I haven't said or implied that immediate responses cannot be conditioned by reflection or cannot be intentionally trained. It seems to me you are changing the subject.

When we recoil from the fast approach of a flying object, the autonomic system is processing info no less than when we reflect deeply upon, say, a complex moral dilemma. The difference, I believe, consists in the resolution of the cognitive processing per unit of time. Deep reflection is high-res processing whereas instinct is low-res processing. — ucarr

I agree they are both information processing. But the immediate response does not consist in reflection on the information. When there is reflection, the active outcome cannot be predicted with certainty, whereas the immediate response consisting in acquired habit, is much more predictable. For me, that is the salient difference between intentional action and simple internally directed action.

It's important to be honest with others, but this is trickier, for reasons I probably don't need to go into. — plaque flag

It's interesting you say that, and it may be different for different people, but I think it is easier to be honest with others, an honesty of expression which may or may not consist in, go along with, being honest with oneself. In other words, I think it is easier to honestly express the views we are conscious of holding, than it is to determine whether the views we consciously hold are coming from a place of honesty or dishonesty, meaning from a place of impartial rationality as opposed to other motivations.

Determining this comes down to self-examination and the attempt to make conscious what might be unconscious motivations that may be misleading me. That all said, I want to emphasize what I've already acknowledged, and admit that this is only coming from reflection on my own experience, and it may well not be the same for others,

My issue is: why do we insist that the familiar world is appearance behind which lurks some Reality ? As far as I can tell, it's only by taking brains and eyes in the familiar world seriously that we can find indirect realism plausible, but indirect realism says those same brains and eyes are mere appearance.

I sincerely don't think this objection has been addressed sufficiently by indirect realists. — plaque flag

I think the assumption is based on the known fact that we cannot be conscious of the processes of self and world arising. We inhabit our cognitions, and we know they cannot be explained in in terms of themselves: thus, we cannot but assume that something more that we cannot be aware of is going on.

The alternative is phenomenalism, which seems to be incapable of explaining anything.

Is it impossible for a brain to be trained to run two personalities? It'd probably be difficult, but maybe possible, if folks were mean enough to experiment on children that way. Two discursive selves would be held responsible for the coherence of two different sets of beliefs/claims. Maybe there's Weekend Willy and Weekday Walt. — plaque flag

The well-documented cases of multiple personality disorder show that one person may experience being multiple personalities. From the common perspective it is one person, and the multiple personalities are a disordering of what is the 'normal' order.

It seems reasonable to think that animals also have a sense of self, not many senses of many selves, judging by the general predictability of their behaviors.

The resolution to this "hidden dualism" is to recognize that the brain and its functions are also representations and, thusly, the brain-in-itself is not what one ever studies in a lab. E.g., neurons firing is an extrinsic representation (within our perceptions) of whatever the brain-in-itself is doing.

The next step is to realize that the brain-in-itself cannot be quantitative (for quantities never produce qualities and we know directly of qualities as our conscious experience). — Bob Ross

I agree with you that when we study the brain, just as when we study anything else, we are studying the brain as it appears to us. We have no idea what it, or anything else, is in itself apart from how it appears to us.

Quantities and qualities are merely different categories of appearances, we don't know what quantity in itself or quality in itself could be, so again, we cannot come to any warranted conclusions about the in itself.

The in itself is simply the dialectical counterpart of appearance, and that's all we can say. We know that we cannot be conscious of whatever gives rise to the network of interrelated appearances we call the world, but it seems obvious that it cannot give rise to itself, so we cannot but assume that there is something behind the veil.

We can imagine various possibilities, but what we cannot know is whether those possibilities are all merely associations derived from our experiences of the world of appearances or whether there is a kind of intellectual intuition that may allow us to glimpse behind or beyond it.

Whatever we might think about that must remain a matter of faith, we can live our lives believing one thing or another about what is behind the veil, and it is the imaginative diversity that situation and the role of faith affords, that makes the in itself an important, indeed central, part of human life.

The very first thing that any proto-organism has to do is enact the boundary between itself and the environment. — Quixodian

The boundary is not enacted by the proto-organism; it is always already enacted to enable the existence of the organism before it can do any of its own enacting.

Or was it just far more convenient to train a brain to be one person ? — plaque flag

One brain per body, no?

