Yeah, but how did we get to the point of "understanding too much" in the first place if we didn't already start from a deconstructed state and then built it all up? — Harry Hindu
The presence of culture and other human beings dominated our development and has a huge impact in developing our established norms - like there are human beings and I'm one of them. — Harry Hindu
The very notion of the real seems to involve what is true for us and not just me. — sign
The mystery is why that would be the assumption. We could go through how communication works on my view step by step if you're interested, but that will probably take some time and it's a significant enough tangent that we should probably start another thread on it if you're interested. — Terrapin Station
There's a traditional sense (a la scholasticism for example) of "real" that's basically the same as "objective ," but that's a bad idea, because it discounts an d basically dismisses personal, psychological phenomena. — Terrapin Station
Those vibrations are intelligible. — sign
Roughly speaking, an image of what we might and should do is somehow repeated in the mind of the listener — sign
I suspect that your theory of communication will eventually have to get around to addressing something like public meaning or inter-subjectivity, even if it eschews those terms — sign
That question particular strikes me as bizarre. Objectivity in no way hinges on us. The objective world would be there just the same if life had never started. — Terrapin Station
Objectivity is a philosophical concept of being true independently from individual subjectivity caused by perception, emotions, or imagination. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject. Scientific objectivity refers to the ability to judge without partiality or external influence, sometimes used synonymously with neutrality. — Wiki
but it is a metaphysical position. — sign
The essence of objectivity seems to be true-for-us-and-not-just-me. The notion of the physical seems to fit this ideal perfectly. But I don't think the physical exhausts the objective. As Husserl might add, we should consider in what way logic and math exist objectively. Arguably, reducing the objective to the physical simply ignores part of experience and offers therefore an only partial account of the situation. — sign
You're going to keep asserting "shared" meaning and I'll keep pointing out that it's not actually shared, and then you'll respond where you talk about shared meaning again, and then I'll point out that it's not actually shared again, etc. — Terrapin Station
I take that you are saying that matter is not mind, — sign
But the very concept of the 'subject alone with meaning' is itself a product of these publicly used signs in some sense. — sign
I don't agree with any sentence there, — Terrapin Station
No, I'm not saying that at all. Some matter is obviously mind on my view. I'm a physicalist, an identity theorist. — Terrapin Station
All concepts are the result of individual thought. — Terrapin Station
So you don't find it true for us but only for me? Or you don't find it true for you? I — sign
The more important thing here is that "'true' for everyone" overlooks perspectivalism, the fact that no two perspectives or reference frames/reference points are going to be the same, a fortiori because they necessarily have different spatial orientations. — Terrapin Station
One problem with this is that there isn't anything that's not a particular. That's not to say that there are not abstract or general concepts (types, universals, whatever we want to call them), but concepts are particular events (or series/"sets" of events) in our particular brains. When you take a universal term to refer to a "real abstract," all that it's really referring to is a very vague, particular idea of a "real abstract," in your particular head, at a particular time. — Terrapin Station
Outside of that, as has been pointed out to you many times- -and not just by me--"tree" refers to a universal just as much as "matter" does. Neither is a "proper name.". So it's not as if you have a doctrine that one only senses things picked out by non-universal terms. — Terrapin Station
But I'd add that this individual only actually exists in a particular community, having been raised in a form of life and at least one language. So the individual is largely constituted by his community. To rip out an isolated subject is like ripping a wolf out of its environment, the things it eats, etc. A wolf only makes sense in its total context and a subject only makes sense as part of a community. Brains have evolved to interact with other brains through language. This is arguably what is most human about the human. — sign
The single brain can of course be contemplated, but this is an abstraction — sign
Yes, I agree that no two perspectives are going to be the same. I'd say that true-for-everyone is a kind of ideal that we strive toward, an ideal that requires abstraction from individual perspectives to something like what they all have in common or usefully overlap. — sign
If each of these ideas "the song Kashmir", and "music", are particulars, — Metaphysician Undercover
We do not use "matter" in this way, it never refers to a particular — Metaphysician Undercover
Objectivity in no way hinges on us. The objective world would be there just the same if life had never started. — Terrapin Station
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.
When I talk about sensing or experiencing "Kashmir" and music, I'm not talking about ideas. — Terrapin Station
always refer to particulars by "matter." — Terrapin Station
Right, but when you say "the song Kashmir is music", you are talking about ideas. — Metaphysician Undercover
I didn't say "particulars", I said "a particular". No one uses "matter" to refer to a particular object, not even you. If someone did, no one would know which particular object was being referred to, — Metaphysician Undercover
Worth watching this interview: — Wayfarer
An abstraction? Why would you say it's an abstraction? — Terrapin Station
The ideal (in my view) would be to get people to realize/acknowledge perspectivalism. — Terrapin Station
The single brain, grasped as a distinct object, — sign
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