says, "it does not appear so to me," what counter argument is left open?
The other difficulty is the idea of "knowledge of things-in-themseleves," as a sort of epistemic standard in the first place. Pace Kant, this is not what past metaphysicians thought they had. The category is itself modern. To hold that sort of knowledge up as a standard is to say something like: "things are most fully known when known without any mind," which is analogous to "what things truly look like is how they appear when seen without any eyes." This has to presuppose that we deny the premise: "the same is for thinking as for being" or that truth is the adequacy of thought to being (or else, there is being that is not truly being). I think the charge here would be that the "things-in-themseleves," are just an inappropriate reification of being, and that even if they were coherent, they would be, by definition, epistemically irrelevant.
Of course, some readings of Kant resolve these issues. I've even seen Kant read as Shankara or Nagarjuna. But these seem like a stretch to me. Doctrines like emptiness would suggest that the things-in-themselves are simply a sort of error (but of course, readings of Kant do dispense with noumena, I just don't think he does).
In support of your observation, Kant went as far as rejecting Descartes' grounds for confirming his own "thinking" as an experience.
Quoting CPR, Kant, B421
Isnt that utterly simple? Going back to the original post: the contention is, simply, that the world (object, thing) is not simply given but is constructed by the mind/brain. Thats what the brain does! In humans, the brain is an enormously complex organ which absorbs a very large proportion of the organism's metabolic energy. Whats it doing with all that power? Why, its creating a world! A very different world to that of cheetahs, otters, butterflies and divas, but a world nonetheless
This is Kants basic point - not that Kant has the last word on all the implications, not that Kant is correct in every detail. But his Copernican revolution in philosophy is the factor which was a fundamental turning point in modern philosophy. It was arguably the origin of all such later developments as phenomenology and constructivism, and why Kant has been (rightly) designated the godfather of cognitive science. Hence also the amount of content devoted to cognitive science in the original post and the implied convergence of Pinter's 'gestalts' with the 'ideas' of classical philosophy.
In respect of the in-itself, Emrys Westacott puts it like this:
[quote=The Continuing Relevance of Immanuel Kant; https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/11/the-continuing-relevance-of-immanuel-kant.html] Kant's introduced the concept of the thing in itself to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.[/quote]
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But he knows how we appear! And we appear to have uniform abilities and faculties across populations, although of course with outliers and exceptional cases and those with anomalous skills. This charge of solipsism is often levelled at the kind of phenomenological idealism I'm advocating - but the response is, we are members of the same species language, and culture. Cultural worlds are vastly different, its inhabitants see things in completely different ways to what we regard as 'normal'. Again this is because we as a species and a cultural type construe the world in characteristic ways.
(When I did a unit in cognitive science, there were many examples of culturally-determined behaviours in response to situations. One I recall was an individual from a forest tribe in Africa, who was taken to a mountain lookout by an anthropologist, from where there was a vista of sweeping plains dotted with herd animals. The forest-dweller seemed to be looking at the view, but after a short time, he squatted and started drawing his fingers through the dirt in front of him. The translator explained that he was trying to 'touch the insects' - the insects being the distant herd animals. As this individual had lived his whole life in a forest, his sensory horizon could not encompass the idea of a 'distant view'.)
There's an enormous range of analogous data from anthropology, ethnology etc. The inhabitants of other cultures live in very different worlds to our own. Of course, it's all the same planet, but a world is more than a planet. Its the structured field of meaning and perception we share through our faculties, language and culture - and thats exactly what Kant was intuiting. That, I contend, is also the source of the later phenomenological concepts of 'lebenswelt' and 'umwelt' (also mentioned in the original post.)
And dont forget that Kant, typical of academics of his day, also lectured in geography, anthropology, pedagogy, logic, physics, and mathematics as well as philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is the point I'm driving at in Idealism in Context. That is about the decline of the 'participatory ontology' that characterised scholastic realism via the absorption of Aristotle's hylomorphism.
Thomist critics like Maritain would say that Kant misses the intuition of being a direct grasp of existence itself that grounds metaphysics. Without that, they argue, Kant seals us off from reality - something other critics also point out. Theres force in that critique. But even granting it, Kants basic insight remains: the world of experience is constituted through the minds forms and categories, not simply received as a mirror of things-in-themselves.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I've mentioned before I first read Kant via T R V Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (c 1955). This book is nowadays criticized by more current Buddhologists as being overly Euro-centric and too influenced by European idealism, but his comparison of Kant and N?g?rjuna really connected a lot of dots for me. Apropos of which:
Descartes mistake is to treat the cogito as if it delivered a determinate object a existent entity. But Kants point in B421 is that this is a category mistake. The I think is the condition of experience of objects; it cannot itself be grasped as an object under the categories. Thats why Kant says the 'I' is not an appearance, not a noumenon, and not a substance its simply the formal unity of apperception, which we can never convert into a determinate object without confusion. But Kant is also justly circumspect about the real nature of the self.
As N?g?rjuna has been mentioned, there's a short verse in the early Buddhist texts in which the Buddha is asked whether the self exists by 'the wanderer Vachagotta' (this character representing the type of seeker who asks philosophical or metaphysical questions.) Asked 'does the self exist?' and 'does the self not exist?', the Buddha declines to answer both questions, instead maintaining a 'noble silence'. Asked later by his attendant, Ananda, why he didn't answer, he replies that both answers would be misleading - saying 'yes' would 'side with the eternalists', those ascetics who maintain there is a permanently existing self, and 'no' would only confuse the questioner, as he would wonder where his self had gone (ref.) This is one of the origins of madhyamaka ('middle way') philosophy of later Buddhism, which designates the two views of 'existing' or 'not existing' as the errors of eternalism and nihilism, respectively. (Most commentators agree that contemporary culture tends towards the latter.)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do we know of any meaning, intention and value outside the context of this spatiotemporal existence?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No argument from me about that conclusion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now you are contradicting what you said earlier. Differentiation just refers to the existence of more than one thing. So "selection" on our part is not logically required for there to be more than one thing.
Quoting Punshhh
Religion and spirituality are not really discursive endeavors. Is there a good reason not to put religion and spirituality aside when doing philosophy?
Quoting Punshhh
Cogent means clearly (and thus clearly expressible) and convincing, so I asked whether you had a clearly expressible and convincing reason to believe in a demiurge. Are you suggesting you have experienced the demiurge? When we experience (perceive) an ordinary object, we know what we have experienced because it is most times there, and we can go back and check, and we check with others if we are in doubt, and confirm (or disconfirm) that they also perceive the same object there.
That gives us cogent reason to believe in such objects, but I don't think the same applies with a demiurge. If we have what we think to be such an experience, what it is an experience of remains a matter of interpretation, and I think that should give us pause. If we feel an unshakeable conviction regarding what it was an experience of, it will be enough to non-rationally convince us, but it will not be enough to non-rationally convince others unless they have a will to believe as we do.
Quoting Wayfarer
As usual you go too far?you forget the role of the body and the world. "Co-constituted" would be a better term. Even if our minds were all exactly the same, which as @Wonderer correctly points out, they are not, that alone cannot explain the commonality of experience, even between us and the animals. This is a point you have repeatedly glossed over.
Well, Kant was a committed Lutheran who puzzled in the Critique of Judgement how Spinoza could carry on without the belief in the continuance of his personal soul.
Descartes reformulated the reasoning of Augustine in his pitch of the experience of himself. I agree that the "self" is a sticky wicket in Kant's model. But I think his concern was decidedly not Buddhist in it's character.
Strictly speaking, Kant is saying that the "I" cannot be experienced as "real" the way other things in life can be. That follows a way of thinking about reason itself such as performed by Anselm, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, etcetera.
Or if you prefer, Wittgenstein speaks of solipsism as manifest but not expressible. But then he stopped doing that later, realizing what he was not saying.
The instances make me wary of comparing one set of ideas against another.
The way I put it is that the 'I' or self cannot be said to exist in the same sense that the objects of cognition exist. There being an observer (a subject of experience) is the condition of existence of objects of cognition. Hence the 'transcendental unity of apperception' in Kant, or the transcendental ego of Husserl, or Schopenhauer's 'no object without a subject'.
But that is not Kant's complaint against Descartes. The limits of intuition do not inform us as to what is possible or not. There is no phrase in Kant that says:
Quoting Wayfarer
It might be better to say that the 'I think' is 'the condition of the possibility of experienceable objects'. And that conforms with the passage you quoted earlier:
Quoting CPR, Kant, B421
Here Kant warns against mistaking the unity of apperception itself (a formal, transcendental condition) for an intuition of a subject (as if the self were some object among objects). The unity of thinking grounds the possibility of objects as given in experience, but is not itself an object of intuition.
I concede the way that I put it (i.e. that there being a subject or observer...) is not strictly correct if that is taken to imply that 'the observer' is an existing thing.
Which permits the thinking about the soul excluded in your previous argument.
The basic idea is that the self or soul is unknowable. We ourselves are, in reality, the in-itself. That, I understand to be the wedge that Hegel used to build his dialectic (although I don't want to venture too far in that direction as my knowledge of Hegel and the other later idealists is cursory.)
Probably stepping in it a bit, but this seems clearly wrong to me. If differentiation is literally just things existing aside from one another (at all), then our perception does logically require selection into categories of those things. Otherwise, we would not perceive any differentiation. We select for object types, within the confines of a priori time and space. That seems pretty uninteresting or controversial if you take the premises on (I get that you may not, I'm just saying within the framework, this does seem required).
If I can address this topic, I will try it in the Rödl thread. It is a difficult conversation when you make certain claims and then disqualify yourself from opining upon them.
In the longer version of the original post (linked from it), there are references to a book called Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, an essay in the philosophy of cognitive science. He starts by saying:
Many will insist that those shapes, features and appearances were there all along - but that is not really the point. Certainly what we cognise was there all along, but it is not until they are re-cognized that they become meaningful to us (and for other animals likewise - Pinter by no means confines this to humans).
So, the Gerson argument? There is only the possibility of a made world against whatever one might propose?
That is what I take as the meaning of the 'in-itself'.
Yes, I told you, "order" itself. It is value not restricted by spatiotemporal context. It provides the foundation for mathematics upon which spatial temporal concepts are constructed.
Quoting Janus
For some reason, you have a tendency of stating things backward. You reverse the order of logic, presenting illogical statements. Here you say that the existence of more than one thing is required for differentiation. In reality though, the act of differentiation is an act that divides, thereby producing more than one thing. So you have the logical order reversed, to produce the illogical statement you make. In reality, for there to be more than one thing requires an act of differentiation, and this is an act of selection, the act which divides according to selected principles. Without this, your proposed "more than one thing" is an unintelligible infinity of divisions already made. An infinity already accomplished is illogical.
Quoting Janus
Selection on someone's part is required for there to be more than one thing. Someone has to choose by what principle one part is to be separated from another part, making more than one thing. How else could there be more than one thing, without assuming the infinity of divisions mentioned above?
Does your approach amount to:
I propose that there is/was a strong countervailing movement against this idea;
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This too.
The idea of the person.
As far as I know mathematics exists only in the spatiotemporal world. There can be no order without things to be ordered.
It seems reasonable to think that, for example, the visual field is already differentiated for infants n terms of areas of different tones and colours, before they learn to recognize anything as anything. Also they would be aware of different sounds, smells, tastes and tactile "feels" and bodily sensations. Otherwise how could anything stand out for them in the first place?
Quoting AmadeusD
I think this is arse-about. If there were not already more than one thing no selection could ever occur.
That's true and entirely uninteresting and changes nothing about what Meta and I have said. You're right - there could be no differentiation. But if there were no differentiation, we(acknowledging the absurdity of 'we' in this context) wouldn't know different. So it's irrelevant.
I'm not quite understanding the import of the first bit directed at me. I understand, and I think I agree. But as above, that doesn't change anything being noted here.
Remember, our perceptions of, and the actual world are not the same. In the world of a perceiving being, the outside, un-perceivable world means nothing at all.
Not that I think the question and the answer to it matter that much, at least not to those who just accept that we live in a material world consisting of many, many things which don't depend on us for their existence.
That view would obviously be more bleak, and hence more significant, to those who wish there to be more than just this life.
If the universe has been around for billions of years, that's a whole different discussion, it being there 'prior to' perception doesn't suggest it's been there for more than a minute nor that if it has been around for a minute, it's fake.
The big bang may be only an essence; a resource for our minds to create the universe. In that regard, it never happened, it's just the simulation of the result of such an event.
Sorry, I meant, is there a good reason not to believe in a demiurge. Im happy to keep religion and spirituality to one side.
Yes, I see now. I was interpreting the word belief in its religious context. Now I see that you were using it in the sense of holding an opinion, or idea.
I do have such an explanation, but whether it would be [I]convincing [/I], is unlikely. Because I became convinced by the idea myself, I doubt I could have been convinced of it by being told it. Or that I could necessarily convince someone else. As it is more of a lived experience, a journey.
Yes, although it would have more likely have been a higher being(indicating there was a demiurge) But this is besides the point now, as we are putting spirituality to one side.
Agreed.
Agreed, this is what I was getting at with convincing
Ill put my idea again, in a simple form.
What we have is the coming together of two things spirit(not in the spiritual sense) and matter( a field of spatial temporal potentiality). This results in the diverse forms we find. But where ever we look, the two are wedded, that one cant be teased from the other. Because what we see is neither(spirit, or matter) but the fruit of that union. Resulting in three things and a world that is neither spirit, or matter.
That conclusion is drawn from the unstated premise that "things" by your usage exist only in a spatiotemporal world. However, we are talking about immaterial "things", which are not spatiotemporal, meaning, value, and intention.
In classical metaphysics there is a very strong logical argument, the cosmological argument, which demonstrates that there must be something immaterial which is prior in time to all material existence, as active cause of the first material thing. This implies that we ought to conclude that your unstated premise is false. Therefore your argument is unsound.
And of course, those who practise mathematics demonstrate every day, that things being ordered need not be spatiotemporal things. So you really ought to reject your own argument.
Quoting Janus
Likewise, we have every reason to believe that there is an immaterial world prior to the material world.
First, denying this would require either that material things came into existence from absolutely nothing, or that they have existed forever. Both of these possibilities are contrary to empirical evidence. Material things do not come into being from nothing, nor do they exist forever.
Second, the nature of time indicates to us that actual material existence comes into being at the present time, now, while the future consists only of possibilities for material existence. This implies that the possibility for any material thing must precede, in time, the actual existence of that thing. Since the possibility for a thing is not necessarily a material thing in itself, we must conclude that there has always been something immaterial prior to any material thing, as the possibility for material things, in general.
Quoting Janus
The philosophical mind however, wants to know the nature of these things which don't depend on us. To simply assume, and accept, that the nature of these things is adequately described by the concept "matter", therefore we live in a "material world", is not good philosophy.
I am not sure if it works to simply claim that appearances are of something, and that this relation is wholly simple and cannot be further explicated. It seems like simply rejecting phenomenalism by fiat. But from whence this unimpeachable knowledge? It would appear to be an absolutely simple and unimpeachable knowledge of things-in-themseleves at least in their relation to "everything we experience." Yet no mechanism can explain such knowledge because "causes" etc. are said not to apply
Certainly, Kant was very influential here, and he is often invoked in these sorts of contexts, but I think this the ascription to Kant of the title "godfather of cognitive science" actually runs quite counter to Kant's own philosophy. To use the empirical sciencesphenomenato say things about the noumenal nature of things is simply off-limits. Kant certainly might serve as an indirect inspiration for those who try to explain the contours of appearances in terms of cognitive science, neuroscience, natural selection, physics, information theory, etc., but in the end all these efforts fall afoul of Kant's epistemology. They are, in reality, far closer to the earlier forms of thinking on this subject that Kant dismisses as "twaddle" because they are not properly "critical."
For, it was hardly a novel thought that the properties of the mind and of man's senses/body affect how the world appears. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," wasn't an obscure insight, but a sort of core dictum, and there was a vast literature on the "way of knowing proper to man as a physical being, and a particular sort of physical being, as against 'angelic knowledge'" that one could trace as far back as Plato, and certainly to De Anima. Kant's novelty lies more in absolutizing this doctrine such that the Peripatetic Axiom that: "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses" (i.e., received by the body through the environment) becomes radically altered, as does the parallel axiom that "what is known best to us (concrete particulars) is not what is known best in itself (intelligible principles)." These aren't exactly negated, but they are very much changed.
The Copernician Revolution then is more about epistemology becoming "first philosophy" then the introduction of the idea that the mind shapes experience and the act of knowing. Hence, contemporary introductions on metaphysics (e.g. Routledge's) have to specify that they are focused on "traditional" or "not post-Kantian" metaphysics, because they don't put epistemic concerns first. You see this all the time in contemporary metaphysics where the conditions for being known (by man)or later, "spoken of"are considered to be synonymous with the conditions for existing at all. Many arguments from underdetermination rest on this assumption.
On this point, I think Pryzwarra has a good answer in Analogia Entis. He says that first philosophy must always deal with both the metaontic and the metanoetic, because some sense of being is required to say anything about anything, and yet how we know anything is always an question with great priority. Hence, first philosophy involves a sort of instability, a passing back and forth between being and knowing (mirroring creaturely instability where essence is not existence). It's like Plotinus says, thinking and being are two sides of the same coin, but only unified in the One. Their bifurcation in creatures causes heartburn, the need to overcome duality (non-dualism; Kant, by contrast, seems to absolutize dualism). Nonetheless, the metaontic has to have a sort of priority, because an "act of knowing" still presupposes something about "act," and existence, being. I think one can see this in how Kant is forced to still appeal to terms such as grund (ground, cause) and wirklichkeit (actuality) even in places where he wants to deny their applicability.
Yet then what of throwing free will into the noumenal realm? At any rate, I think this might lead towards the parallel charge of Kant as leading towards skepticism, that his world bottoms out in nothing. I suppose there is a greater similarity to Nag?rjuna here. Personally, of the bit I know, I find Huayan Buddhism and later Mahayana to be more compelling on this point, with the idea of luminous awareness as the flip side of emptiness, since it appears to be more in line with the idea that the contingent and finite must "boil over" (Eckhart) from the "infinite."
Sure, and that works in many philosophies. I think Kant specifically may have barred himself from making such appeals though. The "cause/origin" of appearances is what they are appearances of. So phenomenal experience "comes from" something we can know nothing about. To appeal to culture and biology, phenomena, as an explanation of what produces that which can receive appearances would be off-limits.
Yes, but they generally also attack the deflated notion of causality he inherits, which is partly what results in the "bridge" being cut off. But without the bridge, consciousness appears to be one way and not any other "for no reason at all." After all, it cannot have "causes" if causes are imposed by the mind. But then the question remains: "from whence these categories?" Appeals to physics, natural selection, or even the seemingly basic structures of information theory and semiotics are off-limits.
And then I think the bolded would just be rejected as a strawman of much prior philosophy. No knowledge of "things-in-themseleves" is assumed because the category itself is rejected. The only "thing-in-itself" analog would be God, whose essence is unknowable. This is an area of some agreement the , but as noted before, apophatic methods work here with God because the transcendent is not absent from what it transcends, whereas Kant allows himself no such purchase.
Here, I think Berkeley's instincts are generally better, even if he hasn't been received as well, or Fichte.
But isnt it you who is here saying things about the noumenal or thing-in-itself? If theres a fault in the expression Ding an sich, it lies in the Ding: as soon as we call it a thing, its already objectified, named, made into some thingeven if we then say its unknowable. Were simultaneously thinking it and not thinking it.
So there is no noumenal nature as if it were an object awaiting description. To treat it that way risks projecting it as the first link in a causal chainan uncaused cause - which is where Kant says it becomes dogmatic metaphysics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agree! I see Kant as continuous with many aspects of the previous tradition. He adopted Aristotles categories almost unchanged, and his habilitation thesis was on Platos Ideas, although that was before his critical period. But meanwhile, there had been the scientific revolution, and the abandonment of the geocentric universe with its crystal spheres. Kant is continuous with the older tradition, but he is also responding to a radically altered intellectual landscape in a way that his immediate predecessors were not.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
N?g?rjuna likewise is accused by his Brahmin critics of nihilism (as was the Buddha). But no-thing-nessthe Buddhist emptinessis not nothing, not a nihilistic void as it is sometimes called. That idea of The Void evokes all kinds of existential terrors (or at least uneasiness, which I can hear you expressing!). It was a common rendering among 18th-century translators of Buddhism, and later echoed by Nietzsche and other European philosophers (Nietzsche called Buddhism the cry of an exhausted civilization).
In the OP, I footnoted a passage from the Kacc?yanagotta Sutta which goes to the heart of this apparent impasse:
[quote=Kacc?yanagotta Sutta]By and large, Kacc?yana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one.[/quote]
The import for the mind-created world argument is that the world (object, thing) outside perception neither exists nor does not exist. To say nothing can be said about it is not to claim it is something that does not exist. Rather, it neither exists nor doesnt exist; in fact, there is no it.
In broader philosophical terms, to speak of the unconditioned, absolute, or unborn is to gesture towards what is not any specific thing at all and is beyond the scope of discursive thought. This is not unlike what we find in Neoplatonism: the One of Plotinus cannot be an object of thought, or an object at all, since it transcends the distinction of self and world. The famous expression of the One as beyond Being means, in my interpretation, beyond the polarity of existence and non-existencebeyond anything of which something determinate can be said.
And you can see how this leads back to Kant and the limits of discursive reason: the Ding an sich is not a hidden object, but a marker of the boundary of thought itself, reminding us that whatever lies beyond cannot be spoken of in terms of existence or non-existence. And as language relies on those very distinctions to gain traction in the world of experience, it is in that sense beyond speech.
Unfortunately that is not a sensible, or even meaningful, thing to say?better just to remain silent. If philosophy is about anything it is certainly not about talking nonsense.
Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.
[However]
Philosophers in the Mahayana traditions hold some things to be ineffable; but they also explain why they are ineffable Now, you cant explain why something is ineffable without talking about it. Thats a plain contradiction: talking of the ineffable.
Embarrassing as this predicament might appear, N?g?rjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you cant even ask this question.[/quote]
But we were always going to hit this wall once straying into Buddhism. In Buddhism this whole world of appearances is nothing but maya. So how can these appearances, or a being enthralled by them, know, or account for the noumena when they themselves are part of the illusion?
It was this realisation that led the Buddha to sit under the bodhi tree.
Its a bit too radical for me, I dont usually go further east than Hinduism. Although I do generally consider the phenomenal world we know to be an artificial construct.
Status quo for Janus, the standard reply.
When the discussion extends beyond the tight boundaries of Janus' preconceived conceptual enclosure, Janus recoils and strikes. Nonsense! There's something outside those boundaries Janus, or else you wouldn't need to be making those judgements. And dismissing that external world as meaningless and unintelligible, does nothing to propagate understanding.
You are assuming this world is an illusion. How could you know that when everything you could possibly know comes form your experience in this world? Something can only be said to be illusory compared to something else that is real, but we have nothing real to compare it a purportedly illusory world to. If this whole world is an illusion then your very existence is itself an illusion, yet to say that makes no sense because your existence is all you have known.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Explain to me then what it could mean to say that something is, and yet that it neither exists nor does not exist?
Quoting Beyond True and False, Graham Priest
And yet Kant talks about the noumena that we cannot experience, cannot know?he says that there are things in themselves that appear to us as things, he says that they cannot exist in space and time, cause anything, or be differentiated or structured in any way. So, he contradicts himself by applying the concepts he says can only be applied to things we can experience by applying them to things he says we cannot experience.
He doesn't really know that we don't experience things in themselves, in fact he says that they are what appear to us as the things of experience, so in that sense we do experience them. It comes down to different ways of taking about it. It is of course simply true by definition that they do not appear to us as they are in themselves, because we can only know them as they appear to us. We also must acknowledge that we do not know everything about them, and could not know that we knew everything about them even if we did. Ignorance is a great part of the human condition.
Our concepts, what we say about things are not the things themselves. Our language is inherently dualistic?whereas we have no reason to think that nature itself is dualistic. The map (our conceptual models) is not the territory. Some things can only be shown, not said. Much is shown in literature which is not explicitly said. Much is shown by body language which is not said. A great part of our everyday experience cannot be captured adequately in discursive words and is better shown by poetic allusion. "A picture is worth a thousand words" and so on. All this is true, but none of it gives us license to speak pretentious nonsense in a discursive context.
Are you familiar with the concept of "potential"? In Aristotelian philosophy "potential" names a category which is required to describe becoming, change. This is what forms the category for those aspects of reality which are neither being nor not being, but may or may not be. Potential is very real, yet it cannot be said to exist nor not exist. Therefore it "is" in the sense of real, yet it neither exists nor does not exist.
Matter is in this category. This is because particular things exist as forms, determinate this and that, but they each have the potential to be something else. That potential is attributed to the thing's matter. But the matter itself cannot be a determinate this or that, or this would negate its definition as potential.
The other thing that comes to mind is the idea of the quantum foam, but in that context the term "virtual" not 'potential' is used. And the virtual particles are said to wink in and out of existence. which would mean that they exist then don't exist, not that they neither exist nor don't exist.
Actually M?y? is Hindu terminology. The Buddhist term is sa?s?ra, cyclical existence. Its idea of the illusory nature of experience is more that we wrongly attribute significance to things were attached to - not that the world is illusory per se, but we evaluate it wrongly.
We are often happy to talk of the 'infinite' yet struggle with the obvious problem of relating to the concept in an experiential sense. Sometimes it pays to speak in order to better present silence beyond the white noise that can never be experience -- when tinnitus dies away we assume the experience of silence exists.
Added to that I think that if you are speaking about something it is a contradiction to say it doesn't exist. You might say unicorns don't exist, but they do exist as imaginary creatures. Fictional characters exist as fictional characters and so on. To say there is a thing-in-itself and then to say it doesn't exist is a contradiction. We can say it doesn't exist in the same sense as our perceptions of objects do, but to say it neither exists nor doesn't exist is just a conceptually empty self-contradictory statement. What could it mean?
Im not claiming that the thing-in-itself is some ghostly half-real entity. My point is that existence and non-existence are categories that only make sense within experience, within a perspective. When you try to apply them outside that frameworki.e., to the 'unperceived in itself'they lose their meaning. Saying 'it neither exists nor does not exist' is shorthand for saying: the category of existence simply doesnt apply there. Thats not a contradiction but a recognition of a boundary or limit to knowledge.
Kants remark in the Transcendental Aesthetic that if we take away the thinking subject the whole world of appearances would vanish is often misconstrued. It doesnt mean the world literally ceases to be, but that the world as knowable is always ordered through the framework of an observer. The realist assumptionthat the world would be just the same even if there were no observerforgets this constituting role of the mind - which is precisely the point of the 'blind spot of science', which regards the world it studies as if it were simply there in itself, while forgetting that the very concepts of objectivity and existence already presuppose the standpoint of an observer.
These are different things though. Kant frames Noumena as something only talked about in the negative sense (meaning we cannot comprehend any 'aboutness'). For unicorns we can visual an 'aboutness' (menaing we have a sensory frame of reference for such a creature).
When talking about ontological epistemic conditions it can serve a useful function to delineate between the unknownable and the ... well ... 'that which is not to be spoken of'. I think this is an area where mysticism shines, with talk of Tao/Dao and other similar concepts in other branches of human exploration.
Anything that can reflect on the framework that is a human being is all there is. What is ineffable can still have a semblance of existence and so the concept of Noumena or Tao/Dao is presented as a roughshod adumbration of our human limitations (through which we can only say is everything).
Yes, but it doesn't follow that they cannot make sense pertaining to things which are inferred to exist outside of experience.
Quoting Wayfarer
If the world doesn't cease to be then it exists, in virtue of the meanings of the terms. Of course the world as known (not as knowable) is always known by a knower?again true by definition. As to the purported "realist assumption" that the world would be just the same if there were no percitpinets, well that's obviously wrong since without percipients there would be no perceptions, and perceptions and the judgements, if any, that grow out of them, are a part of the world. Apart from percptions and judgements, the world would be the same without any observer.
You are presenting a strawman of science?it deals with the world as perceived by us, no reasonable scientists would deny that. A naive realist might think of the eyes as passive "windows" that simply allow us to look out on a world of objects which exists in exactly the same form as our perceptions of them. That is obviously wrong, you don't have to think hard to realize that.
On the other hand there seems to be good reason to think that the way we perceive things is a real reflection of the way the world acts upon us, just as the different ways the world appears to animals is a real reflection of the ways in which the world acts upon them. It seems reasonable to think that objects have mass and shape, for example, independently of our perceptions of them.
Colour is another story, although it seems reasonable to think that the reflection of different wavelengths and intensities of light from different surfaces strictly determines, along with the visual organs of particular animals, what and how colours appear to them. I don't see that we have any good reason to deny those things even if they cannot be known with certainty.
Quoting I like sushi
And yet he talks about them in a positive sense, saying that noumena cannot exist in space and time, while being unable to offer an argument for that, other than that we know space and time only via our experience of phenomena. It just doesn't follow from the fact that we know space and time only via experience that there is no space and time outside that context. It is true to say that there is no space and time as experienced outside experience but that is just a tautology and as such tells us precisely nothing.
I don't know what to make of the rest of your post.
Its not a strawman at all. The Blind Spot of Science article in Aeon (and the later book by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson) addresses mainstream science, the assumptions of physicalism and objectivism, which you will also argue in favour of in other contexts. The point is not that individual scientists are naïve realists who think the eyes are passive windows, but that the methodological outlook of modern science brackets the constituting role of the subject, and then forgets that it has done so. Of course that attitude is contested, but it remains the default for many. So declaring that many scientists hold to scientific realism is hardly a 'straw man' :rofl: .
Quoting Janus
Precisely the point at issue! What world are you referring to? The moment you speak of the world apart from perceptions and judgments, you are already invoking the categories of thought and perception through which such a world is conceived. You have a world in mind, so to speak. To say it would be the same is to assume what is in questionnamely, that the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply outside the framework of an observer. Thats exactly the blind spot. To which your response is invariably: 'what "blind spot"? I don't see any "blind spot"!'
Know independently, yes.
I was referring to the spiritual teachings.
As to my own [I]beliefs[/I] (I dont hold beliefs, rather I seek wisdom), part of my predisposition on these issues is formed by spiritual teachings. Although, I pare it down to the bare minimum, so have very little in what could be described as beliefs. I am working on the hypothesis that physical material and the physical world is a concrete representation of noumena which is so dense and rigid that an entire cosmology of powerful forces is required to sustain it. Rather like if you imagine a delicate melody rendered in concrete blocks that can only be heard by physically banging them together.
As to the details of how, or why, or what, I withhold judgement.
He is talking about Noumena negatively because we have no sense of other-than space and time. That is the point. He cannot even 'point to' noumena only flit around it as a kind of negative limitation on human 'sensibility' (which is all we have).
Edit: 'it' is not an it! Language can make something seem to be that is not possible.
I would add that I believe strongly that anything we can say is possible to be brought into existence as a 'semblanc'e of such ideas. Like a Backwards Purple Banana Hoop or any other string of nonsense.
:up:
The natural sciences don't so much bracket the subject as it is the case that the subject is not within their purview. Science is not a human being so it doesn't "forget" anything. Scientific realism is the idea that science gives us real information about, and understanding of, the world. That cannot be proven to be so, of course, as nothing in science is proven, but it is far from an implausible, let alone an incoherent idea. The strawman is that the natural sciences forget the subject, when the reality is that the subject is irrelevant to them.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't hold to a two worlds conception of nature. There is only one world. As I said before I don't accept the bifurcation of nature into phenomena and noumena.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't question that the predicates you mention can meaningfully apply to what is independent from human perception?to me questioning that is a nonsense. It's not a blind spot, I understand your argument, and I simply disagree with it. I think it is you who has the blind spot in that you apparently cannot imagine that it is impossible that someone might interpret the situation differently than you and being consistent with that different interpretation disagree with you. Apparently you are too mired in your own dogma, your own sense of absolute rightness, to be able to understand that.
I think all language is inherently dualistic and nature, including our perceptual experience, is not. So, in that sense we can say that our language and hence our ideas and models are always more or less inadequate to reality.
Quoting Punshhh
You must believe that it is possible to attain wisdom and that some spiritual teaching or teachings can help you with that.
Okay.
Scientific realism, as you describe it, is not incoherentits indispensable within its proper scope. Whats incoherent is to extend it into a metaphysical claim: that the world is the way science describes it independently of the perspective through which such descriptions become possible. That is the leap from method to ontology, and that is exactly what the blind spot of science critique is about.
Quoting Janus
But youve just restated the issue in another guise. To say the predicates of sameness, objectivity, and existence can meaningfully apply to what is independent of perception is exactly the move that the blind spot critique is drawing attention to. Of course it feels like nonsense to you to question thatbecause youre presupposing the very standpoint Im asking us to examine!
The point is not that your position is inconsistent. Its perfectly consistent within the realist frame. The point is that this frame cannot account for its own conditions of possibilitynamely, the constituting role of the subject. That is what Kant meant when he said that if you remove the subject, the world of appearances vanishes. It doesnt mean reality is just in the mind, but that our very talk of existence and objectivity already presupposes the subjects framework.
So when you say you understand the argument and disagree, that is precisely what the blind spot looks like from inside it. I dont think its dogmatic to point out the conditions that make any interpretation possible. You and I can only disagree because there is already a subjectivity through which concepts like existence, sameness, and objectivity have meaning. Thats not my dogma; its the very ground on which both of us are standing when we argue.
This is not necessarily the case. That is simply how we represent what is named as "potential", as something built into the actual. This is because our knowledge is strictly formal, it consists of forms. And so any understanding of the potential of the world, must be approached through the actuality of the world. For all we know, the so-called "noumenal" could be the potential. Notice that Kant speaks of "the possibility" of sense appearance, and names space and time this way, placing them into the larger category of potential.
Furthermore, we notice, observe and experience sensation at the present in time, now. However, the potential for whatever happens at the present must be prior to it, therefore this can never be sensed, nor experienced in any way. So we cannot accurately understand the potential of a thing as being built into the actuality of that thing, because it is necessarily prior to the thing, temporally. Now we tend to represent the potential for one thing, as the actuality of another thing, in a the way of determinist causation.
But this cannot provide an accurate understanding either, for two principal reasons. First, it produces an infinite regress of "actual things" one being the potential for the next. That would mean that everything in the world is determined, but determined from nothing, no start, infinite regress. The second reason is more complicated, and requires an understanding of how we relate to "potential" in our active experience. Whenever there is potential (understood here as possibility), there is always a multitude of possible outcomes. That is the nature of potential. It implies that an active form of selection is required to produce the outcome which actualizes. If we say that this is an actual "thing" in the sense described above, we deny the reality of selection, and move back to the determinist infinite regress of things, described above. Therefore the active form of selection cannot be the actuality of a thing.
This is why Aristotle proposed two principal senses of "act" . The one sense is the "actuality" of the thing, as what the thing is, its form. The other sense is "activity". The two are fundamentally incompatible, as the thing's form is understood as static being, what the thing is, while activity is understood as the active cause of change.
Quoting Janus
OK, this is a good starting premise. Now, you see that the potential for a thing is necessarily prior in time to the thing's actual existence. Do you understand the two reasons I provided above, as to why "potential" must be a distinct category, and cannot be adequately understood as "built into the actuality of the thing"? Even if we qualify "the thing" as a collection of all things, such that potential is passed from one thing to another as energy, we do not get the premises required to adequately understand "potential". We get lost in an infinite regress. Further, if you believe in the reality of potential, you must also believe in what this implies, the need for an act of selection any time one possibility is actualized rather than another. The act of selection cannot be attributed to "an actual thing", or else the reality of selection is negated.
This is a gross misunderstanding if you are referring to Kant. There is no bifurcation at all.
