If we're not angels and have cognitive limits, there's no way to know and pinpoint how distant the gap actually is — Saphsin
but to suggest that answering more and more of these small subquestions doesn’t give you a new perspective of those big questions, even redefining the big questions, is a claim that’s really odd to me. — Saphsin
Yes these are technically examples of our limits of knowledge, but I don’t think that says much about our cognitive constraints, and definitely not generalizable to extent that it tells us lessons on where to pinpoint our limitations on answering some completely different question. — Saphsin
Chomsky sees knowledge of what’s “really there” as grasping the deep principles at the fundamental baseline, what you call intuitive knowledge. — Saphsin
but I have a hard time seeing if Newton was brought to the future, that he would not see it as a closer clarifying answer to what confounded him about Action at a Distance, it became less mysterious so to speak. It helped narrow our view about the nature of phenomenon, and that counts as an improvement of our knowledge of what’s “really there” as far as I can tell, and on the way it continuously redefines what we understand as physical/material. — Saphsin
The world is not continuous, we’re made of discrete atoms, spacetime is an entity and not just a construct of the mind as Kant thought. That this doesn’t count as knowledge of physical mechanisms if we don’t grasp causation all the way down strikes me as a rather extreme reductionist view of Chomsky’s. — Saphsin
Thanks for this. There are many people who dislike Chomsky and perhaps will not engage with this in good faith. For my money, Chomsky is likely to be better informed and smarter than possibly everyone on this forum. We can't readily ignore what he says. I have seen his talks on this subject several times and subscribe low-rent mysterianism myself. When I get some time, I will attempt to read this and understand it, which may be somewhat more challenging. — Tom Storm
For my money, Chomsky is likely to be better informed and smarter than possibly everyone on this forum. — Tom Storm
If we transport Newton to our time, would he say rational people would reject qualia for lack of a physical explanation? — frank
I don't think he's advocating for "mysterianism" or mysticism. He's simply saying we have limits in our capacities to understand the world, and while we may not know exactly what they are, there are many hints. We seem to progress in some domains and hit brick walls in others, historically. — Xtrix
So qualia is just like gravity in that we know about it, but can't explain it. For gravity, a paradigm shift was required to begin explaining it, but Newton didn't realize that. — frank
As the impact of Newton’s discoveries was slowly absorbed, such lowering of the goals of
scientific inquiry became routine. Scientists abandoned the animating idea of the early scientific revolution: that the world will be intelligible to us. It is enough to construct intelligible explanatory theories, a radical difference. — P173
The mischievious thought that occurs to me is that perhaps what's being shown here is that matter is basically unintelligible — Wayfarer
Getting through it but it's a dense paper. I'll read some more later. — Wayfarer
The mischievious thought that occurs to me is that perhaps what's being shown here is that matter is basically unintelligible. — Wayfarer
I don't think he's advocating for "mysterianism" or mysticism. — Xtrix
About nearly everything, yes. Philosophy, history, politics, and most of the sciences. But we could mop the floor with him if it came to popular culture. — Xtrix
How, with straight faces, can 'mysterians' even feign any confidence in – let alone understand – their own 'mysterianism' — 180 Proof
How, with straight faces, can 'mysterians' even feign any confidence in – let alone understand – their own 'mysterianism — 180 Proof
The mischievious thought that occurs to me is that perhaps what's being shown here is that matter is basically unintelligible. — Wayfarer
Not mysticism, but he does include himself in mysterianism — Tom Storm
So maybe we can’t “understand” the world in the way understanding was once meant. — Xtrix
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