Matter is not what we experience . . .
Matter is not what we experience. Rather, matter is our explanation of what we experience.
We experience only sensations: physical sensations, emotional sensations, and mental sensations.
Other explanations of experience include Descartes' Evil Demon, hard solipsism, brain in a vat, etc.
Matter is a very good explanation of what we experience.
Newtonian Mechanics is a very good explanation of what we experience.
Newtonian Mechanics is not true. Perhaps, the matter explanation is also not true.
Thoughts?
We experience only sensations: physical sensations, emotional sensations, and mental sensations.
Other explanations of experience include Descartes' Evil Demon, hard solipsism, brain in a vat, etc.
Matter is a very good explanation of what we experience.
Newtonian Mechanics is a very good explanation of what we experience.
Newtonian Mechanics is not true. Perhaps, the matter explanation is also not true.
Thoughts?
Comments (44)
You presume what you might conclude. If 'matter' is not a something we encounter in experience, then it has been shuttled off into another ward.
No need to speak ill of it or praise it.
In grammar its called nominalization. Its also known as zombie nouns, because by adding the suffix and removing the active function from its verb-form you take the life out of the word. Like matter, yours are explanations as well, except theyre circular.
Maybe the senses don't exist, as you understand them. Can you point to them? An ear is matter. So is a nose. Sight is miraculous in that you can *SEE* something you aren't touching. The eyes are shamans. The senses are labels
Matter is both what we experience, and the explanation of our experiences.
When we see a tree, we experience visual sensations. These visual sensations are experiences of a tree.
The word "experience" can refer to the phenomenology, or to the cause of the phenomenology. When I go to a concert, I experience sounds, and by doing so I experience the instruments, and the players. When I visit Prague I experience a beautiful city, and I experience all the sights sounds and smells this city induces in me.
It's just that one, the phenomenology, is an "experience of" the other, the object.
I think it's more true that we experience an Other than that in that moment we experience subjective sensation, Husserl be damned. Empiricism trades clarity for cozy tingles not useful for knowledge, Locke be damned
In a mirage, we experience visual sensations of water but we do NOT experience water.
The point of the original post is we can be 100% certain of the sensations we experience but we can not be 100% certain of the cause of the sensations.
Have you tried analytic philosophy? A good deal of it is about overcoming this very notion which means very very little in the grand scheme of things. Fact is you cannot be 100% certain wtf is in your mind is your own either...
To assume so, just means you're a solipsist as per Wittgenstein's account of solipsism.
Cause thoughts come when they want and not when you wish they do. Which means something can be feeding you everything including fake experiences.
More or less, the mind isn't the end all be all. "I can't be certain this tree is a tree." Okay well, when you figure it out let me know mate.
The whole matrix solipsism thing is just like... "were really still discussing this ?" / simulation theory
Such a boring scifi gimmick imo.
And Newtonian mechanics are true, btw. His work isn't something you just get to toss aside cause you're a solipsist. You're quite bound by the mechanics he points out. Try going against them, you may not find yourself living very long...
No concept, word, is what it refers to. When we say "matter" it's not an explanation, it's just a label, a finger pointing.
It might be the case, but this is not what you posted in your op. Your original claim was that we experience sensations, not matter.
We can experience things without being 100% certain of them. I experience you via this interaction, but I am not 100% certain of your existence, as you might be a LLM. I can doubt you in a way that I could not if we were speaking face to face. But that does not mean I am not experiencing you and your communication (assuming you are real).
We do not directly experience matter. Matter might be the cause of our sensations, but we don't know that it is. We know we experience sensations. Matter is one explanation for the cause of those sensations. Other explanations of what we experience include Descartes' Evil Demon, Brain in a Vat (the thought underlying the movie The Matrix), the Simulation Hypothesis, and Hard Solipsism. Didn't Kant make the point that we experience phenomena but cannot know the noumena, the cause of the phenomena?
