Who- why- where are we ?

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Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Osgart wrote:
what if reality is there regardless of your senses?. and what if our senses are telling us the truth?
If there is reality which is not dependent on minds we cannot know it but we can have faith that it exists.
senses themselves change with understanding and increasing awareness.
True

And senses could be 70% accurate.
Could be.
And they are trustworthy enough to function everyday. so there must be truth to the reality of them.
But often they aren't trustworthy enough which is why for instance people who are drunk, drugged, habitually uncaring, half asleep,or partially sighted are not allowed to drive.
experience is real. prove its not.
Okay. Dreams really occur but the contents of dreams are not real. Same for hallucinations which are real but the contents of hallucinations aren't real. You said yourself, and I agreed, that senses themselves change with understanding and increasing awareness.
reality also has much that are senses are just blind too, but they don't lie.
Senses don't lie is not a very good metaphor. Senses are unreliable I'd say. We agreed about 70% reliable as a rule of thumb.
maybe we are alive in a vast dark abyss with inanimate grains of matter that are brute and indifferent.

there is actually there. a real location.
I agree that there is external physical material reality which doesn't depend upon our minds to exist. I.e. I agree there exists mind-independent reality. Because we cannot know anything without our minds we cannot know what this independent reality is like.
True, scientists try very hard to be objective, however scientists presume that mind-independent reality does exist and it's the nature of mind-independent reality which they set out to discover.
Last edited by Belinda on Mon May 01, 2017 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: It's not a matter of whether "I meant it analytically" or not. The statements are synthetic, they convey facts of the world (that could be either true or false). Remember, all we wanted was to test your claim that we couldn't build a logical statement starting with the premise of "not knowing something". It has been tested and your claim is simply wrong.
If their truth or falsity is determined by 'facts of the world', if they are 'synthetic', then you aren't doing logic.
I'm glad we can agree that Quine's essay is not discussing the nature of logic. I've read most of the essays in the book, which apply logic without using formal logic. It shows logic is not necessarily reduced to formal logic.
You do not understand what you have read because you don't understand what logic is; you confuse it with 'making an argument' or 'being rational' or discovering 'facts of the world'. Logic itself is entirely formal; you look at arguments and try to discover the purely formal relationships within them. Once you have described a formal relationship the application of that system of logic is (relatively) simple, it is purely mechanical; it is like doing a sum.

What philosophers like Quine are doing is looking at 'semantics' or 'syntax'. That is, they are looking at the relationship of the sort of reasoning we do when we do science, or say something is 'analytic' or 'synthetic' or represents 'knowledge'. If we could pin those things down, then we could put them into a logical system and 'do logic' with them, but it turns out to be difficult, perhaps impossible.
But you recognize only mental states, appearances of things.


I am not going to keep engaging with this repeated misrepresentation of what I have said. I think I know why you keep claiming it, but it is simply a misunderstanding of how language works; see paragraph after next, below.
No, that's all yours. You're the one claiming that there's no way to know about things in themselves (which include brains and sense organs). So, when you go back to claim that you recognize your brain and sense organs, you are suddenly having that "special insight into the noumenal ".
Again, you want to tell me what I am saying.

I see a rock, I see a brain, I see a nose. In each case, the process is the same; light reflected by the object impacts specialized cells in my body which sends an impulse along a nerve etc. then my brain converts that impulse to an experience. All I get, in each case, is the experience. I can theorise about the experience, about its origins, I can note how one experience relates to another - but I can only experience the experience.
If your mind creates a simulation that pretends for you to have a body, and you already made up your mind that your body does not exist, then you are obliged to reach the conclusion that your body is an illusion. And so all things. There's no workaround to it.
I experience my body - 'my body' is the name I give for that experience. I say of my body 'it exists' meaning 'it can be experienced'. If I think 'my leg' is not an 'illusion' it is because I can touch it, I can see it, I can make it interact with other things I can see and touch...all experiences. There is no extra test of 'realness' that I can apply that wouldn't also be an experience.

So why isn't being able to experience things sufficient to qualify them as 'real'? What else have we got apart from experience?

I get that this isn't enough for you; that there must also be this extra test to reveal the really-real, the reality behind experience. But there is no extra test available. Experience is all we have got and all we can ever have, so (if you insist on saying) experience is 'illusion' then yes; everything would be 'illusion'. But what you don't understand (and what leads you to claim that I think everything is only illusion, appearance etc.) is that if 'everything is illusion' then the word 'illusion' in the sense you understand it becomes meaningless!

(But that is you, not me. For me, 'illusion' describes a misinterpretation of an experience. I see a patch of blue in the desert, I take it to be a lake, but it turns out to be a mirage. But I did see the patch of blue - the experience was real.)
I don't really know what to say: when you claim that "sense perception is our guide to the noumenal, noumena and phenomena are always 'touching'..." you are advocating for everything you have opposed in this thread". Your ability to contradict yourself is staggering.


You said those things. I am quoting you. I am not contradicting myself, I first quote what you say, then (if you read on) I explain why I disagree with you.
Oh, really? So, having all our sense perceptions, all our lights on, objects have leapt into noumenal existence?
If our sense perceptions of an object = the noumenal object, then an absence of sense perceptions = no noumenal object. If our sense perceptions come into being (the light is switched on) then the noumenal object must also come into being.

Just to be clear here; that is your point of view. You think sense perceptions reveal the noumenal; I'm pointing out the consequences.
You're again twisting the sense of the statement. I did not say "we know the rock was there before because we had data of perception", which would look the same as "we know the rock was there before because we perceived the rock" to fit your argument. I said we infer, we arrive to the conclusion of the rock necessarily being there before we arrived.
What you actually wrote last time was 'We infer from the whole data of perception'.

But OK, so our idea that rocks persist over time has nothing to do with perception. In that case, what do we infer it from?
Your argument has another problem: you say that we devise theories that fit our perception, but then you would have to explain why, when not perceiving something we have perceived before, we don't devise theories that fit our current perception of the object being absent, in other words, we would have to switch automatically to the the theory of the object not existing. I see my house: I claim it exists; I go to my office: I must claim my house exists no more.
But you also have the perception that after work you find the house is always where you left it that morning. So, the perceptions are contradictory; when you go to work the house can no longer be seen, but your other perceptions suggest that even though it can't be seen it still persists. You will want to create a theoretical picture of the world to account for both.

Many theories are possible,(brain in a vat' etc.) that could account for all our perception. These are metaphysical; we cannot know which one is true. However, we are only interested in whether they work; in particular are they useful as a way of predicting future experience. So, as long as when you come back from work you find your house is there, the theory it exists independently from perception will do. But if occasionally the house is not where you left it, then you can try to find an explanation within your general theory (somebody must be giving me drugs) or you might have to tweak the general theory. And that is what we do.
Me: So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'.
No. Didn't I mention the specific properties of the grass leaves? And surely we can say a lot of things of those properties in combination with the other conditions that surround the grass (light, molecules in the air, wind, gravity, season, etc.), all of which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes.
But what are these 'specific properties'? Nothing is specific to the grass leaves; everything we can think of, to say about the grass leaves, turns out to be about other things. If you subtract all the non-grass aspects of grass - there is nothing left!