I would like to offer, for your consideration, the idea, the interpretation, that Kant isnt talking about noumena at all. He is talking about the faculty of understanding, and its proclivity for exceeding its warrant, such warrants having already been specified in preceding sections of his critical theory. It may be nothing more than an extreme example of common knowledge, that humans are wont to imagine all sorts of weird stuff, he merely explaining the fundamental causal process in play when we do that.
Especially considering the title of the section in which the subject is brought to bear: Of the Ground of the Division of all Objects .. (A236/B295) One should grasp that the objects being divided according to a certain ground, does not presuppose those objects, but only the relation of conceptions in general contained in a ground, which makes a division predicated on such relation, possible.
Remember? I can think what I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself , which is precisely what understanding is doing, when empirical conceptions of possible objects arise from it alone, the empirical representation of which, from intuition, is entirely lacking.
Ever notice Kant never defines what a noumenon is, but only the advent of it as a conception, and the consequences thereof?
In the text is found the categorical, re: apodeitically certain, judgement . Thus the criterion of the possibility of a conception (not of its object) is the definition of it, in which the unity of the the truth of all that may be immediately deduced from it, and finally, the completeness of what has been thus deduced, constitute the requisites for the reproduction of the whole conception. (B115)
So are we not forced to admit, insofar as Kant offers no definition of what a noumenon is, offers no descriptions of what a noumenon would be like, but authorizes (B115) its validity as a mere possible, non-contradictory, conception, there can be no talk of noumena as such, but only the conception itself, represented by that word, which is actually nothing other than talk of the modus operandi of the faculty of understanding in opposition to its own rules?
The conception is a possible thought, therefore is not self-contradictory. (I can think what I please )
The effort to represent the thought without the required sensuous intuition necessary of all empirical objects, is. ( .and with this I contradicted myself)
The talk is not of noumena; it is of the foibles of pure understanding of which noumena is merely an instance, and from which the ground of the division resides in understanding being limited to cognition of phenomena at the expense of noumena.
Think about it, if you like. Or not.
I am on a path of seeking guidance in this from something like an inner being, or soul, or whatever you want to call it, within my being. Independent of rational thought, although there is a a process of intuition and contemplation involved, but secondary in importance.
As such beliefs are relegated to a thinking mind, or commentary on the periphery after the fact. An insight might take the form of an encounter with an insect, or the play of light, or noticing of a weird juxtaposition, or series of random events in the world which for a moment have a meaning. The meaning is not necessarily intellectualised, or contemplated. The idea is to ease the path of the development whatever way seems appropriate.
Au contraire my friend. Is this not a belief system in and of itself? "Momentary (or perhaps rather conditional) utilitarianism"? Sure this might be watered down or reduced to mere "common sense" and "logic" itself. But it remains a system, whether ingrained to all intelligent, thinking beings or naturally adopted by such out of necessity, it remains a system in its own right and of its own merit.
I dont hold beliefs other than what beliefs are necessary to live a life.
So here is my belief system. Also beliefs are intellectually defined and held positions, or loyalties. I am relegating such things to the chitta chatta of my mind while continuing to go about living my life.
That much should have been unmistakable. For that I apologize. You must understand, I rarely have the gall to interject myself into such established arguments (60 pages and counting!) unless, shall we say, the wine glass has been broken out. :smile:
That said, however. That said. This sentence of yours is interesting. One might consider such a sentence to be superfluous considering, surely, there are people alive, perhaps even living quite well, who don't hold the beliefs you do. Are there not? It's just interesting, is all. Not to deviate, but only an interesting short thought experiment in the context that it relates to the overarching theme of the discussion, of course.
So, I suppose, not to nitpick, but for debate for debate sake, one might ask, what are these beliefs "necessary to live a life" you hold, specifically and in detail? Are you certain all people living life hold them as well? Could they not have different interpretations that fundamentally change the idea of such concepts from your own? :chin:
Quoting Punshhh
Loyalty, eh. Heh. Sorry. such terms distract me due to the complex history of my own life experience. I might say, for some, loyalty exists only in the form of distraction from willfully and intentionally placed fear, often from the same person who claims to relieve such. Ah, no matter. Ignore that. For now.
Quoting Punshhh
Aren't we all, more or less? :grin:
This is a 'yogic pun', of course. In Eastern philosophy 'citta' is variously translated as 'mind', 'heart', or 'being'. According to the classical texts of yoga, the citta (mind-stream) is continuously disturbed or polluted by sense-impressions, cravings, longings, memories of past traumas and so on, which manifest as 'vritti', thought-forms or disturbances. The yogic aspirant aims for the stilling of these vritti, hence the long and arduous periods of 'dhyana' (meditation) and entering states of inner stillness (samadhi). A higher state of samadhi is called 'nirvikalpa', where 'nir-' means ' negation of' and 'vikalpa' are 'discriminative ideas'. So, the negation of thought-forms and inner stillness. Very far from my normal busy mind.
I think this is a very important point. "Noumena" for Kant is analogous to "matter" for Aristotle. They are strictly conceptual, not referring to any independent thing as people are inclined to believe. But "matter" is more like the limit of conception, the closest we can come to contradiction without crossing that boundary. Then many people assume these concepts to be a description of some independent feature of reality. But they are not descriptions at all, just concepts which somehow represent what cannot be described.
Quoting Outlander
Surely you understand that each individual is a unique person in a unique position. The majority of the beliefs which are necessary for me to live my life are probably not even similar to the beliefs necessary for you to live your life. That's how varied life actually is, because we adapt ourselves to our environment, which itself is extremely varied.
That is a stretch too far. We can -- and do -- measure matter. For Noumena there is nothing to say anything about. The very idea of noumena (negative only) is an adumbration of a null concept.
It is fully understandable why people repeatedly misconstrue what Kant meant as it is fairly obvious and fairly obtuse at the same time.
No worries, I enjoy what you write.
I was using the phrase to say that I hold as few beliefs as I can get away with. I would rather do away with the word completely, but I accept it is used a lot, with various meanings. So I try to keep it to precise definitions where it is used. Janus was asking about my beliefs, which is why I wrote that post and explained how I arrive at intellectual and other positions without having beliefs about them.
I seem to have lived a charmed life and often realise that others have had more complex and, or traumatic, conflicted lives. I realise how fortunate I am in this regard and yet still have all the usual emotional, anxiety, confidence hang ups that most people have. Even after many years of defusing and attending to them.
I know a person who always has something to worry about, sometimes he does actuality have a problem, even though often I can see that he caused it himself. Made a rod for his own back, so to speak. Now he has retired and shouldnt have a care in the world. But is still just as worried, seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders at times. But it is all of his own making and it doesnt matter what you say to him, he never reaches the point where it is sorted out and he can just sit back and enjoy life.
Pun is in my name (;-)
A20/B34 (in the Transcendental Aesthetic): Kant says that in appearances there is that which corresponds to sensation (the matter) and that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations (the form).
Here he is explicit: sensation provides the matter of appearances, while space and time are the form in which that matter is ordered.
This is Kants way of transposing the Aristotelian hyl?morph? distinction into the transcendental register: not about substances in the world, but about the conditions under which appearances are given to us. Konstantin Pollok has even described Kants position as transcendental hylomorphism, where the form/matter schema of Aristotelian philosophy is reworked at the transcendental level (ref).
Perhaps; youre more qualified to say than I. If I were to guess, though, Id probably go with substance in Kant relates to matter in Aristotle.
If it is true in Aristotle matter acquires form to become particular substance, and because it is true in Kant matter acquires form to become particular phenomena, then original to both is matter, which leaves Kantian noumena, as it relates to matter, out in the cold ...right where its supposed to be.
But I dont know how Aristotle treats matter at its inception, so .
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If only those many people would just study the damn book. One does not have to accept what hes saying, but should comprehend the point hes making, the major premise in the ground of the division of all objects.
There is a large variety of things which we measure, and each has a name. There is also a variety of different types of measurements. I've never heard anyone claim to be measuring matter. What type of measurement do you think that would be?
Quoting Wayfarer
I wouldn't say that this is explicit. "Form" and "matter" are terms you apply in your interpretation. Aristotelian terms do not correlate very well to Kantian terms, because Kant did not stay true to the Aristotelian structure. Aristotle was explicit in defining "form" with actuality, and "matter" with potential. But Kant blurs the boundary of separation with concepts like "forms of sensibility". Notice that "sensibility" is a potential, so his structure has 'forms of potential'. In this way Kant allows potential (matter perhaps) into the mind, as the a priori intuitions. But Kant is proposing a new way of dealing with the age old active-passive intellect dilemma. The need for "noumena" demonstrates that Kant's proposal, though novel, is not conclusive.
Looking at your statement now, you say "space and time are the form". And, yes, they are the "form", by Kant's words, but they are the form of sensibility, which makes this supposed "form" a potential, inconsistent with Aristotle. And, as potential, these forms of sensibility, space and time, do not possess the principle of activity which is required to order matter. So Kant's proposed system lacks this required principle of activity.
Notice it is "that which corresponds to sensation" which you give the name "matter" to, but in the Aristotelian hylomorphism, it is the form of the particular, not the matter, which is supposed to correspond. Because the form is received in abstraction, it is necessary that there is something passive, potential, within the intellect. That is the passive intellect, which gave the scholastics all the problems, because they wanted the intellect to be purely actual, an independent form, to support absolute knowledge, the afterlife etc.. The passive aspect for Kant is the a priori intuitions, space and time.
Quoting Mww
I'd agree with this. The difference between Kant and Aristotle then, seems to be that "particular phenomena", for Kant is occurring within the mind, whereas Aristotle has instances of "particular substance" independent from the mind, things with an identity. The reality of the "particular substance" is supported by the concept of matter for Aristotle. Since Kant places the potential, which Aristotle assigned to matter, into the mind, as the conditions for the possibility of phenomena, there is no need for the concept of matter. The a priori intuitions take the place of matter. Therefore that entire Aristotelian world view, this assumption about 'the external', that it consists of particular instances of substance, things with an Aristotelian identity by the law of identity, supported by "matter", is thrown aside, to be replaced with "noumena".
Quoting Mww
Philosophy, metaphysics and ontology especially, is extremely complex and difficult. A great philosopher is very difficult to understand, requiring much study, and usually subject to an array of different interpretations. However, what generally happens is that a very simple interpretation starts to develop, which clings to specific terms, and since it is simple and easy to understand it rapidly gains in popularity, becoming the conventional understanding of that philosophy. Of course "simple" is the converse of "complex" so the conventional understanding is never very adequate, or properly representative.
A good example is Plato, and Platonism. The simple, conventional interpretation, known as Platonism, holds that Plato promoted the philosophy of independent ideas like mathematical objects, derived from Pythagorean idealism. However, a thorough reading of Plato will reveal that he actually rejected this Pythagorean idealism, and provided refutation of it in his later writings. But even in those ancient days there was divisiveness as to what principles constituted "Platonism". Aristotle, whom many argue was a true Platonist continued with the refutation of Pythagorean idealism, while the Neo-Platonists, who maintained the "Platonist" name, persisted in promoting Pythagorean idealism.
Kilograms. That is how we do physics.
Telegram from the future. He will reply something along the lines of "weight is not mass, neither is size, necessarily". And likely how mass is merely a phenomenon of gravity or some business like that.
How do you measure a 6 inch solid stone and a 6' empty box? There are dimensions and weight. And the two computed together do offer more or less the mass of such, but there's no reliable measurement because it wouldn't mean anything effectual or useful but for physical beings in a physical world of elements that only care about size and weight.
It's like stepping off into the void into a world where everything is different. It's just not something many people do because, by all observable information, would be a waste of time.
For example, antimatter is a thing that exists, mostly in space. It basically defies all definition of matter, while at the same time technically obeying all the rules, just, per se, it's own special version of said rules.
Still, antimatter is a thing that exists so it's not "nothing" as in lack of something, per se, therefore, in some usages of the word, is still matter that cannot be measured by traditional means.
Is this to say, in Aristotle things come with identity?
Identity being what a thing is, in Kant, identity is assigned to things, not for what it is, but for as what it is to be known. The so-called, and mistakenly labeled Copernican Revolution, although he would probably cringe at hearing it called out as such.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Absolutely. Hopefully, in such case, theres a common ground, an unarguable starting point, from which the divergences can be reconciled.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good synopsis. Thanks for that.
Sure, i see a lot of things weighed in kilograms, but never matter. As I said, I've never heard of anyone trying to measure something called matter. I've seen people measuring and weighing all sorts of different things, but I've never heard of someone measuring something they call matter. Tell me where you think you might find matter being weighed in kilograms. I know a number of physicists, and never heard them talk about weighing matter.
Quoting Mww
That's right one of the things Aristotle is famous for, is the law of identity, "a thing is the same as itself". This law puts the identity of a thing within the thing itself, rather than something which we say about the thing. Hegel was very critical of that law.
Quoting Mww
This is how "identity" is commonly understood today, as what we assign to a thing in knowing it. But Plato showed how sophists abused this principle, because it annihilates the separation between what we say about things, and how things truly are. Truth gets dissolved into justification when we have no principles which stipulate that there is such a thing as the way something really is. So when a thing's identity is simply what we say about the thing, then as long as it is accepted conventionally (justified), then it is the truth, because there is no such thing as an independent "the way that the thing is".
That is why Aristotle insisted on the law of identity, which tells us that even though we don't necessarily know the way that a thing really is independently of us, there is such a thing. It sort of puts truth out of our grasp, but recognizes that there is such a thing. The ontological ramification is that this divides the assumed independent reality into a multiplicity of particular things, each with its own identity. Then those who hold "the One" as first principle would need to support this proposed unity. Kant's use of "noumena" and "noumenon", indicates that he supports this multiplicity of things. However, his principles sort of disallow us from even having that knowledge, of whether the assumed independent reality is simply one, or a multiplicity.
What happened with Whitehead, and process philosophy in general, is that when the supposed independent reality is understood to consist of process (consistent with "energy" as the basic foundation), then principles are required to explain and understand divisions and separations, individuation in general, because it\s all one big process. Then it becomes very difficult for process philosophy to explain why we perceive separations, and divisions which constitute individual things. However, substance philosophy really does not have any advantage in this matter, because they still have no principle to account for why we perceive individual things. Substance philosophy just takes the existence of individuals for granted, by the law of identity. But until we question this, what we take for granted, we won't figure out why we perceive individuals. Maybe, since things are supposed to have a 'centre of gravity', it has something to do with gravity, whatever that is.
This is a gross, unargued bare assertion. Do an internet search on 'two worlds theory vs two aspects theory in Kant scholarship'. You might learn something.
Quoting Mww
It is a tautology that we cannot know things in themselves if 'thing in itself' is defined as what we cannot know, which is the same as to say that all we can cognize are phenomena, and the idea of noumena represents the 'ultimate or true nature of things', which we cannot perceive, but can only speculate about.
So, no one in their right mind would claim that we can know what is defined as that which we cannot know. The thing is though that we can speculate, makes inferences, about the nature of things in themselves or noumena from what we know of phenomena.
So, Kant says that things in themselves cannot exist in space and time. It is true, again by definition, that things in themselves cannot exist in our perceptual space and time, if things in themselves are defined as whatever lies beyond the possibility of human cognition. On the other hand, we can think and speak in a different register and say that things in themselves (things which have their own mind-independent existence) just are what appear to us as phenomena. Interpreted the situation thus we can be said to know things in themselves but only as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves.
Then we are not struggling with an explicitly dualist view, because the things that appears to us are the same things that have their own existence apart from our perceptions of them, it is just that all we can know of them are their perceptible qualities.
Then we can speculate that things in themselves may exist in their own space and time, which cannot be proven but which seems most plausible since an undifferentiated thing in itself that purportedly gives rise to our experience of a spatiotemporal world seems far less plausible than things which have their own existence as different from all other things. For a start "giving rise" implies causation or at least "providing the conditions". How could something completely undifferentiated cause to exist, or provide the conditions for, anything differentiated. To me that idea makes no sense at all.
When it comes down to speculating about noumena or things in themselves there can be no discernible fact of the matter which could confirm or disconfirm any conjectures, so it comes down to what each of us might find to be the most useful and/or plausible way of thinking and talking about them.
My beef is with the dogmatic "thought police" prescriptions about what we can and cannot coherently think and talk about. For me it makes no sense to say "of course things have their own existence independent of any mind in the empirical sense, but not in the transcendental sense'. I see this prescription as dogmatic because there can be no strictly determinable transcendental sense.
If Kant is not positing that there is something which gives rise to phenomena then his position is no different than Phenomenalism.
Quoting Punshhh
Without some criteria to determine what belongs in that category I could say that anything I believe is necessary to live a life. Strictly speaking, to live a life all I need to believe are things relating to the "necessities' of life, and spiritual growth is not one of them, certainly not for most people. Of course you can say it is necessary for you?but perhaps that is just because you have come to think it is necessary for you, that is you have come to believe it.
You say you have discovered things and/ or adapted things as a practice, but you wouldn't waste your time if you didn't believe in the truth of those discoveries, or the efficacy of those practices.
Belief is not that hard to define?anything you are committed to holding as being true is a belief.
Quoting Janus
Maybe you simply mispoke and meant 'phenomena and things-in-themselves'? If so no big deal :)
I am asserting that there are people who misunderstand the difference between 'things-in-themselves' and 'noumena'. I am also asserting -- having read Kant quite thoroughly -- that it makes no sense to talk of a 'bifurcation of nature' between 'phenomena and noumena'. That is very much a gross misunderstanding, but a very common one.
What is the difference between noumena and things in themselves according to you?
Quoting I like sushi
A bare assertion is not sufficient. Why does it make no sense to talk of a bifurcation of nature between phenomena and noumena? You say to think that is a common misunderstanding?do you mean among the population of amateur philosophers or do you mean among Kant scholars. Are you a Kant scholar?
If a 'two worlds' reading of Kant in regards to things as experienced and things in themselves is a coherent and consistent interpretation of Kant's philosophy, then as far as I can that would entail a bifurcation of nature.
I don't care so much about the fine points of Kantian terminology, I am more interested in the substance of his arguments. If a world of things in themselves gives rise to a world of things as they appear to us, then that would seem to posit two very different worlds?one we cannot have access to at all, and one we do access. If the world we inhabit (the empirical world) is an "idea" or "representation" as Schopenhauer reckons is the logical conclusion of Kant's system even though Kant may not have explicitly said so, and the world we have no access to is the objectively real world in itself, then which is the real world and which the ideal. I always thought Kant had this backwards, and I have also read a considerable amount of, and about, Kant.
If we want to say that the world of appearances just is nature (for us at least) then we do find a bifurcation even in the 'two aspect' interpretation, or so it seems to me. I say this because, unless we opt for sheer phenomenalism or Hegelian absolute idealism, we are positing that nature is for us divided into what we have access to and what we don't, and this is still a kind of dualism for all intents and purposes.
Phenomena is everything grounded in our sensibility.
Noumena is not Phenomena.
Things-in-themselves are the intuitively inpenetrable 'whereness' of Phenomena. Scare quotes to denote how it makes little sense to talk of something meaningless to space and time.
I think that is as simple as I can express Kant's view.
The subtle difference in meaning between things-in-themselves is the approach. Noumena is conceptually useful as a limitation whereas things-in-themselves helps to appreciate the aboutness of phenomena as our means of knowing the nature of existence.
A lot of this makes more sense form a phenomenological perspective (which is how I originally approached academic philosophy). Consciousness is 'of something' (the intentional), so if you follow that line of thinking further down the track you presume a grounding function.
If you have literally no interest in phenomenology then I can see how none of the above would serve any purpose nor inspire you to look further. I draw the line at people like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida myself. If you draw it at Kant so be it. It would be a pretty boring world if we all looked at things in the same way :)
Quoting Janus
Someone may perhaps say the same as to your position and say for all intents and purposes it is just a kind of solipsism. I would not say this -- or what you say above -- are at all charitable in terms of interpretation.
If you refuse to believe he meant noumena as a negative concept, and that things-in-themselves was used as a means of distinguishing the subtle difference between 'unknown,' unknownable' and 'nothing' that is your choice I guess.
It is absolutely skirting on the fringes of useful language and is only likley to serve you if you hold a certain view. Much like those who study Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault are happy to frolic in their obtuse verbosity I am not. Regardless, I find them of negative interest and can take something away from reading them.
But why taint the rest of ones interests with it. It ties one to a rigidity of thought and confines one to a hierarchy of sorts of what is true, or not true. One is then tied to these conclusions and loyalties.
In the practice I describe, such rigidity is stifling. In order to develop a sensitivity to nature and a wisdom regarding reality. It is important to free the mind(not just the intellectual parts), from this and become receptive to more subtle activity in ones life and surroundings. Yes there is thinking, analysis and the development of philosophies, ideologies, after the fact. But this is as I say secondary and only provides a helpful feedback where appropriate to the sense of communion I describe.
To insist that belief plays a role in this is to imply a role played by the ego and thinking processes and their conclusions. But, it is primary to remove this aspect of being from the practice prior to and in order to carry it out.
It is an act of being, akin to the act of being, with presence, practiced all the time by our cousins, the plants and animals. Who dont have the intellectual mind, to confuse the issue.
It is not necessary to live a life, so does not come under the purview of necessary beliefs. It is an interest, a leisure, pursuit, an interest.
There is a guiding process going on, but it is intuitive, not rational. Is there a necessity for intuitive activity in the mind to require beliefs? In order to carry out its intuiting?
Agreed; no struggle.
Quoting Janus
Agreed, given the conditions which make that speculation plausible. It just isnt a Kantian speculation and to which I only object because I think it is being made to look like it. In this particular speculation, while Kant also cannot prove things-in-themselves may exist in their own space and time, he only has to prove they cannot, in order for his entire metaphysical thesis with respect to human knowledge, to have an empirical limit. And he does exactly that, by proving .transcendentally .that space and time belong to the cognizing subject himself, which makes the existence of things in them, impossible.
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Quoting Janus
Agreed, in principle, for the transcendental sense has nothing whatsoever to do with the empirical domain of things, that belonging to understanding alone as reference to causality. It follows it is just as true things have their own existence independent of any mind in a transcendental sense, as it does in an empirical sense. All of which is quite beside the point, insofar as all which concerns us as knowing subjects, is any of that which is entirely dependent on the mind.
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Quoting Janus
Dunno about all that, but its moot anyway, for he most certainly does posit something which gives rise to .makes possible the representation of ..phenomena. The whole 700-odd page critical treatise begins with it.
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Quoting Mww
I recognize nothing that hints you have considered, so I shall assume youre not so inclined. Or you have and kept it to yourself. Which is fine; just thought youd be interested.
The problem, is that science demonstrates to us, that at the very small scale, quantum particles, and at the very large scale, spatial expansion, our intuitions of space and time are highly inadequate for understanding the presumed things in themselves. So we ought to think of these intuitions, space and time, as useful and purposeful, and highly evolved, but most likely not representative of the supposed things in themselves, because they didn't evolve for that purpose. Then to "speculate that things in themselves may exist in their own space and time" is really misguided speculation, because the way that these supposed things in themselves actual exist is probably not at all similar to how we understand them, through the intuitions of space and time. Intuition is known to mislead.
But the distinction isnt a matter of thought-police prescriptions. Its a matter of recognizing limits. The transcendental sense isnt an extra layer of metaphysical speculationits the recognition that our very categories of existence, objectivity, and independence only make sense within the framework of possible experience.
When you say of course things exist independently of any mind, youre already employing the categories of existence and independence. The transcendental point is simply: those categories have meaning only in relation to a subject. Its not dogma, but an analysis of how thought works.
So youre right that theres no empirical way to confirm or disconfirm claims about noumenathats precisely why Kant warns against treating them as if they were positive objects. The transcendental sense is not something determinable in the way empirical claims are; its the limit-condition that makes empirical determination possible at all.
You keep calling it dogma, but it seems to me the real issue is that youre not willing to admit that our knowledge has limits. The transcendental distinction isnt a prescription about what were allowed to think so much a recognition that our categories of thought dont reach beyond the conditions of possible experience.
And I suspect the reason you push back so strongly is that you have an instinctive aversion to the very word transcendentalfor you it smacks of God talk, which is why you keep insisting it must be dogmatic. But thats really just your pre-existing conception of the question, not whats actually at stake.
Besides, calling Kants Critique of Pure Reason dogmatic is wildly unjust. Dogma is the very last thing Kant wanted to propagate. His whole project was precisely the opposite: to dismantle dogmatism by showing that speculative claims about the world-in-itself go beyond what reason can justify. What you keep dismissing as dogma is in fact Kants attempt to set clear limits, so that reason doesnt mistake its own constructions for knowledge of things as they are in themselves.
I don't see myself as one of the thought police on this forum. That honour goes to all of those who squeal every time the word 'transcendent' is so much as mentioned.
Quoting I like sushi
Phenomenology intentionally brackets the question of the existence of an external world, and concerns itself with understanding the nature of human experience. Phenomenology can tell us nothing about metaphysics, as it is not in the business of speculation. As Husserl declared: "to the things themselves"( the "things" here being 'things as we experience them'. It is the accumulation of scientific knowledge that places us in a better position to make plausible metaphysical inferences to the best explanation.
When Kant says we cannot know noumena or how things exist in themselves as opposed to how they exist for us, he is basing that on a consideration of only what we can via reflection on perceptual experience, establish that we can have direct cognitive access to. And yet he acknowledges, in order to escape Berkelyan idealism or Humean phenomenalism, that in order for there to be appearances there must be "something" that appears. It is the nature of that "something" which concerned traditional speculative metaphysics, which relied on the idea that intellectual intuition as to the nature of things is possible. Kant debunked this idea, and yet still wished to say what could not be the case with things in themselves or noumena.
If we have no cognitive access to that "something" are we nonetheless able to coherently speculate as to the nature of its existence? Of course we are. But what will be the best guide to such speculation? Intuition? Imagination? Common sense? Everyday experience? Science? I would say common sense, everyday experience and science are the best guides as to what metaphysical speculations are most plausible. It remains, though, that metaphysical questions are not strictly decidable, since any proposed thesis is neither logically provable or empirically demonstrable.
Quoting Mww
I wasn't attempting to make it look like a Kantian speculation. On the other hand, I think there are inconsistencies in Kant. "Things in themselves" is the idea that there is more than just one thing that appears to us as the stupendous diversity of phenomena. Schopenhauer took him to task on this very point ( not saying I agree with Schopenhauer's "solution"). The point is that we cannot make sense of a single something appearing to us as a diversity of commonly perceived phenomena.
You say that Kant "proves" that things-in-themselves cannot exist in space and time, when all he can prove if anything is that they don't exist (and that proof by mere definition) in our perceptual space and time.
Quoting Mww
I agree that as knowing subjects that is all that concerns us. But we can also know what seems most plausible to us when it comes to questions concerning speculative matters which are strictly both logically and empirically undecidable, since such speculating and weighing of what seems most plausible is also entirely a function of the mind. I say "function of the mind" rather than "entirely dependent on the mind", because the latter formulation may mislead into forgetting of experience.
See above.
Quoting Mww
Quoting Mww
I did not have the time to address that at the time. I say that speculative conceptions of the kind of bare bones in-themselves nature of the objects that appear to us as phenomena is not at all contradictory. That is just an interpretation-dependent stipulative judgement that I don't accept. It's all about what can make sense to talk about. Juts as I can sensibly talk about the things I perceive having an existence of their own, I can sensibly speculate about what the idea of such things seems to logically entail. "Things" implies differentiation and form, and differentiation implies space and time. If we are going to talk about things at all, then we should be consistent with what logic is implicit in thinking in terms of things. Of course thinking about things is based on concepts formed on account of the actual cognition of things. Then if we posit things beyond cognition we are in speculative territory. But if all such speculation is incoherent, or worse, contradictory, then forget about things in themselves altogether and go with absolute idealism or phenomenalism.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Whose limits, and justified by appealing to what exactly?
Quoting Wayfarer
No, it's a simple truism being unsupportedly amplified into a purported stricture. You simply have no warrant to pontificate on what may or may not have meaning to others. It's dogma, pure and simple, but I can't make you see that, you have to come to that realization yourself.
You even agree that it makes sense to say that things existed prior to humans. Then you go on to say it makes sense in an empirical context, but not in a transcendental context. I don't accept that bifurcation. "transcendental sense" is an artificial construct, which is neither logically nor empirically supported. So what is it supported by? If you say phenomenology I won't agree, because the whole remit of phenomenology consists in reflection the nature of experience. Science consists in investigation and analysis of the nature of the phenomena we experience. Phenomenology='What is the nature of experience ' and science= 'what is the nature of the things we experience'.
Quoting Wayfarer
We need not talk about them at all except that it seems obvious, even to Kant, that if there are appearances there must be something that appears. What is the nature of that something about which we only know how it appears? It's not directly subject to investigation. But if there is something that appears we know how it appears.
And we know that the idea of something completely amorphous appearing as a world of diversity seems mighty implausible, actually makes no sense at all. If we want to speculate then I say that's the place to start. But I acknowledge we cannot say much, even about what seems most plausible. I also acknowledge that it doesn't really matter, it changes nothing about how we live our lives.
Quoting Wayfarer
If you think that it shows you don't read my posts closely. Of course I admit that our knowledge has limits, but I'm not a fan of pre-determining those limits. Of course we can talk about limits in tautologous way?once we conceive of objects as being "appearances for us" and "things in themselves" it is true by mere definition that if we define 'in itself' as what lies beyond 'how it appears' then we cannot have cognitive access to the in itself. But it doesn't follow logically that speculative talk about what it might be is meaningless.
Quoting Wayfarer
Here we go again with the psychological explanations! I don't so much object to the word 'transcendental' because we can only really reflect on what we experience and on what we can imagine. "The idea of transcendence just indicates that we must recognize that we don't know everything, and that we are bound to think that there must be something beyond what we experience and imagine. We inevitably imagine a transcendental world or aspect of the world that exists somehow apart from and independently of our world of cognitively apprehended objects.
The natural attitude, based on the fact of everyday experience that we all experience the same objects at the same times and places, is that those objects exist independently of our perception of them. That's really it. We don't know what that independent exist is like, we don't even know that there really is an independent existence. But phenomenalism explains nothing, so we are bound to think of an independent existence in some form or other.
Anything we think about it is more or less underdetermined. What thoughts are more determined and what less is the salient question. As Kant says, and @Mww quoted recently: "we can think whatever we like provided we don't contradict ourselves'. The thought that there is a god in whose mind all the objects we encounter exist is not logically contradictory, and nor is the idea of a mind-independent spatiotemporal world of real existents. Choose your poison. I know which I find the more plausible. But to repeat?it doesn't really matter, what matters is how well we live the lives we know we have.
Quoting Wayfarer
Of course you wouldn't see yourself as one of the thought-police. I have no argument with the idea of the transcendental per se. It's the way that some use it to push their dogma, and try to impose what I see as bullshit limits on what others can or should think that spurs me to respond.
Ours the limits of human cognition. And justified by what? By the recognition that our categories of thought (existence, objectivity, causality, etc.) are the very means by which the world is knowable to us. To apply them beyond possible experience - to imagine a world as it would be outside any cognition of it - is to use them outside the domain in which they have sense. Thats the force of the transcendental distinction: not a ban on thinking, but a clarification of what kind of thinking makes sense.
What has never entered your mind is not anything, obviously. And when it has entered your mind, it has done so via the senses, and has been interpreted by your intellect. What is outside that, neither exists nor does not exist. It is not yet anything, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. This is not dogma.
Quoting Janus
It is not a 'bifurcation'. That term is usually associated with A N Whitehead and is a different matter. In fact, the division is between the world as known to us, and what you think it must be, beyond that.
Quoting Janus
Im not laying down a stricture about what others may or may not think. Im pointing out that when we use concepts like existence or independence, we are already relying on the framework of experience that gives those concepts their sense. That isnt dogma its analysis. To ignore that is not to be freer in ones thinking, but simply to overlook the conditions that make thought coherent in the first place.
Quoting Janus
I dont disagree except Id stress that the natural attitude you invoke is exactly what phenomenology and Kantian critique are meant to interrogate. Yes, we all tacitly assume that the objects we encounter exist anyway and independently of perception. But to take that assumption as foundational is precisely to overlook the constitutive role played by the observer.
Youre right that phenomenalism explains nothing; but the transcendental approach is not phenomenalism. Its not saying objects are only in the mind, but that our very idea of an independent existence is already framed by the categories through which we think. Thats why Kant speaks of the transcendental not as another realm to imagine, but as the condition that makes imagining and experience possible at all.
So Id put it like this: youre right that it doesnt really matter whether we speculate about God or noumena. But it does matter whether we recognize the limits of our categories, because that recognition is the difference between naïve realism (taking the natural attitude as ultimate) and critical philosophy (understanding it as a conditioned and contingent reaiity).
Quoting Janus
Do you see the difference? Don't you think it's very significant? This is the subject of this quote, which I've posted quite a few times already, about Husserl's criticism of naturalism, from the Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology:
Why do you think Husserl says that conscious acta cannot be properly understood from with the natural outlook? Do you agree? Do you think it's significant?
Quoting Janus
But it is likely to be dogmatic.
This is why in mysticism the intellect, like the ego is held on a leash and is only of secondary importance (while acknowledging that they are necessary in the cogitation of experience).
The primary means is in seeking to develop the whole being. So that rather than to work out truths, one walks into/upon truths, as if to walk into a room, or through a door.
This is what I see as the greatest difference between Kant and Plato. Unlike Kant, Plato allows that the human intellect can have direct access to what Kant calls noumena, the independent intelligible objects. By Platonic principles, human beings can receive ideas through means other than the senses. This is where "the good" plays its role, and Plato\s "good" is absent from Kant. The good is what is intended, or desired, and as such it does not yet have material existence, and cannot be sensed. Therefore the source of these ideas is not sensation.
The nature of "the good" is not well understood because it avoids the grasp of knowledge, by Plato's description. as prior to knowledge. It illuminates intelligible objects like the sun illuminates sensible objects. Notice that we do not consider ideas to be knowledge until they are justified by empirical principles. So human intention and desire will create all sorts of fanciful ideas which cannot be justified, and will never be knowledge.
We can understand Kant's a priori intuitions of space and time as a replacement for Plato's "the good". Both perspectives realize that it is necessary to assume a principle, or some principles, which are prior to empirical sensation, which enable the mind's capacity to produce ideas and knowledge. For Plato this is the good, for Kant it is the a priori intuitions. We can see how Kant's imposition of space and time limits the scope of knowledge to the sensible world, while the more general, "the good", allows the potential for knowledge to extend beyond the limitations of empirical justification.
Our space and time is not perceptual, meaning our senses do not perceive them, for that would be the same as space and time being appearances. Our space and time is intuitive, hence in us as a condition of our intelligence, where the things that exist can never be found, whether or not such things affect the senses.
It follows that Kants proof of the non-existence of things-in-themselves in space and time is predicated on the tenets of his theory, which states, insofar as they are strictly transcendental human constructs, space and time cannot be the conditions for existence of things, but only the conditions for the possibility of representing things that exist.
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Quoting Janus
Neither do I. I dont accept it because it is contradictory, the judgement being diametrically opposed to the method under discussion prescribes.
Quoting Janus
True enough, but isnt the logic already implicit when the thought is of things? But I see what you mean to think this is to use this logic, to think that is to use that logic, as long as the conceptions contained in this and that, or at least the origins of them, are sufficiently different from each other .
Quoting Janus
.To think an object and to cognize an object are by no means the same thing .
.just like that.
If thats what you think, so be it.
Quoting Wayfarer
The limits of human cognition does not define or determine the limits of what exists.
Quoting Wayfarer
You can talk about the situation that way, but there are of course alternatives ways of framing it. So I would say it is something before it "enters the mind" otherwise there would be nothing there to be perceived.
