Fundamental reality versus conceptual reality
Emanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism is the view that we can never know reality directly (the noumenon), we only know how it appears to us (the phenomenon). Kant made this distinction based on observation, I believe. You cannot invent such a theory out of thin air. Yet many people have wandered off in imagination, offering all kinds of abstract ideas to explain this theory.
I will try to bring this topic back to something everyone can validate on his/her own. I will use the terms fundamental reality and conceptual reality, simply because I get confused by Kant's terms.
To make it experiential, try this experiment: Take 10 cookies and lay them down like this:
***
*
**
*
***
You will agree that our conceptual detection system is at work and recognizes this as a pattern forming the letter E. Eat two cookies and now it looks like this:
***
*
**
*
*
Our conceptual detection system does not wonder where the E has gone. It is now simply the letter F. Next you eat all cookies except the last one. All the letters are gone, only a single cookie is left. No big deal.
*
You will likely agree that the E and F were created in your mind, as a part of your conceptual reality. Fundamental reality provided all the input for that abstraction, no misunderstanding about that. But it is the mind that recognizes the input as patterns and gives it these labels E and F.
Also notice that during the time you were looking at the E and F, the concept cookies was most likely at the background of your mind, although you did perceive them perfectly well. Another sign that perception and concept are not the same thing.
Now take the remaining cookie and look at it. In the hierarchy of concepts we go one level deeper, so to speak. Look at the single cookie. For some reason it is more difficult to say that the cookie is a pattern detected in your mind by your conceptual detection system. It is a cookie, that is how it feels.
I took a cookie as an example because we had cookies since we were one year old. We know a cookie when we see one.
I believe there is actually no difference between the patterns E and F and a cookie. Just like the two letters, the cookie is something our brain recognizes as a separate object, searches the appropriate label for and finds the word cookie. All the information is out there, the recognition and labeling is only in our minds.
Everything that can be said about this cookie, its taste and its color, finds its origin in the reality outside, the fundamental reality. It is inside the mind where the recognition and the labeling happens, which is the conceptual reality.
You can go down more and more levels, until you are at the particle level. Do all the particles in the universe then form this "fundamental reality"? I don't think so. Observe what happens in your mind. Just like "Letters E and F" and "cookies", you now have a label "all the particles in the universe", defined by your current perspective of reality. Still just a concept in your mind, no different than the letters or the cookies.
As a side effect of all that labeling, we now have split reality in such a way that we cannot reintegrate it. Fundamental reality must be the particles, the cookies AND the letters, somehow. But we are unable to see fundamental reality at all levels at once, we are unable to see it as an integrated whole. This is a limitation created by our conceptual view of the world.
Many philosophers have been struggling with this, but this is really all there is to it, I believe.
(You can have the last cookie now, we no longer need it.)
I will try to bring this topic back to something everyone can validate on his/her own. I will use the terms fundamental reality and conceptual reality, simply because I get confused by Kant's terms.
To make it experiential, try this experiment: Take 10 cookies and lay them down like this:
***
*
**
*
***
You will agree that our conceptual detection system is at work and recognizes this as a pattern forming the letter E. Eat two cookies and now it looks like this:
***
*
**
*
*
Our conceptual detection system does not wonder where the E has gone. It is now simply the letter F. Next you eat all cookies except the last one. All the letters are gone, only a single cookie is left. No big deal.
*
You will likely agree that the E and F were created in your mind, as a part of your conceptual reality. Fundamental reality provided all the input for that abstraction, no misunderstanding about that. But it is the mind that recognizes the input as patterns and gives it these labels E and F.
Also notice that during the time you were looking at the E and F, the concept cookies was most likely at the background of your mind, although you did perceive them perfectly well. Another sign that perception and concept are not the same thing.
Now take the remaining cookie and look at it. In the hierarchy of concepts we go one level deeper, so to speak. Look at the single cookie. For some reason it is more difficult to say that the cookie is a pattern detected in your mind by your conceptual detection system. It is a cookie, that is how it feels.
I took a cookie as an example because we had cookies since we were one year old. We know a cookie when we see one.
I believe there is actually no difference between the patterns E and F and a cookie. Just like the two letters, the cookie is something our brain recognizes as a separate object, searches the appropriate label for and finds the word cookie. All the information is out there, the recognition and labeling is only in our minds.
