EIGHTH: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man’s life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist’s social passion. — Bitter Crank

Yeah, that's just sublimated Christianity - but what's the basis for it in a world of inane matter that's basically one damn thing after another?

The ordinary folk that I rub shoulders with every day don't seem to have lapsed into a nihilistic funk — Bitter Crank

I disagree, people in my experience are either 9-5 zombies on a treadmill that's increasingly delivering less real prosperity for the average person, or they're retreating into fantasy worlds of various sorts (sucking the teat of various kinds of consumerism).

We are tremendously advanced in terms of technology, and that's keeping our heads above water, but the morale situation is pretty dire - consider suicide rates (particularly among men).

I disagree, since Nietzsche set it up as his task to find a way to overcome nihilism. — Agustino

Yeah, that ought to be the concern of every really serious thinking person. If thinking about this stuff doesn't put you into a cold sweat, then you're probably not thinking very clearly.

The last outpost, the last fading tatter of Christian morality in the West, is the unquestioning, hysterical attachment to egalitarianism über alles that characterizes modern liberalism. But that's already starting to fade. It's becoming nothing more than just another tool to kafkatrap those you disagree with.

Everything is devolving to "might makes right," everything is coming to be understood as a pure power struggle, with things like morality being masks and rhetorical tricks to mobilize the masses to serve one's agenda - and nobody's agenda has any more moral legitimacy than anyone else's. It's like the last bit of the stern of the Titanic poking above the water - the last few survivors trying to keep their head above water, scrabbling over each other, pushing each other down, to get just an extra little bit of time.

But there doesn't seem to be any solution. It's impossible for a sceptical, materialist-minded person to go back to a religious point of view, and yet it's also psychologically impossible to face nihilism naked and unadorned.

It's hard to see what's so good about a configuration of stuff that's "kind, loving, etc." and what's so bad about a configuration of stuff that's "vicious, murderous, etc." in a Godless, simply material universe.

I mean sure, you can give an evolutionary explanation (behaviours that lead to human survival/flourishing, etc.), but that just passes the buck (that's a viable explanation for why we've evolved with those preferences, and why religions reflect them, but what's so great about human survival/flourishing?).

It seems to me that the real problem of our civilization and culture now is that we're running on moral fumes, the remnants of moral conditioning left over from Christianity. The last remnant of that seems to be the obsession of the PC cult with egalitarianism and "social justice" - but what's so great about equality in a material universe?

And what happens when even that fades? A machine civilization? A "paperclip maximizing" AI dedicated to solving a socialist economy that eliminates the organic middle man and just creates a pretty egalitiarian pattern out of pure silicon?

The questions all involve each other, the puzzle has to be solved as a whole. The breakdown into separate questions is just a matter of convenience, really it's all just one big question ("wtf is all this shit?")

1. What is existence, what is the nature of reality, and what's the catalogue of existents? (Ontology, Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy/Science)

2. Gnothi Seauton. What am I, who experiences this existence? (Psychology, and what's been called "mysticism", or what Sam Harris calls "spirituality")

3. Am I sure about any of that? How sure? (Epistemology)

4. Given that well-checked catalogue of existents, the nature of existence, and my nature, how should I live? (Ethics)

5. Given that well-checked catalogue of existents, the nature of existence, including human nature, and given a code of ethics, how should we live together in society? (Morality, Politics)

6 . How can we maintain the coherence of the good society through time? (Aesthetics, Religion, Rhetoric)

Running through it all is the philosophical distinction par excellence: the distinction between object language and meta language, between the use of language/concepts and reflection on the use of language/concepts, between matters of fact and relations of ideas, between aposteriori and apriori, etc., etc.

Thanks. I used to haunt the Philosophy Forums quite a bit years ago, but this forum seems to have become the place for that old crowd to hang out, now that the other forum seems to be non-functional.

Yes, perspective is an important part of what we're talking about when we talk about consciousness. In fact, "from the inside", it could be said that the perspectivalness of one's experience is the essence of what one really and truly is. Eastern traditions of meditation have also inquired around this area.

Suppose you say, in the ordinary way of things, "I'm seeing a tree." The "story" around this includes a whole bunch of stuff about the world that we normally take for granted - e.g. that you're a physical object, perceiving another physical object.

But then suppose you set all that stuff to the side - it may or may not be true, but what can you truthfully say about your experience without presupposing that background story to be true? Well you could say something like "I'm perceiving a patch of green and brown" or something of that sort. But that's an incomplete reduction - what could the "I" be in that situation, if it's not the normal you with a body?

Perhaps an abstract sort of "point of view"? Or, to reverse the metaphor, some sort of bare "capacity?" A mere space-for-experiences-to-occur-in? But that, again, implies some sort of distance, some kind of space or space analogue - and if it's not physical distance, what kind of distance is it?

Diving deeper, we can say something like, "There exist certain patches of what I call "colour" that seem to reveal a perspective on a world." But even that's not quite right, because what is this "calling things names" process? It's also something that's revealed as part of the picture. IOW, the thought "this is green" is itself part of the "show" of what's being revealed, it's not something that stands outside the show, like the original self stood physically outside its perceived object, or the notional point-of-view stands outside its presented show.

So ultimately you just come down to an event, we know not what it is or what to call it (we're long past the point where calling it "consciousness" at all - or even "matter" for that matter - makes any sense we'd normally understand), that seems to reveal a perspective, and that perspectival quality, the way it sort of "shapes" the content of what's presented, is the faint remnant of "me" or an "observer" of the show.

Economic value is the cardinally-enumerated aggregate of all the subjective acts of ordinal evaluation in society, in which individuals exchange what is less preferred on their individual scale of preferences (often, less preferred "at the margin"), for what they anticipate they would prefer more.

Or: it's a society-wide reflection of the aggregate of all individuals' economic exchange decisions, each exchange being made on the basis of subjective preference rankings.

Because there are certain commonalities (e.g. all human beings need food of some kind) then there are some generally predictable common values - but those are still at bottom the result of individual preferences (one doesn't prefer "food" in the abstract, one prefers cherries to potatoes, or whatnot).

From the subjective point of view, value is "that which you act to gain/keep"; in the trading relationship, you exchange something for what you want to gain/keep. The thing you exchange is a thing you value less than the thing you anticipate getting in exchange.

For example, if you are employed, then unless you just drifted into employment mindlessly, that means you value the abstract purchasing power of a certain quantity of money over the value of the other things you could have been doing during those working hours. More specifically, it means that the value to you of what you can do while employed in your job is higher than the value you could have gotten out of other uses of your time. (e.g. you might enjoy weaving baskets, and be damn good at it, but if you can make as much money - again, abstract purchasing power - in 1 hour on the stock exchange as you could have done in 8 hours of weaving baskets, it's a no-brainer to go for 8 hours at the stock exchange, and weave baskets as a hobby just for its own intrinsic pleasure - which can be a value to you too. Generally, the more you can do with less, the more you have left over to do other things with. This is the core meaning of "economy" in a context where resources are intrinsically scarce in relation to human wants, which are potentially unlimited.)

Billions of exchanges go on every day, with each individual exchange, and its confrontation of two independent scales of preferences, in some small way affecting all others across the entire web of exchange, and economic values (prices, etc.) are the objective precipitate of all those individual subjective evaluations.

Equally, one might simply be curious whether a non-question begging rationale can be had for all of what one presently believes. It might be that there is no dramatically important reason why we must have that rationale; its just that one wants it, or wants to see whether it can be had. That's how it is for me anyway. — PossibleAaran

Yes, but what I'm arguing against is the idea that motivated some of the early modern philosophers - they took seriously the problem of general foundations for knowledge, they thought you actually do NEED such a general foundation otherwise normal inquiry can't proceed properly. That, I think is wrong, and the truth is somewhere inbetween - it's a good exercise to examine our presuppositions generally now and then, sure, and as you point out it's something that arouses curiosity anyway. But it's not something that's necessary (such that if we don't do it, we must down tools and resolve the problem before knowledge-gathering can proceed any further).

One criticizes religion for being question-begging on specifiable, verifiable grounds that are fairly close to the surface. In order to do that, one doesn't need to have examined one's own presuppositions - although that can be done, it doesn't affect the "bite" of the criticism of religion on its own terms.

e.g. one doesn't need to have indubitable foundations for knowledge in general to criticize a religious argument for taking it for granted that "everything must have a cause."

And on the other hand, a lot of the criticism of religious (and these days now, quasi-religious political) dogmas is because people base other-people-killing policies on thin foundations. You say you've had a vision of the Virgin Mary? Well and good, but why do you think that gives you license to slay the unbeliever?

Basically, it's all the other way round from what philosophers thought it was, for a long time: we don't build our picture of the world up from guaranteed-to-be-valid-nuggets (either bits of clear reasoning or bits of clear, indubitable experience); we have an ongoing model of the world that we ongoingly juggle into existence, which is the thing we believe in and trust, until such time as an anomaly crops up and we have to revise the model. That model is always, in its most fundamental nature, conjectural. (Which is the same thing as my earlier "stipulation," as "grammar", as the apriori, etc.) (I should add of course that the validity of our world model in its most general terms is guaranteed in a limited sense, by evolution. IOW, up till now the world has been a particular way that we've evolved to fit in with, so we can be sure the world is largely the way our model models it, at least in terms of "middle-sized furniture.")

