I assume we are talking about the issue with Newton's Laws. It's fine to give references to smart people who are familiar with the subject. I can find plenty of quotes to support my position. I am also capable of seeing for myself. This isn't really a matter of fact. It's a matter of the definition of the word "flawed." — T Clark

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/flawed
flawed: having or containing one or more faults, mistakes, or weaknesses

So for instance, Newton's laws assume that mass doesn't depend on velocity, that's a weakness. Newton's third law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that doesn't work for magnetic forces between charged particles, that's a weakness. Newton's law of gravitation isn't consistent with plenty of astronomical observations, that's a weakness. So Newton's laws are flawed.

That doesn't mean they don't work approximately in some situations, but then again I never claimed they didn't. However that doesn't make them 'right' or not flawed.

As I stated the last time we had this discussion, I've tried my best arguments and failed to convince you of my position. I don't see any reason to continue. — T Clark

Seeing how your arguments are flawed, they fail to convince me. Meanwhile you fail to point out the flaw in my argument, which I stated as concisely as possible again.

They are not flawed in the sense you are describing. It has been acknowledged that they are not applicable in some situations, e.g. when the speed of a phenomenon is greater than about 10% of the speed of light, i.e. phenomena at human scale. Engineering uses Newton's laws almost exclusively because it works and because it's right. — T Clark

If you won't believe me but you will believe Wikipedia, maybe you will believe the Nobel laureate in physics Frank Wilczek, he says the same stuff as me, somehow when I say something it's not true but when Nobel laureates say it it's true, somehow appeals to authority is what serves as convincing arguments on this forum, so there you go:

http://ctpweb.lns.mit.edu/physics_today/phystoday/%20Whence_cshock.pdf

You and I have been back and forth on this issue previously. Dark matter has been detected. It was detected by observing the gravitational behavior of the visible universe. Do you think I have to hold it in my hand or lick it to see how it tastes before there is evidence. Just about everything we know of that is outside human scale we know indirectly, including dark matter. — T Clark

We've been back and forth but you still haven't got it. Seeing that observations do not match Einstein's general relativity is not detecting dark matter, it is assuming that the difference between observation and theory is due to invisible stuff rather than due to the theory being flawed. "But the theory is so well-tested!", yea plenty of well-tested theories were found to be flawed and replaced by other ones. Dozens of experiments have failed to detect dark matter, they're doing these experiments because they are looking for independent evidence for dark matter, because they have a tiny bit of integrity left, otherwise every time a theory doesn't work we could just invoke invisible stuff to make it work again, no need for Einstein if we invoke invisible stuff Newton's gravitation works just fine!

People don't like giving away their precious goods for less than they're worth. If they can abuse the system to be paid more than they're worth, they will, but almost nobody on the planet is ok with the opposite, getting less than they're worth.

Money is the carrot on a stick that keeps people moving. If you want someone to do something, money is probably going to be involved. — TogetherTurtle

Come on, nature has been working without money for eons, people have lived without money for eons, it's not money that makes people move no, but in this ugly society it is, because of the few in power who force people to need money to get what they need, and indeed who have implemented it in a way that it serves as a carrot on a stick.

The current system is abused left and right in horrible ways and there is nothing you can do about it. The system isn't made to be efficient, it's made in such a way that the majority remains poor, so that they have to work hard every day, so that their overlords can enjoy the fruit of their labor, while most people earn just enough to get shelter and food and a tiny bit of fun to keep them motivated. Most people have to earn just enough to be slaves as efficient as possible, if they earn too much they work less and then money becomes less effective as a tool of control, while if they earn too little at some point it becomes unbearable for them and they revolt against their overlords. The system is like that by design, realize that.

If money was efficient it wouldn't take 30 years to pay for a house, because it sure as hell wouldn't take 30 years to learn how to build a house and to build one.

I find disgusting the very notion of forcing people to do something, I don't want to force people to wake up, I want to change what's preventing them from waking up.

It's my belief that nobody does evil things on purpose. It's impossible to see everything and act accordingly, and so sometimes people make mistakes, and people don't like to admit their mistakes, even to themselves. When this "powerful individual" asks you to commit a crime, they're doing so because they genuinely think that keeping themselves in power is for the greater good. — TogetherTurtle

I used to be naive like that. What some people see as the greater good is serving the Devil, literally, they don't worship God they worship Satan. Tyrants don't want the greater good, they care about themselves. People who manipulate others to get what they need do not care about others, they care about themselves. People who want the population to remain slaves do not care about the greater good, they only care that the slaves remain efficient slaves and don't want to revolt. There are actually plenty of people who are focused on themselves and not on a greater good.

We can empathize with them if we want by saying that they do that out of fear, that they need power because they fear for their life if they don't have that power, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that they don't care about the greater good. Not by mistake, by design.

Would you have time for research when you're too busy farming, preserving, or hunting depending on where you build your shack? Civilization exists to solve that very problem. If you want to do this work, you'll absolutely have to rely on others. — TogetherTurtle

People had the time to paint in the Lascaux Cave 17,000 years ago, I guess they had some free time back then, they weren't constantly farming or hunting. Other animals don't spend all their waking hours hunting for food. And somehow we're supposed to believe that without money we would never have any free time? Yea, no.

I would have free time on my own, and I would have more free time if some other people believed in me and brought me food.

I was watching a documentary the other day about Amazonian people who get forced out of the forest so some big foreign companies can come destroy it and exploit its resources. In compensation these people were given small houses in a small city nearby, in essence they were forced into civilization. They were interviewed, and what did they say about it? That they much preferred the life in the forest, there they only had to hunt for a little while to get food, while in civilization they have to work all day long to get money to get food. And they said that in civilization there is constant stress, dangers everywhere, they have to watch out for cars and motorcycles on the road, people have guns, while life in the forest was much simpler and more peaceful, there they were connected to nature.

I don't see modern civilization as a solution, I see it as the problem.

Well, I would hope I don't have to do it alone, or without money. At the very least, you and I agree that this could be a problem, so there are at least two. — TogetherTurtle

Yes, even more than two, but still so few. Though it surely would help if those who agree there is a problem would think together about how to solve it. I'm used to thinking about those things on my own, but when we're all alone some problems appear as insurmountable, while they don't appear that way when we face them together.

Perhaps "waking people up" isn't the right approach. People get upset (specifically at the one who awoke them) when they're woken up.

People chase after their desires. If we want people to do something, there has to be something in it for them, likely in the immediate future. — TogetherTurtle

I suppose it depends if they are woken up from a beautiful dream or from a nightmare. Avoiding the destruction of nature and life would benefit them too, but if they want to blind themselves to the deforestation and destruction of the ecosystem and of other species, or if they believe that anyway science will come to save the day, then they don't care.

Children would be more willing to listen, but then education should be partly focused on making them aware of these problems, rather than shaping them to be efficient cogs in the very system that created and aggravates these problems.

Yes, but what of the positives of money? Currency, at least in the modern era, is used as a certificate of work done. Essentially, unless obtained illegally, what you're saying when you buy groceries is "somehow, human society has justified that my work equals this food". It's the somehow that is the problem.

A fair society without money would be a bureaucratic nightmare. It would take an immense amount of work to track all of the work a person does, give that work a value, and then also value the items they wish to obtain. It would be that, 7 billion times over. — TogetherTurtle

You're reasoning within the paradigm of money there. Why do we need certificates of work done? As if work done was necessarily a good thing. We have plenty of people who make a lot of money while contributing by their work to make the lives of many people worse, while making this world a worst place to live in, they have a certificate that says they have done a huge amount of work, so supposedly they have contributed a lot to society and deserve to be greatly rewarded for it, while they got that money easily by scamming people or by making people addicted to something that destroys them or while destroying an ecosystem. And the very value of their money comes from all the people who are forced to participate in this system, who are forced to need money to get anything.