:cool:

The claim I am resiling from is that possibly developments in mathematics were catalyzed by the discovery of fossil fuels. Of course, there was always wood as a fuel, and the discovery of fire was obviously important but happened eons before the advent of science as we understand it. Technology, on the other hand has been progressing from the earliest human times. There was apparently a precursor to the steam engine in the first century AD. I still believe that the development of science would have been much slower without fossil fuels, but of course I wasn't wishing to deny the importance of mathematics and geometry in science.

Yeah I probably had hold of the wrong end of the stick there.

Sounds about right!

I think the scientific revolution was fueled by advances in mathematics. — Fooloso4

Possibly advances in mathematics were catalyzed by the discovery of fossil fuels, but I do agree that mathematics played a part, particularly in physics and chemistry.

Would the scientific revolution, considered as being predominately an industrial and technological revolution, have been possible, or if possible, nearly as rapid, without the discovery of fossil fuels?

We may differ a bit on this issue. To me the in-itself is something like the 'reflection' of a worldless-subject. It's a limiting concept like the worldless subject that, for my money, isn't worth the trouble. — plaque flag

In the sense that we cannot really do anything with the 'in-itself', I agree. I also agree that when we try to imagine the existence of the world prior to humans we project our (necessarily) anthropomorphic cognitions. On other hand I think it is implausible in the extreme to think that the prehuman world did not exist or that its existence was "human-shaped", even though we are unable to think its existence in prehuman terms (obviously).

For me the importance of the in-itself and the noumenal consists in its sustaining the realization that existence is, no matter how familiar it may seem, ultimately ineluctably mysterious. It is this that allows for, as Kant argued, faith, and I also think it allows for all kinds of wonderful metaphysical speculations, which seem to me just fine provided they are not taken too seriously. It seems to me there is also the humour of absurdity in this ineluctable mystery of existence—and to me that is enriching despite, or perhaps better, just because of, its indeterminability.

Do I believe uni-cellulars act intentionally? Yes. I remember high school biology films showing uni-cellulars avoiding a charged probe acting in the role of a cattle prod. — ucarr

I'm thinking of intentionality as planning, as having reasons for action, not simply as response to environments. Thinking and deliberate action: I believe some animals can do it, so it's not only a human thing.

But it does presuppose naturalism, does it not?

I don’t know if it’s humanly possible, as you mentioned. It does seem like the best we have, but even the best makes some very basic assumptions. — Mikie

I see the naturalism of science as being methodologically necessary. I mean it just really cannot take metaphysics into account; it can only work with what can be observed, and the ways, mathematical and logical, we have of reasoning about what is observed as well as our capacity to create imaginative scenarios that can be worked up into testable hypotheses.

As ↪Janus says, philosophy is thinking for oneself, carrying the tacit implication that he’s not being stupid about it. — Mww

I can only aspire not to be stupid about it, and hope that I'm not being (too) stupid about it. :smile:

Right, we don't create the world, we construct it from pre-cognitive influences we cannot become conscious of. So, we are more like demiurges than creator gods, writ small.

I like to think that the transcendent subject is basically just the human species. — plaque flag

I like this idea; I think it's right on the mark. A disembodied transcendental subject cannot evolve or be affected by anything. If we think about the in itself, the "precognitive influences" I mentioned, as utterly changeless, then we have a huge, insurmountable problem' how to understand how a world of unimaginable diversity and constant change could emerge from an utterly amorphous changelessness.
We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it.

I don't believe we are disagreeing at all. I also think things are just the way they appear (and can appear, with the augmentations of our senses afforded by equipment like telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes, colliders and so forth).

Those "things" of the senses are of a collaborative nature; they exist as affects between what appears to us as the body and what appears to us as its environment, replete with other bodies, animate and inanimate, photons and other phenomena.

Thanks for the link; I'll check it out.

My suspicion is that science largely shines (for most) by the reflected light of technology that just works. A crude power-worshipping pragmatism is the working attitude of, well, all of us maybe in our typical sub-scientific mode. I'm not trying to pose as above it. I'm ambivalent. — plaque flag

I agree, our faith in science is based on its technological applications. But then there is a basic observational aspect of science which is just an amplification of our ordinary observations of the world. For example, "It is raining", "water flows downhill" and countless other everyday observations which can be definitively corroborated or falsified.