It isn't that the properties are giving the grass something, it is rather that the grass, and the properties of grass, are one and the same thing. 'Grass' means (amongst other things) 'that stuff that looks green'. It makes no sense to ask 'but what colour is grass really?' or 'what colour is grass in itself?'
Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Londoner wrote:
It isn't that the properties are giving the grass something, it is rather that the grass, and the properties of grass, are one and the same thing. 'Grass' means (amongst other things) 'that stuff that looks green'. It makes no sense to ask 'but what colour is grass really?' or 'what colour is grass in itself?'
NB I am not disagreeing with Londoner I agree with Londoner above as elsewhere.

When some people insist that something exists that is independent of human perceptions, do they mean that the sum total of all perceptions of every perceiving mind (all species) is what exists; or do they mean that there is mental being which exists in addition to or extra to the sum total of every perceiving mind?

The online Catholic Encycopedia or whatever it's called is quite good on ontological questions. I don't quite know how to condense my question so as to find an encyclopedia's answer.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:Remember, all we wanted was to test your claim that we couldn't build a logical statement starting with the premise of "not knowing something". It has been tested and your claim is simply wrong.
If their truth or falsity is determined by 'facts of the world', if they are 'synthetic', then you aren't doing logic.
Another display of your modus operandi: first you were concerned about the form. Now that it was shown that the form could be achieved, you shifted to being concerned about the content. When we go back to the content, you will shift to form again.
Londoner wrote:You do not understand what you have read because you don't understand what logic is; you confuse it with 'making an argument' or 'being rational' or discovering 'facts of the world'. Logic itself is entirely formal; you look at arguments and try to discover the purely formal relationships within them. Once you have described a formal relationship the application of that system of logic is (relatively) simple, it is purely mechanical; it is like doing a sum.

So, once we have a description of what logic is according to Londoner, let's see if it fits Londoner's previous arguments. Your claim was:

"There are no logical consequences to saying you can't know something. You only start doing logic once you have made an assumption that something is either true (or false)."

As we can see, you are denying the possibility of doing logic with a proposition because of the intrinsic semantic value of such proposition: one must either assert that it is the case or that it is not the case. That fails to show your commitment to "look at arguments and try to discover the purely formal relationships within them...". You shouldn't care whether the propositions were synthetic or analytic, just the formal relations between them, but now you suddenly start to care.

Nevertheless, I showed you how "not knowing something" could be placed in a proposition (either true or false) using the formula "it is the case" or "it is not the case", and translated to symbols of formal logic. That is more than enough to prove my point that there can be logical consequences to not knowing something. All the rest are detours you make to avoid that simple conclusion.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:But you recognize only mental states, appearances of things.


I am not going to keep engaging with this repeated misrepresentation of what I have said...

...I see a rock, I see a brain, I see a nose. In each case, the process is the same; light reflected by the object impacts specialized cells in my body which sends an impulse along a nerve etc. then my brain converts that impulse to an experience. All I get, in each case, is the experience. I can theorise about the experience, about its origins, I can note how one experience relates to another - but I can only experience the experience.

I don't need to say it, I don't need to interpret your words, they are straightforward: you have theorized that light reflected by an object impacted specialized cells in your body which sent an impulse along a nerve, etc., then your brain converted that impulse to an experience. You don't know there's light, an object, specialized cells, your body, nerves, brain, etc., they are all theories, all you know is the sensation. They can be, but you are not sure, you can only be sure of your mental states, the appearances of things. See? It's no misrepresentation,
Londoner wrote:I experience my body - 'my body' is the name I give for that experience. I say of my body 'it exists' meaning 'it can be experienced'. If I think 'my leg' is not an 'illusion' it is because I can touch it, I can see it, I can make it interact with other things I can see and touch...all experiences. There is no extra test of 'realness' that I can apply that wouldn't also be an experience.

...I get that this isn't enough for you; that there must also be this extra test to reveal the really-real, the reality behind experience. But there is no extra test available.


You call body to the appearance of a body, seeing to the appearance of seeing, touching to the appearance of touching, and so on. And then you say we make theories of them and can't go beyond that. I say we do, we can take all those experiences and theories, find their relationships and conclude that our experiences are determined by the "things in themselves", as things that necessarily exist independent of us, that must be in place in order for there to be experience.
Londoner wrote:For me, 'illusion' describes a misinterpretation of an experience. I see a patch of blue in the desert, I take it to be a lake, but it turns out to be a mirage. But I did see the patch of blue - the experience was real.


The problem is you seem to take out other possibilities of experience: getting closer to where the lake is supposed to be and finding out, with the same perceptual abilities, that there's no lake. And once a theory of why you saw the lake integrates with a whole set of experiences of viewing, touching the water, drinking it, etc., you can make inferences and state as a fact of the world, independent of you, that a lake does not exist in that location. That experience is real, too.
Londoner wrote:You said those things. I am quoting you. I am not contradicting myself, I first quote what you say, then (if you read on) I explain why I disagree with you.


In the statement where you made such remarks there are no quotation marks, nothing saying those words belonged to Conde Lucanor, nothing that gives a hint that you're quoting me and then replying. It's right in the middle of a paragraph that starts with "but suppose you don't..." and ends with "so, those noumenal...". Those are words of your making and you're denying the obvious: that you contradicted yourself.
Londoner wrote:If our sense perceptions of an object = the noumenal object, then an absence of sense perceptions = no noumenal object. If our sense perceptions come into being (the light is switched on) then the noumenal object must also come into being.

Just to be clear here; that is your point of view. You think sense perceptions reveal the noumenal; I'm pointing out the consequences.


No, that's not my point of view. I don't believe there's a mysterious sphere called "the noumenal", hidden behind a veil called "phenomena", which is "revealed" by our sense perceptions. I can accept the epistemological distinction between the thing in itself and the mental representation of that thing, but that distinction does not correspond to an ontological division. We might not represent something in our minds because we have never experienced it, and yet that thing may exist, be experienced at any time later and be represented in our minds.
Londoner wrote:But OK, so our idea that rocks persist over time has nothing to do with perception. In that case, what do we infer it from?


In part it still has to do with perception (but not immediate perception alone) because our first mental record of the rock being there is part of the experience of knowing about the rock. When we add other experiences, having to do with perceptions too, from the whole context of information we have gathered, we infer the necessity of the rock being there persistently.
Londoner wrote:But you also have the perception that after work you find the house is always where you left it that morning. So, the perceptions are contradictory; when you go to work the house can no longer be seen, but your other perceptions suggest that even though it can't be seen it still persists. You will want to create a theoretical picture of the world to account for both.


But then you're not describing theories that fit our perception in every instance of perception, but theories that bundle a whole set of experiences (seeing the house and then not seeing it when you moved) to make you realize that your perception of the house has nothing to do with the existence of the house: it is you who made a change as a perceiving subject, but the house has been there all the time, indifferent to what your sense organs or brain do.
Londoner wrote:Many theories are possible,(brain in a vat' etc.) that could account for all our perception. These are metaphysical; we cannot know which one is true.