While on the other hand plenty of people who work tirelessly to help others, to make this world a better place to live in, do not make any money while doing it, they have no certificate of work done, as if they had contributed nothing to society.

You see the problem? But it's not a problem that can be solved by tweaking some things about money or how we use it, it's systemic.

The value of what an individual does for others is not objective, it's subjective. Some people bring tremendous value to other people who have little or no money, so they don't get money from it, and so by the metric of money they have done nothing of value, but the people who have been helped would strongly disagree. While if you carry out a criminal act for some powerful individual, you bring a little positive value to that individual, you bring a lot of negative value to potentially many people, and yet you get a lot of money, and then society values highly what you have done.

That system is rotten. Remove money and bartering and we have a system where people work for themselves and bring value to themselves, to the people they love and to the people they want to help. In such a system society wouldn't reward you for destroying the lives of other people, and you wouldn't be forced to contribute to a system that destroys life and nature. That doesn't mean we would automatically live in a utopia where people all love one another, but at least we could stop the destruction of nature and solve the problems that stem from forcing people to need money.

What if we could develop a system in which money was always made from benefiting the whole? What benefits the whole would be decided on by looking at scientific evidence as well as the goal as a whole being pleasure for all. — TogetherTurtle

I really don't see how you could do that. Once people are forced to need money for anything by the few people who have the most of it, money doesn't benefit the whole, because usually those who have the most power have a lust for power, and that lust for power transcends their desire to benefit the whole (which they usually don't have, they simply care about benefitting themselves).

Again though, I think it's interesting how if there was money in it, you would have been able to conduct your research. — TogetherTurtle

I guessed you would pick up on that. It's not that I would do it for money, nor that it couldn't be done if money didn't exist, it's that I need to eat and a place to live and some freedom in order to conduct that research, and in a world ruled by money it is money that allows to get that. If I go build a shack somewhere I will get kicked out by the land owners and those who enforce that ownership. In a world without money, people who believe in me could provide me with food and shelter and the tools to conduct that research. In this money world people could do that too, but they would need to have money themselves, which is why I referred to funding.

In a world without money I could build my own place and get my own food, and conduct my research the rest of the time without needing anyone. And then if people believed in me they could help me get food or bring me food so that I could focus on the research. No need for money.

I hadn't realized you replied to me.

I've spoken a lot of what others have to gain, but what of us? I think that if we aren't just talking nonsense, then saving a world headed for destruction is payment enough for me, even if nobody knows. — TogetherTurtle

I think that a few people can't save the world if the vast majority isn't willing to wake up on how it is progressively destroying it. Sometimes the example of Gandhi is given to show that a single individual can change a lot of things, while being peaceful, and without money, but the reason Gandhi changed things is that the revolt was already latent within the Indian people, and he was the spark that ignited it. Whereas I see no such revolt within most people, rather they are content with the way things are, they are content with their comfort and technology and they trust science to solve their problems, there is no revolt to ignite, we are sleepwalking while destroying nature. They don't see a problem, because they believe whatever the problem science will come to the rescue, meanwhile they can just be mindless drones enjoying themselves in runaway consumerism. The world won't be saved if they don't wake up.

I too sometimes have an issue with taking money for things. I think this is something we need to get around. If you want to change anything, anywhere, you have to be able throw your weight around a bit. I think a good way to start justifying it to ourselves is by only using profit for the greater good. I've convinced myself that I don't need too much to live, so any profit I make is likely to go into an investment fund for compounding until later use. — TogetherTurtle

I actually think money is at the root of a lot of the problems we face, and that we won't change things if we don't question money. Money destroys relationships between humans and between humans and nature. Nature has lived without money for eons, but now human society prevents us from living without it. The land doesn't belong to all life, it belongs to a few people. If we want to use land or settle on land, we need first of all to have money, otherwise the self-proclaimed land owners force us out with the help of other humans called the law enforcers. To have money we have to work for the people who have money, and usually that involves helping grow an industry that contributes to destroying nature. So essentially money and the people who enforce it force us to perpetuate the very system that is destroying nature.

Replacing money with bartering wouldn't help. Bartering rests on the notion that "if you do this for me, I do this for you, otherwise I don't do this for you", rather than on a notion of "let's help ourselves and let's help others", so in bartering there is still the implicit idea that the value of a human being stems from the resources he has, which leads people to accumulate as much resources as possible, and then the few who own the most resources can enforce their ownership and force people to participate in their own system, and since it is the lust for power that got them there, their system too would likely involve seeing nature as a tool to master and to use rather than seeing it as their own habitat and as something to respect and cherish.

And unless people wake up to all that, that won't change and we'll just stay on our current course towards destroying life.

I think it unlikely that the basis of physics would be flawed if it was done so long ago by such different people and still stands. — TogetherTurtle

Newton's laws stood for several centuries until they were found to be flawed. I believe the foundations of electromagnetism and relativity and quantum mechanics are flawed, and all the modern theories are built on them. They work to some extent but that's it, and now we're in an impasse because questioning these foundations is frowned upon in the scientific community, aspiring physicists become professional physicists by spending years studying and mastering the content and application of these theories, their professional career becomes built on these foundations, they get funding for their research by working on developing the paradigm based on these foundations, they don't get published in professional research journals if they drift too far away from the status quo, so they have every incentive to not question these foundations. The paradigm doesn't change not because scientists of every generation question the foundations and agree that they are the best ones, but because they don't question these foundations, they grow up in a system that teaches them to accept them before they can become scientists.

I would have loved to make a living working on my own theories based on different foundations, but academia wouldn't give me the liberty to do that, and I haven't found people who would believe in me enough to be willing to fund me, so it's something I did in my spare time. But then I grew tired of it, I thought even if I dedicate myself to it 10 or 15 years and I succeed then what? We would have a theory that is simpler and explains more, but people still wouldn't understand why it took so long for such a theory to appear, the fundamental issues in academia and in the scientific community wouldn't be solved, that theory would become the new oppressive paradigm that people aren't allowed to question, and the fundamental issues in our society and in our relationship with nature wouldn't get solved either.

Even if I became famous and began writing on these issues, the world still probably wouldn't listen, because while people are willing to agree with a theory that makes predictions that are observed, they don't want to question their deeply held beliefs unrelated to that theory, they don't want to be told that they are responsible for where the world is going, and they don't want to be told that science won't save them. That's how the later writings of famous scientists get dismissed as the rants of old men who should have stuck to writing about their theory, when they say things that people do not want to hear.


That post is so long already and I have replied only to a little of what you said, I will reply to the rest later on.

Falsificationism doesn't work though, because so-called scientific or empirical hypotheses cannot be falsified: if an observation appears to falsify a hypothesis, it's always possible to not falsify the hypothesis, by assuming that the observation is due to another phenomenon that wasn't accounted for. For instance general relativity can never be falsified if we assume that difference between observation and theory is due to unseen matter or energy, theories of particle physics can never be falsified if we assume that difference between observation and theory amounts to the discovery of a new particle, and in general we can always assume the existence of an unseen phenomenon or invoke errors in the instruments of measurements or invoke a shared hallucination to never falsify a hypothesis.

Here is an example of the vomit-inducing science we get these days and why philosophy (or at least critical thinking) is desperately needed:

Dark Matter May Have Existed Before the Big Bang, New Math Suggests
https://www.space.com/dark-matter-before-big-bang.html

If dark matter consists of new particles that were born before the Big Bang, they affect the way galaxies are distributed in the sky in a unique way.