I'm ambivalent about science too, though, if it morphs into a scientism that claims that everything about animals and humans can be empirically determined. For me it's back to the noumenal, 'the ultimate nature of things cannot be determined"; metaphysics cannot be a science.

Nonetheless I think all these pursuits, science, phenomenology, metaphysics, have things to tell us about ourselves and the world around us.

That's interesting; when I visualize a circle it's just a space enclosed by a line and has no colour.

I guess I reject scientific realism if understood in terms of a truly independent object. I challenge it as semantically troubled. — plaque flag

:up: I agree.

That's an interesting question regarding whether phenomenology should be counted as science. Husserl's 'back to the things' seems to echo the sciences' methodological focus on the things being investigated, while bracketing what might seem imaginatively or intuitively obvious about the natures of things.

I think science deals with things as they appear to us, so we are always there in science, and it cannot tell us about any imagined "absolute" nature of anything. We are obviously capable of thinking that things have absolute existences and natures, completely independent of us, what those existences and natures might be is something completely inaccessible to us. We might even question whether the idea is even coherent.

Phenomenology does not investigate the nature of the things themselves as they appear to us, but rather attempts to investigate the nature of the appearing itself. I think it follows that there cannot be the kind of strict intersubjective corroboration, which is possible in science, but there can be intersubjective assent to, or dissent from, its findings in the form of 'yes, that's how it seems to me" or 'no, that is not how it seems to me'.

Science is naturalistic in that it brackets the question of the supernatural for methodological reasons, and that works...spectacularly well. So, it is not that science has a blind spot regarding the metaphysical or the role of the subject, but that those questions are irrelevant to its most effective methodologies.

I was thinking more along the lines of pre-critical ancient schools of philosophy with their (unquestioned) doctrines and spiritual exercises as described by Pierre Hadot. It would be closer to ethics, to the project of coming to understand how to live well.

I agree that other disciplines will feed into that, including science. It seems, though, that the sciences of, for example, nutrition and exercise have more bearing on the question of how best to live than QM or cosmology.

I have no argument whatsoever with that.

That's true. But is it absurd to go counter-factual and say that a belief would show in action (where thinking counts as an action) if appropriate circumstances arise? Or are you saying that there is no necessary relation between belief and action?

Your examples don't include bedrock beliefs, and I'm inclined to think that my belief that I have a hand or two shows every time I pick something up, so they couldn't occur on this list. Is that right?

The examples on your list all seem to be things that I have learnt or at least thought about, at some point. Would that be a necessary condition? — Ludwig V

I think that certain kinds of beliefs are necessarily associated with action. Beliefs about what we are capable of, about the nature of humans and the animals, plants and soils we deal with.

I'm not sure it makes sense to speak of (some at least) "bedrock beliefs" as beliefs. Regarding the example you gave, I would say we use our hands before we form any explicit beliefs such as "I have two hands", and even then, it seems to be more of an observation or realization than a belief.

The beliefs I highlighted are, as you point out, things we learn or have thought about. In short, I would say that beliefs that have no practical significance to me could be expected to have no effect on my actions. Will that belief, that beliefs that have no practical significance could be expected to have no effect on my cations, itself have an effect on my actions? It has had an effect on what I said, so if you count that as an action, I guess you could say it did.

But I think that is a different definition of action than the one I had in mind.

Certainly there had been scientific and technological advances, but nothing on the scope of the scientific revolution. — Fooloso4

Was that driven more by philosophy or the discovery of fossil fuels?

:up: I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow.

Cheers... I agree it is necessarily blurry; and as far as I am aware philosophy of science is yet to establish any perfectly clear and clean boundary between scientific and non-scientific or pseudo-scientific inquiry.

The idea of a disembodied subject seems to derive from a focus on the visual. We also touch and feel, taste, hear and smell things which to varying degrees seem to bespeak embodiment more essentially than seeing does.

It also seems to be seeing that primarily discloses things as indentifiable objects and perhaps this leads dialectically to the notion of disembodied subject, at least until it is realized that we actually need to move around to synthesize the notion of an environment external to the body.

This is very cursory and needs a good deal of fleshing out of course.

