So you are saying that blue is a quality, and that it is directly apprehended? — Noah Te Stroete

Yes. That's part of the properties of that wavelength of light/electromagnetic radiation.

What explanatory power does that have? What kind of knowledge is that? — Noah Te Stroete

Why would it need to have explanatory power? And it's knowledge by acquaintance.

Get some sleep, by the way. :wink:

Nothing is like a model or explanation. Models and explanations are words, equations, etc.

You'd have to explain that one better.

When you plug your ears, you change sound waves travel from a source to your eardrums. Why do you think that you don't directly apprehend the way that really is?

Re light, we just happened to have evolved that way--it had evolutionary advantages for us, but how would that suggest that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world? If anything, it would suggest just the opposite. Sensing things as they are is going to be a survival advantage.

Re apparent size, that's simply a perspectival difference. And again, how would that suggest that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world?

Sure, but I don't believe that anything supports that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world, and I'm asking for what you take to be a good reason to believe that.

I'm asking about your belief that we don't have direct apprehension of the physical world for example.

Wait, are you saying that you believe this:

"Our minds interpret sense data. We do not have direct apprehension of the physical world. It is filtered through the senses and interpreted by the mind"

because of some definition of "the truth condition"?

And re this:

What it is like without a mind observing it through the senses is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with us. — Noah Te Stroete

Why would we only be interested in ourselves?

No. How do you support that we do if you think you can't know what the physical world is really like?

Our minds interpret sense data. We do not have direct apprehension of the physical world. It is filtered through the senses and interpreted by the mind. — Noah Te Stroete

What do you consider to support the above belief?

I don't think there is anything unchanging, I don't think there is anything that isn't physical, and I see the "noble," good, etc. as a matter of individual preferences.

It doesn't matter if it's divvied up in particular ways re edges/boundaries for whether it's abstract or not (it's not).

how can we say anything determinate about it all without muddying its pristine independence from language/consciousness? — sign

Remember that I'm a direct/"naive" realist, so I don't at all buy that we can't access "(non-mental) things-in-themselves" or that perception is necessarily theory-laden.

Re the other comment, on the other hand, being so self-centered is probably not a good thing. The world doesn't actually revolve around you.

Yes. To thrive, you need to follow norms, not as rigid rules, but as defaults to be observed in the absence of overriding considerations. — Dfpolis

Don't you have to desire to thrive rather than not thrive?

Ok, that's fine, no problem. I hope you understand I'm not trying to make you be a theist, but rather trying to help you be more loyal to your own chosen methodology, reason.

Religious beliefs seem absurd to you for a reason. That didn't happen magically out of nothing. You referenced your chosen authority, human reason, and discovered that many religious beliefs don't pass the tests required by human reason. And so you find those beliefs to be, in your words, absurd.

What you appear not to have done is apply the very same test to the authority of human reason that you reasonably apply to holy books, the theist's chosen authority. That's my complaint, not that you have declined theism. — Jake

I don't know how much I bothered reasoning about it, though. It was more along the lines of "You can't be serious--you believe what?!? :lol: "

What do you think? The event that sparked this line of thought took place in an American history class I'm tutoring. I asked the teacher something along the lines of, "Why do we teach kids that Christopher Columbus was evil?' and his response was "because he did evil things." and of course I agree with that statement, from my point of view at least he did bad things. I guess my question is if he was wrong, why are we right? Will people in the future think that we are evil because they disagree with us? — TogetherTurtle

Just curious how, exactly, you present the idea that Columbus was "evil"?

I'm not in favor of teachers making moral claims period. Why not just teach facts and let students make their own assessments?

challenging the qualifications of the authority their atheism is built upon. — Jake

I'm not sure what that is referring to.

My atheism is primarily built on the fact that I was never socialized into religion. So by the time i was exposed to religious beliefs in any detail they just seemed--as they still do--completely absurd to me.

I don't know what it would amount to to challenge that.

I'm not saying it's "beside the point." Just that it wasn't what I was talking about. "A single brain" isn't an abstraction, because I'm not talking about the concept of a single brain, our our knowledge of it, or anything like that. I'm talking about the material thing, the thing that would still be present (at least for a short period of time) if everyone were to sudddenly drop dead. That isn't abstract. There are no real abstracts (in the sense of objective abstracts).

Sometimes I want to talk about, do philosophy about, etc. the world independent of human concepts, human knowledge, etc. I like ontology.

I said "that may be the case" (that "the overwhelming vast majority of atheists arrived at their position through reference to human reason"), but that's not a necessary criterion for atheism.

But i wasn't talking about our concepts, perception, knowledge, etc.

It's very annoying to keep changing the topic to epistemology. (And/or philosophy of language, etc.)

We see the unity of the human body broken up in terms of organs that function together. The brain becomes a separate object of attention with a boundary. Do we include the spine or not? Where do we draw the line? Do we include the eyes? We make a decision about what is and is not to count as brain. We pluck it out of its context as an object for inquiry. — sign

You're talking about concept-formation there, right? Again, I'd ask why you're talking about that. I wasn't talking about concepts per se.

Is this not an attempt to impose your perspective (perspectivalism) as precisely a truth beyond mere perspective? The impossibility of objectivity as objectivity itself? — sign

You're not understanding me. The objective world is perspectival. I'm saying nothing like "the objective world is impossible."

The single brain, grasped as a distinct object, — sign

Why would you be talking about "grasping" something?