If dark matter were truly a remnant of the Big Bang, then in many cases researchers should have seen a direct signal of dark matter in different particle physics experiments already

Indeed, if dark matter was really there, the plenty of experiments on dark matter should have most likely detected it by now. The absence of detection could have been considered a falsification of general relativity and of the standard model of cosmology. But no wait, if we say that dark matter is really weird and that it existed before the big bang, then we can use some maths to explain why we haven't detected it in our experiments!

So let's say that dark matter is really there, but we can't detect it directly in experiments, let's also say that it existed before the big bang (before what we call the beginning of the universe), and if that's the case then we should see galaxies distributed in the sky in a specific way, but our current telescopes are not powerful enough to detect that, so we need bigger telescopes.

Then if we don't find the galaxies distributed in the way we predicted, it will be because dark matter is even weirder than weird, maybe then if we say that dark matter interacts with dark matter from other dimensions or from other universes then we'll come up with some maths to explain why our telescopes didn't detect a signature in the distribution of galaxies, and dark matter will not have been falsified and our cherished theories will be saved from falsification, and we'll come up with some new experiment to detect an indirect signature of it! We can keep doing that forever too.

But if we do find galaxies distributed in the way we predicted, even if we can find plenty of alternative explanations for why galaxies would be distributed that way in the absence of dark matter, we will say it is proof of the existence of dark matter, and we will run big headlines around the globe saying dark matter at last detected, dark matter found in the sky, a great scientific achievement, Einstein was right again, another success for science! All the news networks will talk about it for a few days, we'll get our moment of fame, maybe even a Nobel prize down the road, funding for dark matter research will explode, the kids curious about the universe will want to become dark matter scientists, our cherished theories will be more certain than ever, and no one will listen to the philosophers who want to spoil the party, after all these guys are useless and bring nothing of value to society, whereas the world admires us and listens to us, scientists.

So let's stop here for a minute and make sure there's no issue with the first part ("It's what some part of the world is like . . .") so that we don't have to repeat that bit. — Terrapin Station

Sure.

It's what some part of the world is like at that spatio-temporal location, sure, including possibly their brain--if they're hallucinating, for example. — Terrapin Station

You're saying what a being perceives at a spatio-temporal location is "what some part of the world is like at that spatio-temporal location".

What do you mean exactly by "including possibly their brain--if they're hallucinating". Are you talking about the being perceiving their own brain, or are you saying that the spatio-temporal location possibly includes their brain?

I was fully in control of my actions when I committed that crime, therefore I am not responsible for that crime and so I am innocent your Honor.

there is no responsibility for without responsibility to — StreetlightX

You're saying "responsibility to" implies "responsibility for"

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/responsible
be responsible to sb/sth: to be controlled by someone or something
be responsible for sb/sth/doing sth: to have control over someone or something

So you're saying "being controlled by someone" implies "having control over someone", that's quite the sophistry.

Obviously we can only be controlled by what we do not control, so we can only be responsible to what we do not control. Which does not imply in any way that we are only responsible for what we do not control.

The very definition of "responsible for" hinges on having control, so it's obvious something has gone wrong in our argument when we conclude that "responsible for" hinges on not having control.

When we twist the meaning of words we can reach any conclusion. Sadly this is the kind of thing that gives a bad name to philosophy, and which makes people see philosophy as useless.

I'm not saying anything like "Perceptions can not be mistaken."

What I'm saying is "Perceptions can be accurate." Contra claims that they can't be or that there's no reason to ever believe that they are. — Terrapin Station

Okay, but you do say that what a being perceives is what the world really is like from their spatio-temporal location, correct?

So how can you distinguish between perceptions that are accurate and perceptions that are mistaken? If a being perceives A from reference point P1, how can you tell whether A is accurate or mistaken? If you compare A with other perceptions from other reference points to reach the conclusion that A is mistaken, how do you know in the first place that the other perceptions are accurate and not mistaken?

It seems to me that in the first place you necessarily assume that some specific perceptions are accurate in order to conclude that a given perception is mistaken. And the issue I see with this is that if at the beginning we take a different set of perceptions that we label as accurate, then we wouldn't reach the same conclusions as to which perceptions are mistaken. Which means there is an irreducible arbitrariness in labeling some perceptions as hallucinations rather than some others.

There's no difference. Space and time never exist "on their own." — Terrapin Station

Is there such a thing as what the world really is like from a reference point where there is no being perceiving? For instance in your view is there such a thing as what the world really is like from the reference point of a rock?

I said that properties are different at different spatio-temporal locations, and there's no way to be absent a spatio-temporal location. I'm not talking about dependencies, though. What things are like depends on properties, and everything has unique properties, including beings. — Terrapin Station

My ontological primitives are matter and relations, where the relations are often dynamic. — Terrapin Station

Okay. To make sure we understand each other, I'm going to rephrase your view in two different ways, let me know which one is correct, if any.

1) In your view, matter is the fundamental thing, the constituent of every thing, and matter has unique properties. Matter can be related to other matter in various ways. A thing has unique properties, which depend on the relations between the matter that compose the thing. A rock and a being are examples of things. In turn, there are relations between things, so for instance there are relations between a rock and a being, which depend on the relations between the matter that makes up the being and the matter that makes up the rock.

2) In your view, there is no such thing as matter existing in isolation, there is always matter in relation to other matter, every thing is matter in relation to other matter. When you talk of a thing such as a rock or a being, you always refer to the thing in relation to its surroundings, so for instance strictly speaking a being is not a thing, but "a being and its surroundings and the relations between them" is a thing, which has unique properties.

To say that the purpose of science is "Progress or Truth" is to assign aspirational aims to science, aims that are not an intrinsic part of science, nor do they define or describe its purpose. Even the definition I have quoted goes too far. Science is not a suitable tool to examine the (human) "social world". I'd go farther: the misuse of science these days mainly centres on our social world, and the complete inability of science to address it usefully. — Pattern-chaser

I was talking about the purpose of science in the minds of many scientists and people, to them there is no need to think about science and about what scientists do and about where science is going, because to them it is on a path to Progress and Truth. I capitalize Progress and Truth because they worship it and want to attain it, like other people worship and want to attain God. That's why I'm saying many scientists and people don't see science as lacking a purpose, they don't see the need for philosophy, to them Science has a purpose and they're moving towards it. And of course I see that as a huge problem, that's why I keep saying that Science has become a religion.

That is the very problem. If we have science without a purpose, science without philosophy, science will stagnate and any science that is done will be done without purpose or reason. science may have caused some of our problems, but I think it wrong to believe that knowledge can be evil in any way. It is the application of this knowledge that hurts us. I think that is one of the many places we find our use. We can use science to fix any damage we've caused to our planet, but only if we can justify doing so, of course, with a philosophical argument. — TogetherTurtle

But we already have science with a purpose, that purpose is Progress or Truth, which supposedly will solve all our problems. Scientists believe that what they do gives us Progress and brings us closer to Truth which will solve our problems. But they won't acknowledge that their own beliefs may be partially responsible for our problems, and that they are not necessarily getting closer to Truth, and that their achievements do not necessarily have to be seen as Progress. Philosophy is sorely needed here, to think about what they are doing, but they won't have it.

I disagree that science can fix any damage if we keep treating it as separate from philosophy, rather I would argue that seeing science as separate from philosophy has caused a lot of damage itself, but we still believe that we will fix our problems by applying what has caused them in the first place.

