I don’t think so, but it’s fine if you do. Hell.....I don’t even know what a mental state actually is. — Mww

So we'll state simple. You know what the experience of a toothache is, right?

How would I know it, such that it couldn’t be anything else?

You know the experience of a toothache is different than the experience of listening to your favorite song, so then the experience of a toothache can't be the experience of listening to your favorite song.

So yeah, I think there are a few paths open in TI. — Manuel

Depends on whose T.I. you’re talking about. Won’t be Kant's, because.....

“...My chief aim in this work has been thoroughness; and I make bold to say that there is not a single metaphysical problem that does not find its solution, or at least the key to its solution, here....”

The paths open, are the changing of it, by finding a metaphysical problem it doesn’t solve or isn’t able to solve. Seems like a lot of trouble.

I'm not calling you crazy, I'm saying your claim is crazy. I didn't mean any offense. Idealism is completely out there, so I know about making crazy-seeming claims. — RogueAI

Absolutely no offense taken. I was just highlighting the conversational dead end of your change in mode of conversation.

Look at a red thing, stub a toe, lose a loved one (though hopefully not). I'm looking at a red object in my room. I'm having the experience of seeing red. There is something that is it like for me to see this red object: me seeing this red object. — RogueAI

Ah but here you've switched from "what it is like to see red") to "what it is like for me to see red". I was rejecting the former. But I would reject a "what it is like for me to see red" too.

A good demonstration that there is no "what it is like to see <a colour>" is the infamous blue and black/white and gold dress, where the colours of a photograph depend very much on who is doing the looking. But even considering only a single person, what colour an object appears to have is very much in the moment: the unconscious brain does a lot of preprocessing before your consciousness gets its hands on data. You see white, even when it's yellow. To test this, just film a white wall in your house with a camcorder and play it back on your TV at various times of day, with and without interior lighting. How a colour looks even just to you is not fixed, but is context-dependent. You are the most important context (there is no "what it is like to see red"), but not the extent of that context (there is no "what it is like for you to see red").

Seems to me you are using the terms idealism and realism in odd ways. I don't see that as helpful. The question is, is there more than just mind. If there is just mind, then idealism is true. else, realism.

The important consequences of Idealism and materialism is that they express two poles of the same binary. — Joshs

No, they don't. See my explanation on page 3. Idealism is the converse of realism, not materialism.

Realism is actually a form of idealism. — Joshs

And ducks are a form of non-ducks.

Say you go skydiving and your friend asks you "what was it like to go skydiving?" Now, you have said that there are no "what it is like to do/feel/be statements" (e.g. "What it is like to see red"). What exactly do you mean by that? Are you claiming you can't understand questions like, "what is it like to do/feel/be x?"?

Sure you can stay with Kant. Nothing wrong with that at all.

I personally follow Schopenhauer and Chomsky, but I don't always agree with them.

I asked how to know a mental state, such that it couldn’t be anything else. But you referred me to experience. Am I to infer that the only thing a mental state can be, is an experience?

Apparently I cannot have a mental state of driving a GT40 at 150mph. Never having done that, never having seen it done, thus having no experience of it, in the context of your pain and music, how is it possible for that sentence to come to me?

Then it must be that imagination is a mental state, but imagination is not experience, therefore, experience is not all a mental state can be.

Because you stipulated simplicity, I won’t pursue the correctness that a toothache is a feeling, not an experience. Just sayin’.......

Sure, because I don't see a reason to stipulate that these things need be incompatible.

One can be a materialist like Dennett or a materialist like Strawson which are extremely different.

One can be an idealist like Berkeley or Schopenhauer also very different.

Similarly, I don't see why realism and idealism need to be in tension. It could be that only those aspects of the world that interact with our innate science forming faculties give us access to reality absent people.

Or mind could be an illusion or reaction like Dennett says. Many options to choose from.

Chomsky is too modern, too political, and FAR too analytic, for me, so what about Schopenhauer do you find disagreeable?

And ducks are a form of non-ducks. — Banno

and flippancy makes my balls itch.

I’d reverse that. Neuroscience always operates at a delay with respect to more abstract psychological subfields. — Joshs

Well I guess it depends what you find satisfying. This criteria suggests 'that which comes first'. What I had in mind, after you'd prompted it, is that only neuroscience is explaining *how*, i.e. what is fundamentally going on. This isn't to diss cognitive psychology or philosophy of mind -- big fan -- any more than the satisfaction of quantum electrodynamics disses chemistry.