As an analogy, we are like security guards watching monitors. We see and hear what we believe is occurring on, say, a loading dock. But we are not allowed to leave the monitoring room, so we have no way of verifying the sights and sounds are coming from an actual, real, existing loading dock. Perhaps, a computer is generating sights and sounds we perceive, but no actual loading dock exists. Perhaps, the loading dock once existed and the sights and sounds were recording and are now being replayed. We cannot leave our monitoring room so we can never directly experience the loading dock. We experience only phenomena (the sights and sounds of the loading dock) but we cannot experience noumena (the apparent loading dock itself.)
This video makes a similar point: .https://youtu.be/1mW3nrQEJ8A
But this I agree with. Your original claim was that we don't experience matter at all.
Your argument is with the direct realists, not with me. But, that one was long, exhausting, and done with.
Sensations may arise when you see a cat, for instance, but what you see and sense and thus experience is the cat, not sensations. To say that we only experience sensations is plainly false. The cat is not a sensation.
There are different levels of experience. When you think about X, which is not present in front of you, X is just a mental image or concept. You can imagine about X, think about X, and reason about X.
If X is a physical object located in space and time, then you can actually go to X, and see, touch and feel X with your own bodily sensation. If X is something that you have never seen before, and it is the first time of your encounter with X, then X may appear as matter to you, in which case you could measure the size and even weigh on the scale. In this case, all you get is just the measurement of the size and weight of X.
Let's say X is a familiar object, such as tree, cup or a person. You know X by all the available properties given to you via your bodily sensation i.e sight which gives the shape, size, and the name i.e. tree, cup, a person etc. Not only you can perceive them in vivid sensation, but also you can interact with them. You can climb up the tree, make coffee and pour into the cup, or say Hi to the person etc etc. You experience them in reality with vividness and forcefulness.
Hence, it doesn't quite make sense, just to say you cannot experience matter. You must also think about what level and type of experience or perception you are having with the matter or object. All the debates on idealism and realism are meaningless in that sense, because they never think about the type of perception or experience which are also the critical factor in the idea of existence and sensation.
This is why we do scientific experiments. We poke and prod the thing and see how it responds. But this raises the following question. If it is true that "we are not allowed to leave the monitoring room", then what gives us the capacity to poke and prod the thing?
So I think that premise, that we are not allowed to leave the monitoring room is not true. We do interact with that world which is explained by "matter". And from our interactions we produce the explanations. But this raises a number of further questions, like how do we judge our explanations, and what inclined you to separate yourself from what you experience, in the first place. Why do you believe that your self is something more than your experience, so that the explanation is proper to your self, and what you experience is something other? What happens if the explanation itself is part of the experience?
Basically you're noting a difference between knowledge and truth. Truth is what is. Knowledge is what we can logically ascertain that does is not contradicted by the truth.
If matter is not what the mind directly experiences then it is something else, let's call it X. X has to exist objectively though otherwise the experiencing is not possible. X however has properties that cause our experiences to have features, so-called Qualia.
Whats interesting about posts like these is the psychology that motivates it.
Certainty somehow is important, and saying this string of letters or this particular group of sounds we make sensations, consciousness, being, reality, is the one thing we can be sure of indicates that value.
Who cares about certainty in the first place? Or whats true or real or fact? Maybe all of that is nonsense to begin with (which is what I think) and were just swimming aimlessly downstream from Descartes and Platos conceptions of the world.
Why did Descartes care about finding something certain in the first place? Why do you?
Sensations are no more certain than anything else. Sometimes just acknowledging that life is kind of groundless is good for you.
So, in addition to the senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, we have other senses?
In particular, we have a special cat-sensing sense?
And when we see an apple, we use our special apple-sensing sense?
What we call a cat is a bundle of sensations.
A material cat may exist which is causes us to experience the bundle of sensations which we call a cat.
Or maybe we're a brain in a vat (as in The Matrix movie). Or we're hallucinating. etc.
Who cares about certainty in the first place? Or whats true or real or fact?
Scientists care. The investigated the funny phenomena of rubbing fur on amber for centuries, which led them to eventually understand electricity, which led to the screen you are reading this on.
Quoting MoK
Exactly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a good point which shows the inadequacy of monitoring room analogy. See first response above about cat-sensing sense. My senses tell me I'm picking up a cat, petting it, etc. but everything I experience still all sensation, is it not? Cannot someone who is a brain in a vat or hallucinating, have the sensor experience of doing experiments and experiencing the results?