I didn't imply knowledge can be inherently evil, indeed the problem is how people see it and what they do with it. I agree with Mark Twain: It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

This is what I was trying to get across before- don't let it happen. It will take more than just a handful of us, but we need to get across that this can and will happen. We can find the ideas of scientists disgusting all we like, but unless we work with them, they won't change, and we will suffer from the destruction of our world. Furthermore, if we continue to find flaws and fix them, not only philosophy in science but all of us finding flaws everywhere and fixing them, we can make this world a better place. — TogetherTurtle

I get your point, but how do you get a cult to change their mind? It's as if you're looking at a child doing something stupid, and you can tell he's going to hurt us and eventually hurt himself, but no matter what you say to him he won't listen to you. And then it's not one child, it's a billion of them. You may spend enormous effort to make one change his mind, but meanwhile ten new ones have replaced him. I don't know how to wake people up, I just don't. Even if you find flaws they don't listen, so the flaws don't get fixed.

Years ago I had come to the realization that the only way they would listen is if we came up with a theory that is more simple than the ones we have now (for instance in fundamental physics), but that can explain more and predict more than the ones we have now. This way they would see the use of philosophizing about what they do, as it would be philosophy that got them out of their impasse. But then I thought, probably they still wouldn't see the use of philosophy, they would just say that whoever came up with that theory is a genius, a new Einstein, and they would misinterpret the concepts that the theory uses, and then they would build new theories on top of it while adding their own misconceptions and fallacies, and nothing would have fundamentally changed.

Most people only listen to status and money, that's what runs the world. So I thought if I want to change things, I need to climb the social ladder and get a lot of money, and then I would have the power to make people really listen. But then I realized I'm not good at making money, I don't have the right mindset for it, I like to help people, I don't like to ask for something in exchange. And this society runs on people who want to take from others, not help others without asking anything in return. It's like a huge machine that can't be stopped and that will run its course until it has destroyed so much that it will die while taking almost everything with it, and meanwhile all we can do is watch.

So gravity and spacetime are reifications. — T Clark

Reification is the act of reifying, of treating an idea as a concrete thing, it doesn't mean anything to say gravity and spacetime are reifications, they are ideas. Treating them as concrete things is a reification.

What about electromagnetic radiation, subatomic particles, the universe, galaxies, forests, black holes. — T Clark

I'm going to answer them all because I find it interesting to think about.

Electromagnetic radiation is an idea, we don't see electromagnetic radiation propagating. Some of the things we do observe behave as if there is invisible stuff propagating between them at a specific speed, and it can be useful to see it that way, but it's also equally valid to say that there is nothing propagating and that things interact at a distance with a small delay.

Strictly speaking I would say treating electromagnetic radiation as a concrete thing is a reification (in part because of the way electromagnetic radiation is characterized: it is said to consist of an oscillating electric field which generates an oscillating magnetic field, which itself generates an oscillating electric field and so on, whereas it has been shown theoretically that there is no causal link between the two, so picturing electromagnetic radiation as concrete electric and magnetic fields mutually creating one another is decidedly a reification).

Same goes with subatomic particles, we don't observe them, however it can be useful to imagine that they are really there, but it's not necessary. Again this is not to say that we don't observe the effects that we do observe.

The universe is an idea, we don't see the universe, we imagine that we see parts of it.

It is customary to think that things we see through telescopes are real things out there that we can hardly see with the naked eye (or not at all). It's surely possible to come up with a model that says that galaxies only exist through telescopes, but personally I do believe like pretty much most people that there really are galaxies out there made of stars and planets and so on. But if we were really pedantic we could say that until we travel to them and see that they're really there, we can't know that they exist outside of telescopes. The ontological difference between galaxies and curved spacetime though is that we don't see the latter in any way.

If we define a forest as a bunch of trees close to each other, sometimes we do see that, so concrete thing.

A black hole is an idea, but it most likely refers to a concrete thing as well (in the sense a collapsed star so dense that we cannot see it directly). In principle one way to check it's concrete would be to travel towards it. Whereas there is no way to check for curved spacetime.

I'll go back to oceans again. Salt water is concrete, but I don't see how an ocean is. — T Clark

Yes, a whole ocean exists as an idea, unless you see Earth from above and see one all at once.

We know space time using the same general techniques as we use to know stars - indirectly through observations of radiation which has been travelling for millions or billions are years. — T Clark

Again we don't see curved spacetime in any way, I thought I gave enough reasons why. We can interpret any observation and experiment in a flat space or in a curved space, spacetime is not a concrete thing that can curve and that we observe in any way. For instance gravitational lensing can be interpreted as light having a curved trajectory rather than as space being curved. Einstein himself saw spacetime as a tool of thought, not as a concrete thing. What more do you need?

Trying to avoid that, I'm not saying anything like, "Whatever anyone claims is what's the case." — Terrapin Station

But when you say that what a being experiences is what the world really is like from their spatio-temporal location, it seems like you're saying that as long as people don't lie then what they claim is what's the case.

Although I love the fantasy of ghosts, it's difficult for me to say what would be required for me to believe that I actually saw one. Chances are that I'd be skeptical of it no matter what, because I can't figure out how to make the idea of them coherent. — Terrapin Station

Just to make sure, when you talk of reference point it seems to me you're not just referring to a spatio-temporal location, rather you're referring to a spatio-temporal location in addition to what is present at that spatio-temporal location. So for instance two beings present at approximately the same spatio-temporal location could disagree about what the world really is like not in virtue of their different spatio-temporal location, but in virtue of them being different beings.

Which implies that in your view, what the world really is like doesn't just depend on spatio-temporal locations, it also depends on beings. It seems to me your ontological primitives are spatio-temporal locations and things such as beings, rather than a world that contains spatio-temporal locations and beings. Is that correct?

Without getting into issues about truth, yes. What's the case at reference point x might not be the case at reference point y. For example, at reference point x, F is round, while at reference point y, F is oblong. — Terrapin Station

So you agree that the statement "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" is true from your spatio-temporal location, but this statement might not be true from another spatio-temporal location? So for instance one could say that "there is no real way the world is from some particular spatio-temporal locations", and it could be true from their spatio-temporal location? And while their statement is not true to you, it could be true to you as well if you were at their spatio-temporal location?

Re the ghost thing, I answered that already. — Terrapin Station

What I'm trying to understand is, do you consider you would have seen a ghost as well if you were at their spatio-temporal location, do you consider that there really was a ghost which could be seen from that spatio-temporal location? Or that if you were at that spatio-temporal location you wouldn't have seen one?

There's not much "poof" to it. That's simply the properties of the matter in question, from the frame of reference of being the matter in question. — Terrapin Station

I don't see how that's not rephrasing the "poof" in a more complicated way.

But just "some way" doesn't really answer it. We just have no idea how it's supposed to work other than "some way," and then don't worry about it? — Terrapin Station

"Some way" is how I feel about your explanation for how minds arise from brains. I agree that saying minds interact in some way is not a satisfying answer, but I also think there is a lot to discover by looking in that direction, I'm not saying it's a final answer.

Sure but one thing at a time. Let's keep the posts short. I like to do this more or less just like we'd talk if we were having a conversation in person. (Which is what ideally I'd prefer, and then I'd prefer a phone conversation, then online chat.) — Terrapin Station

Okay, but as I said this is a thread on realism, and you are the one holding a realist view, and I don't see how discussing my idealist view can help me understand your view and answer the questions I asked. As I had explained in other threads I used to be a realist and as I explained in this thread I'm willing to tentatively let go of idealism to try to understand your point of view, so I don't see how it is useful to discuss idealism in order to eventually address my questions.