Well, certainly brain in a vat may be a theory that tries to account for perception, but it's not a good one. The main problem I see is that it does not conform to the actual conditions in which a subject perceives and understands the world. The model actually bypasses sense experience and just feeds a disembodied brain with pre-elaborated data, then takes that transference of information as the sense experience and pretends that is the same that happens with embodied brains, like the Jiu-Jitsu lesson in The Matrix. It's a preposterous idea.
Londoner wrote:But what are these 'specific properties'? Nothing is specific to the grass leaves; everything we can think of, to say about the grass leaves, turns out to be about other things. If you subtract all the non-grass aspects of grass - there is nothing left!


Not true. The grass leaves will have the properties of their organic molecules and the structural components of the cells that constitute the plant. You can't subtract them and still have grass.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor, when we do inductive reasoning, whether it's the layman's commonsense variety or the statistician's more controlled uncertainty factor, uncertainty is a fact of our lives.

For practical purposes laymen, sociologists, medics, educationists, engineers, and physicists, etc. allow for different proportions of uncertainty /probability.

Deductive(formal) logic has conclusions that are certain inasmuch as validity of the reasoning is certain. However deductive(formal) logic does not advance the structure of knowledge within a culture of belief. Within any given culture of belief knowledge has a margin of uncertainty. Statisticians can narrow that margin of uncertainty, as can scientists who deal in both stats and empiricism.
Here I don't find key disagreements with what I've been saying so far.
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: Another display of your modus operandi: first you were concerned about the form. Now that it was shown that the form could be achieved, you shifted to being concerned about the content. When we go back to the content, you will shift to form again.


You are not reading my posts. A premise in logic has to be either true or false; if it is neither it breaks the law of the 'excluded middle'. Going into the subject in detail was probably a mistake if you don't get the basics.
Nevertheless, I showed you how "not knowing something" could be placed in a proposition (either true or false) using the formula "it is the case" or "it is not the case", and translated to symbols of formal logic.
I disagree.
You call body to the appearance of a body, seeing to the appearance of seeing, touching to the appearance of touching, and so on. And then you say we make theories of them and can't go beyond that. I say we do, we can take all those experiences and theories, find their relationships and conclude that our experiences are determined by the "things in themselves", as things that necessarily exist independent of us, that must be in place in order for there to be experience.
It would be good if you could be clear about this, in particular the word 'determined'. Do you think:

(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green).
No, that's not my point of view. I don't believe there's a mysterious sphere called "the noumenal", hidden behind a veil called "phenomena", which is "revealed" by our sense perceptions. I can accept the epistemological distinction between the thing in itself and the mental representation of that thing, but that distinction does not correspond to an ontological division. We might not represent something in our minds because we have never experienced it, and yet that thing may exist, be experienced at any time later and be represented in our minds.
You use phrases like 'that distinction does not correspond to an ontological division' but I cannot tell what they might mean. What is an 'ontological division'? And if you accept there is ' the epistemological distinction', what is that distinction, and why do you think we should accept it?
But then you're not describing theories that fit our perception in every instance of perception, but theories that bundle a whole set of experiences (seeing the house and then not seeing it when you moved) to make you realize that your perception of the house has nothing to do with the existence of the house: it is you who made a change as a perceiving subject, but the house has been there all the time, indifferent to what your sense organs or brain do.
Again, I find it hard to understand what you are saying. My position is that we try to create a theoretical picture of the world that best-fits our experiences of it. That the house is always there can be explained by theorising it exists independently of perception...although one could have other theories that also explain this (brain in a vat etc.). Since these theories are 'metaphysical' we cannot use the physical to reveal which one is right.

The theories do not have to fit with every experience, or only with experience. In fact, I can only form a coherent theory if I question the validity of experience, because some experiences contradict others. For example, if I gave absolute trust to 'seeing' then I would have problems finding a theory that explained the experiences that are linked to invisible forces, like radiation.

The house I return to is the same in some senses (it is at the remembered location) but now it also looks different in certain respects (because it is now night). So there is no particular perception that makes me think it is the same house, but rather a loose bundle that is linked to my general theory. So, if I returned home and find the house has gone to leave only a pile of hot bricks, even though my perceptions are quite different they still fit into my general theory, because that theory incorporates 'that houses can burn down'.

However, if I returned home and found my house in a completely identical state, but 1 metre to the left of where it was that morning, I would have problems fitting that into my general theory. What I would do is try to find a way of making it fit with the existing theory (for example, I know my memories can be defective), but if absolutely necessary I would have to tweak my theory, maybe shift to the 'brain in a vat', or incorporate 'sometimes there are miracles'...or maybe some less drastic adjustment.

As I say, that is what we do. We discover effects that do not fit our existing theory and so are obliged to adjust the model, incorporating sub atomic particles, relativity, quantum mechanics... And this has an effect that ripples out, so that my understanding of what something like my house 'is' now has to incorporate these ideas. So, although my perceptions of the world (seeing, hearing etc.) remain the same, my understanding of those perceptions is changeable, flexible.
Me: But what are these 'specific properties'? Nothing is specific to the grass leaves; everything we can think of, to say about the grass leaves, turns out to be about other things. If you subtract all the non-grass aspects of grass - there is nothing left!

Not true. The grass leaves will have the properties of their organic molecules and the structural components of the cells that constitute the plant. You can't subtract them and still have grass.
Molecules are not unique to grass. Nor is grass the only thing that has structure.

A molecule is a description of a constituent of all matter. If grass really had its own, unique, 'molecules', separate from molecules generally, then they wouldn't be 'molecules', they would be something else. By saying grass has molecules, you are not differentiating it from other things, you are doing the reverse.

There is a whole lot of things we can say about grass; it looks green (to human eyes under white light), it grows and dies, it has a molecular structure, cows eat it...but nothing in that list, that vague bundle, would be 'specific' to grass, they all involve non-grass things. To put it another way, we do not understand things like grass (or anything else in the world) separately, 'one at a time', rather everything is understood relative to everything else, as part of a complete picture.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:You are not reading my posts. A premise in logic has to be either true or false;
I read your posts, but it's hard to determine what is your point, since you keep shifting from opposing views. The statements I submitted comply with the rule of either being true or false:

It is the case that we cannot know that there is or there isn't a noumenal world behind phenomena.

It is a valid statement that conveys a contingent fact about the world: that some people cannot know something. That proposed fact can be either true of false.
Londoner wrote:Do you think:


(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green).

To say "internal experiences" begs the question. I would admit it if it means mental representation or mental state. But in experience itself participates the whole self of the subject and even in the most passive states (as during sleep), it is a body going through the experience. It's not a non-physical, isolated mental domain running the show, disembodied. It might feel as if the "ourselves" was our consciousness and the body is just an accessory, so one gets used to talk about the inside and outside of us, but the metaphor does not depict what is really going on. Instead of that internal/external distinction, I'd rather use the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived, which still admits the subject as a participant in the experience of the objects, but as another object, a special kind of object (one with perception and consciousness). The most appropriate distinction is then the one of subject/object, which expresses a relationship between two kinds of physical entities dwelling in the one and only realm of a material world. Not a relationship between two different worlds (dualism).