So in that context it's perturbances that motivate the resolution of something called "doubt." And while it's a theoretical option to extend that doubt to the whole of the background of the knowledge-gathering process, at that point since the type of perturbance that would have to crop up to motivate a serious inquiry at that level would have to be absolutely enormously weird, a playful inquiry isn't going to get very far, because it has no actual anomaly of that "size" to work on.

Or: yes, doubt at that over-arching (or to switch the metaphor foundational) level is possible, but we haven't yet found a reason why doubt at that level, doubt about the presuppositions of knowledge in general, has to be taken seriously. For the doubt to be taken seriously, you'd have some evidence to work on, and you'd need evidence of a weird anomaly on a massive scale that would be the evidence that JUSTIFIES THE DOUBT. And again, merely imagining alternative possibilities isn't a reason to doubt.

Our disagreement is that you don't think any non-question begging rationale can be had for our beliefs, at least not if you push questioning far enough back. You seem to think this is obvious. I'd be interested to know why you think it is so obvious, and also whether you would be prepared to characterize this as a kind of Pyrrhonian Scepticism, since it is just what those ancient sceptics used to maintain? — PossibleAaran

It just goes back to my original points re. doubt - the reason you dig back behind presuppositions in the ordinary way of inquiry is when and if you have some anomaly or some other reason to doubt. Some hint from experience that things may not be as you think they are. That's the home of doing something like "examining our presuppositions."

Other than that, I don't think there's any general need to have "indubitable foundations" - so it's not so much that I don't think any non-question-begging rationale can be had, it's that I wonder at the purpose of the exercise of looking for some non-question-begging, over-arching rationale, given that the usual process of knowledge-gathering doesn't require such things.

As Popper says somewhere, you don't need to drive piles infinitely deep to have a secure foundation for a house - not even if it's built on sand.

IOW, we examine our presuppositions in a certain general type of context, and there's a reason why we check our premises, and that context and reason is usually discomfort at some anomaly, some way in which our experience isn't going as the words and concepts we're using (to characterize the world) would predict it would go. Doubt is the active searching process for an alternative explanation consequent upon such an anomaly.

So there's a one-to-one match between the procedure of examining our presuppositions, and some problem or anomaly that prompts the procedure. Essentially, it's a contextual flipping of the usual hierarchy, where we trust our presuppositions (and the tiny but fairly secure fortress of established scientific fact) and that gives us leverage to doubt the evidence of our senses. Here instead we trust the evidence of our senses (although in fact we no longer know what these "senses" are or what "evidence" would mean in the flipped context) and we think that gives us leverage to doubt our presuppositions. But there's no general "examining of presuppositions" required in the ordinary context, there's no reason to be constantly on tenterhooks second-guessing our presuppositions.

Or to put it another way, one can envisage such a reason to doubt the entire chain of our presuppositions to its depths - but it would have to be something world-shakingly, majorly anomalous, like people turning into bananas, or a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man stomping through Times Square.

A philosopher merely dreaming up some alternative possibility from the one we think obtains, and demanding that we secure our propositions against that imaginary scenario, isn't going to cut it - that's not even an anomaly, it's not a reason to doubt, it's just an imaginary way we could be wrong.

The truth of the proposition is not caused by our coming to know it. I agree. It was caused by agreement regarding cardinal directions, the establishment of cities, and other meaningful creations of humans. — creativesoul

Not sure if it's the truth of the proposition that's "caused by agreement". I think it's the possibility of the truth of the proposition that's caused by agreement, i.e. the agreement creates a thing to say yes or no about, to be true or false about, or rather a question for nature to answer "yes" or "no" to, upon interrogation.

The meaningful element that we interpose, the cardinal directions, etc., creates the possibility for something to be true or false, or a standard in terms of which things can be measured, etc.

In this way, universals contain an element of both the internal and external. The thing that comes from us is the logical possibility (a way things could be), but then it's Nature that goes its own way and provides examples of things that either have that nature and logic - or don't.

If we don't find the thing to be like we imagine it to be, we dust ourselves off and move on - either alter the logical construct, or look harder, check whether we made a mistake, etc., or even reinterpret the evidence if we really want to stick to our posit.

It's simplest if we just think of things as indeed having some nature, and us not knowing that nature in advance, but positing natures, positing structures for things; yet if the thing has that structure, then it really has that structure. It's not like our saying anything earmarks any particular structure for an object of experience coming down the pipe, but if it has a structure, it really has that structure, that nature.

To shift the discussion slightly, your posts always presuppose that there is such a thing as 'our ordinary concepts' and that is your fixed point from which you argue that my position warps those concepts into meaninglessness. I reject the idea that there is any substantive body called 'our ordinary concepts'. People sometimes have the same thing in mind and use the same word to represent it, but quite often people have quite different or slightly different things in mind whilst using the same words. — PossibleAaran

Yes but that's a feature, not a bug. We can certainly tighten up our language and our concepts for any given purpose, narrowing our focus but what I doubt is the idea that we can (or need to) tighten up our language in a general (non-domain specific) way by means of things like the Cartesian method.

As Wittgenstein said, I paraphrase, the philosophizing in the Tractatus is like a special case of the philosophizing in the PI, it's not that there's anything wrong with philosophical theorizing in general, because doing so does help you see things in a different light - it's not like the Cartesian excursion is fruitless, because you learn what not to do, what's a waste of time - the problem is when you're theorizing philosophically but you think you've got something more objective and more indubitable than you had before, when really you're just getting into even murkier territory where we don't know what up or down is (metaphorically speaking).

Just as an aside, I'd say that Wittgenstein is closer to Aristotle than maybe you think. Aristotle would have had no truck with any of this kind of nonsense either :D I always thought it was quite ironic and amusing that Wittgenstein lamented he'd read no Aristotle, since he was sort of starting to reinvent Aristotle in On Certainty :)

Given in the sense of, as Stace puts it, 'logically given'. Indisputable in that what is given provides a satisfactory, non-question begging, answer to the question "why should I believe that?". — PossibleAaran

Yeah, that's the thing, I don't think there is such a thing in the ordinary realm, but I don't think there's any such thing as a non-question begging answer as to what it is you're seeing when you're looking at matters from a truncated, phenomenalist point of view either. It's even more mysterious, so it can't be a purifying foundation. Isn't that what Carnap found out, after all?

What do you mean 'a public world'? What's a 'public world', and why does the concept 'experience' only have meaning 'in that context'? — PossibleAaran

Because the conditions for whether a concept like "experience" as ordinarily understood is being used correctly, or not, only make sense if the world is a public world, a shared world, a world we are all partaking in, accessing together and discussing together, investigating together, etc. We normally use words like "me," "you," "experience", "unperceived", etc. in a way that involves (not the "prior acceptance of Realism" as you would have it but) acceptance that at least some things are as we think they are, that there are at least some perceptions that are valid, etc.

The methodological solipsism of the Cartesian method brackets that world from the start, but in doing so it thereby removes the normal conditions for the use of those concepts, which means that the concept isn't being used in the way it's normally used.

But then what, in what way is it being used? When are you applying or using "schmexperience" properly? How would you know? What is the nature of the "self" who's "having" "experience" in this new sense? Or does schmexperience not have a haver? Or is the haver of a different kind? If so what?

The situation is really that the words are being used as analogies. The concepts have a vague connection to the ordinary concepts, but only insofar as they still have a few of the criteria that in their ordinary use would accompany the bracketed criteria, so there's enough of a family resemblance we feel justified in using the term.

But actually we don't know, in the depths of suspension of presuppositions, what the hell it is that's going on; we actually have less confidence than we have looking at the whole show in terms of ordinary language, not more.

There is a lot here to discuss. The characterization '3-d cinema show hanging in nothing' is both uncharitable and difficult to understand. — PossibleAaran

Why is it uncharitable? It's just an attempt to describe, by analogy, what you get when you don't have any presuppositions. The nearest you can get to describing the stuff of experience without presuppositions is that it's some kind of experiential display that purports to be of something, but you can't be sure that it's of anything, and nor can you be sure what you are, who perceives it. In fact, "you" even drop out of the picture altogether (even your thoughts themselves are just part of the display) and the nearest that one can get to describing what "you" are in that context is the very perspectivalness of the display, the fact that it seems to display things from a point of view.

But what news from that world enlightens the ordinary, everyday world? How do you tighten up our thinking in the ordinary everyday world but simply noting that the less you presuppose the less you can say about what exists?

What is meant by 'hanging in nothing'. If you mean here that experience is the presentation of images which are pictures of the world, and the phrase 'hanging in nothing' is supposed to indicate that we are bracketing the issue of whether the pictures really are of the world, that is not at all what I meant to do. That obviously presupposes a veil of perception, which I reject. What I mean to restrict us to at the outset is simply what can be seen. Now, in one sense, when I look in front of me at the moment, what I can see is a laptop, and as you said, the laptop exists unperceived. But in another sense, that isn't what I see at all. What is available or given to my consciousness at this moment? Not the property of existing unperceived. Only certain patches of colour of a certain size and shape. — PossibleAaran

"In another sense" - in WHAT sense, precisely? What is this "seeing" you're talking about?