Idealism is the converse of realism, not materialism. — Banno

I thought materialism was a form
of realism

Idealism is the converse of realism, not materialism. — Banno

:up:

the apparently external world... — Wayfarer

Well, here's a problem - the assumption that there is an internal and an external world, rather than just a world. The world is just what is the case; the concatenation of true statements, as it has been phrased elsewhere.

Some see the world as inherently divided in twain, and then feels a need to choose one side or the other. Idealists choose mind. There are materialists who do much the same thing, only to choose the opposite side. The victims of Descartes' folly. If a physicist is an atom's way of looking at itself, then there are atoms. Not only does the purported division of subjective and objective have no absolute foundation, it is misleads us from the very start. It requires years of misleading philosophical study before one begins to doubt the human instinctive sense of realism. Years spent trying to understand the way the mind constructs the experience of the world from the elements of experience can erroneously lead to one mistaking the experience for the world for the world - to Stove's Gem.

This might be somewhat of what @Manuel and @Joshs have at the back of their discussion.

The opposition between realism and idealism is one of the many ways in which philosophical myth building leas on astray.

There's just the world, and included in it are our reactions to it.

The point I was making was that the materialist position was stronger a a century so ago when we felt we had a good grip on what matter was and it seemed like all that was left was to tie up some loose ends. The problem is in claiming all reality is something, and then being unable to define what that something is. Without a definition for the material you risk falling into a tautology, "everything that exists is matter. What is matter? It's everything that exists."

Physical models of yore would have rejected non-local causality as magical nonsense, but here it is. The necessity of an observer might be here to stay too. Maybe the definition of the physical can be stretched to contain these factors, but at that point it seems at risk of becoming meaningless, a stand in for "reality." It would be quite different from the materialism of the 19th century. Yet because that 19th century model is simple and useful, we still use it routinely, out of convenience and habit. However, we shouldn't confuse "useful" with "true."

As to impotence, if results are what matter, the idealists have plenty of those. As the grand father of communism and nationalism, the arch idealist Hegel certainly can't be accused of not getting results; the last two centuries have revolved around the ideas he helped birth.

Sure I understand your Chomsky angle. I do like Kant, but I think he is way too obscure at times.

As for disagreements with Schopenhauer, let's see:

I believe we have freedom of the will, unlike him.

I'm unclear if will is actually continuous or discrete. I'm more sympathetic to the continuous angle, but am I'm not convinced yet.

I don't think his doctrine of Platonic ideas makes much sense. It allows for way too many ideas. Not that I'm unsympathetic to Platonism, on the contrary I very much like this school of thought, just not as articulated by him.

I think history is more important than he gives it credit for.

Obviously he was quite wrong about phrenology and vision and women.

But these are not huge disagreements, just different points of emphasis so far as philosophy is concerned.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/551863

There's just the world, and included in it are our reactions to it. — Banno

In other words, if I take your meaning correctly, the territory includes making and using maps of the territory. Agreed.

it is misleads us from the very start. It requires years of misleading philosophical study before one begins to doubt the human instinctive sense of realism. — Banno

And good that we did mistrust this instinct, it led to the great discoveries made by Galileo and Newton and many others. The way the world is (absent us) , is not the way it appears to us.

Had we stayed with instinctive realism, we'd still be debating in scholastic terms.

...the territory includes maps of the territory. — 180 Proof

Yep; but more than that, it includes making maps of the territory. The world it is a recursive process, not just a concatenation of true statements. That's a pivotal critique of stuff from the Tractatus to

And good that we do mistrust this instinct, it led to the great discoveries made by Galileo and Newton. The way the world is (absent us) , is not the way it appears to us. — Manuel

I don't agree. But you've presented only half an argument here. What exactly is it in Newtonian physics that you think disagrees with how things appear?

Apples seem to fall, because that's what they do. So does almost every concrete object. They want to fall down.

Except that they don't and the force that keeps the moon orbiting the Earth is the same force that causes apples to fall.

And Newton agreed with this, it was incomprehensible to him that objects can affect each other absent physical contact.