When we say our experience is determined by the things in themselves, what that means is that the objects of the world come in contact with each other because of whatever circumstances, contingent or necessary, and such contact, when involving subjects, is the experience of those subjects. When we sense something, it is a physical event between our physical sense organs and the objects. It is, as we all know, a partial, filtered sensation, since our sense organs are not built for capturing all of the properties and constituents of the object. We cannot see, smell, hear, touch or taste everything there is to see, smell, hear, touch or taste in an object. And we know that other species might sense those things we can't. Nevertheless, the mere act of sensing them, while at the same time sensing our own presence, our own embodied persona, produces in one unified experience the awareness of the presence of such beings in the same world we live in. Let's say it's a basic, naive awareness of the presence of beings that are not us. At this stage, it would be possible to posit that every object we get in contact with, as well as our own body, our whole self, are non-physical, immaterial beings, and the unified experience that connects them, pure images, stand alone representations occurring inside a non-physical world. This world, as it seems obvious, is posited as a "mental" world, in other words, as a disembodied mind, without physical neurons, brains, sense organs, etc. There begins trouble for that theory, as the events that would take place in that realm would not resemble the constrained order you would see in a real world of objects and physical laws, but a dream, a surrealistic order. As in any dream, there wouldn't be constraints and "anything goes".
Londoner wrote:You use phrases like 'that distinction does not correspond to an ontological division' but I cannot tell what they might mean. What is an 'ontological division'? And if you accept there is ' the epistemological distinction', what is that distinction, and why do you think we should accept it?

An ontological division would be a complete separation between two categories of beings, two domains of existence, two realms, two worlds. An epistemological distinction does not imply dividing the world in separate domains of existence, but describing different approaches in our understanding of the world. I can acknowledge we can't apprehend every single characteristic of the objects in the universe, their whole being with all their relations and determinations, which we could call noumena. And then I can also acknowledge we apprehend some fundamental characteristics of the objects and their relations, which we could call phenomena.
Londoner wrote:Again, I find it hard to understand what you are saying. My position is that we try to create a theoretical picture of the world that best-fits our experiences of it. That the house is always there can be explained by theorising it exists independently of perception...although one could have other theories that also explain this (brain in a vat etc.). Since these theories are 'metaphysical' we cannot use the physical to reveal which one is right.

But note that before we even get into theorizing, we already had the experiences of perception. And that perception is already pointing at the presence of objects as beings independent of us. That's the basic intuition that we rationalize and theorize a posteriori, using the manifold of perceptions, leading to the validation that they indeed exist independent of our perception.

As already explained, brain in a vat is not even a good theory of perception.
Londoner wrote:Molecules are not unique to grass. Nor is grass the only thing that has structure.

I never said so and it has nothing to do with the problem.
Londoner wrote:A molecule is a description of a constituent of all matter. If grass really had its own, unique, 'molecules', separate from molecules generally, then they wouldn't be 'molecules', they would be something else. By saying grass has molecules, you are not differentiating it from other things, you are doing the reverse.

That was quite a leap. I didn't even suggest there were specific "grass molecules". You should have understood that different organizations of the same organic molecules will produce a vast array of living forms, including grass. There are cellular structures that form the grass roots, leaves, etc., and those will have their specific properties. You can't subtract them and still have grass.
Londoner wrote:There is a whole lot of things we can say about grass; it looks green (to human eyes under white light), it grows and dies, it has a molecular structure, cows eat it...but nothing in that list, that vague bundle, would be 'specific' to grass, they all involve non-grass things. To put it another way, we do not understand things like grass (or anything else in the world) separately, 'one at a time', rather everything is understood relative to everything else, as part of a complete picture.
Grass is grass. No matter how you would want to organize its concept in your mind, you couldn't make it a cow.
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Conde Lucanor wrote:
Grass is grass. No matter how you would want to organize its concept in your mind, you couldn't make it a cow.
Men conceptualise. The concept named 'grass' (in English)probably has many attributes that are common to many cultures. However people who have not the concept of horse don't attribute feed- for -a-horse to grass.

'Grass' is a category, a universal, among other categories or universals. A blade of grass or a specific grass plant exists in that it occupies space and time. Grass as a category, a universal, is an idea which lacks spatio-temporal referent.

Some particular cow is an entity which occupies or occupied space and time. Cows in general are a universal category which has no referent beyond what men attribute to cows in general.

Given that all cows and all grass plants and the nutrition of all herbivorous animals are important concepts for many people from several societies it's unlikely that anyone would make the concept of grass that same as the concept of cow. That is my belief which is shared by many. However language and conceptualisations are plastic and closely follow upon both practical necessities and world views.
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: The statements I submitted comply with the rule of either being true or false:

It is the case that we cannot know that there is or there isn't a noumenal world behind phenomena.

It is a valid statement that conveys a contingent fact about the world: that some people cannot know something. That proposed fact can be either true of false.
And what is the fact? Apart from being packed full of double negatives and qualifications ('some'), the proposition needs to be clear, simple, 'atomic', whereas your example confuses more than one thing. For example, that 'we cannot know' something might be a claim of a lack of human ability, or just the lack of ability of 'some' people', or because such a thing is unknowable, or unknowable to 'some', or that it can be 'known' but the knowledge is not sound knowledge, or because the thing described is self-contradictory. Which of these alternatives is it saying?

Pick just one, express it clearly, assume its truth or falsity, then find a second premise.
Me: Do you think:
(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green)


To say "internal experiences" begs the question. I would admit it if it means mental representation or mental state.
An experience must be internal in that it involves an experiencer. If an experience was entirely external to me, then I wouldn't be having the experience!
But in experience itself participates the whole self of the subject and even in the most passive states (as during sleep), it is a body going through the experience. It's not a non-physical, isolated mental domain running the show, disembodied. It might feel as if the "ourselves" was our consciousness and the body is just an accessory, so one gets used to talk about the inside and outside of us, but the metaphor does not depict what is really going on. Instead of that internal/external distinction, I'd rather use the distinction between the perceiver and the perceived, which still admits the subject as a participant in the experience of the objects, but as another object, a special kind of object (one with perception and consciousness). The most appropriate distinction is then the one of subject/object, which expresses a relationship between two kinds of physical entities dwelling in the one and only realm of a material world. Not a relationship between two different worlds (dualism).
You could say that if there are 'two kinds of physical entities' then we do have dualism, or because there are 'two kinds of physical entities' that we don't have dualism. I really don't mind.
When we say our experience is determined by the things in themselves, what that means is that the objects of the world come in contact with each other because of whatever circumstances, contingent or necessary, and such contact, when involving subjects, is the experience of those subjects. When we sense something, it is a physical event between our physical sense organs and the objects. It is, as we all know, a partial, filtered sensation, since our sense organs are not built for capturing all of the properties and constituents of the object. We cannot see, smell, hear, touch or taste everything there is to see, smell, hear, touch or taste in an object. And we know that other species might sense those things we can't. Nevertheless, the mere act of sensing them, while at the same time sensing our own presence, our own embodied persona, produces in one unified experience the awareness of the presence of such beings in the same world we live in.
Yes, and what we are working on is what you understand by 'awareness'. Reading the above, this seems to be going with (a), that we can be aware that our experiences have a cause outside ourselves, but not (b) that the nature of our experiences are the same as that cause, for the reasons you give.
Let's say it's a basic, naive awareness of the presence of beings that are not us. At this stage, it would be possible to posit that every object we get in contact with, as well as our own body, our whole self, are non-physical, immaterial beings, and the unified experience that connects them, pure images, stand alone representations occurring inside a non-physical world. This world, as it seems obvious, is posited as a "mental" world, in other words, as a disembodied mind, without physical neurons, brains, sense organs, etc. There begins trouble for that theory, as the events that would take place in that realm would not resemble the constrained order you would see in a real world of objects and physical laws, but a dream, a surrealistic order. As in any dream, there wouldn't be constraints and "anything goes".
Why would a non-physical world have to be random?