Everything that can be said about this cookie, its taste and its color, finds its origin in the reality outside, the fundamental reality. It is inside the mind where the recognition and the labeling happens, which is the conceptual reality.
You can go down more and more levels, until you are at the particle level. Do all the particles in the universe then form this "fundamental reality"? I don't think so. Observe what happens in your mind. Just like "Letters E and F" and "cookies", you now have a label "all the particles in the universe", defined by your current perspective of reality. Still just a concept in your mind, no different than the letters or the cookies.
As a side effect of all that labeling, we now have split reality in such a way that we cannot reintegrate it. Fundamental reality must be the particles, the cookies AND the letters, somehow. But we are unable to see fundamental reality at all levels at once, we are unable to see it as an integrated whole. This is a limitation created by our conceptual view of the world.
Many philosophers have been struggling with this, but this is really all there is to it, I believe.
(You can have the last cookie now, we no longer need it.)
Comments (98)
Welcome to the forum. To start, a single cookie is not a cookie, it's a period.
Down to business. I think you've oversimplified what Kant had to say and have missed the important point. Kant is not the only one who recognizes that the world at its most basic level is unspeakable. It cannot be put into words. When you put things into words, conceptualize them, you create something different from the thing itself. "Moon" is not the moon. As I see it, this is the fundamental fact in understanding our relationship to reality.
Quoting T Clark
And thanks for the welcome.
As for the business, I don't see the difference in what I say and what you say. With the cookies in a certain configuration, that "E" or "F" is a label we give to the form. Fundamental reality provides everything that is needed for these letters to appear, so in that sense they really do exist. But when we call it "E" or "F", we create something in our conceptual reality that is not there in fundamental reality.
I rephrase it a little by making it two realities.
There are many philosophers who add a lot of reasoning to that (eg: two objects interpretation and two aspects interpretation)
In other words, reality consists of collections of collections of collections... Welcome to set theory, the instantiation of abstract mathematics in concrete forms. Every set (collection) is an object in its own right, not identical to any of its elements but something in addition to them.
Philosophy Forum Contributor Proves Kant Wrong In Single Post!
Now we can move on to more fundamental things, such as why 'mercans say "cookie" when they mean biscuit.
:up: *Quantum-woo* is @Wayfarer's catnip (& @Gnomon's too).
:up: :up:
I like the humor, but actually, I fully agree with Kant. I only commented on the other philosophers who make it more difficult than it is.
True, but that is still conceptual reality. It makes it more apparent that fundamental reality is of a different make and cannot be understood. One cookie that first was part of the letter E, suddenly becomes part of the letter F. (And later becomes a period according to T Clark). It is clear that that only happens in our mind. So, if it only happens in our mind, what is the nature of reality out there that provides these collections of categories?
Why would it only happen in our mind? The cookie is out there, it is a part of collection E, then a part of collection F. Collections E and F are out there too.
We perceive the letter E because we perceive a relation between the "cookies" (the "atoms"). In other words, we see a relation between the parts of the whole.
One aspect is the ontological nature of relations. Where do "relations" exist"? EG, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Relations
If relations don't ontologically exist in "fundamental reality", then the letter E can only exist in our mind as a "conceptual reality". This also means that other objects, such as "chairs" and "tables", don't exist in "fundamental reality".
If relations do ontologically exist in "fundamental reality", then the letter E exists both in "fundamental reality" and our "conceptual reality". But from this a number of philosophical problems arise.
Using Kant's terminology, if relations don't exist in "fundamental reality", then neither can "noumena" nor "things-in-themselves" exist in "fundamental reality" (the difference between "noumena" and "things-in-themselves" is argued over).
Without humans inventing the letters E and F, how can there be these letters in fundamental reality? Only when you know what you are looking for, you can verify that, hey, fundamental reality confirms our conceptual view on the matter. So it is one-directional in some sense. You can only recognise something "out there" if you already have a concept available "inside". And since our concepts are limited by our brain capacity, the question remains, what is actually out there?
And yes, what applies to these letters also applies to chairs and tables. O, I should say "chairs" and "tables"
For me the important thing is to stay close to what you can perceive directly. Kant did not invent this theory out of thin air, he observed his mind while it was operating.
