Hello Philosophim,

Thank you for waiting Bob, the weeks have recently been filled so I have not been able to respond quickly to you

Absolutely no worries my friend! Take all the time you need: I always appreciate your substantive responses.

Now you can see why truth as a subjective concurrence with reality doesn't work for me. What is true about the thing-in-itself is something which is beyond my ability to know.

Demonstrating that we cannot know the truth about things-in-themselves does not demonstrate that ‘truth’, as a concept, should be deployed as equivalent to ‘reality’. I have no problem, under my theory of truth, also claiming that we cannot know the truth about the things-in-themselves. So I don’t think this is a valid reason for why you would, as noted in your first sentence above, use truth as non-subjective.

It is true that the thing-in-itself exists.

To you, this would be an inconcise sentence, since ‘it is true’ and it ‘exists’ are both expresses the same thing.

For me, ‘it is true’ denotes the accuracy of the claim, which is that ‘the thing-in-itself exists’.

My concurrence of belief or representation is irrelevant.

I think we may be using the term ‘non-subjective’ differently as well; because I have no problem noting that the truth of the matter is independent of my beliefs and perceptions—but not independent of my thought, because I cannot express anything is ‘true’ other than a thought corresponding to reality.

But I can also use truth within my subject, which I agree with you on. My major point is that your use of truth either disregards are eliminates the colloquial understanding of "truth outside of our subject". If you wish to delineate the two, I would add some adjective to truth to mark the difference,

My definition does not eliminate the fact that truth is independent of the content of our thoughts, of our beliefs, and our perceptions: it just notes that the thought is required for there to be truth at all, since what is true is a claim that corresponds to reality. You seem to be eliminating the correspondence aspect of claims, and noting that truth is just what is.

Good discussion Bob! I will try to get back soon on replies going forward.

You too! I look forward to any future discussions we have!

Oh, that's what I thought you were saying, since you replied "exactly" to my response saying how do you know you have thoughts if only accept public knowledge.

Whether a thought is more than what we can introspectively access does not negate the fact that we can know certain things from private knowledge, such as that we have thoughts.

Hello Leontiskos,

I did not give a definition, and what I said is, "the existence of moral facts would presuppose the existence of fundamental obligations." I did not say—as you incorrectly claim—that "an obligation would presuppose the existence of a moral fact."

I apologize: I must have misunderstood what you were saying. The claim that “the existence of moral facts would presuppose the existence of fundamental obligations” simply does not follow by the definition of ‘obligation’ that I gave. There can be no such subjective obligation while moral facts still exist. Again, and correct me if I am wrong, I am interpreting you to be using the term ‘obligation’ to refer to an prescriptive statement that is objective, which is the only way I can fathom that one would think moral facts presuppose the existence of obligations—let alone fundamental ones.

How could a judgment exist independent of minds? Judgments are judgments of minds.

That is the whole point of moral realism: that the moral judgment is objective, which is to say that it exists mind-independently (i.e., independent of any subject: mind: person: thinking being). E.g., biological functions (for physicalists and potentially substance dualists), a priori knowledge (for Kantians), a platonic form (for platonists), a law of nature (for naturalists), etc.

These deploy a moral judgment as categorical, which is to say it exists independent of whatever a given mind produces or generates.

Hello Mww,

How do you figure I’m affected by the very thing I didn’t notice? I concede a thing happens, an effect on me, but from that I don’t have to concede I am aware that it happens, an affect in me. The food I eat has an effect on me, but I’m not aware of it.

Oh I see: I was not intending by “affected” that you were aware of it (as the ego).

It is absolutely impossible for me to justify, given only the account determinable from my frame of reference, that I simply didn’t age as fast as you. It is the case, therefore, there is no way to explain the relativity of inertial frames from a purely metaphysical Kantian point of view.

But if it isn’t accounted for within Kant’s view, then doesn’t it pertain to the things-in-themselves; which Kant say we cannot know? I have no problem with the idea that you don’t perceive the time dilation, but the fact that there is such a thing is either accounted for (1) in Kant’s metaphysics or (2) it pertains to the things-in-themselves.

Backwards from best guess, that which we’ve already done, gets us to representation. To say we start from representation when in reverse, contradicts the method by which we arrived at the best guess

I didn’t quite follow this part. But I agree that:

The chain of mental events ends with knowledge, so in reversing, THAT is the star

So I cannot say we start with representations but, rather, experiences; and reverse engineer that.

Even if there is a limit on our knowledge of what they are, there is no uncertainty in the fact that they are. If we deny or even doubt the appearance of objects because Nature is not itself causal, we destroy the very notion of an internal cognitive system, relying on pure subjective idealism

It sounds like you are claiming to know something about the world-in-itself: that it has causality. Am I correct in that? If so, then that does get around the worry I invoked but introduces a new one: if space and time are the possible forms of experience, then how is positing a ‘world-in-itself’ space and time not transcendent metaphysics (of which Kant adamantly is against)?

the representations in us presuppose corresponding things external to us, and, Nature is causal in itself, but that doesn’t mean we have to know anything about either of those two things

To me, the second reason here is purely transcendent metaphysics; and the first I have a hard time justifying, since all we know is conditioned by are possible forms of experience.

The two forms by which experience is possible do not condition or shape how we understand our-SELVES, but only how we understand real objects external to us. Our-SELF is a subject, and no subject can at the same time be an object, therefore our-SELF, as mere subject of which can only be thought as conception, has no need of phenomenal representation, hence is not conditioned by that which makes them possible. And this, among others, we cognize a priori, or technically, transcendentally.

That makes a lot more sense! Building off of this, then what do you think of our self’s actions being also represented in our outer sense? Doesn’t that prove we know at least some things-in-themselves (or thing-in-itself)?

What’s the brain for, if “mosquito” is given immediately from a sensation? I know you don’t think that’s how it works, so….where did “mosquito” come from in your view?

I am not saying that we don’t represent the world (viz., that we just know from direct sensations), so I should have been more careful with my terms: I mean that the mosquito is made up of the representations, the experiences, we have of—it is constructed of purely qualities and, thusly, to remove those qualitative properties (of which we experience) is to remove completely that thing which we called a mosquito; and I am uncertain as to what it could be in-itself nor as this ‘thing’ that you mentioned.

Hypothetical imperatives cannot ground obligation, which is why the existence of moral facts would presuppose the existence of fundamental obligations.

By ‘obligation’, I mean something which one ought to do—that’s it.

However, if by ‘obligation’ you tie it, in definition, to moral facticity; then, yes, an obligation would presuppose the existence of a moral fact. Nevertheless, this is would incorrect to use your definition in parsing my OP (since I did not use it that way): I mean a fundamental normative statement.

Under your definition, you are just noting that there are fundamental normative facts within moral facts (i.e., there’s a hierarchy to moral facts) which are necessary not one’s “fundamental obligations” in the sense that meant it, since there are more fundamentally some taste which is committing you to the moral facts in the first place.

Positing the existence of moral facts without the existence of fundamental obligations makes no sense at all

There can exists a fundamental moral judgment which is subjective that is fundamental to one’s moral system, and there can equally exist moral facts.

In reality what you call a "moral fact" is a hypothetical imperative, and what you call a "fundamental obligation" is a moral fact.

No. By moral fact I mean a moral judgment which exists mind-independently, and I do not mean that they are themselves hypothetical imperatives (for those are moral non-facts: tastes). Likewise, I think I already clarified above what I mean by ‘fundamental obligation’.

But objective idealism doesn't reduce ontology to epistemology.

My position is that it's (more) reasonable to be "confident" only in those experiences and facts which we do not have compelling (more-than-subjective) grounds to question or doubt

So, if I am understanding you correctly, you think that you do have compelling grounds to question that your have thoughts?

My point is that people should be most confident in their private, mental life existing then anything else; which you are implying they should be confident in the abstractions of 'physical' and public knowledge and you are going so far as to say you don't know if have the mental inner life. That's backwards to me.

Hello Leontiskos,

The OP grants moral facts with its right hand and takes them away with its left. "You can have moral facts but you cannot have fundamental obligations," is the same as saying, "You can have moral facts but you cannot have moral facts." A fundamental obligation is one kind of moral fact, and if there are no fundamental obligations then there are no moral facts.

The fact that no fundamental obligation is a moral fact does not negate the existence of moral facts. The point is that the moral facts are not doing any of the work in a rational moral system: its the hypothetical imperative(s) which is(are) the fundamental obligation(s).

On another note, as argued in the OP, a moral fact cannot be a fundamental obligation, as that would be circular logic.

Hello Jorndoe,

non sequiturs [...] follow [...] therefore — Bob Ross

... are examples of deduction

A nonsequitur is not itself a deduction: the former is a hypothetical that has a false implication, and the latter is an argument wherein its premises necessitate its conclusion.