Quoting Wayfarer
'Bifurcation' is a synonym for 'division'. The bifurcation is yours?between the empirical and the transcendental. If all we know is the empirical world, and everything that has evolved out of that experience, and attempting to understand that experience?maths, geometry, science, music, poetry, literature?then we can say nothing about the transcendental other than that it is an idea of the possibility of something beyond.
You bare the one saying what the transcendental must be like?that it cannot exist in space and time, be differentiated and so on. I am saying that the transcendental is just an idea of the possibility of something beyond the empirical world. It's an idea that's been around for a very long time, and for which there can be, on your very own argument, no evidence. You say all we know, all our concepts, mathematics, geometry, science, music, poetry, literature and so on find their sense in the empirical world, so we cannot coherently speak about anything beyond that. because we have no cognition beyond that to give sense to whatever we say.
You admit that we can coherently say, within the empirical context that the world existed prior to humans. I say that is right, and that is where we stop our saying, and don't pretend that there is another context in which it makes no sense to say that. There is your bifurcation. By the way I didn't have Whitehead's "bifurcation of nature" (although I studied Whitehead's ideas quite extensively quite a few years ago) specifically in mind. He was more concerned with bypassing the division of nature into primary and secondary qualities, and of course that is a related issue, but let's not go down that rabbit hole.
Quoting Wayfarer
The terms "existence" and 'independence" are common coin that get used in various contexts. To repeat, you say yourself that we can perfectly sensibly talk about the existence of the world prior to humans with the caveat that it makes sense only within the empirical context. I say there is no other context?so it looks like we are actually agreeing. I say there is no other context in which we can say anything at all, because we don't know any other context
I wouldnt know. I would guess scholarly consensus for Kantian discourse is an oxymoron.
But the whole point of the essay is what we know of what exists. When I say the world relies on an implicit perspective, I mean the world-as-known. To speak of what lies entirely outside that perspective is already speculative. Better to call it purported or imagined existence.
Quoting Janus
To call it something already applies a category it doesnt yet have. Thats why I said: it is not some-thing. But I'm also not saying it is simply non-existent. This is what you keep insisting is 'nonsensical', but when the context is understood, it is really quite straightforward: it is neither a thing nor nothing, but precisely what lies beyond the scope of those categories.
Quoting Janus
There is no division between the empirical and the world as it is in itself. The world known by empiricism is simply the universe as it appears to us. To speak of the world in itself is not to posit a separate domain, but to point to the condition that makes the empirical world possible in the first place.
The point being that a lot of modern thought tends to forget that empirical knowledge is contingent in this way, which is to accord science an authority it doesn't really have.
I was editing as you were responding apparently. Anyway I'm sayin that we can sensibly say that the things we perceive have their own existence independently of us, period. You say we cannot sensibly say that except within the empirical context. Then I respond that everything we say is from within the empirical context. So, what are we disagreeing about?
Quoting Wayfarer
You are again confusing what we say with the things we are talking about. The things we talk about only "have categories" insofar as they are talked about?it doesn't follow that they are such that they cannot be thought to be fit or not to be included whatever category we are thinking of. You are thinking in simplistic terms here. You say it lies beyond the scope of the categories?if we haven't perceived it yet, it may or it may not. Say there is a cat behind a tree?you haven't seen it yet, but you imagine it is a dog. Then you go around behind the tree and find it is a cat. If you had thought it was a cat, then it would have fitted that category before you perceived it, but it didn't fit that category because you mistakenly thought it was a cat.
Quoting Wayfarer
The world known by us is simply the world?there is no other world for us. We know the world, but we do not know it completely, obviously. There is always more to learn. There could not be more to learn if there was not more there, presently unknown, to be experienced and to be learned about via that experience. We think there might be things we could never know about the things we know?we can't know for sure, but one thing we do know is that even if we reached the end of knowledge, if we knew everything it is possible to know, we could have no way of knowing that we had reached that point.
The objection:
Quoting Questioner
The response
Quoting Wayfarer
It's this taken-for-grantedness that is the main target.
I disagree, but i get the joke ;)
That's one way of describing the situation. On the other hand I can say I perceive the space between objects, albeit usually more or less filled up with other objects. I do perceive space but I don't perceive empty space.
Quoting Mww
So, to refer to things-in-themselves as "strictly transcendental human constructs" is again a particular way of framing, not an expression of any determinable fact of the matter. If things are human-independent existents that have mass, form and size then space and time would be the condition for their existence, just as they are the conditions, not just for our cognition, but for our very existence. In our material existence we are not different than other things.
Quoting Mww
Of course I cannot disagree with that. Since it is true by definition. On the other hand, some might say that for God to think an object and to cognize an object are one and the same.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't understand why you keep repeating this when I have long acknowledged that the world as perceived is (you might even say by very definition) mediated by the nature of bodily organs and processes. Science can study this and even model what the world might look like to different animals given the different ways the perceptual organs of individual kinds of animals are constituted.
Quoting AmadeusD
The issue is as to whether it is more plausible to think that we carve nature "at the joints", so to speak or arbitrarily. If it were arbitrary we would not all perceive the same things. Our bodies with their perceptual organs, or minds if you prefer to frame it that way, cannot be the sole determinants of how we differentiate nature or we would not all see the same things. So differentiation is down to real patterns and regularities that are independent of us in nature or some kind of collective or universal mind. Choose your poison.
I don't think so. We don't perceive space between objects, we perceive separation. And knowledge tells us that there is another, invisible object, air, which exists in the medium. And we actually sense that air, feeling the wind and the smells. We don't ever perceive, or apprehend space except as a concept.
So, you say that you perceive space, but not empty space. Imagine the space which you believe that the air occupies, or that some other object occupies. How do you think you are perceiving this space, rather than simply assuming it as a fundamental concept?
Basically you're saying that it's subjective, a matter of opinion. 'It's OK if you see it that way, but I see it a different way'. It's not 'determinable' because it can't be validated empirically. Whatever is not determinable by science is a matter of personal preference.
Quoting Janus
I keep repeating it, because you keep misrepresenting it. You say 'Science can study this and even model what the world might look like to different animals'. But you're still positing a real world beyond what appears, as if that is the criterion of realness, when it is the very point at issue. That's why I posted this:
[quote=Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology]In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sensethis would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effectbut rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousnesss foundational, disclosive role.[/quote]
Quoting AmadeusD
I do agree, but I also think there is a danger in the word 'create' - even though I used it in the OP. I think 'construct' might actually have been a better choice, and besides, there is a school of thought 'radical constructivism' which is very similar in outlook to what I'm arguing for (info). But it is a semantic distinction.
The truth concerning what is neither empirically nor logically demonstrable is not strictly decidable and so is a matter of what each of us finds most plausible or in other words a matter of opinion...call it what you like. And of course a dogmatist won't want to accept that.
This is going nowhere so I'm going to leave you to it.
Got it...Cheers.
The separation of objects just is the space between them.
But there is not space between objects, only more objects, that's why you said you do not perceive empty space.
Suppose one object here, and another object over there. implying a separation between them. You perceive other objects in between, perhaps the movement of air. By what principle do you replace the objects you perceive between the two objects, with the concept "space", and then claim to perceive this "space".
This is the same issue I had with I like Sushi, only that was with the concept "matter" rather than the concept "space". I like Sushi claimed that we measure, and weigh matter, but we do not. We weigh particular things not matter. Matter is purely conceptual, as is space. The two being very good examples of universals. Now, you and I are going through the same thing with the concept "space". You claim to perceive space, but you don't, you have a concept of space which you apply when you perceive that things are distinct from one another. Application of concepts is not the same as perception.
I'm saying that the argument in the OP is a logical argument. If arguments can only be decided by empirical means, then we're back at verificationism or positivism. You will also need to justify why you think the argument is dogmatic.
We derived our idea of existence from our cognitive experience, therefore nothing can exist apart from its being cognized.
The conclusion does not follow logically from the premise, so it is not a deductively valid argument.
What you are offering is a certain perspective on the situation?a certain way of framing it. There are other ways of thinking about it. There is no determinable truth of the matter; so really comes down what seems most plausible as to what you will believe. In other words it is a matter of opinion, or preference, or taste or whatever you want to call it.
If you think otherwise then explain how you think your view could be established to be correct.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We perceive the extendedness of objects; that is what space is. It is not an empty container. If you think we cannot perceive space as an empty container, well of course that is true, but irrelevant.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, whatever cannot be determined by observation or logic is a matter of opinion. You tell me how it might otherwise be determined.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I'm positing a real world beyond what appears, because I think all the evidence points to that. You are positing that there is not a real world beyond what appears because (apparently) you think all the evidence indicates that to be the case. Neither of us can demonstrate that we are right, so it is a matter of opinion. That's plain to see, but you apparently cannot accept that.
BTW, I'd rather just discuss this with you?there is little point quoting entries about Husserl or other philosophers I am well enough familiar with to know that I disagree with them and why. Invoking authority figures just doesn't cut it for me.
Thats a very simplified gloss, and not my argument. Im not claiming that nothing exists apart from cognition. Im saying that any concept of existence only makes sense within the conditions of possible experience. (I'm not bound by Kant's argument, but I am trying to stay in his lane, so to speak.)
The point about the Husserl quote was that:
That is much nearer what I mean. You're saying, there must be a reality outside any consciousness of it.
Quoting Janus
But thats precisely the point: your criterion itself only what can be determined by observation or logic counts is not itself established by observation or logic. Its a philosophical commitment, not a scientific observation. And that is what I mean by dogmatism: a framework that denies legitimacy to what it cannot assimilate, while never acknowledging that its own framework is not supported by its arguments.
Quoting Janus
But this real world you posit beyond appearances is itself nothing but conjecture. You say all the evidence points to it, but by definition the evidence only ever belongs to the realm of appearances. To project what the real world is behind appearances is less defensible than what youre criticizing, because it claims the authority of evidence precisely where no evidence can reach. And I'm not positing that there is no reality beyond what we can experience: what I said was that 'what its existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible.'
[hide="Reveal"]Again, staying in Kant's lane:
A30/B45:
What may be the case with objects in themselves, and separated from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains entirely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which, therefore, does not necessarily pertain to every being, though it must pertain to every human being.
A45/B63:
We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time disappear, but even space and time themselves vanish, and cannot as appearances exist in themselves.
A251/B306:
If we take away the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world must vanish, as this world is nothing but appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as subject, and a manner or species of representation. But if we leave aside our kind of sensibility, and even our thinking in general, then the corporeal world, together with the extension and the relation of appearances in space and time, yes even space and time themselves, vanish. Yet the thing in itself, which lies at the basis of these appearances, is not therefore annihilated, for we cannot know it as it is in itself, but only as it appears to us.[/hide]
It does if that is all there is we ever have access to. If something exists beyond space and time it is not a 'something'. Get it?
Kant talks about our 'intuitions' being space and time.
I can see why someone would suggest a Two Worlds scenario but this is stretching what Kant is stating too far. The Noumenal World -- so to speak -- is not a World. If we have some as yet unknown facaulty that allows for some other intuition (other than space and time) then, and only then, is talk of another World open to sensibility. That said, it woudl still be a natural and necessarily integrated part of space and time.
So noumena is in itself a phenomena referred to in reference to human existence (the only existence we know of being space and time).
A fuller appreciation of phenomenology can help frame what Kant was talking about because by taking up a phenomenological approach forces us to look at the certain limitations of cognition we are bound by. For instance, we cannot conceive of a polygon with no sides, a colour with no pigment, nor a sound with no pitch. Something similar is held in what Kant means when using the term 'noumena' and is famously framed by saying "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."
Quoting Wayfarer
I would argue there is no intrinsic difference between saying one or the other. No one can speak of something outside of space and time if there is faculty of cognition possessed by humans that operates in a completely distinct sense to the faculties we possess.
A shape with no edges is not a shape at all. If there can exist something 'shape-like' beyond sapce and time it does not 'exist' in any sense we can frame and if not soley separate we can appreciate it. This is the difference between being open to discovery by us and not existing, but 'not existing' is a concept that we appreciate not that we do not.
So there may be a sqircle somewhere, but because we cant frame it, we cant say it exists. Because to say it exists we would have to define (definitively) it. But we cant define it, so we cant say it exists, or that it doesnt exist?
But surely we can talk about the neumenon and conclude that it exists? But we cant define it, because it has no shape, colour, dimension(as we know them). This is not to say it doesnt have attributes like this, but that we dont know what they are.
Also, if we do attempt to define them, we will only be using attributes that we know about from the phenomenal world and by definition neumena are outside of the phenomenal world. So we would be describing things in the phenomenal world and attributing them to something outside that world. Which we cant do.
So we can say it exists, provided we dont define it (because that would miss the mark). Because without it, the phenomenal world wouldnt exist and the phenomenal world exists.
Seems straightforward enough to me, I dont know what all the fuss is about.
Surely we have just defined a necessary being?
No. Because:
Quoting I like sushi
We understand what exists for us is all that can exist for us. We cannot know what we cannot frame within the bounds of our cognitive capacities (time and space) unless we have some other 'intuition' that is yet to be articulated.
When we 'talk about noumena' we are not talking about noumena as our faculties are framed in space and time and the concept of noumena is not -- hence it serves as a means of understanding what we can understand and how we frame the term 'exist'. Nothing is the absence of something, noumena is not even that, no words can capture it as it is not an 'it' and only represented as a limitation of our cognitive capacities. Any sense of 'beyond' is mere word play.
Quoting Punshhh
We CANNOT. Therefore it is less than nothing. Nothing we can say about noumena is noumena. It is Negative only. Literally everything we can ever conceive of in existence -- abstract or otherwise -- is phenomenal. Noumena is not phenomena. This is not to say just because we lack a sense, it is to say we have no grounds for talking about non-constituent part of existence because that is nonsensical. Understanding that it is nonsensical is the establishment of noumena as a negative limiting term for what exists and what does not with res[ect to space and time.
Quoting Punshhh
Everything we can talk about and speculate about exists. The point is we have no right to say 'exists' when if any such capacities to recognise such is absent.
Hopefully you get the idea that no matter how long I go on EVERYTHING I can say is noumena negatively ONLY and can NEVER be positively captured.
I think it is a good place to begin when trying to understand the kind of problems that arise in human experience including how we articulate what consciousness is and how it relates to the physical world as well as our metaphysical concepts about the world -- which are necessarily connected in some fashion.
Quoting Punshhh
It is so straight forward it bends around everything!
Necessary being? I do not see how. We are not talking about any such thing, although Kant certainly doe scover such ground in his work and states we cannot say anything about any such noumena (see above).
The closest other thing I can think of that covers this kind of concept is probably Dao/Tao (the 'way'). More poetic than Kant but far less precise. If either works for you then that is probably enough.
So, you're saying that something might exist apart from cognition, but that it makes no sense to say that? In any case the concept of existence outside of cognition makes sense to me. You can say it makes no sense to you, but that is all you are entitled to say. There is no determinable fact of the matter that that can be used to ascertain what makes sense and what doesn't as a universal rule.
Quoting Wayfarer
No I'm not; I'm saying it seems most plausible to me that there is a reality outside any consciousness of it.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is established by observing that no other way of determining truth is to be found. If there is another way, then tell us what that way is, and how it works.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't believe that's true. It is an undeniable aspect of experience that people see the same things at the same time and place down to the smallest detail. It's easy to test. That is what is to be explained and I think the inference to a world of mind-independent existence is the best explanation. You don't have to think that?but since it cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation or logic it becomes a matter of what each person finds most plausible. That's the way I see it.
Anything we say about things which cannot be decided by observation or logic is a matter of conjecture?I've never denied that.
"Not determinable in what sense? If you mean not determinable by science, then of course but that doesnt reduce it to mere opinion. If you mean not determinable in principle, then I disagree: there is a fact of the matter about whether categories like existence or mind-independence are meaningful outside the bounds of cognition. Thats the point of the argument: Its not about my opinion versus yours. Your implication always seems to be: can't be 'determined scientifically' therefore it's a matter of opinion.
Quoting Janus
As said a number of times already, 'there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind.'
Quoting Janus
At the macroscopic level its easy to say we all see the same thing. But at the quantum scale - which is the smallest detail you can expect - its not so clear cut. In the double-slit experiment, whether you get an interference pattern or not depends on whether an observation is made. And the 'Wigners friend' experiments show that two observers can have inconsistent but equally valid accounts of the same event. So the claim that everyone just sees the same thing in the same way doesnt hold once you look deeper. On that level, which is the most fundamental level, it's the nature of the physical that is 'not determinable'. So you can't appeal to it.
Furthermore, the fact that we all see the same thing is not some metaphysical given its because we are all members of the same species, with the same sensory and cognitive apparatus, and also because we inhabit a shared culture that trains us to interpret the world in broadly the same ways. Thats why we can agree that this is a table or thats red. But how a bat, or an octopus, or a machine intelligence perceives the world is another matter entirely and one we simply cannot know from the inside. So even the claim that we all see the same thing is already species- and culture-bound.
But, appreciate the questions.
I think that's one of the best examples of a straw man that I've ever seen.
Quoting Janus
The extendedness of objects is just another concept which you've swapped for "space". You started off by saying "I perceive the space between objects", and when I informed you that you do not actually perceive whatever it is that separates objects making them distinct, you changed your proposed meaning of "space", to define it as "the extendedness" of objects.
But the "extendedness" of objects is purely conceptual, just like "space" is. You do not perceive extendedness. To "extend" is to increase something. So to conclude that something has been extended, "stretched out spatially" requires an application of logic. It is not a perception but a logical conclusion.
You are still not distinguishing between perceiving, and applying concepts. I suggest, that once you recognize that this distinction is impossible to make at the foundational level, you'll understand the need for a priori concepts. The application of concepts is inherent within even the most basic acts of perception. This implies that conception is prior to perception, therefore conception is not dependent on perception. That is why Kant proposed the a priori, as intuitional 'concepts'.
Quoting Janus
You keep saying things like this, but it is so clearly false. In fact, the argument that different people never see the same thing is far more sound then the argument that people see the same things. To begin with, if you point to an area and ask people to describe what is there, they will never use the exact same words. And even if we point to a location, and agree on the words to be used in reference to that location, this does not imply that the people see the same thing. It only means that they are agreeable. Therefore in reality, it is an undeniable aspect of human beings, that they are agreeable, and you falsely present this as "It is an undeniable aspect of experience that people see the same things".
YES, I HEAR YOU, I UNDERSTAND. Ill have take your word for that for now, until Ive read more about it.
Agreed, I have been doing the same from a different school for decades along with using it in my practice.
A little less wordy though, the gist is the same.
So presumably there are a number of philosophers around who dont like the idea?
Hmmm. Sure, I suppose you could say that. Take a dinner table place setting: the space between the dinner fork and the salad fork seemingly filled by the perception of the table they both rest on.
Ive got a pretty decent telescope, and when I look here, and look there, the space between is full of stuff I dont perceive without it.
Still, in both of these, the space between is actually space in general; the table isnt in the space between the forks, and with respect to the scope, the other objects seemingly between here and there could very well be in front or behind and not between them at all.
Quoting Janus
If you agree all perceptions have a sensation belonging to them ..what sensation does one receive from the perception of space? What is it about your perception which distinguishes the space you perceive from empty space you do not?
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Quoting Janus
Yeah the bane of speculative theoretics in general, the fact of impossible physical verification. Nevertheless, its hard to argue with proper logic.
Quoting Janus
While it may be true, at least for a human or human-like being, that in order for there to even be a thing at all, mass, form and size are the conditions by which it is so. But it still needs to be known the necessary conditions for mass, form and size of a thing, and even more importantly, the necessary conditions by which differences in mass, form and size of different things are related.
All of which reduces to the inevitable conclusion, that the necessary conditions the relations of mass, form and size have nothing whatsoever to say about the existence of the thing to which they belong. Space and time, then, are merely the necessary conditions for the possibility of a thing for which mass, form and size are determinable, the existence of which is given regardless of whatever mass, form or size it may be determined to have.
A reminder that space and time are pure intuitions belonging to sensibility, while existence is a pure conception belonging to understanding. That the representations of one are conjoined with the representations of the other for any human experience reflecting perception of real things, does not make one dependent on, nor the condition for, the other.
The problem here is, of course, I have argued why the conclusion of your opinion represented by the quoted comment cannot hold, but I have nothing by which to judge whether my argument is relevant to the construction of your opinion. In other words, I have no idea what qualifies the truth value, the logical ground or presuppositions, of what you say, which means I may have engaged myself in a dialectical non-starter.
Perish the thought!!!
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Quoting Janus
Theres one major difference: my material existence can never be in-itself, insofar as it is apodeitically necessary that my body be an appearance for me, whereas that condition is merely contingent for any other material existence.
But I get the point: the material of my existence is no different from the material of any other existence. What do you intend to be gleaned from such analytical truths?
What do you mean by "meaningful outside the bounds of cognition"? Let's say for the sake of argument nothing for human discourse is outside the bounds of cognition, are you saying categories like 'existence' and 'mind-independence' can only apply to the objects we perceive?
If so, then it seems obvious that they don't only apply to the objects we perceive when they are being perceived. In my view all our experience, both ordinary everyday observations and science, informs us that there are human-independent things in the Universe now and that
there were before humans existed.
Quoting Wayfarer
It follows then that it must be real independently of all minds unless you posit a hidden collective mind. Is that what you believe?
Quoting Wayfarer
Regarding any individual experiment, all observers see the same result, though. The fact that the behavior of microphysical particles seems counter-intuitive, even paradoxical, shouldn't surprise us given that we have evolved in a macroworld, and our expectations as to the behavior of entities has been conditioned by our experiences of macro-objects.
There is also no clear consensus among the physics community as to the implications of those observed weird results. In any case why deny what science tells us, and then appeal to it when it suits you?
I don't believe you have any real doubt that the everyday objects we encounter constantly have their own existence, which does not rely on our perceiving them. As Peirce said: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts".
Quoting Mww
Right, I haven't claimed there are any truly empty spaces. But then when it comes to spaces that look empty that just speaks to the fact that there are things there we cannot see with the naked eye. It's kind of irrelevant anyway, because all I'm saying is that we can perceive extension, distance, and that counts in my view as perceiving space. You are free to frame it differently.
Quoting Mww
The sensation is one of extension, or distance as a said above. I'm not sure what you are driving at here.
Quoting Mww
I don't know what you mean?the necessary conditions for the perception of mass, form and size are that they are there to be perceived. The overall form of an object is not dependent on perspective, although of course how it looks from any angle will be if it is not a sphere. Size is relative, and if one object is larger than another, that would not seem to be dependent on perspective either. Same with mass.
Quoting Mww
Clarity?
No. It's that when you imagine or conjecture a universe with no humans in it, that conjecture still requires an implicit perspective. To conjecture a universe, or an object, without already bringing to bear the framework of space and time would be impossible - you would be imagining nothing. All of your statements about the 'already existing objects' and 'previously existing universe' rely on that implied perspective which you're bringing to bear on it, without noticing that you're doing it.
Quoting Janus
But they don't. The claim that we all see the same thing doesnt hold once you move beyond the classical scale. Wigners Friend (1961), a thought-experiment, implied how two observers could end up with irreconcilable results one sees a definite measurement, the other only a superposition. And in 2019, Massimiliano Proietti and colleagues ran this with six entangled photons. The result: Wigners reality and the friends reality coexisted but could not be reconciled. That suggests there may be no single set of objective facts that all observers must agree on which is precisely the point at issue here. Also Does Physical Reality Objectively Exist? Ethan Siegel (Medium, may require registration):
For relativity:
[quote=Ethan Siegel]Space and time might be real, but theyre not objectively real; only real relative to each individual observer or measurer.[/quote]
For quantum physics:
[quote=Ethan Siegel]To the best that we can tell, the real outcomes that arise in the Universe cannot be divorced from who is measuring them, and how.[/quote]
Quoting Janus
Ethan Siegel, for instance, is a well-known popular science communicator and writer. Mostly he just writes on straight-ahead physics, but that essay above is him looking at the philosophical question concerning whether physical reality objectively exists. And he suggests that both relativity theory and quantum theory suggest not.
So - I'm not disputing science. I'm questioning scientific realism, which is philosophical attitude, not a scientific theory. Or if you like, a meta-scientific theory.
Quoting Janus
From the OP: 'It is empirically true that the Universe [and 'the object'] exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis.' Which is Kant's 'Copernican Revolution in Philosophy'.
This requires an exercise in looking at your spectacles, instead of simply through them.
PS - also I would never want to be accused of science denialism. I accept wholeheartedly the science of climate change, and the science of vaccination, things which are only denied by cranks and weirdos (and the current US administration.)
All my statements are expressions of my perspective?so what, that's trivially true. Of course I'm aware of it. I also acknowledge that my perspective is not the reality?you know, "the map (or model) is not the territory".
Quoting Wayfarer
If the existence of the Universe is independent of any particular mind, whether human or animal, how does it not follow that it is independent of all individual minds? Of course there is a perspective involved in saying that the Universe is or is not independent of minds, but it doesn't follow that it is impossible that the universe be either independent or dependent on minds?we just don't know and may only speculate about it.
I'm not going to try to address any purported implications of quantum mechanical experiments and results because I don't have the expertise, and I don't believe you do either. It is arguable that even the experts understand only the math, not what metaphysical implications might be suggested by QM. Wasn't it Feynman who said: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics"?
Quoting Wayfarer
You can't look at your spectacles without looking through them.
Quoting Wayfarer
I didn't address this as thoroughly as I meant to. The claim is that truth is determinable only by observation or logic, and otherwise we can have only beliefs about what is true. A radical skeptic would say that we cannot be certain of the truth even of what is observed or logically self-evident. Can you give me an example of any truth which is determinable in any way other than by observation or logic, and also explain just how that truth can be determined?
Right - that's what you're doing. You fall back on the 'it can't be determined, therefore a matter of opinion.'
Quoting Janus
I think the logic of the original post is quite sound. Every time you take issue with it, you do so on the basis of an innaccurate paraphrase of it, before reverting to the argument that 'it can't be known, it can't be determined'.
Quoting Janus
Very convenient. Remember that it was you that said:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
It doesn't require knowledge of mathematical physics to show that the sources I mentioned call this into question: it is not the case that 'people see the same things at the same time and place' and that 'all observers see the same result'. So if you're going to appeal to the facts, how about making sure you understand them first.
This is becoming very repetitive, you keep making the same objections, and I'm giving the same responses. If you honestly can't see the point of the OP, maybe find another one to comment on.
It looks to me like you are out of answers. You claim that there are ways, other than by observation or logic, to determine truth, but when pressed by questions such as this:
Quoting Janus
You don't even attempt to back up your claim.
Surely I am free to raise objections to any OP, or am I allowed, according to you, to comment only on those I agree with?
Don't say this to me. I firmly believe that an independent reality would be completely different from, and not at all similar, to the representations we have of it as the sense perception of objects. In direct contrast to what you say, I have no real doubt that the supposed independent reality would be in no way similar to the everyday objects we encounter in our perceptions.
For analogy, consider that a word, numeral, or any symbol, may be completely different from, and similar in no way to whatever it represents. Sense perceptions are representations. And in general, representations, like the symbols of language, are produced and maintained trough principles of use and efficiency, not by principles of similarity.
Isnt that exactly what the OP was about? The point of the transcendental argument is that there are truths not determined by observation or logic, but by clarifying the conditions that make either possible. Thats why I began the thread in the first place. Your two-years-worth of criticism don't illustrate any grasp of that.
Quoting Janus
I say the OP stands on its own two feet. You can continue to say whatever you like, but unless you can come up with an actual criticism, I will feel no obligation to respond.
How I feel is not observable, but the truth of it exist only within myself and cannot be observed, even by me, because I am having the feelings. Direct experience is also a source of truth. It is clear that this is not logical or empirical (in the sense meant by "observation" anyway. Probably is empirical in some other sense).
Quoting Wayfarer
How do we determine the conditions that make either possible if not by observation and logic? We can reflect on our experience, that is we can do phenomenology, in order to try to determine the essential characteristics of all experiences. Such reflections are not directly testable observations, so there may be disagreement about their findings, but I think that given good will substantial agreement can be reached.
That all perceptions of objects must be spatiotemporal and that embodiment is spatiotemporal are two uncontroversial examples of such phenomenological reflection of the character of experience. I would count phenomenological investigations as a species of observation, and of course logic plays its part in all our judgements.
Other more controversial results such as that consciousness is non-physical because it doesn't seem to us to be depend on the framing. What exactly is meant by "non-ohysical"? Does it mean "not an object of the senses" or "not a function of, and completely independent of, any physical substrate".
Do you have anything to add to that?
Quoting Wayfarer
I have asked questions and posed counterpoints which you have no even attempted to address. Here are two:
Quoting Wayfarer
You say that you are not saying that nothing can exist apart from its being cognized, and yet that is what saying that any concept of existence only makes sense within the conditions of possible experience amounts to. If we accept a framing that says we cannot possibly experience things-in-themselves, then it follows that things that cannot possibly be experienced cannot exist. This must follow because if they can exist, then it cannot be incoherent to say that they can exist.
Of course I don't accept that framing because I don't accept the notion of "things-in-themselves" I think there are just things that we perceive, and that there is no logical contradiction in saying that those things might (or might not) exist independently of being perceived, and that there may be some things about them that we cannot perceive, given the limitations of our perceptual organs.
Quoting Janus
On reading your response below which apparently occurred while I was editing and adding to my post, I see that you have agreed that phenomenology may be thought of as a species of observation, so I guess we are in agreement there unless you have any further examples of ways of determining truth.
You're missing the point. We do this, and gain secure inferences which are not part of the logical or empirical assessments at hand. I don't quite see other examples among philosophers than with Kant, and if you reject his positions then you wont accept this argument anyway, as he's put it better than anyone before or since.
The fact (in concept) is when we make "truth" evident in situation A, we often are committed to accepting "truth" in some realm we have not assessed.
If A then B, but we've only assessed A. and A obtains. We haven't assessed B at all. If you see a transitive holding weight, that's fine. I don't.
So when I say that existence or objectivity only have sense within experience, Im not appealing to a particular empirical observation, but to precisely this kind of reflection. And thats where the transcendental analysis differs from science: its not discovering new objects but clarifying the preconditions of there being any objects-for-us at all.
On the non-physical question, my point would be that the very category of the physical is itself mind-dependent in some basic way. Thats not to deny that there are physical objects of course there are. But the physical as such is already a construct of our observational and conceptual framework: spatiotemporal, measurable, extended, resists our will. To point this out is not to dispute reality, but to draw attention to the inescapable role of the observer in what counts as physical in the first place. As I said in the extended version of the OP:
Quoting The Mind Created World
But, overall, very good questions.
:up: I think we've reached some consensus, so I'm happy to leave it there if you are.
This seems to be hte method of truth-finding, in any case?
I'm not sure what you are saying, and I can't think of an example of what I think you might be saying. Can you give an example for clarification.
Please don't take this personally, but the reason I often don't respond to your posts is that it seems as though your interpretation of what I've said that you're disagreeing with seems to me so far from what I intended that I find it difficult to get enough purchase on what you are saying to respond.
The example to give, which I think is more closely a description of the above, is Kant's noumena.
They are logically required for the system to get moving (and it seems, for us to have any interaction with anything). Consider:
P1 = I can see an apple(1), and I know (through other's observations) that my system of perception works in x way to produce the images I use to 'observe' anything (2).
P2 = due to my knowledge in (2), i can confirm that there is something beyond my scope to observe which must be there to cause (1) to obtain.
C = now that I know (1) and because of (2) B obtains, I have assured knowledge of B, without ever having assessed its possibility. It is inherent in the knowing of (1) and (2), but is not the same thing as either of them.
As best I can tell, this, but across fields we could theoretical observe, is how "truth" functions, particularly in science.
I'd like to be Sam, but I won't insist.
I guess strictly speaking, even if what that "something beyond" is is just a world of physical existents, it can be said that they are noumenal to us. On the other hand we perceive objects, so the objects are not unknown to us even though there may be things about them we don't or even cannot, know. For example it seems we could never be certain about the ultimate or most basic constitution of physical things.
In that case it would not be a case of there being noumenal things, but noumenal aspects of things. If things are ideas in the mind of God, we might know all about the things because God makes everything about them to be discoverable, and there is nothing unknowable left over about them at all. But we still
wouldn't know that that was the case.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm happy enough with being Ralph.
No.
No, again.
Bye
There you go.
It is meaningless to say "noumena are not nothing, they are less than nothing". That's just philosobabble.
No.
Yes, this [I]crisis/initiation[/I] is foundational in Eastern religions and spirituality. Its promising to see that philosophers are making it over this hurdle too.
Lets see how many other hurdles they have jumped.
So you say, but as I observed yesterday:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My disagreement is with things you repeat over and over, which are false. Since these are repeated statements of yours, it's highly unlikely that I interpret them incorrectly. What is actually the case, is that you really don't know what you are saying, and this is why my interpretations are not consistent with what you intend. You intend to express your beliefs, but your statements betray the falsity of them. You do not intend to express false beliefs, so the interpretation of what you say is unintelligible to you.
It appears like after I point out to you the meaning of what you stated, and the falsity of it, you decide that it is not what you wanted to say. Then, since you cannot determine in your own mind what you actually wanted to say with those words, other than what you did say, and my interpretation which demonstrates the falsity of what you said is the only interpretation of those words which makes sense, you simply dismiss my reply as unintelligible to you.
In other word, since I demonstrate to you, that the fundamental principles you repeatedly insist on, are very clearly false, instead of addressing the meaning of those words which express those principles you strongly believe in, to understand why your fundamental beliefs are false, you insist that the conventional interpretation of those words which express those strong beliefs, is nonsense
I would use the word orientation in that it is a question of perspective, or direction. A viewpoint, or gaze which then sees something already known, or commonly seen in a different light.
A development within the self, or being, in which, (by analogy), a lens is cleared (a veil lifted), or brought into clearer focus. Allowing more light through (illuminating further), or a broader, or deeper perspective.
I think this is well-worded. The noumena aren't necessarily esoteric, just as if they are in a room we can't access, so its not as 'mysterious' as one might think. But we can at least securely infer that they are there, or we'd not perceive anything.
No, Im not suggesting that. The commonalities between German idealism and Eastern philosophy were a matter of convergent development. Schopenhuaer always insisted that he developed his main ideas and published the first edition of WWI before encountering the Upani?ad, but he did say that he felt the common ground he found with them was due to a universal wisdom. Thats an idea Im not averse to. (See Schopenhauer and Buddhism, Peter Abelson.) Kant never mentioned Eastern religions at all so far as I know, but there have been extensive comparisons of the Critique of Pure Reason and Buddhist Madhyamaka (Middle Way) philosophy.
Quoting Janus
Right! Kants philosophy despite its enormous complexity and prolixity is really an acknowledgement of our limitations. He does manage to retain that Socratic sense of knowing nothing. Having that sense of not having it all worked out is a virtue. Better to know we dont know, than to think we know something we dont.
I thought this comment referred to a conversation we were having in the other 'idealism' thread. I'm not so sure what it refers to in this thread.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, that's why I referred earlier to "bifurcation". If the things that appear have their own existence in some way (whether actual physical existents or ideas in a universal mind) they are nonetheless what lies behind our experience of phenomena. And about their nature as unperceived things we can only infer, which means that that nature is, in Kantian terms, ideal or noumenal for us.
That said, I have my own preference for thinking that they are actual, not ideal, existents?the 'god hypothesis' I don't find so compelling.
The idea of an "ultimate nature" seems to have troubled humanity from ancient times, and not only in the West.
Quoting Wayfarer
I can't argue with that, although in practice I think we generally all do cleave to one preferred hypothesis or another. That said I've always been attracted to the kind of suspension of judgement of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics? ataraxia has its definite attractions.