Scientific practice ideally consists in unbiased and (as much as is humanly possible) presuppositionless inquiry. The abandonment of belief in what is merely imagined and what seems merely intuitively "right" with no other supporting evidence seems to be the essential element of scientific method, and what distinguishes it from speculative practices that existed prior to the advent of this new kind of scientific practice and which of course still exist today.

I think we can be confident that people believe many things; beliefs which do not make themselves evident in their actions.

For example do not many people believe in evolution, that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System, that the Earth revolves around it, that the Moon is smaller than the Earth and revolves around it, that there are distant galaxies containing stars and planets, that the Earth is roughly spherical, that there was life on Earth prior to human life...the examples of beliefs which do not show themselves in actions seem to be countless.

Philosophy as poetry or poesis... concept creation and self-making and self-transforming?

Reflecting on my own experience I find I can think in images or I can 'hear' my thoughts as 'spoken' in English. I can only think things which can be visualized in images. I cannot visualize metaphysical speculations or things in themselves or Kant's Categorical Imperative. If I want to think about those kinds of more abstract subjects I need to talk to myself.

Where is the boundary between intentional action and internally directed action?

Single celled organisms demonstrate internally directed action; do you believe such organisms act intentionally?

We can think in images, but that is not abstract thinking. We can imagine generic objects and associate them with particulars with which they share morphological characteristics.

Quite the contrary, I post materials and ideas from many different sources in support of idealist points of view, and for more than ten years, your only response has been to shoot them down. — Quixodian

This is not true at all. What you call "shooting them down" I call "raising legitimate questions about them". From my perspective it seems you very often just stop responding when the questions become too penetrating or difficult to address.

You should know by now that I'm not pushing any particular view but rather raising what I see to be the salient and often difficult question entailed by any view. I give as much critique of naive realism as I do of naive idealism.

My theory is that secular culture works very hard to normalise this attitude, and to discourage anything that calls it into question. And as a staunch defender of secular values and common-sense realism, you feel duty bound to follow suit. Fair comment? — Quixodian

There is no one "secular culture" in philosophy in my view. Or to look at it another way, I think theology is not philosophy, or at least it is only one small area of philosophy. I am not at all a "staunch defender of commonsense realism" and your saying that makes me think that you don't actually pay attention to what I say. I support neither realism nor idealism; I see them as the two main imaginable metaphysical speculations, both of them under-determined by evidence or logic.

I understand that you personally believe in intellectual intuition, which is fair enough, but I think it cannot but be a faith-based view. I'm not saying it's wrong to hold faith-based views, we all do, but I do think it's wrong to assert that such views can be supported by evidence or logic, and it is mainly such attempts that I call out when I see them.

I say it's controversial because it challenges realism, which is the ingrained tendency of the natural outlook. Plenty of people dispute the interpretation of that passage in Kant. — Quixodian

To me that seems to be a tendentious and poorly informed psychological explanation for a controversy which is understandable in a difficult area of philosophy that is about trying to determine the limits of our knowledge and understanding.

You seem to me more in the business of looking for support for how you want things to be than you are coming to these questions with an open mind.

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. — CPR, A369

I take this to be referring to the space and time we intuit, the subjective intuition of space and time. I think he's saying that we cannot rightly extrapolate that beyond the context of our perceptual intuition and understanding.

You should not forget that there are different schools of thought within Kant scholarship, and just what his transcendental idealism entails is not a given.

One way of looking at time is simply as change, and it seems impossible to reconcile the current scientific stories about the evolution of the cosmos and of life with a claim that absent us there would be no change. We cannot begin to imagine how a changeless cosmos lacking any difference or diversity could give rise to an experienced world of unimaginable complexity and diversity.

What motivation could there be for asserting such an incoherent idea?

Transcendental realism, according to this passage, is the view that objects in space and time exist independently of our experience of them, while transcendental idealism denies this. — Quixodian

One interpretation of transcendental idealism may deny this. As I said my reading is that things in themselves do not exist in our perceptual space and time, which is an assertion that seems to be virtually self-evident or true simply by stipulation. Beyond that we cannot make any assertion about the in itself.