Not exactly, no. We're talking what the Pope, priests, gurus, imams, pujas, etc promote (be it simple complex sophisticated renditions), the Avestan Ahura Mazda, the Vedic Shiva, the Biblical Yahweh, the Quranic Allah, etc, the currently prevalent, elaborate religious faiths, often mutually incompatible (as mentioned), what people out there actually believe and sometimes practise:

Ah, I see. However, there are plenty of sophisticated theological arguments (which are formal) for these religions, such as Christianity; of which many of its mainstream followers are unaware of. I just think this “idealized” vs. “elaborate” distinction doesn’t really hold very well.

Maybe. I'd call them definitions, e.g. G is defined as a supposed 1st cause (like Aquinas did), or "super-designer", or ... As to the mentioned gap, the kalam/cosmological argument, for example, does not derive the Biblical Yahweh, cannot particularly differentiate those "historicized" deities or "the unknown" for that matter (incidentally admitted by one of the foremost promoters of that argument).

But they aren’t definitions, they are arguments. Aquinas defines and argues for God being a first-cause, and, thusly, his argument for that property of God is distinct from God’s definition.

The kalam cosmological argument is not supposed to prove the Christian God as existing, it simply proves (or attempts to prove) that there is a necessary being by positing the universe as contingent itself.

There's been realism versus idealism threads before. Maybe it's time for another. Hit it, if you have something good, it's one of those things the forum is about. Roughly 4/5 contemporary philosophers go with realism. 2009, 2020 A topic in its own right, all the way back to Plato ... (Descartes) ... Berkeley ...

If one holds that the representations they have are of mentality and that alive beings are immaterial minds; then the only manner of maintaining an ‘objective’ reality, which has many explanatory benefits, is to posit a universal mind, of which can be labelled as ‘God’. Thusly, God and reality become one. I find this compelling only insofar as I find objective idealism compelling, which, in turn, is predicated off of philosophy of mind (and, more specifically, giving an account of conscious experience).

I guess your take is more or less at odds with the entire elaborate category above? If my bare guess holds up, you'd have something in common with a few atheists:
I'm guessing atheism primarily is concerned with the former (elaborate), and agnosticism more found in the context of the latter (idealized) — both of which could be held by one person, and thus need clarification.

I am at odds, of course, with mainstream, ill-thought out, religious views; but I wouldn’t say that atheism itself is only or primarily concerned with those kinds of views: they don’t focus on the bad arguments for the God’s existence. Graham Oppy, for example, which you quoted before, certainly is not concerned with mainstream religious views and bad arguments: he concerned with rebutting his theist colleagues and defending his naturalism against them.

Those mentioned above aren't arguments, just poor explanations. Some reasons were listed.

Oh, got it. Well, I just didn’t find them convincing for the reasons already stated.

Hello Mww,

As I said before, it is true there would have been a ~12 x 10-8sec (dunno how to type exponents, sorry) discrepancy in elapsed time in my age upon flying to Rome, and yours, if you didn’t. Not that either of us would have noticed…..

But this concedes that it does affect you! I get that relative to your inertial frame nothing affected you, but the whole the point is that it is relative to other inertial frames; and if it affects you, then it must be explained (or accounted for) in Kantianism: I believe you saying, and correct me if I am wrong, that space and time themselves are not behaving differently (depending on where one is) but, rather, the description of space ‘curving’ and ‘time’ dilating are just shorthands of explanations of the behaviors of the content of one’s pure forms of experience (such as speed and gravitational displacement).

If your asterisk holds, mine should read, thing > sensation > intuition > understanding > representation, which would then be right if, in addition, representation is exchanged for knowledge. It’s a methodological sequence, start here, end there. In either case, the production of knowledge doesn’t belong here, re: the proposition, “reverse engineering of what was sensed produces knowledge of the mere thing”, is false.

I have a hard time with this, because there is no ‘thing’ and this denotes the thing-in-itself as completely irrelevant to what we are representing: so, in your view, the ‘things’ becomes effectively what the ‘things-in-themselves’ were supposed to be. Now the ‘things-in-themselves’ are just imaginative, unprovably existent, “objects” of the world.

If in the series as you’ve given it, starting at representation and working backwards is inconclusive, in that which of the two kinds of representation, phenomenon or conception, is not determined.

Exactly, which I would say that this entails that we do not reverse engineer, ever, the things-in-themselves but, rather, only the best guess based off of the limitations of our senses and understanding; for we cannot start anywhere else but the representation in “front” of us.

If the start is knowledge, on the other hand, working backwards arrives at understanding represented by conception, then intuition represented by phenomenon, then sensation, then the appearance of the thing, and the sequence is upheld.

What do you mean by “start with knowledge”? You cannot start with anything but the representations that you have (of the inner and outer senses) and reverse engineer, at best, what is necessary for the possibility of it. Anything else is pure imagination.

which is the mere appearance of some undetermined thing, hence the fallacy of knowledge production.

Exactly, why think, if Kant is right, that there are things-in-themselves? I think the root of the problem, as I noted before, is that Kant is presupposes a causal kind of relationship when transcendentally determining our a priori faculties and then using them to say that causality is only valid within those representations: kind of self-undermining.

Now reverse engineering isn’t engineering, but reversing time, which gives, say, in the case of the mosquito bite, that time before the mosquito bite. It should be clear we cannot say, after the sensation of being bitten, we were not bitten, but only that there was a time before being bitten.

Then it seems as though reverse engineering the process of producing a representation (e.g., sensibility, receptivity, intuition, cognition, etc.) since it requires time, which was supposed to be a pure form, and nothing else, of the faculty of intuition in the first place!

So….switching to science, surround yourself with all sorts of test equipment.

I don’t think science helps us with this dilemma one bit, since we are contrained to the two pure forms of our experience; and so it seems impossible to know, even transcendentally, that they are produced (themselves) by our intuition.

So….switching to science, surround yourself with all sorts of test equipment. The experiment is restricted to the reversal of sensation, again, say, of the mosquito bite, which focuses the equipment right down to the pores and little tiny hairs on the skin, at the epidermal level and the nerves at the posterior epidermal level. The sensation empirically manifests as an object having penetrated the skin and affecting the nerve endings, so reverse engineering that, is backing that object out of the skin, removing the affect on nerves, insofar as the non-penetration of the skin is exactly the same physical condition as not even having the particular sensation the experiment is meant to depose.

By reverse engineering, I am not saying to remove all the senses, for then we have nothing sensible left (as Berkeley rightly pointed out): instead, I mean that the object within our representations is the sensations (e.g., the sense of site of it, the sense of touch of it, etc.). What was sensed is only reverse engineered insofar as we converge our representations of it. I think it is very flawed to think that one can look at a mosquito, separate the sense of the feeling of the bite, and hold that the mosquito exists tangibly as (close to) what one saw of it but sans the sensations of touch that one had; for the sense of site is equally a sense, and thusly just as dependent on the subject as the sense of touch.

Hence, you don’t have knowledge of the thing to which the object of the sensation belongs, repeating the fallacy of knowledge production

This just circles back to the major problem that Kant demonstrates, but adamantly tried to dogmatically refute: that we cannot know a priori that we sense, intuit, nor cognize: we are stuck with being conditioned, ultimately, by the two pure forms of experience and they shape how we understand ourselves after that.

And you think we’re done here? Oh HELL no, we’re not!!! Expand the test equipment focus to include the immediate surrounding space. Now you got proof of the initial cause, now you perceive the thing to which the reverse-engineered, skin-penetrating, sensation-giving object belongs. Ask yourself whether, right here, right now, it can be said what that thing is.

No. Because this test is still dependent on your sense of site (at a minimum); take that away, and the mosquito returns back to a giant question mark: something insensible.

Hello Count,

Moral realism is irrelevant because there are no objective facts about morality. But isn't that the very question at hand?

I think you may have misunderstood the OP (which is totally fine): it is not that moral realism is insignificant because there are no facts but, rather, that if it were true it would be irrelevant. I am questioning the value of moral realism, and not its truth (or falsity).

In many conceptions of moral realism, as I will discuss further below, facts about good and evil are facts in the same sense the fact of who won the 1986 World Series is a fact

This is fine, and it should be. To me, a moral fact is an obligation which exists mind-independently.

It might be useful to differentiate here between propositions, statements about the world that are true or false, and states of affairs, descriptions of reality that either obtain or fail to obtain.
…
A proposition cannot be good or evil.

The content of a proposition can be evaluated to being good or evil, which I think has your idea of ‘states of affairs’ subsumed under it. Irregardless, I am not entirely following why this distinction needs to be made. If you claim that state of affair A is morally evil, then you are stating a proposition such that state of affair A is morally evil.