By "actual" do you merely mean they as a matter of fact exist?
The fact of the dualism of thought and language aside, if I think of phenomena as being the very same things as noumena, just thought about in different ways according to a natural distinction that arises in a dualistically oriented mind, then I am undercutting any substantive "bifurcation".
If I propose that the things are ideas, then I must imagine an unseen, unknowable entity?a "mind at large" to quote Kastrup, and that seems to bring in the inevitable ontological dualism involved in thinking there is a transcendent realm or reality over and above the one we know.
And I wonder whether that isn't a "figment" generated by the dualistic nature of language?a reification or hypostatization. As I like to say "choose your poison" and it seems that people usually do, especially on philosophy forums.
In good company - I agree, tentatively.
Very much agree with the material/ideal distinction, I would even go so far as to say that the issue is merely terminological, not substantive, unless it is reframed.
Sure, ideas vs what these ideas are about (objects) is a problem.
Quoting Janus
The topic of things-in-themselves is just brutal. When I go down the rabbit hole, it's just total blindness.
But I think we can simplify a little, either things exist independently of us (in a manner we cannot at all conceive) or they can't.
If they cannot exist independently of us, then I can't make sense of reality. Granted both ideas are problematic, just that one is more coherent than the other to me.
Might I suggest that this is another consequence of the Cartesian divide between mind and body?
Again, the definition of phenomena - the definition, not my idea of what it means - is 'what appears'. Nowadays there is a lazy tendency to describe everything and anything in terms of 'phenomena' but it's a misuse of the term. The 'phenomenal domain' is what appears to us through the senses and instruments. Mathematical theorems, however, are not phenomenal.
Quoting Janus
I address this in another Medium essay, Is there Mind at Large? This essay interogates Kastrup's expression and compares it with Berkeleyian idealism. But then it draws on Yog?c?ra Buddhism, the school colloquially known as 'mind-only', to argue that it is not necessary to posit any kind of super-mind or cosmic mind.
Although I also concede that if Kastrup simply means 'some mind' or 'mind in general', then I am in complete agreement with him. Why? I think the reification trap is associated with the tendency towards objectification, to try and consider anything real in terms of it being an object or an other. This is where Heidegger's criticism of onto-theology rings true.
Quoting Manuel
There's a lot of confusion caused by the question 'what is the "in itself"' - as if it is a mysterious thing, or a mysterious realm. Then the natural tendency is to try and work out what it is. As I've quoted a number of times already, "a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the thing in itself as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble."
Although I have also learned that Hegel replaced ding an sich with simply 'ansich' - the in itself. I am not the least perturbed by that idea, it is simply 'the world' (or object) as it is in itself. But to even designate it 'thing' is already to sow the seed of contradiction.
Yes, that's one interpretation of it, called the "deflationary" one by Allais. And sure, that could well be what Kant meant. That's not how I read it, but that's marginal.
The point is not Kant - it was formulated before him. More richly, in my opinion, by Plotinus, as "the One". And also, Neo-Platonists (Cudworth, More, Burthogge, etc.)
The question is if things - objects - have a nature independent of our (a way of being or existence). I think they do, but if they do, the way they exist must be completely incomprehensible to us.
I understand some will think this even if true is pointless, but it obsesses me.
Quoting Manuel
I think that by asking about "things", "objects", you've already assumed more than what is granted by the premise of "the in itself", or "the One". You've already assumed a multitude of distinct things. In effect, you've succumbed to the influence of sensation.
They're different formulations of the same issue. The way objects are (in themselves), absent the way they affect our sensation and intellectual capacities goes way beyond sensation, necessarily.
Now, you may think the premise does not follow the conclusion, but I don't see how I'm succumbing to the influence of sensation if things-in-themselves are intellectual posits.
The question is, why do you assume that absent the effects of sensation, there are "objects", plural. Division into distinct objects is a part of sense perception.
It was a joke, about people looking at the same thing from different perspectives.
From point 6.1;
From point 6.2;
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/
From this it looks like Kant saw noumena as intellectual concepts, referring to something entirely inaccessible to us, which is inferred. Being intellectual they are entirely abstract and an invention of the human thinking mind. So we cannot say anything about what they are, or arent. But they are inferred because if we experience appearances, then they must be appearances of something. Something which is inaccessible to us, because if they were accessible to us, they would be appearances.
He is also saying that transcendental objects, our conception of appearances, cannot be separated from the appearances. So in a sense we are tied to the acceptance of appearances during the experiencing of them.
A double whammy, not only cant we say anything about noumena, but we are confined within a world of appearances, so cant say anything about anything else (apart from appearances), either.
I don't think the conclusions you make here are logical. First, if "they are entirely abstract and an invention of the human thinking mind", then we cannot conclude that "we cannot say anything about what they are, or arent". The proper conclusion is that we can say whatever we want about what they are or aren't. Next, we cannot initially make any conclusions about how they are related to our experience of appearances.
We might consider that our construction of mathematic concepts is an attempt by us to represent noumena as intellectual concepts (traditionally understood as independent Forms). Notice that the pure mathematician is free to use whatever axioms one wills. This is the act of saying whatever we want about the noumenon. At this point of production we cannot make any necessary statement about any relations between this proposed representation, and our experience of appearances. Then, after practise, experimentation, application of theory, we can start to make some conclusions about such a relationship. In this way, the field of practice, application, and the world of phenomenal appearances in general, always stands as medium between our representations of the noumenon and the noumenon itself.
The important point being that we cannot judge our representations of the noumenon by means of a comparison to the real noumenon, because of the inescapable brute fact that the world of phenomenal appearances forms an unsurpassable boundary between the two.
It baffles me to no end, that the trivially obvious fact that there are no things as such between the ears, making representation of things a necessary predisposition of human intelligence, doesnt thereby automatically make things-in-themselves a perfectly comprehensible explanatory device.
All those goofy lookin creatures in the depths of our own oceans? Must we say their existence is predicated on whether or not humans development the equipment by which their reality is given, or, do we merely grant they were already there beforehand?
And that aint even the fun part. If we insist things we havent experienced dont exist unless we do, it follows necessarily, e.g., that the very equipment used to discover those creatures, would never be developed, insofar as that equipment has never yet been an experience for us.
To reconcile the absurdity, it is clear on the one hand humanity is not itself sufficient natural causality and the possible existence of things is affirmed by inference a priori without the experience thereof, and on the other, there must be an apodeitically certain duality in the manner of a real things existence. And yet, somehow or another, that affirmation which any rational intellect surely grants, is refused the representation thing-in-itself by some of them.
The thing-in-itself is a thing, says so right there in the name. A thing in this manner or a thing in that manner, as the duality of its nature requires, insofar as a thing is an experience for us at one time or it is not at another, can have whatever name sufficient to distinguish one from the other, which is all and only what the thing-in-itself conception was ever intended to do.
On placeholders:
Hasnt anyone noticed that there can be a whole boatload of spaces and times of any thing, but one and only one space and time of any one thing-in-itself?
Correct, individuation is something people do, hence why Schopenhauer speaks of the "thing-in-itsef", or Plotinus on the One.
It's tricky. Perhaps monism exists as a single substance, but its instantiation will be plural in some sense. This goes way back to the problem of the one and the many.
Kant disagrees about there being nothing to say about either. He distinguishes our ignorance from a skepticism that would presume more than it can display. Here is Kant's argument with Hume on the matter:
Quoting CPR, A758 B786
The above quote also supports 's observations concerning the role of boundaries in rational activities.
Im new to Kant, so havent yet got a handle on his style.
I will try to approach the passage by comparing Kant's objections to Hume with Kant's arguments against Descartes and Berkeley:
Quoting CPR, B274
Immediately following the above text is the Theorem to support it. It is a set of paragraphs that are not included in the first (or A) edition. I read this addition as an attempt to clarify language used throughout the work. One can see how the terms are carefully developed through their use.
Kant's beef with Hume is not the skepticism the latter employed regarding the narratives produced by "reason". Kant agrees that much cannot be proved. But the limits are part of a larger understanding of experience. As quoted before:
Quoting CPR, A758 B786
A gloss on first the section Paine quotes ( A758 B786)
1. Ignorance as motive, not paralysis
Kant begins by distinguishing types of ignorance. Some ignorance is contingent (we simply dont know some facts yet), which motivates empirical or dogmatic investigation. But there is also necessary ignorance ignorance grounded in the very conditions of our knowing which is revealed only by critique. Thats the crucial distinction between simply bumping up against the limits of what we happen not to know, and recognizing the boundaries of possible cognition itself.
He stresses: ignorance known critically becomes a kind of knowledge a science whereas ignorance known only empirically is merely a vague awareness that theres more out there than we presently grasp.
2. The sphere vs. plane metaphor
The extended image is helpful. If reasons domain were like a flat surface with an indefinite horizon, we could never tell how far our knowing might reach ignorance would always be open-ended. But if reason is like a sphere, then from any part of its curvature we can (at least in principle) work out the total extent and boundary.
The analogy is drawn from mathematics: by knowing the curvature of a degree of arc, you can infer the whole globe. Likewise, by analyzing the structure of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant claims we can infer the scope of reason itself where it has jurisdiction and where it does not.
This is why his project is not mere censorship (Humes skeptical rejection of claims beyond experience), but critique: not simply banning speculative metaphysics, but charting the precise boundaries of possible cognition.
3. Hume as halfway point
Kant explicitly positions Hume as a geographer of reason who erred by thinking that because causality could not be justified a priori, therefore no metaphysical principle could extend beyond experience. Thats skepticism as a resting place useful for sobering us up from dogmatism, but not a permanent home. Kants third step is to give positive grounds for why certain a priori principles (e.g. causality as a category) apply within experience but not beyond it.
This is Kants classic Copernican move: reason is not authorized to legislate beyond the field of possible experience, but within that field, it has real and demonstrable authority.
4. The architecture of the Critique
You can see Kant here making explicit the shape of the CPR as a whole. Its not merely destructive of metaphysics, nor is it skeptical in Humes vein. Instead, it seeks to establish metaphysics as a science by:
Thus the sphere of reason is bounded, but not indeterminate.
5. Resonances
A further reflection: - Kant addresses the limitations, not the limits, of knowledge. There may be no limit to the discovery of further empirical facts, but there are limitations inherent to reason itself, regardless of the accumulation of facts.
@Janus - this is typical of how Kant says there is a 'determinable fact of the matter'. It relies on sophisticated arguments to be sure, but that is what he is claiming.
Oh man. In the A/B 700s. Youre diggin waaaaayyy down deep in the weeds. Not many get that far, and of those, fewer stay for the rewards. One finding things-in-themselves hard to get past is going to seriously flounder with the transcendental concept of reason is none other than the concept of the totality of conditions for any conditioned. Took me more than a little while, I must say.
Ive always been struck by the compositional structure of the critique: first is what happens for knowledge: perceive a thing, yaddayaddayadda, know a thing. Most just stop there. But fully half the book, roughly pg 297 through ~ pg 700, depending on the translator, tells all about the proverbial man behind the curtain, that by which it all works together, from the background, and what happens when attention is not properly paid.
Anyway .good stuff. Preciate it.
Hey these damn gadgets are almost too modern for me.
I read your essay, and I thought it was well-constructed and clearly expressed. However I remain unconvinced about the idea of a collective or universal mind being explanatorily unnecessary for an idealist thesis concerning the nature of the world and its relationship with human and animal experience.
You cite as an alternative the ?laya-Vijñ?na or storehouse consciousness of Yog?c?ra Buddhism, an idea I am fairly well acquainted with from my studies of Eastern philosophies and religions. I always thought of it as a kind of collective karmic storehouse, and it is explicitly doctrinally classed as a form of consciousness. So I'm not seeing how it is not an idea of collective consciousness or mind.
If the thought is that our individual minds are separate then what is posited, in the absence of also positing a collective mind that connects and/or coordinates them, is that, as far as minds go, it is only individual minds that exist. I don't see a "reification trap' in the sense of a 'tendency towards objectification' because neither individual minds nor collective minds are being posited as objects of the senses. I see mind as an activity of the body/brain, not as an object of the senses. It's maybe not the best analogy, but digestion is also an activity of the body, not an object of the senses.
Regarding the ?laya-Vijñ?na there is also a Theosophical idea designated the "Akashic Records", which I think bears some resemblance to the Buddhist idea. It seems that idealist thinkers have long recognized the explanatory need for some kind of collective consciousness as a substitute for the independent actuality of physical existents.
Do you have anything to say about my contention that the idea of storehouse consciousness is an idea of a collective consciousness or mind?
As I say, a very deep topic, I could easily be mistaken about many aspects. It is not accepted by all Buddhist schools, because it said by some Buddhists to be too close to the idea of an 'underlying self or soul'. Madhyamaka philosophers say that ?laya-vijñ?na risks reifying consciousness into a hidden essence or foundational mind. From their standpoint, this contradicts the radical emptiness (??nyat?) of dharmas.
Early Buddhist schools (e.g. Therav?da and some Sarv?stiv?dins) didnt have this concept, and when later confronted with it, some commentators saw it as smuggling in an underlying self.
Even within Yog?c?ra, the idea had to be very carefully explained: the storehouse consciousness is not a permanent self or universal mind, but a provisional way of accounting for karmic continuity and the latent seeds (b?ja) that ripen into experience.
But the whole subject is one which hinges on the sense in which such a faculty can be said to exist. Perhaps we could say that it exists as potential - but then in what sense do such potential states exist? They are by definition not yet manifest so not existent. But also not beyond the realm of possibility.
Calling the alaya a collective mind does tend to reify it as some ethereal kind of medium or intelligence, which is really a non-Buddhist view. I remember the well-known W Y Evans-Wentz translation many of us has in the 60's and 70's The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation by Knowing the One Mind. Regrettably, that translation is not at all accurate, and there is no 'one mind' concept in Tibetan Buddhism. Evans - Wentz absorbed those ideas from theosophy which also had many spurious interpretations of Buddhism.
Bernardo Kastrup in the other hand sometimes dialogues with Swami Priyananda, and says that his analytical idealism is broadly compatible with Vedanta. And I think his mind at large reflects that. So my essay reflects a Buddhist critique.
[quote=Nishijima Roshi] Buddhists believe in the Universe. The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on!idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes.
Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like spirit to describe that something else other than matter, people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept spirit.
I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit. So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe?
If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter.
Some people explain the Universe as a universe
based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose.
So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than
matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word spirit is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.[/quote]
Who did? Kant? Sure. There's no reason to deny that physical objects cause perception of physical objects. I think probably the distinction you want to make is far too close to a non-transcendental idealism for me.
As best I can tell, all Kant was trying to show was that the noumenal world is made up of objects which our bodies interpret through various sense organs and processes. That seems correct, on his explication of the human understanding.
Why do you posit (well, this is a negative inference, but still) that physical objects could not be noumenal? This suggests that everything we perceive is non-physical, other than in perception. To me, that is clearly and almost risibly a non-starter (with respect... It just seems ludicrous to me).
We wre talkign about what Kant said. I am sticking to what he said, and the mass concensus, not using weird or outdated interpretations.
Flat out wrong.
Kant, or Janus? I am addressing Kant's positions, not Janus'. If you disagree with my take, take me to task :)
The consensus is that Kant intended a "physical object" and "limiting factor" aspects to the noumenal. They couldn't do the former latter without hte former holding.
I have also checked my interpretation with the modern evaluation of what he meant. Have you?
Kant is something of a cornerstone in philosophical history so it makes sense to point out mistakes when they occur -- especially when repeated by more than one person.
Quoting AmadeusD
This misses the mark because he does not talk of a noumenal world in any physical sense. Anything physical is phenomenonal, not merely known through out limited 'senses' as he uses the terms 'intuitions' and 'sensibility'.
You seem to be confusing the 'noumena' with 'transcendental objects'. That is my guess.
In my opinion, in order to understand the other of consciousness, one must understand how consciousness is constituted at the most fundamental level. And consciousness is constituted at the most fundamental level as present and immediate time. Thanks to Husserl's analyses, we understand that consciousness is constituted at this level by diferences in protensions and retentions. This implies that there is always a non-present side with which consciousness is continuously in contact. This non-present is precisely the form of the world, as something not given in consciousness. In this sense, the existence of the world can be maintained as something distinct with which consciousness relates. But even more, it is consciousness itself that is constituted by the non-present, so it can be said that consciousness is constituted by the very nature of the world as non-present. To deny the world, we must deny the existence of the non-present. But that non-present is fundamental to consciousness and its functioning.
The world is like a note on the refrigerator. It is always pointing to the non-present. The dark side of the moon becomes a paradigmatic example of how experience works: we see it on one side, but within us there is always the hint of a non-present. This non-present is the dark side of the moon, which, if we see it, we stop seeing the other side, and the hint persists. Even to sustain the unity of the object, the hint of the non-present and the non-conscious is necessary. Its non-presence also guarantees its consistency and ultimately its existence. This is the world created by non-consciousness. Perhaps the moon does not have a dark side, but this "perhaps" is persistent and accompanies everything we call experience. It is the perhaps of what is not consciousness.
There are ways around this*, you know how gravity works at a distance, but absent the theory of relativity, there is no known physical mechanism by which the force is exerted. Relativity accounts for it, but is little more than a descriptive, rather hypothetical explanation, a mathematical mapping of the relation between bodies, forces and energy. Perhaps there is the equivalent between minds**. Also there is the idea, which dovetails to an extent with idealism, of all beings/organisms, or more pertinently living entities, as one entity, branched, or budded off into separate organisms in the realm of manifestation/objectification. With the root unseen, or known by us rather like the root of gravity being unseen, or known.
* although I dont see the need for such aversion to the idea of some connection, or lineage, or [I]mind[/I] between beings. I can understand the aversion found amongst Western philosophers and Buddhist scholars. But for me, I see, a kind of apologetics, or fig leaf being used when such ideas come to the surface.
** I use mind in a broader sense than the thinking, or computational intelligence, often referred to. Rather the animating living aspect of being, which incorporates the whole electrical cohesion of the body.
I tick therefore I am :lol:
I said as much here on pg 59. He doesnt talk about a noumenal world at all.
The chapter on noumena is relatively short, in which is found that noumena are merely the proverbial red-headed stepchild of a wayward human understanding.
After two books consisting of four chapters consisting of eight sections, ~200 pages, telling us all about how the faculty of thought/judgement/cognition works properly, and prior to moving on to the faculty of reason itself, he concludes with a scant 20-page exposè warning, by example, of understandings attempts to function beyond its warrant, perfectly demonstrating the major limitive premise, .I can think whatever I please, provided only that I do not contradict myself .
To say he talks about that for which even a representation is impossible to conceive, is so far beyond mistaken as to be deemed ..speaking of which ..ignorant.
This is a very fine example of the faulty deterministic perspective derived from the overextension of Newton's law.
In reality, the activities of the living being are caused by the being itself, not some external forces. Perception is an activity of living beings. Therefore, we have a very strong reason to "deny that physical objects cause perception of physical objects".
That is why your interpretation of Kant is like Sushi says, "flat out wrong". Kant proposes that the a priori intuitions of space and time are put to work by the human being, like tools in its production of the phenomenon you call "perception of physical objects", rather than perception being caused by what you call "physical objects".
Protension is the way that we relate to the future, and retention is the way that we relate to the past. As being at the present, we recognize a significant, even substantial difference between the two, past and future. Deterministic principles serve to dissolve this difference.
Whitehead, in his process philosophy, uses the concepts of "prehension" and "concrescence" to explain how a being at the present can experience the flow of time.
Quoting JuanZu
The non-present, which is "the form of the world", must necessarily be divided into two, to accomodate an adequate understanding of it. This is due to that substantial difference between past and future, and the result is that some form of dualism is necessary in order to derive an appropriate conception of "the world". Again, deterministic principles serve to dissolve this requirement.
Quoting JuanZu
We can understand that within the conscious being, the two distinct substances of past and future, are united into one, as retention and protension, and this constitutes conscious being at the present. This implies that being at the present, consciousness, "is constituted at the most fundamental level", as a combination of these two distinct things, past and future.
Your observation regarding the structure of CPR is interesting. I best not put my trowel away.
What still surprises me about the later sections is where he dismisses the either/or quality that has often been ascribed to him by later thinkers. The attempt to form the last words on an issue is yet not to have the last word. Otherwise, there would only be the silence Cratylus was said to have fallen into.
Are you referring to principles, that in which resides always and only absolute certainty?
Agreed on last words, generally. Thing is, Kant sets a high bar for himself, then claims to have attained to it. Anyone is free to agree whether he did, thereby tacitly giving him the last word, or not, denying the last word and setting the stage for saying something else.
Exactly. But the flow of time implies that the relation with the past and the future is not discontinuous. That is why our present is constantly related to non-presents and non-consciousnesses in the flow of time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Here you lost me. Can you explain this?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They cannot be two consciousnesses as two substances. Because we have to guarantee the unity of experience, for example that the past is a past of mine just as the future is a future of mine. In this sense we are body, where non-presents and non-consciousnesses constitute us. This body is the world that constitutes us.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not a dualism it is simply two dimensions that relate to the present. But the important thing is that they are constitutive and non-present. In that sense consciousness is constituted by that which is not it. We do not perceive these dimensions in themselves unlike the present. There is something that is not conscious that constitutes consciousness. I call it the form of the world because we normally understand the world as something beyond consciousness and distinct from experience. There is an analogy with the non-present and the non-conscious.
I will have to think about it in those terms. I don't want to get too far over my skis.
In the passages I quoted, the view of Descartes and Berkeley as being childish both involve the personal being taken as a fundamental ground that is not only unproven but misses elements of experience. Kant claims his more mature approach looks for a set of conditions for the experience of the 'I think' that it is not self-evident but requires more understanding. How we visualize the boundaries seems connected to this kind of unknown. I will try to express this better in other posts.
Your point about Kant having the last word in many places if left unchallenged is well taken.
I appreciate this translation. I cut my teeth with the Norman Kemp Smith translation fifty years ago. It was like being sent to a different planet.
We have both read much of what the other has not. That is a peculiar feature of this space.
So, we could all benefit from what troubled you while reading this text.
I don't think we can make this conclusion. The flow of time itself appears to be continuous, as a continuous activity, but consider what is happening. Future time becomes past time. August 29 will change from being in the future to being in past. In the meantime, it must traverse the present. What I propose is that the present acts more like a division between past and future, than as a union of the two. Therefore the relation between past and future is discontinuous.
Quoting JuanZu
The difference between the deterministic world view, and the free will world view, is that the deterministic perspective assumes a continuity of existence, from past, through the present, to the future. This is what is supposed to be a necessary continuity, stated by Newton's first law. Things will continue to be, in the future, as they have been, in the past, unless forced to change. Any change is caused by another thing continuing to be as it has been, so that any change is already laid out, determined. That support a block type universe.
The free will perspective allows that as time passes, there is real possibility for change, which is not a continuity of the past. This violates Newton's first law. But in order to allow, in principle, for the possibility of this 'real change', we must break the assumed continuity of existence, past through present, into future. We must allow that at any moment of passing time, Newton's first law, the determinist premise, may be violated. This means that the idea of a thing having equal existence on the future and past side of present, would have to be dismissed as wrong. What this implies is that an object's existence is recreated at each moment of passing time. This is the only principle which will allow that a freely willed act can interfere in the continuity of existence, i.e. the continuity of existence is false. Of course, this is not difficult to accept, for those who believe that objects are a creation of the mind, anyway. The mind can only create the object as time passes.
Quoting JuanZu
Why do we need to guarantee such a unity? From the free will perspective this proposed unity makes no sense. Experience is entirely past. We have no experience of the future. We think of the future in terms of possibilities, but it is irrational for me to think that all possibilities will come to pass, and be a part of my experience. Only those possibilities which are actualized will be experienced. Therefore we cannot say that the future and past are united in experience. Only the past has been experienced, and future possibilities always remain outside of experience.
Quoting JuanZu
I agree with this, except there is one big problem. The problem is that we understand the non-present to consist of two parts which are radically different, the past and the future. We know that with respect to the future there is real possibility in relation to what we will do, and what will come to pass. And, we also know that with respect to the past there is an actuality as to what we have done, and what has come to pass. So, if we accept this as a reality, that the past consists of actuality, and the future consists of possibility, dualism is unavoidable.
You call this "something that is not conscious that constitutes consciousness", "the form of the world", and I am pointing out to you, that the form of the world consists of two very different aspects. And because there are two very different aspects which constitute the form of the world, we need a dualism to understand the world.
Its not that I find Kant troubling so much as that reading him is very hard work. But I find if I go through it methodically I can understand the arguments. I also want to understand it well enough to understand the criticisms by his successors.
Are you familiar with the book Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist. He develops the idea of absentials, which are constitutive absences - a purpose not yet achieved, such as a seed aiming to become a plant, or the absence of a specific structure, like the cylinder in an engine that channels force, which gives it causal power. or the axle hole which allows the wheel to spin.
Deacon's Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emeged from Matter was published around 12 years ago. Very hard book to descibe in few words. Have a look at the info about it. particularly this interview. He stays within the bounds of scientific naturalism, but is critical of mainstream materialist explanations of living beings. He introduces concepts including 'absentials' and 'ententionality'. Worth knowing about.
Thanks for info. Might be a useful read in the future :)
Terrence Deacon's concept of "absentials" from *Incomplete Nature* refers to higher-order phenomena that are defined by what is absent, constrained, or negated rather than by what is materially present. These are real causal powers that emerge from organized absences or constraints.
Here are some key illustrative examples:
**Biological Examples:**
- **A hole in a membrane** - The hole itself is an absence of material, but it has real causal power (allowing specific molecules to pass through while constraining others)
- **Enzyme active sites** - The precisely shaped "empty" space in an enzyme that constrains which molecules can bind and react
- **Ecological niches** - Defined not by what's there, but by the absence of certain competitors, predators, or resources, creating opportunities for specific organisms
**Physical Examples:**
- **Soap bubbles** - The bubble's spherical form is maintained by the constraint of surface tension minimizing area, not by any positive structural material
- **Whirlpools or hurricanes** - Stable patterns maintained by constraints on fluid flow, with no fixed material components
- **Crystalline structures** - The regular lattice emerges from constraints on how atoms can be arranged, creating "forbidden" positions
**Information/Meaning Examples:**
- **Phonemes in language** - The sound /p/ is defined by the absence of vocal cord vibration that distinguishes it from /b/
- **Musical rhythm** - Defined as much by the silences and what doesn't happen as by the notes played
- **DNA's informational content** - Meaning emerges from constraints on which base pairs can form, not just from the bases themselves
**Thermodynamic Examples:**
- **Temperature gradients** - The difference (absence of equilibrium) drives heat engines and biological processes
- **Chemical potential** - The "tendency" for reactions based on what's energetically prohibited vs. allowed
These absentials demonstrate how constraint, absence, and negation can be causally efficacious - they do real work in the world by organizing and channeling material processes, even though they're not material things themselves.
At a glance the above notes you provided remind me of Gleick's book 'Chaos'.
Busy on other projects atm, but sounds super intriguing. I never suffer from lack of distractions! :D
From my point of view, the division between past, present, and future is like a painting where three colors are differentiated without there being a clear division. There is a difference between past and future, but the difference is not clear. The discontinuous view of time requires punctuality in which each moment stops, and we would see how everything stops at each moment. But experience shows us the opposite
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I understand what you mean, thank you for the clarification.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I speak of guaranteeing the unity of experience simply because I am talking about consciousness and how time passes through it. In this sense, the time of consciousness is analogous to that of the world, but it is not strictly that of the world; it is only a point where a little time flows, so to speak. A small number of events compared to the vastness of all events in the universe.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For me, the past and the future do not belong to being, so I cannot say that they are substances and therefore I cannot say that there is any dualism. Ousia is precisely present, and this can be found in Aristotle's physics. And when I speak of non-presents, I am speaking of something that is neither ousia nor substance. As I see it, we must opt for a category other than being and substance. Something other than substantialism. Derrida calls them traces, as things that are not present, but never totally absent, since we come into contact with them and they constitute us. According to this, we are made up of traces of the past and the future.
Ive read the passages you mentioned, hes explaining how in considering time and causation we can conclude that things have an existence in themselves (in its self).
Ive also had a look at noumenon, I cant unfortunately copy and paste the text from this pdf. So I will have to paraphrase, the passage Im thinking of is to be found in B311, page 350, in the text.
It basically explains that noumenon are all things thought about, or which could potentially be thought about, but which are not brought into thought by sensible intuition( thinking about things we experience through the senses), which have an empirical basis. As such they are thought about through insensible intuition, (our imagination) or thought divorced from empirical understanding. That by definition they cannot be thought about, because any thought we do have is conditioned by our sensible intuition. So they are an absence of thought. They cannot be thought in any way. They form a boundary of sensible thought. They are not invented arbitrarily, but are connected with the limit of sensible intuition. Yet without being able to posit anything positive outside the domain of the latter.
They are a limit, or boundary, beyond which we cannot pass. But enable us (hypothetically) to see the the boundary of thought and understanding.
From the text;
The way I see it is as a boundary like a line, or plane in three dimensional space. On one side is the world of appearances, the empirical world we know. While on the other side is an absolutely undefined realm, which is not nothing, because it is defined by being on the other side of the boundary, (which certainly exists), because it is defined by the world of the senses. But we cant project, or say anything about it, it is blank.
However this is not to say there isnt anything there, there might be. There might be more there than on the side of the senses. But we have absolutely no way of seeing, or knowing that. We are entirely limited to the world of senses and appearances.
For windows, highlight, simultaneously control/c, control/p;
For Mac, highlight, simultaneously command/c, command/p.
I had the same frustration with the Cambridge download.
This is similar to the idea that knowledge progresses through a determination of what is impossible. In a world of possibility, the impossible constitutes necessity. A multitude of impossibilities may be shaped or formed as constraints, which leave a designed "hole" allowing for only a specific type of possibility.
With modern computational capacity, to collect and classify statistics, the focus has moved away from impossibility, to deal with possibility directly under the concept of probability. However, probability does not obtain the same degree of certainty as the necessity of impossibility.
Quoting JuanZu
Using your colour analogy, my perspective is that past and future are distinct colours, like yellow and blue for example, and the present is a mixing, or overlapping of the two, green. Like yours, there is no clear division apparent to the observer at the present. However, unlike yours, I assume that there is actually a clear division which can be discovered through analysis of the elements at the present, to reveal which are blue and which are yellow. The issue being that intuition tells us that the past is of a completely different type from the future. Therefore the mixing must only be apparent, a deficiency of the observation tools, and there is a true distinction which lies underneath, waiting to be revealed. The mixing of black elements and white elements produces the appearance of a grey area.
Quoting JuanZu
When the categories are properly created, actual and possible, the difference is very clear, like black and white.
Quoting JuanZu
This is the critical point. The Platonic tradition in philosophy holds the basic principle, 'the senses deceive us'. This is the "deficiency of the observational tools" I refer to above. Experience shows us a continuity of activity, and we do not see that everything stops at each moment, but that does not necessarily mean that this is the reality of the situation. We know that a progression of still frames can produce the appearance of continuous activity. The binary on/off of "everything stops at each moment" could be a fundamental vibration of reality.
Quoting JuanZu
I think you should pay close attention to how you conceptualize "the world", and "the universe", especially in relation to the subject of the op. There are two ontologically distinct ways of conceiving "the world". In one way, "the world" is a large external unity, sometimes called "the universe", of which each person is a part of. In the other way, "the world" is a mind-created concept, held by the subject. Of course both are described as "distinct ways of conceiving" therefore the only one which could be true is the latter.
From this perspective, "the time of consciousness" is not "analogous to that of the world", it is that of the world. Any conception of an independent "time of the world", is just an extension of, or projection from "the time of consciousness".
So when you say "it is not strictly that of the world", there is untruth to this because "that of the world" is really just an extension of the time of consciousness. We can assume that there is a distinct 'time of the world', independent from the one we conceive of as an extension of the time of consciousness, but in doing this we must be prepared to accept that it may be completely different from our current conception of time, due to the deficiencies of our observational tools.
Quoting JuanZu
This is why we have to look very closely at "the present", our personal being at the present, and things like that, to question which propositions about the nature of the present are logically consistent with our own conscious being.
Consider the difference between your representation, of three distinct colours, and my representation of two distinct colours producing the appearance of a third, through mixing. The problem with yours is that it produces the need for two distinct boundaries, one between present and past, and one between present and future. This is what is required to isolate the present as distinct, and the only true "substance". That, I see as an unnecessary complication, actually producing three distinct substances. You class the two, future and past together, as other than being. But this is incorrect, because the difference between future and past disallows them from being classed together. The problem with mine is that it produces the need for skepticism and doubt concerning our "experience of the present". There is an appearance that the present is distinct, and separate from the past and future, as the substance of being, but that appearance is misleading. Which do you think i more logically consistent with your own conscious being, yours or mine?
Brain fart. Ive never used a Mac, and like you I use an iPad these days, so cant explain why I said Mac.
Anyway .. command/c, command/p.
Here is the whole paragraph of your citation:
Quoting CPR B310
The boundary helps us understand what our intuitions do not give us. But Kant puts the kibosh on any attempt to relate the two domains in a wider view. The beginning of the very next paragraph is:
Quoting CPR, B311
I recommend finishing the whole paragraph for yourself as paragraphs are the basic unit in this writing.
To approach the difference between inner and outer, more attention needs to be spent on earlier paragraphs concerning intuition and experience. I will try to point to what stands out for me in the coming days. I have to get back to my chores.
I guess I would agree with the Madhyamika philosophers. Because on the other hand without such a reification, it becomes merely an idea, and thus seems to lose all explanatory power.
I always comes back to this basic problem?experience shows us that we all see the same things at the same times and places is unquestionable that we live in a shared world. On the other hand there is no evidence that our minds are connected in any way such as to be able to explain that shared experience. The default assumption is that things we encounter are real existents that don't depend for their existence on our encountering them. So that model explain why we would experience a shared world. The idealist alternative would be to assume a hidden collective mind or consciousness, or a universal mind of which we are all manifestations, and that could be the Abrahamic God, Brahma, or some creator deity.
I don't see gravity as a good analogy because its effects are measurable. I believe that the idea of independently existing things makes sense?others see problems with it, but it seems those problems stem form assumptions that I don't share.
The idea of a shared or collective mind is not logically contradictory, so it makes sense in that sense, but I think the idea is extremely underdetermined by our everyday experience.
Quoting Paine
That's an interesting passage from Kant?I don't remember encountering it before. It seems to undercut any move towards dualism.
Some say that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible and that it has nothing to do with sense experience, but they seem to forget that Kant's categories were discovered by him by reflecting on perceptual experience and abstracting its general and necessary characteristics.
That's where you're being dogmatic. As has been pointed out, physics itself has cast this into doubt, to which you then say you don't have the expertise to judge that. But it can be explained in English, even if the subject itself relies on mathematics. You can't just brush that off, as if it has no significance, when it's central to philosophy in the 21st century.
The second point is, that I've also repeated a number of times, we share a common set of cognitve, cultural and linguistic practices, which converge on what you describe as a shared world. I say it's a shared experience of the world, which is almost, but not quite, the same thing! The world as it perceived by very different kinds of beings, would be a very different world.
The things we encounter don't depend on us for their existence, but what their existence is for us does. So again you need to get clear what I mean by independent of mind. I say right at the outset there are many things we ourselves will never encounter or know, but that doesn't vitiate the argument, that all we know of existence is dependent on our cognitive and intellectual faculties.
