To get into my truth theory is going to be a big tangent. Don't you not have time at the moment? And we should probably start a different thread about it, because it would be a long, involved thing that would be getting even further off topic.

Also, if you have time I want you to answer this first: how you're coming to the conclusions you are re mind-independent facts, whether we can know them, etc.

No. A standard way to use "fact," in both philosophy and the sciences, is that it's a state of affairs, independent of our knowledge. We make statements about facts. Our knowledge is about facts. And we can get the facts wrong. We can be wrong about what the world is really like (which we can only know because we can get it right, too).

When you have time in the future I want you to answer how you're coming to the conclusions you are re mind-independent facts, whether we can know them, etc.

It’s not a simplified generalization — Noah Te Stroete

It would be to assume that I was saying "everything is an instrumental model" just because I said one thing is. That's what I was talking about re that phrase.

It’s a fact that the mind models the physical world. — Noah Te Stroete

Sure. But that's not all it does, and the fact that the mind models the physical world doesn't imply that that's all there is.

The things-in-themselves have no facts independent of a mind. — Noah Te Stroete

Again, why would you believe such nonsense? How would you come to that conclusion?

So quanta are just models, — Noah Te Stroete

Keep track of what you asked about. You asked about the idea of "changing behavior when observed." I didn't say "everything is an instrumental model," but I immediately guessed you'd go there (as if I did say that), because people in general also have a weird tendency to assume universal, simplified generalizations.

How do you explain the fact that quanta change behavior once they are observed? — Noah Te Stroete

Via noting that scientists have a tendency to reify instrumental models. They're particularly bad about that when it comes to anything mathematical.

A fact is nothing more than the order that the mind gives to the world. Without minds, there would be no facts. — Noah Te Stroete

Why would you believe such nonsense? What led you to that conclusion?

Positing is something that we do. Mind-independent facts are not something we do. They just are.

You can’t posit a fact without first assuming a mind. — Noah Te Stroete

Positing a fact is different than the fact itself.

But what is a mind-independent fact? — Noah Te Stroete

Most states of affairs are mind-independent facts. A tree being deciduous, for example, or that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, or that seawater has an average salinity of about 3.5%, etc.

The first question was "Talking about the human mind, which is the brain in particular (dynamic) states, isn't talking about something not mental, right?"

You ignored the question I asked earlier and then ignored the question about why you ignored the question. I wasn't asking questions simply for decoration.

The overwhelming vast majority of atheists arrived at their position through reference to human reason. — Jake

That may be the case, but since someone who lacks a belief in gods but who came to that view via another means is still an atheist, we don't include the motivational background in the definition. That the position was arrived at via reason is not a necessary component of atheism, as common as that may be.

Brain scans aren’t mental. But I’m sure that’s not what you’re saying? — Noah Te Stroete

Right, since a brain scan isn't a moral stance or a normative, etc.

fMRI scans in conjunction with reported accounts are observable phenomena. They are objective. That’s how we corroborate the mental activity of minds giving order to the world. — Noah Te Stroete

What I kept specifying was mind versus mind-independent, no? I didn't say anything about whether anything is observable.

Just take the example of a city. It is order. Minds came up with the idea, but there are physical aspects to what we call “cities”. Living as intelligent social beings, we also cannot consistently live together without emergent objective social norms. — Noah Te Stroete

The question is whether norms, ethical stances etc. are mind-independent. The question isn't whether once we have norms and ethical stances in mind whether that has any impact on mind-independent stuff.

Is there a reason you didn't answer the question in the last post, by the way?

Your stipulation was that mental states refer to the outside world truths — Noah Te Stroete

That's not what I said (and there are reasons I definitely would never say that that way (which I don't want to get into because it would be a big tangent)).

What I said was that normatives, and moral stances, etc. are mental only. They don't correspond to something not mental. So talking about the human mind, which is the brain in particular (dynamic) states, isn't talking about something not mental, right?

It’s a fact about how brains work. — Noah Te Stroete

Sure, a mental way that they work, right? (Otherwise you're not saying something about the human mind after all, no?)

No, I an saying norms have an objective foundation in reality, which though not themselves norms, justify the application of norms. For example, there is a biological basis for not eating 2-week old cream pie. — Dfpolis

Do they objectively justify the application of norms?

I was referring to the objective fact that the human mind/brain seeks order — Noah Te Stroete

For it to be an objective fact, it has to be a fact that's mind-independent. How is a fact about the human mind mind-independent?