In terms of what you quoted from @Alkis Piskas, if I remember correctly, I differ with them fundamentally on what a proposition is (and thusly what a fact is). They seems to be claiming it is a proposal about the future, moral judgments are about the future, facts are about the past, and thusly (as the argument goes) moral judgments can never be facts. I find many things wrong with this.

First, the classic "God is the arbiter of what is good and evil." Here, we have a creator of the universe. We can ignore the Euthyphro question about whether God loves what is good because God is good or if what is good is good because it is beloved by the God(s)

Although, as an example, I totally understand what you are saying (although I don’t think it really pertains to the OP, as noted above); but I don’t think one can, if we were to discuss whether moral realism is compatible with God’s existence (which, again, is not anything related, at least directly, to the OP) then I would say that God and moral realism is incompatible; for either (1) God is the arbiter of moral judgments (and it is subjective) or (2) God’s nature (or something else) conditions God’s will such that it furnishes God with the moral goodness (like a platonic form) (and thusly is objective, but now God doesn’t exist because there is something greater than God, which defies God’s very basic definition of being that which no being is greater).

That is very interesting, as I am more sure that I have thoughts then that the world exists, and it seems kind of backwards to me to think otherwise.

Hello Mww,

Not in my inertial frame it doesn’t, hence, it is not an effect on me, hence I am not affected by it.

Yes and no: you are right that it doesn’t affect you insofar as you experience one continual stream of temporal processes, but it does affect you in the sense that your time is ‘sped up’ or ‘slowed down’ relative to another person. So the laws which Einstein describes are affecting your forms of experience, as opposed to the content thereof.

For what you said, I said “Nope”, which makes explicit we said very different things.

I know you think we are saying different things, but hear me out…

I am saying:

‘thing-in-itself’ > sensations > intuitions > understanding > representation

You seem to be saying the same thing, but noting:

‘thing-in-itself’ > sensations* > intuitions > understanding > representation

* The reverse engineering of what was sensed does not produce knowledge of the thing-in-itself but, rather, the mere ‘thing’.

Is that a fair assessment? Let me know where I go wrong if not.

With your mosquito analogy, I would say that the mosquito-in-itself is whatever affecting your senses, but the reverse engineering of the in-itself from the for-us only results in a ‘thing’: the site of it, the feeling of it, etc. comprise the mosquito-for-us, and we try to extrapolate what it is in-itself from that (but really only get the ‘thing’). I am not saying that our sensations of the thing-in-itself affects it, just that, rather, the thing-in-itself is what causes what we experience of it and our extrapolation of its ‘pure essence’ is the thing (and not the thing-in-itself).

Think of the science. For every bee sting or sweet taste there is a difference between what the senses do and what the brain does. But the brain can do stuff even if the senses don’t, and, the senses can do stuff the brain doesn’t recognize.

But how can you appeal to science to furnish you with evidence of those two separate faculties, when it is conditioned by the forms of human understanding (i.e., experience) in the first place?

We just love to say we KNOW the car is in the garage for no other reason than that’s where we left it. But it is an illegitimate claim, lacking any empirical warrant whatsoever. And THAT, my friend, is NOT speculative.

Speculations based off of empirical evidence is not pure speculation. Thusly, I don’t think it is purely speculative that the pure forms of our experience is space and time, but I do find it purely speculative that we have a faculty of intuition that is separate from a faculty of understanding. By ‘pure’, I mean it is indistinguishable from human imagination (or conceivability).

From my personal, well-worn armchair, this makes no sense at all…..

Very interesting, I don’t see how will would be a cognition but I do see how the actualizations of its intentions are. Why would Kant think will is a cognition? Why think that when one has clear introspective knowledge that what they will appears in the representations (of the outer world)?

Simplest explanation which says it all….if one likes K he won’t like S and if he likes S he won’t like K

Apparently so (:

Throw enough metaphysical reductionism at “memory” you arrive at “consciousness”, right?

I think you arrive at the imagination, which is a part of conscious experience for sure, but not equivalent to our (outer world) representative knowledge (nor experience).

Surely, you agree that there is some legitimate evidence which is not public (e.g., introspective knowledge, self-reflective knowledge, etc.)? Otherwise, I don't know why you think you have evidence that you have thoughts or emotions then, or any qualitative experience whatsoever since, of course, they are private knowledge.

Hello Jorndoe,

I didn't read those as deductive, but as evidence in support of the case. Though, I could of course have misread Christina.

I am not saying they are deductive arguments: even if they are inductive arguments they are still non sequiturs (viz., if the argument’s premises are accepted as true, the conclusion does not clearly follow at all from them, no different than me saying “I’ve seen a banana before, therefore unicorns don’t exist”).

That being said, these observations (evidence) can draw attention to the point in the opening post regarding elaborate versus idealized.

By “idealized”, it seems to me that you are referring to formal theological arguments for God, is that correct?

By “elaborate”, it seems (from your OP) that you are referring to laymen’s beliefs about God.

This is a fine generic and imprecise distinction (for not all laymen beliefs are distinct from formal arguments) for practical purposes, but I would say that your distinction just turns into the “elaborate” being the bad, vague arguments for God and the “idealized” being the good, clear arguments for God—so I think “elaborate” probably not a good term to express the former (nor “idealized”, as formal arguments are not in the business [necessarily] of idealism nor arguing for ideals).

I would say that when I refer to good arguments I have heard (although I am not convinced of them), I am referring to your “idealized” category (if I am understanding you correctly)--i.e., cosmological, ontological, teleological, etc. The best arguments for God that I find appealing are the one’s predicated off of idealism.

It becomes difficult to see the point of a proof of God's existence when it is construed as a proof of an individual's existence. Does one use arguments to become acquainted with an individual? Either that individual exists or it doesn't, and experience alone can tell us which. The project of a proof of God's existence thus ironically comes to appear meaningless to contemporary philosophers of religion.

I love Graham Oppy, and I haven’t read the whole article, but he/they are personifying God, which obviously makes no sense. A theist should not be arguing for the existence of a being when one could immediately experience, as God is posited in order to explain the underlying structure of reality itself. Secondly, yes, people use arguments to “become acquainted with” other people. I may not have met my cousin, rose, but I have ample evidence to support that she does, indeed exist: so a theist would say they can provide evidence of God’s existence without directly experiencing God.

I find "supernatural magic" and "G did it" to be non-explanations
…
They could (literally) be raised to explain anything, and therefore explain nothing.

Sort of. Bad arguments for God, or simply ill-thought out metaphysical explanations of the world, can fall prey to this sort of ‘God-of-the-gaps’ sort of explanation; but contemporary theists in theology do not do this at all.

Also, I can parody this argument with naturalism: someone could ‘explain’ a phenomena by presupposing it as ‘natural’ without actually explaining anything. So what? This just reflects a particularly bad argument, and not that all naturalism is bad argumentation.

When did such an explanation ever do away with ignorance/errors?

When we practice metaphysics correctly, it provides a useful theory of what we think reality is, and, of course, metaphysics is always speculative (so there is always, just like anything else, a degree of possible error).

But, hey, if you don’t like metaphysics, then that’s fine; but just remember you can’t coherently nor consistently hold naturalism, physicalism, etc. as well: it goes both ways.

Not themselves explicable, cannot readily be exemplified (verified), do not derive anything differentiable in particular, ...

There are plenty of ways to verify or illegitimize arguments for God: they just aren’t scientific.

I forgot to respond to the fence analogy: sorry!

Even if it’s the same fence, your experience of it is different, which reduces to the fact all your experience is ever going to be, regarding that fence, is predicated on your perception of it, no matter who does what to it.

This doesn't make sense to me: for the reason that you perceived it differently is exactly because someone did something to it.

So….say the fence is a different color but you don’t drive by. How you gonna get an impression from the fence you didn’t drive by? Now it is that the condition of the fence changed but your experience of it didn’t.

You didn't have a new experience of it that was different than your previous experience because you haven't experienced it again. Once you do, then it will have a different color. Are you talking about memories?

Hello Mww,

With respect to Einstein vs. Kant, it appears as though, to me, that you are accepting Einstein’s equations but through the lens that they describe merely the a priori structure of our representative faculties, is that correct?

I’m not directly affected by, therefore care very little for, e.g., gravitational lensing and assorted SR/GR relations

But you are: time dilates even at the scale of our normal lives.

For any object, your experience of it, how it is known/what it is know as by you, is predicated on your intelligence alone, the state or condition of the thing itself be as it may.

But doesn’t the thing-in-itself have to ‘appear’ to you in order to perform those logical operations on the sensations of it?

(Nope. The thing impacts us)

I appreciate the elaboration, but it seems like, to me, we are saying the same thing. You seem to be calling the aftermath of the thing-in-itself ‘appearing’ to us as a ‘thing’, and the sensations are what comprise the ‘thing’; whereas I am saying that the sensations are what comprise our limited knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Aren’t we saying the same thing?