Again what I'm arguing against is the idea of a kind of ultimate objectivtiy, that the real world is what exists independently of any observation or knowledge on our part. I'm arguing that all knowledge has an inelminably - can't be eliminated - pole or aspect. Contrary to what you say, this is not 'trivial', it's something that many objectively-oriented philosophers and scientists don't accept,
What you are gleaning from physics is just one interpretation?the one you resonate with?there is no solid consensus that your interpretation is the correct one. Also you are not an expert in that field, by any means, which gives you even less warrant to cite it.
The commonalities of our sensory organs and cognitve, cultural and linguistic practices cannot on their own explain the fact that we all see the same things at the same times and places. At most it can only explain what might tend to stand out for us, or the general form our perceptions take?for example in regard to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can detect, or the limitations on the acoustic frequencies we can detect?as well as the names we give to the things we encounter, and the we have conceptions of them, such as their purpose, place in human life and so on.
Even if it could explain how it is that humans see the same world, it cannot explain the fact that our observations show that our dogs see the same things we do, for example. I live on a fifteen acre property and there are many wallabies. When I walk the dogs I will often catch sight of a wallaby, and the dogs will also, and if I don't restrain them they will be off chasing it. Now the wallaby may look different to dogs than it does to us on account of the fact, among others, that when it comes to colours, they can apparently only see in blue and yellow, but it is undeniable that they see what I call "the wallaby".
I have asked you to explain how "a common set of cognitve, cultural and linguistic practices" could determine our seeing precisely the same things. Say, for example you and I have in front of us a white A4 sheet of paper covered with "hundreds and thousands" (I'm sure you are familiar with those little coloured sweet grains). I take a very sharp pencil and point precisely to just one of the hundreds of grains, and ask you what colour it is. You will agree with me as to whether it is yellow, blue, green or red, undoubtedly. Can you explain how your "common set of cognitve, cultural and linguistic practices" can account for that agreement?
And what. specifically, about the original post goes against that?
Quoting Janus
It goes directly against your contention that every observer sees the same thing when the observations show they dont. If it were really objective there would be no need for interpretation.
Don't worry about the original post or QM, just answer the straightforward question above if you can. What is at issue is the explanatory power of your idealist thesis absent the inclusion of 'mind at large', collective mind, universal mind, God.
I just can't believe you don't see the problem.
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you saying that the fact that there are different conceptual interpretations of the experimental results goes against my claim that every observer sees the same thing? Well, it doesn't? just as it is possible that people can pass different judgements about anything that is seen doesn't entail that what has been seen is different.
It is not that different things are observed, but that the class that what has been observed should be placed in, or the explanation for what is observed, may differ from person to person. Judgements about what is observed are interpretive and of course may differ?what is observed is not a matter of interpretation.
As to that I meant that when the 'two slit experiment' is carried out every observer sees the inference pattern, and when they pass light through one slit every observer sees the accumulation of points on the photographic plate.
What Im saying is that the frameworks through which we recognize yellow, blue, green, red are already the product of shared cognitive, biological, and cultural conditions. That explains the convergence without appealing to a mind at large. Agreement on basic perceptual categories doesnt refute idealism it actually illustrates it: what we call the same world is constituted through intersubjective structures of cognition. Thats the whole point of transcendental idealism: not denying reality, but clarifying that the way it shows up for us is inseparable from the conditions of human experience.
You keep coming back to the idea that Im saying the world is all in your mind. But Ive disclaimed that right from the start. My point is not solipsism. The point is that the only sense in which we can talk about the world is through the cognitive and experiential structures that make it appear for us at all. That doesnt deny that there is a shared reality on the contrary, it explains how we come to agree on things like colors in the first place: because we share common forms of sensibility, cognition, and culture.
Quoting Janus
Youre the one who said that if science digs down far enough, different observers will converge on the same underlying reality. But quantum physics has shown that this is not straightforward. The uncertainty principle already tells us that knowledge of subatomic particles is inherently approximate, not exact. And in some cases, like the experiment described here A quantum experiment suggests theres no such thing as objective reality. It doesnt take a degree in maths to follow it: two observers obtain different and conflicting observations, both of which are accurate. But there are other examples from quantum physics, such as Wheelers delayed choice experiment.
And its not a matter of my choosing or preferring one interpretation over another. If it were truly objective, thered be no question of interpretation.
But what is it that you call "the wallaby"? Is it the colour? No, because then the dogs wouldn't be seeing the wallaby. Is it the shape? Why would you think that the dogs see the same shape as you if they do not see the same colours? Colours outline the shape. What exactly is it that you are seeing, which you think the dogs are also seeing, which makes you conclude that they see the same thing as you? That you insist it is "undeniable" that they are seeing the very same thing, which inclines you to say "wallaby", is simply ridiculous.
In reality, you are just seeing something and assuming, or concluding that there is a thing there called a wallaby. But the dogs are neither assuming nor concluding a thing called a wallaby, so why would you conclude that they are seeing a thing called a wallaby? They are seeing something, and perhaps they are even assuming something about what they see, but they are not assuming "a wallaby". So what makes you think that they are seeing "the wallaby"?
You are merely forcing your own subjective conclusion onto the other (dogs in this case). Without even discussing it with the dogs, you simply conclude that because you see what makes you think "wallaby", and the dogs are seeing something, then the dogs must also see the very same thing which makes you think "wallaby". But this is so obviously illogical, not having the premises required for that conclusion.
You even admit that what you are calling "the wallaby" "may look different to the dogs". So, unless you can say what you see which inclines you to designate "the wallaby", and show how the dogs are also seeing the very same, so that they would also be inclined to designate "wallaby" in the same way that you do, your claim is completely unsupported. It's just an arbitrary assertion, perhaps designed to support a very likely ill-conceived ontology.
The first is correct, the second is the contradiction of it, which makes it false. That there is a thing observed is not a matter of interpretation, corrects the contradiction.
Youre correct .or, I agree .that you and the dog see the same thing, whatever it may be. Of the two, only you represent the thing seen with a particular concept, but you would readily admit that you havent a clue what the dogs doing with his perception, but you can be sure he isnt representing it to himself with the same conceptual reference as you.
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Wouldnt you agree its possible for a human and some other kind of intelligence to have a common perception? Which is just to say some thing is given by which their respective senses are affected, which in turn is just to say, albeit with fewer technicalities, they see the same thing, isnt it?
There is the dualism between the appearances and the objects generated through thinking. But this is nothing like the "hylomorphism" presented by Aristotle and others. The contemporary use of "mind-independence" as a criterion of objectivity is for Kant a misunderstanding of the soul caused by the limits of our experiences of the "I think":
Quoting CPR A360
This should be read in the context of it being but one element of the chapter: "The paralogisms of pure reason" beginning at A341/B399.
Then you would do well to actually do this; not make blanket statements not even (until after this passage) supported by even your own take on something.
Quoting I like sushi
I think you're wrong, because that is precisely what Kant does. He simply tells us we cannot assert any content to the conceptual objects logically required for the system to work. This is a distinction that it seems you're missing entirely, when thinking about 'physical'. Kant, you're quite right, never discusses noumena as physical objects. In this sense, they present a boundary case for human reasoning.
However, he is also quite clear that these objects are, in fact, required, despite holding for us absolutely no content or quality, for the system to make any sense. Noumena must be physical objects. That is what the system requires. Kant is just extremely careful not to say something he cannot support - therefore, these objects are beyond our ability to conceive. And that's fine.
If you want to hold that we perceive physical objects without there actually being any objects to cause our perception to be involved in anything whatsoever, I can't understand how you aren't a full-on idealist hoping to one day become a disembodied mind. I can't get on with even the beginnings of such a clearly wrong-headed way of approaching phenomena. My response above clarifies that I don't even disagree with what you're saying, as far as it goes. But it doesn't go far enough. Below...
Your second paragraph is missing a crucial, unavoidable and clearly required aspect. That is the objects which engage our perception. Otherwise, we are perceiving nothing. That's clear. So, If the arguments are going to continue along these lines feel free to assume a W and leave me out of it. Have bene over this several times with several people and it is, to me, obviously and somewhat incredibly, wrong.
Please assemble a collection of citations that support this interpretation.
The difference between the action of gravity on our experience and the action of a universal mind, for example, may be that one appears in the external world of appearances where we measure things and the other doesnt. The latter might have an action in us, which we cant measure, or isolate as a property.
Anyway, I was using it to illustrate that there are things/forces in our world which literally affect every movement we make about which we have little understanding.
Quite, but as I say, its presence in our lives might just be inobvious, or orthogonal to our preoccupations.
Referring back to Kant, he is pointing out the limits of our understanding of the world we find ourselves in by delineation the noumenon. Also in Eastern philosophies, such concepts are used the the contemplation of our nature and the realisation of worlds, or realms accessed via meditation, or revelation.
I have an affinity with these concepts as I am concerned with realising our limitations and developing ways to view our limitations in the context of our lives (living a life), for example.
In pointing out that feature, I am admitting a certain portion of interpretation when I emphasize a particular set of sentences above others. So, I am trying to be fair to alternative readings.
I've been alerted to a book on Kant called Kant's Theory of Normativity, Konstantin Pollok. He refers to Kant's transcendental hylomorphism, by which he means that Kant transposes Aristotle's form and matter relation to the register of cognition itself (where form is supplied by the a priori structures of sensibility and understanding, and matter by the manifold of intuition). This is foreshadowed in the opening section of the Transcendental Aesthetic, where he writes:
[quote=B34-A20]I call that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relationsa I call the form of appearance. Since that within which the sensations can alone be ordered and placed in a certain form cannot itself be in turn sensation, the matter of all appearance is only given to us a posteriori, but its form must all lie ready for it in the mind a priori, and can therefore be considered separately from all sensation.[/quote]
This is not to suggest a direct equivalence with Aristotelian hylomorphism, but rather a genealogical similarity: Kant is reworking the old formmatter distinction in a new, transcendental key, shifting it from the register of being (ontology) to the register of knowing (episteme).
Incidentally for those interesting reading Kant, the site Early Modern Texts has a useful resource here https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/kant. The translator, Bennett, translates the texts into a more modern idiom with explanatory content. It's more an addition to the Cambridge/Guyer translation, rather than a substitute for it, but also has very useful detailed tables of contents which help with forming a mental map of the materials.
You are still missing the point. Due to the general structural and functional characteristics of the human eye most of us see the same range of colours. Humans don't see ultraviolet or infra-red. Dogs apparently only see in tones of blue and yellow. That has nothing to do with cultural conditioning. How we categorize and names the more than a million distinct colours we can detect is a function of both cultural conditioning and the similarities between the different hues and tones.
That we agree when I point to one particular coloured particle out of hundreds as to which colour it is is not at all a function of cultural conditioning. I point at a green one say, and that you also see me pointing at a green one shows that there must be something independent of both of us that explains that, provided we accept that our perceptual organs and minds are in no hidden way connected. This is my final attempt to explain it to you?if you still don't get it, then that's pretty incredible but just too bad.
Quoting Mww
It is not merely that there is a thing observed, but that the fact that there is a particular kind of thing observed is also not a matter of subjective interpretation. We both see the dog there and we both class the thing as being a dog, so what you seem to be thinking of as the interpretation only relates to the classing, and the classing is not a subjective interpretation, but a shared practice of naming. If there was a cat or any other other object there neither of us would see a dog.
The dog and I both see something we call a wallaby. I know he sees an animal there and not a runaway trail bike, because if he catches what he sees, he may start to eat it. So, then I know he sees, just as I do, something suitable to be eaten.
I confess I don't understand what you or the quoted passage from Kant is attempting to convey. Can you explain?
Quoting Punshhh
I agree, and for me this means that gravity is a definite part of our experience whereas a universal mind is not?the latter is purely speculative.
Quoting Punshhh
I have no argument with that?we each have affinities for different ideas.
But I'm not denying that there is an external world. What I'm denying is that knowledge of that world is purely objective, that we can see it as it is or as it would be absent any observer. The entailment being that when we imagine or depict the Universe with no human observer in it, that depiction is still dependent on the perspective which only the mind can bring. But that we forget that, or suppress it, or bracket it out, such that we believe that our bare cognition of the world reveals it as it truly is, in itself.
There's no point in trying to 'explain' something to me in respect of something I haven't claimed in the first place:
Quoting Mind-Created World
The I have no idea what we have been disagreeing about, because it is true by mere definition that we cannot see the world as it would be absent any observer.
I had thought you took issue with the idea that we can speculate about what existed prior to humans, which just consists in imagining what we would have seen had we been there. The other point is that I don't accept the idea that things cannot exist outside of any perspective, and I'm pretty sure you disagree with that.
My point all along has been that there is no use in arguing about that because there can be no way of determining the truth regarding that. Of course take issue with any dogmatic assertions about it given that no one could know for certain.
So, I am not dogmatically asserting that things definitely existed prior to any percipients, or definitely exist absent any perception of them, but I do think that is the most plausible conclusion, most consistent and coherent with human experience and understanding of the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't know what conundrums you are referring to. I see more potential for conundrums in denying that things can exist absent percipients.
What might that be. That within which. Hmmmm ..
Usually known by the name of the ordering and placing in a certain form, rather than the name of that within which it occurs. Sorta like, only reason people know Joe the plumber is from his plumbing. And the term for the result of all that ordering and placing in a certain form, is as well-known as George Herman Ruths nickname.
Be careful, anyway. Theres two of them. Or one of them with the proverbial split personality. Everydayman himself ..all else being given ..admits hes got one, and readily acknowledges he even uses it. But how its doing what it does when he uses it he cannot tell you. One of the anti-Kantian gripes ..he cant tell you how either (A78), but incorporates it as a what that plays its part, not in one, oh HELL no, but BOTH!!!!! (Yikes) aspects of the very system transcendental philosophy prescribes, re: sensibility, where all that ordering and placing of empirical stuff, happens, and logic, where all the ordering and placing of rational stuff happens.
But still, its his philosophy, he invented it. Take it or leave it, right?
Way past the register of being (A247) for sure, but maybe not quite the register of knowing.
Whos we? You and the dog? Its only you and the dog perceiving this thing, right then, right there, and that is one damn special dog telling you he sees what he calls a wallaby. Nahhhhh, theres no one else there, so its you and the dog seeing what you call a wallaby.
You got the right idea, kinda, but your wording needs rewording. My opinion, of course. Maybe Im missing the point here, dunno. Cuz the wordings so .confusing.
You make it sound like my wording is generally obscure, but I think if it be compared with Kant's or even your own, I doubt it could be judged to be any more obscure, and if anything would probably be judged to be less obscure.
Anyway it's rare on these forums that anyone complains that they cannot understand what I've been saying.
I don't know if you're missing the point?which was just that the dog and I both see a wallaby, and judging by the dogs behavior towards it, he sees it as something to be eaten. I don't see wallabies as to be eaten but as to be preserved, but I have hit and killed one with my car ( on the road, not on the property I dwell on), which I subsequently ate (not my car, the wallaby, just in case I've been obscure again).
Ok, Im done with this.
Quoting Janus
HA!!! Good one.
Name one.
Anything that appears presumably exists somehow independently of appearing. You contradict yourself when you say that you don't deny the existence of the external world, and then claim that anything that exists must be subject to a perspective. That is to conflate perception of something with its actual existence.
If you want to get away from bare phenomenalism? the idea that all that exists are perceptions ?then you must allow that there is something, not generated by the percipient, that appears, whether it is actual existents or ideas in God's mind. Either way when it is not appearing it cannot be subject to any perspective unless in the "God's mind' scenario, God is held to have a perspective.
Your anthropomorphism lacks credulity.
On one way of reading this: that 'existence' is only ever intelligible to us under the conditions of immediate experience, what you are saying is, firstly, a dogmatic statement, since you are only entitled to say what is intelligible to you.
Secondly saying that the idea of existence is unintelligible under said conditions just is to deny that anything can exist that is not presently subject to a perspective, or that it cannot be said to exist outside of that perspective.
It's true that we cannot think the existence of something, in the sense of thinking what the existence is like, without applying a perspective to it, that is to say we cannot imagine what a totally perspective-less existence could be like.
But that is not to say that we cannot coherently imagine that things can and do exist absent any perspective?that they can and do exist completely independently of us and our imaginings. It's all about nuance.
Another possible reading is more sensible: you could be saying that we cannot say that anything exists or has existed which in principle we could not possibly experience or perceive. If that is all you are saying then I don't think I disagree, although I might need to think some more on that. Dark matter and energy come to mind, although admittedly their existence is speculative, even if supported by the physics.
No. I would say that a perception is unique to the being that perceives it. This is due to a multitude of factors, unique spatial temporal perspective, unique features of the perceiving body, etc.. So I believe it is impossible that two beings could have a common perception.
Quoting AmadeusD
Why do you assume that there is an object which engagers a person's perception. Like I said, the perception is a creation of the perceiver. Therefore the perceiver creates the object.
Quoting AmadeusD
This is an unjustified conclusion. A person can be wrong in what they believe they are perceiving, and this does not produce the conclusion that they are perceiving nothing. So, a person can wrongly believe that they are perceiving objects, when in fact they are not perceiving objects, and this does not produce the conclusion that they are producing nothing. They might simply be perceiving something other than objects, and falsely believe that what is perceived is objects.
Quoting AmadeusD
As explained above, what appears to be clear to you is completely illogical.
Quoting AmadeusD
it's incredibly wrong to you, because you have an illogical thinking process.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is exactly the crucial thing to understand about Kant. He brings the potential of matter (by Aristotle's principles) right into the conscious mind as "the a priori structures of sensibility". Accordingly, since "matter" refers to the unintelligible aspect of reality, Kant makes the unintelligibility of reality a feature of the mind rather than a feature of the independent reality. A deficiency of the mind is the cause of the unintelligibility of the mind. Simply put, it is the minds dependence on the senses. This is distinctly different from the Neo-Platonic perspective which assigned perfection to the mind, as immaterial anmd independent, making the reason for unintelligibility something separate from the mind, matter. In a sense, for Kant, mind is already corrupted by the presence of matter, as the a priori intuitions.
At the base level, there's nothing wrong with eating roadkill.
If you think noumena is physical though you are completely and utterly wrong. This is not really a matter of opinion. It might be annoying to hear this, but there is nothing wrong with being wrong.
If you are still convinced your view is right then the onus is very much on you to reference and explain why, using his actual words; as the scholarly concensus on this is pretty much stacked completely against you. Note: When I say 'scholarly' I mean reputable scholarly work not amateur interpretations (which are rife with misrepresentation of Kant, due to his multifacted approach).
So what?
I cant (Kant) see a disagreement between us, its more a difference of emphasis. That looking through different ends of the telescope thing again. You emphasise the importance of proof and the empirical. Me pretty much the opposite, the emphasis on what cant be proved, or focussing on what cant be quantified in the empirical. Although we both are concerned with sticking to the truth and not wondering down blind alleys.
Tread carefully, dog is God read backwards. What if dogs read backwards?
Anubis anyone.
The title of the thread is* (in a nutshell), to tease out a blindness in the view that, supported by science etc. the physical world**is what exists and anything else is mere speculation. A view which is held by the majority of the population. That the overwhelming truth of this orthodoxy cannot in all seriousness be challenged, and that this (orthodoxy) results in a blinkered view.
*apologies Wayfarer, if I have misrepresented the tittle.
**I am simplifying the various physicalist perspectives into one phrase here.
I imagine you meant each perception is unique to the being that perceives. Yours implies a perception is perceived. Nobody perceives a perception.
But I didnt ask about the perception as much as its causal necessity.
So you dont agree that a thing given by which dissimilar beings senses are affected, is the same as the effect a given thing has on dissimilar beings perceiving it.
Ever notice, e.g., forest fires, where all sorts of critters are all running away from the same thing;
Creatures as dissimilar as whales and terns each treat bait balls as the same one thing;
You claim to see a horses head, I claim to see a lions head, but we are only perceiving a cloud.
Judgement of a perception is unique; perception itself, that by which various and possibly dissimilar sensibilities, are effected, is not.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I dont read A20/B34 that way, which is where he first installs matter as such into the system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It doesnt; it refers to the undetermined aspect of reality. The undetermined is not necessarily the unintelligible.
What I am saying is that the idea that there is "a thing" which is perceived is a faulty idea. So, I'm saying that all these supposed "things", forest fires, balls, and clouds, could be better understood if we simply accept that the perception of them as things is mistaken and misleading. It doesn't matter that all types of critters act as if they are perceiving things, because they all evolved in a similar way, and that was in a way which conditioned them to act as if they are perceiving things, just like us. The claim that we all perceive the same "things" is just as effective to argue that we all make the same mistake, as it is to argue that it must be the truth, because it is common.
So here's an example. We describe the way that electromagnetic energy interacts with 'things', as the photoelectric effect. Because we understand electrons and atoms as things existing in spacetime, this forces us to conceive of electromagnetism as things, photons, in order that we can understand this interaction. However, much evidence indicates to us that electromagnetism actually exists in the form of waves, rather than as things called photons. Further, there is also much evidence which indicates that the interaction between the supposed 'things', photons and electrons, would be better understood, if we represent these things as waves in a substance, rather than as things in spacetime. Therefore the evidence indicates that we are moving in the wrong direction, toward misunderstanding rather than toward understanding, by representing the wave activity of electromagnetism as things, photons, instead of representing the supposed physical things as wave disturbances, to establish the required compatibility to understand interaction.
As an analogy, consider how we understand hearing. We know that when a supposed thing makes a noise, we don't sense the noise as physical particles of noise being emitted from the thing making the noise, and being received by the ear. We understand it as a wave activity of molecules. But then we must understand that the supposed thing emitting the noise, and the supposed thing receiving the noise, are not actually things at all, but a collection of particles, molecules. The idea that there is a thing which emits the noise, and a thing which receives the noise is very misleading because it does not allow the proper understanding, which requires that the supposed 'things' must be understood as really the activity of something else. The true understanding is that the supposed 'thing' is not a thing at all, but some other activity of something else, which appears to us as if it were a thing.
That's the key to understanding how the conception of 'things' is misleading. The supposed 'thing' is really a bunch of underlying activity, and insisting that it is actually a physical thing debilitates our capacity to understand the reality of it. That is the point of process philosophy in general. Modeling reality as consisting of things which are perceived by us is not an accurate representation, and very misleading to anyone who wants a true understanding.
I see that Pollock supports my statement that mind-independence is not a critical criterion for objectivity in Kant.
Pollock quotes the second edition preface:
Quoting CPR B16
Pollock's Introduction ends with:
Quoting Pollock, Theory of Normativity
Tell that to my thumb, after getting whacked by a mis-directed hammer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Doesnt have to be an accurate representation; it is only necessary such representation not contradict either Mother Nature, at the same level, and not contradict antecedent experience on any level. Being flawed intelligences on the one hand, in that we get stuff wrong once in awhile, and being as we possess a purely speculative idea of our own intelligence on the other, it is forgivable that we may not have, nor is there sufficient reason to expect to ever have, a true understanding. And we may not even know true understanding, if it happens.
Your reasoning is exemplary; it just exceeds the criteria for empirical knowledge of things on a common everyday scale. I mean .when was the last time you approached the SOL in anything with which you were consciously engaged? Weve all perceived the alignment of susceptible particles into the shape of a field, but none of us have perceived the field of which the particles assume the shape.
I guess I should say Ive never perceived; perhaps others have, dunno.
Some commenters you could look at:
Henry Allison: Takes the dual-aspect argument on and imo compellingly.
P.F Strawson makes similar comments in Bounds of Sense
Lucy Alais doesn't commit, but is heading in this direction, from what I've read (but that could turn out to be embarrassingly unhelpful)
Schulting seems to presuppose the noumena as physical
the SEP on Qualified Phenomenalism seems to also support this, or at least run over why its reasonable.
Essentially, one of the 'limits' Kant seems to implicitly assume, and then explain, is that we must make this assumption about there being physical objects, even when we have literally no other reason to think so than appearances. They are required to ground the purpose of the entire Critique.
This could be wrong, but It seems to be entirely reasonable and a respectable, if not more compelling interpretation than one which says we must jettison the concept of the physical (required, if we reject Noumena as such - or at least, we are given no way to retain it).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These are two different things. I'm unsure how best to to get this across, but you cannot have a shadow without a physical object physically blocking light, even if we can never access that object. This how noumena must work for perception to do anything which gives us a physical impression. It seems a bit "edgy" to argue otherwise, to me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This doesn't make much sense. A person is not perceiving if they are imagining, which seems to be what you're talking about. If you mean to make a delineation between perception-led impressions and imagination or ideas, then sure, that's highly relevant and complicates things. But it does not give me a counterexample to what I've said, that I can see.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. Sorry.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, no. Sorry. This seems a fairly standard response from people who like to argue about Kant and have rather precious interpretations. That;s not to denigrate you, or it. It is to say that I have come across this many times, and I am hearing nothing new.
Quoting I like sushi
1. Correct.
2. Not actually possible. If Kant is so complex, and I can find several notable and respectable writers who take the position I'm putting forward, you can't make this claim. Its exactly the same as I'm objecting to above. It is a standard response which is not actually capable of being made on the writings Kant left. The interpretive process gets us here, fairly squarely.
Quoting I like sushi
It seems you maybe have a twisted idea of what is going on in the work, and how people interpret it. I shall stick to reading those interpretations, thinking, and making reasonable inferences. Because this is simply not true. It is true, a consensus exists that the noumena act as a limting factor in human understanding. I've not argued this. There is a second aspect, though more fundamental to the system. I've been over this. It seems, from this, that you and others are not even understanding what's being said in my comments.
The fact is, if noumena do not represent, in an abstract phrasing, actual physical objects the system falls apart. That much is sound. I couldn't care less for quibbling over the fact there are two possible interpretations, and you think one is "flat out wrong" in the face of all I've said, and cited. I just can't take that all too seriously, though I appreciate the efforts everyone is making. You are simply not saying things that make my position incoherent, wrong on the words of Kant, or somehow way outside the reasonable interpretation window.
I'm going to agree with in this regard. I don't think there is a phrase that translates as 'physical object' in the COPR. Kant is clear that noumena cannot be equated with physical objects. Physicality, for him, already belongs to the phenomenal realm (governed by space, time, and causality). Noumenon functions as a boundary concept (as you say), marking the limit of experience (or: hypothetically as an object of intellectual intuition). To say noumena must be physical objects is to import a post-Kantian usage of physical that he explicitly brackets out. The better way to put it is: noumena are required for the system, but precisely as non-physical and unknowable.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fascinating line of thought. It reminded me of Heidegger's essay on the topic What is a Thing? where he says that our very notion of 'thing is not given once and for all but always interpreted in accordance with the domain of discourse in which it is understood.
(Incidentally, a line from the introductory paragraph of that essay: If one takes everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged. Something which participants in this thread would be well advised to contemplate.)
Quoting Punshhh
It's not a blindness but a sensible intellectual humility. All we know is this world. We can have no way of knowing if there is more. I think your assertion that most of the population think this world is all there is unsupported by the data: It is estimated that more than 85 percent of the global population identifies with a religious group.
I'd say those who want to believe in something that cannot be known to be true are the ones wearing blinkers. They see only through their own confirmation bias. I have no problem with people believing whatever they like provided they can be honest that it is all about faith, not knowledge. Apparently to admit that would undermine their beliefs, though. People's priorities are pretty sad considering the state the world is in.
[quote=Heidegger]If one takes everyday representation as the sole standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged.[/quote]
Like the OP, right?
At the time of injury, I would never be thinking about ontology. What's your point here?
Quoting Mww
Speak for yourself. Some of us are interested in truth. That's what I believe philosophy is all about. And for truth accurate representation is necessary, lack of contradiction doesn't fulfil the the criteria for truth. That we don't have truth is forgivable, as you say, but that doesn't mean we ought not seek it.
Quoting Mww
I think i said already, that a key point in Plato's philosophy is the failings, or deficiencies of sensation as a guide toward truth. To find truth we must exceed empirical knowledge. The "common everyday scale" is the life of the cave dweller. Truth is about escaping that common everyday perspective.
Quoting AmadeusD
This argument is based on a specific assumption about what "a shadow" is. If that assumption is wrong, then the argument is unsound. I believe the assumption is wrong, therefore I believe your argument is unsound. I'm unsure how to best get this across to you.
Quoting AmadeusD
My argument is that a person may misjudge what one is perceiving, and this does not imply that the person perceives nothing. That was to counter your claim that if a person is not perceiving objects one is perceiving nothing. It may be the case that the person judges oneself to be perceiving objects, but is not perceiving objects, yet still is perceiving.
Quoting Wayfarer
It all relates to the distinction I make between past and future. "Things", as physical objects, are a product of sense knowledge, empirical evidence. However, despite the fact that people claim that sensation occurs at the present, all sensation is always in the past from the perspective of the sensing subject. This means that "things", or "physical objects" refers only to the past. And when we realize that the future consists of possibilities rather than things, or physical objects, this forces us to totally reconceptualize what exactly exists at the present, or more precisely, what is actually happening at the present.
I believe that. But Heidegger is quite difficult. Good luck!
Quite, and its a good way of thinking about it, in order to free ourselves of hard materialism, or something. But its more complicated than that and we mustnt lose sight of the fact that what we are involved in, in our little lives in this world we find ourselves in, is reality (for us) and that there is a purpose and process going on with and between the things.
As for the activity of something else, presumably we are talking of distant, or large objects, acting as poles. As in electrical, or magnetic poles?
Show me in the text where Kant says noumena is physical. You cannot. End of story.
I imagine out of all of these SEP might hint at such. I doubt very much any other states noumena is physical. you are jus trawling for secondary commentaries for evidence instead of presenting primary source quotes ... which makes me wonder if you have actually read COPR? Many people pose as if they have when it fact they simply did a course on it and were spoon fed information via a secondary source. Perfectly understandable as not everyone has the tiem or inclination to sift through such a dense volume.
You think the Kant's description of the unknowability of the in itself is a religious dogma, because you don't understand it. You think he's projecting an unknowable something. Meanwhile, 'the world', which you so confidently proclaim our knowledge of, is itself not the knowable, familiar and determinate realm which you so casually believe it to be. So you categorise this kind of argument, and that of the original post, as being kind of religious, which is why you think them dogmatic. It's just completely transparent, and it's the opposite of intellectual humility.
Ohfercrissakes. Obviously, my point is your thumb will be just as wounded by a mis-directed faulty idea as mine is by a hammer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wonderful. Be sure and let me know when, or if, you happen upon an accurate representation. That to which you compare the one you have, to another you dont, from which the necessarily deficient quality of yours is determinable .well, good luck with that, I say.
Now, you might say the comparison is always just between your own representations, a succession predicated on changes in experience, which, ironically enough, is precisely what every cave-dweller since Day One, has done. But there is never in the manifold of successive changes in your own representations the implication of the unconditioned, that from which no further change is possible and from which the only logical notion of an accurate representation, is given.
Which leaves you with .(sigh) ..only those that dont contradict each other, and from which it is clear the form of truth, that in a cognition which conforms to is object, already manifests an accurate representation, and justifies logic as the necessary criteria for the form any truth must exhibit.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Given as established the [i]conditio sine qua non[/i ] form of truth, that in a cognition which conforms to its object, and the impossibility of exceeding empirical knowledge with respect to experience of the objects contained in those cognitions, which is always that to which the form of truth relates, it follows there is no universal criteria for the fact of truth available to the human being.
There may be considered sufficient reason to exceed empirical knowledge insofar as the empirical knowledge we have does not afford us truth as such. But considering sufficient reason for an impossibility, is incomprehensible.
Yes, i think it's very complicated, and the trend for us is to simplify. We even have evolved in a way which has us sensing a very small bit of reality. So it is intuitive for us, as built into the fabric of our very existence, to simplify things. Consider for example, that our eyes are only sensitive to a small portion of the electromagnetic wavelengths, one octave so to speak. We've simply evolved in a way to focus on a very small, but very relevant part of reality.
The simplification helps to keep us focused directly on what is important and purposeful to our little corner of being, but it misleads us into thinking that this is representative of "the universe" as a whole. Ontologies like monism are an extension of this misleading trend toward oversimplification.
Quoting Punshhh
Not necessarily distant or large. If for example, we understand electromagnetism as waves, then there must be substance which the waves are active in (common called aether). That is simply the nature of a wave, it is the activity of the particles of an underlying substance. In our trend to simplify things, it seems like we overlook this need for an underlying substance which is active as waves, in our representations of electromagnetism. But then we end up with a wave function, or something like that, which accounts for the energy of the waves in their capacity to interact with assumed particles of matter, without providing any real representation of the waves.
The issue of poles is a further problem which I don't think can even be approached without a true representation of the waves. To look for the poles without first representing the waves would be like looking for a cause without first knowing the effect which you are looking for the cause of.
Sorry Mww, but I still don't get it. Whether or not a person understands how one received a wound, or even what it means to be wounded, is irrelevant to the feeling of being wounded. It seems like you are trying to say that fi one doesn't know how they got wounded, then they cannot feel the wound. If that is your point, then it's not valid.
Quoting Mww
Thank you, as you seem to understand, we need as much luck as we can possibly get, with this endeavour.
Quoting Mww
You seem to be saying that the process would go on forever, infinitely. I disagree, I think there would be an end to it. Whether the end comes in a good way or a bad way is another question, but I think the good way would be better than the bad way.
Quoting Mww
You are completely neglecting the reality of possibilities, and our inclination to judge some possible outcomes as better than others. It is not contradiction, or lack of it, which forms the basis, or grounding of our judgements, it is better and worse, good and bad, which provides that base. And these have a view toward the future, rather than the view toward the past which empirical representation has. Therefore real truth is grounded in the principles by which we judge goodness, as the basic form of all judgement.
Quoting Mww
Do you recognize two very distinct meanings of "object"? One is a physical thing, an object of sensation, empirical knowledge. The other is a goal, or end, the good. Since the physical object of empirical knowledge is demonstrably a faulty concept, produced by the deceptive nature of the senses, then we must consider that the true "object" is the goal or end, the good. Therefore "the form of truth" relates to the good, as the true object, the goal for the future, and not to the false "object" which is the object of empirical knowledge. The "object", as the goal, or end, the good, cannot be known by empirical knowledge, and this is why we must exceed empirical knowledge for real truth, to understand the real object, as the good. That is the principle of the is/ought divide.
Quoting Mww
Do you classify knowing the good as impossible?
I looked through what I could find of Henry Allison's writings, and he promotes a view of 'transcendental idealism' over against the view of 'transcendental realism' that he attributes to P.F. Strawson. I cannot copy and paste from the preview but here a link to Allison's book: Kant's Transcendental Idealism.
The Preface orients the distinction in the context of the CPR. Chapter 1 introduces sharp critics of transcendental idealism on page 4 and introduces P.F. Strawson as the champion of those views on page 5. The two thinkers are diametrically opposed in this debate concerning 'things-in-themselves.'
In the Cambridge edition of CPR, Strawson is cited in an editors' footnote for the following text:
Quoting CPR A36/B53
The editors' footnote #20 says (in part):
Strawson appears to hold the criteria of mind-independence as the last word on objectivity. Allison defends Kant's argument that the subjective condition is integral with the real.
Do you realise that you have just said that we know nothing, in particular. Well apart from what we have evolved to deal with.
I would go further and state that we cannot say anything positive, or negative about anything other than our world (except through revelation), welcome to the ranks of mysticism.
Regarding the poles, I would refer one to the myth of Ishvara (there are differing interpretations within Hinduism). I liken it to a divine being, spinning the world from her fingertips.
Or the first verse of the bible;
In both cases the deity whispers, blows, or spins the vibrations, or waves of form and diversity onto/into a ground, a field of potentially.
I won't get into the technicalities here - they don't fascinate me, with some exceptions of course. But I think looking at Lucy Allais' Manifest Reality is very comprehensive for Kant. She also analyzes people like Allison and Peter Strawson, many others.
Do you know of a portion of Allais that suggests I have mischaracterized the debate between Allison and Strawson?