My spidey sense is tingling, something evil is underway here.
Your senses don't tell you "I'm picking up a cat", that is a form of interpretation, done by your mind or your brain, something other than the sense organs.
The "brain in a vat", or other explanations appear like alternative explanations, but they all involve problems. For instance, if it's a brain in a vat, where do the senses fit in? They are not part of the brain, and not part of the thing sensed, how do they fit into the brain in a vat scenario? There is a type of interaction problem which occurs if we try to make the brain the sole source of the sensations. In other words, we still have to account for how sensations are caused to appear to that brain. If the brain was creating its own sensations, wouldn't it know that it was doing this? Self deception appears impossible from this perspective, because there is only a brain and nothing else, therefore an evil demon is require. But how does the evil demon get the sensations into the brain without any senses?
So the issue I pointed to, is that there is an "interaction" between the person (self, mind, consciousness, or whatever), and the proposed separate world. Placing "the cause" as completely on one side or the other, solely outside the self, or solely inside the self, are both, each in its own way, deficient ways of looking at things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Unfettered skepticism that leads to questioning how, or even if, we experience an external world would create all sorts of problems for the brain in a vat idea. Brains and vats are material objects that are experienced, so if you're questioning the reality of your experience then that would include the ontological existence of brains and vats. It makes no sense to question the existence of the material world using a thought experiment involving material objects. By invoking the idea of the existence of the material objects of brains and vats, you're automatically implying that material objects exist and we can perceive them as they are - as brains and vats.
The cat exists independent of your bundle of sensations. If you'd only experience sensations, then you'd never experience anything else. Yet you know of a cat, and publish the word, neither being bundles of your sensations. When I feed my cat, I feed the cat, not a bundle of sensations.
We experience phenomena.
We cannot know the noumena.
But since we experience cause -- causation is one of the Categories which organize experience -- phenomena are governed by causality.
We're tempted to say that the noumena causes phenomena because that makes sense of the noumena, but it's only a temptation. Once we have causality we are no longer talking about the noumena.
That's true, but I think the issue of skepticism is better represented as questioning whether things are as they seem to be. The conception of "matter" involves specific spatiotemporal references in relation to our perceptions. The "brain in a vat" scenario is just an example of how reality could be radically different from the way that we perceive it. So the example serves its purpose regardless of whether we conceive the "brain in a vat" as material, it still demonstrates that this entire conception of "material world", along with the brain in a vat aspect, could be completely wrong.
Yes, objective reality is an inference. So it really devolves into a question of certainty.
My question would be whether cogito ergo sum represents (subjective) certainty of our own objective existence. In which case matter might get to go along for the ride.
It only seems to question whether we can trust our senses in a material world of brains in vats. The thought experiment still implies that brains requires sensory input from outside of itself. The brain in a vat needs to receive input through its sensory interfaces and would still be connect to the outside world in some way.
I don't believe that our senses lie. They provide information about the world and it is our interpretation of what the senses are telling us that is either accurate or not.
If we were brains in vats, what would be the purpose of us experiencing illusions, hallucinations or dreams? What would be the purpose of the experiment, or the reason why our brain is in a vat? Who put the brain in a vat - some entities that do see the world as it is? How would they know that they are not brains in vats? In the same way the "this is a simulation" thought experiment creates an infinite regress of how the simulators don't know they are in a simulation, etc., how do the mad scientists that put our brains in vats know that they are not themselves brains in vats? Why would the mad scientists allow us to even conceive that we might be brains in vats if the point was to fool us?
So I don't see how the thought experiment is useful. It seems simpler to just say that we interpret our sensory input incorrectly when we make knee-jerk assumptions about what it is we are experiencing, but when we use both observation and reason over time (scientific method) we are able to get at the world with more accuracy. I think that many of these discussions regarding how we know the world do not take this into account. It seems to take examples where we only had one observation to go by - like seeing a mirage for the first time - and then running with that without taking into account that we eventually realize what a mirage is by making more observations over time and applying reason (puddles of water do not move further away when we move toward them).