The “impact” trigger our receptivity and sensibility to receive and produce raw input of, within the limits of what it is capable of, the thing-in-itself.

This sounds like the same thing I said, but why postulate a ‘thing’ then (on top of a thing-in-itself)? The ‘raw input’ is of the thing-in-itself, which isn’t necessarily a 1:1 raw input of the it.

3. The intuition and the understanding both process the raw input.
(Nope. Intuition processes the raw input, understanding processes the representations of the raw input. Intuition informs of the raw material of the thing; understanding informs that intuitions can or cannot have conceptions related to them.)

I don’t understand how this isn’t pure speculation: what exact about one’s experience implies that the intuition processes the raw input and the understanding processes those representations? How do you even know there are two different faculties doing it?

Yep, him. Although, upon closer inspection, it turns out $9.8M was the asking price, not the sale price. It was for “A Walk in the Woods”, 1971, currently held by a museum gallery, purchased from a legitimate former owner for….(gasp) $1000.

Niceee.

Another question for you: I find schopenhauer’s argument compelling that we know the ‘thing-in-itself’ insofar as we can introspectively access that our will is what is getting represented in our outer representations, such that the outer representations are not completely cut off from our knowledge. I would presume that a Kantian would think that the immaterial events (such as thoughts) which one has is somehow still conditioned by their faculty of understanding (but not intuition): how do you go about explaining that?

Hello Jorndoe,

Although I am not familiar with that book, I would like to just share some brief comments on the 10 reasons you expounded for not believing in God.

consistent replacement of supernatural explanations of the world with natural ones

I find that these terms are regularly deployed in vague and superficial manners, where either can be used to consistently and coherently explain reality: it just depends on how loose or precise the definitions are of them.

inconsistency of world religions

This just simply doesn’t entail that God doesn’t exist: it entails, if granted as true, that ‘world religions’ are false. Seems like a non sequitur to me.

weakness of religious arguments, explanations, and apologetics

If we are talking about mainstream apologetics, arguments, etc., then I agree; but so do most theists I talk too! If you are claiming that arguments for theism are all weak, then I don’t buy that. I have heard sophisticated and rational arguments for and against God’s existence.

increasing diminishment of god

Based off of the ‘rawstory’ article you linked, I believe you are referring to humanity being able to explain what was once called ‘supernatural’ with ‘natural’ events. Although this may prima facie count in favor of a physicalistic metaphysical theory, I think there are plenty of theistic arguments that hold weight as well.

Likewise, some people (like myself) would place God in nature as nature: so I find it to be a false dilemma to say that either (1) God exists and there are supernatural events or (2) we can explain everything naturally.

fact that religion runs in families

Again, this doesn’t entail God doesn’t exist. If someone were to argue that God exists because they were taught that traditionally by their family, then that is a bad argument for God’s existence.

physical causes of everything we think of as the soul

One can believe in souls without being a theist, and theists can believe that we don’t have souls (albeit less mainstream and stereotypical).

Also, as a neo-schopenhauerian, I reject the notion that our representations of the world exhaust it, and metaphysically the other side is mind: so I quite literally accept that from the side of the ‘physical’ (which is our representations of the world) we should find no evidence of a soul, but that, from introspection, we realize that the representations are of the soul (of mental events). So kind of a false dilemma again for me.

complete failure of any sort of supernatural phenomenon to stand up to rigorous testing

It’s a metaphysical claim, so one should never expect to study it empirically within our representations: it is (usually) meant to give the best account of the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.

slipperiness of religious and spiritual beliefs

Sure. But why does this convince one that God doesn’t exist, as opposed to people believing false things?

failure of religion to improve or clarify over time

I get the feeling that the title should have been ‘why I am not religious in any mainstream way’ and not ‘why I don’t believe in God’. Religion, as a mainstream institution, is not a science nor is necessarily a means of refining our knowledge of God (if God exists).

complete lack of solid evidence for god's existence

This is entirely dependent on what one constitutes as “solid evidence”. If they are expecting to scientifically observe God, then I think I have more of a problem with their criteria for knowledge.

Hello Philosophim,

Let me take your second post as an example.
…

And yet we've already established that what is real does not depend upon a subject. As I noted earlier, this argument that truth requires a subject is just the nature of a subject using language to describe objects. That's just grammar.

The problem is that you are saying your definition fits the colloquial settings better (which you strongly advocate that we stick to the colloquial definitions), which I broke down, in my second post, why it is not. Secondly, you are still conflating a sentence being contingent on a subject and a sentence referencing something which is contingent on a subject, which you insist is a mere ‘grammatical issue’.

So, how do you go about reconciling your definition with its alleged incompatibility with a sentence such as “its real that the universe would exist without me”? I don’t think you adequately responded to that part.

Bob, very simply does the thing that we reference still exist despite us not seeing it?

It depends on what you are referencing. If I reference another thought with a thought, then no. If I reference a ‘tree-in-itself’ with a thought, then yes.

Here is a breakdown of the normative idea of truth under JTB from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Everything in that paragraph and section in the standard encyclopedia is compatible with every major theory of truth (e.g., pragmatic, correspondence, coherentist, etc.): it simply noted that (1) truth is independent of our opinions, (2) truth is independent of our justification for it being true, (3) truth is is independent of our knowledge, and (4) truth, within the context of JTB, is being deployed in a metaphysical as opposed to epistemological sense (viz., it is about how things are, as opposed to how we come to know them).

Which part of that did you find incompatible with my theory? And where did you think it referenced your theory?

Then I have no idea and see no value in defining truth as you do. Why are you defining it this way Bob?

I think I have already stated my reasons, but here they are again:

1. Captures better what people mean by truth (e.g., the truth of the matter is always, within a claim, a referencing of a thought corresponding to reality).

2. Something that simply exists, simply exists: it is redundant to say ‘it is true’ and incoherent (since one is referencing a claim with ‘it’ while simultaneously claiming ‘true’ signifies nothing about thought). Asking what it means for ‘something to be true’ presupposes that something as a proposition, which is a thought (in the form of a truth-apt sentence).

If I observe or have an opinion that I believe is true, yet you tell me that it is false, then you are telling me truth does not care about my opinion or observation.

Truth is independent of opinion. But this doesn’t entail specifically your theory of truth.

It is true that something exists which you observed to be an orange ball. There is the truth of your observation "seeing orange" and the truth of the light which entered into your eyes.

Yes, but this response is missing the mark: you were asking if ‘that’ existed independently of observation, which you are now agreeing it doesn’t (completely).

I am trying to give you all the benefit I can in this, but I do not see any other claim when you state:
(Me)A tree is a combination of matter and energy.

(Bob) A tree, as a tangible object, is the representation; and not the thing-in-itself

What you quoted here does not in any way entail any sort of argument of semantic dependency on subjects: I am not following why you think that: could you elaborate? Things-in-themselves vs. representations is a metaphysical distinction, not semantic.

Also, metaphysically, I don't think trees are a combination of matter and energy. Scientifically, that is the model we have of reality, but I don't think science is capable of penetrating reality far enough to give us metaphysical insight.

when I am pointing out the thing-in-itself in the context of the conversation.
…
I am not referring to the "tree" as a representation of the thing in itself.

Ahh, I see. So I am using ‘things-in-themselves’ in the traditional way: they are whatever exist as themselves and are never directly perceived by us. The tree-for-you is a representation of the tree-in-itself, and they don’t necessarily match 1:1 (e.g., the tree-in-itself does not have green leaves, but the tree-for-you does).

The truth of that thing in itself's existence does not depend upon myself as a subject.

The thing-in-itself, as opposed to the thing of which you experience, does not depend on yourself as a subject, but object within your experience of it (which is a representation of it and the only candidate that you could ‘single out’ as a ‘that’) is.

Hello Mww,

Sorry the for belated response, but it took some time for me to give your response the proper thought it deserves.

Firstly, if you think that Einstein and Kant’s “views are incompatible”, then how do you accept general/special relativity as a Kantian? Are you saying that you accept the empirical aspects but reshape them, so to speak, under a Kantian metaphysical outlook? It just seems like, on the one hand, you are saying the Einstein’s math is sound, but then turning around and saying Einstein’s views are incompatible with your own.

Secondly, I desperately need a refresher on the process that is taken by our representative faculties under Kantianism (under your interpretation of it), all the way from the thing-in-itself to the representation. You said the things-in-themselves are “NOT a thing of which we have a sensation”; but, as far as I understood, the sensations (the raw input) are a approximate of the thing-in-itself.