Normally seeing implies or presupposes a bunch of physical-world-story stuff. But if you're not implying that, then what is the testable content of this "seeing", what are the conditions for whether one is "seeing" in this sense? When can one correctly be said to be "seeing" (shcmeeing? :) ) in this sense, and when not?

Now, I am not saying that all I experience, in the ordinary sense of experience, is patches of colour. What I am saying is that that is the only part of my present experience which is indisputable; it is the only part of my experience for which there is a clear answer why I should believe it to be there. — PossibleAaran

Actually it's no more "indisputable" than unperceived existence. That this is a "colour", or a "patch" - these terms also hide presuppositions, just like "seeing."

I'm afraid I can't shake the suspicion that you are captivated by the veil of perception idea, otherwise why would you think that "coloured patch" is somehow less disputable than "laptop?" In fact, without the normal background world story as a context for the phrase's normal use, a phrase like "I'm seeing a coloured patch" used in the Cartesianly bracketed sense is even MORE disputable, MORE mysterious, than the same phrase could ever be in the ordinary, unbracketed sense.

"Coloured patch" and "laptop" and "unperceived existence" are all on a level, and all involve elements of public verification (it's just that unperceived existence requires a bit of indirect verification, and can't be read off from present experience of the object); you aren't getting to some deeper, more indisputable level by calling a thing a "coloured patch" and not "a laptop."

You might think "coloured patch" is something you can "read off" of present experience without presupposition, but look more deeply. Colours are normally a property of light or physical surfaces, both of which are such things as are capable of existing unperceived - but if you can't allow that they're a property of light and physical surfaces, because you can't perceive unperceived existence so you can't be sure there are physical surfaces, then what is this "colour" thing if it's not a property of physical surfaces? And if surfaces aren't such things as can demonstrably exist unperceived, what are they? What is this thing that you're sheerly beholding and are determined to restrict to present experience in order to behold? You can't call it colour, so let's call it schmolour. What are the criteria for application of schmolour, if they're not the usual ones for colour?

If you really want to drill down to absolutely no presuppositions, then you can't even help yourself to terms like "colour" or "patch." On the other hand, if you feel you can confidently call a thing a "coloured patch", then you can just as confidently call it a "laptop." Again, you're not actually getting to any deeper or more indubitable a layer by calling something a "coloured patch."

On the basis of this experience alone, there is no answer as to why I should believe that anything exists unperceived. You are right that this is a non-ordinary concept of experience. It is one tailored for the purpose of building an indisputable system of philosophy - not one which is certain, just one where there is a sensible answer as to why each part should be accepted. You don't even have to call this concept experience if you don't want. Call it schmexperience for all it matters. What I schmexperience is only certain colour patches of a certain size and shape. These things are given to me in such a way that it is simply indisputable that they are there. I cannot sensibly doubt that there are these patches of colour before me at this moment. There is an obvious reason why I should believe it. With that said, I am happy to concede that the ordinary concept of 'experience' cannot be meaningfully applied here. — PossibleAaran

And neither can ordinary concepts like "patches of colour." If you accept "patches of colour" then you are implicitly bringing in the public world, because patches of colour have no name outside the context of that kind of world, there's not even any possible method for tying them together across time (because, again, "memory" is going to have a different meaning in a non-physical world, and we don't know what that meaning could possibly be).

As I said, the concept of 'experience' implicit in my remarks is the concept of 'what is indisputably before my consciousness'. — PossibleAaran

And this consciousness is what? Is it the consciousness of a human being? Then you're implicitly accepting phsyical, public world presuppositions. Is it, on the other hand, the consciousness of a mere thinking thing or an abstract point of view as such? Then you're never going to get outside that prison by any means, so you might as well give up now! :)

The conditions for verification grow and shrink with the presuppositions accepted (hence my Chinese finger puzzle metaphor) - but then in that case, nothing is being revealed from the level with no presuppositions that's going to be of any help at the more presuppositions level, that level is not being firmed up in any way - but then, nor does it need to be, it never needed to be. Whatever you discover there, in the presuppositionless world, you can't bring back to here, it stays there and is applicable only there. But that's fine - that's why it's just a queer little game off to the side of life, and doesn't have the profound purport some philosophers think it does.

I don't want to 're-define' anything. I am happy not to use the word 'experience' if it is so troubling, although to drop that word represents a departure from traditional ways of discussing the issue. — PossibleAaran

So if it's not experience, what is it, and what bearing does it have on experience as ordinarily understood?

Does the concept which I have explicated above have no meaning? It seems to me that I understand it perfectly well. — PossibleAaran

Yes, that's the illusion. You think you are saying something that makes sense. But it doesn't make any sense in the world out here with its presuppositions (where things like camera tests are perfectly fine for testing unperceived existence). But then if it doesn't make sense here, then there must be some other kind of sense for it to make in the presuppositionless realm. So what is it? To what are you attaching the term "seeing" or "experience" or "coloured patch" in the presuppositionless realm? What is that thing? And how can you be sure you're not using the term or applying the concept wrongly?

On the other hand, if that thing is a "sensation", then we're back in the world where camera tests makes sense, where the fact that you can't perceive the unperceived is a mere tautology, and the difficulty it presents can easily be gotten around by perceiving not the unperceived existence, but the distal effects of that unperceived existence on your perception, by means of the present traces of its existence while you weren't perceiving it. If what you're having is a sensation as ordinarily understood, then the camera test is fine. It's only if what you're having is a "sensation" in the Cartesian, bracketed sense, that there's still the feeling that the truth has to be gotten from present experience directly. But that's only because you've set it up so that answers can only be gotten from present experience directly (and that's what's making the tautology that you can't perceive the unperceived an un-get-overable barrier to understanding, instead of just a slight inconvenience that can easily be gotten around).

Perhaps you are worried because the concept is not 'ordinary', but I don't see any reason to think that if a concept is 'not ordinary' then it must be meaningless. What is so magical about 'ordinary concepts' that they get to have meaning but 'non-ordinary' concepts don't. — PossibleAaran

It's not that they don't, I don't know whether they do or don't have meaning; it's that their meaning (the meaning of concepts used at the presuppositionless level) has yet to be explicated, and it's difficult to see how they can be explicated without surreptitiously borrowing from their meaning in the larger world.

This is just the suggestion that it is impossible to build an indisputable system of philosophy, which is just what ancient scepticism was. I've always thought that Wittgenstein was a Pyrrhonian. — PossibleAaran

No, rather it's saying that bracketing all presuppositions isn't necessarily the best way to build an indusputable system of philosophy. IOW, such a thing may or may not be attainable, but it's certainly not going to be attainable by retreating to a presuppositionless realm and trying to rebuild from there. We already know how that ends up, it ends up in solipsism with a thing that has no name and character "experiencing" various things that may or may not be the case. Yes, a very solid foundation for a philosophy.

I know some Realists and Phenomenalists made a lot of this issue of the 'directness' of perception. Russell did, for example. I don't think that's important at all. — PossibleAaran

If so, then you should have no problem with the camera test.

All that matters is that certain elements of experience are unproblematically available to consciousness in such a way as to make them indisputable, and some aren't. The property of unperceived existence, isn't. It is painfully easy to produce a story, compatible with all of the indisputable 'given' elements of experience such that nothing exists unperceived. I have no way to prove to you, I suppose that the property of unperceived existence isn't given to my conscious awareness like the property of blueness is. I take this to be patently obvious to anyone who has the faculty of sense perception. — PossibleAaran

Again, given =/= indisputable. "Given," like "experience," etc., etc., already carries some baggage from the larger world. "Given" in distinction to what?

I don't think its foregone at all. Why is it so obvious that no conclusion can be drawn from the given? I certainly can't tell, a priori, that this is so. The discovery, if it were one, would be that almost nothing that I believe is indisputable, and that sounds to me like an interesting philosophical discovery. I can't stop global warming with it, but all the same. — PossibleAaran

But you already knew that nothing is indisputable, that's already built into the ordinary way of looking at things. You just need a reason to dispute, but staring at your sensations and dreaming up alternative logical possibilities doesn't give you a reason to doubt the ordinary application of some ordinary concept.

I didn't use the concept of necessary existence in my reducio about God. I used the concept of existence, and you did claim that laptops are such things as exist - which was the premise of the reducio. So it still seems to me that that argument is parallel to the one which you gave. — PossibleAaran

But the argument only makes sense as pointing to a fallacy if you do think of necessary existence as taken for granted. Otherwise it's just an ordinary case of empirical discovery - someone says something exists, and we all go look and see, and take our scientific instruments with us (which help us "see" things we can't see). They might be right, they might be mistaken, any number of things could be problematic about the claim.

That knowledge can absorbed in the course of a person's induction into society from childhood, it doesn't have to be innate.

I do think morality has an objective aspect, and that there is broadly speaking such a thing as natural law. That is to say, that because human beings are a certain way, and the world is a certain way, then there's always going to be an objective set of possible conditional rules that get you from any given ideal to its implementation, and the general guiding ideals of most societies form a basket of closely-related ultimate goals, e.g. survival, flourishing, happiness, virtue, etc., from which particular sets of rules will fall out as likely to achieve those goals.