I have been checking out secondary sources as they are appealed to by interlocutors. But I also have been trying to respond to them in the context of specific interpretations of the primary text such as those put forward by AmadeusD and Wayfarer.
What a ridiculous statement?I never claimed it was a religious dogma.. The in itself is unknowable by mere definition/ stipulation?the in itself is also just another human idea. We see things as they appear to us, and we have a natural tendency to want to know of those things what the fundamental nature or existence independent of their appearances to us is, and we recognize that it is impossible to know that?we might even say that since it is impossible the very idea is irrelevant or even a nonsense.
It is also true that we can speculate about what seems to be the possible alternatives, and we can consider whether it seems more plausible to think that our cognition of things gives us some knowledge of them or not.
It is also a ridiculously presumptuous and petulant statement?as usual you claim that anyone who has a different take than you must therefore not understand.
Quoting Wayfarer
Human knowledge of this world as it appears to be is vast and comprehensive. Can you cite even one piece of knowledge which is not of, about, or dependent upon this world of human experience?
I don't expect you to answer of course, because you apparently don't think it necessary to answer questions that present difficulties your dogma cannot handle.
Your own words:
Quoting Janus
Here, you are directly equating the argument in the original post with religious dogma - and now, you're denying you said it. Just as you constantly appeal to positivism, and then deny you're doing so. Doesn't warrant any further response.
There is nothing in the quoted passage there about Kant's description of the unknowability of the in itself being religious dogma. I haven't even used the words "religious dogma" there at all. What I have implied is that claiming what is accepted on faith is knowledge is to be asserting some religious dogma.
Quoting Janus
Meanwhile, as expected, you make no attempt to address my refutation of your ridiculous and obviously false claim that we don't know much of and about the world. You make a lot of claims, but when they are challenged you deflect and hide behind strawmen.
You know, it's not a matter of "I'm right and you're wrong", but of "I think this" and "Oh, I disagree with that because..." You seem to think that your perspective is unimpeachably correct and that the reason people disagree is because they are mired in a kind of modernist forgetting of truths know to the ancients. Such a claim is unsupported, hopelessly underdetermined, that's why I don't share that view. You cannot even be confident that you really understand what the ancients thought, since you don't read ancient languages and you rely on translators, who each have their own take on ancient thought.
So, I don't say you are so much wrong as you are spinning a story that suits your wishes as to how the world should be. You are basically a dogmatic proselytizer.
I think you did fine. The bit I understand of what you put forth makes sense.
But Kantian scholarship isn't something I'm an expert in; I suggested Allais because she covers almost all of them.
So, no interpretative issue arises that I can see here.
This really depends on how you would define "know". Unlike some epistemologists, I don't think that truth is a requirement for "knowledge". Plato, in The Theaetetus, demonstrated that we cannot actually ensure truth, so a determination of truth is not necessary for us to call some information "knowledge". So I'm not saying that we know nothing, I'm saying that truth isn't really part of our knowledge.
Quoting Punshhh
I tend to enjoy your mystic perspective.
Yes, and there are different kinds of knowledge. Something that interests me is knowledge acquired through the witnessing of events. This doesnt require learning, or understanding, just observation, or presence. I can remember and visualise clearly, in memory, events that happened 30 years ago. In which I witnessed something unexplainable, something which defies credulity and which has broad ranging implications for how I think about the world and reality. And yet at the time, it was just something I noticed, experienced, for a split second. Something that happened so quickly and was over before I could react. I could have just carried on, walked past and not given it another thought. But my enquiring mind and curiosity latched onto it instantly and it is still with me now as though it happened yesterday.
This experience is logged in me along with many others like a film archive, of curious observations and form an important part of my knowledge.
Yeah, my fault, being facetious. Im just having trouble understanding how anyone could feel physical pain from a faulty idea. You said objects were, or might be, just faulty ideas, a hammer, being an object represented by that conception, would fit the bill.
I started out by saying, you hit my thumb with a faulty idea and Ill hit yours with a hammer, but it got lost in the shuffle somehow.
Anyway .
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the search for accurate representation, if not for the LNC, what other way is there to judge the relation between the object we perceive and the object we think? If logic doesnt end the search, insofar as all relations are determinable by it, it stands to reason the search for a relation wouldnt end. But it always does, either in the affirmation or negation thereof, so the logic would seem to be both necessary and sufficient.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Doesnt everyone with even an inkling of philosophical inclination? A thing is always an object but an object is not always a thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Theres that faulty idea thing again. Ya know, right, the senses dont describe? The only nature attributable to the senses would be to inform of a real presence, nothing more or less.
Furthermore, empirical knowledge is not of a physical object, but the representation of it, and the senses have nothing to do with representations, being merely the occasion for the possibility of them.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. The good isnt something to know; it is something to feel. That by which one feels anything is reducible to an aesthetic judgement, that by which he knows something is reducible to a discursive judgement. The formal ground of the one is pure practical reason, of the other is pure theoretical reason.
Last but not least, that by which one merely comprehends the possibility of knowledge, is pure speculative reason, upon which is constructed the transcendental philosophy of German Enlightenment idealism.
I believe it is important to the topic of this thread, to understand how intention guides attention, and knowledge is dependent on attention. So 'the created world' is a product of 'what we pay attention to', and 'what we pay attention to' is guided by our intention.
Quoting Punshhh
I find it very interesting how different people will remember the very same event in completely different ways. So you might say, something incredulous happened, but someone else in the same area might just notice a mundane occurrence.
Quoting Punshhh
In Plato's Theatetus, and Meno, Socrates said that curiosity, or wonder, is the source of philosophy. Being amazed is what inspires inquiry. Those who simply take things for granted do not notice all the potential sources of amazement, and do not aspire to philosophy.
Quoting Mww
OK, I see what you are saying, and it exposes a misunderstanding of what I said, which I didn't notice before. Let me try again.
The idea of "objects" is a faulty idea. That you pick up a thing called a hammer, and start banging at things called nails, is a misconception, a faulty representation of the reality of the situation. It is just conception and perception which is supported facility and efficiency. It is very easy to understand reality in this way. To have objects which we name and talk about facilitates communication, and easy knowledge. However, sciences like chemistry and physics, prove to us that reality is actually completely different from this conception/perception representation. Activity is not at all as we represent it, as picking up objects called a hammer and nails, and hitting one object with another. That's a vastly oversimplified representation of what is actually going on, and really a faulty representation.
Why your pain reference is irrelevant, is that a person will feel pain after making the mistake which you describe as hitting one's thumb with a hammer, regardless of whether this description, "hitting one's thumb with a hammer", is an accurate description of what really happens, or not.
Quoting Mww
The LNC does not apply to the good of intention. This is why goods are often said to be subjective, different people can have contradicting goals, or goods. Even the same person will sometimes have conflicting goals. That is what makes deliberation necessary.
The "object we think" is created through the guidance of intention. As explained above, intention guides attention, which induces observation. The "object we perceive" as the result of observation, is therefore a product of intention. Since intention is the guiding factor, in the relation between the object we think and the object we perceive, and the LNC does not apply to intention, then LNC based logic is not what is required to end the search for understanding this relation. We must consider the type of logic by which we deliberate, and judge goods. This is a logic of priority and hierarchy, where things exist in a relation of order, rather than a logic of this or that.
Quoting Mww
Science demonstrates very clearly, that the conceptual structure based in objects of substance, physical objects, moving and interacting in space, is insufficient, and cannot adequately represent the reality of activity. This implies that it is a faulty idea. Please accept this as reality, instead of referring to mundane experiences in an attempt to make fun of the reality of the situation.
Quoting Mww
Right, with this understanding you ought to be in a very good position to be capable of simply rejecting this representation, that of "empirical knowledge". This representation has demonstrated to us that it has reached its limits of efficacy, and at that point it has shown itself, proved to us, that it itself, is based in faulty ideas. Therefore we need to start all over, from the bottom up, with something more reasonable as the foundation.
Quoting Mww
OK, now since the two, practical reason and theoretical reason, may contradict, and this will inevitably call into question the applicability of the LNC, we need to be able to hand priority to one or the other. Would you not agree, that "that by which one feels anything" is necessarily prior to 'that by which he knows something"? This puts practical reason as the higher, more conclusive form of judgement.
Kant supports this as well. The a priori intuitions of space and time, as the conditions of sensibility, are "that by which one feels something". Since these intuitions form the basis for theoretical reason, we must conclude that this type of judgement, practical reason, is a higher form of judgement.
Quoting Mww
The category of "speculative reason" is completely unnecessary, created and referred to, as a distraction. Rather than accepting the reality that practical reason is higher than theoretical reason, and that theoretical reason is subordinate to it, another category, speculative reason, is proposed as higher than the two. However, when we recognize the reality that practical reason is actually higher than theoretical reason, and that practical reason is by its very nature speculative, then there is no need for that further category.
Let me describe the event (that happened 30yrs ago), because there we two people who experienced it and it involved an exchange of glances between another person and myself and in some ways the setting was not the main event. It was the meeting of minds.
I was at the New Years Eve rave at Anjuna beach, Goa in 1995/6. There was a dense throng of dancers in a dense area about the size of a tennis court. I had been observing the dancing, the music and how it affected the people and how the crowd would become one. There was a kind of churning of energy following the music, the people would move with the churning as a flock of birds, or shoal of fishes. With the highlight being when someone would blow a whistle. Needless to say, I found this fascinating and was contemplating the spiritual dimension. When all of a sudden the throng parted by chance, a wall of about twenty, or more deep of dancers simultaneously all moved in such a way that a clear passage opened up in the throng. I saw at the other end of this passage, a small chap who was all grey, drained and exhausted, he looked as though he was struggling to stay on his feet and wanted out. I just looked on astonished, like a rabbit caught in headlights. He suddenly noticed me and our gaze met. I could see his desperation and his heartfelt plea for me to release him. He reached out his hand and I failed to respond. Although there was nothing I could do. The wall of people closed in on him again in an instant and I realised there would be no way I would be able to go in there and pull him out. I just carried on my way, contemplating what had just happened.
There was a visceral exchange between us, an acknowledgment and an understanding, the whole thing lasted for about a second, although it felt more like about ten seconds. I often wonder just what happened there in that moment. Although it wasnt an isolated incident, lots of other interesting things happened around that time.
But going back to my point about being a witness, I am sure that for the other person along with myself, the encounter was burned into our minds and I know I certainly had a profound sense of every detail of it. There was knowledge given to me absent a thinking mind, instantaneous and unforgettable.
Except that the reality demonstrated by the sciences is only demonstrable from the very same system of conception/perception representation, as the common Everydayman reality not the least concerned with the scientific version at all. When was the last time you approached the SOL ..etc, etc.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Activity is exactly as we represent it to ourselves, give appearances in compliance with our particular physiology alone. The fact it is a vastly oversimplified representation doesnt make it false; it merely makes it incomplete, and that merely from perspective, iff given by a deeper scale of investigation. The point being, the completion of the representation, determined from such deeper scale, wouldnt be a necessary addendum to our experience, insofar as knowing e.g., the distinct molecular composition of different kinds of forks, does nothing whatsoever for disturbing the already established activity of getting food to the mouth using one. Contingent with respect to future experience, certainly, for deeper-scale investigations make things like penicillin possible. Such is science, not as opposed but in juxtaposition, to metaphysics.
How is all that not exactly congruent to the fact SR/GR doesnt falsify Newtonian physics, but supplements it, given a different scale of representation?
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, it doesnt; it applies to the understanding of whether or not the good is judged to be satisfied by the intention.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
(I hesitate with the term goods, but continue with the subjective)
Of course. On the one hand, good things for me are not necessarily good things for you, hence each good of a thing is a subjective judgement. On the other hand, any of my judgements regarding what is good, insofar as they all arise in me alone, can hardly be termed subjective, in that there is nothing to which they relate except my own determinability. The good in such case, reverts to relative degrees of a necessarily presupposed good, rather than different forms of good itself. Such condition is the same for both of us, granting the commonality of our respective human inclinations and intellectual attitudes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
True enough for Everydayman, but the well-practiced philosopher is the more likely to not.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Insufficient .for what? It is quite sufficient for us. Weve conceived space and time, applied them quite adequately to the activity of objects. Is there more? Sure, could be, seems science has said so. Doesnt make what weve already done with our conceptual structure any less adequate.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fine. Youve suggested dumping what we have, but havent suggested what to replace it with. You are in no position to prove the system we speculate as adequate for us, has a substitute that is better for us, which is really nothing but a greater degree of adequate.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh, I have no problem with accepting the science. As a matter of fact, because science is the best indicator of the LNC available to us, wouldnt it be great to subject the speculative methodologies by which our mundane experiences manifest in us to the same criteria, in order to discover whether or not we can get something beneficial out of them?
Ever noticed that no science is ever done that wasnt first thought? Ever heard of a scientist that wasnt human? You favor the scientific so far beyond the necessary ground for its very possibility, making fun is what one does rather than to disrespectfully scoff outright at the absurdity of the favoritism. Or, fanaticism, perhaps. At any rate, the objects of science proper are irrelevant with respect to how science is done.
That being said, I shall immediately rescind my objections, upon being presented with that rational system which is better than, over that system which is merely not good enough.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This, and all that pursuant to your practical reason and theoretical reason may contradict, I leave for future debate, for the subtleties therein are even more obscure than those at present.
Again, I don't think you've misinterpreted anything. I was just pointing out what I think is the more comprehensive account of Kant's epistemology.
It's a suggestion, nothing more.
Thank you for the clarification.
I will take a look at Manifest Reality and see if it pulls me in. I am stingy with my time upon secondary texts and like to keep work on them in balance with engagement with primary texts, even when the secondary ones are very helpful.
My recent interest in Kant comes from realizing that so many philosophers after him have become 'secondary sources' in their own right in regard to him. I am trying to make a separate space from all that to investigate what is said.
She was a student of Galen Strawson and he recommended her book, fyi.
Hi,
The difference I explain between present, past and future is a difference in their constitutive roles. If the past and future are constituents of the present, then the present is not something pure, but something that does not participate in ousia or substance. There would be no need to make the present something totally different from the past and future, since all three do not participate in ousia. The difference between these three must be thought of differently from how we normally think of three different things, since they are not so different and their difference is erased at every moment.
Your position fails, i think, when it demands precision, since you are seeking to differentiate between past, present and future by treating them as substances. In other words, for me there is a complicity between the demand for precision and the idea of a classical difference between three substances. For me, it is necessary that the difference between past, present and future be unclear and constantly erased in order to show that consciousness is more than the present: it is being erased in a difference distinct from presence and ousia. For me, it is necessary that the difference between past, present and future is not clear and is constantly blurred in order to show that consciousness is more than just the present: it is being blurred in a difference distinct from presence and ousia. This implies introducing non-being as part of its essence. This implies that the world is not distinct from consciousness insofar as the world has been classically conceived as the non-being of consciousness. In this sense, the world is something different from consciousness, but it is also something equal to consciousness.
In other words, the conclusion I would reach according to my position is that the world and consciousness differ, but not according to a classical difference as we understand it according to the logic of identity. The difference shows us that there is something of the world in consciousness and there is something of consciousness in the world.
Quoting Mww
The point though, is that what is demonstrated is its own faultiness. You know, when a method fails in its capacity to reach the desired end, it demonstrates its own faultiness.
Quoting Mww
I completely disagree with all this. Perhaps, by the principle of relativity, activity is exactly as we represent it to ourselves, but I thing relativity is a means of avoiding truth. In general, oversimplification is falsity.
Quoting Mww
We seem to be losing any common ground for discussion.
Quoting Mww
Insufficient for truth. That is what I was talking about.
Quoting JuanZu
The point though, is that "substance", just like "the present" may itself be an illusion. So the issue is not whether the present is something pure, but whether the present has any kind of reality at all. And if it is real why would we think that it partakes of substance?
Quoting JuanZu
I treat past and future as substance, but I see no reason to assume any substantial existence of the present. The present is purely active, without substance. I disliked your proposal because it required three substances, instead of my two. by making the present something distinct from the past and future.
A tree produces a seed in order to produce another tree. If you just look at the seed and say "oh that's not a tree, obviously it failed let's destroy this tree" one quickly notices an error in judgement. Belief systems call this arrogance or pride. Society calls this impatience and imprudence. Science calls this just being wrong. Remember that.
I don't see the relevance. If the seed fails in producing a tree it demonstrates its own faultiness.
Of course. But my point is sometimes we jump the gun, per se. Some flowering plants take hundreds of years to produce fruit. People don't live hundreds of years. So, by all apparent rational sense, you could be like "oh look this plant doesn't do anything" when in reality you're dead wrong. Literally. :lol:
Come on you should know this stuff. This isn't elementary school.
I already gave good reasons why it isn't a case of premature judgement.
I think we can learn quite a lot from these sort of experiences, its like a window into hidden parts of our world that we dont ordinarily see*.
For example; I have come to realise that extremely inprobable events and coincidences happen all the time. Probabilities equivalent to a lottery win. The probability that the crowd of dancers would part like that is extremely low. I have many other experiences which confirm this observation**. And yet, very few few of us notice these events, or if we do, realise the significance.
Secondly; for this event to happen, there was a collective action between all the people involved. So in a sense the crowd, including myself and the small chap, were acting as one cohesive organism. Which might suggest that we act as one organism more often than we might expect.
Thirdly; there was some kind of calling, need, requirement for the two of us to see each other and have our interaction***. I have had numerous encounters with people which involved exchanging of glances, as intense, or meaningful as this, indeed even more so. So have come to view such interactions as a window to the soul, or something like that.
Fourthly; and this point involves another encounter at the same event, aswell. The realisation that brief meetings between particular people can have a meaning, or significance, way beyond what we might expect. And that some kind of group communion is going on within populations.
This leads me to conclude a number of things about our world and humanity, which are not overtly evident and that there are deeper meaning and far reaching processes and purposes at play in our world about which we know nothing (in particular).
* we are blind, or blinkered to it. Although some cultures are not so blind and embrace it.
** I know about probability, chance and random events. But I am putting it in the context of a human life and the rarity within the experiences of a person for such improbable events to happen with meaning, within their particular path of experience. And that through the development of the skills of observation, one can come to see these events more and more and make use of them.
***the implication being that there is something going on at a soul, or spirit level in the beings involved.
We are all still in kindergarten, but dont realise it. We are playing with our shiny toys and passing them around in our own little worlds pretending to be important, or saying important things. While the grown ups are in the next room keeping an eye on us. Just to make sure we dont go pressing any big red buttons out of curiosity.
I strongly agree. That's why there is sayings like "truth is stranger than fiction". I believe it has something to do with the variety of possibility. Possibility extends through such a vast array of features of a vast array of activities, far beyond the capacity of the most imaginative minds. That is why superstition extends to such a broad array of habitual activities. You'll find that people who work in a career where luck and chance are significant factors (such as sports games) pay very strong attention to the most minute factors of daily life. They are said to be superstitious. Very small things, which are not even noticeable to most people can end up having a large effect on what happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Quoting Punshhh
These two features involve a non-conscious relation between individuals, which will act to amplify the minute factors of possibility, through multiplication.
Here's an analogy. Consider that a living body is composed of a multitude of small parts, individual cells, or even the smaller parts, parts of a cell and the parts that act between cells. Each part is acting out its own role, by what it is inclined to do by the deterministic laws of physics, while leaving open minute factors of possibility. That is, it is still free to make a different move, one which would appear to be chance, or random. Also, there must be an non-conscious relation between all the different parts, so that the possibility which is left open by each individual is multiplied by the possibility left open by each other, allowing for coincidental apparent chance or random acts. This "coincidence" acts to "amplify possibility". When the whole, as a group, does something unexpected, the effect of amplified possibility is realized. We observe this, "the effects of amplified possibility" every time a being makes an act which we designate as freely chosen.
Quoting Punshhh
This is analogous to the above referenced "butterfly effect" itself. However, there is a very big difference. Understanding of the butterfly effect is based in principles of chance, randomness, described by chaos theory. This theory demonstrates how the concept of "amplified possibility" is permissible in a deterministic world, if we allow that at a fundamental level, chance occurrence is real. The chance occurrence must be very real, for chaos theory to be real, so in reality chaos theory is a denial of the "deterministic world". People will claim that chaos theory is consistent with determinism, but it is not, because it requires chance, undetermined actions, at the basic level.
What you are indicating is that these supposedly "chance" occurrences, which form the base of chaos theory, actually have meaning and significance which extends far beyond the capacity of the conscious human mind to understand. This implies that within the "non-conscious relation between all the different parts", there is some form of what you call "group communion", which is some form of recognition of the underlying meaning or significance, and this acts to cause the amplification of possibility which is required for the individuals to act together as a whole, in a way which is non-deterministic.
Yes, although, I am focussing on the personal angle of a being. Which is actually quite limited, on a small scale and only covering a small number of events, outcomes etc. This does require the vast majority of what happens external to the being to be ignored, or screened out*. For such a being, the experience of such an unusual event is very rare, perhaps once in the lifetime, or only for 1 in 10 people in their lifetime. What Im saying, is that infact it happens more than we know, even regularly, but we either dont see it, couldnt appreciate the relevance, are conditioned to screen it out etc. essentially we are blind to it, except in certain very narrow circumstances determined by our life, heritage and conditioning.
For the mystic, or [I]seer[/I], this is fertile ground for exploration and contemplation.
Yes, that makes sense, specifically to my second point. But when it comes to my third point, I am talking about something else. That there is some transcendent (perhaps) process, or cause which may involve far reaching [I]karmic[/I]**significance. For example, two beings who have some connection from a previous life. Or some extended interaction between historical groups etc. in which the two people involved are emissaries, or representatives to some other unknown process, or meeting.
Yes, Im with you about it not being deterministic. I go back to my emissary analogy, in each event, each being may act as an emissary, or ambassador for a whole species, or series of unconnected(seemingly) events. Also, there is an internal dimension within the physical body of the beings (we are after all a colony of millions of individual cells), a spiritual dimension and a [I]cosmic [/I] dimension, to this.***
* we have evolved to do this, in a profound sense, through necessity.
**I am using the word karmic, descriptively, not necessarily in its precise meaning.
***I would refer you to Hindu mythology, in which there is a vast, infinite spiritual cosmos, of which we are in a small pond in a distant backwater.
I opt for "regularly". I tend to think that this sort of thing happens all the time, and it is a significant aspect of existence, but since it doesn't make sense to our deterministic way of understanding things, we have been conditioned to tune it out.
Here's an analogy, or another example of the "tuning out". There is talk and speculation about people who experience an "inner voice". Many people do not experience the inner voice. Those who do experience it, generally condition themselves to believe that the inner voice is simply a personal dialogue, talking to oneself. The self-conditioning occurs at such a young age we do not even remember it. It could be very confusing to think that I am talking to someone other than myself, internally, so I carry on a self-dialogue which effectively blocks out, tunes out, any external source from my inner voice. Talking to myself, internally allows me to block out any internal voice which is not my own, convincing me that the internal voice is simply my own. Any external sourced voice, in the internal, is pushed under the rug, and drowned out, therefore not noticed.
However, some do not succumb to the conditioning, and end up believing that the voice of another is speaking to them internally. These people are designated as psychologically challenged. That designation doesn't make the phenomenon go away, or make it any less real. So this feature, of having someone who is somehow not you (external in that sense), speaking to you internally, is very real, despite the fact that normal people shout at themselves internally to drown out or tune out, the "not you" aspect, and think of this as thinking.
Shhhhh, you might want to keep quiet about hearing voices and talking to yourself around here they might think youre away with the fairies (just joking).
Yes, I agree with you entirely. Indeed one of the stages, initiations, or crises that I talk about is reaching an accommodation, an understanding with the internal dialogue. To develop a trust and rapport and develop the ability to work with, to bounce ideas off the voice. At a later stage, one might develop the faculty to hear the divine voice. Something, which I think is achieved by prayer in monastic settings. For me it is rather like a radio receiver.
So let's say that we do have a radio receiver of that sort, and it's common to us all but the majority of people, (the normal people), condition themselves to tune it out, or maybe even turn it right off. I don't consider myself to be normal, so I am cognizant of that signal as I explained, but I also understand that I've spent most my life under the 'tune it out' program of conditioning. I didn't succeed in completely tuning it out, or turning it off, because it was too strong for my conscious mind to overpower. Now it really confuses me, even causing unnecessary stress and anxiety, because I don't know how to interpret or translate the meaning, having never taken the time to learn the language, yet it is so strong and seems to tell me that I ought to try.
If I want to try and understand it, what do you think would be my best approach? Should I first attempt to determine where it's coming from, and then after forming that understanding I would have an approach toward trying to understand what it is saying? Or, do you think that I should first learn to understand what it is saying, then, where it is coming from might sort of reveal itself naturally?
First thing first though, how can I know that it is really being received, and not just created by me as a form of self-deception? That's what I'm really afraid of, that it's a sort of self-perpetuating anxiety, like I am creating a problem for myself, and actively propagating the problem. The 'tune it out conditioning' tells me it is self-created deception and that's why it must be shut off. How can I convince myself of its reality, so that I can peacefully live with it, and so it resolves that anxiety of self-deception, rather than creating it? Is there a logical trick, like even if it is self-created, it must have a cause?
Yes, there is a logical trick and various techniques. Were you involved in the New Age movement at all? Because these techniques would have been available then. I cant offer much help, from here, because normally I would advise someone to undergo a programme of self development for a few years first. This is important because it would bring to the surface any psychological issues, or trauma which would be problematic at a later stage, or might make one unsuitable for such practice. Due to the risk of psychosis, or other mental health problems.
Youre in Australia right? I would have a chat with Tom Storm, he might be able to refer you to someone who can help.
I can give you a simplified overall description of what is involved, but as I say, it needs to be undergone with, or adjacent to a group who are able to assess and assist in the process.
I spent a decade of rigorous self development before I was in a position to develop what I am talking about.
So basically, you come to an accommodation with yourself, once this is established and settled, with no conflict, or any issues. Then you establish a dialogue with the voice, or alter ego*. You come to terms where you have an established and shared common interest which is directed at the purification and development of your being. Because there is a strong common interest there is no, opportunity, or room for mischief. I say this because we are here dealing with the ego and the subconscious and if there are any internal conflicts, unreleased trauma, then it can derail the process and progress cannot be made.
The next stage involves reaching an understanding and trust with the voice/alter ego, to become good friends so to speak. To develop a working relationship. This goes hand in hand with a spiritual path in which one is seeking to reach a common understanding with the soul(or equivalent) and become aligned with ones divine presence**.
Once this is established, one then proceeds to divine (as in divination), or using intuition the ways in which the divinity is infusing into the being. To practice a good life and role in a community, or family.
Over time this develops and reaches a point where there is a divine, or spiritual voice, or presence. Something which is acted out in small acts of kindness with other members of the community and or family. At this point, one would have developed a strong sense of humility and peace in living a relatively simple life engaging in pastimes like gardening, painting, literature or the like. Or discussing these ideas on a friendly forum, for example.
*working with the ego is a whole subject in itself and is the subject and goal of self development practices.
**alignment with ones divine presence is simply the process practiced in all religions and spiritual schools of becoming one with ones higher self, soul, becoming close to Jesus etc. There is a whole spiritual philosophy around this with more advanced stages and practices, where one allows the soul to play a guiding role and one and ones soul (or equivalent) become assimilated in one being, or person.
The story of Jung and the scarab beetle is one of the most famous examples he used to illustrate his concept of synchronicity.
Once Carl Jung was treating a young woman who was a very difficult patient. She was highly educated and deeply rational, so much so that she had "sealed herself" off from emotional or psychological progress. Jung felt he was at an impasse with her, as she was resistant to his therapeutic attempts to get her to a "more human understanding." He hoped that something "unexpected and irrational" would happen to break through her intellectual defenses.
One day, she was in his office telling him about a dream she had the previous night. In the dream, she was given a piece of jewelry in the shape of a golden scarab beetle. As she was recounting this dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping sound on the window behind him. He turned around and saw a large flying insect tapping against the pane, seemingly trying to get into the dark room.
Jung opened the window and caught the insect as it flew in. He was astonished to discover that it was a scarabaeid beetle, a common rose-chafer, whose golden-green color was the closest thing in that region to a "golden scarab."
Jung handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."
The event had a profound effect on the woman. Her rigid, rational worldview was shattered by the coincidence of her dream and the appearance of the real beetle. Jung noted that this "broke the ice of her intellectual resistance," and the treatment was able to proceed with satisfactory results.
I could tell you a story or two about such things. Like when I was half way through writing the word, evil, when a large spider ran onto the back of my right hand, the hand I was writing with.
Also the idea of a world view being shattered is in the area I am referring to.
So this, I think would be the most difficult part, the initial accommodation. That is where the logical trick I requested would be required. Maybe Wayfarer's example of the scarab beetle is such a trick. The trick is not really logical, but something which goes beyond logic, something which demonstrates the vast field of meaning which is not enveloped by logic. This is where significance commonly escapes conscious interpretation. Once I recognize that things which I don't even notice, and which would commonly completely escape my conscious perception, may in reality have great significance, then I might be in a position to accommodate my alter ego. The alter ego might be in a position to provide me with a sort of window into this vast realm which is a very real part of the world, completely surrounding me, but totally unnoticed by me. It appears like the only access I have to this very significant part of my environment, is through the means of an inner adventure.
I'd like to replace "alter ego" with the subconscious, or unconscious aspects of my being. What I find is that there seems to be a sort of self, which is almost totally distinct from my conscious self, and this other self which somehow lies in my unconscious, is evident in dreaming. This is my real being, as a living organism. I must pay respect to the fact that the unconscious self is the immediate environment to the conscious self, and the consciousness is a product of the unconscious self. Now I find my consciousness to be within this environment, the living being, and this environment completely escapes my observations. Furthermore, I find that the unconscious living being, allows the consciousness to practise self-deception, in thinking that it is the real self. It is not the real self, my consciousness is just a small bloom which has blossomed out of the unconscious activities of my being, and my ego deceives itself into thinking that the conscious mind is representative of the being itself.
Therefore, i must allow that when messages from the deep internal, the underneath, the alter ego, or subconscious, are being received into my conscious mind, these are coming from the real being which lies underneath. Whenever I block them out as being not-real, I feed the self-deception which supports my conscious mind in its illusion that it is the real self, and the real being. In reality, I think that maybe the underlying real being produces this consciousness, providing for that self-deception, so that the consciousness will do all sorts of different strange things, in a trial and error sort of way, supporting the being's quest for freedom. The underlying being, in disconnecting the consciousness from itself, and producing the conscious self-deceptive illusion of selfness, allows that the consciousness can act in an "objective" way, which is free from the influence of the true interest of the underlying being. Then the underlying being is the true observer of the conscious antics.
This crisis, or inititiation is foundational in the mystical life. Along with the other crisis I referred to in an earlier post. The one where one realises that the world might not be made of the solid objects we live alongside, but could be some form of immaterial phenomena, or something as yet undisclosed.
The mystical life is a combination of realising what we dont know, our limits, so to speak and a movement inward to the true self and along the way we encounter human nature. Which is profoundly evolved to see the world as real and dwell there. So there is grounds for a conflict here, or a straight jacket, built in to our predicament. This is where the scarab beetle analogy is appropriate, for the aspirant there is a hurdle, perhaps a number of hurdles to overcome to reach the point where one is ready to begin.
Regarding the initial accommodation I didnt mean what you describe, which is referring to later stages in the process. The initial accommodation is with yourself here and now. Its such a subtle distinction its almost impossible to grasp. It is with the person typing this message, so to speak. What you refer to here as my consciousness is just a small bloom which has blossomed out of the unconscious activities of my being. You know the well used phrase, be true to yourself, this encapsulates it. Although here I would describe it in more technical terms.
One reaches an accommodation with ones self, such that there is no question, or possibility of a breaking of the bond, or trust between you.
I know this sounds odd, how can you have an unshakable bond with yourself etc. But we must remember human nature. We are beings with an incredibly complex brain and mind, which consists of many layers of activity. Including projections, layered over projections. So basically there is more than one you, or you are a nexus of slightly differing and sometimes opposing mental and emotional processes. The task is to unify this in a way that is [I]true to yourself[/I]. Initially it is more a case of reaching a threshold, beyond which the true you holds together and is able to build a focal point. Or its like crossing the Rubicon, you pass the point of no return(this is not strictly true, just an analogy).
This stage is very important, because all the other stages build upon it and in a sense they are present in it as it is achieved. So it is a real crisis, or initiation and it inevitably results in a moment of choice(a pivotal choice), the forming of a conviction(determination) and an act signifying the step being taken(acting definitively as your true self).
This can be practiced as an initiation right and there is a long history of this in our cultures. The boy becomes a man, through a right of initiation.
This is not a question of the act of crossing the Rubicon, that happens internally and in all likelihood cannot be pinned down to a moment, or a thought. It is symbolic of a movement within the self, which leaves behind the previous status quo.
You see right through me. This is where I have an ingrown difficulty which will probably never be resolved. It seems that the inner me has some tendencies which the outer me has difficulty accommodating for, social anxiety for example. The outer me therefore, has created a bunch of defence mechanisms to fend off what the inner me is telling it. The outer me has set up ways to effectively block the influence of the inner me, because the outer me wants something different from what the inner me can provide for.
This can be understood in the context of moral training. The inner instinctual inclinations and desires are suppressed because we are taught that these tendencies are not good, and moral virtue requires suppression of them. In my case, what I describe above, the inner tendencies created uncomfortableness for the outer me, from an extremely young age, so the defence mechanisms referred to, which were required to fend off that uncomfortableness, are very strong. For the conscious me to be at all comfortable, from a very young age, the inner me had to be significantly blocked. In effect, the inner me is the enemy to the outer me, and creating a "bond" like you describe would require a complete annihilation of the outer me. The inverse, destruction of the inner me, is impossible. In other words, I cannot live with myself, and I believe that the separation must be maintained to ensure my existence.
Quoting Punshhh
So the task appears unsurmountable to me. Contrariety runs deep, and "true to myself" would require truth of contradiction. The river cannot be crossed, and I believe an alternative, a compromise of sorts, is required. Can't I take another path, which allows for a disunited me, some form of divisive dualism maybe?
This is not necessarily insurmountable, although it would require professional help to unravel. We all have inner conflicts like this of some kind. I had something similar with intense shyness from a young age. But it didnt develop into something problematic and through considerable effort during my formative years I was able to overcome it. Even now it rears its head occasionally along with other psychological ticks and dysfunctional, or underdeveloped (resulting in repressed), character traits.
But I am able to manage them, neutralise them and clean up the emotional impact they have when they happen.
There is a sense that our weaknesses are actually our strengths, because we have unique experience and ability to live with these. So being able to see this as a strength rather than a failing helps one to face it, work through it and live with it. Even use it to our advantage. Also we have the opportunity to shape our lifestyles to make it easier to live without these issues normally arising. The thing with following a mystical life, it is entirely personal and doesnt require, necessarily, dealing with the outside world, and you can shape your lifestyle to suit.
Now there are two tricks I use which might be of use to yourself. You may have already come to this realisation. The first is that there isnt actually a destination, because you are already at your destination, always have been and it is simply a process of taking off the blinkers. Even this is not necessarily required, it might be seen rather as just taking a breath to be quiet, still, that is required. Breathing practice, pranayama, is very beneficial here.
Secondly and this is quite a neat trick, (this is the simplified version). You basically offer yourself up freely to any entity who is gooder than yourself. This necessarily requires one to be sufficiently good yourself that you would happily give yourself up someone equally, or more good than yourself. Once this level of goodness and conviction is reached, you can do a deal with yourself. You will offer access to yourself on the condition that your alter ego becomes at least as good as yourself. With the selling point being that, such a deal would enable progress and greater access. And of course your alter ego would naturally offer access to itself for yourself, because the result would only be gooder, or at least the same level of good. Then both partys can become gooder and gooder in a partnership of mutual benefit.