My exposition of Kantianism with regards to this representational process would be as follows:

1. The thing-in-itself “impacts” us.
2. The “impact” trigger our receptivity and sensibility to receive and produce raw input of, within the limits of what it is capable of, the thing-in-itself.
3. The intuition and the understanding both process the raw input.
4. A representation is the aftermath of the aforesaid process.

How would you explain it?

I’m ok with Nature being restricted to the possibility of experience.

Ok, then that’s fine. I was interpreting it as capital N nature.

Your namesake. The one I asked about awhile ago? One of his pieces just sold…….$9.8M.

Are you referring to a Bob Ross painting?

@Philosophim

I just thought of a clearer way of expressing the implicit use of correspondence theory of truth in colloquial speech, and just wanted to briefly share (and hear your thoughts).

Let's take your statement "Its true that the universe would exist without me.", which is, from your point of view, an expression of truth which is not contingent on thought. There are two aspects of my interpretation of that sentence that I think are worth elucidating to you:

1. "Its" is referencing a thought (i.e., a claim); and
2. "true" is signifying the reality of what is referenced as "its".

I think this is important to our conversation because I think, for your theory to be compatible with this colloquial sentence, one of the above must be false (i.e., either "its" does not reference a thought or "true" is not signifying the reality of whatever is referenced by "its"). Of course, this is presupposing that one is trying to fit their theory of truth into common language, which I believe you are definitely a proponent of that (based off of what you have said).

By my lights, if both of the above are true, then 'true' is signifying the reality of what is referenced in a thought which, in turn, directs the person interpreting the sentence to examine the thought and take its claim about reality to agree with reality: thusly, it entails that truth is not merely 'what is' but signifies the process of correspondence of a thought with reality.

I don't see it very plausible that either of the above are false, let alone one of them; so if, for you, one is (by your lights) false then it would help understand your view better if you elaborated on it. If I am just completely missing the mark, then perhaps elaborating on that would help me better orientate towards whatever you are thinking.

Are you saying that you disagree with basic embryonic devlopment?

No, I agree with it; but it does not make any claims metaphysically about whether one is an immaterial mind or a mind-independent organism. By my lights, most forms of idealism are compatible with "basic embryonic development" (such as mine).

My question pertains to what you mean, semantically, by 'cognition': I can assure you that I am not intending to tie you up in sophistries or semantics here, nor is this a trick question. If you say "just the standard one from webster, which is <...>", then that's fine. If it is a more robust definition (like the 'understanding' and 'reason' for Kant or the physicalist typical usage, for example), then that is fine too. I just want to get clarification on it so I make sure I am understanding your position.

Hello Chiknsld,

Yes it is. The reason I am asking for clarification is because there are two major ways the term 'cognition' is used, and I have no means of determining (without guessing) which one you mean: thinking (cognition) as an active participator in the construction of one's representations (e.g., Kantianism, Hegelianism, etc.) or a passive after-the-math self-reflective thinking about the representations & internal activity (e.g., the more modern, physicalistic sense of the term). I am presuming, if I had to guess, that you mean it in the latter sense, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.

For me, as an objective idealist, I am not certain that my existence precedes my thinking (cognition); but if you mean it in that latter sense then that's fine and there's no need to dive deeper into this (for all intents and purposes) as I can go with that definition.

I appreciate your clarification!

I see that you removed in #1 the clarification I had in parenthesis: was that incorrect? Do you mean something else by 'intrinsic'?

Likewise, I see you changed #2 to 'cognition': was I misunderstanding your use of that term with 'self-reflective knowledge'? If so, then what do you mean by 'cognition'? Prior to brain functionality? Prior to the ability to reason? Prior to the understanding? Etc.

Hello Chiknsld,

ChatGPT (;

I appreciate your response, but I think we may need to take this a bit slower. I propose that we just try and tackle our discussion about 'natural rights' first and then we can move on to 'ethics' vs. 'morality'. Is that alright with you?

With respect to 'natural rights', upon reading your response in full, I am understanding a 'natural right', under your view, as having the properties of:

1. Being intrinsic (to the nature or perhaps existence of the possessor).
2. Being prior to moral judgments.
3. Being prior to self-reflective knowledge (which is what I am understanding you to be meaning by 'cognition'); and
4. Being prior to ethics.

Before I comment on any of this, I would like to pause here and see if this is an accurate representation of your position. If not, then please let me know what properties I missed, which properties are wrong (or need refurbishment), or/and if there is anything I am missing in general.

I look forward to your response,
Bob

As an idealist, I would say that so long as a human being is alive they are conscious: so it becomes, for me, a question of whether I consider the fertilized egg to be alive itself (as a human being); which I am, as mentioned before, unsure of, but advocate that it is prudent to treat it as though it is.

Hello Chiknsld,

Hi Bob, this is merely basic ethics that one learns in college.
…
Try to remember that it would be “unethical” to turn morals into laws. It is not a judgement of morality but rather ethicality.

Again, even if you heard of it in college, it is a self-undermining argument (for reasons I already stated), and is only used to attempt to illegitimize other people’s morals that one doesn’t agree with.

There’s nothing wrong with voting or trying to advocate for passing laws which agree with one’s morals.

Morals are individual whereas ethics are based on the morals we agree upon. Ethics are consensus based (this is why laws are only based upon ethics).

That we, in a republic, use consensus based law making does not negate the fact that we make our voting decisions based off of our morals. Nothing I said excludes the possibility of having such a republic system.

Turning your own personal morals into law would be tyrannical (which is why unanimous consensus is required).

Not in the sense of a government tyranny; but we do, always, invoke our morals when determining what to vote for.

Bob, If you study basic embryonic development you will know that the heart of the body is the first to develop.

An example: you have the natural right to live.

Yes, but just because you have a heart, it does not immediately follow that one has any rights. What about them having a heart or being alive gives them an intrinsic right as opposed to one granted by other human beings?

You are born with natural given rights.

Well, I am no further, unfortunately, in understanding what your argument is for them; and as far as I can tell we don’t have any. Nature doesn’t give us rights: he give them to each other.

Hello Mww,

Einstein used mathematics to prove if there is a stationary clock here and a moving clock there, there must be a change relative only to the clocks but not as an experience of the subject, who only experiences the verification of the mathematical logic but not the relativity of the clock’s times to each other, which is a function of Nature alone without any regard whatsoever for principles of human reason.

But wouldn’t Einstein’s argument also be explained metaphysically as:

Kant understood perfectly well if there was a clock here and a clock there, one moved and the other didn’t, there must be the experience of change in a perceiving subject, the change relative to the clocks themselves utterly irrelevant except as the representation of an internal logical human principle.

It seems like they are incompatible views, but Einstein’s empirically verified views can be reconciled with Kantianism insofar as one denies Einstein’s metaphysical views.

Furthermore, upon the successful exhibition of that which was formally only mathematical logic, makes necessary actual real things, which again removes the thing-in-itself objection, re: Hafele–Keating, 1971.

I didn’t understand this part: could you please elaborate?

Representations are somewhat accurate….yes, but only of the sensations evoked in us of a thing, not a thing-in-itself

I have a hard time parsing this, as the sensations are supposed to be the raw input of things-in-themselves, so are you saying that after the things-in-themselves have conformed to our sensibility we have accurate representions of that?

I figured you’d glean from “the properties of real things is fathomed” presupposes those properties, which makes explicit that which fathoms cannot be the source of that which is fathomed.

Yeah, I mean I think kantianism operates implicitly under the assumption that causality is not merely the pure forms of our intuition: otherwise, I don’t know why a Kantian would even think that they are “fathoming” properties of a thing-in-itself, which has “impacted” their senses in a manner that resulted in a process of interpretation (i.e., creation of a representation). This is one thing I think Schopenhauer got right: (physical) causality only pertains to the representations, and so there is absolutely no reason to believe that things-in-themselves are impressing upon our senses.

What….I can’t free-wheel with language, just a little? Nature doesn’t technically “show” me anything, but when things make their presence perceivable to me, are they not shown to me?

But isn’t ‘nature’ the totality of the ‘things-in-themselves’, which you equally claim you know nothing about?

And why should Nature be an incomprehensible nothing? If I can think a conceivable representation then it is necessarily something, and it being a conception that doesn’t immediately contradict any other conception it must be comprehensible. Right?

Only if by ‘nature’ your claims are restricted to the possibility of experience, and not universally valid (I guess).

Sorry for the dialectical delay.

Absolutely no worries! I appreciate our conversations, and would much rather have a substantive response that takes a while than a quick superficial one!

Hello Chiknsld,

Hi Bob, morality is personal. Ethics apply to everyone.

I disagree with this ‘morality’ vs. ‘ethics’ distinction exactly because of this:

No Bob, you cannot turn personal morals into laws, that would be unethical.