Besides, here we are assuming that there is an external material cause for our internal experiences, and that being a regular cause it produces regular effects. The question was about the nature of these effects; whether they are the same as the cause. Is the effect 'green' produced by a green cause?
But note that before we even get into theorizing, we already had the experiences of perception. And that perception is already pointing at the presence of objects as beings independent of us. That's the basic intuition that we rationalize and theorize a posteriori, using the manifold of perceptions, leading to the validation that they indeed exist independent of our perception.


As far as I can tell, your answer to 'Is the effect 'green' produced by a green cause? ' seems to be 'no. That the nature of certain experiences indeed makes us posit that they are caused by something outside our own heads, but it would be another step to claim that our experiences correspond directly to those causes. And it would be very questionable to take that step since we have no reason to think they do, and we find it very difficult to describe how this might be the case (for example, to ascribe our experience of colour to any particular object)
That was quite a leap. I didn't even suggest there were specific "grass molecules". You should have understood that different organizations of the same organic molecules will produce a vast array of living forms, including grass. There are cellular structures that form the grass roots, leaves, etc., and those will have their specific properties. You can't subtract them and still have grass.
Exactly, except this isn't a point about plant biology. You argued that the grass has 'specific properties', 'which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes'. If a sensory experience (like 'green-ness) is supposed to be a specific quality of the grass, then it ought only to relate to the grass. If it was the case that an experience had a direct relationship to the object of experience (green-thought from green-thing) then it would be particular to that object. Yet everything we say about it, whether reports of direct experience like its colour, or ideas of its moleculaar structure, all turn out to be complex, involving more things than that grass itself.
Me: To put it another way, we do not understand things like grass (or anything else in the world) separately, 'one at a time', rather everything is understood relative to everything else, as part of a complete picture.

Grass is grass. No matter how you would want to organize its concept in your mind, you couldn't make it a cow.
But nor can you entirely separate the two. Everything you want to say about either the grass and the cow (their colour, their weight, their dimensions, their location, etc.) will not be some quality that only applies to either grass or cows. Even 'a cow' is only comprehensible if you have the notion of a type of animal.

What we are working round here is whether we can even name a pure sense experience - let alone take the further step of saying what we have named is in some sense the same as the cause of that experience.
As already explained, brain in a vat is not even a good theory of perception.
It depends what you mean by theory of perception. It is entirely compatible with our experiences; there is no perception that could not be the result of the scientist who controls the vat feeding us that perception. It just replaces the idea of an external world being the source of our perceptions with the idea of an external scientist being the source of our perceptions. As far as we are concerned, it makes absolutely no difference.

Briefly:
An ontological division would be a complete separation between two categories of beings, two domains of existence, two realms, two worlds.
I do not see that this would be possible. Suppose one tried to describe one of those completely separated categories; you could only do it in terms of the other. But in that case you must be doing so from a position which comprehends both.
An epistemological distinction does not imply dividing the world in separate domains of existence, but describing different approaches in our understanding of the world. I can acknowledge we can't apprehend every single characteristic of the objects in the universe, their whole being with all their relations and determinations, which we could call noumena. And then I can also acknowledge we apprehend some fundamental characteristics of the objects and their relations, which we could call phenomena.
Again, if it was possible to take different approaches, how could we describe any conclusions as fundamental? Surely what would be fundamental would be whatever was required for all approaches?
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:And what is the fact? Apart from being packed full of double negatives and qualifications ('some'), the proposition needs to be clear, simple, 'atomic', whereas your example confuses more than one thing. For example, that 'we cannot know' something might be a claim of a lack of human ability, or just the lack of ability of 'some' people', or because such a thing is unknowable, or unknowable to 'some', or that it can be 'known' but the knowledge is not sound knowledge, or because the thing described is self-contradictory. Which of these alternatives is it saying?


You are just going around the bushes. By now, you have forgotten that all you cared was that the sentence could be translated to formal logic. Now that it does, you are suddenly concerned about the content of the clauses, whether they are simple or compound, whether they are explicit or ambiguous, etc. Your objections could be extended to every sentence in every language, working around the possible meanings to undermine its propositional value, but it's mere sophistry to evade the point that was clearly made: that a logical statement can be constructed starting with the premise of "not knowing X". None of those objections are relevant and you have not produced a logical refutation of the validity of the sentence. The pronoun "we" could easily be replaced by a list of specific individuals and it would make absolutely no difference. Assuming there were double negatives, you would have a very hard time trying to show that is not a valid rule in logic. You don't like the construction "not knowing X..." because it's negative? Well, then replace it by the affirmative: "ignoring X..." The meaning of the sentence is the same and your attempts to avoid facing it will fail, no matter how long you go around the bushes.
Londoner wrote:An experience must be internal in that it involves an experiencer. If an experience was entirely external to me, then I wouldn't be having the experience!

Internal to what? Other than figures of speech, what is exactly the internal and external of the experiencer?
Londoner wrote:You could say that if there are 'two kinds of physical entities' then we do have dualism, or because there are 'two kinds of physical entities' that we don't have dualism. I really don't mind.

That's the old fallacy of amphiboly. "Kinds" refers to "classes of things". Neither the number of classes, nor the number of things have anything to do with dualism or monism. If I have seven apples, would you consider that "seventhism"?
Londoner wrote:Yes, and what we are working on is what you understand by 'awareness'. Reading the above, this seems to be going with (a), that we can be aware that our experiences have a cause outside ourselves, but not (b) that the nature of our experiences are the same as that cause, for the reasons you give.

Again, you keep being confused with the internal/external analogy. "Outside ourselves" should be read "other being that is not ourselves".
Londoner wrote:Why would a non-physical world have to be random?

I didn't use the word "random". It would be a world of no constraints, where anything goes. What constraints you would identify in a surreal order of pure mental states? What are the laws of a non-physical world?

Londoner wrote:Besides, here we are assuming that there is an external material cause for our internal experiences, and that being a regular cause it produces regular effects. The question was about the nature of these effects; whether they are the same as the cause. Is the effect 'green' produced by a green cause?

Forget the internal/external distinction. It's a nice figure of speech, but it's causing you a great deal of confusion. The experiences are lived by the subject, which is a material body. The properties of the objects that reflect light wavelengths that hit our eyes cone cells will produce our sense of green. Under different conditions of light or changes in the properties of the object, a different color will be produced, in other words, our eyes will sense those changes. It's not that the objects sent directly the code "green" to our brain and you call that "experience of green", nor it is that a disembodied brain came up by itself with the "internal experience" of green and then tried to come up with the explanations of it.

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:That was quite a leap. I didn't even suggest there were specific "grass molecules". You should have understood that different organizations of the same organic molecules will produce a vast array of living forms, including grass. There are cellular structures that form the grass roots, leaves, etc., and those will have their specific properties. You can't subtract them and still have grass.


