If I understood that comment, I’d probably criticize it. — Wayfarer
The 2021 Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy — Wayfarer
They may have stopped threatening Galileians with torture, but they continue appointing Cartesians to the Royal Court! — counterpunch
:fire: :clap: Eppur si muove ...The blind-spot is not a consequence of objectivism and physicalism, but rather - of an assertion that subjectivism has absolute primacy; such that humans believe they can use science as a tool while ignoring the picture of reality science paints, dot by tiny factual dot.
It begins withGalileo - who formulated scientific method in order to prove the earth orbits the sun, and was threatened with torture and forced to recant, was found grievously suspect of heresy and held under house arrest for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, his contemporary, Descartes - using an argument that can only be described as sophistry, asserted the primacy of the subject - in a manner consistent with emphasising the spiritual and reviling the profane, and he was appointed to the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden. — counterpunch
Right! That helps a lot. I noticed your impassioned response against my purported ‘subjectivism’ in one of our recent exchanges. But I stand by it. Michel Bitbol’s observation about ‘the blind spot’ is both physiologically and analogically accurate. Physiologically, because there really is a blind spot, where the optic nerve joins the eye, which you never notice until it’s pointed out by way of the blind spot test. — Wayfarer
The reason it’s analogically accurate is not nearly so simple to explain, but equally true. First, let me observe that Galileo’s treatment by the Catholic Church had nothing to do what what is discussed in that essay by Bitbol. Yet, it’s the first thing you mention. Why is that? What is the connection? — Wayfarer
What is at issue is not that ‘subjectivism has absolute primacy’ at all. Rather, it’s the belief that science is ‘the umpire of reality’, that science alone can tell us what is real, what is worth paying attention to. That is so ingrained in our culture that it, like the blind spot, can’t even be discerned, unless you know how to look for it. — Wayfarer
The ancient Greeks, Chinese and Indians recognized that subjectivity or the mental was something substantial that needed to be dealt with. — Marchesk
configuration of the brain — counterpunch
A configuration isn't physical. Imagine 3 balls, one red, one green and the other blue. A configuration would be some kind of permutation/combination of these balls but there's no net energy, mass, volume difference between these configurations. — TheMadFool
Right, but what you're asking me to do, is imagine three balls - and then take them away, and suppose there's some substance of configuration still there. — counterpunch
The scientific method doesn't include subjectivity into its theories, even though that's how we all experience the world. Whatever consciousness is and however it fits in with the world science describes, that fact can't be wished away by blaming Descartes. — Marchesk
Right, but the configuration doesn't exist of itself; it exists as a configuration of three balls, a pen drive, a brain. What's at issue here, ultimately, is this:
"Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience."
If that's the case - how do we know we're not just brains in jars, being fed sensory data we mistake for reality? How do we know we're not in the Matrix? If we assume we are not in the Matrix, we have to assume the primacy of the objective, if only on the basis of the chronology of the question. Consciousness evolved from inanimate matter. If consciousness is subjective - where did it come from? The spirit realm? — counterpunch
No thanks, I had cereal! — counterpunch
Analogically too, there is a blind-spot, but the essay is completely wrong about its nature and cause. — counterpunch
But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, — counterpunch
Philosophers, according to a source I chanced upon, is about knowing more and more about less and less until there comes a point when a philosopher knows everything about nothing. — TheMadFool
So what is it really? — Wayfarer
‘Blind spot? What do you mean, ‘blind spot?’ — Wayfarer
But science does account for subjectivity - admittedly, as an obstacle to understanding to be accounted for and subtracted from the objective, but there's observer bias, the Hawthorne effect, the placebo effect - all sorts of ways in which subjectivity is accounted for in science. — counterpunch
Descartes jumped on board with both feet. He withdrew a work on physics from publication, and instead made an argument in Mediations on First Philosophy that methodologically, is presented in terms of sceptical doubt (such that falls at the first cut of Occam's Razor) to arrive at views consistent with religious orthodoxy; and he was showered with gold while Galileo remained imprisoned. The rest of Western philosophy piled in behind Descartes - and justified science used as a tool in the Industrial Revolution, and for military power, without any regard to a scientific understanding of reality. — counterpunch
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (pp. 35-36)
The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'.
Nagel is probably most widely known within the field of philosophy of mind as an advocate of the idea that consciousness and subjective experience cannot, at least with the contemporary understanding of physicalism, be satisfactorily explained using the current concepts of physics.
I’ve never encountered this reading of history before. The orthodox account is that Cartesian algebraic geometry was a crucial foundation for the ‘new science’ of Newton and Galileo. The other crucial element was the definition of primary and secondary qualities, with the former being those which were amenable to precise mathematisation and the latter being relegated to the mind of the observer. This set the stage for modern scientific materialism. — Wayfarer
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