Alternatively, experiences are part of what mind is. Thus homunculus-free deflation, "what appears" is sometimes one end of worldly interaction, yours. Less excess of mental furniture at least. — jorndoe
Who says science is all-knowing even in principle? — Janus
It is not science's business to try to reproduce your sense of consciousness and feeling, but rather to attempt to explain how such phenomena could arise in physical systems. It hasn't been exhaustively explained yet, but that fact doesn't preclude the possibility that it could be. — Janus
It is not science's business to try to reproduce your sense of consciousness and feeling, but rather to attempt to explain how such phenomena could arise in physical systems. It hasn't been exhaustively explained yet, but that fact doesn't preclude the possibility that it could be. — Janus
It [i.e. nature of consciousness] hasn't been exhaustively explained yet, but that fact doesn't preclude the possibility that it could be. — Janus
The idea that science has not yet fully explained consciousness is far from justification that science cannot explain it. (Indeed, I'd say the ability to make progress puts the odds well in favour of, if not complete explanation, sufficient explanation.) I was essentially parodying metaphysical discussions in which precisely that fallacy is evident. I think you may have taken me to endorse viewpoints I was in fact deriding. My fault, of course: insufficient winkyfaces. — Kenosha Kid
Are you converging on the old mind conundrum (Levine, Chalmers), or maybe you just like your ever-present homunculi? :) — jorndoe
Isn't self-awareness given (to some), or am I misunderstanding your comment? — jorndoe
But in ordinary and scientific usage (which assumes neither Platonism nor Nominalism), the natural world is separate and prior to our ideas about it. — Andrew M
'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'
Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.
The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.
This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.
Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Wayfarer
How would we ever know that something has been exhaustively explained? On the other hand, something could be exhaustively explained if there was, irrespective of the impossibility of our knowing it, no further true explanation possible. — Janus
You keep saying, it's obvious science can't explain or encompass the first-person nature of experience, — Wayfarer
[...]explaining the phenomenon of first person experience from a physically causal perspective[...] — Janus
It's important to understand what Schopenhauer means by his 'vorstellung' (usually represented as 'representation'.) He's not saying, like Locke was saying, that ideas represent objects. Nothing like that. It's closer to saying that the whole cognitive act, our whole act of knowing, and what we take as the external world, is really a creation of the mind - and that this is what constitutes knowledge (see the first paragraph).
But that *doesn't* say that 'the world is all in your mind'. That perspective comes from thinking you can stand outside of this whole process. But you can't stand outside it, as we are that process of knowing. I know it's a very contentious claim and a difficult argument. — Wayfarer
So, I am pointing out a distinction which you seem to be missing: that between explaining the phenomenon of first person experience from a physically causal perspective and explaining it from the first person perspective itself. The latter is not the business of science at all, so it is a category error to criticise science for not being able to do something outside its purview; much as it would be to criticise poetry for not being able to explain quantum physics or geology. Apropos of this distinction see Sellar's ideas of "the space of causes" and " the space of reasons". — Janus
The realist argument is that we perceive and understand the world as human beings. There is no view from nowhere. — Andrew M
The realist argument is that we perceive and understand the world as human beings. There is no view from nowhere. — Andrew M
Thomas Nagel’s primary aim in his book The View from Nowhere is to explore the various philosophical puzzles that arise from the tension between the subjective and objective standpoint. The subjective standpoint is the personal perspective of an individual person; it is her view of the world “from the inside,” the world as she sees it; it is her own private window on the world, so to speak. The objective standpoint is the impersonal perspective a person adopts when she conceives of the world “from the outside,” not as it appears to her but as it really is. From the subjective standpoint, a person is at the center of her world; from the objective standpoint, she is simply one of many people who all see the world as she does. Thus, Nagel also characterizes the objective standpoint as “centerless”; someone who looks at the world objectively strives to take in “the view from nowhere.”
Nagel is convinced that the tension between the subjective and the objective standpoints surfaces in many of the enduring questions of philosophy.
So if the scientisitc approach asserts that science has the capacity to, or will have the capacity to, do something which "is not the business of science at all", (i.e. understand the first person perspective), by claiming that it could fully understand consciousness, then this is a mistaken assertion. — Metaphysician Undercover
You can’t completely remove bias from the brain. “You can’t change the fact that we’ve all grown up in different worlds,” Balcetis said. But you can encourage people to listen to other perspectives and be curious about the veracity of their own.