But I don't think it's necessary for the knowledge of (whatever society's best guess is at that) set of moral rules to be innate in people, it can be something that evolves at the level of cultural evolution (as rules are are tried and sifted, societies that follow some rules are successful and others who follow different rules not so much) and is then inculcated into members of the society as they grow up.

However, that doesn't also mean that there can't be some innate, instinctive element. That much is shown by evolutionary psychology, which reveals that there are some commonalities even at the pre-verbal level.

IOW there's a certain measure of free play in the way that societies can make up rules and follow them or not, but a lot of the rules societies make up will tend to follow some core guidelines that just occur to people naturally (as natural Schelling Points that can then form the basis of more conscious, articulated forms of assent, and be discussed and argued about).

I think what it shows is that people talked about stuff for far longer than they wrote about stuff. There have probably been something akin to "schools of thought" since human beings became human beings, but prior to writing they would have been purely oral traditions, and probably more mixed in with religion and ritual.

Incidentally, I think the fact that for pre-literacy schools of thought to exist at all they would have had to have been oral traditions, is what's responsible for the fact that earlier philosophies were more like "guru worship" cults (the veneration of people who retained more of what people around them were discussing, and passed it on).

But in the course of transition to writing, it became more and more obvious that the message can be detached from the messenger and looked at objectively. It became clear that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, it became clear that poisoning the well, ad hominem, etc., shared a certain quality, called "fallacious."

No, "sexual liberation" increases the likelihood of sexual harassment. As you can see today, "liberals" are more frequent sexual harassers than conservatives. Many of the people being accused of harassment now are people who grew up with the "sexual liberation" ideas of the Boomers that were fashionable when they were growing up. They learned to treat sex casually and to treat women casually as objects of personal gratification.

The idea that sexual repression leads to sexual harassment comes from Frankfurt School twaddle, which in turn is partly based on Freudian twaddle (the school was generally speaking a fusion of Marx and Freud). All that stuff about "the authoritarian personality," the nuclear family leading to sexual repression and closet fascism, etc., etc,. is bunk. Generally, the "liberal" idea of the conservative is a complete fantasy (and partly a projection too).

At bottom, the idea is based on a sort of "hydraulic" model of sexual "pressure." (The notion that sexual energy can be "pent up", etc.) But in reality, the more you do of a thing the more you want to do it. The more people treat sex like a toy instead of the nuclear bomb it is, the more opportunities you'll create for mishaps, and for unwanted sexual encounters. It's rather analogous to the sugar problem: we're designed to want it, a lot, so if we're put in an environment where we have a lot of it, we overdo it.

If you want less sexual harassment, then you encourage males to treat females with respect - i.e. traditionally. You respect the things that follow from the relative rarity of eggs and the relative abundance of sperm, facts that are encoded in the rules that human societies developed over the course of thousands of years, in terms of religious ideas and mores. (Teenage celibacy, courtship rituals, limited opportunities for encounters that might turn sexual, avoidance of inebriation, etc.) How tight or how loose these mores should be is open to question of course (not too tight, not too loose is the ideal), but you can't get rid of them entirely without inviting problems.

Suppose I do that. Suppose I specify apriori that I want to figure out whether there exists anything which is black, rectangular, has a motherboard and exists even when unperceived- in a word, a laptop. I then look to my perceptions. I perceive that the thing is black and rectangular. I look inside and perceive that it has a motherboard. But I don't perceive that it exists unperceived. I can't. — PossibleAaran

Yes, you can't directly perceive that it exists unperceived while you're not perceiving it, but you can indirectly verify that it has the property of unperceived existence by virtue of traces of the causal connections it has to the rest of the world while you are not perceiving it, by virtue of the fact that it interacts with the world around it while you're not perceiving it.

So I find this thing, a camera, and I take a photo with my eyes closed and get a print out. The picture is a picture which looks just like the thing I was earlier looking at. What does this show? That the laptop existed unperceived while I took the picture? Well if the thing I used really was a camera then yes, it shows that. But unless I already believe that things exist unperceived I won't believe that it really was a camera - that is, I won't believe that the picture it took is one of a thing which existed unperceived. And this you already admitted. — PossibleAaran

It doesn't even matter if the camera doesn't exist unperceived, so long as it functions in all respects like a camera for the purposes of the test - it could itself be a cameraX (that blinks out of existence when you're not looking at it) for all you know, but that wouldn't matter, because its property of not existing unperceived wouldn't make any difference to the test. (You could easily tighten up the test to take account of the possibility that the thing you're using to test the unperceived existence of the original object is a cameraX - don't let it out of your sight and take the picture backwards.)

You don't have to believe that everything exists unperceived prior to the test. That's something you have no possible way of knowing anyway (even less so if you're just staring at present sensation). You merely have to stipulate a possible kind of thing, that you're going to call "physical," as possessing a logically possible property - unperceived existence - and check whether there's any instance of it. And in order to check whether there's any instance of it, all you need to do is (not attempt the impossible - i.e. perceive that something exists unperceived by the method of directly, in the here and now, perceiving its unperceived existence, but) perceive evidence of the fact that it still interacts with the world around it while you're not perceiving it, which is something that can be done indirectly. A photograph is evidence of that, as would be the readings from a weight sensor, etc., etc., or the testimony of someone else.

I am not sure about that first part. I'm not even sure what is meant by saying that the concept of unperceived existence 'comes from the world of public physical objects'. What do you mean 'comes from'? Are you saying that I couldn't possibly have that concept unless there were physical objects? Surely I could gain the concept of unperceived existence just by reflection on myself and my experience. The concept of existence I can derive from knowledge of my own existence. The concept of experience I can derive from awareness of my own experience. — PossibleAaran

What it means for you to exist, what it means for you to experience, each of these concepts only has meaning in the context of a public world.

Suppose you do restrict yourself to the consideration of present experience without presuppositions, then in that case the "you" that's experiencing isn't a human being with a body, it's something like Descartes' "thinking thing," or the "pure experiencing" of the non-dual mystic, and its object is something like a 3-d cinema show hanging in nothing. So in that scenario, concepts like me and experience, or sensation - their grammar, as ordinarily used, doesn't have any purchase. Those concepts are "built for" (have criteria in terms of) the physical world, and then only secondarily are introjected by the philosopher in course of the peculiar exercise of Cartesian bracketing; but they only have verifiability conditions in a physical world, they have no verifiability conditions in that queer, truncated realm.

IOW "Experience" in ordinary language doesn't mean, "a 3-d cinema show hanging in nothing," it means experience as the usual kind of human being in a world of objects with the usual qualities.
So in essence what you are doing in the course of the Cartesian exercise is re-defining "experience" to mean something like, "a 3-d cinema show hanging in nothing," which is the newly discovered object of your ("you" now as a pure point of perception) exercise in Cartesian bracketing. But in that case you have no standard of verification for your new term, like you would have had when you used the concept normally (you can't presuppose the validity of those tests). You can't even avail yourself of the concept of memory to check things, because memory too lives in the very public world you've temporarily renounced in the course of the exercise.

I can negate the concept of experience to create 'unexperienced' and then put the two ideas together to create 'unperceived existence', and then it is just a matter of imagining a thing which has that property. Why does the concept need to 'come from' the world of physical objects, whatever 'comes from' means here? — PossibleAaran

You can certainly negate "experience" in the normal sense, in which case you end up with things like the camera test to verify the negation. But how would you go about negating "experience" as referring to that "3-d cinema show hanging in nothing" thing?

If you depart from the criteria for concepts as used in the ordinary sense, then you've lost the ability to apply those concepts in the presuppositionless stance too. But then what are you talking about after all? You don't know, you don't know what it is, you don't know the first thing about it. But if you don't know the first thing about it, how can you draw usable criteria from it?

Bracketing presuppositions is an important tool of philosophy, for sure, but bracketing all presuppositions is not definitive of philosophical reflection, and actually doesn't lead anywhere, can't lead anywhere. It's a Chinese finger puzzle for the mind (or Wittgenstein's "fly bottle").

So again, we come back to the thing of truth being prior to doubt, doubt functioning as doubt by using truth as a lever (e.g. the subsequent perception telling you that the previous perception was an illusion).

Incidentally, I thought originally that you were defending Realism. But now it turns out that you think Realism is just as non-sensical as Phenomenalism. Is that right? — PossibleAaran

Yes. It's a non-problem, because the Realist and the Phenomenalist take in each others' washing. Each actually allows some grain of truth in the other's position. The grain of truth that the Realist has to accept from the Phenomenalist is something we already know and are familiar with - that perception can't be "direct" in the Naive Realist sense (although that doesn't mean it can't be direct in other senses - the actual directness is in the fact that there are no such things as mistakes in a casual chain from object to brain). But the Phenomenalist sin is this: you can't reduce experience to something called "sensation," or even "experience," without accepting some elements of the Realist position. For example, as above, the thing you're staring at while exercising Cartesian doubt can't be "sensation" unless some elements of the real world story are accepted. But then if it's not sensation, if it's being thought of truly "without presuppositions," as the 3-d cinema show hovering in nothing, then no conclusion can be drawn from its existence or form whatsoever. It's already a foregone conclusion that it's not going to be able to connect to anything external to it, it's not an interesting discovery that it can't connect to anything external to it.