The following, including the passage you quoted is from the SEP article on Kant's transcendental idealism

In the first edition (A) of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant argues for a surprising set of claims about space, time, and objects:

Space and time are merely the forms of our sensible intuition of objects. They are not beings that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves), nor are they properties of, nor relations among, such beings. (A26, A33)
The objects we intuit in space and time are appearances, not objects that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves). This is also true of the mental states we intuit in introspection; in “inner sense” (introspective awareness of my inner states) I intuit only how I appear to myself, not how I am “in myself”. (A37–8, A42)
We can only cognize objects that we can, in principle, intuit. Consequently, we can only cognize objects in space and time, appearances. We cannot cognize things in themselves. (A239)
Nonetheless, we can think about things in themselves using the categories (A254).
Things in themselves affect us, activating our sensible faculty (A190, A387).[1]
In the “Fourth Paralogism” Kant defines “transcendental idealism”:

I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances [Erscheinungen] the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves [nicht als Dinge an sich selbst ansehen], and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves [als Dinge an sich selbst]. (A369; the Critique is quoted from the Guyer & Wood translation (1998))

Ever since 1781, the meaning and significance of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” has been a subject of controversy. Kant’s doctrines raise numerous interpretive questions, which cluster around three sets of issues:

(a)
The nature of appearances. Are they (as Kant sometimes suggests) identical to representations, i.e., states of our minds? If so, does Kant follow Berkeley in equating bodies (objects in space) with ideas (representations)? If not, what are they, and what relation do they have to our representations of them?
(b)
The nature of things in themselves. What can we say positively about them? What does it mean that they are not in space and time? How is this claim compatible with the doctrine that we cannot know anything about them? How is the claim that they affect us compatible with that doctrine? Is Kant committed to the existence of things in themselves, or is the concept of a “thing in itself” merely the concept of a way objects might be (for all we know)?
(c)
The relation of things in themselves to appearances. Is the appearance/thing in itself distinction an ontological one between two different kinds of objects? If not, is it a distinction between two aspects of one and the same kind of object? Or perhaps an adverbial distinction between two different ways of considering the same objects?

So, to me your claim that what Kant meant is "pretty clear" seems ill-informed. I think it would pay you to read the entire article in order to get a better, more nuanced grasp of the subtleties and inconsistencies involved in Kant's views, which have led to the controversial nature of Kantian scholarship.

I think that is a misunderstanding of Kant. I don't understand Kant to say that time and space are only the perfect forms of intuition, but that we cannot impute time and space, in the way that we understand them in relation to our perception beyond that context.

If we say that the organisms and animals that have been preserved as fossils, lived at different times, millions of years apart, and at the same time say that they did not exist at those different times, and in fact did not exist at all, then we are simply contradicting ourselves.

So, we cannot say what the "in-itself existence of those organisms and animals was, any more than we can say what the in itself existence of the world we experience today is: all we can say is that if we had been there at those various times in the past we would have seen the organisms and animals of those times.

The passage above is not a quote from Husserl, but from you or someone else who claims to know what Husserl believed. In any case who cares what Husserl believed; is he an infallible authority now? In my view, philosophy is about thinking for yourself.

Things don't exist from no point of view, they exist within a context, and the mind provides that context. — Quixodian

Things don't exist from any particular point of view; they are perceived from points of view. They don't even exist for us from any particular point of view. How could we possibly know whether they exist absent us? Well, the fossil record tells us they did, and if the Universe is older than the human race then it follows that it existed prioir to us and our points of view.

So the quoted statement from you above is just a bold, groundless claim or stipulation on your part.

Right, I don't deny the idea that we can think of mind as fundamental (in some sense we have no way of understanding) but that wouldn't change the status of objects as existing independently of our minds. Likewise, we can say that physicality is fundamental, and which is the more plausible might be said to be a matter of personal opinion. Either way, there seems to be no doubt that the existence of what appears to us, but obviously not of the appearances themselves, is independent of our minds, of our very existence.

I'm familiar with Kastrup's views, but the whole idea of a universal mind holding the incredible diversity and invariance we see in place by thinking it seems implausible to me. And in any case what practical difference would it make whether mind or mind-independent physical existents were the fundamental constituents of reality; what difference would it make to how we live our lives?

Additionally, if everything. including everything we think and everything anyone has ever thought were a manifestation of this one mind, how to explain the remarkable diversity of opinion regarding the nature of things?