I just assumed that everybody in the discussion would agree that necessary truths are exempt from global skepticism. Although, one could argue that this isn't so, I wouldn't.Then you contradicted yourself. You said doubt is like jello, there is always room for it... but apparently not for cogito ergo sum according to you. — intrapersona
Uh.... what?Is it not possible to arrive at that conclusion without reason alone? — intrapersona
Not only religions but physics as well. Such as the hypothesised 11-dimensions of string theory/m-theory etc. — intrapersona
OK, but the 'greater reality' I had in mind would be a greater dimension of possible experience. And I don't think String theory qualifies; it is nothing more than a mathematical theory. Really the same goes for QM and Relativity. We cannot directly experience, or even visualize, the warping of three-dimensional space-time, for example. — John
I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, we don't experience space-time as being curved; we experience the 'weight' of gravity, and the curvature of space-time is just an explanation for our experience of that 'weight' (amongst other things). — John
Likewise we don't experience the world as Quantum mechanics tells us it 'really is'. — John
Secondly, the advents of those theories have not, in themselves, (as opposed to technological advances that may be associated with them) expanded our realm of experience. — John
I don't see that there's a necessary connection between Sellar's distinction and representational realism. Husserl pointed to the same phenomenon, that science cannot explain human life as it is lived, in the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
To me it seems to be simply an undeniable phenomenological fact that we cannot understand our own behavior in terms of causes, but instead we understand it in terms of reasons; a fact which is attached to no particular metaphysics but is despite all of them. The response: "because of neuronal activity in my brain" is never going to be a satisfying, or even really an intelligible, answer to the question "why did you go to the shop?". — John
I think we do experience a force that acts on our bodies that we call 'gravity'. This is so whatever we might think, or come to think, the explanatory mechanism of gravity is. The Greeks of antiquity, the Aboriginals of Australia and the ancient Chaldeans all felt it just as surely as we do. Of course they would not have called it 'gravity'; they would have had other names for that bodily feeling of being acted upon by some force or power. — John
Would you similarly say that you experience a force that pushes you back in your seat when you are in a car that suddenly accelerates?
It seems to me that we can feel like we are being pushed back in our seats (or are being pulled towards the ground) without also supposing that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies. — Andrew M
Uh.... what? — Mongrel
I can't really see what DMT has to do with this discussion. What is experienced, according to my own experience at least, under the influence of DMT is strange, for sure, but not incomprehensible. If an experience were really incomprehensible to you, then it would be as nothing, and you could not remember anything about it at all; it would not even count as an experience that is. — John
OK, but the 'greater reality' I had in mind would be a greater dimension of possible experience. And I don't think String theory qualifies; it is nothing more than a mathematical theory. Really the same goes for QM and Relativity. We cannot directly experience, or even visualize, the warping of three-dimensional space-time, for example. — John
using terms of reference that derive their whole sense from a context that assumes a reality, in a claim that purports to be skeptical about that whole reality (global skepticism), is to be inconsistent. — John
That is just a cheap way to say "I think you are right, but I am too prideful to concede" — intrapersona
I actually do agree with what you write in your first paragraph; I think Sellars is ultimately aiming at the primacy of science. And I do agree that science is an extension of lived experience; it's just that when it leads to the objectification of the human (which it inevitably seems to) it has separated itself (and us, if we follow it) from lived experience. You may not agree, but for me the most important part of lived experience consists in spiritual experience; and science endangers that dimension of human life by excoriating it as 'mere superstition' and exiling it from its conception (and by extension any 'respectable' conception) of human life. — John
You've raised a tricky point. Are the push-back of acceleration and the push-down of gravity experienced, or merely conceived, as external forces? You say we need not suppose "that we are experiencing an actual force that acts on our bodies". On immediate impulse I want to say 'actual' in this context just means 'acting upon', so the phenomenological question becomes 'do we feel acted upon?'. I would say we do insofar as we experience something that is not volitional; the pushing is not experienced as something we are doing, but something which is done to us by 'something else'. — John
I think those are really philosophical issues rather than statements about science itself. In its most basic form, science is methodological naturalism, which can be effectively practiced regardless of the philosophical views that the scientist (or the consumer of science) brings to it.
So, in that sense, there is no undermining of lived experience from science, but there may well be from philosophy. — Andrew M
Yes, so the question then is what is the 'something else'? In the case of the car's acceleration, it isn't an invisible force that is pushing us back into the seat, it is the seat (attached to the car) that is pushing us from behind. Similarly our experience of gravity isn't as an invisible force pushing us down (per Newton), it is the ground that is pushing us from below (due to space-time curvature caused by the earth's mass). — Andrew M
The way the physical world (including our bodies) behaves, as science has described in great detail, is as a fully integrated cohesive material realm, which unswervingly adheres to the processes described by science as spacetime, gravity, mass, spin, motion etc. — Punshhh
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