At any rate, I think you will agree that a proof of the existence of God which only works if we assume that God exists is absolutely worthless if we are trying to establish God's existence for the first time, without merely assuming it to be true. I think you will agree that it is of no consolation whatsoever to be told that the concept of 'God's existence' is a concept which 'comes from the world in which God exists' and to do anything like question that idea is to take the concept 'God's existence' and make an odd game of it. Is there some difference between your argument and this one? What is it?

As I said, no one's claiming that physical cameras and laptops are such things as exist necessarily and couldn't possibly not exist, like God is supposed to be.

Ancient Chinese philosophy is also very interesting. There were fully developed systems of logic, debates very reminiscent of nominalism vs. realism, that kind of thing. But unfortunately China has been subject to occasional outright purges and mass destruction of literature in its long history, so a lot has been lost.

More accessible and fully developed systems of non-Western philosophy can be found in Tibetan Buddhism, which fortunately preserved a lot of very sophisticated stuff from the period of the great Buddhist universities (which were destroyed by Islamic invasion). Check out anything from the Gelugpa school, which is the most intellectually-oriented school. It's fully as interesting and complex as anything Western, and is quite comfortably mappable onto Western philosophy in many ways.

Let us begin by distinguishing between perceiving something and perceiving that something is the case. I say that, though you might perceive a laptop - where this is by definition something which exists unperceived - you can never perceive that it is a laptop, since the property of unperceived existence is not something which you can possibly perceive. You agree with this in Quote 4 and Quote 7. But you worry in Quote 3, Quote 5 and Quote 6 that my characterization of sense experience is already committed to Phenomenalism or even that it is incoherent. It isn't. All I am saying is you never perceive that something exists unperceived, since that property is not one which you could perceive. Similarly, I say that if 'laptop' means partly 'a thing which exists unperceived', you can never perceive that something is a laptop, even though you might be perceiving a laptop. Perhaps I did not make this clear before. — PossibleAaran

Ah, the perpetual beginning, the perpetual setup of the hypnotic trance! If only you could just get ... behind it, somehow, you could discover something wonderful :)

What's true apriori is that you cannot perceive what you are not perceiving; it doesn't follow, from that, that you can't perceive that something exists unperceived. You can do it easily via a photograph, which reveals that the thing existed while you weren't perceiving it.

I say that if you cannot perceive that something exists unperceived then, if you are to have any reliable means of establishing it, you need to infer it from the properties that you can perceive (perceive that). — PossibleAaran

Not at all, you can perceive it indirectly (e.g. by means of a photograph, or a weight sensor or something like that), you don't have to "infer" it from other properties that you can perceive.

This was what I thought you were offering by offering the camera test. I thought you were trying to give an inferential argument that things exist unperceived. Understood that way, the camera test is fallacious. Nobody who did not already accept Realism would accept the ordinary understanding of what the camera can do, even if it is part of the concept 'camera', and that ordinary understanding of what the camera can do is just presupposed by your camera test. You admit this of your camera test in Quote 2, but insist that there is no problem here, because 'neither the laptop nor the camera's unperceived existence is at all dubious - if they're truly laptops and cameras'. I struggle to understand why you have said this. If we are genuinely open about whether Realism or Phenomenalism is true, you have admitted that the camera test won't sensibly convince us of Realism. What use is an argument which can only convince someone who already believes the conclusion? I think such an argument is worthless, which is why I called it fallacious, and using arguments of that sort is not at all truth conductive. — PossibleAaran

The point is that you don't infer the property of unperceived existence from other, presently-perceived properties of the object, you infer it from the identity you're claiming for the object. As I've said numerous times, IF it's a physical object, then necessarily it exists unperceived, because that's what physical objects do - and you can test that that's what they do by various means, like the camera test, or asking someone else to check if the object disappears when you turn away, etc. Such procedures are the standard by which we check "exists unperceived." There is no other "exists unpercieved" standard, particularly no "exists unperceived" standard that comes from the kinds of reflections you're indulging in.

You haven't seen your friend for years, you ask, "Did you exist while I wasn't perceiving you?" They answer, "Yes". That sort of thing is sufficient, our lives are interwoven with such things constantly, and the mass of such observations and interactions cement the idea of a physical object. There is no other place such an idea could come from - particularly not from staring at one's sensations in the present moment.

If you think the camera is made of ectoplasm or is a cameraX that itself disappears when unperceived, or if you think you're friend is mistaken, then you need to provide separate arguments to that effect.

Now, of course, you might be mistaken in your identification of the object (could be a laptopX and not a laptop, it could be a cameraX and not a camera), but you could only discover that you are mistaken by means of further perceptions that you accept, at some point, as valid identifications. (That's the point re. primacy of truth over doubt again.)

Inferring that the thing which I perceive exists unperceived from the premise that what I perceive is a camera and cameras, by definition, exist unperceived is just as fallacious as arguing that the thing which I mystically perceived must exist because what I mystically perceived was God and God exists by definition. Nobody who doesn't accept the conclusion will accept the premises. — PossibleAaran

But nobody is saying that cameras or laptops exist by definition (whatever that might mean). They may or may not exist, but IF they exist then necessarily they are such things as exist unperceived.

But then, perhaps you weren't offering the camera test as a kind of inference. Perhaps you were saying that the camera test is a reliable method of establishing that things exist unperceived, distinct from sense perception and inference. If that were your suggestion, you would be doing just what I asked various others to do: locate a reliable source for the belief that things exist unperceived even if there is no way to prove that the source is reliable to anyone who didn't believe that it was. That would certainly make a lot of sense of your insistence that 'if the camera is a camera, then it can verify that things exist unperceived'. Before I discuss this suggestion. Is this what you meant to do? If it is, I apologize for having missed it for so long. — PossibleAaran

No, that's not it either.

The camera test is an extension of perception, just as a SWAT mirror is an extension of perception. Again, there's no great mystery about it.

Despite your protestations, and probably unbeknownst to you, you keep doing doing the thing you say you're not doing: proceeding from the kinds of assumptions in terms of which alone the silly debate between Phenomenalism and Realism seems to make some kind of profound, mysterious sense.

One doesn't specify the nature of the thing one is perceiving from the qualities of present sensation, as you keep wanting to do; one specifies a logically possible object apriori and one tests whether the thing one is perceiving answers to those properties, has that identity. But that's a process that takes place in a world that's already accepted as public, already accepted as physical, already accepted as taking place in time and space, and often involves instruments and other people, it's not a sheer beholding of present sensation. But it's from that world that the very concept of "exists unperceived" (and the standards for resolving it) comes; philosophers aren't originating that concept, as if it were some kind of special armchair discovery, they're merely pinching it, detaching it from its normal moorings and making an odd game out of it.

In particular, from the method of sheerly beholding present sensations NOTHING can be securely inferred, so it's no surprise that the quality of physical objects, that they exist unperceived, can't be inferred either.

Philosophy deals with the broadest, most general categories and ideas, so it actually has the biggest influence on us of all the intellectual disciplines, because it "sets the tone" for all thought that's more concrete; but that influence is diffuse and long-term. [Insert the famous Keynes quote here]

I tend to think of philosophy in the original sense, as the pursuit of wisdom, so for example to me science really is natural philosophy, which is part of the general philosophical project of seeing how things hang together, which has the practical purpose of helping us orient ourselves in the world.

To me, academic philosophy as we know it (conceptual analysis, say) is just a specialist subset of philosophy - but scientists, natural philosophers, also have to be philosophers even in this narrow sense, at times.

The pursuit of wisdom also involves guarding against rhetoric/hypnotism (hence the "therapeutic" aspect). And it also involves a certain amount of creativity in the realm of those biggest, most abstract ideas (hence the more "continental" approach).

It's sort of roughly contemporaneous with ancient Greek materialism (Leucippus was 5th century, and there are hints that Greek atomism may go back even further). And of course then there was Epicureanism, which was based on atomism and also had a hedonic ethics.

Some schools of early Buddhism were also quite materialist (IIRC there was a fully developed school of atomism in early Buddhism, which would also have been around maybe the 4th century - so it must have been in the air :) ).

Rationalist materialism is quite a venerable tradition - it's never been the majority tradition, but even during "spiritual" epochs there were always some who flew the flag (if they were allowed to - usually it was thought too corrosive of social mores, which is actually a colorable claim given the history of the past hundred years or so).

Personally, while I see the attraction of Theism (it neatly brings closure to rationality), I stick to agnostic rationalism. We just don't know enough, I just don't know enough, to be sure either way.

IOW the Theist argument is persuasive in abstracto, but it depends on so many steps that are themselves open to question, that involve heavy abstraction, that it makes more sense to me to move forward slowly and carefully from where we are, in terms of probabilities and likelihoods, and not "leap ahead" so to speak.

And if God exists, I don't think He'd begrudge me this caution - all-too-human fairytales about God to the contrary.

Depends on what grain and standard you're using. If you're going down to the level of neuroscience, the actual "scanning" part of our sensory equipment works on a tiny timescale. On the other hand, if you're looking at the the ongoing "model of the world" that the brain's juggling as it goes, which involves memory, it's something like 7 seconds or so? Forget the exact figure, but it's something of that order.

