@Wayfarer, @Tom Storm

So I read the book. Still processing what seems to be a bit of a mess – which may be down to my still piecing it together. This is just some preliminary remarks.

Most of the text seems to be a defence of scientific realism, somewhat re-dressed.

Central to the 'denial of materialism' titular to this thread is the exact nature of Conscious Realism. This is the topic of Chapter Ten, much of which strikes one as speculative. For example Hoffman claims "physicists realise that spacetime is doomed", but there is, so far as I a can see, no such consensus.

More worrying is his definition of consciousness in terms of the PDA loop:

This is a diagrammatic representation of the mathematical definition given in the appendix. The obvious issue here is the extent to which the consciousness of a PDA loop corresponds to consciousness as understood in ordinary language. The PDA loop looks like a formalisation of "response to stimulus", were an experience leads to an action. Is that really all that is involved in consciousness?

The inclusion of "world" worried me at first, it seemed at first Hoffman was assuming the existence of reality. But it appears that what he has in mind here is an iterative process, where "world" is replaced not by space, time and such stuff of our common acquaintance, but with other PDA loops... Not sure what to make of that.

Amongst other things he makes a point of rejecting panpsychism because it relies on dualism, as well as Kant's thing in itself.

Two resources for further consideration. The first is a cut down version fo the book, the second a substantive critique by an Australian academic.

https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
https://philpapers.org/archive/ALLHCR.pdf

The answer might be found in Philosophical Investigations, §201:

For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”.

It's what we do.

On the third day he rose again...

what he's arguing against is not 'reality' per se, but 'objectivism' — Wayfarer

Half way through the book, and still not confident about what it is he is claiming. I can't decide if the vacillation is rhetorical or if he really does not understand the distinctions he is trying to deal with.

I think this is incorrect — Bob Ross

Don't misunderstand: I'm offering this as a clarification, a proscription, of the use of "antirealist", by way of bypassing the "contentious and unsettled nature of the topic". I'm basically stealing the use made of it by logicians such as Kripke.

Otherwise we will be prone to an unhelpful, even tedious, diversion into the many and various "..ism"s.

So long as we understand and obey universal laws, physics... — Benj96

You have the option of not following the laws of physics?

Again you are confusing the act of accepting/believing in a claim because it is true with the abstract ideal value of truth. — Nickolasgaspar

Actually I am explicitly differentiating these. I have pointed out that truth is a unary predicate, taking a statement, while both belief and knowledge are binary predicates, taking both a statement and a person - the one doing the knowing or believing.

You are apparently espousing some pragmatic theory of truth. You are changing "...is true" into a binary predication. So you apparently want to be able to say things like "It was true for medieval folk that the Sun moved around the Earth, but when better data was found, it became true for renaissance folk that the Earth moved around the sun"

Now part of my argument against pragmatist approaches to truth is that this locution misuses "...is true", in the place of the perfectly sensible, standard use of "believed". That is, we can say the very same thing as was said in the somewhat constipated phrase above, by saying "Medieval folk believed the Sun moved around the Earth, but Renaissance folk believed the Earth moves around the sun".

The teaching point here is to show some of the inadequacies of the pragmatic account of truth, in the hope of inciting an interest in other approaches. The substantive theories of truth – correspondence, coherence, and pragmatism – each have inadequacies. Philosophical accounts moved beyond these, especially after Tarski, into much more fertile ground. See the SEP article for a potted overview.

Anyway, I hope it clear that a merely pragmatic view of truth is inadequate. It is inconsistent with our actual use of the words "true" and "believe", hence not informing them, and it is inadequate for many of the things we do with those words - such as claiming that it is true this sentence is in English.

It's all your posts deserve.

Bye.

Νο obviously I don't. Evaluations of truth aren't defined by the ideal of absolute knowledge but by whatever facts you currently have access to. — Nickolasgaspar

Hang on. The fact changed? So the fact was that the Sun went around the earth, and now the Earth goes around the sun?

I put it to you that the Earth has always gone around the sun, that this was true even when we believed that the Sun went around the Earth, and that the fact, the truth, has not changed. That our evaluation of the truth of a statement is not the very same as the truth of a statement. That belief is different to truth.

I believe I am suggesting fact/reason. — Benj96

I didn't just make assertions. i pointed out that

You are making the cosmological argument again, with all its implicit logical flaws, but replacing god with a vacillation between energy and law, as if the existence of either of those were any better understood than the existence of the world. — Banno

The cosmological argument is that the world depends on something else for it's creation, usually a theistic god. The argument has been shown wanting. You make the same argument, replacing god with energy; you claimed that the world is dependent on energy, or on rules, or on some combination - exactly which is left ambiguous. And you add, in treating this as answer to the OP, the non sequitur that this somehow gives us a meaning for life.