Exactly, except this isn't a point about plant biology. You argued that the grass has 'specific properties', 'which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes'. If a sensory experience (like 'green-ness) is supposed to be a specific quality of the grass, then it ought only to relate to the grass. If it was the case that an experience had a direct relationship to the object of experience (green-thought from green-thing) then it would be particular to that object. Yet everything we say about it, whether reports of direct experience like its colour, or ideas of its moleculaar structure, all turn out to be complex, involving more things than that grass itself.


You're totally wrong there. It IS about the plant biology What else could it be? But you are stubbornly fixed to the the color property, as if someone had ever stated that one color (green) is an essential, primary property of the object grass. There could be non-green grass, as one that has dry leaves and has become yellowish, or one that has been darkened by a fire, etc. None of those changes to the grass itself undermine its grass-ness, including the light-reflecting property. If someone happens to suffer from Daltonism, that subject will sense the color of grass differently than the rest of us, but that is not to be confused with a "subjective appreciation of the color X". It's just the opposite: there are objective, non-mental causes for that sensation in the daltonic subject, which reside in the physical characteristics of the sense organ, a part of the subject's body.
Londoner wrote:But nor can you entirely separate the two. Everything you want to say about either the grass and the cow (their colour, their weight, their dimensions, their location, etc.) will not be some quality that only applies to either grass or cows. Even 'a cow' is only comprehensible if you have the notion of a type of animal.

You're confusing here two things of what Aristotle made a key distinction: the accidental and essential qualities of an object. You're also mistaken in the understanding of singulars and universals:

All objects in general MUST have a weight, dimension, location, color, etc., but NOT all objects MUST have the same weight, dimension, etc. Not even all objects of the class "cow" or the class "grass". A set of essential, as well as accidental properties of "cowness" are to be found in any particular cow, making it distinct from any particular grass, which will show its own set of essential and accidental properties. You can certainly separate those objects, both from the singular or universal perspectives. And you can distinguish one cow or one grass from another, because of their singular mode of being, their accidental properties. They can't be confused.
Londoner wrote:It depends what you mean by theory of perception. It is entirely compatible with our experiences;

No, it's not. I already explained you why 'brain in vat' is a preposterous idea: "it does not conform to the actual conditions in which a subject perceives and understands the world. The model actually bypasses sense experience and just feeds a disembodied brain with pre-elaborated data, then takes that transference of information as the sense experience and pretends that is the same that happens with embodied brains, like the Jiu-Jitsu lesson in The Matrix."
Londoner wrote:there is no perception that could not be the result of the scientist who controls the vat feeding us that perception. It just replaces the idea of an external world being the source of our perceptions with the idea of an external scientist being the source of our perceptions. As far as we are concerned, it makes absolutely no difference.

But you see, there's no such thing as an "external world", other than a figure of speech we use. There are no disembodied brains getting pre-elaborated data directly from a source. That's a lot of difference.
Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote: An ontological division would be a complete separation between two categories of beings, two domains of existence, two realms, two worlds.

I do not see that this would be possible. Suppose one tried to describe one of those completely separated categories; you could only do it in terms of the other. But in that case you must be doing so from a position which comprehends both.

Of course it's not possible, but interestingly, that approach pretty much resembles yours when positing a realm of phenomena vs. a realm of noumena, or an internal world vs. an external world.
Londoner wrote:Again, if it was possible to take different approaches, how could we describe any conclusions as fundamental? Surely what would be fundamental would be whatever was required for all approaches?
Fundamental would be for us humans to deal with the world as it really is. Materialism and monism are fundamental.
Belinda
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Belinda »

Conde Lucanor wrote:
Fundamental would be for us humans to deal with the world as it really is. Materialism and monism are fundamental.
Is the world as it really is to be discovered, or to be invented?
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

Conde Lucanor wrote: You are just going around the bushes. By now, you have forgotten that all you cared was that the sentence could be translated to formal logic.


It can't.
Now that it does, you are suddenly concerned about the content of the clauses, whether they are simple or compound, whether they are explicit or ambiguous, etc. Your objections could be extended to every sentence in every language, working around the possible meanings to undermine its propositional value, but it's mere sophistry to evade the point that was clearly made: that a logical statement can be constructed starting with the premise of "not knowing X".
No; if its meaning cannot even be expressed clearly and unambiguously in normal English, obviously it can't be used in logic. And yes, that does apply to most, perhaps all, expressions in ordinary language!

Think about maths; terms like '6' do not stand for 'six apples'. Numbers only work if they do not stand for any particular 'six'. '6' is not a predicate of the apples; the apples do not have 'six-ness'. Logic works like maths; it is not concerned with meaning, with content, only with relationships. 'True' in logic does not mean 'it is a fact' or 'I am being honest', it is more like the plus or minus sign in maths, it is abstract.

If you are to use an ordinary language sentence in logic it must be like a number (which is why we can replace it with letters, like 'P' or 'Q'). I know we like to illustrate logical rules with 'If Socrates is a man..' type examples, but these are misleading.

So if we were to try to use an ordinary language term in logic it would have to be as transparent as a number. If it was complex; if the meaning of a term was not 'atomic' then it would already contain a logical relationship. In that case, before we could start we would have to break it down into a simpler form. (Since in your example we cannot even tell what the subject of the sentence is meant to be, it shows how far we are from being to use it in logic.)

At this point I feel I need to say again that I am not making this up as I go along. This view isn't some personal eccentricity. The reason we know all this is because of attempts to reconcile logic with maths, involving Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and co, and the investigation of maths itself. To understand it you have to get your head around something that is quite counter-intuitive.
Me: You could say that if there are 'two kinds of physical entities' then we do have dualism, or because there are 'two kinds of physical entities' that we don't have dualism. I really don't mind.
That's the old fallacy of amphiboly. "Kinds" refers to "classes of things". Neither the number of classes, nor the number of things have anything to do with dualism or monism. If I have seven apples, would you consider that "seventhism"?
No, it is me saying I really don't care whether how want to label a particular point of view. What I want is some clarity about what you are saying.
Me: Why would a non-physical world have to be random?
I didn't use the word "random". It would be a world of no constraints, where anything goes. What constraints you would identify in a surreal order of pure mental states? What are the laws of a non-physical world?
So what is the difference between 'random' and 'no constraints, where anything goes'?

The laws of the non-physical world would be the same as this one. We have had this before; I can only know the world that I experience. The question of 'why the world is like it is' is metaphysical. It may be that God wills everything that happens, or it may be the scientist who manages the 'brain in a vat'...or it may be something less interesting. I cannot know. All I can ever get is the experience, I cannot get the cause of the experience.

I know you think you are being down-to-earth, scientific, but you aren't. Science - good science - understands that it is is deliberately restricting itself to phenomena. It does not do metaphysics. I have already quoted Newton on this.
Forget the internal/external distinction. It's a nice figure of speech, but it's causing you a great deal of confusion. The experiences are lived by the subject, which is a material body.
I can't forget it because if you use the word 'experiences' and 'the subject' then you have re-introduced it. Who is having the experience? If 'the subject experiences something' then there are two things; the 'subject' and the 'something'. (As with 'dualism' above, I really don't care whether you want to find a form of words that will emphasise the sameness of those two or the difference.)

Sure, the experiencer's body is a material object, but you think it is a different material object to the source of the experience. So that would mean that the experience involves the combination of two different material things, therefore the experience can be neither of the two things considered separately.