Here they are again:

I'm willing to do my best to entertain and understand your point of view. So you say there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location, and that it's meaningless to talk about how the world is without reference to a spatio-temporal location.

So it means that from your spatio-temporal location "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" is true, whereas that might not be true from another spatio-temporal location? Or is the statement "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" made without reference to a spatio-temporal location?

Then, from your spatio-temporal location, if you see someone say that they have seen a ghost who was as real as a tree and that they weren't hallucinating, does it mean to you that they really saw a ghost from their spatio-temporal location, or that they hallucinated a ghost, and how do you reach that conclusion? — leo

So yes, either matter comes to exist spontaneously, or it's always existed (those are the only two options for whatever we're positing ontologically) and we can explain how minds come to exist by explaining stellar and planetary development, explaining how certain materials in certain conditions amount to life, explaining evolution and how it leads to brains, etc. — Terrapin Station

And then poof minds arise out of brains.

So what, at least roughly, would you analogously do for an ontology where mind somehow exists first and creates things like planets? — Terrapin Station

You can have a primary mind that imagined what we call the universe, and we would be part of that mind.

If only minds exist on your view, then how would you claim that you can ever observe anything, including other people/other minds, aside from your own mind? In other words, how would you establish anything other than solipsism? — Terrapin Station

Our minds would be connected in some way, I'm not saying we would all live within our own mind disconnected from others.


I have shown my good faith answering your questions, now it would be nice if you could start answering mine. Your view is the realist one, so discussing it would be more on topic than discussing mine. But it seems like you stop reading my posts after one or two sentences, so I'm not even sure you're gonna read that.

"I do not like to suffer at all from what I call the German disease, an interest in philosophy"
- James Watson — Constrained Maximizer

That quote is from his paper "Biology: A Necessarily Limitless Vista".

I find it quite funny that in the very next paragraph James Watson engages in philosophy:

I should begin by saying what I mean by science. It is simply a method of trying to explain the animate and inanimate objects around us – or at least their reproducible parts, how the world works, and what it is made of. That is, what are sometimes called the laws of nature.

Then

A question I find more interesting than the abstract discussion of the limits to scientific knowledge is how far can you limit human curiosity? Are there ways of prescribing what humans think about?

then

life is organized solely around molecular structures that initially spontaneously came together to create the first form of life and which later evolved using natural selection into the extraordinary diversity of living organisms that now populate our planet.

We should thus accept the fact that we alone, without any help from the heavens, must organize our futures to the best of our abilities.

I guess he did suffer from that disease too, and the worst part is he didn't even know it.

This sounds, at least to me, like an "us versus them" argument. I think it may be time to step back and realize what team we're on.

We rely on the progress science makes to improve our lives. If that progress slows or even halts because of a flaw in their ideology, we will suffer. All mankind will suffer. Under the right circumstances, it could even result in the regression or even extinction of our species. — TogetherTurtle

I don't see it as an us vs. them, to me science and philosophy are inseparable, and trying to separate them makes science a religion and philosophy something irrelevant to most people. I see the whole endeavor of making observations and thinking about them and interpreting them and comparing them and connecting them as both science and philosophy, they didn't use to be separate in the minds of people, but now they are for no good reason in my view, simply because of confusions and misconceptions.

So whatever progress is a result of what I would call science-philosophy, even scientists who say they despise philosophy make use of it in their research, they just don't realize it, but that means they are often not aware of their beliefs underlying their research. Also I disagree that what we call 'progress' necessarily improve our lives, it seems to me we're on a course towards destroying life on Earth all while reveling in the idea that we're making progress. Maybe if we thought more about what we are doing, rather than just keep on doing whatever we're doing, we wouldn't be going that way.

This, civilization, is a collaborative effort. We must all bring to the table what we have, because if everyone does, the rewards will be greater than anything we've given up. If we can fix something now that may cause problems later, it is our very purpose to do so. Even if you refuse to accept an apology, even if your disgust towards these people never fades, you must at least acknowledge that a world without them is a world you don't want to live in. — TogetherTurtle

I don't have a disgust for scientists, I have a disgust for the idea that thinking about what we are doing is useless, that it's useless to think about the meaning of what we're doing, to think about how certain the results we get are, to think about the beliefs and assumptions underlying what we do, to think about other world views we would get by picking other beliefs or assumptions, to think about the consequences of what we do. The idea that the only thing that's useful is to keep doing whatever we're doing because supposedly we're making Progress and supposedly we're getting closer to Truth and supposedly Science will solve all our problems. We might very well go on to destroy the world while being stuck in that cult.

Which is why I asked why you'd believe something like that. So you think that a mind exists spontaneously (in the history of the universe) and then, what, thinks matter and then--poof--matter exists because of that? How would that work ontologically?

And then the mind also thinks of people and poof they exist, and then those people think if things like rocks, say, and they poof into existence? — Terrapin Station

That's kind of a derogatory way to look at it, I might as well say so you think matter exists spontaneously and then aggregates in a specific way and then poof mind exists because of that? How does that work ontologically?

In my view it's not just a matter of thinking, it's a matter of believing, what we believe shapes what we experience and what we think and what we desire, which shapes what we experience and what we believe, in an interacting whole. Also mind does not create matter that exists outside mind, it's still a part of mind. And minds interacting in some way create other minds, which can appear as people.

But you don't even need to know why I believe that everything stems from minds to answer the questions I asked. Like I said I am willing to tentatively let go of that belief. Here I have let go of it, I'm listening to you, I'm willing to do my best to entertain and understand your point of view. So you say there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location, and that it's meaningless to talk about how the world is without reference to a spatio-temporal location.

So it means that from your spatio-temporal location "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" is true, whereas that might not be true from another spatio-temporal location? Or is the statement "there is a real way the world is from a particular spatio-temporal location" made without reference to a spatio-temporal location?

Then, from your spatio-temporal location, if you see someone say that they have seen a ghost who was as real as a tree and that they weren't hallucinating, does it mean to you that they really saw a ghost from their spatio-temporal location, or that they hallucinated a ghost, and how do you reach that conclusion?

For a long time Philosophy has been cast aside by most. At least in America, they don't even teach it in school. (outside of the occasional reference to philosophers that may have inspired the founding fathers, of course.) If we want to change that, we have to prove that it's worth it to change that. We have to present what our findings contribute to humanity and show that we don't agree with those who would manipulate our work to accommodate their delusional world view. — TogetherTurtle

At some point people need to have a bit of intellectual integrity, they just have to look at the history of science and read papers of renowned scientists of the past to see that these scientists were also philosophers, and that philosophizing led them to their path of discovery. People keep talking about "the scientific method", "the scientific method" doesn't say what hypothesis ought to be formulated or how it ought to be tested, at that point philosophy enters the stage. Bridgman used to say there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists. If people won't acknowledge that, if they are not willing to make the effort to see the importance of philosophy in science, what do we have to prove and what can we prove to them? They are not willing to accept the proofs, they just want to stay in their ivory tower and think they are better than everyone else while they are actually poor scientists and more like parrots who regurgitate what they have rote-learned.

Everything we know, everything we think is metaphorical. Spacetime is as real as gravity, inertia, atoms, countries, oceans, dog hair, and so on and so on. The world isn't split up into anything until we come along and do it. Everything is a reification. Why pick on spacetime? — T Clark

If that's the way you see it, then again by that logic unicorns and ghosts are as real as oceans and dog hair, just because we can think about them.

Reification is defined as treating an idea as a concrete thing. For instance a rock is a concrete thing, you can see it, you can touch it, even smell it or taste it. You can do that with dog hair too, and with ocean water. You can't do that with a country, but you can do it with concrete things that you define as part of a country, or with a part of a concrete map that you define as a country. You can't do that with inertia, or gravity, or spacetime. That's the distinction.