To me, this is a semantic move to justify your own morals and while invalidating other peoples’ morals; for you in order to ban morals from laws (which is a political move), then one must invoke the moral judgment that one should not invoke moral judgments in legalities—which is clearly, when put that way, self-undermining.

In other words, I don’t think your argument can respond to “why should I not invoke morals into laws” without invoking a moral judgment.

Your natural rights come from your physical existence which persists and also precedes your cognition

I didn’t understand this: could you elaborate? Perhaps give an example of a ‘natural right’ that is derived from one’s ‘physical existence’ that ‘precedes’ one’s ‘cognition’.

Social convention does not override the natural given rights of the individual as social convention is merely a subset of the natural given right of every individual.

How, under your view, are natural rights not a subset of social conventions? What properties do they have that make them precede social conventions?

Hello Philosophim,

Yes, and I disagreed with your interpretation, and noted looking to the Gettier argument's idea of truth gives the normative view of truth.

Gettier arguments don’t demonstrate your theory of truth: it is compatible with both of ours. Gettier was demonstrating the faultiness of justification in relation to truth. I can say that, in any Gettier argument, that the justification failing to prove the truth is because the justification for the claim corresponding to reality was insufficient for demonstrating that it actually does.

And I think the only thing I can spot is that you want to say truth is not material reality, which I will get to later.

Although I know you think it is the crux of our conversation and I will continue to converse about it, I want to disclaim again that our metaphysical differences (with respect to ontology) are irrelevant. Correspondence theories are compatible with metaphysical theories that posit a material world (beyond our conscious experience). As a matter of fact, typically it is viewed that idealists cannot hold correspondence theories; and my only point here is that our conversation about whether a material, mind-independent object exists does not matter for the conversation about truth, no different than how morality doesn’t matter either.

The idea that truth is redundant with reality and therefore should have its definition changed is an opinion.

It is less parsimonious, incoherent with respect to the basic norms of semantics, and the terms are not merely synonyms (under your view)(as a synonym can be a word which is not equivalent to another word but can be exchange loosely for it).

This is the general understanding of truth as referred to in JTB. Truth is true irrelevant of your justification, or correlation to it.

Again, yours is not referenced in JTB. Secondly, I agree that truth is not contingent on our justification for it: I never claimed that.

What is true does not care about our opinion or observations

That’s false. It is true that I saw an orange ball today, but not that an orange ball exists outside of observation, as color does not exist as a property of the ball in reality (even under your view). So I disagree that it is not contingent upon observations (in a holistic sense): like you even said, truth encompasses observations, but you would be excluding it if you said it if it was independent of observation. If by this you just mean that you either observed X or you didn’t, and that isn’t contingent on you opinion of the matter, then I totally agree.

For myself, I have not seen a compelling case in removing the word truth as something which exists independently of subjects.

Saying that is exists dependent on subjects (to some extent) does not mean that it is contingent on our opinions. Either the claim corresponded to reality or it didn’t: independent of our opinions on the matter (i.e., other claims we make about it).

The expression of grammar in language is not an argument

You are making a false analogy between language and (my definition of) truth. You saying that my argument for truth is no different than arguing that objects corresponding to words are subjective because the word is subjective—which is obviously false. They are not analogous. The word references something which is not dependent on a subject; but ‘true’ references a thought and an object and compares them.

That’s why I said “its” is referring to a thought, and it makes no sense to say “its true <...>” if that is taken away. I am not merely saying that describing things makes no sense without words. To make it analogous to your language example, it would have to be an analysis of a word and whether it corresponds to the said object (in the sense that the word actually semantically references it). This ‘word-to-object comparison’ would be contingent on the word (and thusly the subject) and the object, just like truth.

I think its absolutely the crux, because I can see no other reason why you would argue for the notion of truth in such a way. There is zero gained utility in it beyond minor personal preference, unless you have issue with the general idea of "things in themselves".

I’ve already explained the benefits: it is more parsimonious and captures what we mean (implicitly) by truth better. We only say something ‘is true’ when relating a thought to something in reality, such that it corresponds: to use your definition (with consistency) one would have to come up with a different way of expressing it with language, which I think just counts in favor of my definition being better suited for colloquial settings.

Lets say that I'm walking along a road and I see a pole with a flat board and some lines on it that look like writing. We both agree this is real. I point to "it". I say, "That". Does "that" exist even if I haven't seen it? Yes.

This is too vague. For example, I take it that you agree that color is not objective, in the sense that the object does not contain the property of color which we attribute to it (e.g., I see a red ball, but that ball isn’t red: it is reflected a wavelength that my eye interprets as red). Imagine the pole is red, and you point it out with “that” and ask “is ‘that’ real despite my conscious experience of it?”. Well, no, the redness is not a property of the “that” in reality. Now, imagine extending that for all qualitative properties, which is all conscious experience, of the objects. E.g., does ‘that’, as a tangible pole, exist despite me consciously experiencing it? Well, if we grant (which I know you won’t) that it is analogous to color, then no. Does it not exist at all beyond our conscious experience of it: no, I would say the information about it is accurate enough: it just isn’t ontologically a tangible, red pole.

This insistence that there cannot be a tree in a forest if no one is around only has teeth as a grammatical note

I am not sure why this would be true. I am not arguing that a tree doesn’t fall (literally as a material object) beyond conscious experience because language is dependent on subjects: that’s a horrible argument.

there's still that thing in itself that we would have called a tree falling in what we would have called a forest.

But the thing-in-itself does not have to literally fall to still objectively exist, no different than color doesn’t have to literally be a property of the thing-in-itself.

No one ever said reality had to be a material world. Reality and truth are simply what is.

I never said it did, and this is why I didn’t find it relevant for us to get into our metaphysical differences. My theory of truth is independent of my idealism. As a matter of fact, I developed it when I was still a physicalist.

we've solved none of the problems we still have with knowledge.

Although we can get into trying to tackle gettier problems, and such, I never was claiming that my theory of truth (nor yours) solves them. One’s theory of truth is a prerequisite for their theory of knowledge: not vice-versa.

Hello Philosophim,

You seem to think that your definition ‘truth’ is predominant in society and that mine is not; but they are both aspects of the standard colloquial notion of truth. I already shared the definitions as per the Webster dictionary, and, as one more, a simple Google search (which gives colloquial definitions at the top) defined ‘truth’ as ‘that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality’ in the second definition. So I don’t see how you can rightly claim that my definition is not circling around in the colloquial ecosystem as a predominant notion. Thusly, when you keep saying things like:

This is a normative notion of truth that will be accepted by the majority of the people.
…
That's not a reason to change the identify of truth as "what is".
…
Did you say anything above that couldn't just be resolved to the normative notion I put forward?

You are just presupposing one of the things under contention.

I also would like to point out that your use of ‘subjective’ truth is absolutely not the common notion of that term. People tend to mean by ‘subjective truth’ that it is relative to the subject, or a whimsical opinion, and not ‘the experience of a subject’ which is also ‘objective true’. I agree, though, that people use ‘objective truth’ in the sense of something independent of opinion, factual, or independent of desires, thoughts, etc.

Nevertheless, I don’t think that we should strictly always use colloquial definitions for the sake of keeping it immediately comprehensible for the public; for there are a lot of situations where the terms need to be technical to encapsulate its entire refined conceptual meaning. So, even if ‘truth’ was predominantly viewed as ‘what is’ in society, I have already elaborated on why this definition is insufficient—some of which you passed over as ‘minor quibble’:

1. Is redundant with the term ‘reality’
2. Does not completely capture its colloquial usage (e.g., saying “bob’s claim is true” makes less sense if ‘truth’ is ‘reality’, as it is implying that it is true in virtue of the fact that bob’s claim corresponds with reality—but ‘true’ no longer relates to correspondence under your definition). — Bob Ross

I don't think you made a strong enough case for me to agree with these. I can definitely see some agreeing with you, but not the majority. But this is a minor quibble.

Both of those, taking in conjunction, offer ample evidence that, if true, your definition is insufficient; so I don’t think you can just skip over those two: please demonstrate the falsity or why they are irrelevant/insignificant to our discussion.

I can say, "Its true that the universe would exist without me."
…
"Its true that there are things existent outside of our thoughts".

“Its” refers to a claim, and so this sentence makes no sense without it. So I don’t think you have provided examples here of an expression of something that is true which is not being related to thought (implicitly or explicitly).

. Lets look at the notion of noting that the descriptor of true and false would not need to exist if there were no beings that. Why is that special for truth?

I never said it was special. The difference, however, between words and truth is that the former is only contingent on subjects.

Your notion is just describing that we create identities, and without people to create identities, identities wouldn't exist.

No, I am not saying that truth is equivalent nor analogous to language. I am saying that the thought corresponding to what it references about reality is what it means for something to be ‘true’, and not that we create identities; but, of course, a ‘thought’ is a ‘created identity’ (in your terminology), and so if ‘truth’ is defined with any contingency on ‘thought’, then, naturally, it is to some extent contingent on the subject (which I have already noted).