Meh. I'll leave you to it. Enjoy.

:roll:

I think you're conflating meaning with subjective feelings and emotions. — Benj96

Rather I am trying to have you see the difference between saying how something is and saying how it ought be. Physics is about how things are. It is silent as to what we might do about it.

There's a whole aspect of life, concerning our actions and our responses to how things are, that is left out of mere physics.

Perhaps. But the use to which you put it in your theory does no work.

Look, Ben, you attempted to argue that the universe exists because energy exists. But all this does is move the question on step further back - instead of asking why the universe exists, we ask why energy exists...

Physics can't provide an answer to questions of meaning, of purpose, because such questions are not about physics. They are about intent. it's a different type of question, with different language and presumptions.

:confused:

You give an explicit insult after three posts. Brief, even for you.

The point is simply that not all imagined possibilities are worthy of consideration. But of course, the Jatravartid differ as to the details.

...and while I am quoting Mr Adams, here's one for :

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? — Douglas Adams

...an imaginable possibility... — Janus

As is

...the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. — Douglas Adams

You are right, idealism must posit something like a universal mind in order to achieve coherence.

But instead of credulity, better to treat this as a reductio. If that's what idealism needs in order to explain apples, then so much the worse for idealism.

Of course it changed. — Nickolasgaspar

So you are saying that the Sun used to go around the Earth, and now the Earth goes around the sun?

Interesting. So on a rough line, which approach, which perspective, comes closer to the interests you express here - Bunge's "real man" approach, decisive and practical, or Midgley's open, piecemeal, remedial approach?

There is a deeper non-material reality which we perceive as physical matter in spacetime. (Hoffman's headset metaphor). The deeper reality is not static; it changes. From within our headset, we perceive those changes as evolution. — Art48

And if evolution is nothing more than our perceptions, then it didn't really occur.

The view still undermines itself.

She started describing the historic sequence of political philosophies and how the changes in metaphysics proceeded. That's something I've thought about a lot, but more in the precinct of ontology than ethics and politics. I haven't spent as much time thinking about them. I think that's because I live my life mostly through my intellect and I'm most interested in becoming more self-aware about how I think. — T Clark

You seem to imply that the intellect has little to do with ethics and politics...

Just for clarity, here's a way one might understand the justified true belief account. For simplicity let's use a fairly direct example. The cup has one handle. Now the sentence "the cup has one handle" will be true if and only if the cup has one handle. And since I specified that, it does.

And some folk will believe that the cup has one handle. What's interesting here is that the truth of "the cup has one handle" is irrelevant to the belief. That is, even if the cup has two handles, some folk may believe that it has one.

They are what we in the trade call "wrong".

So we have truth on the one hand, being ascribed to statements. And we have belief on the other, setting out a relation between a statement and someone.

Bringing these together, we get that some folk believe "the cup has one handle"is true, and some believe "the cup has one handle"is not true. We are close to being able to say that the folk who believe "the cup has one handle" is true know that "the cup has one handle" is true.

The folk who believe that "the cup has two handles" cannot know "the cup has two handles" because the cup does not have two handles.

And here we add the practicality that "the cup has two handles" fits in with the other things we know; that there are cups, that they sometimes have two handles, sometimes one, that we can trust things like our eyes, or my pronouncements, and that if I say the cup has one handle that's a good enough reason to go along with that statements, and so on.

That is, we can justify the belief that the cup has one handle.

So we have a justification, for a belief, that is true. So we can say that we know the cup has one handle.

Do you agree with the definition that Truth is an evaluation term of a specific quality? if not pls provide your definition — Nickolasgaspar

I don't think folk can provide a definition of truth, at least not one beyond the simple T-sentence: "P" is true IFF P. This is so because of the special place attributing truth to a statement has in language.

Is "...is true" an evaluation? well, it's a predicate ranging over statements, if that is what you mean.

But if, as it seems from the remainder of your post, "evaluation" is to be understood as a relation between a statement and someone, then as explained, that's not truth, but belief.

So folk apparently used to believe geocentrism. Now they believe heliocentrism, or something more complex still. While the belief has changed, the truth hasn't. Our evaluation changed, but the truth didn't.

idealistic thought — Nickolasgaspar

To be sure, what I am espousing here is not idealism... It is very much realism.

I want to be sure we are on the same page...because it doesn't feel that we are now. — Nickolasgaspar

Let me help.

