Is this not an attempt to impose your perspective (perspectivalism) as precisely a truth beyond mere perspective? The impossibility of objectivity as objectivity itself? — sign
Why would you be talking about "grasping" something? — Terrapin Station
You're not understanding me. The objective world is perspectival. — Terrapin Station
We see the unity of the human body broken up in terms of organs that function together. The brain becomes a separate object of attention with a boundary. Do we include the spine or not? Where do we draw the line? Do we include the eyes? We make a decision about what is and is not to count as brain. We pluck it out of its context as an object for inquiry. — sign
You're talking about concept-formation there, right? Again, I'd ask why you're talking about that. I wasn't talking about concepts per se. — Terrapin Station
what it's supposed to be physically as something public. — Terrapin Station
But i wasn't talking about our concepts, perception, knowledge, etc.
It's very annoying to keep changing the topic to epistemology. (And/or philosophy of language, etc.) — Terrapin Station
The question seems to want to reduce meaning-as-public to the physical, missing that 'physical' itself a meaning we are publicly discussing — sign
What kind of wall do you prefer to bang your head against? Brick or concrete? One with sharp extruding bits that draw blood, or more a smooth surface that just causes concussion? — Wayfarer
I'm talking about the material thing, the thing that would still be present (at least for a short period of time) if everyone were to sudddenly drop dead. — Terrapin Station
Sometimes I want to talk about, do philosophy about, etc. the world independent of human concepts, human knowledge, etc. I like ontology. — Terrapin Station
how can we say anything determinate about it all without muddying its pristine independence from language/consciousness? — sign
Re the other comment, on the other hand, being so self-centered is probably not a good thing. The world doesn't actually revolve around you. — Terrapin Station
I don't think there is anything unchanging, — Terrapin Station
I don't think there is anything that isn't physical — Terrapin Station
and I see the "noble," good, etc. as a matter of individual preferences. — Terrapin Station
To me, mind is a form of matter and it is actually due to physicality, being what it is, that we get these mistaken views such as idealism, dualism or soul belief. The experiencer is not substantively evident to the experience due to things being physical such that it is physically impossible for me to turn inward on myself. We are like prisoners of our own physicality and I find it amazing and awesome that we can come to agreements on many matters and indeed disagreements also. Agreements and disagreements we are behooved to make to due to being physical, sensitive creatures living in a physical world. (I was going to use the word material but I didn't want to come off sounding like Madonna! :joke:)We can even postulate that the distinction between 'mind' and 'matter' is necessarily ambiguous, precisely because 'mind' is entangled in 'matter.' --or also note that the distinction is already a metaphysical axiom that obscures how we actually live in or even as meaning-matter. — sign
You can imply that I have misread Berkeley all you want but it still remains that if you buy into Berkeley's immaterialism then you should accept that deity itself is but a perception also and not of any actual substance. If you don't then it's a case of special pleading. Berkeley's immaterialism is preposterous due to this simple inconsistency. And you can replace deity with whatever, because at the end of the day, they too are all just ideas.I think you're in a bit of a tangle here with what Berkeley is really saying. — Wayfarer
My mum likes those inspirational quotes/biblical verses on prints (tea-towels, cushions etc.) I might get her those words printed for a xmas present!There is the well-known and oft-quoted limerick which might have already been posted in this very thread, but it's such a gem it can hardly be repeated too often: — Wayfarer
Maybe that term as such but ancient man did conceive of gods and other fantastical creatures very much part of the natural world with Plato being apart from the norm in contemporary Greek thinking.And what you’re calling ‘objective realism’ is a very recent arrival! — Wayfarer
There is only one context pertinent here; ontology!I would not define a term like that, because it has too many different uses in different contexts. — Metaphysician Undercover
:brow: It was you that brought up these principles. I'm starting to think that you really don't know what's real or not! But in your defense, you're not the only one! :up:I can't say that I have an answer to this question because I do not understand the context. — Metaphysician Undercover
No. It is you that has missing the point. I understand what you are trying to say. What I'm saying is that it is no different than what a materialist says. We are both saying the same thing (kind of). What you call a premise, I call a cause. A premise is a type of cause - a deterministic one - like all causes and their effects. What I call an effect, you call a conclusion. A conclusion is a type of effect - an effect of premises. But then conclusions are causes too. They cause action, or behavior, and so on. The causal relationships "cross" this "boundary" between causal relationships in the mind and the causal relationships that are not part of the mind (what people refer to as the external world). Thinking of them as separate sides is what dualism does. Monism says that they are one and the same. There is no "boundary". It's just an illusion.You have missed the point of the difference between logical entailment and physical determination. Even if you wanted to say they are the same that would be reliant on the assumption that rigid determinism obtains, which is itself not logically necessary and we don't and can't know empirically whether it does or does not obtain , and yet we can and do know what is logically entailed by premises. — Janus
Loops often come to my mind when thinking about reality. Self-awareness is like a camera pointing at it's monitor and creates a visual feedback loop of a "infinite" corridor. Natural selection is basically environmental feedback - the environment shaping itself.That's a good point. It's an interesting project, considering how 'matter' became 'conscious' (or however one wants to frame it.)