I think the tree is made of wood which is material. I think my eye and brain are made of cells which are material. Both are material. So those (material) eyes and brain see the (material) tree. But the electrical activity the seeing involves in my (material) brain is not made of the (material) wood.

In this latest formulation you say 'the experiences are 'lived by' the subject', which is another form of words which avoids the question.

My question was:

Do you think:
(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green)

I think we have settled with (a). We posit that our experiences have an external cause. But have no reason to think (b) that our experiences are the same as that cause. I do not see that you are currently presenting any arguments that contradict this.

Briefly, the side issues:
You're confusing here two things of what Aristotle made a key distinction: the accidental and essential qualities of an object. You're also mistaken in the understanding of singulars and universals...
No, you are avoiding my point. We were trying to find an example of a perception that would correspond to what the object might be 'in-itself'. But every perception you name will not refer to the object 'in-itself'. If it did, it would not be comprehensible. It would be like asking somebody to describe something that was 'completely unique'. If it was literally 'completely unique' then we would have no words for it.
No, it's not. I already explained you why 'brain in vat' is a preposterous idea: "it does not conform to the actual conditions in which a subject perceives and understands the world. The model actually bypasses sense experience and just feeds a disembodied brain with pre-elaborated data, then takes that transference of information as the sense experience and pretends that is the same that happens with embodied brains, like the Jiu-Jitsu lesson in The Matrix."
In the film 'The Matrix' the drama is created because some people can get out of the Matrix; they can know-of the Matrix. But if you were in the Matrix, the world would appear exactly the same as it does now. There is nothing that somebody within one of those capsules can do that would reveal that they were in a capsule...so it might be true of us; people in the cinema watching 'The Matrix' might be in the Matrix! That is the point of the film.
Of course it's not possible, but interestingly, that approach pretty much resembles yours when positing a realm of phenomena vs. a realm of noumena, or an internal world vs. an external world.
Let's not go back to you telling me what I am saying!
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by SpheresOfBalance »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote: It's not a matter of whether "I meant it analytically" or not. The statements are synthetic, they convey facts of the world (that could be either true or false). Remember, all we wanted was to test your claim that we couldn't build a logical statement starting with the premise of "not knowing something". It has been tested and your claim is simply wrong.
If their truth or falsity is determined by 'facts of the world', if they are 'synthetic', then you aren't doing logic.
I'm glad we can agree that Quine's essay is not discussing the nature of logic. I've read most of the essays in the book, which apply logic without using formal logic. It shows logic is not necessarily reduced to formal logic.
You do not understand what you have read because you don't understand what logic is; you confuse it with 'making an argument' or 'being rational' or discovering 'facts of the world'. Logic itself is entirely formal; you look at arguments and try to discover the purely formal relationships within them. Once you have described a formal relationship the application of that system of logic is (relatively) simple, it is purely mechanical; it is like doing a sum.
No it's not! Words are not necessarily quantifiable. Give us a real world example! Instead of just stating something you haven't proven to us.


What philosophers like Quine are doing is looking at 'semantics' or 'syntax'. That is, they are looking at the relationship of the sort of reasoning we do when we do science, or say something is 'analytic' or 'synthetic' or represents 'knowledge'. If we could pin those things down, then we could put them into a logical system and 'do logic' with them, but it turns out to be difficult, perhaps impossible.
But you recognize only mental states, appearances of things.


I am not going to keep engaging with this repeated misrepresentation of what I have said. I think I know why you keep claiming it, but it is simply a misunderstanding of how language works; see paragraph after next, below.
No, that's all yours. You're the one claiming that there's no way to know about things in themselves (which include brains and sense organs). So, when you go back to claim that you recognize your brain and sense organs, you are suddenly having that "special insight into the noumenal ".
Again, you want to tell me what I am saying.

I see a rock, I see a brain, I see a nose. In each case, the process is the same; light reflected by the object impacts specialized cells in my body which sends an impulse along a nerve etc. then my brain converts that impulse to an experience. All I get, in each case, is the experience. I can theorise about the experience, about its origins, I can note how one experience relates to another - but I can only experience the experience.
If your mind creates a simulation that pretends for you to have a body, and you already made up your mind that your body does not exist, then you are obliged to reach the conclusion that your body is an illusion. And so all things. There's no workaround to it.
I experience my body - 'my body' is the name I give for that experience. I say of my body 'it exists' meaning 'it can be experienced'. If I think 'my leg' is not an 'illusion' it is because I can touch it, I can see it, I can make it interact with other things I can see and touch...all experiences. There is no extra test of 'realness' that I can apply that wouldn't also be an experience.

So why isn't being able to experience things sufficient to qualify them as 'real'? What else have we got apart from experience?

I get that this isn't enough for you; that there must also be this extra test to reveal the really-real, the reality behind experience. But there is no extra test available. Experience is all we have got and all we can ever have, so (if you insist on saying) experience is 'illusion' then yes; everything would be 'illusion'. But what you don't understand (and what leads you to claim that I think everything is only illusion, appearance etc.) is that if 'everything is illusion' then the word 'illusion' in the sense you understand it becomes meaningless!

(But that is you, not me. For me, 'illusion' describes a misinterpretation of an experience. I see a patch of blue in the desert, I take it to be a lake, but it turns out to be a mirage. But I did see the patch of blue - the experience was real.)
I don't really know what to say: when you claim that "sense perception is our guide to the noumenal, noumena and phenomena are always 'touching'..." you are advocating for everything you have opposed in this thread". Your ability to contradict yourself is staggering.


You said those things. I am quoting you. I am not contradicting myself, I first quote what you say, then (if you read on) I explain why I disagree with you.
Oh, really? So, having all our sense perceptions, all our lights on, objects have leapt into noumenal existence?
If our sense perceptions of an object = the noumenal object, then an absence of sense perceptions = no noumenal object. If our sense perceptions come into being (the light is switched on) then the noumenal object must also come into being.

Just to be clear here; that is your point of view. You think sense perceptions reveal the noumenal; I'm pointing out the consequences.
You're again twisting the sense of the statement. I did not say "we know the rock was there before because we had data of perception", which would look the same as "we know the rock was there before because we perceived the rock" to fit your argument. I said we infer, we arrive to the conclusion of the rock necessarily being there before we arrived.
What you actually wrote last time was 'We infer from the whole data of perception'.

But OK, so our idea that rocks persist over time has nothing to do with perception. In that case, what do we infer it from?
Your argument has another problem: you say that we devise theories that fit our perception, but then you would have to explain why, when not perceiving something we have perceived before, we don't devise theories that fit our current perception of the object being absent, in other words, we would have to switch automatically to the the theory of the object not existing. I see my house: I claim it exists; I go to my office: I must claim my house exists no more.
But you also have the perception that after work you find the house is always where you left it that morning. So, the perceptions are contradictory; when you go to work the house can no longer be seen, but your other perceptions suggest that even though it can't be seen it still persists. You will want to create a theoretical picture of the world to account for both.