And when we talk of spacetime really curving, and when we say that planets (which are concrete things, we can at least see them) move the way they do because spacetime is curved, we're treating spacetime as a concrete thing, as if it was some concrete entity really curving, but spacetime is nowhere to be seen or touched, it's an idea that is defined from concrete things, or as Einstein put it it's a free creation of the human intelligence, a tool of thought, as opposed to, say, a rock.

If you don't want to make a distinction and remain consistent, you either have to treat every idea as a concrete thing (so a ghost is concrete like a rock because you think about it), or you have to treat every concrete thing as an idea (so a rock is an idea just like a ghost or a unicorn is). Otherwise if you want to make a distinction and you're treating an idea as a concrete thing then you're making the fallacy of reification.

I'm not necessarily picking on spacetime, I just think it's a good example, because it's a concept I struggled with for a long time precisely because teachers and physicists talked of it as if it was a concrete thing, precisely because they made that fallacy of reification, and I see that as a sign that philosophy is sorely needed in physics and more generally in science. But besides spacetime I could also pick gravity or energy or force or plenty of others.

To say for instance that gravity isn't a concrete thing isn't to say that we don't observe things falling to the ground, but it's a fallacy to say that things fall because of gravity: gravity is a summary or model of observations of concrete things, a thing falling to the ground is just an instance of what we call gravity, it is not caused by gravity, gravity isn't a concrete thing we have identified independently. Whereas if we see you pick up a stick and cut it in half, we can say the stick being cut in half was caused by you, since you are a concrete entity, you aren't just an idea.

The important point here is that when we're talking about "the composition of Mount Everest," we are not talking about the concept of composition, even though obviously we have such a concept and we need to invoke it in order to talk about the composition. But per the use-mention distinction, that's on the "mention" side. I'm referring to the "use" side. On the "use" side, the composition isn't a concept and doesn't have anything to do with concepts. It has to do with what sorts of rocks/minerals/etc. comprise the mountain. — Terrapin Station

Okay, but you know my view is that everything stems from minds in some way, so in my view these rocks/minerals also stem from minds, I don't see them as existing independently of minds, so if you're asking me why I believe that rocks/minerals existing independently of minds would depend on other minds, that's already not my belief. I can attempt to tentatively entertain your point of view when needed, but I can't explain why I believe something that I don't believe.

I think it would help if you attempted to answer some of the last questions I asked so I could understand your view more precisely.

For instance it's not clear to me what you mean by "a reference point is a spatio-temporal location" when a person is the reference point.

And considering you say what a person experiences is what the world really is from their reference point, if that person experiences a ghost and says it's real, then from the reference point of that person the ghost is real and not a hallucination; and then would you say that there really was a ghost in the part of the world that was accessible from the spatio-temporal location where the person was?

I mean, a century ago scientists-philosophers like Einstein and Poincaré understood fundamental ideas about science and the concepts it uses that many scientists and teachers today do not understand, and then people who are curious about science do not understand them either. There are so many fallacies and misconceptions in recent educational materials, it took myself a great deal of time and effort to see through them and all the confusion it generates.

Something has gone terribly wrong since then, my view is that in preferring mathematical elegance over intuitive simplicity, physicists of the 20th century have built theories that are much more complex than they need to be, and instead of rethinking the foundations they keep building on top of them and they have created a monster which has become almost inscrutable to philosophers, in which the motto is "shut up and calculate". So physics students have no time to philosophize, they have to learn all the intricacies to shut up and calculate properly, and by the time they become professional researchers they keep on making the monster grow, trying to unify its different parts by coming up with ever more complex concepts that encompass them.

I think most if not all of the great advances in science came from scientists who were also philosophers, or from chance discoveries. There is probably more to gain by thinking about and rethinking the foundations of fundamental physics that by continuing to develop the current theories, which in my view are stuck in an impasse of growing complexity and diminishing returns.

Are you saying that unicorns and ghosts are as real as spacetime? Also, I don't understand why you would feel the need to ridicule people who believe in ghosts or the afterlife anyway. Here we are whining about how scientists ridicule us about our beliefs. — T Clark

I don't ridicule people who believe in ghosts or the afterlife, but it's often what scientists do.

I'm saying that if you believe in curved spacetime, curved spacetime is as real to you as unicorns and ghosts are real to people who believe in them. While if you don't believe in unicorns or ghosts, they exist to you as an idea, just like curved spacetime exists to me as an idea.

It's also somewhat the way Einstein viewed it:

we have attempted to describe how the concepts space, time and event can be put psychologically into relation with experiences. Considered logically, they are free creations of the human intelligence, tools of thought, which are to serve the purpose of bringing experiences into relation with each other, so that in this way they can be better surveyed.
(in his book Relativity and the Problem of Space)

The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.
(in The Meaning of Relativity)

You imagine that I look back on my life's work with calm satisfaction. But from nearby it looks quite different. There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track.
(in a letter to a friend in 1949)

He saw curved spacetime as a tool of thought, whose only legitimacy is to "represent the complex of our experiences". He didn't assume that curved spacetime was necessary to account for observations.

The geometry of space is not something that can be tested experimentally. For instance you can account for gravitational lensing by assuming that light travels in straight lines in curved space, or by assuming that light has a curved trajectory in flat space.

Poincaré understood that over a century ago already, here is what he said in his book Science and Hypothesis:

we could give up Euclidean geometry, or modify the laws of optics, and suppose that light is not rigorously propagated in a straight line. Euclidean geometry, therefore, has nothing to fear from fresh experiments.

no experiment will ever be in contradiction with Euclid's postulate; but, on the other hand, no experiment will ever be in contradiction with Lobachevsky's postulate.

It's a bit sad that these insights aren't found in the minds of most physicists and science enthusiasts today.

People often call things "reification" as a way of undermining the legitimacy of an idea. Spacetime is as real as gravity, electrons, and dog hair. There's a good argument to be made that calling something "dog hair" is also reification, but that will just make scientists even surer we are all boneheads. — T Clark

Sorry no, if I can make predictions as accurate as general relativity without using the concept of curved spacetime, I'm not gonna say that curved spacetime is as concrete as dog hair I feel with my hands. If I let a ball fall to the ground, I'm not gonna say it accelerates because it contains some substance called potential energy that gets converted into another substance called kinetic energy, cause I can't feel these substances either. Otherwise by that logic I can just say that unicorns are as real as dog hair because I can think about unicorns, it's just a matter of thinking about them and they become concrete, they exist! But then let's stop disrespecting or ridiculing people who believe in ghosts or in the afterlife, because it's concrete to them just like curved spacetime is to you.

This is getting to the questions. I hate going on and on though, so I want to figure out why we're doing that. — Terrapin Station

Let me help you figure that out. If a person perceives a ghost, and says that this is not a hallucination, do you think it's really a hallucination and that person is wrong, or that there really is a ghost from the reference point of that person?

But you're claiming that, say, the composition of Mount Everest, say, in some way depends upon other minds.

Why would you believe that? — Terrapin Station

I believe that the very concept of 'composition' stems from minds, and that different minds have different experiences, so minds could disagree about what the composition of Mount Everest is, but some minds could pressure other minds to believe that the composition of Mount Everest is such-and-such, and then these other minds would believe it, and then even if they went to Mount Everest to check for themselves, their belief would influence them in a way that their observations wouldn't disagree with what they have been made to believe, or maybe the observations would disagree in appearance but they would interpret it as errors of measurement or as themselves being too stupid to make correct measurements, and that the only way they could disagree with what they have been made to believe is if they broke free of that belief. In that way other minds influence what we see and what we think we see.