But if we would listen to Kant, he says we cannot understand fundamental reality. Our conceptual thinking is unable to go there. Nobody listens. Instead everybody goes on trying to squeeze fundamental reality's secrets in our conceptual minds. Of course you end up in contradictions then. In short, listen to Kant and leave it there...
Regrettably theres no dummies guide to transcendental idealism.
Kant is a proponent of Realism. in that his belief is that there is a "fundamental reality" that exists independently of our "conceptual reality". This "fundamental reality" contains "things-in-themselves", although we can never know what these "things-in-themselves" are.
There is the paradox within Kant's CPR that Kant doesn't properly answer, though gives an attempt in B276, of how we can know that there are things-in-themselves if we can never know what they are.
To say "transcendentally" is not an answer, in that "transcendentally" is just a name, not a description. In the same way that my saying that it is possible to travel through time using a "wormhole" in space is meaningless.
However, in practice, living in a "conceptual reality" is sufficient. We don't need to understand "fundamental reality" in order to understand "conceptual reality". For example, if I perceive the traffic light to be on red, I can react accordingly. I don't need to know the "fundamental reality" that the traffic light is actually emitting a wavelength of 700nm.
But that is also conceptual reality! As soon we have words, it is a concept.
I look at the world and perceive many parts in the world.
I have the concept of the letter F in my mind, look at the world, and see the letter F.
The letter F is a unified single whole composed of several parts.
The parts exist in the world.
The question is, does the whole exist in the world or only in my mind?
If the whole does exist in the world, for example the letter F, then what is the ontological nature of the relations between the parts of the letter F in the world?
First, that picture is genius! I see the letter F and E !
To answer your question: that is something we simply have to accept that our mind is incapable of capturing. Language is a tool, like a bucket is. Don't try to put a river in a bucket.
One limitation of conceptual understanding is that it is sequential, just like language is sequential. Maybe we get an overall sense of understanding, but this is after re-assembling the concepts in an overall kind of impression.
In short: just accept that fundamental reality is (by definition) something we cannot understand, but we can prove it is there.
Why?
I must say I like your questions, they force me to really think it through.
Also, how does this help you creating an AI algorithm?
It is quite possible to speak of things that you don't know. Language doesn't have a problem. The "unknown" you can speak of, just as "future", "surprise".
Also there is a few things that we can say about fundamental reality, that is, if we query it for some concept "is that 'E' really there?" we get an answer.
Quoting I like sushi
Interesting question and I really don't know. This curiousity is what led me into this project. So that is how my mind works it seems. Also, maybe it doesn't help me but at least I can understand if this is a smart thing to build or not... I am quite confident it is, but I cannot fully explain why.
It's Immanuel.
I appreciate the attempt to make Kant's terms clearer. Though I think you're dealing with the more general dichotomy between representation (conceptual reality) and represented (fundamental reality). Rather than the one between phenomenon (conceptual reality, representation) and thing-in-itself or noumenon. The distinction in Kant, or pair of distinctions - between phenomenon and noumenon, or phenomenon and things-in-themselves, doesn't neatly map onto the concept of representation and represented. The things-in-themselves are alien to any conceptual apparatus or system of perception, whereas the represented can be more or less adequately grasped by a representation.
The driving force of this paragraph is the phrase "created in your mind", which you could read substantially or relationally. Substantially, insofar as a representation (item of conceptual reality) is part of your mind while perciving the cookie configurations, or relationally insofar as the perception of the configuration results in classifying the configuration as a given letter. NB that someone who had no concept of the letters E or F would be able to see the relative positions and numbers of cookies, and you were also able to bring about a change in the represented (cookie placement) in order to elicit an expected change in our aggregate representations (letter classification). The significance of this is that you've used a representation to elicit an expected change in the un-represented by using a concept - which would be very odd if the represented is somehow beyond relation to conceptualisation as a process.
"background of your mind" is also allegorical. You seem to be equating that with a degree of cognitive awareness of the label of the percept - being cognisant of the fact that if I see that configuration, I may assert "that configuration is E". Whereas the latter step of assertion is potentiated but not required by the classification. That matter since you would need to establish that concepts did not saturate both steps. As far as I know concepts do saturate both steps, and they do for Kant as well as contemporary accounts of perception.