Many theories are possible,(brain in a vat' etc.) that could account for all our perception. These are metaphysical; we cannot know which one is true. However, we are only interested in whether they work; in particular are they useful as a way of predicting future experience. So, as long as when you come back from work you find your house is there, the theory it exists independently from perception will do. But if occasionally the house is not where you left it, then you can try to find an explanation within your general theory (somebody must be giving me drugs) or you might have to tweak the general theory. And that is what we do.
Me: So if asked 'what colour is the grass-in-itself?' the answer would be 'it depends on things outside the grass-in-itself'.
No. Didn't I mention the specific properties of the grass leaves? And surely we can say a lot of things of those properties in combination with the other conditions that surround the grass (light, molecules in the air, wind, gravity, season, etc.), all of which will give the grass perceived the aspect it has to our eyes.
But what are these 'specific properties'? Nothing is specific to the grass leaves; everything we can think of, to say about the grass leaves, turns out to be about other things. If you subtract all the non-grass aspects of grass - there is nothing left!

It isn't that the properties are giving the grass something, it is rather that the grass, and the properties of grass, are one and the same thing. 'Grass' means (amongst other things) 'that stuff that looks green'. It makes no sense to ask 'but what colour is grass really?' or 'what colour is grass in itself?'
Londoner
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Londoner »

SpheresOfBalance wrote: No it's not! Words are not necessarily quantifiable. Give us a real world example! Instead of just stating something you haven't proven to us.


I do not say they are. I say logic is like doing a sum in that the validity of the conclusion is determined by the formal relationship between the propositions/numbers. 2+3=5 is not a 'real world example' of any thing. It is not valid because 'there are five apples'.
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Conde Lucanor
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Re: Who- why- where are we ?

Post by Conde Lucanor »

Londoner wrote:
Conde Lucanor wrote:You are just going around the bushes. By now, you have forgotten that all you cared was that the sentence could be translated to formal logic.

It can't.

It surely can, since all that is required for a proposition to qualify as a proposition is that if affirms or denies something and has a subject and a predicate. It takes in formal logic the symbol A, B, C, etc., to which one applies the operators.
Londoner wrote:So if we were to try to use an ordinary language term in logic it would have to be as transparent as a number. If it was complex; if the meaning of a term was not 'atomic' then it would already contain a logical relationship. In that case, before we could start we would have to break it down into a simpler form. (Since in your example we cannot even tell what the subject of the sentence is meant to be, it shows how far we are from being to use it in logic.)
That clauses and propositions can be embedded in many levels only means that they can't be more or less complex, not that they are not valid. The need for "being atomic" is an invention of yours. In any case, you should remember that I provided the "atomic levels" since my first attempt to make you stand for something. Remember:
Conde Lucanor wrote:We can sum up this to 3 options. Either:
1) There is a noumenal world behind phenomena.
2) There is not a noumenal world behind phenomena.
3) We cannot know that there is or there isn't a noumenal world behind phenomena.
I pick 1. What's your pick?
Translated for you again:
1) X
2) Y
3) We cannot know X or Y.
All of the above could be either true or false.
Londoner wrote:At this point I feel I need to say again that I am not making this up as I go along. This view isn't some personal eccentricity. The reason we know all this is because of attempts to reconcile logic with maths, involving Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and co, and the investigation of maths itself. To understand it you have to get your head around something that is quite counter-intuitive.
I don't see how invoking some names adds value to this discussion. I can invoke names too. What matters is what you're actually arguing in this debate and you're not getting it right. Whether you're being faithful to the positions taken by these gentlemen, that's a matter of another debate.
Londoner wrote:So what is the difference between 'random' and 'no constraints, where anything goes'?
It's a word you used and I clarified that it is not a word I chose. For me, "random" would feel like something in which you can still find causal concomitance: snowflakes fall randomly, but a given point in time, their location has a cause that obeys some physical laws. "Anything goes" admits even the absurd.
Londoner wrote:The laws of the non-physical world would be the same as this one.
How do you know that? On what grounds it becomes necessary?
Londoner wrote:I can only know the world that I experience.
The "world" that you mean, we must assume, is your mental states. Therefore, you're leaving your sense organs out of the experience. How can you explain your experience without your sense organs?
Londoner wrote:I know you think you are being down-to-earth, scientific, but you aren't. Science - good science - understands that it is is deliberately restricting itself to phenomena. It does not do metaphysics. I have already quoted Newton on this.
I'm not concerned about being scientific, but about being realistic. Saying that science is deliberately "restricting itself" tries to imply that science already knows there's something beyond its objects of inquiry, but that is not the case. Science is pretty much concerned about the structure of reality, so it has to be realistic, too.
Londoner wrote:I can't forget it because if you use the word 'experiences' and 'the subject' then you have re-introduced it. Who is having the experience? If 'the subject experiences something' then there are two things; the 'subject' and the 'something'.
I don't find anywhere how this leads to the internal/external distinction. You found two things and that's it.
Londoner wrote:Sure, the experiencer's body is a material object, but you think it is a different material object to the source of the experience. So that would mean that the experience involves the combination of two different material things, therefore the experience can be neither of the two things considered separately.
Exactly! The experience arises from the two objects coming in contact.
Londoner wrote:I think the tree is made of wood which is material. I think my eye and brain are made of cells which are material. Both are material. So those (material) eyes and brain see the (material) tree. But the electrical activity the seeing involves in my (material) brain is not made of the (material) wood.
So you assume there are trees, eyes, brains and electrical activity, but you don't really know. All you know are your mental states, right?
Londoner wrote:Do you think:
(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green)

I think we have settled with (a).
I have not settled for anything, because your formulation is false. "Internal experiences" is not a real situation.
Londoner wrote:No, you are avoiding my point. We were trying to find an example of a perception that would correspond to what the object might be 'in-itself'. But every perception you name will not refer to the object 'in-itself'. If it did, it would not be comprehensible. It would be like asking somebody to describe something that was 'completely unique'. If it was literally 'completely unique' then we would have no words for it.
I don't know what you're doing, but of myself I can say that I'm not "trying to find an example of a perception that would correspond to what the object might be 'in-itself". I think I have thoroughly explained what my position is regarding our primary impressions and how those impressions, as imperfect as they are for acquiring immediately all the properties of the objects presented to our perception, ultimately help us EFFECTIVELY to infer sufficient and necessary properties of the objects, as it is their objective existence, independent of our perception. And we obtain that knowledge by virtue of accumulated experiences, multiple sensations, validation from instruments and second observers.
Londoner wrote:In the film 'The Matrix' the drama is created because some people can get out of the Matrix; they can know-of the Matrix. But if you were in the Matrix, the world would appear exactly the same as it does now. There is nothing that somebody within one of those capsules can do that would reveal that they were in a capsule...so it might be true of us; people in the cinema watching 'The Matrix' might be in the Matrix! That is the point of the film.
It's a great film, always loved it, but it doesn't mean its philosophical premises are correct, at least not all of the thesis we may interpret that the film conveys. So, basically, people live in a capsule where they dream their lives. Solipsism. From an independent viewer of this scenario, experience is just a mental state, a simulation, an illusion fed directly by the machines to brains. However, what's being injected into the receiver's brain is the whole cognitive package, not just the raw stimuli of sense perception, but also the conceptual framework, the connections and relationships that constitute experience. The source of consciousness will not be the subject, but the agents feeding the subject. The subject would not own his/her consciousness, not even his/her certainties and uncertainties. No knowledge possible. There would be no subject at all, proving that in this conception, anything goes.
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