But I then say that the concept of an experience is inherently a relational one: someone has an experience of something. An experience being had by nobody is an experience not being had at all, and an experience being had of nothing is again an experience not being had at all. This indubitable experience thus immediately gives justification to the notion of both a self, which is whoever the someone having the experience is, and also a world, which is whatever the something being experienced is. — Pfhorrest
My general position on the nature of reality is empirical realism. — Pfhorrest
But if these are distinct categories, then would not the concept of "reality" by definition (and usage) have to be expanded to encompass both? Maybe it is an "inflationary" reality(-concept). ie. the representation has a reality also.representation of a reality that might be nothing like its representation — Pfhorrest
This empirical realism might well also be called physicalist phenomenalism, in that it holds that only physical phenomena exist — Pfhorrest
In the very act of setting out this fabulous journey you use, and hence must admit, the language in which it is embedded. Here's a certainty that escapes mere experience. — Banno
How is language something beyond experience — Pfhorrest
It's almost a kind of idealism, except that reality isn't "in" any mind(s), it's just made up of "mind-like stuff"; the actual (e.g. human) minds experiencing it being presumably just the activity of brains, those brains being made up of matter, which is made up of this "mind-like stuff", these "occasions of experience" as Whitehead called them. — Pfhorrest
Those light-like fundamental particles, that I think are identifiable with the interactions or "occasions of experience" that constitute the web of reality as described here in my ontology, thus make up, in a sense, the electrons and quarks that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up all of the matter that makes up the entire world, including people like you and me. — Pfhorrest
The antidote is the realisation that not just certainty, but also doubt, requires justification. — Banno
How can mind-like stuff be just the activity of brains — Banno
Are they particles, and hence Pfhorrest is a realist, or are they "occasions of experience", and hence Pfhorrest is an idealist? — Banno
a vicious little circle if ever there was one — Banno
Empiricism is necessitated by the same principle that necessitates rationalism more generally: every answer must be questionable, which means not taking anything on faith, which means not entertaining claims about anything that can't be tested. — Pfhorrest
You callin' me names?You seem to be arguing here for a critical rationalism... — Pfhorrest
Think of Quine's holism — Banno
It's fine to question anything, but absurd to question everything. — Banno
You callin' me names? — Banno
I don't see that disembodying ideas by calling them "information" relieves you of the charge of idealism. — Banno
But I also hold that the content of that reality is entirely empirical in nature, that there is nothing real that is in principle beyond all observation, that if something exists, there will be some noticeable difference in the reality that we experience compared to what we would experience if it did not exist, and the whole of that thing's existence is the observable differences in reality it makes. — Pfhorrest
The most peculiar part is the sense in which no time passes for, and no space is traversed by, light: a feature of SR that has always amazed and alarmed me. — Kenosha Kid
So you can leave out the bit that deduces stuff from a basis of certainty, and proceed instead from the common sense of the stuff around us. — Banno
It's fine to question anything, but absurd to question everything.
There are things in which we needs must be confident in order to participate in doubt. — Banno
Good reason to be skeptical. — Metaphysician Undercover
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