...Just as we can look at an image and see things that aren’t really there, we can look out into the world with skewed perceptions of reality. Political scientists and psychologists have long documented how political partisans perceive the facts of current events differently depending on their political beliefs. The illusions and political thinking don’t involve the same brain processes, but they follow the similar overarching way the brain works.
...Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty. This happens with vision. But it also happens with more complicated processes, like thinking about politics, the pandemic, or the reality of climate change.
Doesn't "fully explain consciousness" imply both? So if the scientisitc approach asserts that science has the capacity to, or will have the capacity to, do something which "is not the business of science at all", (i.e. understand the first person perspective), by claiming that it could fully understand consciousness, then this is a mistaken assertion. — Metaphysician Undercover
How is the very nature of causation a topic that is in the purview of the empirical sciences—rather than in that of the philosophical branch termed metaphysics?
To me this is a Hume 101 question. Succinctly explained, a cause is not a percept—and so cannot be empirical (as empiricism is understood in modernity). — javra
Way too many folks on (& off) this forum don't grok this, and I don't understand why.It is inapt to ask for proof of scientific theories; proof is appropriate in logic and mathematics, not, for the most part, in science. What Hume showed is that causation is not logically necessary. — Janus
Apropos of Schopenhauer etc, there's a current media article “Reality” is constructed by your brain. — Wayfarer
Way too many folks on (& off) this forum don't grok this, and I don't understand why. — 180 Proof
The first part is mainly about optical illusions, but towards the end it gets into philosophically significant territory in talking about how people's inclinations and prior experience influence what they see. — Wayfarer
No, I would say that if a coherent and plausible physical theory of consciousness, which delivers predictions which can be confirmed by experiment and observation, then neuroscience would have done all you could expect it to do. — Janus
The capacity to predict does not constitute a full understanding. The ancient Greek, Thales, predicted a solar eclipse without fully understanding the orbits of the solar system. — Metaphysician Undercover
In any case in the sciences and technologies causation is assumed in most of our explanations and doings, and working from that assumption complex and highly predictively successful systems of explanation, which are also (mostly) coherent with each other have been developed. What more would you ask of science?
It is inapt to ask for proof of scientific theories; proof is appropriate in logic and mathematics, not, for the most part, in science. What Hume showed is that causation is not logically necessary. — Janus
The realist argument is that we perceive and understand the world as human beings. There is no view from nowhere.
— Andrew M
Given the attempted granularity of the discussion, I'd call this facile. It implies, for example, that all the means and methods for understanding natural science are founded/grounded in the being of human beings. Hmm. I guess when the aliens finally come to rescue us from our follies that we'll have nothing in common with them - yes?
Edit: Even jackasses like beer. — tim wood
If there is a ‘platonic world’ M of mathematical facts, what does M contain precisely? I observe that if M is too large, it is uninteresting, because the value is in the selection, not in the totality; if it is smaller and interesting, it is not independent of us. Both alternatives challenge mathematical platonism. I suggest that the universality of our mathematics may be a prejudice hiding its contingency, and illustrate contingent aspects of classical geometry, arithmetic and linear algebra. — Michelangelo's Stone: an Argument against Platonism in Mathematics - Carlo Rovelli
The realist argument is that we perceive and understand the world as human beings. There is no view from nowhere.
— Andrew M
"
Thomas Nagel’s primary aim in his book The View from Nowhere is to explore the various philosophical puzzles that arise from the tension between the subjective and objective standpoint. The subjective standpoint is the personal perspective of an individual person; it is her view of the world “from the inside,” the world as she sees it; it is her own private window on the world, so to speak. The objective standpoint is the impersonal perspective a person adopts when she conceives of the world “from the outside,” not as it appears to her but as it really is. From the subjective standpoint, a person is at the center of her world; from the objective standpoint, she is simply one of many people who all see the world as she does. Thus, Nagel also characterizes the objective standpoint as “centerless”; someone who looks at the world objectively strives to take in “the view from nowhere.”
Nagel is convinced that the tension between the subjective and the objective standpoints surfaces in many of the enduring questions of philosophy.
"
I agree with him. That's what I was referrring to. Many of the arguments in this and other threads are based on the conviction that science delivers just such a view. — Wayfarer
What would a "full understanding" look like; how would we know whether the understanding we have is a "full understanding"? — Janus
My point was not that we wouldn't share commonalities with other beings. My point is that how the world is perceived and understood depends not just on the characteristics of the thing being perceived but also on the characteristics of the perceiver. — Andrew M
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