This object has no meaning until some one gives it a meaning. If there is no one to give it a meaning, it cannot have a meaning. — RussellA

I suppose that I was thrown as a result of you saying that no one would know it's meaning. I should have asked if you believed that the statement has meaning in that case, because "it" referred to the statement. The time frame in question was void of humans. So, I wondered why and/or how you believed that statements could still be meaningful in such a situation.

I would agree that there are no such things as meaningful language or statements in that situation. If we imagine a time in the future when all humans have perished, the once meaningful and true statement "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" would be neither true nor meaningful.

That's why saying that "no one would be around to know it's meaning" threw me a bit. Still does, but the thread is more about the analytic synthetic distinction, and Chomsky's take on that. So... I'll leave well enough alone...

Thanks for the answers.

:smile:

:up:

Would "The Eiffel Tower is located in France" be true if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?
— creativesoul

Is "ya mnara lipo nchi" true if there is no one who knows what it means. If no one knows its meaning, then it isn't a language, it's an object like a pebble, and as a pebble cannot be true or false.

Similarly, "the Eiffel Tower is located in France" would no longer be a language, it would become an object, and just like a pebble, cannot be considered as either true or false. — RussellA

So, would "The Eiffel Tower is located in France" still be be meaningful if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out, but it could not be true or false because no one would know it's meaning, or would it no longer be meaningful at all?

Would the thing that we've named the "Eiffel Tower" be located in the place that we've named "Paris" if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?
— creativesoul

Yes.

We observe something in the world and then name it "The Eiffel Tower". This something existed before we named it. As this something existed before being named, its existence doesn't depend on being named.

Similarly, we observe somewhere in the world and then name it "Paris". This somewhere existed before we named it. As this somewhere existed before being named, its existence doesn't depend on being named.

As both the something that has been named "The Eiffel Tower" and the somewhere that has been named "Paris" can exist without a name, they can continue to exist even if there was no one around to name them. — RussellA

Okay.

Would "The Eiffel Tower is located in France" be true if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?

Would the thing that we've named the "Eiffel Tower" be located in the place that we've named "Paris" if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?

:rofl:

Yup.

Chomsky very recently characterized chatGPT as glorified plagiarism, or words to that effect.

I do think that awareness and the material world we are aware of are two seperate things. — lorenzo sleakes

I never said otherwise. I criticized the presupposition that sensation and mind are completely distinct 'things'. Seems to me that the former are part of the latter in such a way that complex minds such as ours evolved - over enough time and mutation - from simple sensation(s). In other words, without sensations there could be no minds.

There are currently all sorts of offline activities that are more productive for me, practically speaking. I agree with the frustrations that can come with this medium. I can certainly relate. To answer your question...

Not all beliefs are reasons for doing something. That pretty much sums it up... broadly speaking.

I've read back a bit, but I'll need to carefully reread further back in order to better remember what all we had been discussing. I do seem to remember that there were some very interesting aspects that I hoped we would further explore.

Yes. We might use the metaphor of a distorting lens. — plaque flag

I've called it the worldly fingerprint placed upon each of us by virtue of natural language acquisition/adoption. That's another matter in its own right, and would be too far tangent to be considered on topic.

Yeah, I should probably not continue here. My own position rejects both direct and indirect realism as it's currently defined. That is due to the stark ontological differences in what constitutes thought and belief, and subsequently... a mind.

Is that directed at me, in response to my last reply???

A group of people can watch the same set of events unfolding in real time and walk away with completely different opinions about what happened.

One reason why and/or how is because each person brings their own worldview along. They each have their own sets of thoughts and beliefs about themselves and/or the world around them. It is through these respective worldviews that people 'see' the world. One's pre-existing belief system largely mediates how one comes to terms with the world and what happens in it(and in them). There are all sorts of preconceived notions at work in each of them, and these preconceived notions can and do influence the way the events are taken into account while being witnessed. Thus, any differences in testimony about what happened is often due to the differences in worldviews.

Eye-witness testimony has also been proven to be quite unreliable at times. It does not follow from the fact that different people have different accounts of what happened that they did not all watch the same set of events unfolding in real time.

if all observers are directly observing the same facts in the external world, then why do different observers make different judgements about the moment when one fact changes into a different fact. — RussellA

Could you rephrase this question by dropping "facts" and "external world" out of it?