The level of description that you applied to the cookie configurations is not the level of description you would apply to the single cookie - since the cookie configuration concept requires relations between distinct cookies, and there is one. You can take a different concept - say "marks on page", "distribution of pixels" - and describe the cookie in those terms. Those concepts do not have a hierarchical dependence, since both letter cookie configurations and single cookie configurations can be described in terms of the properties of marks on a page - when one judges markings on a page, one does not need to judge letters and vice versa.
One type of information is out there - the spatial properties of the page marks. Whatever goes into recognising the marks as E or as F, or indeed as a letter, is a relationship between the marks and the perceiver's learning. It need not be in the page or the perceiver's mind, it can be interpreted as an element of the relation between them.
This hasn't distinguished the fundamental reality from the lower levels of the conceptual hierarchy you stipulated - is fundamental reality at the bottom? If it's like the thing in itself, that fundamental level is unconceptualisable, so how could some concept be closer to it?
Quoting Carlo Roosen
One reason philosophers struggle with this is that it's incredibly hard to make an account of it, given all the stuff that's going on, the biases involved in introspection, and pinning down the meaning of concepts. To be frank, the imprecisions in your key terms and relations "created in your mind", "object", "hierarchy", "conceptual", "fundamental" are what's doing the work in appearing to solve the problem. Your account is evocative but its imprecisions leave fatal gaps that ensnare it in the problems you've sought to escape.
Which isn't a bad thing, you're just among the bad company of fellow travellers.
The 'thing-in-itself' is where he arrives at the concept of Noumenon as opposed to Phenomenon. We can only talk of Noumenon in a Negative sense. We can talk of Phenomenon in a Positive sense.
It is quite hard to get your head around the idea of noumenon being more than simply 'stuff we do not know' it is more or less 'stuff we cannot even refer to' - hence 'negative' only.
What is unknowable is unknowable.
Kant must have observed his own mind while looking at how he was perceiving the world. Just as I am tempting you to do with those cookies. Just a minute ago I did it myself again (with checker pieces, not cookies this time) to try the example of RussellA. It is really something you should do and then observe what happens.
Quoting fdrake
The difficulty only happens in the human mind. Paradox is a limitation of language, fundamental reality has no paradox. So be careful with adding more conceptsthan we can grasp.
I'm responding to the relations of concepts in your post by analysing them, yes. Is this a problem?
(That is not true, I read abstracts ;))
Alright. What are you struggling to understand in my post, and I'll do my best to rephrase it.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
Like , I also noticed that the phenomenon/noumenon or phenomenon/thing in itself distinction is misused in your post. If you're using the more common distinction between a representation (like a painting of a duck) and represented (like a duck), your post makes more sense on those terms.
What I am referring to, and that is what I believe Kant is referring to as well, is that when we look at a duck and call it a "duck", we have never captured its reality. As the example with the cookies show, the letter E is only a way for the mind to point to a pattern it recognises. The same with the duck, although it is more difficult to capture the moment that the mind makes the translation. It is really something you have to try out, not something you can invent while writing. A field experiment, so to speak.
Ducks, in the sense of independently existing objects, aren't even "available" (scare quote) for us to call them "duck" though. in Kant though! What counts as a duck is a judgement of our perception. That's a very imprecise and inaccurate way of putting it, it's just supposed to connote that there's no "duck in itself" in Kant.
Whereas our percept of a duck can be thought of as a representation of the duck-in-itself (the duck), we might even see how long its wings are.
Alright. Which do you mean? Do you mean that
Quoting fdrake
reflects the dichotomy between fundamental reality and conceptual reality, or that
Quoting fdrake
reflects it?
Roughly - because the first entails that the judgement only applies to perceptions, whereas the second entails that judgement also applies to the things in themselves.
Sort of. Expecting to understand the thing in itself is like expecting to be able to bake a unicycle. Personally I don't enjoy Kant's phenomenon/noumenon/thing-in-itself distinction that much, but I don't want to see it misrepresented.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
The same as which though? The Kant one or the more generic representation vocabulary?