Well, if you want to get fussy, a brain itself is a material thing, so by that premise alone, it doesn't make sense to think of a brain in a nonmaterial world, whether or not it is in a vat.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think it's obvious from what science has revealed, that our senses grossly mislead us concerning the nature of reality. I wouldn't say that senses lie though.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see that this sort of questioning is at all useful. It's like asking if God created the world, who created God. How is this type of question useful? Unless we identify and understand God, we have no way of knowing what created God. Likewise, until we locate the "mad scientists", and interrogate them, we have no way of knowing what their intentions were. So how can a question like this be useful?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think the thought experiment demonstrates that the scientific method may be incapable of giving us an accurate understanding. Since it can only validate through sense observation, it cannot validate any part of reality which is inherently unobservable.
True. But Descartes's Evil Demon does not require an external material world.
Right, but the world is not experienced by way of sense-data, it is experienced directly. Therefore, there can be no demon in between the world and our experiences.
The demon-problem is entirely artificial, it arises from dualism and the false assumption that experience is indirect (e.g. by way of sense-data, mental images, phenomena etc.)
Then the very foundation of science is called into question as science relies on observations. Science has pulled the rug out from under itself and doesn't have any ground to stand on.
The fact is that science has not shown that our senses mislead us. It is our interpretations that mislead us. In providing a more accurate explanation of mirages and "bent" straws in a glass of water given the nature of light, we find that mirages and bent straws are exactly what we would expect to see. Our senses aren't lying. Light is bent when it travels through different mediums and is why we experience these things the way we do. It wasn't our senses that were lying, it was our interpretation of our experience without the understanding of how light behaves, and it is light we see, not "material" objects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This was my point. The brain in a vat thought experiment is nonsensical because it leads to an infinite regress.
Is there any type of perception, either human or not (animals, mad scientists, advanced life forms that create simulations, etc.) that gets at the world directly? If not, then mad scientists putting brains in vats and advanced aliens creating simulations, and gods would have the same philosophical problem.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, all this does is turn the tables on your claims that brains are material objects when this is based on observations. It seems to me that the answers lie somewhere between extreme skepticism and extreme (naïve) realism, in that we can trust what our senses tell us given an accurate interpretation, which takes more than one observation and reason integrating these multiple observations into a consistent explanation.
Yes, I think that is the endeavour of skepticism, to call into question the very foundation of science. And, the skeptic will reveal that science does pull the rug out from under itself. It always proceeds from some fundamental assumptions, and progresses as far as it can go based on those assumptions. At this time problems are revealed, and skepticism is required to demonstrate how these problems show how science has pulled the rug out from under itself. This is what is revealed by Kuhn's conception of paradigm shift. The paradigm shift is an essential feature of science, and it is exemplative of knowledge itself. Knowledge proceeds according to a designed method (science in this case), and progresses to the point where it reveals that the method has exhausted itself, and must be replaced.
Quoting Harry Hindu
As I said, our senses don't lie to us, they mislead us. Lying implies that it is done intentionally, the senses do not intentionally mislead us. It's simply the case that the sense organs are product of evolution, and so they are organized toward specific forms of utility. Human beings have now developed a mind which is inclined toward knowledge and truth, but the senses evolved before this inclination of human beings. So the utility of the senses is not knowledge and truth. That is why they mislead us.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I would say introspection does this. But it is not really a type of perception.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't think so. The senses were not designed to provide us with truth, so why should we think that they do.
and
How do we experience what we experience?
Are different questions.
Hi,
When we see a glass bottle in front of us, the bottle is related to us. However we cannot eliminate the bottle from the relation, because the bottle participates as an "other" different from the perception that cannot be eliminated as an "other". It is not an explanation, it is an ontological state of encounter between perception and its other. And for there to be a relationship there must be compatibility. So, if we call the bottle "matter" we must say that matter has something of perceivable and perception has something of material (and vice versa).
But "matter" as an "other" distinct from perception cannot be eliminated from the relation.
Even the self-relation presupposes the otherness that is me or my perception itself when it is taken as an objects.
When I say "I" it is at least two who speak (I and I as other). And this means that "the other" encompasses the "matter", but obviously this "other" is not reduced to "matter".