You just told me a bunch of stuff about how some people think, what they believe, what they prefer.

Your claim was that "genocide is wrong" can be found in the world independently of us.

So it doesn't do any good to attempt to support that by talking about how some people think, what they believe or what they prefer. The only way to support it is to give the evidence of "genocide is wrong" occurring mind-independently.

Where would you say "genocide is wrong" is located in the world? What is "genocide is wrong" a property of?

I don't like "agreeing to disagree" about stuff like this. I want people to not have the same old incorrect beliefs.

Nope.

There are no objective whatever-you-want-to-call-thems period when it comes to good, bad, evil, etc. (most terms, like assessments, evaluations, judgments, already suggest things we do, so you can use whatever term you think best suggests things the world does/is like independent of us)

You can't refer to or grasp the objective reality of anything that's only mental, because it's only mental--by definition not objective.

Are you claiming that normatives are referring to something non-mental that's anything like a normative? What objective thing?

The meaning of a word is only mental. The sounds or marks etc. are not. Beliefs per se are mental, but if they correspond to something that's not only mental, they can be correct or incorrect.

Normatives don't correspond to anything non-mental. The actual conduct doesn't have anything like a normative in it.

Intersubjectivity is nonsense on my view, at least insofar as it attempts to refer to anything other than the facts that we can agree and cooperate with each other.

If meaning and coherence are subjective, then how or why would we do philosophy? — sign

Because we want to know what the world is like, and we believe it's worthwhile to examine that with a methodological approach different than science in addition to doing it with science's methodological approach. That would be the case no matter the ontological reality of meaning. The whole point is to figure out what meaning really is, how it really works, which just as when we're doing science, can easily turn out to be contrary to conventional wisdom, conventional ways of looking at it, etc.

The real puzzler is why people are so averse to subjectivity.

Do you have something in mind like intersubjective coherence? — sign

Lord no. I think that the whole idea of "intersubjectivity" is nonsense outside of the fact that we can agree with and cooperate with each other. "Intersubjectivity" is an intentionally fuzzy invention of folks who are averse to/uncomfortable with subjectivity but who realize that claiming that things like meaning and ethical stances are objective is ridiculous.

But there has to be significant overlap to make philosophy possible. How could you or any other thinker hope to offer anything valuable to another thinker without appealing to a similar meaning and coherence? — sign

Your assumption here is "philosophy isn't possible, and even if it were it would offer nothing of value, if we couldn't know that we have the same or at least remarkably similar meanings (and assessments of coherence, etc.)"

The mystery is why that would be the assumption. We could go through how communication works on my view step by step if you're interested, but that will probably take some time and it's a significant enough tangent that we should probably start another thread on it if you're interested.

And how could objects in the world be objective (for me and you both independent of our wishful thinking) without assuming an immense overlap in the interpretation of sensation? — sign

That question particular strikes me as bizarre. Objectivity in no way hinges on us. The objective world would be there just the same if life had never started.

Or if we just directly see the object, then how do we nevertheless assemble a shared coherent picture of the world, which we can't see all at once? — sign

What's shared are the observable parts of language, for example. Explaining how this works logistically could be part of the longer discussion about how communication works on my view.

Any assessment has to be done by a mind, so, it seems that what you want, "a mind-independent assessment," is a contradiction in terms. — Dfpolis

Hence "If normatives are only mental, then there are no facts about them aside from the fact that a particular mind is thinking about them however that mind is thinking about them."

I said we sense particular things like trees, but we do not sense matter because it is in no sense of the word a particular thing. "Matter" in no way refers to any particular thing which we sense. Where's the problem? — Metaphysician Undercover

One problem with this is that there isn't anything that's not a particular. That's not to say that there are not abstract or general concepts (types, universals, whatever we want to call them), but concepts are particular events (or series/"sets" of events) in our particular brains. When you take a universal term to refer to a "real abstract," all that it's really referring to is a very vague, particular idea of a "real abstract," in your particular head, at a particular time.

Outside of that, as has been pointed out to you many times- -and not just by me--"tree" refers to a universal just as much as "matter" does. Neither is a "proper name.". So it's not as if you have a doctrine that one only senses things picked out by non-universal terms.

I think that the idea of anything being nonphysical is incoherent.