Quoting Carlo Roosen
That's another ambiguity though. The things in themselves do indeed exist independently of conception and judgement, and it's precisely that independence which renders them unintelligible. So your fundamental reality's existence concept is kind of the same as the conceptual reality one - which means the entities in both are of the same type, no?
It might help. Otherwise this could go on for several pages where everyone talks past each other.
Again, I think you've missed the point. Here you are conceptualizing "fundamental reality," but you're not allowed to do that. You can't even really think about it, and yet here you are thinking about it. So what you're thinking about isn't fundamental reality. It's not cookies or patterns or anything. All you can talk about is how it is impossible to talk about it. There is nothing else to say.
Are you familiar with the "Tao Te Ching" written by Lao Tzu more than two thousand years ago. The first lines of the first verse is "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name." The Tao represents the unformed, undifferentiated, unconceptualized, inchoate ground of being - what was there before there was anything to think about it. Lao Tzu calls the Tao "non-being," and the multiplicity of things we perceive here in the world as "being." The implication is that the Tao doesn't exist, which makes sense to me. The idea that there is no objective reality is not a radical one in philosophy.
Muricans.
I don't think this is true. The noumena/phenomena distinction is not based on empirical observation, it's metaphysics. It's not true, it's interesting and useful. Here's a link to an article you might be interested in - "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology" by Konrad Lorenz.
https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz
After reading it, I have rethought the way I look at this issue.
If this is a paradox, I don't think it is a very complicated one. We don't know there are things-in-themselves. It's not unreasonable to say that they don't exist, i.e. they are not things at all. Of course, it's impossible to talk about them yet here we are talking about them. You can call that a paradox, but I think of it as a joke that we're all in on.
I don't think that is true. Fundamental reality is a concept to point to the fact that the real nature of things cannot be understood conceptually. We have words for all kind of things that we do not know, I mentioned them earlier "surprize", "future", "unknown" or "black swan", (the latter referring not to a rare animal but a special concept for an unlikely event). So it is perfectly fine to talk about fundamental reality.
And yes, I have the Tao Te Ching, and here applies the same, more or less. We cannot speak about it and yet we do.
I always think of it as a joke. We all recognize it's impossible, but then do it anyway.
But it's not unknown, it's unknowable.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
No.
Also "unknowable" is still a word. And "you cannot say anything about fundamental reality" is a contradiction in itself.
I fully agree with what is written there so I don't see the issue you have.
You've ended up understanding things with concepts which you've prior stipulated as being unable to understand with concepts. That is the rub. It's a contradiction, but it's a contradiction which results from your ideas rather than criticisms of them. Generally that means there's a problem with your ideas rather than the criticisms.
You can sustain an opposition by making certain moves, eg by putting the intelligible and the unintelligible in a dialectical relation, but you've not done that.
Because the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
As I noted, it's a joke. This is an excerpt from Ellen Marie Chen's translation of Verse 25 of the Tao Te Ching.
I wasn't using it to raise an issue, I just thought you might be interested.
Conceptual reality is in our minds. It is fragmented, it has a notion of time. It has ideas of things it can expect. It has language. And also, it is sequential, basically we are only aware of a few things simultanously. We can notice that there are strange things in this conceptual reality, for instance that they are organized in levels, from atoms to cookies to letters, but nothing inbetween. We have things like emergent complexity, for instance ants that walk around seemingly randomly yet form living bridges across two branches and we cannot explain how it works. And the brain. We invent or discover things that we didn't know before. So we can clearly see that there are things beyond our knowledge. Also, the world is larger than our skull, so it is obvious that the reality we perceive can never be the full reality, we have to compress it.
For that reason we invent a term, I call it fundamental reality. It is about the things we don't understand. It is perfectly fine to have a term for the collection of things we have no name for, that happens all the time. Just like "future". We can say a few things in general about fundamental reality, in the same way we can have predictions about the future. Still, both the future and fundamental reality are fundamentally unknowable. (that is the only thing these two terms have in common, it is not a full analogy)
One of the things we can say about fundamental reality is that if you know what you are looking for, you can find conformation that it is there. And those conformations regularly do align. So there must be *something* out there, we cannot say everything is just an imagination.