Keep in mind that I am NOT necessarily referring to persons, perceptions etc. by "reference point." I'm referring to spatio-temporal locations.

The reference point would be whatever your spatio-temporal location is. That doesn't imply that there's a "you" in the equation in terms of what's phenomenally occurring. — Terrapin Station

Don't you count brain states as part of a reference point, and not just spatio-temporal locations? Or do you mean that when the reference point is a person, by reference point you refer to the set of all spatio-temporal locations that this person's brain occupies?

If you can't observe the world, how would you observe what other people say to know what the consensus is? — Terrapin Station

I would say I observe a world that depends on my mind and on other minds, I'm not saying that what I observe is totally disconnected from other minds.

Can you answer my questions?

We don't just do that arbitrarily. We do it because we observe the world to be different than how we thought it was. — Terrapin Station

Yes, but how does that contradict the idea that "things are determined by minds"? Other minds could influence the world we observe in a way different than we thought.

Re that other comment, again, part of what the world is like is physical "laws." You seem to be misinterpreting my views as saying that no on can be wrong re their perceptions relative to what they believe those perceptions peg ontologically. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that we can be right re our perceptions relative to what we believe those perceptions peg ontologically. And that fact is the only way that we can say that any perception doesn't get the world right in the first place. — Terrapin Station

But these physical "laws" are determined through social consensus from what the consensus observes, people who have different perceptions could disagree that these laws have universal validity. If the consensus defines hallucination in reference to physical laws, it still boils down to the consensus defining hallucination in reference to what the consensus perceives.

And then when we're saying that such and such experience is a hallucination, all we're saying is that in the model of the world that the consensus uses, such an experience is labeled as hallucination, whereas it could be that in some other model that some other people use, such an experience is not a hallucination, and that in itself doesn't make the first model fundamentally more correct than the second one, would you agree with that?

And then would you agree that it's possible to have a coherent view of the world in which there is no such thing as a hallucination? But rather that people have different experiences, and sometimes people share similar experiences, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes people can come to perceive things they didn't think they would perceive and that others had reported perceiving without being believed.

Actually, it's fact which makes that determination. — Galuchat

And how is 'fact' determined?

You seem to have ignored everything else I've said.

If things we're determined by minds, by what we're asserting, then we couldn't discover that we're wrong. — Terrapin Station

We could change what we are asserting and interpret it as discovering that we were wrong.

It's not determined by minds, but by what the world is like. We couldn't just decide to assert that P, where P would then be the case. — Terrapin Station

If two people are at about the same spatiotemporal location, and they have different perceptions, you're saying they see what the world is like from their reference point, but then because they disagree the first one says he's seeing reality while the other is hallucinating. But the second one can equally say that about the first. So why is a distinction needed between reality and hallucination, why can't we just say that they're seeing the world from their reference point? It seems hallucination only serves as a tool used by the social consensus to dismiss perceptions that some other people have, and to not have to take them into account into their model of the world.

This merely hides the fundamental issue and does not address it in any way. If most people were blind, reports of visual perceptions wouldn't be linked to external stimuli, because most people wouldn't have an explanation for these perceptions based on what they perceive themselves, and so your visual perceptions would be deemed to be hallucinations.

Or some decades ago you would have said a rogue wave is a hallucination, that is "a perception which has no environmental stimulus", or maybe an illusion, "which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception", because most people didn't believe that rogue waves were things that existed out there, as in they didn't think they would perceive them themselves, and so if they can't perceive it and it doesn't fit into their theoretical models then they conclude it doesn't exist out there in the environment, it isn't external, it is internal.

It's consensus and theoretical models that determine what's hallucination and what isn't. Blind people wouldn't be right to dismiss reports of visual experiences as hallucinations, even if they didn't have these experiences themselves. They could come up with their own model of the world, their own theories, and in them visual experiences would be classified as perceptions in the absence of external stimuli, as hallucinations. In their world, visual experiences would be hallucinations. In our world, they aren't, but we treat some other things as hallucinations, even though in the world of some other people they may not be.

What it boils down to is that when the consensus doesn't perceive something and some other people claim to perceive it, the consensus classifies it as perception in the absence of stimulus, which itself boils down to: "perception that the consensus doesn't have". What is classified as external stimuli is basically perceptions that the consensus has or that it defines as originating from external stimuli. If your perception isn't one that the consensus has, or if it hasn't been defined as originating from an external stimulus, then the consensus says you're hallucinating. It's not more profound than that. If the consensus changes, what is classified as hallucination changes as well.

I think we should do away with the concept of hallucination. To classify an experience as hallucination is basically to dismiss it as irrelevant. Well, the experience of rogue waves wasn't irrelevant to the people who encountered them. Many people who are said to be hallucinating might have experiences that are very relevant to them and possibly to other people as well. Classifying experiences as hallucinations is blinding ourselves and remaining within our own bubble, not opening ourselves to what others experience.

Also worth mentioning that the forum is (mostly) about physics. Makes sense to me that they might not know about things outside of their area of expertise, i.e. metaphysics. — TogetherTurtle

There would be no issue if they didn't make metaphysical claims about what's possible and what's not possible, what the world is and what it isn't, what we are and what we aren't, where we come from, where we are going, and then ridicule or attack people who disagree with their metaphysical claims because supposedly these people don't understand 'physics'. If they don't know about things outside of their area of expertise, it might be better if they didn't claim to know about them no? The worst part is they aren't even aware they're doing it, so fundamentally they don't even know the limits of their supposed area of expertise, and so they aren't experts about physics either, but they believe they are, and that cult is widespread.

It is probably more related to what Linus Torvalds quipped: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." In that kind of context, Linus demands that you do something considered objectively "hard" in order to first gain respect.

For example, in the philosophy of engineering, they want you to first show why they should respect you as an engineer. Generally spoken, in the philosophy of X, they want you to show your real proficiency in X.

From there on, aptitude and knowledge of philosophy is considered impressive. Peers will respect you more as a practitioner in the field of X, if you have a deep understanding of the philosophy of X, and ultimately of general philosophy. Free-standing, general philosophy, however, is not much appreciated, because there is the impression that everybody can just spout whatever vague ideas, i.e. mere verbiage.

It is the same with sales and management. You cannot sell airplane repair services, if it is obvious that you have never held a screw driver in your hands, ever in your life. You cannot manage programmers, if they detect that you cannot write a line of code. These people will not accept you in those circumstances. They will simply not respect you. Still, if you can really do the work itself, and you are good at philosophy, then you will automatically rise to the top of your field. Thought leaders in any field are always good philosophers, and they typically work their way through the philosophy classics too, because that really helps.

People tend to learn things in the wrong order. Theory follows practice, and not the other way around. That is why you better get lots of work experience in your field first, before even getting a degree. The other way around will often make you sound like an arrogant prick who seeks to "skip the hard part". — alcontali

I generally agree with this, but one problem for instance in fundamental physics is that practicing a lot of theory-learning and problem-solving can lead one to become very disconnected from the meaning of the concepts and symbols that are being manipulated. For instance when while studying general relativity we are told that matter tells spacetime how to curve and the curvature of spacetime tells matter how to move, it's very easy to start reifying spacetime as a concrete entity that does curve, especially when you have to spend a huge amount of time manipulating and solving mathematical equations, and once this misconception and others start adding on top of one another you start going down a rabbit hole that it becomes very hard to get out of. When you spend years and years studying difficult theories and learning how to solve problem within them, afterwards it becomes very difficult to think outside their frameworks and to philosophize about them.

