I like Sellars and Popper for trying to figure out how to talk about the world without having to talk about anything mystical or hidden like sensation or experience. These concepts are fine for everyday use, but they've led philosophers to strange, questionable positions. — Pie
When you think about it, ideas and sensations are the most familiar thing to us. — Olivier5
Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space. In particular, some forms of phenomenalism reduce all talk about physical objects in the external world to talk about bundles of sense data.
This ghost knows what it means to say, even if the words are hard to find, because meaning, like sensation, is pure , immaterial, ghost stuff. The 'ghost' or 'soul' is 'behind' or hidden in the body in some strange way, perhaps in the pineal gland...just as meaningstuff is 'behind' or hidden in the words that carry it. — Pie
Doubting the real world is just escapism. It's like dreaming that your parents adopted you, and your real parents are in fact Tigger and Winnie the Poo. — Olivier5
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. — Bacon
It is the ripping off of this natural view that is truly alien to us and thus strange: an unanimated, dead world, without any meaning, where beds don't have any intention whatsoever, is not our natural way of thinking of it. — Olivier5
So, it seems material objects are actually theoretical constructs, i.e., ideas we experience based on our sensory input. (Some philosophers go further and claim this disproves materialism. I don’t agree. But it does reveal the epistemological basis of materialism, i.e., materialism is an ontological construct not an evident, directly experienced reality.) — Art48
How can we put norms and electrons in the same causal nexus, convincingly ? Heal the rift? Just as the German Romantics like Hegel wanted to do... — Pie
Dawkins, Dennett, and Darwin — Pie
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