I don't see a contradiction here. If there is one, probably you are misinterpreting a few of my words or introducing concepts that are not mine. Also, I believe what I say is obvious and simple, you can easily verify what I am saying.
Is there an uncomplicated explanation to the puzzle of how we can talk about things we cannot talk about?
I agree with Kant's Realism, in that a world independent of the mind does exist, but there is no reason to believe that what we imagine to exist in this world, such as tables and chairs, do actually exist in this world in the same way that we imagine them to be.
Yes, I said it. He was responding to me. I don't know if I'm alone. Certainly not in general. Probably not on the forum. Perhaps in this discussion.
As Lao Tzu wrote, "I know not its name, I give its alias, Tao."
For what it's worth, I don't think you've been treated fairly in this discussion.
There has been a lot of condescension directed at you.
As Lao Tzu noted, an alias. And as I indicated, I see that as a trick we use to say what can't be said. If you forget the irony while you're saying it, you've gotten lost. And again, it's not about things we don't understand, it's about things that can't be understood, that perhaps are not things at all. It's not for things we have no name for, it's for things that can't be named.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
As I said previously, it is a defensible position that no fundamental reality exists. I started a discussion about it many years ago.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
It is not obvious to me. Actually, that's probably not true. I think I understand what you're saying, but it's different from my understanding of what Kant was saying.
That's the contradiction though.
There are two ways in which we could fail to understand something like fundamental reality, the first of which is the unknown which we could come to know, the second of which is the unknown which we could not come to know. The first unknown is like the future, like what will happen tomorrow. The second unknown is like... nothing clearly statable - it's the sound of one hand clapping.
The following two are aligned with the unknown which we could come to know.
At any given time of day, the next instant is not apprehended, and in that regard the next instant could be construed as fundamentally unknowable. Even though every particular instant could be known, just not now.
Contrast that to something commonplace which we interact with and judge. We know what it is and how it works, but only approximately. Our perceptions and judgements interface imperfectly with the nature of the thing, and it is full of hidden mysteries. That object, that register of reality, is fundamentally unknowable in the sense of being inexhaustible by representation. But not beyond representation's reach.
The last three are aligned with the unknown which we could not come to know.
Contrast that to something beyond the observable universe. We know that exists, but we can't ever observe it, so it's impossible to know about it with sensors and perceptions in the same way as we would the observable universe. That construes the non-observable universe as fundamentally unknowable in one sense of knowledge, but its properties can be inferred - grasped only rationally. This unknowability marks a practical exterior to one type representation, but not a theoretical impasse to all representation.
Contrast that again to the idea that no matter what you say, it will be about something we've perceived, judged, interpreted and so on. That's the noumenon in the negative sense that you were told about previously. It marks a fundamentally unknowable exterior without giving it any positive determination. In that regard "judgements" of such an entity are not contradictions in terms, since whenever they are articulated they are secretly determinations of the aggregate of our perceptions, judgements, interpretations and so on. That exterior is... unpredicable, but extant. Only its existence is entailed by the adequacy of any of our representations, but none of its content is.
Finally contrast that again to the uninterpreted reality that exists prior to all conceptions of it, a substantive which is unintelligible. Formless, unpredicable, but structured. The true alien nature of reality in which we're all hopelessly subsumed. That kind of fundamental reality is unknowable in virtue of the failure of all of our representations to grasp it, even as it effects our minds and bodies. It is the register of Lovecraftian horror. Of the cut between the soul and materiality, that which demarcates the concept of the mind from the body without demarcating the body from the mind. An analogue of it is something like radiation post Chernobyl, an incomprehensible reality that nevertheless saturates us and determines our lives - evinced through cancer and nonsensical death. It is the idea that we already live among the "things in themselves" and their unintelligible structures and causal whimsies.
An agglomeration of all these concepts is self contradictory. While the body - the content - of any "fundamental reality" is indeterminate in at least one sense, the concepts that vouchsafe that indeterminability can contradict each other and thus require separate accounts or contextualising factors.
Cookies.
The shapes, not the names.
The discussion has been around since at least Aristotle, a good 2,000 years ago.
As all our information about any world outside the mind arrives through our five senses, we can only know about an outside world through our senses, which are representations of the outside world.