In short - the world is not simply given. It is in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind. The sense in which it exists outside of or apart from that mind is an empty question, because nothing we can know is ever outside of or apart from the act of knowing by which we are concious of the existence of the world in the first place. This doesn't mean the world is all in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, the species and cultural mind of h. sapiens - is an inextricable foundation of the world we know, but we can't see it, because it is what we're looking through, and with. — Wayfarer

What evidence could you possibly have that the world is "in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind." if the fundamental nature of the world is, by your own argument, ineluctably hidden from us? How would you explain the easily testable fact that we all project the same objects in the same locations except by appealing to a collective mind? Is there any evidence of a collective mind? If not, would not the most parsimonious explanation be that we divide the world up conceptually in ways which reflect the actual structures which appear to us as objects and events, as well as the actual hidden structures of our own constitutions?

I've no clear idea of what you are proposing. Apples don't seem to fall, they do fall. And Newton was forced to accept action at a distance because it explained how things work.

I'm not going to try to articulate your ideas for you. Put them together yourself, then get back to me.

Let me rephrase:

Apples fall because of gravity, not because they're "going to there natural place". That's what the scholastic philosophers used to say about apples falling, because that's what seems to be happening when we look at apples falling.

Yes, Newton was forced to accept it. Because to him, it was obvious that the idea of gravity made no sense. Otherwise he wouldn't have been forced to accept anything.

Please, if you would, clarify / explicate the non-trivial differences between "intrinsic" and "non-intrinsic" (modes? degrees? types? of) "reality". — 180 Proof

Having no inherent reality or real being; their nature is imputed to them, not intrinsic to them, in accordance with their causes, context and the intentions of the observer (per the madhyamika dialectic of Mahāyāna Buddhists.)

In the context of physics, that manifested as the inability to discern an absolute point-particle - an atom, in fact. It was found that sub-atomic entities have a kind of ambiguous or indeterminate nature rather than being indivisible atoms.

The “experience of seeing red” isn’t a “different kind of object”, it’s just a configuration of the brain. — khaled

That's where the experiment i mentioned, about 'representational drift', is relevant. What it shows is that the same stimuli produce completely different patterns of neural activity over time - it drifts around different areas of the brain. The experimenters had assumed that habitual reactions to stimuli would produce habitual patterns in the neurons. But they don't. The the brain is constantly reconfiguring itself, it is an immensely dynamic and highly complex system (actually the most complex phenomenon known to science.) SO it is easy to believe that a configuration 'stands for' or 'represents' an experience, but we're not ever really in a position of comparing the object of the experience with the neural data. Partially because the neural data is so complex, but also because we're never in a position to stand outside the idea or the experience, and the object of experience.

So you a have a mental construction, where you imagine red 'in the world' and the experience of red as a pattern - but that too is a pattern! It is precisely 'the eye trying to see itself'. You set up this world picture, here the subject with his ideas, there the world with it things, and think that it's all settled.

Some see the world as inherently divided in twain, and then feels a need to choose one side or the other. Idealists choose mind. There are materialists who do much the same thing, only to choose the opposite side. The victims of Descartes' folly. — Banno

I am aware of that. The kind of approach I take is closer to phenomenology, and also Buddhist forms of non-dualism, so I'm very much aware of that conceptual division, which I've mentioned a few times in this thread already. You should take the time to peruse Michel Bitbol, that paper contains numerous references to Wittgenstein.

The point I was making was that the materialist position was stronger a a century so ago when we felt we had a good grip on what matter was and it seemed like all that was left was to tie up some loose ends. The problem is in claiming all reality is something, and then being unable to define what that something is — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well said.

What evidence could you possibly have that the world is "in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind." — Janus

It's an a priori argument, based on the observation that there's no light inside the skull.

How would you explain the easily testable fact that we all project the same objects in the same locations except by appealing to a collective mind? — Janus

I do accept that there is a collective consciousness. This Forum is a splendid example. But so are culture and society, generally. H. Sapiens has the longest period of extra-somatic enculturation of any creature - 18 years, give or take - during which we onboard our understanding of the world. And as we see on this site, the current culture is generally scientific in orientation with respect to that. What I draw attention to is the deficiency of science as a source of values.

So within that matrix of culture and society we have common cultures, languages, and so on.

we divide the world up conceptually in ways which reflect the actual structures which appear to us as objects and events, as well as the actual hidden structures of our own constitutions? — Janus

The first is pretty straightforward, the second much less so.

And your point? What conclusion do you want to reach? What's the relevance of all this to the topic?

You should take the time to peruse Michel Bitbol, that paper contains numerous references to Wittgenstein. — Wayfarer

For whatever reason, that link will not work. Nor have you elicited much enthusiasm for it's contents. I've a half-dozen other things to read first.