I think the question presupposes not so much that there is some way, but that the question can be meaningfully asked, and is important. — J

Presupposing that the question can be meaningfully asked is not the same as knowing how to answer it. Perhaps you are thinking that we can work out what will count as an answer and go on from there. It may be possible, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that it cannot be answered because nothing would count as an answer. On the other hand we can answer lots of questions about the world and, for me, these count as telling us how the world really is. What is puzzling is why you think those answers do not count.

If my point of view is such that aliens have secretly replaced my family, that is not how the world really is. — J

That's not quite what I mean by a point of view. It is a conclusion which you have no doubt reached from some point of view. Most likely, you have adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that is a point of view. The issue then comes down to your principles of interpretation and how you are applying them. Certainly, it is not likely that a direct challenge to your conclusion will be particularly persuasive. Changing the subject might help.

For Sider, what's fundamental is structure, grounding. — J

Structure and grounding are not the same thing. There such things as self-supporting structures that do not require grounding or even require not to be grounded. Planets, for example, and space-ships.

we're supposed to conclude that the only reason the latter truth is more important than the former is because it reflects our interests and our way of life. — J

I'm open to ideas. Actually, in this case, I would suggest that it is important that "The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees" is embedded in a complex web of beliefs, whereas "grue" and "bleen" don't seem to be embedded in anything.

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration. — Janus

I can buy that.

Presupposing that the question can be meaningfully asked is not the same as knowing how to answer it. Perhaps you are thinking that we can work out what will count as an answer and go on from there. It may be possible, but it doesn't exclude the possibility that it cannot be answered because nothing would count as an answer. On the other hand we can answer lots of questions about the world and, for me, these count as telling us how the world really is. What is puzzling is why you think those answers do not count. — Ludwig V

I don't think we're that far apart on this question. There may, as you say, be no answer at all to the question, which, just to jog our memories, was:

The problem, I think, comes when we ask which of these points of view (if any) reflect how the world really is. — J

The "if any" was meant to acknowledge your point: No answers may be forthcoming, and that could be for (at least) two reasons: We can't find the answer, or the question is badly put because it implies that "how the world really is" is meaningful when in fact it isn't. I'm not sure I know how we would "work out what will count as an answer," exactly, though I rather like putting it that way because it's a reminder that there's probably no way to simply discover the answer.

As for the kinds of answers we do have about the world, I certainly think they count, but it's not obvious what they count for. If we decide that "how the world is" is a matter of semantics, and we ought to just go ahead and allow that our current best objective knowledge is about how the world really is, then that knowledge counts for a lot, maybe everything. But I'm arguing that it's an open question whether we need to do that.

That's not quite what I mean by a point of view. — Ludwig V

I know, but I deliberately chose an outrageous example so I can illustrate the idea that "point of view" is uncomfortably ambiguous, though it gets invoked constantly in these discussions. As you say, my deluded self has "most likely . . . adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that it is a point of view." But is a point of view merely a perspective, any perspective? How is what I do when I take a deluded point of view different from what any non-insane, objective, scientifically respectable point of view does? I think it's a lot different, myself, but why? What makes objectivity different from "just what I think"? Surely it has something to do with the way the world is . . . and maybe we should just leave out the "really" part.

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration.
— Janus
I can buy that. — Ludwig V

Me too. As Nagel says, how the world appears to us is part of what is real.

Structure and grounding are not the same thing. — Ludwig V

Sorry, forgot to respond to this. Sider doesn't mean grounding in any physical sense. Rather, it's a question of what must be metaphysically fundamental -- what concepts give rise to, or secure, other concepts. Jonathan Schaffer's excellent essay, "On What Grounds What," gives a clear picture of these issues, influenced by both Sider and Aristotle.

The "if any" was meant to acknowledge your point: No answers may be forthcoming, and that could be for (at least) two reasons: We can't find the answer, or the question is badly put because it implies that "how the world really is" is meaningful when in fact it isn't. I'm not sure I know how we would "work out what will count as an answer," exactly, though I rather like putting it that way because it's a reminder that there's probably no way to simply discover the answer. — J

Yes. Questions need to be nested in a considerable web of beliefs. There's quite a lot of different things that can go wrong. The fact that there's so much debate suggests that something is wrong here. "Real" is being used outside or beyond the structure that it usually carries with it.
But sometimes there does seem to be a meaning to it. For example, there is a real puzzle about how to make sense of the physics of colours and sounds in relation to our experience of them - and why not add pain, for that matter. It is, to me, unbearably paradoxical to assert that there are no colours and sounds in the world, and yet colours etc. are not objects in the world. The facts suggest to me that those sensations are produced by the interaction of our sense organs with the world. But then, how to make sense of the fact that we see colours and hear sounds at spatial locations - not in our heads or eyes.

