It seems to me that experiences are always subjectively distinguishable, otherwise they are simply the same experience. For example, the experience of drinking regular water is distinguished from the experience of drinking drugged water subjectively - in one case after I drink it I go like "Ahhh! That's refreshing", in the other I go like "Oh wow, whose that beauty my eyes are seeing?"Yes but all the idealist can acknowledge as 'real' are the experiences of drinking the water (which are, let's say for the sake of argument, subjectively indistinguishable from drinking ordinary water), of becoming high, and of making the inference "There might have been something in the water". — John
Let's say in a meeting room with nobody else around, I dissolve some drug in the water pitcher, not knowing who will be using the room next, just because. You come in for your meeting an hour later and drink the water. You get high and act erratic during the meeting.
Here is the problem. How did the water remain drugged in between my leaving the meeting room and you entering an hour later, if nobody was there to perceive it? All you perceive is some water. Why would it have a drug in it?
For subjective idealism, what connects my perception of adding drug to the water earlier, with your perception of normal water followed by getting high after drinking it, given that there is a gap between perceptions, and I'm not in your meeting to perceive the drugged water?
Realism and objective idealism have a dead simple answer for this. There is a drug persisting in the water in between my experience of adding it, and your experience of drinking it. This sort of explanation doesn't work for subjective idealism. There can't be anything persisting in between experiences (no God, universal mind, or panpsychism to keep it there). — Marchesk
So? No experience is instantaneous, experiences last over time. For example, I put the glass to my lips, feel the cold touch of the water, then drink, feel it go down my throat (don't think anything nasty now John), and then into my stomach, and afterwards, I still feel the coldness of the drink in my throat. The experience doesn't last one second, it's always connected and always exists in time, with no crisp boundary to delimit it.But the action of the drug would not be instantaneous — John
This doesn't make sense. If there is nothing at all by which they can be distinguished, how are they different? If nothing at all is different about the color of one book and the color of the other, than aren't the two colors the same - isn't that, in fact, precisely what we mean by something being the same as something else? We compare them, and upon our comparison find no differences, and hence we say "Aha! They are the same".Also, there is no inconsistency in saying that the experiences of drinking the two different waters would not be the same, and yet that they could be indistinguishable, in other words, that they could be, although not the same, subjectively the same. — John
But the drug in the water is not experienced; or at least it is not known to subjective experience. — John
Yeah sure. But that's still subjective inferences they make based on their connected experience. They inject what they expect to be drugs in their veins, and so they expect the drugged sensation to follow, and it does, so they think that what they injected were indeed drugs.What if the drinker injected what they thought were drugs, but which were not immediately prior to hallucinating. Then they would falsely think the hallucinations had been caused by the injected substance and would not think the water had been drugged at all, irrespective of whether or not they had been able to detect any unusual flavour in the water they had drunk. — John
And what is chemical analysis? It is, say, dropping a few drops of something in the water, and seeing the water turn red, as opposed to staying transparent. The water turning red, we know through our experience, indicates the presence of drugs. It's still reasoning within experience. I don't care if you call this objective or subjective, because as far as I'm concerned, all we ever have is experience, so objective is merely a different species of subjective in my own humble fucking view.The water would have to be subjected to chemical analysis to discover whether there really were drugs present in it. — John
And analyzing it isn't done experientially no? The results aren't experienced? We just gain mysterious access to them in a flash of insight...But you don't "feel funny" as you are drinking it. If you did, then the drugged water would be distinguishable from plain water. but you still could not be sure the water was drugged until you analyzed it. There could be some other explanation for your feeling funny". — John
Okay so? What does this have to do with anything? You're like Samuel Johnson disproving idealism by kicking a mental stone with a mental foot >:OTo be sure testing the water does not actually prove there are drugs in the water. But the more tests ( preferably of different methodology) that you submitted it to, the less reason there would be to doubt that there had been drugs in the water. — John
How did the water remain drugged in between my leaving the meeting room and you entering an hour later, if nobody was there to perceive it? All you perceive is some water. Why would it have a drug in it? — Marchesk
Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected [idealism], whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' — Bryan Magee
If all idealism were saying is that the way we see things is partly conditioned by the nature of our perceptual organs; then who could disagree with that? That's no world-shattering revelation! But it is a very different thing to go further and to say that being is constituted, rather than merely that the experience of being is partly conditioned, by human consciousness. — John
The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating it as the primary substance while reducing the remaining substance to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.). Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism. — "Dan
I think it does say that - but what does 'constituted' imply? Does it mean when you look at an object, that 'mind' or 'human mind' is one of its constituents? — Wayfarer
We think the material world is materially constituted, because we experience it as material. We don't really know what it could mean in any ultimate sense for things to be materially constituted; it is just an idea derived from the materiality of objects — John
So the characteristic view of materialism is that humans, and everything else, are material entities, the consequence of physical laws, their actions transmitted via material mechanisms, and having material consequences. Furthermore, that is a view that many educated people believe in and defend. — Wayfarer
But isn't that precisely what materialism says? Isn't that what the whole 'mind and matter' debate revolves around? — Wayfarer
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