There is subjective truth, my experience, and objective truth, that which is outside of my experience. Its simple, coherent, and everyone understands it

Couple things to note:

1. I didn’t say simplicity is an objective epistemic norm: I said parsimony, which is very different.
2. Both of our definitions are coherent; so I am not following that part of your claim (that it is somehow in your favor with that regard).
3. With words, sticking to common language is ideal, so prima facie this does count (sort of) in favor of your view. But I think my is also very aligned with the common notion.

4. The common notion of truth is incomplete and vague; so it is not most parsimonious to stick with it, albeit simpler. I think mine is perfectly parsimonious for accounting for what ‘truth’ is (i.e., I don’t think it posits entities without necessity). However, yours does posit an extraneous entity: the definition is redundant with the definition of ‘reality’.

this is a simple observation that without subjects, identities created by subjects don't exist

No. The point was that the correspondence theory applies to everything, including what pertains to subjective operations in reality. There is no ‘subjective’ vs. ‘objective’ truth distinction under my view, because I don’t think it makes sense. The subjective truth as “my experience” is subsumed under absolute truth and is no different, in its nature as ‘truth’, as this objective truth that you mentioned (viz., reality doesn’t care about my thoughts about my thoughts, which also fits your definition of ‘objective truth’ but since it is just about my thoughts it is also ‘subjective’ truth—and now we have even more redundancies and unnecessary turbidity). Positing them both makes it sound like there are two natures to truth, or types of truth: which is false. There is only one truth.

We may have to, as I think this is the crux.

I think it is completely irrelevant, as it simply depicts our metaphysical differences (which we are both aware of at this point) that do not affect in any way our definitions of truth. However, with that being said, I am more than happy to dive into this if you would like (if you believe it would help)!

Identities are our representations of what is real so we can understand them. What is real does not cease to exist just because our identities do.

Correct. I agree.

A tree is a combination of matter and energy.

A tree, as a tangible object, is the representation; and not the thing-in-itself. So I disagree here (assuming you mean that reality herself contains such a tangible tree).

Whether we're there to observe and identity it or not, that matter and energy exists, and has a state change.

The information about the tree falling is independent of conscious experience of it; but not the material (i.e., tangible object) falling of the tree to the material ground.

I can say this using normative language, and its clear for everyone to understand. You note that reality exists apart from subjects. Aren't we essentially saying the same thing, but I'm able to do so more efficiently?

Saying the same thing about ‘truth’? No. About reality being independent of our observance: yes. About reality as a material world being independent of our observance: no.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Bob

Hello RogueAI,

You think a zygote has the same moral status as a thirty year old woman? They're both equally persons?

It depends on what you are exactly meaning by ‘moral status’, but based off of your example, I would say no. They can have different moral consideration in different contexts while both remaining persons.

Suppose fire breaks out at a fertility clinic where a million fertilized eggs are stored and an orphanage with ten kids present. Where do you send the town's only fire truck?

I would absolutely send it to the orphanage, because (1) I have to choose which to save, (2) the kids are significantly more developed conscious beings than the fertilized eggs, and (3) I am presuming that there is no culpability worthy of any consideration in this case (since most young kids we don’t blame as much for the same mistakes and I doubt any of them are arsonists).

I doubt very much you would prioritize the fertility clinic over the orphanage, so isn't that suggestive that fertilized eggs are not people?

Not at all. Two beings can be persons and one can be prioritized, within a context, over the other. Being a person does not mean that they have an absolute right to their life.

For example, if I have to choose between saving my mother from an active shooter or a stranger: I am 100% of the time picking my mother because she is my mother. The stranger and my mother are both persons, but I don’t, in that situation, have to treat them 100% equally (i.e., I don’t have to just save the person that is closest, to be fair or something).

But the NIH has an article that says it's not clear at all.

You are confusing academic articles with academic consensus. The consensus is that it is bad: period. But there are, of course, always students, undergrads, grads, and professionals diving in deeper and posting articles on different views that contend the consensus. One should not believe an article of contention over the consensus.

If it were the consensus, then would you really anticipate that the CDC would say that there is absolutely no safe limit to drink while pregnant?

Hello 180 Proof,

If X deprived of Y, then do Z in order to restore X by mitigating Y

To me, whether it is expressing something subjective is if the hypothetical is an operation of the mind as opposed to something mind-independent. So, for me, even if that were hardwired into our biology (which I don’t think is true for all people) it would be contingent on one’s mind since I hold that biological operations are mind-operations (metaphysically). For your view, as I noted before, if you hold that this hypothetical is a product of mind-independent operations that governs our actions (as a mind), then it would be a categorical imperative: not hypothetical. In other words, the hypothetical, holistically, is a categorical imperative (viz., the hypothetical is deployed as some function of our mind independent processes).

Whether or not one chooses to do a moral, or right, action (i.e. a hypothetical imperative to reduce harm) is no more "subjective" than whether or not one chooses to solve a mathematical equation because both are, I argue contra the OP, equally objective operations.

If by this you are referring to the above hypothetical as an actually ingrained judgment which mind-independently governs us, then I agree that it would be objective. However, for me, since I am an idealist, I hold that we do many things which are subjective (mind-dependent) but not within “our” (as the ego) control in any meaningful sense of the term: minds, for me, operate in very consistent and regular ways: its just higher-order aspects (like the ego, our facutly of reason, etc.) that tend to operate quite whimsically or in a manner that ‘we’ (as the ego) feel we are in control of.

Does the following change your mind at all about alcohol and pregnancy?

No. It is very clear that drinking is always bad for the child, and the CDC clearly reflects that: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/fasd/alcohol-use.html#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20known%20safe,exposed%20to%20alcohol%20before%20birth.

People, academically, can investigate it further and right articles on it and perhaps overturn the current consensus later on, which is totally fine; but, right now, as it stands, alcohol is bad for children in the womb.

Also, do you think that a fetus in the first month of development is a person?

Before and on week 4, I do not have any means, by my lights, to determine any autonomous (or partially autonomous) movements of the embryo, but that doesn't entail it is not a person yet (just that we cannot detect it). I would say, from a standpoint of prudence, that conception be taken as the indicator of life (which I tie with personhood) and so I consider the developing human a life and person from conception, although it may not be prior to the 4th week.

Hello chiknsld,

Most assuredly it would be unethical but I draw a strong line between ethics and morality.

We just have very different definitions of ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’, which is totally fine. For me, I use them interchangeably as the study of, generally speaking, what we ought to do (although, yes, epistemic norms are technically different but subsumed under this definition).

I don’t think of ethics as fundamentally community focused, I view the community as driven by one’s morals and the morals that socially evolves over time (which, of course, can be very community focused).

History shows us the value of civil disobedience but in general I do align my morals with the law because I have trust in the law and in Lady Justice.
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If abortion were illegal then I would say that it is wrong to do so, but in the end it is still her natural given right. In such a case she might practice civil disobedience.

I see!

It is said that morals lead to ethics but I only consider the law as based in ethics, not morals.

I disagree: if one thinks an action is immoral, then they should consider it unethical. And if they considerate unethical, then they should attempt to regulate it (legally) no matter how imperfectly. Perhaps, in some situations it is legally infeasible to regulate, but one should try.

To me, it makes no sense to say “I think you shouldn’t do this, as a matter of not my personal goals but as something you are also obligated to do, but you should be legally allowed to do it”. Those seem a bit incoherent with each other.

I would say that without context, the deliberate pregnancy and killing of a fetus is wholly immoral. This immorality does not usurp her natural given rights.
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It means that that her rights come from nature itself, whereas morality does not.

Morality is relative whereas natural rights are facts that cannot be disproven. They are self-evident.

Interesting, it sounds like, and correct me if I am wrong, you are claiming that ‘natural rights’ are amoral (or exist in some ‘space’ outside of morality and ethics), of which are self-evident; whereas, I would say rights are always predicated on morality, values, and ethics—and there are no self-evident moral judgments.

How can it not be disproven that one does not have the right absolutely over their bodily autonomy? I don’t see how any moral (or ‘natural right’) judgments are incapable of refutation. Could you please elaborate?

A physicalist would say 'mind is physical' (just as processes like digestion and vision are physical).

I don't think this quite depicts physicalism, as it implies (usually) that it exists mind-independently. So saying 'mind is physical' is shorthand, by my lights, for 'the mind is "emergent", a product of, a process of, etc. mind-independent entities'.

For me, I would say that 'mind is natural', but not that it is 'physical' nor 'material'.

Right, but my question is not whether it's immoral for pregnant women to not eat right/smoke/drink, but whether you think it should be illegal for them to do so.