I know, but I deliberately chose an outrageous example so I can illustrate the idea that "point of view" is uncomfortably ambiguous, though it gets invoked constantly in these discussions. As you say, my deluded self has "most likely . . . adopted a way of interpreting the information that you have, so let's allow that it is a point of view." But is a point of view merely a perspective, any perspective? How is what I do when I take a deluded point of view different from what any non-insane, objective, scientifically respectable point of view does? I think it's a lot different, myself, but why? What makes objectivity different from "just what I think"? — J

"Point of view", "perspective", "interpretation", "presupposition" are all involved here. It wouldn't be hard to work out distinct senses for them in this context, and it would help to prevent people over-simplifying things. But I'm just as lazy as the rest of humankind.

Sider doesn't mean grounding in any physical sense. Rather, it's a question of what must be metaphysically fundamental -- what concepts give rise to, or secure, other concepts. Jonathan Schaffer's excellent essay, "On What Grounds What," gives a clear picture of these issues, influenced by both Sider and Aristotle. — J

I didn't think he did. On the other hand, metaphors affect our thinking, so it is worth paying attention to them. However, I don't think that "metaphysically fundamental" helps much. I'm trying to suggest we should pay attention to different kinds of case. Russell's project, for example, was (if I remember right) about the foundations of mathematics. That's completely different from the Wittgensteinian idea that the foundation of mathematics is our practices of counting and measuring things.
Thanks for the reference. I'll certainly look at it.

To conclude: metaphysics as I understand it is about what grounds what. It is about the structure of the world. It is about what is fundamental, and what derives from it.

I have a weakness for reading last paragraphs first. So here we go - three different metaphors in two lines - and still the assumption that any one of them applies universally. ?

So for me it is meaningless to say that our experience gives us no true picture of the real. It doesn't give us a complete picture, but that is a different consideration.
— Janus
I can buy that.
— Ludwig V

Me too. As Nagel says, how the world appears to us is part of what is real. — J

I think that's an important point. We can say that what is beyond the possibility of experience, whether in principle or merely in practical actuality cannot be real for us except in imagination, and hence transcendental idealism follows. But that argument seems to me to be a kind of "cooking of the books" and for the sake of honest intellectual bookkeeping we should admit that we do think that whatever is beyond our possible experience is real in itself, with the other category being whatever is amenable to experience, which is thought of as being real for us.

I think that is a very common way of thinking―people think of God like that. We cannot prove or know whether God exists, but if he exists he must be real and if he doesn't exist then he is imaginary. So we would then have empirical realism and transcendental realism, two different categories of the real, the nature of the latter of which we are terminally ignorant about iff we don't allow that what is real for us tells us nothing about what is real in itself. That question is the one which cannot, even in principle, be definitively answered―if we hold a view about it we take a leap of faith.

The question then becomes as to whether there can be any worthwhile point arguing about which faith is true.

“Objectivist ontology became king as scientists grew accustomed to assuming that the creations of their mathematical physics could be treated as timeless laws held in the “mind of God” and viewable from a perfectly objective, perfectly perspectiveless perspective—a “view from nowhere.” Thus, when quantum mechanics appeared from the same experimental workshop that had created the triumph of classical physics, many scientists believed their job was to defend the ontological heights and equate reality with the abstract formalism." So, no, I don't believe their interpretation is at odds with Nagel's, in fact Nagel is cited repeatedly in the text. I think they're converging on a similar point.
— Wayfarer

Here my question is about your "they" (though I may just be misreading you). Do you mean Frank and Gleiser, or the scientists referred to in the quote? I think you mean F&G, in which case I'd ask you to expand on this. — J

Let's focus on what the basic argument is about. What I'm saying is that the authors ('they' - Adam Frank, Marcello Gleiser, Evan Thompson), cite and endorse Nagel's The View from Nowhere:

Our purpose in this book is to expose the Blind Spot and offer some direction that might serve as alternatives to its incomplete and limited vision of science. Scientific knowledge isn’t a window onto a disembodied, God’s-eye perspective. It doesn’t grant us access to a perfectly knowable, timeless objective reality, a “view from nowhere,” in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s well-known phrase.

That passage you quoted above from Thomas Nagel's 'View from Nowhere' is from his chapter on Mind, and the difficulty of framing an objective view of consciousness, given its first-person nature. But it doesn't really conflict with anything in the essay or the associated book. They're approaching the same kinds of questions from separate angles, but I don't see any inherent conflict.

(Frank) says things like “Science has no answer to this question” and “Science is silent on this question” as if we should then conclude than ignorance and silence are the end of the story. — J

In the essay, the context is as follows:

consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question.

Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.

This is not 'science has reached a dead end', or that 'silence is the end of the story'. The point is polemical: to illustrate how these fundamental elements of experience are outside the scope of science. It is in keeping with the whole thrust of the work: that science is grounded in objective analysis, that is, analysis of those things, states, processes that can be made objects of analysis. The argument is that this involves the process of abstraction - the bracketing out or exclusion of factors that are not part of the specific process that science wishes to study. This process of abstraction then becomes internalised as part of the 'scientific worldview' - and voila! No subject! No experience! All that remains are the equations and abstractions that describe - very effectively! - how stuff happens.

This is very much the same territory as that explored by Husserl in the Crisis of the European Sciences.



I don't think Husserl's grand aims for phenomenology as a universal science really took off, but it made a mark, and this book is in that lineage.