Therefore, we only directly know representations of any outside world, and therefore only indirectly know about any outside world. This is my position as an Indirect Realist.
If we can only know something indirectly, then that something must be fundamentally unknowable. We can never directly talk about the thing-in-itself, although we can indirectly make inferences about the thing-in-itself.
From the The New World Encyclopaedia on Representation
I just gave it another name, "fundamental reality" instead of "a real, material, external world". T Clark doesn't seem to like this. I don't understand, both are descriptions of the same.
I believe my terms work better because they take away the unease of things not being real.
As an Indirect Realist, I believe that there is "a real, material, external world", aka "fundamental reality", and I know that I have "ideas", aka "conceptual reality".
"Fundamental reality" and "conceptual reality" are good names, but names are not descriptions.
But it should be recognized that as names, they don't include the aspect that the Indirect Realist only has a belief in a "fundamental reality" yet has knowledge of a "conceptual reality".
Of course we don't capture fundamental reality with the term "fundamental reality". That is never the case, it is the luxery of language. When I talk about a duck here, without quotes, still there is no duck. Thus we can have a word "unknowable" or "afterlife" and use it like: Some people believe that in the afterlife we will know the unknowable. No logical problems here.
Also, I haven't heard anybody comment on this statement of mine, that with a concept in our mind we can do all kinds of tests to confirm that concept in fundamental reality. I called it a one way system. It is what science does all day. So the concepts still *apply* to fundamental reality. Don't say this is a contradiction, I say nothing more than what you can perceive directly. You expect your keys where you left them, or your wife took them. You rely on fundamental reality every moment.
I am curious, am I now crossing a border that Indirect Realists don't like?
It's quite difficult to tell what your ideas' relationships are to ordinary philosophy positions.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
Every variety of realist and anti-realist would agree with that, is the thing.
The future is not one moment defined in time, but it moves with time progressing. So the future is as unknowable as fundamental reality. And just like the future is revealed bit by bit, without ever being known, so is fundamental reality.
This analogy breaks at some point ;)
Every contradiction finds its source in limitations of language. Reality does not contradict itself. So when some things contradict, search for a viewpoint where they don't. Just like your contradiction about future versus fundamental reality, it was caused by a different understanding of the term "future",
As an Indirect Realist, I believe that my conceptual reality has been caused by a fundamental reality, even though I believe that I can never know this fundamental reality.
In my own words:
that with a concept in our mind we can do all kinds of tests to confirm that concept in fundamental reality
Suppose people observe that the Sun appears in the morning in the east and disappears in the evening in the west.
Person A hypothesises that the Earth rotates around the Sun. This hypothesis supports their observations, and leads them to think that they understand fundamental reality.
Person B hypothesises that the sun travels across the sky in a flying chariot driven by fiery horses and ridden by Zeuss son, Apollo. This hypothesis supports their observations, and also leads them to think that they understand fundamental reality.
IE, the fact that an hypothesis may be justified by observations is no guarantee that the hypothesis describes fundamental reality.
So the concepts still *apply* to fundamental reality
My belief is there is only one fundamental reality, and therefore there is only one cause of our observations.
However, it does not logically follow that because a theory can explain a set of observations, the same theory of necessity also explains the ultimate cause of these observations.
For example, that I can observe a broken window tells me nothing about what caused the window to break.
Both Person A and B are able to predict that tomorrow the sun will rise in the morning in the east, but having a theory that allows them to make predictions about the future does not mean that the theory is describing fundamental reality. In fact, theories explain the immediate cause of observations, not the ultimate cause of such observations, not "fundamental reality".
IE, our concepts apply to our observations, from which we infer fundamental reality.
You rely on fundamental reality every moment.
Yes, on the one hand, without a fundamental reality there would be no observations, but on the other hand, there is no information within an observation as to the cause of such observation. For that, we have to infer the cause using reason, and if inferred, could be wrong.
IE, this is why we directly rely on theories and hypothesise, and only indirectly rely on fundamental reality.
There is also the reversed possibility that two people fully agree conceptually. If experiments can confirm these theory, even when the theory is wrong, it forms empirical evidence of the consistency of fundamental reality... I think...
:100: If fundamental reality wasn't inherently consistent, life couldn't exist.