I was responding to your contradictory claim, where you initially make a claim about what science has revealed as evidence for what you are saying: Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
and then go on to question science:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, IS the brain itself a material thing, or is science that reveals the nature of material things misleading us?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The distinction between lying and misleading does not take away from the main point I was making:
Seeing a bent straw in a glass of water is exactly what you would expect to see given the nature of light and that we see light, not objects. Our senses are not misleading us. Our interpretations of what our senses are telling us is misleading us.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You get at the external world by inspecting yourself?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I understand that many of us come to this forum to discuss philosophy to escape real life for a time, but in doing so we forget about all the trivial things we do throughout our lives that would easily contradict some of the assertions we make here on this forum. So think about all the trivial things that you do through your life that you have no issues with succeeding. You make it to work each day. You can pour a glass of water without spilling it. You are able to use you mobile phone and other complex technology without issues. You can read other people's words and get at their meaning and have a meaningful conversation. We have even split the atom and landed on the moon. All these things and many, many more examples show that we get around just fine. If we use our ideas to accomplish some task successfully, then it can be safely said that the way we perceived the world at that time was accurate (I'm not really sure the term, "true" is useful here).
Well, according to materialism, everything is made of matter. Thus, to see rabbits, trees, ants, flowers, etc. [I]is[/I] to see matter. "What else could you be observing?" the materialist might respond.
To say "something is not true because I can imagine some radically skeptical scenario where it is false" is not a particularly compelling counter example. Likewise, to presuppose that matter is [I]merely[/I] an explanatory framework seems to essentially beg the question vis-a-vis a realist interpretation of materialism. I imagine they would prefer to say that knowledge of matter is rather abstracted from material things, and that matter is useful in explanations precisely because it exists, and that our knowledge of it comes through the senses.
At any rate, the claim that we do not experience things because we only experience sensations seems to me a bit like claiming that man cannot write because he can only move his fingers around, or that man cannot drive a car but can only push pedals and turn steering wheels. The idea that we "do not experience the world because we only experience experiences, sensations, concepts, etc.," seems to suggest something of the Cartesian theater. But the materialist rejects the Cartesian humonculus on the grounds that it presupposes dualism.
No wonder I didn't understand. There was no contradictory claim.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Both.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I have no idea how your example is supposed to demonstrate the point you claim.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, it's the only true way, due to the fact that the senses are misleading.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Again, I don't see how your conclusion follows from your premise. Premise: I can be successful at some task. Conclusion: therefore the way I perceived the world at that time was accurate. Do you see the problem? I set a task for myself, and I make the judgement myself, that I was successful at that task. Then I conclude that because I was successful, the way I perceived the world was accurate.
Unless the task was exclusively designed to be, (and realistically representative in that design), an accurate representation of the world, the conclusion is invalid. If that conclusion was valid, I could define "accurate perception of the world" in any way I wanted, so long as I could complete the designated task which represents this. Obviously, the task represents a very small aspect of the world, and being successful at that task doesn't indicate that my perception of "the world is accurate". Success at self-designated tasks really just demonstrates that I have some degree of understanding of my capabilities, not that I accurately perceive the world. Success at a task doesn't even prove that I know what I am doing. Socrates demonstrated this principle thousands of years ago, and the principle hasn't changed.
Matter isn't an explanation; it's an explanatory hypothesis that a particular kind of thing exists.The hypothesis explains all those sensations.
Newtonian mechanics is a hypothesis as well, but in terms of ontology - it just proposes that a law of nature exists. It's actually a pretty good hypothesis, even if it isn't entirely true..
It's logically possible that the "matter hypothesis" is false, but why would we abandon it - unless we had a superior hypothesis? We only abandoned Newtonian mechanics when a better hypothesis came along; even then, it wasn't a complete abandonment. It still works perfectly fine for most applications.
I suppose we could say that ~solipsism is also a hypothesis (albeit an intrinsic one), but there's no reason to abandon it since it hasn't been falsified.
In yor mid, what is the "matter hypothesis"?
Matter can be explanation. We say "What's the matter with you?" It is asking for an explanation on what you are up to, or what is wrong with you.