Meaning can be pinpointed as physical events in our brains. (I wouldn't say "reduced" because that suggests we're changing something in some manner. We're not. We're simply correctly identifying what something is ontologically.) If meaning is supposed to be located elsewhere, there's no evidence for it obtaining in or amounting to a process of other physical things. And it can't be something nonphysical because the very idea of that is incoherent.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking your question is about how to categorize the being of meaning. — sign

Not categorize, per se, but to say what it's supposed to be physically as something public.

I was talking about experiencing things. The whole point was talking about experiencing a tree pre-conceptually. You said that you can experience the tree but not matter, which is what led to mocking you with the music example . . . and then you decided to seriously endorse the absurdity I was mocking.

That is the "common sense" definition of it--which is why the dictionary reports the same.

No, I'm talking about the sounds, because we were talking about experiencing it. Why would I be talking about concepts per se?

The problem is that if you say that meaning is public, then what, exactly, would you be saying it is ontologically?

Something seeming some way to you isn't a mind-independent assessment is it?

Would you accept "laziness" as a justification to harm another human or animal? — chatterbears

Would you say that there could be a difference between accepting someone else proposing something (y, say) as a justification (for x, say) and yourself feeling that that x is justifed by y? (I'm asking because I want to understand just what you're asking me--I can't really answer until I understand the idea you're getting at.)

At any rate, by the way, as I've expressed many times, NO non-moral stance can justify any moral stance.

In general, you keep bringing up "justification(s)," but I don't talk about justifications when it comes to morality, and I don't think it really makes a whole lot of sense to talk about them, except as another way of saying that someone has whatever moral stances they do. I see justifications as good reasons to believe that something is the case, but when we're talking about morality, we're not talking about anything that's the case. We're talking about ways that people feel.

I will point out there is a difference between our private lives and being public. Our new technology has seriously disrupted the privacy we once had, and this lead to many questions about our social rules.

Like our roads have rules to protect everyone, societies have rules. I have a strong preference for those rules being based on reason rather than religion, and a very strong preference for privacy. I think those rules are good in advancing trust and reducing fear. I hope we can speak more about this. If I think you are like me, I am not afraid of you. However, when I think you are different from me I have all kinds of fears. What will you do and how should I behave? Today a lot of people are loosing their jobs and some are even incarcerated because we do not have agreement on the rules. You don't have sex unless you are married and then you have sex only that person, makes sexual decisions very simple, and that helps people keep their jobs and stay out of prison.

Our liberty goes with the notion that decent people follow the rules, so we do not need authority over the people to make people do the right thing. And again, I will bring up the importance of privacy. These issues were intense in the conflict between Sparta and Athens and for sure their sexual morals were not compatible with Hebrew morality. :rofl: The Jews became much more concerned about educating their sons, when their sons began behaving like Greeks. :gasp:

How about this- the best thing we can do for humanity is expanding their awareness of others, while at the same time having rules for their sense of security because when people feel safe, they are not afraid and relationships are better. Rules can change but perhaps changing the reasoning before forcing a change is a good idea? — Athena

That pretty much all sounds very different from how I think, what I prefer, how I think people should behave, etc.

Ok, so if one's atheism arises from the use of tarot cards, that's just as valid as any other method, and the difference between one chosen authority and another is irrelevant. There's no need to examine and question any particular chosen authority, because they are all equally valid, and how one arises at one's views, on any subject, is irrelevant. — Jake

It's not a matter of "valid" or not, whatever that would amount to in that context. It's just that "atheism" doesn't in any way denote how one arrived at a lack of belief in gods. The only thing it denotes is that one lacks a belief in gods.

Actually, the Republicans need to figure out how to get rid of Trump and get someone respectable to run in his place, — Metaphysician Undercover

Republicans who don't like Trump, you mean?

"The song Kashmir" refers to a particular, and so does "music" refer to a particular (particular idea or whatever) — Metaphysician Undercover

There, "music" refers to a particular as in a particular song, like "Kashmir" (and a particular instantiation of "Kashmir" at that.)

I'll do my best to focus on this. Is the distinction of the signfied from the signifier ever perfect? A related question is whether the distinction of the subject from the world is ever perfect. — sign

<shrug> I have no idea what a distinction being "perfect" would amount to.

A final question is whether the thought of the isolated ego — sign

"Thought of the isolated ego"? You might as well be typing to me in Swahili.

I wish you could write a sentence that I'm not stumped about.

I didn't bypass it. I replied and I said that it is only coherent if they mean something, or else it's just scribbles. That isn't subjective. — Harry Hindu

Meaning and coherence are subjective.

What I'm asking for is the mentally-independent assessment that one state versus another counts as advancement.