For the Direct Realist, the world we see around us is the real world itself. — RussellA

Is there no distinction to be drawn and maintained between a direct realist and a naive one?

:yikes:

:grin:

How does phantom limb syndrome work? — Michael

Reactivated neural pathways in spite of no longer being complete. A consequence of the largely autonomous central nervous system simply doing it's thing in spite of its having lost most of the input mechanisms of those pathways.

Neural pathways are not just in the brain.

May have something to do with neuroplasticity as well(the biological machinery repairing itself by virtue of using different structures than before to perform some task/function that was once performed by the missing structures).

Severely damaged nerves can do weird things. I nearly cut off the end of my thumb once. Dr said that I was very unikely to recover much feeling in the part beyond the laceration due to the nerves being completely severed. Years later, for a brief time, I experienced odd pains in that area, despite there not having been anything external to me playing a role.

There are a multitude of places where philosophy 'went wrong'! Many have been pointed out by later philosophers throughout history.

Here's one that has yet to have been adequately addressed and/or corrected in academia...

Philosophy went wrong, and still goes wrong whenever taking account of thought and belief, both human and non-human.

In fact we're trying to do exactly that to enable the blind to see. — Michael

Good luck in the absence of red things outside the head to play a role.

"Electromagnetic radiation stimulating the photoreceptors can cause someone to see red for the first time" is a gross oversimplification.

You used "activation". I think it's better put as a "reactivation". The difference is one of evolutionary explanation of seeing red. There's no way to check, but I think it's much safer to claim that we could not induce seeing red for the first time with someone who was in the complete dark, had never seen red before, using only the means you're suggesting are required.

The evolution of seeing red...

Okay. Then seeing red does require things outside the head.

The position you're arguing for seems to completely neglect all the events that lead up to the ability to reactivate the biological machinery.

I'm just baffled by the claim that seeing colours and shapes does not require anything outside the head.
— creativesoul

Does feeling pain require something outside the head? — Michael

Of course it does. Phantom limb pain requires once having had a limb. The limb is outside the head. As is any prior object that caused injury to the limb.

Does it require having seen red before?
— creativesoul

And really it can only be reports of having seen red, I'd think, which is the application of a concept requiring language. — plaque flag

Well, I do not think that seeing red requires language. Our discussion of it does. I'm just baffled by the claim that seeing colours and shapes does not require anything outside the head. That makes no sense. Or better yet, it leads to saying that everything is inside the head.

Seems to me that the activation is better called reactivation...

So, the very first time someone sees red, it does not require anything not in the head?

A red colour occurs when the appropriate areas of the occipital lobe are activated. — Michael

Does it require having seen red before?

I understand that.

Are there trees inside the blind person's head that they can see only after activating the biological machinery? If so, then all that is required for seeing trees is activating the biological machinery.

Just look at perception from a purely biological perspective. Electromagnetic radiation stimulates the rods and cones in the eyes. This sends signals to the occipital lobe which processes visual information, which is then sent to the temporal lobe where the visual information is processed into memory and to the frontal lobe where the visual information is processed into intellectual reasoning and decision-making.

Now what happens if we ignore the eyes entirely and find some other means to activate the occipital lobe, such as with cortical implants or the ordinary case of dreaming? I would say that the subject undergoes a conscious experience. And I would say that their conscious experience is one of visual imagery, such as shapes and colours. Seeing shapes and colours does not require electromagnetic radiation stimulating the rods and cones in the eyes (or an apple to reflect said light). Seeing shapes and colours only requires the activation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex.

Given that seeing shapes and colours only requires the activation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex, regardless of what triggers it, it's understandable why one would argue that the shapes and colours we see are "in the head" and not properties of apples. Seeing shapes and colours is no different in principle to feeling pain or hot or cold. — Michael

I think there's something to be said about the claim that seeing shapes and colours only requires the activation of the appropriate parts of the cerebral cortex. That is false. It's akin to claiming that phantom limb pain does not require having once had a limb.

If we ignore the eyes(or previous limb) we're also ignoring everything that led up to the ability to 'activate' the biological machinery. Much of what's being ignored is not located in the head.

Very nice. The best yet, and he will not have financial motivation to be here as most of the others have had. One need only read through the previous guests' responses to see that they were trying to sell a book. That was quite disappointing to me.