I realise that this might be a non starter, but it works well for me. Although I do have a back up association with the deity Kali*, via an association and practice with a Guru and Ashram offering devotional worship to the goddess Kali**.
I would also say that this path isnt an important thing to do, for any particular reason and is more a choice for certain people who have a calling of some kind to follow it. Others might follow a more intellectual pursuit, or something else entirely. All equally valid and meaningful.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
**I dont think it necessary to have such a back up, I just happened to have made and established this connection prior to further work on myself.
Reflecting upon your responses to that particular text, it prompts me to wonder how Kant's objections to the theories of a "rational psychology" relate to explanations that base themselves on some version of that.
That point is also made in many other places, including the issue of method put forward in my quote.
The topic of "rational psychology" is often brought up in the CPR as a fusion of personal experiences with universal conditions. That response opposes, for instance, the presumptions of Neoplatonism and other depictions of what is rational in regard to our existence.
Many of the objections to Kant, as they played out in his lifetime and afterwards, concern his treatment of the "object" as a product of what we do. So, the effort is different from someone who looks at the attempt of explanation as a product of talking per se. I am not up to speed with Buddhist texts, but Zhuangzi put it as every attempt at division.
So, I submit that there is an importance difference there.
OK this is me, fundamental intense shyness. It didn't develop into anything problematic because I managed to get around it with conscious tricks and defence mechanism to ward off the social anxiety. However, I feel that it still exists as a basic part of the inner me. Now, the conscious tricks by which I suppressed the basic shyness are really problematic if I want to reconcile the outer me with the inner me, because they seem to have produced an inauthentic outer me. The outer me is not representative of the true me. I can't erase the conscious tricks, and recoil back into shyness, because they are a very strong part of my character, and actually very necessary for coping with the social aspect of life which is unavoidable.
Quoting Punshhh
.I've already come to take this approach, that our weaknesses are actually strengths. My weakness is that I am a conflicted or divided person. If I look at this as actually a strength, then I see no reason to unify myself. That division within me has now become a strength.
Quoting Punshhh
I like this, but it's going to take a goodly number of readings to fully realize the meaning. I've already accepted the alter ego as the real me, therefore the better me. But the conscious me needs some reciprocation from the alter ego, or else I'd be lost in the social environment. This is where the alter ego needs to become at least as good as the conscious self. So I'm thinking that there must be various aspects of myself to be judged, and the conscious me might actually be the better me with respect to some aspects, even though the alter ego is the more real me.
How can the conscious me request the alter ego to submit, when the logic by which the conscious me recognizes the reality of the alter ego is by assigning to it a higher reality? If I remove that higher reality, then the alter-ego becomes imaginary, a delusion in fact. And, if I assign some sort of equality to it, I lose the grounding for both, and my being in general becomes illusionary. I lose the principle by which i would determine better and worse. So I don't think this sort of proposal would be adequate for me.
I believe, that since I find this divisiveness within me to have become a strength, then attempts to unify might actually be a mistake. Perhaps I can use the divisiveness to encourage healthy competition between the two. Instead of one submitting to the goodness of the other, maybe they can always challenge each other. Then if one appears to be better than the other, the other will need to best up.
The question which comes to mind, do you believe that the alter ego can change itself? And if so, how?
This strikes me as a conversation which might better be conducted in private.
If there is anyone who would like to look into this subject further I would be happy to start a new thread.
You might be right.
Many objections, sure.
What is to be understood by object?
And what is it we do by which the object is a product?
.an object is that, in the conception of which the manifold in a given intuition is united. Now all union of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently, it is the unity of consciousness alone that constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore of their objective validity, and the fact they are modes of knowledge; and upon it therefore rests the very possibility of the understanding . (B137, in Kemp Smith)
Given scarce objection to the object here, by definition, how is it different from object?
Honest; just trying to see what you see.
The passage you quote puts it in a nutshell; All instances of "objectivity" are also moments in consciousness. The emphasis upon objectivity that Wayfarer finds fault with is, by this account, already too "subjective" for some thinkers.
Kant was wrestling with his contemporaries on the question of what was "real" in this context when discussing the existence of time outside of our experience of it. This is touched upon in my quote upthread:
Quoting CPR A36/B53
As the rest of the passage demonstrates, there is an aspect to experiencing an object that points beyond the representations of it. Kant is saying that that element is not a representation in its own right.
And yet I find no reference to Kants treatment of what you call the object, thus no indication of the ground for peer-reviewed dispute.
The cause of the questioning resides in the fact Kant doesnt make such distinction, re: object/object, which implies he isnt talking about either one except to define the former under initial conditions for the ensuing exposition in B137. And because he isnt talking about either one within the exposition itself, I wonder by what ground is there objection to his treatments, and of whatever that treatment entails, why it should be called treatment of objects?
My question is repeatable with your real. All I wish to be told is the difference between object and object in the first case, and the real and the real in the second. A matter only of my interest, your interpretive arrangement be as it may.
My interpretive arrangement so far has been to try and make sense of what Kant seems to not explain. When I read certain passages to be restrictions upon how to understand representations, for example, I am not claiming insight into the role of objects in Kant's system.
The "real" involved in this case is not my opinion but a citation of where Kant answered a challenge on the matter by his contemporaries.
Is your question about "object" such that you remove yourself as a peer capable of reviewing the text?
Nope; got nothing to do with the text. By asking what you mean object to represent prevents me from prematurely mis-judging your use of it solely from what I think it represents.
I just want to know what object gives me that object doesnt. What do the marks give to object that object doesnt already have?
What I mean by that is that the properties of space and time that we confer to existing things in an Aristotle or Aquinas set of givens is upset when those are taken to be primarily intuitions that make our experience possible. The reaction by Kant at A36/B53 shows him insisting upon a strong separation from what things are beyond our experience. But it is not an absolute separation expressed in forms of idealism he opposes. But it is a duality of his own making. In that sense, it does not give more than it takes away.
Ok. Thanks.
I'm still reading the voluminous 2025 book by James Glattfelder : The Sapient Cosmos, What a modern-day synthesis of science and philosophy teaches us about the emergence of information, consciousness, and meaning. It's an encyclopedia of current concepts of the Idealistic worldview. The book has chapters on cutting-edge science, such as Relativity, Quantum physics, Information theory, and Complexity science. But it also has chapters on Buddhism, Shamanic traditions, and Psychedelic adventures. So, the label for his worldview is Syncretic Idealism, which some interpret as "scientific spirituality"*1.
Syncretic : a combination, or mish-mash, of various schools of thought.
My personal background is mainly in the scientific aspects of the Mind Created World. But yours is much deeper in traditional Philosophy, including Buddhist insights on mind. So, the Shamanic & Psychedelic explorations in the mental world are exotic territory for me. Glattfelder calls those who experiment with mind-altering drugs : "Psychonauts". And he seems convinced that they are directly experiencing parallel realms of reality (Ideality???). He also thinks Near-Death experiences are previews of the afterlife. But those ideas about Idealism are hard for me to accept.
Today, I just read a quote from Richard Tarnas, historian and astrologer, that sounded reminiscent of your Mind-Created World : "The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition. Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign."
To me, that statement makes sense, insofar as Cognition is a construct, and Worldviews are personal models of reality. But the notion of opening The Doors of Perception*2 to alternate realities, that can be explored by "poisoning" the brain with serotonin agonists, that stimulate "non-ordinary mental states", and that skeptics call "hallucinations", does not compute.
In my profession as an architect, we built imaginary models of potential or possible buildings that do not exist yet in the real world. Although you may imagine yourself walking thru the atrium, the model is not intended to be interpreted as a hyper-real structure that you can inhabit with your disembodied Self/Soul.
Personally, my worldview is both Realistic (physical senses) and Idealistic (mental images)*3. But I'd like to hear from you, as the resident expert on traditional Idealism, what you think of Syncretic Idealism, as a synthesis of Science and Spirituality. Have you ever explored alternate Realities with a mind "cleansed" by entheogens? :smile:
*1. Syncretic idealism is a term used to explain the concept of scientific spirituality.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNukwNH0htX/
*2. Aldous Huxley :
[i]Huxley used the phrase to describe his experiences with psychedelic drugs, which he felt temporarily "cleansed the doors of perception," allowing for a greater awareness of the world and human consciousness
https://www.google.co[/i]m/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=doors+of+perception+quote
*3. Both/And Principle :
[i]My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
# The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
# Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? whats true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
# This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until observed by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
But the action of lysergic acid is very different to intoxicants as the amounts ingested are minute, in the micrograms. It doesn't 'flood the brain with chemicals' so much as trigger a kind of chain reaction which can considerably provide and enhance insights well beyond the normal sense of 'existence as usual'. While I wouldnt ever advocate the consumption of illegal substances I have no doubt that this particular class of substances do indeed open the doors of perception (insights which are of course impossible to communicate or even really remember on a conscious level).
Yes, the Tarnas quote is exactly what I was getting at in this thread. Why this is even considered controversial beats me. It is obvious that our fantastically elaborate hominid forebrain creates our world. It doesn't mean there's no world outside it, but that's not the world we ever know.
I've looked at Glattfelder's books and listened to some of his talks. Overall I'm well-disposed towards him although some of it is pretty far out. He didn't coin the term psychonaut by the way.
If or when "recreational" Marijuana becomes legal in my area, I may give it a try, just to see what I'm missing. Most of the other "street drugs" seem to do more harm than good. So, I'm not inclined to open those particular doors. My naive question is this : do the psycho-drugs actually or metaphorically open your perception to exotic realities or to warped hallucinations?
Glattfelder lists a wide variety of psychic experiences that are "real" to psychonauts : Synchronicity, ESP, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Clairvoyance, Mediumship, Presentiment, Psychic abilities, etc, that he deems worthy of scientific investigation. To explain their marginalization, he accuses scientists of have closed minds ; instead of having good reasons to avoid wasting time on subjective, non-empirical beliefs. And yet, in the last century, academically-trained Paranormal scientists & ghost-hunters have attempted to use empirical methods to study most of those realities, but their results have been generally un-reproducible*1, and have led to no practical uses, other than spooky entertainment*2. Therefore, like religious beliefs, such phantom realities seem to be a matter of faith, rather than science*3.
He says, "Although the boundaries of physical reality remain solid most of the time, there is not a priori reason radical modulations of sentience should not be able to puncture them momentarily". Does that assertion fit your understanding of the Mind Created World? He goes on to say, "this --- presumably, the fleeting temporariness of glimpses into other worlds --- would explain the difficulty in measuring and replicating such subtle and delicate effects accessible to the human mind only in moments of extreme modes of sentience." Besides, most of the plant-derived drugs may be natural, but their natural function is to kill or deter pests. So, using them to open doors to parallel worlds is un-natural. Can meditation open psychedelic doors?
He goes on to say, "this --- presumably, the fleeting temporariness of glimpses into other worlds --- would explain the difficulty in measuring and replicating such subtle and delicate effects accessible to the human mind only in moments of extreme modes of sentience." Quantum experiments are also fleeting and subject to biased interpretation, but they are reproducible and mathematical. On the other hand, most of the plant-derived psycho-drugs may be natural, but their natural function is to kill or deter pests. So, using insecticides and neuro-toxins to open doors to parallel worlds is literally un-natural. Is Buddhist meditation a safer option for timid psychonauts?
Apparently, the necessity for "radical modulations" --- that may lead to compulsive behavior and addiction, not to mention liver & heart disease & poisoning deaths --- makes other-worldly psycho-adventures just as dangerous as jungle & mountain explorations in mundane reality. Historically, ethyl alcohol (a mild neurotoxin) has been the most common & popular Affect Modulator. But it also modulates unacceptable social behaviors, that provoked wise King Solomon to denounce : "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise" Proverbs 20:1. Since I am not, by nature, an adventurer, I leave exploits in other-worlds to highly-motivated others. From the sentient safety of my armchair, I know the secret knowledge of Amazon Indians --- e.g. ethnobotany --- only by second-hand National Geographic reports. :nerd:
*1. No, paranormal activity has not been scientifically proven;it is considered a pseudoscience by most scientists and academics because there is no conclusive empirical evidence to support its existence. Many experiences attributed to the paranormal have scientific explanations, such as psychological factors (like pareidolia or sleep paralysis), environmental factors (like infrasound or electromagnetic fields), or even misinterpretations of mundane phenomena.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=history+of+paranormal+research
Note --- "no conclusive evidence" is not for lack of trying. After centuries of optimistic efforts, Paranormal research is not mainstream, not necessarily due to prejudice, but to lack of corroboration and practical applications.
*2. Paranormal research originated in the 19th century with the spiritualism movement and the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882 to scientifically investigate spirits.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=history+of+paranormal+research
*3. The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. ____ Nikola Tesla,
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/139502-the-day-science-begins-to-study-non-physical-phenomena-it-will
Note --- Maybe Elon Musk will invest some of his Tesla profits into Mental, instead of Martial (Mars), exploration of other worlds.
As for the paranormal, Im an open-minded sceptic. I dont think it will ever be proven to exist, but I know that telepathy happens, it cant simply be explained away. I think its possible that there are fields other than electromagnetic fields, something like Sheldrakes morphic fields, but that cant be detected by electronic instruments.
Me too! Glattfelder has a favorite term to describe the ambiguities & uncertainties of paranormal phenomena : Postmodern*1. He expresses some skepticism toward attempts to prove divine MIND by means of psychedelics and statistics*2. But he remains convinced that subjective Syncretic Idealism will soon be proven to be just as real, if not more, than the objective Reality of empirical Science*3*4.
Toward the end of the book, he quotes "philosophical entertainer" Alan Watts : "God also likes to play hide & seek, but because there is nothing outside God, it has no one but itself to play with."*5
I get the impression that Paranormal Research illuminates the dark corners of Consciousness with black light (statistical uncertainty), revealing formerly invisible things by re-emission of Bayesian belief. :smile:
*1. Trickster God? :
"In another display of postmodern mischief, reality appears to be teasing us by yet again hiding its true nature in a fog of inconclusiveness." {page 558}
Note --- After quoting a skeptical publication on telepathy, Glattfelder says "in this context, it is very hard to assess any claim for or against psi.
*2. "Yet again, psychedelics appear as a panacea for unorthodox knowledge access." {page 560}
*3. "It should be noted that the critics of syncretic idealism can only be taken seriously if they themselves have proficiency in modulating sentience."*4 {page 563}
Note --- Since he doesn't have much to say about Meditation, I suppose he means "modulating" brain functions by artificial means such as psychedelic drugs. Some paranormal researchers have indeed placed their bets on mind-soul-manifesting hallucinogenic substances (entheogens), to reveal the divinity hidden within the human entity.
*4. The phrase "modulating sentience" refers to the concept of influencing or altering the capacity to have subjective experiences, feelings, and sensations. This is a theoretical and speculative topic at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy, and artificial intelligence (AI). While the total modulation of a biological organism's sentience remains beyond current capabilities, certain processes can alter the experience of consciousness.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=modulating+sentience
*5. "Quantum hide and seek" [i]refers to both a metaphor for the elusive and uncertain behavior of quantum particles and a scientific concept used in steganography and quantum computing to hide information. Researchers use analogies of hide-and-seek to describe the nature of quantum systems, where particles can be in multiple places at once (superposition) until observed. /i]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quantum+hide+and+seek
I get the impression that, compared to the "beauties" of the hallucinogenic*1 Psychedelic version of "reality itself", Glattfelder finds the sober view of human social Reality to be depressing. In the Epilogue to The Sapient Cosmos, he adds a "gloomy summary of the status quo". There, he lists a litany of what's wrong with the modern world ; not so much the natural world, but the un-natural un-spiritual environment created by the materialistic mind of technological humans.
He seems to weep for the loss of innocence of the babes in paradise (Genesis), after reaching the age of reason. As usual, that fall from grace is blamed on the serpent of Science, the "most cunning of all beasts". The snake-eyes of objectivity have given us wise apes mastery over the garden of nature, which we have raped & pillaged to gratify our own material desires.
Glattfelder seems to believe that humanity was better-off before science penetrated the "mystical veil" of reality. Before forces & energies replaced spirits & gods. Back when we were helpless animals kneeling before the mysterious powers of the non-self world. Back when we had to bend the knee to Nature, and to Nature's God.
His Syncretic Idealism seems to lean more toward Ontological Idealism (reality itself is mental) than to Epistemological Idealism (all knowledge is mental). But, although I find Idealism to be a good counterpoint to crass Realism, I've never been that romantically idealistic : more Pragmatic than Utopian. I was hopeful that the book would describe a sensible philosophy of Idealism to counter the crass Realism of Scientism. But if it requires dissociative drugs to open that door, I may have to remain benighted in Plato's cave for a while longer. :cool:
*1. Hallucinogenic drugs can cause hallucinations, which are sensations and images that seem real but aren't. People may hear, feel or see things that aren't really there. Some psychedelic drugs cause people to feel out of control or disconnected from their bodies and environment.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=on+and+off+psychedelic+drugs
LICK THE TOXIC TOAD TO FREE YOUR MIND
from its prison in mundane reality
I would categorise it into two effects;
Firstly, the awareness of a subtle layer to our reality, which I will call the astral plane ( I know there is a lot of baggage with this word, as is often the case with these discussions), as shorthand for some kind of subtle realm that we are not normally aware of.
Secondly, a release from our rigid conditioned view and ideology of the world. A loosening of the bond and an awareness of something different, although fleeting, distorted, uncertain and undefined, due to the brute action of the chemical.
Both these realisations can be made through meditation and or religious practice. Or just happen through experiences of epiphany. The use of drugs does hasten the process, But I would guard against any use seeking to go further than this. As it can result in a whole range of psychological, or psychiatric conditions, which would prevent further progress. Also I am of the opinion that once these two realisations have been made, there isnt really much more benefit to be made. The shell of the primordial egg has been cracked so to speak and one will begin to glimpse the chink of light through the cracks.
The symbolism of the Fall is appropriate, considering that the fruit was 'from the tree of knowledge'. Another potent metaphor is that of Faust who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge. Mythological but as often the case, these religious metaphors convey something profound about human existence. And I've often mused on the idea that the physicalism sees humans as 'advanced hominids' - it's almost an article of faith (pardon the irony). One of the consequences of popular Darwinism is the belief that we're no different from animals in essence - so why aspire to anything higher?
I have a more prosaic view, although we arrive at a similar conclusion. He says in his Medium synopsis
There is a solid historical basis to this claim (even if it sounds extremely polemical). This is that the Scientific Revolution split the world asunder - into objective/subjective, mind/matter, self/world. This was not a conscious choice nor the doings of any specific individual, although there are several individuals who crystallised these tendencies into the underlying paradigm of modernity (Descartes, Galileo and Locke, to name several). It's also central to the themes explored in John Vervaeke's lecture series Awakening to the Meaning Crisis (in particular, Episodes 20, 21, and 22.)
The upshot was that the Universe comes to be seen as matter acted upon by physical principles which is accorded the status of 'primary reality'. Purpose and meaning are then assigned to the mind, and mind is, through evolution, a product of or derivative from 'the blind watchmaker' (Dawkin's terminology). And, with Descartes, comes the view that 'mind' and 'matter' are of utterly different kinds, with mind being pictured as 'res cogitans' (thinking substance) - which I think is an incoherent picture (i.e. it doesn't hang together.)
It has never been universally accepted, and there are many cracks showing up in it, but that is the 'big picture' view of how the Universe came to be seen as the meaningless collocation of physical forces.
Bernardo Kastrup and James Glattfelder are two of those who are criticizing this picture. (Note that Glattfelder's book was published by Essentia which is Kastrup's publishing house.)
The mind/matter distinction was the keystone of "Neoplatonism", where matter is only to be seen as the extremity of mind informing what matter could be. The interest in opposing that view was not only to say it was the other way around.
By contrast, in Aristotelian philosophy, matter was only ever a potential something; outside of form, it had no intrinsic existence. Aristotles prima materia was a theoretical posit, not a substance you could pick up and throw. Galileo, however, shifted the emphasis: he insisted on the primacy of the measurable attributes of matterthose that could be captured mathematically. As John Vervaeke observes, matter now also possessed inertia, hence the modern concept of inert matter. So here the idea of inert matter, now devoid of intentionality and purpose, but conceived instead as passive, measurable, and defined in mathematical terms.
We have been down this road before regarding the "intrinsic existence" of matter in Aristotle. His speaking of matter as having "to be of a certain kind" has long complicated the discussion.
Your synopsis excludes that part.
Well, Aristotle puts a lot of emphasis on the being in front of you is what actually exists. We have different ideas about how that is possible, but the first thing is the encounter with such beings.
So, that is germane to the issue at hand.
(See Dan Browns new book,
The Secret of Secrets
For a similar investigation)
The Occasions of Experience via Whiteheads Great Poet/Programmer
Like drops of dew upon the morning grass,
Brief moments sparkle, then are quick to fade;
Each occasion born, fulfilled, surpassed
From these small deaths, reality is made.
The universea vast mosaic laid
Of prehensions, feelings, pure events;
Each atom, thought, and star in grand parade
Becoming, perishing, in present tense.
No substance fixed beneath the world we sense,
But process flowing through eternal Now;
Each moment grasps the past with reverence,
Then adds its novel aim, and takes its bow.
The concrescence of all things that be
Each drop contains the cosmos memory.
Each moment bears within its fleeting form
The echoed traces of what came before;
Subjective aim transforms the uniform
Into creation's never-ending score.
We are not things but poems being writ,
A string of moments dancing into one;
The many and the one forever knit
A billion suns comprising just one sun.
[hide="Reveal"]The void of time fills up with occasions bright,
Each grasping, feeling, yearning into form;
The universea symphony of light
Where past and future meet in endless storm.
So Whitehead taught: realitys not clay,
But living moments born and passed away.
The actual worlda tapestry unfurled
Of prehended moments, gathered whole;
Each subject weaves the threads of what has swirled
Into new patterns as the cosmos rolls.
No static substance underlying all,
But drops of experience, self-creating;
Each moment rises, answers to the call,
Then perishes, its being still vibrating.
The great philosopher's vision clear and bold:
Reality is not of things, but acts;
Each now contains what every then has told
A living process, not just lifeless facts.
The past is not just gone, but flows within
Each nascent moment, ready to begin.
Beyond the veil of common senses reach,
Lies truth more fluid than our words contain;
Each entity, like waves upon the beach,
Is but a ripple in experiences chain.
The Poets primordial vision guides
Each occasion toward its best becoming;
The lure of beauty where all truth resides
Eternal objects, endlessly oncoming.
The universe is not a clockwork cold,
But living feeling, sentient at its core;
Each quantum flash of being, brave and bold,
Creates itself, then passes through deaths door.
So Whitehead saw beyond the ancient rift
As moments bloom and die, existence shifts.
Each moment blooms, a pulse in Times great sea,
Not things, but actsevents that come to be.
From drop to drop the cosmos takes its shape,
A dance of mind and matter, wild and free.
No static stone, no idle, lifeless clod
But process moves beneath the soil and sod.
Each flash of being, brief as morning dew,
Is real as stars, is kissed by thought not odd.
These occasions rise with feeling at their core,
They prehend the past, yet seek a little more.
Each grasps the world, then yields itself in turn,
A spark that fades, but opens up the door.
They form a web, these nodes of sentient flare,
The past flows in, the future stirs the air.
Realitys not built of blocks and beams,
But woven through with feeling, time, and care.
The worlds not made, but making ever still,
With every act a push against the will.
No fate is fixed, no god is locked above
Creation wakes in each occasions thrill.
So sip this cupeach moment brims with wine,
Distilled from all that was, in grand design.
A drop contains the cosmos in its fold,
And flickers out, yet calls the next to shine.
The world becomes, it never merely is,
A flux of feeling, not a world of fizz.
No atom sits alone in timeless gloom
It feels, it yearns, it tells us what it does.
Each moments born from many come before,
It draws their echo, adds a little more.
Then perishes, a whisper in the dark
Yet leaves a trace no future can ignore.
Subject becomes object, tossed in the stream,
Each plays its part within the larger scheme.
No soul stands still, no world remains the same
All shift and shape as in a woven dream.
From Poets lure to matters smallest twitch,
Each moment leans toward depths we cannot pitch.
Realitys a poem never done
Penned not in stone, but in becomings witch.
Not being, but becomingthis we are,
More like a flame than like a fallen star.
We flicker, burn, and pass our light along
Each life a note in Times unending bar.
So here we dance, occasion upon flame,
Each flicker formed with joy, regret, or shame.
Yet in the forming lies the sacred spark
A fleeting self that bears eternal name.
The stars themselves are thoughts that came to be,
Each nova sings in process, not decree.
A galaxys a rhythm, not a rock
It hums with ancient acts of poetry.
Each quark, each pulse, each curve of stellar flare,
Responds to past and feels the futures air.
The cosmos is a mind that builds itself
A scaffold strung with intuitions care.
No vast machine with cold and mindless gears
But swirls of yearning shaped by hope and fears.
A thousand billion hearts in every sphere,
All whispering their stories through the years.
The past is real, but not a prison cell,
Its echoes guide, but do not bind or quell.
Each moment holds the power to re-form
The curve of time, the place where starlight fell.
From primal flux to now, the arc has bent
Not by command, but lure and deep intent.
A One who woos, not rules, the world to grow
Each choice a note in Loves great instrument.
So let the comet blaze and atoms spin,
Each dance of dust a tale that dwells within.
No void is emptyeverywhere there burns
A silent hymn of process born in din.
Creation is not doneit is the song,
Each verse a shift, each rhyme both right and wrong.
We are the singers, listeners, and score
The universe becoming all along.[/hide]
This was the emphasis I was thinking of, while not coming at it from a philosophical perspective. What we encounter, fully formed in our world is what is of primary importance and that is what we are evolved to interact with. We dont necessarily need to look under the bonnet, to see/know what is important.
I was reaching the end & epilogue of Glattfelder's book on Postmodern Paranormal Phenomena, when I began reading Dan Brown's new novel. To my surprise, he introduced the Golem of Prague, based on Jewish folktales, as a central character. And a major theme of the book seems to be Paranormal ESP, as investigated by a Noetic scientist. The real-world Institute for Noetic Sciences was founded by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, to study Parapsychology, among other "fringe theories".
In his 2017 book, Origins, Brown also dealt with topics on the "fringe" between Philosophy and Science. The Futurist Ed Kirsch made a "discovery" that was said to challenge both Science and Religion : "If there is a divine force behind this universe, it is laughing hysterically at the religions we've created in an attempt to define it". But maybe that "force" would be sympathetic with the childish efforts of its own god-emulating upright-apes --- "poems being writ" --- to make sense our ever-changing world of contrasts & contradictions : of Angels & Demons.
Although some aspects of Kirsch's (Brown's) philosophy may not agree with my own Information-centric worldview, I found it generally compatible. For example, Robert Langdon was asked if he believed in God. He replied : " . . . . for me, the question of God lies in understanding the difference between codes and patterns. . . . . Codes, by definition, must carry information. They must do more than simply form a pattern --- codes must transmit data and convey meaning." :smile:
PS___ Regarding ultimate Origins, a sign on Langdon's Harvard classroom says :
"[i]In my classroom, T > 0
For all inquiries where T = 0,
please visit the Religion Department.[/i]"
Wow! You're on the ball; it only came out about a week ago. Has much about consciousness coming in from the outside.
One contrast I keep in mind is how deeply structured we are by our ancestors. They made their choices and we make ours.
I don't hold that they have a special power over our fortunes or anything of that sort. But their life is vivid in the expression of character and disposition of particular individuals. That view does not mesh well with the vision of souls being their own thing but also conscripted to the "material" world.
Care to elaborate on that?
Yes, just read it again, it is good. I like the implicit suggestion that planets and stars are conscious beings and that each act has a deep creative potential. Along with the idea that each act is/can be informed by distant events.
I don't have to believe in animated-clay Golems or Paranormal Activity, or Parapsychology, in order to enjoy Dan Brown's fiction. I read fiction, in part, not to escape from reality, but merely to vicariously experience experiences that are different from our mundane existence. So, if I saw a clay-monster on the street, I'd assume it was a Comic-Con costume.
Likewise, I don't have to believe in Consciousness as signals from outside the skull in order to consider the philosophical implications of such a state of affairs. The Bible, that I was raised to believe was the word of God, has stories of people receiving divine messages from Angels, Demons, and Deities. But I now consider those stories to be fictional, not actual.
Therefore, while I have given some thought to the notion of brains functioning as radio receivers of messages from God, or from a sentient cosmos ; all I can say at this point is that I remain skeptical. However, I am working on an alternative explanation for the Hard Problem, based on non-fiction Energy & Information*1. For now, I do not accept the currently popular theory of Panpsychism, but I have my own theory of Enformationism, that some might consider equally fringey. :wink:
*1. How Does the Brain Create Mind? :
The Mind is an imaginary model of brain functions
Kastrups alternative to ancient Materialism & Panpsychism is similar to the equally antiquated worldview of Idealism¹?. His updated version of the all-is-mind concept is labeled Analytic Idealism, which some have renamed Cosmopsychism.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page14.html
In Plotinus, the soul animates matter as far as it can. The source is a power that can only go so far because matter is never completely mastered by form. The origin of that soul is from before our birth. Plotinus has also said he has visited that realm through contemplation.
I will leave off from distinguishing this view from Aristotle since years of our debates have become a circle. I will try contesting this view of "matter" with considerations from a modern thinker, Gregory Bateson.
Our ancestors show that our lives are built with components of past generations. We see that most readily through inherited characteristics in our relatives and ourselves in a mirror. Some very old material is moving through. One natural question is how does that element relate to an individual life. Bateson both ties oneself to the ancestors but separates them from our experience:
Quoting Bateson, Form, Substance, and Difference
Whatever opinion may have of this thinking, it is not "a view from nowhere."
That is perfectly in keeping with the mind-created world. Bateson is one of the sources of enactivism and a major influence in The Embodied Mind, which comprehensively deconstructed the view from nowhere.
I recognize that influence. I submit that it is incompatible with the Gerson view of Platonism.
You seem to want to have both at the same time.
Sure, but that is not a topic of debate in this thread.
So, I should not connect all the things you have said as the continuity of your thought?
I suffer from institutional memory.
Just out of curiosity, what is the difference between a person's created world and a person's perceived world?
The world perceived by a mind has an external cause that may be of a different nature from the mind (classical dualism).
The mind-created world, as I understand the OP, has no external cause and is a monism where everything that exists has mental properties.
Not quite what it says. I don't claim that the mind is constitutive of objects in the way that wood is constitutive of boats or clay of pots. It is an epistemological arrgument.
I acnowledge that the word 'created' might be a poor choice of words in the context. I'm referring more to the role of the mind in constructing or synthesising what we take to be a completely independent and external world.
Was that controversial key-word a Freudian slip, or intentional challenge, to keep this thread going in circles for 70 pages? :wink:
Reality vs Ideality : Divine Creation vs Human Construct vs Cosmic Accident
Nicely put, (Im not familiar with Plotinus), I would go further. There are a constellation of souls including some who instantiate matter from pre matter. But I would caution that these latter souls are very distant from our own, ( Some very old material is moving through, from your post).
Perhaps it is time we consider the role played by the distant past.
The search function on the site is pretty darn good at locating where this has been discussed in the past.
I will withhold from saying more about it in this thread.
Thanks for this, but I cannot see how this is particularly relevant to the arguments, rather than a good go-over of what was put forward as commentary.
The fact remains, Kant's system *does not work* unless there is an assumption that something causes our sensations. That is all I've claimed, and it is literally required to get the system off the ground. This is not an argument from anything particular. His system quite obviously requires it. Kant knew this - which is why his later work treats the noumenon differently*. Here, we can say that Kant understood noumena to be intelligible, but not knowable. He couldn't have begun his first page without this.
You, and others, are quite right that the focus in the CPR, and one of the two fundamental aspects of the noumena is simply a limiting concept for the human understanding. I've not argued against that, either. *But it is quite clear (to me) that by the time he published the Prolegomena, he almost said outright that these 'objects' must be presupposed:
"And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing in its internal constitution, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. The understanding therefore, by assuming appearances, grants the existence of things in themselves also, and so far we may say, that the representation of such things as form the basis of phenomena is not only admissible, but unavoidable.
"We must therefore accept an immaterial being, a world of understanding, and a Supreme Being (all mere noumena), because in them only, as things in themselves, reason finds that completion and satisfaction, which it can never hope for in the derivation of appearances from their homogeneous grounds, and because these actually have reference to something distinct from them (and totally heterogeneous), as appearances always presuppose an object in itself, and therefore suggest its existence whether we can know more of it or not.
There are several others of varying degrees of clarity (and from other works). But in any case, this shows a contrast to how he speaks in the CPR where he's essentially saying we are all necessarily agnostic, despite any other claims, as to noumena. We can't know. But later, he's saying we must pre-suppose them (despite, not being able to know them). This is how a shadow works, so is not conceptually controversial at all. For his moral systems, this is also required (with the same necessity - albeit, one which simply follows from concept-to-built-up-concept). The bolded passages are, for me, quite good enough to essentially say "No, thank you" to the objectors so far here.
I hope this clarifies what I'm talking about. It is an extremely discreet issue which, quite frankly, doesn't need much discussion. For my personal part (which is far more open to discussion) this was obviously to me from the first 30 pages or so of the CPR. There couldn't be anything further to talk about unless these objects are pre-supposed. His inability to admit this was the right thing to do in that book (though, i contend it was left open, not denied so this could be a weaker objection than I'm giving it anyway). His later ability to admit to this was the right thing to do in those circumstances.
I suggest I've responded to anything this underhanded post could be meaning underneath, above. Suffice to say this response shows me some pretty damn bad faith. Would you like me to send you a picture of me holding my copy which has obviously been read-to-death? Good lord.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This doesn't touch the claim I've made, so I have to assume i did it clumsily. The above should clarify pretty well. Insofar as this can be treated, you've not adequately understood even what you've jsut said, it seems. Let me try to make that understandable:
"a person may misjudge what one is perceiving, and this does not imply that the person perceives nothing."
Yes. They are perceiving something. Things are objects. That fact we can't know what/which (and similar questions) doesn't change that part of the position. (and, as above, Kant knows this too).
Good. That's all I needed.
Yes. They are perceiving something.
Good. That's all I needed.
The thing perceived is not necessarily objects. The person may judge oneself to be perceiving objects, but if "objects" doesn't fulfill the criteria for what the person is actually perceiving, then that judgement is wrong. the person is mistaken, and is perceiving without perceiving objects.
I thought Kant had just explained that.
I'm just not very good at this. Wondering about any specifics.
Sorry, I was joking.
Its difficult to work out what Kant has got to say about it.
I don't think Kant was ever saying that our experiences came only from our minds. The issue I see is how many of the properties we develop in our judgement of appearances can be applied to the things in themselves. Things in themselves are an inevitable outcome of our judgement. He says that in the quoted passage, adding that they are "problematic." The issue of "mind independence" as a cause does not come up for Kant. What Strawson and Allison were debating {in the link I provided} concerns:
Quoting CPR A36/B53
The "physical objects" we experience in our sensations and judgements are representations made possible through combinations of our intuitions of space and time. That space is consistently called the "outer" intuition and time the "inner" demonstrates that Kant was not disavowing a difference between the two. The correlation between what happens beyond our experience and the way we map the world as space would, of course, never work if it did not work. That points back to the repeatability factor central to Hume. What gets Strawson's knickers in a twist concern how time is excluded from what we can ascribe to whatever is beyond our experience.
Note in the quoted passage how Kant confines the issue to whether or not he or others "could intuit himself" by some other means. That does not make our judgements to be without a cause beyond our experience but forces us to include the absence of other "intuitions" into the set of our limitations.