When pregnant:

Eating some junk food should not be illegal.
Drinking should be illegal.
Smoking should be illegal.

Hello Mww,

Was there ever a thought you didn’t think?

Yes: other peoples’ thoughts.

Of course not, which is to say every thought of yours was both a priori and certain, which is its form. Now if the content of each thought is included, it follows necessarily that the object thought has the very same certainty as it relates to its form

I see.

All logic to be thought….which is all mathematics is…..needs its content verified empirically. So the opinion reduces to, mathematical propositions refer to understanding for their certainty, so they do not refer to reality, and, insofar as mathematical propositions refer to reality, it is not for the certainty of them, but for the empirical verification of their certainty, which is their proofs

I just don’t think Einstein was conceding that mathematical propositions find their certainty in the understanding, but, rather, are certain insofar as they are in reason (as a cognitive faculty we have of our experience, and not the active participator therein).

How else does a thing get its properties, if the human thinker doesn’t decide what they are?

It would not be the human thinker deciding their phenomenal properties if the understanding is an aspect of the universal mind, and not the particular ‘I’ of any human; which I am starting to lean towards, as it seems implausible to me that the ‘I’ is the decider of the entire experience of which it has and is an entity within that experience.

But that’s not quite right, in that Nature only showed him a thing of a certain shape, but not that it was round, which he came up with all by himself, and assigned that as a property inherent in things of that shape, without regard to whether he, or Nature, was its causality.

But I don’t think this is accurate in Kantianism, if causality (and space and time) are produced by the human (as its forms of intuition), then there the ‘nature’ you refer to is reduced to a purely negative concept—an incomprehensible nothing—which cannot be understood to even “show him a thing of a certain shape”. You are inferring the representations from human understanding from the after effects of the human understanding, which is allegedly supposed to not provide any knowledge of the things-in-themselves.

If Nature gave the properties of things to us along with the thing itself…..why do we assign spin to an elementary particle as a property of it, when spin as rotating mass has no relation to what spin as this property, is meant to indicate?

I did not follow this part: could you restate it differently?

So, yes, human reason is the only means by which the properties of real things is fathomed.

It is a very, prima facie, appealing argument I must say; but it fails because the “proof” of reason actively determining things’ properties requires that the representations are somewhat accurate of the things-in-themselves, which, if Kant is right, there is no way to determine anything about them; instead, the claim “we represent the world” becomes not universally valid but, rather, valid only insofar as it is constrained to the possibility of experience—but Kant is working with a framework where the possibility of experience is a representation!

That’s the cool thing about Einstein’s avant-guarde thought experiments: there is no way to empirically verify them

Interesting!

.the viewpoint of things-in-themselves doesn’t make any sense, insofar as things do not have a viewpoint;

You were saying that Einstein views things from the universes’ perspective; that is, everything is relative. And Kant views it from the perspective of the individual, and thusly universal. However, these do not seem to be compatible views, as if Kant is right then Einstein cannot take the viewpoint of ‘everything is relative’ since it speaks of the things-in-themselves—not the individuals’ experience.

Hello Philosophim,

I think we are missing the forest through the trees here and I'm going to back out a bit to focus on the key points that I think are relevant to the discussion.

Fair enough!

Why should I not hold this? What does your view of truth introduce that solves problems of knowledge, or clarifies confusion in epistemology?

To speak briefly, using your definition:

1. Is redundant with the term ‘reality’
2. Does not completely capture its colloquial usage (e.g., saying “bob’s claim is true” makes less sense if ‘truth’ is ‘reality’, as it is implying that it is true in virtue of the fact that bob’s claim corresponds with reality—but ‘true’ no longer relates to correspondence under your definition).
3. Every deployed use of ‘true’ is contingent on a thinking being: there is no example where someone would say something is true without that something being related to thought. E.g., ‘that is true’ refers to a claim someone made and is useless as a proclamation if there was no claim made.

(Philosophim)Truth exists within the subject and despite the subject.

Truth still exists despite a subject, under my view, but not despite of all subjects. — Bob Ross

I don't understand this statement. Can you clarify the latter part?

Under my view, I am not saying that truth is relative (e.g., that there is my truth and your truth, and they can be contradictory but equally true); I am not saying that if I died right now, that truth would no longer exist, for there are other subjects which still exist. So long is there is at least one thinking being, I would say truth exists; but if all subjects died, then there is no truth (and, within the hypothetical where there are no subjects, there is certainly no use for describing things within it as ‘true’ or ‘false’: everything just is).

I said its true because what you are thinking is "what is". What you think, is "what is". The fact that you are having a thought is true

Yes, but whether it is true that you are thinking is not, for you, dependent on your thought (that you are thinking) corresponding to reality, such that you really are thinking. For you, it just has to be the case that you are thinking. Now, of course, if there are no thinking beings, then the claim, under your view, would be false—but not because the claim that “you are thinking” does not correspond to reality but, rather, because it simply is not the case. Even saying ‘it is not the case’, to me, implies that something did not correspond to reality, which, under view, is irrelevant to whether it is true or not.

But the lack of the observer does not negate the air's vibration when the tree falls. That is also true. How does your view of truth that needs a subject handle this?

I am not saying that thinking is not a part of reality, my correspondence theory applies to everything in reality; so I am thinking iff my thought that I am thinking corresponds to reality such that I am actually thinking. This process applies subjective acts just as much as anything else.

In your analogy, I found nothing wrong with it (other than that I do not think that a tree literally falls, a physical sense, when no one is conscious of it: but I doubt we want to get into that right now). I am just failing to see how this ties to my idea of truth: could you elaborate a bit more?

Bob, this is a contradiction. You can't say that truth is not contingent on the subject, then say that it is an emergent property of the subject

I didn’t say that, I pointed out that the argument you gave doesn’t work and that is why, of course, you should find something flawed with (i.e., the claim ‘You think because we can note that our subjective experience is true, that the truth of that subjective experience suddenly means all truth is tied to our subjective experience’). I was simply noting that that is not what I am claiming.

To clarify, I am saying that truth is contingent on the subject and object; but not on any particular object nor subject (viz., if I die, then truth still exists; if every subject dies, it does not; if all possible objects of thought perished, then truth no longer exists; if one object of thought perishes, then it still does).

Its that our minds are jumping to improper conclusions that aren't real.

Exactly! Which makes more sense if we are depicting a faulty correspondence between their thoughts and reality—and not just that ‘it is not’.

Hello LuckyR,

Cute. Even if your name wasn't Bob, I'd know you were a guy. Ear infection, eh?

You have absolutely no clue what gender I am, and you clearly misunderstood the analogy.

If you want an analogy, let's give an analogy. Let's say if you jump in the pool you'll get mystery disease X. Folks who get mystery disease X have a 1.4% chance of "serious morbidity", a 32 per 100,000 chance of dying and about a 33% chance of needing major surgery.

This maybe be a perfect analogy to compare two things, but not the two things I was comparing in my analogy, and thusly this is not pertinent to the conversation you quoted of me (that I am having with someone else).

However, I am more than happy to entertain your analogy, so long as it is not misunderstood to be a replacement of mine. I would say that the person in your analogy is not obligated to save the person themselves (although they may be obligated to try to get help from someone who can: like the authorities) because (1) they are not culpable for their condition and (2) the disease posits threat of significant unwanted bodily modifications.

Next: "Generally speaking, there is legally no duty to rescue another person.

Correct. I never said that there was.

The courts have gone into very gory details in order to explain this. In Buch v. Amory Manufacturing Co., the defendant had no obligation to save a child from crushing his hand in a manufacturing machine. The court suggested an analogy in which a baby was on the train tracks – did a person standing idly by have the obligation to save him? Legally, no

I, prima facie, agree with their conclusion about the two examples (they gave), because the rescuer is not (1) culpable for the condition of the other person and (2) saving them posits threat of significant unwanted bodily modifications. The pool example I gave does not have #2, but only #1.

Another thing: I can tell you that the kidney stabber convict situation is well established in the Medical Ethics field and it is quite clear the stabber cannot be coerced into donation of a kidney.

I disagree with this established view in the case where (1) the person is culpable for the other person’s condition and (2) they are the only means of saving that person. I do not think that taking organs should be used as a punishment but, rather, a last resort if amending the situation requires it—I don’t think the kidney stabber should get away alive while that person dies. Of course if there is a donor, then by all means use that kidney!

Lastly your commentary is missing another angle in the abortion situation and that is society and the courts give very broad powers to parents to manage the healthcare of their minor children. Thus it stands to reason that it should grant even broader powers to those governing potential children (who are not minor children).

They absolutely don’t when it comes to the life of that child and basic essentials. We do not let parents kill their children, nor do we let them neglect them (e.g., starvation, etc.).