Kudos... MAJOR kudos to whoever set this up!

Great job!

Disappointing ending to the Fox News trial. Yes, Murdoch has to shell out $700 million and eat a certain amount of crow, but the cast of clowns that spew lies and pollute the electorate don’t have to own up to their bullshit on their own stations or in the witness box. Still, it’s something. — Wayfarer

It's something alright..

A tremendous public disservice!

You have no way to assess how the construction of your own CNS compares to the source of the stimulus. — frank

That pretty much says it all.

In order to know that A is not equal to B, one must have access to both. By definition, an indirect realist stipulates that we cannot have direct access to the world. Kant's distinction between Noumenal and phenomenal suffers the same fatal flaw. Arguments outright denying objectivity based upon the idea that everything ever believed, known, and/or stated come through a subject do as well.

Untenability by virtue of being strung up by one's own hamstrings.

The result renders the distinctions/dichotomies themselves meaningless/useless in that they cannot be used as a means to draw and maintain the distinctions of their own namesake.

It's the situations when someone holds false belief unbeknownst to themselves that the practice is found lacking, because it is during these times that the person cannot even tell you what they believe. It is impossible to knowingly hold false belief, and/or be mistaken.
— creativesoul

Yes, quite so. I think that these cases are one kind of embedded belief, in that we (but not everyone) think that beliefs are also appropriately attributed to animals that don't have language. For the record, my belief (!) is that beliefs are reasons for doing something, and are essential to the language practice of attributing rationale to certain actions. One art of this is that we find that sometimes people act as if p were true when it isn't. So if a rational agent acts as if that piece of cloth were a cow, I believe that agent believes it is a cow. Another part is that sometimes they act without taking into account some p that is clearly relevant, and it can be the best explanation that they do not believe that p. I think that "know" does the same job, with the addition that p is true. This contributes to the language practice of passing on information. It may all sound a bit wacky, but I find it very satisfying. — Ludwig V

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that thought and belief are efficacious. The explanation sketched out above makes sense. Given that all knowledge that p consists of belief that p, what you say here sounds about right in that regard.

Although...

We may be talking past one another in a specific way. I'm often making ontological arguments, and I'm not sure if you've been aware of that. For example, my argument against convention is ontological. The conflation of propositions and belief is the charge I've made, and subsequently supported throughout this thread. So, while I agree with saying that beliefs are reasons for doing something(Witt sets this out nicely in a manner that you've continued here), I do not think that beliefs are equivalent to reasons for doing something, and you've said much the same thing a few replies ago.

The definition of terms is an interesting case. Kant differentiates between a priori concepts and arbitrary ones, which I take him to mean: technical terms (set aside by Jamal; referred to as “stipulated” by @Banno). He says they are ones (conceptions) that we create, which (unlike the other kinds of concepts) we can define; he says: however we choose, as we created them (which Kant excelled at). — Antony Nickles

I'm sympathetic to Kant(given his time), but much as Banno hinted at earlier, he's far too confused/confusing and - I think anyway - overcomplicated things by unnecessarily multiplying entities. I think that Kant's taxonomy could not perform the task of drawing and maintaining the distinction between that which exists in its entirety prior to our taking note of it(prior to our naming and describing), and that which does not.

Hey Ludwig! So, I've been partaking in an international move. Sorry for the delay! I'm curious if you are still interested in continuing this discussion? I'd love to!

Seems to me that the question presupposes sensations and minds are completely distinct things. I think that that is entirely mistaken.

Is “define your terms!” always or often or ever a legitimate imperative? — Jamal

Seems extremely helpful for readers... to me anyway. I mean, when there are terms that have more than one commonly accepted use, it's certainly helpful for mutual understanding.

Consciousness is meaningful experience.
— creativesoul

Meaning is neither physical nor non physical, internal nor external, etc.
— creativesoul

Consciousness is neither physical nor nonphysical? Are you saying ontology doesn't apply to consciousness? — frank

Not at all. To quite the contrary, I'm saying that attempting to parse meaningful experience into either/or dichotomous language is a fatal flaw when that something consists of and is existentially dependent upon both. Thus, if I'm to be taken as saying anything at all about ontology, I'm saying that the historical and conventional ontological frameworks are fatally flawed in that they are inherently inadequate as a result of being incapable of taking meaningful experience into account.