Which means that life would exist, but it wouldn't.
If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with what? Life? If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with life life couldnt exist? Profound!
The speed of light is a physical constant, part of a fundamental reality, and has been found to be consistently 299,792,458 m/s.
If the speed of light, together with all the other physical constants, exhibited no consistency and continually changed, one day 350,000,000 m/s and the next day 250,000,000 m/s, it seems to me that life would not be possible.
I don't know the answer to your question. I don't know what fundamental reality is consistent with.
What do you think fundamental reality is consistent with?
You mean if there were no constants then no stability including life would be possible? If so I agree. That seems obvious. I think using the word consistency here clouds the issue. For me the word suggests one thing being in conformity with or non-contrary with or non-antithetical to something else and its use would thereby be better restricted to matters of logic.
Quoting RussellA
In accordance with what I say above I think the idea of consistency loses its meaning in that context, both because fundamental reality is presumably not something conceptual and because there is no second thing for it to be consistent with even if it were conceptual.
Though we must have the concept of a fundamental reality, otherwise we couldn't be talking about it.
Presumably, our concept of a fundamental reality, in order to have any value, must be consistent with our observations.
consistency, I think it is defined by me and others in this post as: consistent with our models. I called it a one-way system. This is what I mean by that: in most cases, if you test your models, the result that comes back from fundamental reality, most often agrees with those models. Most rocket launches are successful. In the cases this is not true, we assume our models need adjustment, not that reality has become unstable. So it is not a "hard" property, it is our general experience that fundamental reality is stable.
I believe the speed of light is also a concept. It involves time and distance, these are already very much determined by the human conceptual view of reality.
In physics, the deeper you go it the theoretic aspects, speed of light becomes an almost transcendantal topic and looses its hard meaning. Maybe seen that way it does no harm to call it fundamental reality.
In practice, I think it has little consequence if you call "all the particles in the universe" the fundamental reality. For the same reason, that is an almost transcedental way of looking at the universe.
Yes. The only thing I know for certain are my experiences of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. I happen to believe that these experiences have been caused by something external to my mind, something I call "the world".
Therefore, every idea I have about what exists in this "world" is an inference from my experiences.
So yes, any idea that I may have about the speed of light can never be any more than what I have inferred from my experiences, and being an inference may not only be of a completely different nature to the something in the world that caused my experience but may also be wrong.
Right of course we have a concept we call "fundamental reality". My point was that if there is such a thing as a fundamental reality it is not a concept.
I agree that if we are going to attempt to give an account of what fundamental reality might be that it should be consistent with our best science.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
Should we think of the data that comes from our testing as showing us something about fundamental reality or reality as we experience and understand it? The problem is that the term 'fundamental reality' is not definitve.
I thought about it a bit more, and realized that "fundamental reality" and "future", in fact, are exactly the same thing! Talking about contradiction, "fundamental reality" is in the space/state dimension, and "future" in the time dimension. And I claim they are the same thing! Now we can have a discussion...
The contradiction is not unexpected. It is the point that our conceptual thinking is not capable of capturing the truth. It is the point where we have to say: thoughts no longer apply here. It is like the symbol of infinity in (highschool) Mathematics, it is not allowed to enter this in a formula, it wil lead to contradictions. If you want to see an example, I can show you. [edit, I just read you are a math tutor so this isn't needed. Also, division by zero is a better example, and I started a little discussion in the Lounge]
So, "fundamental reality" and "future" are exactly the same thing? For example, a spaceship lands in your backyard. Before it happened, it was both "in the future" and in "fundamental reality". Two abstract terms that only mean that we can expect a stream of surprises from that corner.
After the spaceship has landed, we can try to understand it. Aha, it was a toy rocket from our neigbor. Or, indeed, they were aliens coming to say hello. It becomes conceptual reality as well as history.
This is how fundamental reality / future gets to us, as a series of surprises, discoveries, inventions, accidents etc. The current moment is like a border between that and the conceptual reality / history. Even when we see something but don't know what it is, the moment we actually DO realize what it is, is when this piece of knowledge crosses the border.
I hope you can find something to relate to this explanation! I know, it is not a standard view, and you don't have to agree. But it is my personal view and I like to hear your response.