Worth watching this interview: — Wayfarer

Good example of reifying mathematics.(Which I see has led him to focusing on nonsense like "multiverse" theory, string theory, etc.)

Right, but when you say "the song Kashmir is music", you are talking about ideas. — Metaphysician Undercover

No I'm not. I'm talking about objective events, objective sounds.

I didn't say "particulars", I said "a particular". No one uses "matter" to refer to a particular object, not even you. If someone did, no one would know which particular object was being referred to, — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would we be talking about how people use language? That's not the topic.

We could diagnose you.

That was very persuasive.

If each of these ideas "the song Kashmir", and "music", are particulars, — Metaphysician Undercover

When I talk about sensing or experiencing "Kashmir" and music, I'm not talking about ideas.

We do not use "matter" in this way, it never refers to a particular — Metaphysician Undercover

I always refer to particulars by "matter."

Yes, I agree that no two perspectives are going to be the same. I'd say that true-for-everyone is a kind of ideal that we strive toward, an ideal that requires abstraction from individual perspectives to something like what they all have in common or usefully overlap. — sign

I don't see shooting for something that isn't true as an ideal there. The ideal (in my view) would be to get people to realize/acknowledge perspectivalism.

But I'd add that this individual only actually exists in a particular community, having been raised in a form of life and at least one language. So the individual is largely constituted by his community. To rip out an isolated subject is like ripping a wolf out of its environment, the things it eats, etc. A wolf only makes sense in its total context and a subject only makes sense as part of a community. Brains have evolved to interact with other brains through language. This is arguably what is most human about the human. — sign

I look at it like this. Say that there's a particular kind of mold that only grows inside refrigerators when they're running. I don't know if that's true--I don't think it is, but let's just imagine that it is. Well, you could say, "Those refrigerators, that mold, only exists due to a particular community, having been designed and build blah blah blah" Yeah, that would be true, but nevertheless, there's a kind of mold that ONLY occurs inside running refrigerators. It doesn't occur outside of those refrigerators, or when they're not running. Pointing that out isn't claiming that the refrigerators aren't designed and built in social contexts, etc.

And if every time you talked about that mold, someone felt the need to interject, "But ultimately that mold can only exist in a social context, because you need a society that has ideas and builds refrigerators and blah blah blah," that would be very annoying.

The single brain can of course be contemplated, but this is an abstraction — sign

An abstraction? Why would you say it's an abstraction?

So you don't find it true for us but only for me? Or you don't find it true for you? I — sign

My truth theory (which I'm pretty sure I gave you in detail a few weeks ago) has truth as a subjective judgment, but that's rooted in (though obviously not the same as past the roots) the standard analytic way of looking at truth and its relationship to propositions. That's a big tangent to get into and we're already way off topic.

The more important thing here is that "'true' for everyone" overlooks perspectivalism, the fact that no two perspectives or reference frames/reference points are going to be the same, a fortiori because they necessarily have different spatial orientations.

I take that you are saying that matter is not mind, — sign

No, I'm not saying that at all. Some matter is obviously mind on my view. I'm a physicalist, an identity theorist.

But the very concept of the 'subject alone with meaning' is itself a product of these publicly used signs in some sense. — sign

All concepts are the result of individual thought.

but it is a metaphysical position. — sign

Obviously it's a metaphysical position, yes.

The essence of objectivity seems to be true-for-us-and-not-just-me. The notion of the physical seems to fit this ideal perfectly. But I don't think the physical exhausts the objective. As Husserl might add, we should consider in what way logic and math exist objectively. Arguably, reducing the objective to the physical simply ignores part of experience and offers therefore an only partial account of the situation. — sign

I don't agree with any sentence there, but I don't know if it's worth it to spell out why I disagree with all of it. (Because are you really interested in my view per se? Are you even paying much attention to it? Will it have any impact on you? I doubt it.)

I suspect that your theory of communication will eventually have to get around to addressing something like public meaning or inter-subjectivity, even if it eschews those terms — sign

In other words, you'd probably call something "public meaning" that I'd say isn't actually meaning? That could be.

Those vibrations are intelligible. — sign

Obviously. Because people think about them, assign meanings to them, etc.

Roughly speaking, an image of what we might and should do is somehow repeated in the mind of the listener — sign

That's so rough that it's inaccurate. You're not literally passing any sort of mental content, just catalyzing the same.

It seems, by the way, like we're just going to keep doing the same dance over and over. You're going to keep asserting "shared" meaning and I'll keep pointing out that it's not actually shared, and then you'll respond where you talk about shared meaning again, and then I'll point out that it's not actually shared again, etc.

The very notion of the real seems to involve what is true for us and not just me. — sign

There's a traditional sense (a la scholasticism for example) of "real" that's basically the same as "objective ," but that's a bad idea, because it discounts an d basically dismisses personal, psychological phenomena.

Okay, but how would the fact that we can agree ("I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong"--"Hey! I think that nonconsensual killing is wrong, too!") or the fact that we can cooperate ("Let's make that illegal then") have any impact on the fact that morality, meaning, etc. are subjective?

Because I believe in the physical world. I believe we get sense data from it. — Noah Te Stroete

I know this. I'm asking you on what grounds do you believe this, given your views?

What possible grounds would you have for saying she's not just an idea in your own mind then?

Isn't she just an idea in your own mind on your view?

States of affairs are inherently mind-dependent. — Noah Te Stroete

If you have time, I want you to tell me the process by which you reached that conclusion.