"Required as an assumption" implies that the assumption is a necessary aspect. That is why the sensation is commonly called a representation. It is assumed to represent something.
Consider what Paine says:
Quoting Paine
If these representations are false, it may be the case that the person is not actually perceiving objects, despite believing oneself to be perceiving objects.
Quoting Patterner
I would say that the single most important criterion for "object" is temporal extension.
That error comes up a lot in Aristotle. Perhaps you could point out where that happens with Kant.
I don't quite understand what you are asking Paine.
Quoting Patterner
Any activity I suppose. At each moment it is new and different, therefore there is no temporal extension of any specific thing.
Yes, that is the subject of process philosophy. And, I think it's exactly what modern physics has determined to be the case. So I believe it is likely.
Can you give an example of an activity someone perceives and mistakes to be an object?
Anything perceived as an object, a book, a desk, a chair, might really be activity. Doesn't physics tell you that these supposed objects are just a bunch of activities?
Speaking of the distinction between a Created vs Constructed world, Dan Brown's new mystery/thriller, Secret of Secrets --- I'm almost to the halfway point --- hinges on the competition between Materialistic and Noetic worldviews.
The noetic scientist is publishing a non-fiction non-popular book, asserting that Consciousness is not "created" by the brain, but is a signal received from some external Mind Field. Hence the physical "real" world is actually a model constructed from bits of data transmitted from the noumenal World Mind, and beamed into the brain. For some as-yet-unstated reason, the evildoers seem existentially threatened by an abstruse philosophical theory.
Or, at least that's my personal construct from superficial knowledge of Noetic theory. How does the notion of brain-as-reciever-instead-of-sender fit with the creator/creation topic of this thread? If you think it's off-topic, I may start a new thread. Or you can, if you are more familiar with Noetics. :smile:
Errors of perception, like the one you describe, are a common theme in Aristotle. Dysfunctions caused by illness or old age are brought up in De Anima. Imagination is described at DA 428b in distinction to other kinds of false appearances.
Deciding what is a mistake in Kant is more difficult. We don't have the object of representation in hand to compare with another supposed object in the unexperienced bush.
That's why I was talking about the possibility of mistake. Instead of insisting that there must be real independent objects, because we perceive objects, as Amadeus seemed to be doing, we ought to accept the possibility of mistake.
Kant is right to emphasize that appearances are always appearances of something. But he does not press the consequences of this observation. It sets up a close relationship between appearance and reality and undermines the idea that appearances are entities that exist independently of what they are appearances of. It even suggests to me the somewhat surprising possibility that appearances are, or at least can be, what reveal reality to us, rather than concealing it.
Quoting Paine
"Difficult" is a very mild description for this situation. It suggests that you think that "representation" is not really an inappropriate concept to apply here. But you also (seem to) accept that there is no real evidence for such an object "in the unexperienced bush". So I'm rather puzzled what to make of this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's hard to disagree with that. But if we accept that possibility, should we not, by the same token, accept the possibility that there is no mistake. We could then ask which of those possibilities is actually the case. Or even question the framing of the question.
Quoting AmadeusD
That makes a lot of sense. But you seem to me to be giving with one hand and taking back with the other.
You describe these objects as "actual, physical objects beyond the senses". But since we cannot, apparently, go beyond the senses, these objects turn out to be unavailable to us, which places them beyond our reach. Kant realizes this and so adopts the concept of the object-in-itself or being-in-itself. These concepts are hard to grasp. On the one hand, we know that they exist. On the other hand, we know, and can know, nothing whatever about them. Given that existence is not a predicate, this "knowledge" doesn't seem to amount to very much.
What all this even harder to understand is that physics appears (!) to have provided us with a view of the world that describes objects-beyond-appearances as radically different from what appears to us, on the evidence of what appears to us.
When you say that actual physical objects are an assumption or presupposition, you seem to leave open the possibility that that assumption is wrong - or at least that a different assumption or pre-supposition may also result in a not incoherent alternative conceptual structure. Compare what happens when you abandon the parallel postulate in geometry. We need something a bit stronger than this.
I think the issue is the nature of "representation", and the different types of mistakes which are possible.
Suppose that we consider words as an example of a representation. Mistake could consist of two principal types, mistake in producing (choosing} the representation, and mistake of interpretation. Each assumes a form of consistency whereby inconsistency would constitute mistake.
Mistakes of interpretation are maybe easier to determine, but some, such as those caused by ambiguity, are not so easy because they require an understanding of the intent behind the act of producing or choosing the representation. Other mistakes of inconsistency in interpretation are easier to determine.
Mistakes in producing or choosing the symbol to be used as a representation are more difficult to determine because that requires an analysis of the context, and the intent, to determine whether principles of consistency are being followed.
I figure a representation happens when what is given through sensible intuition becomes an object one can have knowledge about:
Quoting CPR, B138
The intuitions are given sensations without which there would be no objects. The things-in-themselves are the result of our activity of thinking about objects. They are not representations of what is beyond experience. They do reflect the given aspect of objects. In that sense, they point to a cause that AmadeusD is calling for. But I cannot refer to the noumena as a cause even if we speculate about it:
Quoting ibid. B148
Reading on from here through B159, these limits upon representing things beyond experience are shown to apply to experiences of ourselves:
Quoting ibid. B159
That's quite a tall order. But still, if they can all be determined as mistakes, it follows that there must be a truth of the matter, beyond appearances.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That tells me a lot about what you mean by "representation". You don't mean that the representation is similar to or resembles or looks like its object. So now I need to know what kind of relationship you think there is between the representation and what it is a representation of.
Quoting Paine
Do you mean what I would call an experience? Something that one might be "directly" aware of? Are you gesturing at a "raw" (uninterpreted) experience? I don't see how anything like that could become a table or a chair. I do think that Kant's point about appearances apply also to experiences - they are always experiences of something; it seems obvious that the object of an experience cannot be the experience, but also experiences cannot also be objects of experience. This is really quite bewilderning.
I'm sorry, but the quotations don't help me.
Kant's terminology is intimidating. I think the way Kant speaks in the Preface to the Second Edition is a good outline to his intentions and what he means by experience, intuition, and cognition:
Quoting CPR, Bxvi
The text is linked through the citation. The footnote to this passage speaks of being "imitated from the method of those who study nature." Observe how most of the other footnotes in the Preface make similar parallels.
I don't think so. First, i didn't say anything about how mistake would be determined, only that we ought to believe it is possible. Then, when we look at the primary feature of determining mistakes, mistake is commonly a matter of not producing the desired result. This doesn't imply truth or lack of truth.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think there is a relationship of mastery, like a tool masters the circumstances it is applied to, to produce the desired end. The representation (symbol) is a tool, the living being uses it, and this tool assists the being in survival, as well as making use of its environment toward its ends, and perhaps some other things, dependent on intention.
In general, that's right. It depends on the project. But sometimes the aim of the project is truth, so in those cases mistake does imply the (possibility of) truth.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
H'm. But it is odd to say that the tool masters the circumstances. I always thought it was the user who mastered the circumstances by using the tool. But isn't there a case for describing the tool as adjusted to or fitting in with the relevant circumstances. A carpenter's saw is good for cutting wood. For metal, you need a hacksaw. Hammers for nails (appropriate in some circumstances). Screwdrivers or spanners in others. Certainly, the enterprise is to adjust circumstances in certain ways; but one needs to recognize what can be changed and what can't.
Quoting Paine
That is much more helpful. At least, I seem to be able to get my head round the argument. I wasn't much impressed by the analogy with Copernicus, however. Yet it is an ingenious thought. Maybe there is some sort of parallel. On this reading, my doubts focus on his "a priori" and especially the requirement that the a priori tells us something about the objects in the world. However, I'm delighted to learn that there are objects in the world and that we can know something about them. Some wires may have got crossed between here and the belief that we only know phenomena (are phenomena objects in the world, I wonder) and we cannot know anything (much) about objects or being in "themselves" (unless objects (being) in themselves are not objects in the world.
I believe Kant thought he had uncrossed those wires when he refuted both Descartes and Berkeley with a single blow:
Quoting CPR, B275
That supports the statement at B159 that we can know things in the world better than we can know ourselves.
The need for the a priori is to explain why we are built that way. The need becomes necessary by the "altered method of our way of thinking." Otherwise:
Quoting CPR, Bxvi
The analogy with Copernicus is to demonstrate how mutually exclusive the two standpoints are.
How some of us went from this location to reading "things-in-themselves" as "mind independent" is a long and winding road through perilous terrain. Time for lunch.
Perhaps, but I think it is the tool, as the means to the end, which actually overcomes the circumstances. It is more proper to say that the means is what brings success rather than the will. If it was just the will, you could will yourself to success. Instead, success is highly dependent on the tool employed.
Quoting Ludwig V
Of course. I recognized this type of mistake when I said in the earlier post, "Mistakes in producing or choosing the symbol to be used as a representation". That would be a mistake of trying to use the wrong tool. We were talking about the different types of mistakes which are possible, and whether each type could be recognized.
We don't know anything of objects or phenomena in general a prioriin terms of what commonalities we can know about all objects without actually consulting particular objects in real time, we must reflect on their general characteristics as perceived. That is we must reflect on prior experience of phenomena in order to see what they all have in common.
Kant agrees with that in the first section of the Introduction to the Second Edition, titled:
On the difference between pure and empirical cognition. Experience is prior in time to knowledge but the possibility for experience is prior as a condition.
Quoting CPR, B2
In the Preface, objects of experience are either made present to us through an intuition that has to
"conform to the constitution of the objects" or by means of our processes of reason.
I'm afraid this makes no sense to me. I don't see how any cognition can be "absolutely independent of all experience". Can it be explained?
As a matter of textual interpretation, it is clear that reason is being closely tied to the limits of empirical knowledge. That our judgement is, to some extent, a result of our nature established before our particular experiences is not, by itself, an observation given through experience. Kant calls that part thinking about what occurs "independent of all experience."
So, it is not a claim to a noetic hinterland but a parallel to Aristotle trying to understand the relationship between potential and actual beings.
You mean that we are not born blank slates is not something we can know via our experience of ourselves? Can we not know via observations, both our own and via accessing the records of the observations of others, e.g., via ethology and anthropology, that we and other animals are not born as blank slates?
Also, referring to having a pre-cognitive nature as being a purely mental attribute seems tendentious. Physiological investigations seem to show that what is given pre-cognitively via the senses is processed by the body pre-cognitively, and only ends up being conscious experience on account of processes of which we have no awareness or knowledge in vivo. The understanding we do have of such things would seem to be all a posteriori.
You are putting a lot of theories in my mouth. I am not trying to defend what Kant said but clarify what I heard he was saying. Neither was I trying to defend what Aristotle said.
I am guessing that Kant introducing a new standpoint is neither here nor there from your standpoint.
I didn't mean to suggest you were defending Kant. Perhaps I should have been more careful with the wording.
I think Kant did introduce a new standpoint, and I also think doing that is always worthwhile in moving ideas along. Kant's standpoint seems to me to be superceded today.
[quote"=CPR, B275"]The proof that is demanded must therefore establish that we have experience and not merely imagination of outer things, which cannot be accomplished unless one can prove that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience. [/quote]
I'm very much in sympathy with the sentiment. But Kant was right not to mention Berkeley here. He does distinguish between those experiences which have a cause that is not myself and those that are caused by myself. His criterion is that the latter are less "vivid" than the former.
[quote"=CPR, Bxvi"]If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori. [/quote]
On my understanding of a priori, we don't know anything about how the world is before we experience it. The clue is in the label - the a priori is what we know before experience. But if it is just a metaphor, we need to be a bit careful in interpreting int. It's hard to see how we could know anything about the objects of experience before experience. On the other hand, mathematics and logic could be seen as telling us about what objects are possible in experience.
I'm fascinated by the phrase "conforms to the constitution of objects"? It's another metaphor. Does it mean "is true of.." or perhaps "applies to.."? Am I wrong to be reminded of the picture theory of meaning, or perhaps of W's idea that language describes the world because it is structured (logically speaking) in the same way as the world.
Quoting Paine
Yes, I get that. I suppose it's not an unreasonable idea. But it doesn't explain the metaphors that riddle his language.
Quoting Paine
Yes, indeed. I hope lunch was good.
Quoting Janus
Yes. Does that fit with the standard analytic view of the a priori? I think not. Yet there is something important here, I suspect.
Quoting Paine
I don't think you can separate experience from knowledge in that way, unless you think you can catch the wild goose of raw experience.
Quoting Paine
Are there two roads to the same destination or different roads to different destinations?
The bolded passage is the slide from something I understand to something I don't. Our experiences of objects are not the objects (dare I say "themselves"). Yet I can see a point here. What we know of objects must be based on how they appear to us. I part from Kant where he says that all we can know is the experiences/appearances. They themselves show us what reality is and that reality is not limited to what appears, what we experience.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I think that this is glass half-full/glass half-empty. I'm very much inclined to represent human beings as iinter-acting with the world, rather than mastering it. The latter version reminds me too much of the Biblical idea that we dominate the world. In some ways, that seems true, especially these days. But climate change reminds us that we don't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't know whether a complete catalogue of possible mistakes is possible. Perhaps it is.
I think it is definitely not possible, that's why we categorize by types, to extend our comprehension of what is possible as much as we think is possible. So we start with the most general "mistake is possible", and we assume this catalogues every possible mistake. Then we divide into different types of mistakes, but we realize that some may complete escape our categories. But if that is the case, then it means that we don't completely understand what "mistake" means. And if we look back at the initial category "mistake" and the proposition "mistake is possible", we can see that there may be some mistakes which escape our judgement of "mistake". There may be some mistakes which we never would know as mistakes. Then we have to admit that "mistake is possible" doesn't capture all the possible mistakes. And that's just the nature of what a mistake is, something which eludes judgement.
OK. It's just that it seems to me that there are always endless ways to screw things up, but very few to get things just right. Though some mistakes may be small enough to be unimportant.
Berkeley is, in fact, mentioned by name at the beginning of the Refutation of Idealism:
Quoting CPR B274
Kant figures his refutation of both is one stop shopping if he can prove the Theorem:
Quoting B275
One question is how far outside of myself have I gotten if it is my intuition of space and time that allows for the possibility for the experience. To argue on behalf of Kant, I think that question gives the Copernicus analogy a job. It is to say you cannot jump back and forth between standpoints. The conditions for objectivity in one cannot be used as grounds in the other. Kant's position reverses the imagery of Copernicus. He is the one standing still while the objects revolve around him. He describes the problem of switching back and forth between views as a misunderstanding of specificity:
Quoting CPR A379
I do think that these issues relate to Wittgenstein, especially his different discussions of solipsism. But I have chores to do. I have to paint a very specific appearance. Maybe later.
Essentially, I agree with you and those final couple of lines sit very well with me. This speaks to the dual aspect I've been vying with. Obviously, "noumena" is a limiting factor for human reason and in the CPR this is essentially all he does with it (though, I have provided some titilating indications otherwise). But logically, and in terms of his description of his system, it requires something beyond the understanding. "Something" to me speaks "object". I don't care what form that comes in. Denying that these "objects" obtain precludes the entire system from doing anything for us.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I can't grasp what the purpose of this response is. From what I gather, this agrees with my quoted reply.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In the context which we are, this is not a possible situation unless idealism proper (or solipsism i guess). At any rate, it isn't in the system Kant describes.
Quoting Ludwig V
I did exactly the opposite:
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting Ludwig V
That's true in some sense - except that I accept this, and remove 'physical' "Some object" is good enough for me. Quoting Ludwig V
Bang on.
[quote="AmadeusD;1016142"]I did exactly the opposite:
I misunderstood you. I'm sorry.
Yes, I knew that he explicitly criticised Berkeley somewhere. Thanks for the reference.
Quoting Paine
I'm not sure, but I think the correct answer starts from the fact that space and time are infinite. But it seems absurd to say that I have (actually) got infinitely far outside myself just because I have a mathematical function in my head that is infinite.
Quoting CPR B274
I'm pretty sure that Berkeley would not recognize this critique. As I remember it, he argues (rightly. as it turns out) that space is relative, not absolute. He does claim that space is not absolute, but that doesn't mean that he claims that space is impossible. Since he doesn't have a concept of things-in-themselves, it seems a bit of a straw man to space can't be a property (??) of them. It would seem, however, that Kant thinks that space is absolute. How does that square with his idea that space is an intuition? Thinking about this, it seems that Kant's (and Berkeley's) conception of space seems to be that it is something that exists as a vessel or a medium in which objects have their existence. I don't see that. The existence of objects in space and space itself are not two separate discoveries. Each depends on the other, conceptually speaking.
Quoting B275
Well, yes. Except that the distinction between me and objects outside me requires that both are established in the same argument. I don't see how one could establish my own existence first and then establish the existence of objects in space outside me. Now we have to go back to the cogito and its implications.
Quoting CPR A379
Quoting CPR A379
The way he expresses this thought is - a bit awkward, because he seems to allow us to formulate our questions and then ask us not to press them. But once a question is asked, it is necessary to respond, either with an answer or an explanation why the question is illegitimate. Sadly, experience does in fact pose questions to us that invite us to push at the boundaries. My favourite example here is the discovery of pulsars. This happened because a radio signal received by a radio telescope in Cambridge (UK) that in some ways was entirely unremarkable could not be explained, until an entirely new kind of astronomical object - the pulsar - was posited and then proved (by experience with some help from mathematical calculations) to be the explanation. Kant's limit seems arbitrary.
Quoting CPR A379
This isn't psychology as we now know it, is it? Still, that's not important. I have say, I was pondering whether one could argue that appearances exist and therefore are real in their way and consequently things-in-themselves. It seems I've been headed off. But I still need to ask how appearances can be appearances of things-in-themselves and things-in-themselves be completely unknown.
I'm grateful for your patience with me. I may be raising objections all the time, but I am learning as well.
I should not have used a spatial metaphor while discussing space. I meant to say that taking intuition of space and time as a process of my perception raises the question of how "objective" it is. That ties into Kant's beef with Berkeley who treats space as an experienced phenomenon. Kant argues that it is, rather, an a priori condition for sensibility:
Quoting Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document
This view of intuition is at odds with your statement:
Quoting Ludwig V
The "objects in space" appear to us through the function of the intuition. What makes the experience possible is what makes it a priori. The possibility for experience is not experienced. That is why it is said to be "beyond experience." This is the language Janus was objecting to upthread.
Quoting CPR, B2
In the Prolegomena quote above, this corresponds to:
I, too, am learning from this discussion.
I will try to respond to some other of your comments but need to get back to painting a specific appearance.
I saw that, and the first thing that came to my mind was, to say the same thing .Ill have to think about it.
Probably not what you meant, but, considering the currently discussed author and his original Prussian linguistic tendencies, I might be forgiven.
The things-in-themselves are, by definition, what is not experienced. The appearances do not represent the things-in-themselves ala Aristotle. We investigate the appearances without knowing how they are made or how we came to know them. That is expressed as an unknown ground:
Quoting CPR A379
The various stances taken by the psychologists and the spiritualists in the passage would try to give an account of what objects are in general but do not get us closer to the unknown ground. As the Prolegomena passage emphasizes:
Quoting Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document
While this statement is challenging to understand next to those about what is "beyond experience." It does not involve the questioning of experience as related in your pulsar example.
I started using the phrase from reading:
Quoting CPR A379
That gives me confidence that the door I am painting today is the same one I was painting yesterday.
But I like your interpretation. That I might be starting to pun in a Prussian manner is food for thought.
Years ago, I found it much more advantageous to shy away from the A edition. Read it for context, but not study it for comprehension. I mean theres a reason the Good Professor made changes, so I just figured it best to go with what he himself thought as better.
Sidebar: the a in .specifically a wholly distinct appearances , is a translators (not authors) footnote indicator belonging to specifically; it isnt the indefinite article of grammar spellchecker wants it to be.
I think it potentially very confusing to think of I as an appearance, as mentioned in A379, however specifically distinct it may be, especially if one has already understood the transcendental aesthetic in which appearance is only that empirically/physically/materially real thing from which sensation follows necessarily. One would naturally surmise that I is certainly no real thing therefore should not have been considered as an appearance at all.
But an appearance to the senses is that by which they are affected. To be consistent, then, regarding appearance, if I am an appearance it must be that I am an affect on myself, which, of course, is that very specific distinction he meant to convey in the text but only makes perfectly clear in a bottom-of-the-page asterisk.
Still, Im sure youre aware, all that is revised in the B edition, 157, where that as I appear to myself reduces to only the consciousness ( ) that I am, which releases appearance as previously given in the Aesthetic, from the intuition which is proposed as necessarily following from it. And, which is kinda cool, by doing that he tacitly supports Descartes sum while not being quite so supportive of the problematic idealism explicit in the cogito ergo part. Also, he belays the whole existence thing, relegating it to a category where it belongs, rather than connecting to the I, which is only a transcendental thought to which existence proper does not belong.
(I am) .not because I think, but because the (consciousness of thinking) represents that I am. Or something like that . synthetic original unity of apperception, is what hes trying to establish to modify or amend or basically replace the whole original cogito idea.
If you havent already, scroll all the way to the end of the text youre referencing, to the translators comments, by text page-grouping, to see that Kant had trouble with this whole thing .getting what he wanted to say across to his readers. And if he had that much trouble with getting it out to us, its not hard to image how much trouble we have taking it in.
Or its just me and Ive completely missed the mark. (Sigh)
Space and time are big issues in philosophy, and I'm not an expert. But I do agree that we do not experience space as a phenomenon. I wouldn't say that it is a condition for sensibility, but rather a principle of interpretation of the phenomena.
I'm afraid, though, that I simply have no grasp of what he means by saying that it is an intuition. Is it something like a brute fact?
My other problem is how we can conceive of space without objects in it, when we cannot conceive of what I call objects without their spatial dimensions and position in relation to each other. The mathematical representation of space - as a graph with three axes and an origin seems to separate space from what it contains, but I think that is an illusion. The graph has no meaning except as a way of locating objects.
I realize that a priori means before experience, but what does the metaphor mean here? (I realize that it is a deeply embedded metaphor that has become a regular way of speaking. But I detect an ambiguity here, whether before means a stage in a process or a position in a structure, supporting or enabling experience. My metaphor for understanding the a priori is framework vs content, setting up the rules of a game vs playing the game. I think that that Kant thinks that the a priori tells us something about how the world is - about possible worlds.
Quoting Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document
My word. That is a surprise. He sounds like a radical 20th century analytic philosopher.
Quoting Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document
This just defeats me. Perhaps you can paraphrase it for me?
".... space ..... can be known by us, because .... ... and makes all intuition of the same (i.e. all perception and experience) ....possible."
Well, yes, with reservations.
Does "space .... and all its determinations a priori," mean Geometry?
What does "(sc. space)inheres in our sensibility as a pure form before all perception" mean?
"... experience, according to Berkeley, can have no criteria of truth, because its phenomena (according to him) have nothing a priori at their foundation"
"...space and time .... prescribe their law to all possible experience a priori, and at the same time afford the certain criterion for distinguishing truth from illusion therein."
That's roughly the definition of the a priori, using a metaphor, which I think clouds his meaning. The kind of law that is a prescription defines the possibility of breaking it. But if the a priori defines possibility, there is no possibility of breaking it.
I would need some argument to accept that space and time are the criterion for distinguishing truth and illusion. I would have thought that non-contradiction and identity would be essential - or is that what he means by the "pure conceptions of the understanding."?
Quoting Paine
That's all right, then.
Quoting Paine
I see from later comments that you are painting a door. That's a hard task, because a vertical surface promotes drips. I was, however, rather surprised. I always thought that the only way you could paint an appearance was by painting a picture.
Quite right about the 'a' being a footnote and not an indefinite pronoun. One of the hazards of copying and pasting text here. I try to clean those up as a rule. With Kant, it is like herding cats.
Your points about how the use of appearance became more strictly expressed through later works is well taken. Thank you for connecting the A379 language to that of B157. The corresponding pages of the Editors Notes are 739 and 727. For others following the linked edition. It is from those notes that I remembered the passage from Prolegomena above.
I have been reading what is said in A379 through the lens of the Refutation of Idealism given in the B edition. I was thinking that the specificity is still focused upon the difference between what is given through inner and outer intuitions when the Theorem states:
Quoting B275
That also, as you said:
Quoting Mww
I will have to mull over whether the Theorem is "not so supportive" or a thumb in the eye to the other part. I have been leaning toward the latter.
One element in both the A and B editions that is fairly consistent is the term 'transcendental object.' It is used 28 times in the text (according to my find-in- page function). The meaning as the "unknown ground" for both the inner and outer seems to be preserved at each passage.
I will continue to think about the role of the "I am" that you illuminate.
Before trying to respond to that, it would help to know which thinkers you are well versed in. Kant was using the language of his contemporaries. I know some things about them and their differences but studied Ancient Greek philosophy before and more rigorously than turning to Kant's time. I am still a stranger in a strange land.
All the thinkers Kant responded to had different ways of framing what is intuition, phenomena, ideas, logic, and categories. They were arguing within a set of parameters. The problems we have looking in from outside is that we cannot share that set without problems of translation.
With that said, where are you coming from?
I'm fairly typical of people educated in the 20th century English-speaking philosophical tradition. But with an emphasis on ordinary language philosophy and Wittgenstein (especially the later Wittgenstein) and Locke, Berkeley and Hume, so very sceptical of analytic philosophy. Some Ancient Greek Philosophy, but mostly early to middle period Plato and Aristotle's ethics. Some continental philosophy, especially existentialism. I was not active philosophically from 2000 to 2020 so considerably out of date.
Quoting Paine
I'm not surprised. There's always a delicate balance to be struck there.
Thank you for the report. I will work on painting a picture.
Here's a question I would like to put to you.
I found the following in SEP - Kant
That makes a lot of sense to me, and would resolve many of the objections that I've been raising. What, if anything, do you think of it?
The writer of the article is assuming that things-in-themselves are present whether we experience them or not. That is not what Kant says in the quote given in the preceding section:
When the writer says in section 3,
experience is taken to be a matter of contact with either one or the other kind of object. The narrowness of that reading is what I argued against in my comment to you here. There is a ground where the inner and outer are thought to be in one world, but it is not presented as only things outside of us. The writer is unknowingly presenting a two-object interpretation: Objects in the world and our representations of them.
The writer continues the misunderstanding in 3.1. What is being called a "two object interpretation" by the "so-called Göttingen review by Christian Garve" is what Kant vehemently denounced in the Prolegomena passage I quoted previously
namely as appearance or as thing in itself
(Bxxvii)
In other words, the Critique does teach the twofold aspect, but not of the object. It is the two-fold aspect of the human intellectual system as laid out in transcendental philosophy. It is by means of that system that an object is treated as an appearance in accordance with sensibility on the one hand, or, an object is treated as a ding an sich on the other, in accordance with pure speculative reason.
All that is perceived must exist, but it does not follow that only the perceived exists. Because it is absurd to claim only the perceived exists, insofar as subsequent discoveries become impossible, we are entitled to ask .for that thing eventually perceived, in what state was that thing before it was perceived?
Why? To defeat Berkeleys esse est percipi, as prescribed by that dogmatic idealism predicated on subjective conditions alone.
I believe the briefest explanation provided by Kant on the role of intuition as a possibility for experience is where he distinguishes intuition from thinking. In the section titled: [u]On the original-synthetic unity of
apperception[/u] (at B132). The terms used there are related to one another and thus given definition.
At B137, the term object is introduced:
Quoting CPR B137
It is in the context of this unity where the dual aspect referred to by comes in to play. The passage continues to show how space is not just a concept:
Quoting ibid. B138 underlined emphasis mine
Yes, we know, or can discover, what manner of existence things have for us. We can also ask what manner of existence they could have for other percipients or absent any percipients at allbut about that question we can only assess what seems most plausible given our understanding of our own experience.
Cant argue with any of that. Except that absent any percipients thing; you seem alright with it, so Ill leave it be. I know what you mean.
That points to the structure of the Critique establishing limits as starting places before building upon them to introduce new thinking. For instance, the conditions described at B132 to B138 are observed but qualified by B165 or the Result of this deduction of the concepts of the understanding:
Quoting CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine
The reference to epigenesis separates this view from Descartes and Berkeley who only offered versions of the real as reductions to a single ground for experience.
I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply. Off-line life, which we choose to call real, intervened. I need to take more time to work through what you have posted. So, for the moment, a thought about something else.
Quoting CPR, Bxvi
My puzzlement about what "conform" means continues. It occurred to me that taking into account what Kant may have been reacting to might be illuminated by looking again at Aristotle. (It is possible that he actually had Aristotle in mind, but I'm not historian enough even to suggest that.)
SEP - Aristotle's Theory of Mind
If I remember right, Aristotle thinks that our minds cannot have any inherent form, because that would prevent it being able to grasp any external object that had the same or similar form. So Kant's Copernican move makes sense. Possibly. But I think the comparison helps.
Quoting Mww
This seems very plausible to me. But since it is a question of how the object is treated, I wonder what ground there is for talking of two different kinds of object. Put the question this way, what determines whether a given object is treated in accordance with sensibility or in accordance with pure speculative reason. Or is it like the difference between smells and sounds, where the difference is guaranteed by the nature of the "intuition"?
Quoting Janus
I'm not at all sure that the latter alternative will stand up to Berkeley's "master argument". (He concludes too much in his conclusion that the tree doesn't fall unless someone perceives it. The tree falls and if some one had been there, they would have perceived it.)
All good, except .
Quoting Paine
.I think observed is out-of-place here. The listed pagination concerns the analytic of logical functions, not the aesthetic of empirical givens.
I have the feeling you appreciate the precision in recounting the text, with the same precision with which it was written, and meant to be understood.
But, as with , I know what you mean.
-
Quoting Ludwig V
A given object is always treated in accordance with both sensibility and reason. What determines that such should be the case, is nothing but this particular version of speculative metaphysics.
An object in general, or a merely possible object, without regard to any particular one, constructed by the understanding hence that object not given to the senses but still related to possible experience, is called an empirical conception and is treated a priori by pure theoretical reason. For example, justice, beauty, geometric figures, deities, and the like.
That object without any empirical content whatsoever, and no possibility of it hence entirely unrelated to possible experience, both constructed and treated by pure speculative reason, and is called a transcendental object or idea. For example, the categories, mathematical principles, inferential syllogisms, and the like.
These are not proper objects, of course, not existent things, but merely indicate a position in a synthesis of representations in which they are contained. Rather than being objects as such, they are objects of that to which they stand in relation. Object of Nature is an appearance, object of intuition is a phenomenon; object of understanding is a conception; object of reason is an idea. Explanatory parsimony, if you will.
Thats what I get out of it, anyway. Loosely speaking.
Correction noted. Explanatory parsimony rules the day. I may use that tight wad in other shops.
It may be a loose way of speaking, but it make sense to me. Thanks. Very helpful.
I will pursue my Buddha nature by not commenting on the SEP article.
The receptivity of perception in Aristotle can be seen as a parallel to that of the intuition of sensibility. But where Kant directly rebukes Aristotle is over his use of logic at A268/B324. The disparaging remark occurs in the section titled: On the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection through the confusion of the empirical use of the understanding with the transcendental at A 260/B316. This topic concerns your question:
Quoting Ludwig V
Kant demonstrates how the categories and grounds are different for the two. The sources for the difference has already been established by previous deduction. The "conformity to objects" of Bxvi is the issue at the quote provided previously:
Quoting CPR B165 to B167 underlined emphasis mine
The confusion Kant works to undo in the amphiboly is achieved by defeating Leibniz and Locke with one sweeping roundhouse kick:
Quoting CPR A270/B326
If you continue reading to B344, the object of the Preface has been put in its transcendental place:
*Paine checks his pockets to see if he still has enough left over to buy lunch*
That is enough to tell me what I need to know.
Quoting Paine
I don't read that as critical of Aristotle, so much as critical of "schoolteachers and orators". I was also very impressed that Kant (seems to) retain some concept of form and matter. How he reconciles that with the new science I cannot imagine.
Quoting Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, page 374, or page 69 in the linked document
I can understand the a priori as about the possibilities of experience, and then it makes sense that the senses are about actual experience. But now I don't understand why he says this. I suppose that pure understanding/reason is not the same as the mixed understanding of possible experiences. But then it seems odd to me that he seems to think I must grasp all the possibilities before I can grasp any actual experiences. Surely understanding some possibilities would be enough.
I'm bit preoccupied with his concept of the a priori. I thought I might find it helpful to look at what other contemporary philosophers have had to say about it. I did some research in SEP. I didn't find it mentioned in the articles on other major eighteenth century philosophers. There's a precursor in Locke, (distinction between demonstrative and probable reasoning) taken up by Hume; Leibniz is quoted as saying "An idea is true when its notion is possible and false when it includes a contradiction"; Spinoza seems to have been very pre-occupied with necessity. I don't suppose you know where something like our idea of it first occurs?
Quoting CPR A270/B326
Yes. I guess his great contribution was to break the empiricist/rationalist dilemma by showing that both are necessary. Which should have been obvious all along.
I greatly appreciate all the work you are doing with me. But as I get deeper, I find it harder to keep a grip on any one topic. (You may have noticed that my replies are getting slower and slower.) Yet obviously it is a system and one really needs to understand the whole thing. But I think I need to take a break for now. No doubt I'll return to him at some point in the future.
For the moment, I'm going to read the Prolegomena and the Refutation of Idealism. If I can get my head around those texts, I'll have learnt a lot.
The term comes from Aristotle. a priori is Latin for what comes earlier or first. a posteriori is what comes later or behind. The Greek words are ???????? (proteron) and ??????? (husteron).
What is primary is what is sought throughout Aristotle. In Metaphysics he says:
I am not a Kant scholar who knows all the places Kant mentions Aristotle but his intellectual milieu in Konigsberg is said to have been steeped in the tradition. Kant's terms can be said to move across the background of their Aristotelian versions.
There is a book I plan to read concerning this topic: Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, and Method By Marco Sgarbi
I need to get more chores off the honey do list first.
Of course it is. It's clearly a precursor. I'm not sure it's exactly our idea or Kant's idea. That quotation doesn't mention experience, which I think is the key idea for us.
Quoting Paine
I didn't know that. It isn't a surprise, though.
Quoting Paine
I know that list. But I've not heard it called that before.
I am surprised by your lack of surprise. The shared use of terms by the two authors is clearly evident in comparisons of their texts. That includes the term 'experience', that invokes what is called empria by Aristotle which led to the word "empirical."
It's based on my interpretation of references in Berkeley and Hume to "the academics" or "the schools" or "schoolmen". Aristotelianism as such is usually though to be over by 1700. That doesn't mean that nobody studied either Plato or Aristotle after 1700, and Aristotelianism was a major opposition to the new science and Enlightenment.
Pedantic note. The Greek for "experience" is "empeiria". Probably just a typo.
Afterthought - Aristotelianism died out by 1700. Berkeley would have been a young man (student) at that time, Hume would have been students less than 50 years later. There were likely Aristotelians still living then.
Yes, a typo.
It is off topic to this OP, but I often wonder about self-identified schools of thought and the range of vocabulary shared amongst different views represented through them. I won't try to talk about that in this thread.
Yes, the vocabulary must be really important. People usually identify schools by their shared doctrines, but actually, I think it is just as much about their disagreements. That's what the shared vocabulary enables. There's also the social dimension.
:up: :up:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/new-way-to-map-the-unique-brain-organization-of-individuals/
@wonderer1 @Patterner @Wayfarer
The mind can only be what it actually is. What is 'appears like' isn't anything. It does things. Whether there's a dualist element or not, that's the case. It isn't a 'thing' to be misinterpreted as best I can tell. You can't be deceived about what you mind. Just what it's giving you.