I think we have reached an impasse. From where you see it, my characterization of the issue is just an odd way of talking which creates problems. For me, you are just insisting that things exist unperceived by definition. I will try once more to try to make you see it my way. — PossibleAaran

Hehe, I'm not being obtuse, I assure you. I used to be captivated by all this stuff myself, so I understand its attraction.

Look at your computer. What do you see, literally? — PossibleAaran

A computer.

Describe every property of the thing you are looking at, without adding any property which you can't see. You might say things like 'a black, rectangular, three dimensional thing with letters on it'. — PossibleAaran

Why would I describe it in such peculiar terms? "A black rectangular three dimensional thing with letters on it" could just as easily describe a plaque as a computer. It's a computer, so it's implicitly and necessarily a three-dimensional thing, and has a shape and colour.

The reason I think it's a computer is because I'm familiar with computers and it's very similar to other computers I've seen, and it functions as a computer; not because it's a "black rectangular three-dimensional object." It is those things, but those properties are incidental, they aren't the signifiers of it being a computer, and I don't get anywhere closer to specifying it as a computer just by specifying a comprehensive list of those sorts of properties. The signifiers of it being a computer are more to do with its internal structure and its functionality (use it for email, browse the internet, play videogames, etc.).

Again, you keep denying that you're mistaking experience for object, but this smells very much like you're asking me to reduce my description of my experience to my sensory experiences in abstraction from what they're sensory experiences of, and then somehow build up or infer an idea of what I'm perceiving from there.

No matter how careful and detailed is your description, you will never say 'which exists when I am not perceiving it'. — PossibleAaran

I wouldn't say "which has a motherboard, CPU and RAM inside it" either, but those are also implicit in the thing's being a computer, yet my not seeing those things doesn't mean it's not a computer.

The point is, there's no occasion to add "which exists when I am not perceiving it" because I already know it exists when I'm not perceiving it, because it's a computer.

It's possible that I could be mistaken that it's a computer, but if it is a computer then I can't be mistaken about its persistence while I'm not looking, and that persistence is not something I need to "see" or "infer."

If you did say this, you would no longer be describing, literally, what you can see. You would just be adding a property which you believe the object to have, — PossibleAaran

No, no, no. I already "added the property" (so to speak) when I saw the thing as a computer. The property is implicit in the thing's being a computer. And I can test that property, if I want, by the means I pointed out, just as I can test the computerhood of the object by seeing if I can email with it, etc.

but which you can't see that it is, rather like the amateur artist who draws the human eye as a perfect oval, because that's the shape he believes it has (artists have to work quite hard to learn only to draw what they see and nothing more). — PossibleAaran

Yes, exactly, and the fact that you use this example suggests, again, that you're doing what you say you're not doing. Because the perspectival proportions are not what the artist literally sees, what the artist literally sees is the object, the perspectival vision is precisely the result of training in abstracting away what one knows of what one sees, and sort of beholding one's sensory experience in suspension, as something like a projection on a flat surface with certain proportions of colour and shape. (Amusingly in this context, parsing a photograph is the opposite process.)

Similarly, this tangle you're getting yourself into is the result of you abstracting away what you know of the thing you're experiencing, so that "literally" to you really means a detached, truncated description of some sensory experiences in abstraction.

Sure, you're never going to perceive unperceived persistence that way, but you'd never be able to perceive perceived persistence that way either, because you've already cut yourself off from directly perceiving any object that isn't pure, present sensory experience. You've already turned yourself into a phenomenalist or idealist by choosing the method you've chosen, so the whole exercise is a sham.

If you really weren't doing what you say you aren't doing, then the answer and the tests I've given you would be sufficient. The fact that you still think a camera test is insufficient, and you still think that you need something extra to prove unperceived persistence, over and above the fact that physical objects are by definition things that exist unperceived, and that that persistence can be tested by the use of various kinds of tools and instruments, demonstrates that you are after all painting yourself into the corner of a phenomenalist/idealist stance.

If you have never seen the property of unperceived existence, how do you know the object you are looking at has this property? — PossibleAaran

If it's "an object I'm looking at," a physical object, then necessarily it has this property. (If the "object" is just sensory experience in abstraction that I'm sheerly beholding, on the other hand, then necessarily it doesn't.)

Can you infer that property from what you do see? If you can't, then how can you possibly know it? 'Know' is being used here merely in the weak sense of reliably produced true belief. How can you reliably believe it? — PossibleAaran

Some people are incurious and never open up their computers, so they've never seen the motherboard and CPU. So how do they know their computer has a motherboard and CPU if they haven't seen it?

Similarly, I'm incurious about the computer's existing unperceived, so I've never done the camera test. But I could easily do it.

We can be incurious about these things and still know about them because having a motherboard and CPU is a necessary implication of a thing's being a computer, and persisting unperceived is a necessary implication of a thing's being a physical object.

In these examples, the properties (respectively, having a motherboard and CPU, existing unperceived) aren't being directly perceived in sensory experience, nor are they inferred from sensory experience, they're inferred from the things' being what they are, supposing that they truly are those things.

You have said that if you take a picture with a camera then that will prove that things exist unperceived. But how? Since you cannot literally see that things exist unperceived, I took it that you meant to offer an argument for it here, but I think that argument is fallacious. Here is something we ordinarily believe about cameras: you can put a camera up in a room when no one is in it and the camera can get you a picture of the things which exist in that room when no one is there. Equally, you could close your eyes and take a picture of your computer, and the camera would show you what the computer was doing when you weren't looking.

I think once I lay out this ordinary understanding of a camera in this way, you can see immediately that nobody who wasn't already convinced of Realism would accept without further question that any of it is true. Someone who does not believe Realism to be true would not accept that you can put a camera up and leave it to take a picture of what exists unperceived. — PossibleAaran

Yeah, but there's nobody who actually believes that. People who say they don't believe in Realism don't really disbelieve Realism, they just disbelieve Realism in toy examples where they're hypnotizing themselves into artificially shrinking their experience of the world down to the experience of sensory qualities in abstraction. It's a rakish pose.

I understand what you're saying: the camera is on a level with the laptop, and if the laptop's unperceived existence is dubious, so is the camera's, so one can't be used to prove the other.

But neither the laptop nor the camera's unperceived existence is at all dubious - if they're truly laptops and cameras.

Now they might indeed be something else - a laptopX and a cameraX, both of which have all the properties of normal laptops and cameras, with the exception of unperceived existence. But you'd have to demonstrate that's what they are. And you can't demonstrate that with your "let me literally behold only my sensory experiences in abstraction" game, any more than you could demonstrate perceived existence from that stance.

'To all appearances seem like normal physical things' is tantamount to 'to all appearances seem like things which exist unperceived', but as I have pointed out, you never see that something exists unperceived and so, literally, it never seems that way. — PossibleAaran

"You never see that something exists unperceived". Genius :)

But one wouldn't expect the property of unperceived existence to be something one could see.

Fortunately, you don't need to "see that something exists unperceived" to know that the physical thing before you exists unperceived, because as I said, that's already an ironclad implication of things being physical objects.

You have to accept this, unless you're going the phenomenalist/idealist route you deny. It's completely incoherent to say, "This is a physical object, but I can't be sure, from inspection, whether it exists unperceived." Present inspection isn't the sort of thing you could logically expect to reveal that particular property. What you could logically expect to reveal that property would be things like the camera test.

Now, you might say something like this:- "Ha! You think you are perceiving physical objects, but for all you know you might be perceiving something that to all appearances look and behave like physical objects, but lack the property of existing unperceived."

In that case we'd do the camera test. If the camera showed nothing there when I took the picture, that would be a verified example of something blinking out of existence when unpercieved. BUT THEN IT WOULDN'T BE A PHYSICAL OBJECT AS WE UNDERSTAND PHYSICAL OBJECTS It would be something new, something mysterious and interesting, that shares some properties with physical objects, but lacks the property physical objects have, of existing unperceived.

SUMMARY:- We don't "build up" the idea of physical objects from sensory experience, we POSIT such a thing as physical objecthood and then we test with POSSIBLE tests, using perception as the very standard of judgement, whether a thing answers to those properties. (The process is the same throughout all cognition, right up to science: generate-and-test. What would be the logically necessary outcome for sensory experience, for perception, supposing x is true? Test it.)

Unperceived existence is certainly one of those properties, but since seeing the unseen is a logical impossibility it's not a possible test for unperceived existence; but if something passes possible tests for unperceived existence (like using cameras or other instruments), then that is a sufficient test for unperceived existence.

But I don't believe you did 'already tell me'. This argument about taking a picture is a new argument introduced with this post, is it not? — PossibleAaran

No, I proposed such a test in post 131625, and you even quoted it yourself en passant in a later post:

"You can easily verify the existence of unperceived objects by means of instruments (e.g. using a watch, shut your eyes and simultaneously take a picture with a camera with a timestamp)."