My point is that truth and knowledge are observer relative evaluations, limited by our current observations. — Nickolasgaspar

This is your comment with which I took issue, way back. The problems I see:

First, there is a sense in which knowledge is observer-relative but truth isn't. Both knowing and believing something can be represented as a relation between someone and a proposition: Nick knows that Paris is in France; Banno believes that apples are a fruit. But truth does not have this relational characteristic. It's true that Paris is in France and that apples are fruit. Statements of truth differ from statements of knowledge or belief in this important regard: Knowledge and belief are always relative to the one who knows or believes. Truth has no such constraint.

And second, truth is not always fixed by observation. Specific things can be true, or false, regardless of their having been observed. Now to be sure we might only know that something is true as a result of making an observation. The observation can serve as the justification for our claim to know or believe what is observed. But the observation does not generally fix the truth vale.

Thanks for the link.

Sure, philosophy, like plumbing, can be done very badly. And when it is done badly, it is smelly and messy.

Is the answer to not do any plumbing?

, , , , , , consider this:

Mary Midgley: Philosophical Plumbing

I don't understand how "just-so" stories are any worse than "just No" stories without a beginning, — Benj96

"Just-no" stories are honest? They admit "I don't know".

Because that's what energy is. — Benj96

All you have done is replace notions of spirt with energy, making a pseudo-physics.

I've lost track of this discussion. By way of trying to pick it back up, I'll point out that what you are doing in the post linked is already engaging in a language game, the rules for which you are setting out and explicating.

And if you are already in a language game, you are already meaning things by what you do.

So if what you are doing - and I'm not sure what it is you are doing - is giving an account of meaning, havn't you missed the boat? You are already using meaning in giving the account...

As Wittgenstein pointed out, somewhere in PI, pointing at something only works if the other folk around you understand that they have to follow the direction of your finger - and that is already to be participants in a sign language.

All this by way of pointing out that at some stage any account of meaning will come down to: it's just what we do.

2. They are objective. — Bob Ross

Sure. Then we ask how "objective" plays out. In realist/antirealist discussions, the fraught notion of objectivity gives way to a tighter discussion of truth values. An antirealist will say that there are moral statements that are not either true nor false; so they might say that moral statements are actually commands, or expressions of preference, or exclamations; but not statements. And not being statements, they may not have a truth value.

This is how your subjectivism, non-cognitivism, and error theory treat the truth value of moral statements.

Whereas deontology and consequentialism may say that there are moral statements, and that these are either true or they are false, and thereby take a realist stance, what you might call an objective approach.

And within each of these there are multiple ways in which things might play out.

This is the way the realist/antirealist discussion has been played out for thirty years or so.

I wasn't able to follow your "fixated" and "implicit" account. It looked a bit like Anscombe's direction of fit.

And then Spinoza? It has the same temptations. I've a great deal of sympathy for such ideas, but...

Sorry - https://philosophynow.org/issues/154/An_Encounter_with_Radical_Darwinitis

thought it had been shared earlier.

Sure, scientists cooperating to do philosophy badly. All the more reason to keep close track of their arguments.

It's worth noting the connection, and one could probably trace a history as well, perhaps back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Who are we discussing here, Hoffman or Kasturp?

Yep. That's Tallis' criticism, which remains unanswered.

The realist/antirealist discussion pretty much reduces to whether you want to use a bivalent logic or not. Realists say that all statements, even those about things we we don't believe, know, perceive or whatever, are either true or false. Antirealists say that at least some statements either do not have a truth value at all, neither true nor false, or have some third truth value that is neither true nor false.

The subjective/objective discussion remains mired in imprecision, sometimes being about the difference between public and supposedly private statements, sometimes being about distinguishing the world from supposed mental states, and sometimes being about grammatical differences between first and third person accounts.

It seems to me that you might have inadvertently carried the ambiguity of the subject/object discussion into the realist/antirealist discussion.

No.

But not truth. The assumptions and the conclusions can be true, but not the argument.

Do not attribute to me arguments I have not made. I have written extensively on this forum about the logic of truth, defending Davidson and Tarski and attempting to articulate their approach with WIttgensien's meaning as use. If you wish to continue such discussions, have a look at what I have actually said.

Yeah. That's a common condensation. The approach he is advocating is rather than trying to do philosophy by finding the meaning of terms, to look at the use that they take on in the language game and the broader form of life.

Statements are the things that can be true or false. Arguments are valid or invalid.

I've no idea what the remainder of your post says.

EDIT: Ignore this, I shouldn't come to a thread late without digesting the whole thing. — bert1

Actually, this is right on the point. Very often those who espouse idealism are defending a god of one sort or another. Further, something like this is needed by idealists to explain other minds, and avoid solipsism.

But this is where the argument goes, not where it begins.

Idealism is not a claim to omniscience. — Wayfarer

Yeah, it is. Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability. Idealism implies that everything that can be known is known.

Again, stuff we have dealt with previously.