And I feel strongly that the more productive way would be to focus first on observations and experiments with as little theory as possible, rather than to focus on the theory-learning and the problem-solving. After all theories are built out of observations and experiments, not the other way around, and it is much more illuminating to look at how theories were developed rather than learning how to apply them, because the observations and experiments could have been explained in different ways, and focusing on the theory makes one blind to these other ways, and then we start thinking that what these theories say is more certain than it is and we have a hard time seeing the beliefs at the roots of the prevalent paradigm.

So I actually think that focusing on observations and experiments and good philosophy with little theory could make one a better scientist than the ones who are being trained now, who focus mostly on theory. But then the problem is that these other scientists don't see you as one of them if you don't think within their paradigm, and so it becomes hard to be acknowledged and for your ideas to be considered by these peers, and so it's not necessarily the cream that rises to the top, rather it's a system that perpetuates itself while accepting little influence that it sees as coming from outside, and then the more complicated the theories within the paradigm are the harder it is to make the system evolve, and I submit that this is why fundamental physics has become pretty much stagnant for the past decades.

Whereas at the end of the 19th century the prevalent theories were less complicated to learn and the system had less inertia, which allowed for a paradigm shift in the beginning of the 20th century, but maybe now it would take much more than new observations and new experiments for there to be a paradigm shift, I think it would require that scientific education become more focused on observation and experiment and philosophy and much less on theory. Or one could assume that physics is pretty much done, that we have the good foundations and it's just a matter of working out the details, but I think there are way too many unsolved fundamental problems to see that as acceptable.

So first, hallucinations and illusions are real hallucinations and illusions. (Where we're not using "real" in the traditional manner to refer to something objective or that exists extramentally.) But we can know that there are no real pink elephants in someone's apartment when they're hallucinating a pink elephant in their apartment, because other people can see that there are no pink elephants, we can tell this via instruments, as well, and we know a lot about how matter behaves and can behave, what's required for there to be an elephant in an apartment, and we also know a lot about how brains work, including how they work on LSD (if that should be the case in this instance), etc. — Terrapin Station

The problem with this characterization of hallucination is that for instance until a few decades ago we could also say the following:

We can know that there are no real rogue waves on the ocean when people are hallucinating a rogue wave on the ocean, because other people can see that there are no rogue waves, we can tell this via instruments, as well, and we know a lot about how waves behave and can behave, what's required for there to be a big wave on the ocean, and we also know a lot about how brains work.

What's the fundamental difference between the two examples? In the two cases, a few people claim something while the majority disagrees with them, we don't have instrument records that can corroborate what the minority claims, and we have well-tested models that explain how what the minority claims is impossible.

And yet, over 150 years later, measurements corroborated what the minority claimed, and then we had to admit that our models were wrong. So how can we ever decisively conclude what is hallucination and what isn't?

Also, you're basically defining "real" as something that the majority reports seeing, but then that means that if the majority was blind then everything we see with our eyes would be called a hallucination, and then the blind majority would come up with some model explaining how the minority has some real physical disorder that leads them to have these hallucinations.

And so I see these characterizations of 'hallucination' and 'real' as very problematic, it boils down to "X is a hallucination and not real because the majority agrees that it's not real". What's real is defined through consensus, and we don't know whether something labeled as hallucination might not be labeled real some time later, or the other way around. For instance, maybe the idea that "everything we experience reduces to brain states" will end up being seen as a delusion by the majority.

And all of this is one of the observations that lead me to say that 'reality' is defined and constructed by people to a great extent, or rather by minds.

Sure, but I'm not at all endorsing representationalism, idealism, etc. Those require theoretical moves just like any other stance does. That was the point. — Terrapin Station

I think Terrapin Station is saying that there is a real way something IS from a particular spatial temporal reference point, and how that thing is from that particular point is knowable
— Noah Te Stroete

That's all correct. To finish the above, it's knowable, for one, from perception, which isn't theoretical. But in cases where perception isn't possible, sure, then we have to do something theoretical. — Terrapin Station

Okay. So now my question would be, if anything anyone experiences is reality from a particular reference point, how do you ever get to a distinction between reality and hallucination?

But it just seems to me an almost impossible task to discuss anything remotely meaningful in most branches of academia if philosophy is completely rejected, which is impossible, and replaces it with philosophical theories like scientism, physicalism, reductionism, materialism, etc. (and claim that those beliefs are pure science and that they don't hold to any beliefs and that they are not philosophy at all). It seems really ridiculous to the point that you may get banned or silenced if one attempts to discuss these things in these circles, as though they were a cult of scientism or something akin to that — Shushi

Do scientists have an irrational bias against philosophy, specifically philosophy of science? — Shushi

Yes. To separate philosophy from science is to make science a religion. They think they have eliminated metaphysics from physics, but all they have done is blind themselves to the metaphysics in physics. They often believe they are dealing with the fundamental constituents of existence, and that there is no belief involved in their conclusions or in the reasonings that lead to their conclusions. They are not aware of their metaphysical beliefs, and it takes some philosophizing to uncover them. Without philosophy they just react like a cult.

Again, this is different than the experience qua the experience, which can be of just a tree. The above is a theoretical account of what's going on.

Hence asking a question about experiences qua experiences versus theoretical accounts of what's going on with those experiences. — Terrapin Station

Sure, but it seems to me you still arrive at the same result as Dfpolis, that both in your theoretical account and his theoretical account everything we experience are experiences of a conscious being, even if the conscious being doesn't always identify them as experiences of a conscious being. I think that's relevant, I'm still thinking about how.

Personally, I don't buy any sort of phenomena/noumena distinction, no appearance/reality distinction. Appearances are what things are really like from some reference point, and there's always some reference point. — Terrapin Station

But if you say reality from some reference point is how things appear from some reference point, then I suppose you agree that when the reference point is a conscious being, what the being sees is always an experience of the being, so even though the being may encounter the phenomenon of "just a tree", it's still an experience of the being, and then doesn't that link back to what Dfpolis said in his first post, that all we have is our experiences?

I never said otherwise. Idealists pretend it's not the case and that idealism is clearly the default however.

What's important to realize is that we have to make theoretical moves in our philosophy of perception, our basic stance on realism/idealism, whatever our stance is. Once you realize that, we can deal with the reasons why we'd choose one construct over another.

You were guessing that I was arguing that one choice didn't involve invoking theory at all, while the other did. That's not at all what I was doing. I'm trying to get "your side" to admit that you're making choices based on theoretical options. It's worth exploring how you're arriving at the theoretical options you're arriving at, what those theoretical options imply, why you'd choose them over other options, etc. — Terrapin Station

Fair enough. I guess one of the main reasons I'm not a realist is that I have noticed how what I believe changes in profound ways what I experience, so in a sense the reality I see depends on what I believe. And then I can't just model what I see to conclude that my mind reduces to a brain, that conclusion isn't warranted to me, it makes more sense to me to say that what I experience depends on me in some way, whatever that 'me' is (which isn't just the body I see). I have also noticed how interacting with other people can lead them to change their beliefs and to then see a different reality, or how that can lead myself to change my beliefs. "Folie à deux" is a thing (or "folie à plusieurs"), wherein several people come to share a reality that is very different from the commonly accepted one. Of course the realist view sees it as a mental disorder ("there is only one reality so if they don't agree with ours they're crazy!"), but without assuming realism it doesn't have to be seen that way. And it seems many other people have noticed that the reality they see depends in some way on what they believe. And I think that people who always stick to the same beliefs wouldn't understand that, because they wouldn't have had that experience.