Is this right? I don't know Scholastic philosophy very deeply, but I thought that the concept of intelligibility meant that we can know what is real in the physical world as well. — J
and ask him whether, when we see an apple, we are seeing something that is really there, more or less as presented to our senses, wouldn't he say yes — J
That's a good point. The reduction of mechanism to mathematics itself starts to look more idealist than mechanistic. I would argue that one might consider many forms of ontic structural realism popular among "physicalists" to be a sort of idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
And consciousness? What about the experience of consciousness is "mechanical", colors, sounds, smells, thoughts seem to me to be extremely different from a "machine" in any meaningful way this word may be used — Manuel
We must think of ourselves in terms of the device and not the other way around — JuanZu
The apparatus measures, but not with the intention of measuring. It is characteristic of idealism in quantum physics to introduce mental aspects into the apparatus. But these aspects are nowhere to be found. — JuanZu
To me, that sounds like the ghost in the machine — JuanZu
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp 35-36
For me, if there is no Ghost in the machine the answer no longer lies in how the machine resembles us, but in how we resemble the machine. — JuanZu
To know anything in total one must know everything, which is impossible. This leads to a limited sort of fallibilism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That may be part of the reason we find QM so hard to understand, we don't have the type of intuitions that would help up make sense of the phenomena. — Manuel
And that is the cost — the de-humanisation is the legacy of this division. When you say “the machine provokes a response in us,” you’re still trying to frame the matter purely in terms of physical causation. But signs are not physical things. They are relations, interpretations, meanings — irreducible to mechanism, yet not “ghostly” either. This is precisely the false dichotomy that the ghost of Descartes has saddled us with. The irony is that by trying to exorcise the ghost, we remain haunted by it. The world this ghost inhabits is one in which the entire cosmos is stripped of interiority and meaning, and we ourselves are left as the orphaned offspring of blind physical causes that somehow, against all odds, have given rise to mind. — Wayfarer
Yes, it wasn't very well put. I only meant that, in addition to the possible explanations you named, it's also possible that the universality of mystical intuitions is explained by their actually being what they claim to be, namely experiences of God or some transcendent consciousness. — J
I haven't followed every post between you and Wayfarer today, so I'll just speak for myself. I don't think a statement like "I have had an experience of the Godhead" or "My third eye opened" or "I encountered Jesus and was born again" or any of the countless variants of this should be presumed to be "demonstrably true." Nor are they demonstrably false. It's not clear to me that they can be separated from 3rd-person/objective claims such as "God exists". — J
All I can say is, we're left with possible explanations, possible ways of assigning probability values to the statements under discussion. And we'll rate these probabilities differently, based on our own knowledge and experience -- just as we would for any topic that's tough to know about for sure. I see plenty of daylight between "My account of my mystical experience is demonstrably true" and "Here's what I think probably accounts for my experience." The latter seems unexceptionable to me.
It's not clear to me that they can be separated from 3rd-person/objective claims such as "God exists".
— J
I'm puzzled by your last sentence here. How can "god exists" be an objective claim if there is no possibility of confirming it such that anyone unbiased would have to acquiesce, or even at the very least the possibility of assessing it against our overall experience in terms of plausibility? — Janus
some metaphysical claims are far more consistent and coherent with the human store of knowledge and understanding than others.
Of course it is still up to the individual to make their own assessments. — Janus
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