At any rate, this isn't all that clear. What exactly does taking the picture prove? So at this moment, T1, I am perceiving something. I close my eyes at T2. Does that which I perceived when my eyes were open still exist when unperceived? I take a picture with my eyes closed at T3. When I open them at T4, I can see on the camera a picture which 'looks just like' that which I experienced with my eyes open. What is the evidence we have at this stage? Well I remember perceiving something at T1 and I remember taking a picture at T3, and I am currently perceiving something else (namely, the picture which looks like what I perceived at T1, on a camera screen) at T4. These three bits of evidence don't logically entail that something existed unperceived and which the camera took a picture of. — PossibleAaran

They do logically entail that, because that sort of test (perhaps tightened up with watch and timestamp, as I proposed) is just the kind of standard by which we'd normally decide whether something exists unperceived, in the ordinary sense of "exists unperceived" (such as real vs. hallucination). And normally it's even simpler than that: we just ask a friend. If you think that standard isn't good enough, you need to say why.

Now, as I said before, you could load a bunch of "but what ifs?" on top of the tests, but at each stage you'd have to justify it - and merely thinking up something that's logically possible that might require a higher standard of justification if it were the case (such as: objects that otherwise have all the normal characteristics of physical objects, except that they blink out of existence when unperceived) isn't a actually a justification for dissatisfaction with that standard.

For example, "but what if my memory is playing me false?" Well, do you have any reason to think your memory is playing you false? Just the mere thought "my memory might be playing me false" isn't in and of itself a reason to doubt that your memory is being reliable, it's just a logical possibility hanging in a vacuum.

I know at this point you will likely complain that they do entail it, because cameras take pictures of things and they can't take pictures of things which don't exist. So if I really did take a picture of something at T3, it follows that the thing I took a picture of existed unperceived at that time. But now it is clear that this whole language of the camera 'taking pictures of things' assumes that Realism is true and hence begs the question. — PossibleAaran

What else is it doing if it's really and truly a camera?

In other words, it is an interpretation of the evidence to suggest that I took a picture of something which existed unperceived at T3 and that thing is what I have a picture of at T4. — PossibleAaran

No, it just falls out from what cameras are and what physical objects are, and you need to give me a reason why I should suspect that what I'm using isn't a camera and what it's taking a picture of isn't a physical object.

The experiences I have at T1-T4 do not entail that interpretation. We should describe the evidence neutrally, in a way that doesn't just assume that something existed at T3 of which I took a picture. If we do that then the evidence I have is that I perceive something at T1, then I close my eyes at T2, then I press a button at T3 and hear a clicking sound, then at T4 I perceive a picture of something which looks like the thing I perceived at T1. None of that entails that things exist unperceived, so how do you cogently infer that things exist unperceived from this data? This would be an intriguing argument, if you could fill the details in. — PossibleAaran

That's not "describing the evidence neutrally", it's redescribing the evidence in a weird way that automatically creates the mystery you're supposedly trying to solve (for example "I press a button at T3 and hear a clicking sound" is just a queer way of saying "I take a picture with a camera").

As I said, the sheer positing of alternative logical possibilities (such as laptops that blink in and out of existence depending on whether they're perceived or not) simply isn't good enough reason to doubt, therefore the idea that someone else has to provide you with something you're calling "evidence" to guard against those possibilities is a meaningless rigmarole. That's just not what evidence is, it's not the kind of thing that links or unlinks imagined alternative logical possibilities to experience, but rather it connects experienced object to experienced object in a continuum, weaving a coherent story. It doesn't have to step outside the continuum of experience to take account of mere imaginings - such as physical objects that blink into and out of existence - and "prove" that the imaginings aren't really the case.

We don't have to "cogently infer" that things don't flash out of existence when unperceived, because a) there's no reason to think that there is any such thing as an object that has all the sense-available characteristics of physical objects, except that it blinks out of existence when it's unperceived, and b) we can easily test by perfectly ordinary means whether things do or don't exist unperceived.

This is the 2nd time you have accused me of this conflation. I am well aware of the difference, which Moore pointed out, between the experience of something and the object of the experience. I am not sure I even used those words in my last post. At T1 I perceive something. It is something which I would ordinarily call a 'laptop', but since you insist that if it is a laptop then it must exist unperceived, I do not call it a 'laptop'. Instead I try to characterize the perception in a way that doesn't presuppose Realism, by saying merely 'I perceive something'. This was also the reason I spoke of the 'object of my experience'. The 'object', as I was thinking of it, is merely that which I see. I see a black, rectangular thing with a slightly lighter front face. What I don't see, is the property of unperceived existence, which is why if the thing I perceive really has that property, I can only reliably tell that this is so by inference. — PossibleAaran

Again, it's the very narrowing of your description that's causing the problem, but it's actually impossible to say what you want to say unless you are in fact doing what you say you aren't doing.

For example, as soon as you say "see", then that automatically carries connotations of physical objecthood - unless you're doing what you say you aren't doing, which is taking "experience-of-object" for "object".

It comes down to this: what reason do you have to suspect that things could possibly exist that to all appearances seem like normal physical things, except that they pop out of existence when they're not being perceived?

If you did have a reason to suspect that such things existed, then yes, you'd have a hell of a puzzle trying to figure out an evidentiary standard for distinguishing them FROM "normal" physical objects that don't blink out of existence when unperceived.

But you don't have any reason to think such things exist, so there's no reason to think that the ordinary evidentiary standard for "exists unperceived" (such as I've given you) is somehow insufficient for distinguishing whether objects exist unperceived.

I am presently asking whether what I ordinarily think is actually true, and whether I have any reliable means of figuring it out. — PossibleAaran

I already told you: do something like take a picture while you have your eyes closed, and you will be able to verify that the object of your experience exists unperceived. Or just ask someone else. It's not that complicated or difficult, and there's no great mystery about it.

As I said, you're only making it seem difficult and mysterious because you're mixing up the abstraction of the experience of the object with the object. This is also the reason why you think I'm begging the question, or defining things into existence.

Your experience of the laptop, certainly, cannot possibly exist unperceived. In the case of experiences as such, abstracted away from what they're experiences of, esse most certainly is percipi.

But objects, the things we normally perceive, are not the sorts of things that exist only while being perceived, they exist unperceived, and that is easily verified by means such as I outlined (instruments, like cameras or other causally-connectable things).

A painfully simple way to see the difficulty with your argument here is as follows. Every Theist means by 'God', a being which actually exists. Does it then follow that God exists, just from the fact that the Theist uses a word a certain way? Surely not, but if not, why should it follow, from the fact that I use the word 'laptop' to mean a being which exists unperceived, that the thing actually exists unperceived? — PossibleAaran

It doesn't follow from the fact that you use the word "laptop" that the laptop exists unperceived, it follows from the fact (if it is a fact) that you're really and truly perceiving a laptop that it exists unperceived.

Again, if you're really perceiving a laptop, then necessarily it exists unperceived, because a laptop is a physical object and physical objects are just the sorts of things that exist unperceived (a fact that can easily be verified by various kinds of instruments, as I said).

And you check whether it's really a laptop (a physical object) by means of further inspection - e.g. by switching it on to see if it functions as a laptop, by opening it up; or by taking a picture, or asking someone else, if you suspect you might be having something like a laptop hallucination (which would be something that only exists while perceived).

I mean they're inaccessible to us in terms of being a shareable raw basis on which to build shared meaning. Obviously once we have shared meaning coming from objective shared habits, then we can easily compare our inner experiences.

I claim the theses which I mentioned in my last post, all of which you ignored. — PossibleAaran

I didn't ignore it, I said that it's a flight of fancy you've given me no reason to take seriously. It's just a different definition of "doubt" from the everyday one which I've outlined (which you agree is what we normally use).

I am currently having a certain sensory experience as I type these words. It is an experience I would describe as 'of a laptop'. The object of my experience is just that which I am aware of at that moment. Does that thing, 'the laptop', exist unperceived? — PossibleAaran

If it's truly a laptop you're perceiving then of course it exists unperceived. Laptops are just the sort of thing that exists unperceived, and you can check for yourself, in the way I outlined, that your laptop exists unperceived.

If you are talking about (abstracting away) your experience of the laptop, then it obviously doesn't exist unexperienced.

But these are two very different things.

IOW, there's a sleight of hand here between "object of experience"=laptop and "object of experience"=experience-of-laptop.

So not only are you giving me an idiosyncratic definition of "doubt" without giving me any reason why I should follow you in your redefinition, you're also giving me an idiosyncratic definition of "object" without giving me any reason why I should follow you in that redefinition.

You may think you're revealing something profound and interesting, but from my point of view you're just redefining words in a way that creates a queer artificial mystery. No mystery exists in relation to the normal uses of the concepts, the mystery, the puzzle, only appears when one takes seriously your proposed redefinitions of those concepts.

But you will forgive me for being sceptical: why should I re-jig my concepts so that "object" means "experience-of-object?"

Where you take note of the differences, I note the similarity. Mental correlations. — creativesoul

Yeah but the similarities (as well as the differences) are inaccessible to us, all we have that we can share is the shared patterns of symbol use.

IOW it doesn't matter that when I hear "tree" I have a different internal "brain writing" (or whatever one might call it) than you, all that matters is that we use "tree" the same way.

That shared language use is what sets us into right relation with the world (with the way the world really is) and with each other at the same time, because the objectively similar language use lives in the same realm ("out there") as the way the world really is.

That shared de facto objectivity (the objectivity of the patterns of use being out there in the world right alongside the way the world really is) then reflexively gives the "correct" meaning to our variable/similar internal "brain writing" calculi, internal imagery, etc.