We seem to have two origins. We can use language to contemplate the origin of language. Then the origin of language would exist for or within language. A Mobius strip comes to mind. — sign
No I'm not. I'm talking about objective events, objective sounds. — Terrapin Station
Why would we be talking about how people use language? That's not the topic. — Terrapin Station
There is only one context pertinent here; ontology! — Happenstance
I'm starting to think that you really don't know what's real or not! But in your defense, you're not the only one! — Happenstance
Well then I have no idea of what you're talking about because I have no idea of what you mean by "objective sounds". — Metaphysician Undercover
What we've been talking about since we first engaged in this thread is how people use the word "matter", what "matter" commonly refers to. — Metaphysician Undercover
because you seem to have no idea what people refer to with "matter", — Metaphysician Undercover
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
Well we probably can find more agreement than you think, then. I have the sense that you understand me to be saying some more outlandish than is the case. The German idealists were identity theorists (maybe in a different way than you), and I think they were on to something. The problem may largely be about jargon and background. — sign
This thread appears to wander all over the place, — Metaphysician Undercover
Locke builds his case on an ability to abstract ideas from general terms — Jamesk
The ability of the mind to generalise was not, I think, something much considered by Locke, and indeed one of his main weaknesses (as it was also with Berkeley). — Wayfarer
He argued that secondary qualities only exist in the world because of our relationship to the object. Therefore the existence and knowledge of other things is revealed through the sensation of a material that underlies all physical substance. We can figure out that objects exist outside of our mind because we have knowledge of these things independent of the things themselves. In other words, physical substances exist whether we perceive them or not, and therefore it is a physical substance that makes up the object. This is Locke’s main point.' — Wayfarer
It was this that Berkeley attacked. Any attributes of an object, even those so called 'primary', are present to us as 'ideas in the mind'. He says - I think misleadingly - that 'what we know are ideas'. Why that's misleading, is because it's not as if 'ideas' are the objects of perception; rather it's that whatever we know, is present in our mind as 'an idea'. And we never know anything that is not present as an idea, because that is what 'knowing' comprises! — Wayfarer
If I have learned one thing from following this discussion, It is that the "identity theory" Terrapin Station is espousing is decidedly not a child of any German Idealist. First of all, there are no "phenomena" because that term implies a separation between the spectator and the show that the theory is trying to disappear. — Valentinus
As far as I can tell this is the same old grasping of 'internal' and 'external' experiences in the same causal network. Is it any deeper than saying that opiates makes the pain go away?Seeking an alternative to the classic dualist position, according to which mental states possess an ontology distinct from the physiological states with which they are thought to be correlated, Place claimed that sensations and the like might very well be processes in the brain—despite the fact that statements about the former cannot be logically analyzed into statements about the latter. Drawing an analogy with such scientifically verifiable (and obviously contingent) statements as "Lightning is a motion of electric charges," Place cited potential explanatory power as the reason for hypothesizing consciousness-brain state relations in terms of identity rather than mere correlation. This still left the problem of explaining introspective reports in terms of brain processes, since these reports (for example, of a green after-image) typically make reference to entities which do not fit with the physicalist picture (there is nothing green in the brain, for example). To solve this problem, Place called attention to the "phenomenological fallacy"—the mistaken assumption that one's introspective observations report "the actual state of affairs in some mysterious internal environment." All that the Mind-Brain Identity theorist need do to adequately explain a subject's introspective observation, according to Place, is show that the brain process causing the subject to describe his experience in this particular way is the kind of process which normally occurs when there is actually something in the environment corresponding to his description. — https://www.iep.utm.edu/identity/
It is this separation that Locke uses to describe primary and secondary qualities that Berkeley calls abstract ideas. — Jamesk
They are all three legitimate empirical approaches, and all probably wrong but until today we don't really understand how the mind works and we cannot know the full nature of 'ideas'. — Jamesk
According to evolutionary biology, Homo Sapiens is the result of billions years of evolution. For all these thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate - in such a way as to give rise to the mind that we have today.
Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a hierarchical matrix of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic nervous system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘discursive reason’ (and perhaps beyond, although this is beyond the scope of current science.)
Consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in fact totally dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.
When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the light-waves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).
And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely below the threshold of conscious perception.
In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them (i.e. Locke's tabula rasa). Rather, consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on, not to mention the activities of reason, which allows us to categorise, classify and analyse the elements of experience.
As far as I can tell this is the same old grasping of 'internal' and 'external' experiences in the same causal network. Is it any deeper than saying that opiates makes the pain go away? — sign
It is deep... If the relationship between epistemology and ontology is problematic in the thesis, maybe it is troublesome outside of it. — Valentinus
And again, because they saw that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could truly be affirmed. It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Heracliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once. — Valentinus
In regards to the Heidegger approach to contending points of view on the matter of experience, I prefer Sartre who noted that not all of our experiences of awareness require the "Ego." That view is less entangled with what we mean by meaning and how objects are what they are in relation to being an object. — Valentinus
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