That said, of course because of evolution, there is a lot that's going on in our brains that's probably similar, or analogous, just as it is with animals. But it doesn't have to be for communication to work; and we can also sharpen up the precision of our communication to some aribtrary degree, quite regardless of the differences.

I think the early sceptics doubted convention and conventional ways of understanding, and cast doubt on the values imputed by those around them on such things as wealth, possessions, social status, respectability, the social contract, and the kinds of things that ‘everyone knows’ to be true. — Wayfarer

Yes, I think that's right. Early philosophers would have been (rightly) baffled by Cartesian scepticism.

I am assuming that by 'doubt' here, you mean suspend judgement. — PossibleAaran

Doubt is not suspension of judgement, it's the questioning of the truth or validity of something based on reasons (e.g. some anomaly). Suspension of judgement would be something like agnosticism or indecision.

We cannot prove to someone who doubts it that the objects of sense perception exist unperceived, — PossibleAaran

If they are truly objects of perception, then necessarily they exist unperceived, so doubting that objects of perception exist unperceived doesn't make any sense. Generally, with odd exceptions like rainbows, objects of perception just are the kinds of things that exist unperceived (or: if it doesn't exist unperceived, then it wasn't an object of perception after all). You can easily verify the existence of unperceived objects by means of instruments (e.g. using a watch, shut your eyes and simultaneously take a picture with a camera with a timestamp).

I have given a perfectly clear meaning of 'illusion' which doesn't at all depend on any of our perceptions being veridical. — PossibleAaran

Yes, but you've given us no reason to take it seriously and to replace our ordinary use of "illusion" with it. It's just an imaginary usage, a flight of fancy that bears little relation to the ordinary, everyday concept of illusion. The ordinary use of "illusion" is contextual - illusion in relation to veridical perception, and one doubts perception based on reasons. Imagining a deceiving demon isn't a reason to doubt perception.

Slavery has always had its detractors, and even at worst, most societies that have had slaves have had rules about not mistreating them.

It would be a mistake to think it was "perfectly moral" in earlier societies (it wasn't that "you ought to have slaves"), rather it was expedient, and a function of conquest, for a long time, and it became more and more of a moral question as alternative forms of technology started to come along, which made people realize what had always been the case (that it's immoral to use people to do stuff for you, and immoral to ignore their own agency), as other means to do things, like steam engines. etc., came along. (Also we discovered that paying free people to do things got better results than forcing people to do things.)

So there was always the insult against the dignity of the person, and some people always noticed that, but that signal was swamped by more archaic, immoral patterns of expediency and feelings of superiority, and only became more and more salient as the pragmatic value of slavery diminished.

Our biology is at the root of the bad things (habits and ways of life we call "bad") as well as the good things (habits and ways of life we call "good"); the development of morality is the strengthening of the good tendencies and the falling into disrepute and disuse of the bad tendencies. Or in terms of my post above, it's the gradual discerning of an ideal pattern of social rules, and the gradual eliciting of over-arching goals relating to human flourishing/happiness that we're all gradually homing into agreement on.

Holding expectation is possible prior to language. — creativesoul

I don't think the Wittgensteinian angle Banno's flying the flag for would deny this, in fact Wittgenstein's way of looking at things almost relies on there being pre-verbal foundations to thought, that would be part of the idea of a "way of life." There are some things we just do naturally, there are what you might call "motions of the mind" that don't necessarily use words.

But the point would be: could your cat communicate to other cats that treats are on the way?

You see so far, those internal "motions of the mind" are idiosyncratic to each creature, bespoke internal symbolisms. In human beings, that might mean that when I hear the word "tree" it triggers a vague coloured tree image, like an impressionist painting, whereas when you hear the word "tree" a particular sharply defined tree that's an archetypal or prototype tree occurs to you, but in monochrome, for another person a simplified tree schema, for another person, a particular memory of a tree from their childhood, etc.

But the variance of these things means that what's important about words and communication, and therefore thought to the extent that it's shareable, can't be reliant on those internal pre-verbal motions, there's no logic to them, so they all "cancel out" (same as with Wittgenstein's beetle example); what's important for logic, thought and language, is the shared habits of shuffling symbols around in particular ways in particular contexts. That's the thing that crosses the abyss between man and man, that's the thing that allows communication - those shared habits. That's what makes it so that we understand each other even though our internal imagery, etc., might be quite different.

Any "why believe that?" question can be answered normally. Why believe there's a table in front of you? Because you can see it, it's got the functional form of a table, you can rap on it, etc. Those sorts of things are the standard for answering "why believe?" questions.

You can't extend doubt to everything because, as I said, you can only doubt on the basis of some other things held to be true, because that's how doubt works, it's leveraged off of truths. Truth comes first, doubt is secondary. Truth is the usual state, doubt departs from it and returns to it.

For example, you can only say that something is an illusion on the basis of some other corrective perception that tells you it's an illusion. But that means you're accepting the corrective perception as valid. But that means you can't doubt whether all perceptions are illusions, only some.

IOW, if there's such a thing as illusion anywhere, then there logically must also be such a thing as valid perception somewhere, because without valid perceptions no such thing as illusion could possibly be revealed (or: "illusion" would have no meaning). They're inextricably tied together, depend on each other for meaning (or to be more precise, "valid perception" is tied to "illusion" in this way), so the idea of "extending" doubt to all perception is incoherent, it seems like something you might be able to do, but you can't actually do it, except as an imaginary exercise. But no truths hang on the use of the imagination.

Notice that even with something like the Brain in a Vat thought experiment, the hypothetical mad scientists must have been having valid perceptions in order to cobble together the apparatus. On the other hand if you use something like Descartes Demon to get rid of that problem, the problem with him is that he's just an imagined possibility. Whereas the mad scientists have the advantage that we know they're actually possible, at a stretch, there's no reason to believe a deceiving demon could exist; but if the mad scientists are possible then they must be perceiving things correctly, so the hypothesized BiV predicament can't possibly cast doubt on all perception, only one's own. But we already knew that our perception can be mistaken, that's why we sometimes check things by asking other people.

Another way of putting this: you can extend doubt by "but what if?" extensions, but the more "but what if?" extensions you add, the more you're just drifting into speculation without any reason for it, the more your doubt is transforming into idle imagination of alternative possibilities; whereas the simpler, more limited, more specific, particular and occasional the doubt, the more ACTUAL reasons you CAN HAVE for doubting.

Yeah, exactly. Global scepticism is a dead end in thought. It looks tempting, and it's instructive to poke around, but ultimately it just doesn't make any sense.

Or to put it another way, whatever the hell the global sceptic thinks they're doing, it sure isn't doubting :)

"Grounded in" isn't at all the same thing as "determined by."

I'm not sure if I can explain my position any better than I already did in that last post, so I'll leave it there.

The problem with scepticism is that doubt only makes sense if it's limited, because doubt about one thing requires a reason to doubt, which presupposes the truth of something else, usually some other perception. Doubt can't exist in a vacuum, in suspension, without any presuppositions whatsoever.

The cash value of doubting is checking, which usually involves some further action. If you doubt whether a perception is illusory, then you do something like shift position, ask someone else, etc., etc. If you doubt the results of a calculation, you re-do the calculation, ask someone else to check it, etc., etc.

Generalized doubt, Cartesian doubt, or global scepticism, is fundamentally incoherent, especially if it's based on merely imagining that things could be different than they appear to be (imagining alternative "logical possibilities"). To doubt, you need a reason to doubt, not just a contextless wondering whether things might be different than you think they are.

One certainly imagines other possibilities when one is doubting, because one uses those alternative possibilities to formulate plans of action for checking; but the doubt is resolved by action in one way or another, it doesn't just stop at the mere imagining of alternative "logical possibilities."

And at some point, one or another of the results of the checking actions aren't doubted.

IOW, doubt is a phase of cognition that alternates with bits of truth acceptance, it can't coherently be elevated to a permanent cognitive stance that doubts everything.

There's nothing wrong with sharing your ideas with others, or recommending things to them, however bizarre, I think the line to cross would be if you force others to proclaim belief in what you believe - but that's the case whether your ideas are about imaginary entities or real entities.

Moral codes aren't actually all that different depending on where you are.

There are certainly some differences, and occasionally bizarre differences, but if you think of it from the basis of zero and all the possible social rules that are imaginable from that basis, human beings actually do generally follow quite similar social rules all over the world (for example the incest taboo is pretty much universal, so are rules against murder, and so are property rules).

This was actually the origin of the idea of "natural law". When Alexander and then later the Romans conquered large parts of the world, philosophers and legal thinkers were surprised by the similarities between the social rule systems they came across, so the idea came about of there being some things that are fairly constant, which they thought of as natural law, natural morality.

Stephen Pinker has some stuff about this IIRC, where there's a tabulation based on data.

Children aren't more informed, they have access to more information, those are different things. Children still don't have the nous that comes from experience - i.e. the canniness to sift through the available information and sort the wheat from the chaff, the ability to sniff out what's likely to be a waste of time and effort.

Theoretically, adults are supposed to provide some guidelines that encapsulate their nous to children, so they can get a head start in thinking for themselves, but that's never really been done very well by mass education systems.