In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views? — Joshs
he wasn't pushing idealism, and it doesn't seem to refute materialism in any way — noAxioms
I think quantum field theory has pretty much made a hash of the position because try as them might, they've never found any actual material. — noAxioms
Humans are highly sociable, they live in a shared world of concepts, language, culture, and so on. — Wayfarer
The dinosaurs were conscious, but they were not philosophers. By their fossils we can know that they existed, independent of us. Independent of human consciousness ever coming into existence on earth. Because we are not imagining the fossils, they are remnants of a former time in the universe — TheArchitectOfTheGods
100% agree. But I don’t understand how this defends idealism from the argument I’ve presented. — Hello Human
“The world is my idea”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea - that is, only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.'
From a methodological point of view, that is perfectly sound, but it is easily forgotten that the mind of the detached scientific observer is still, after all, a mind. 'But where is that "mind"?' will come the question. To which the answer is that it is never the object of cognition, nor is it amongst them (which is the basis of the so-called 'hard problem' argument). — Wayfarer
I think the difficulty in grasping it is that idealism requires a kind of perceptual shift - something which Schopenhauer has also stated in the Preface to his book. — Wayfarer
our knowledge of even the most apparently basic material objects is experiential in nature. — Wayfarer
the fundemental constituents of reality are material — Wayfarer
it is easily forgotten that the mind of the detached scientific observer is still, after all, a mind. — Wayfarer
'But where is that "mind"?' will come the question. To which the answer is that it is never the object of cognition, nor is it amongst them — Wayfarer
to grasp that requires a kind of self-reflection — Wayfarer
One talks about the constituents of that which causes our mental experiences, the other about how we come to know of it. Two different questions entirely. — Isaac
...the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. 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.
This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
Can you provide an example from philosophical naturalism where this is 'forgotten'? — Isaac
What, then, is the relation between the standard ‘third-person’ objective methodologies for studying meteors or magnets (or human metabolism or bone density), and the methodologies for studying human consciousness? Can the standard methods be extended in such a way as to do justice to the phenomena of human consciousness? Or do we have to find some quite radical or revolutionary alternative science? I have defended the hypothesis that there is a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely covers the ground — all the ground — of human consciousness, doing justice to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental method that have worked so well in the rest of science. — Daniel Dennett, Whose on First?
Does non-empirical analysis take place somewhere other than the mind — Isaac
materialism claims that matter, or matter-energy, or whatever it turns out to be, has a kind of mind-independent or inherent reality which is the source or ground of everything that we see and know, whereas idealism stresses the primacy of mind or experience. — Wayfarer
Dennett's critics claim that there's no way to reproduce the reality of first-person experience in third-person terms. — Wayfarer
It has different standards of evidence. — Wayfarer
There's nothing contrary about claiming the 'primacy' of the mind over the 'independence' of the source of what we know. Primacy and dependence are, again, two different properties. — Isaac
One might be a staunch materialist and still believe in the primacy of mind or experience. — Isaac
But in neither case is it 'forgotten' that the mind of this 'third-person' is a mind — Isaac
how are you linking standards of evidence to the ability of a mind to comprehend itself? — Isaac
But what is dependency dependent upon, if not the primary? — Wayfarer
'Materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or reducible to them'. — Wayfarer
he can't claim that the mind simply doesn't exist, but he does claim it can be wholly understood in terms of unconscious neural processes, something which he calls 'unconscious competence'. — Wayfarer
You can't necessarily prove its validity to anyone else — Wayfarer
How does what they are causally dependant on, or what they reduce to have any bearing on how fundamental or important they are? My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is. — Isaac
You don’t just understand her at the reductive level of neural or molecular interaction in causal terms. You also understand her molar behavior in such terms(social and bodily influences). — Joshs
if your wife develops depression do you recommend a cognitive therapist who will help her to change her ‘unrealistic’ thinking, a classic Freudian who would examine her adjustment to the ‘real world’, or would you choose a client-centered therapist who would encourage her potential to create new realities? — Joshs
'Primary' as in most fundamental is a different meaning to 'primary' as in most important. We're talking here about the causes of our mental events. Materialism is saying that those causes are material. Unless idealism is saying that those causes are not material, then it is not saying anything incompatible with materialism. — Isaac
My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is. — Isaac
Contrary to the image you may have of me, I have no issue with the limits of empirical research in explaining human mental events. What I take issue with is the idea that some other form of enquiry would do any better. — Isaac
To say that the cause of mental events - the cause of thought or of a chain of reasoned inference - can be understood in molecular terms, undermines the efficacy of reason. — Wayfarer
The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts (e.g. by describing them in terms of molecular properties) one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions (or neurophysical activities), however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. — Wayfarer
The problem is, if you say that what the mind is nothing but the activities of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses, then you're excluding intentionality from the picture — Wayfarer
you regard other kinds of explanations as speculative and unprovable — Wayfarer
It's perfectly possible to believe that mental events are caused entirely by physical matter and yet also believe that they will never be understood that way. This is, in fact, my personal position. — Isaac
If I were to claim "It is true that my thoughts are just neural states" then I agree with the analysis. I cannot say such a thing without recursion because the means by which I've determined it to be true must itself be nothing but a set of neural states and there's no reason to believe they yield 'truth'. In fact, the very concept of 'truth' would be meaningless since a 'true' state of affairs would just be a state of affairs which elicited a particular neural state (the state of something seeming to be true). — Isaac
But his recursion affects reason no less. If I say that my thoughts are just logical relations, I must have used a logical relation to arrive at that conclusion and it is the logical relation of facts which lead me to believe it is true. But if 'truth' is just those facts which seem to result from a logical relation, then I've no ground on which to claim that logical relations lead to truth. The argument is no less self-immunised. — Isaac
Yet we know perception is flawed. Illusions exist. We can resolve that recursion quite adequately for our needs by coming to a collective decision about what is real (and hence what is an illusion). — Isaac
Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else? — Isaac
When I show you an empirical proof, you take it to be proof, you agree. As does virtually everyone. — Isaac
So how is a causal explanation that can't be understood anything other than an article of faith? 'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' It's like a Catholic talking about transubstantiation. — Wayfarer
it doesn't follow that reason itself is subject to the same criticism because reason is the court of appeal for any and all claims. — Wayfarer
Why can intentionality no be constituted of neurons and exchanges of ions across synapses? Why must it be constituted of something else? — Isaac
For the reasons we have been discussing. — Wayfarer
Except for all the thousands of issues for which there is a range of different interpretations, huge controversies raging, threatened paradigms, etc etc. — Wayfarer
'Well, we'll never really know how it works, but even so, we must believe it.' — Wayfarer
So all I'm saying is that the materialist model of mental activity is of the former category of theory. It's a perfectly reasonable theory, it just can't ever be shown to be the case because we must rely on that very mental activity to process any evidence we might produce. We can't escape that particular recursion, so we can't 'look in the box'. But the fact that we can't provide proofs doesn't preclude its reasonableness as a model. Nor, most importantly, does it raise any alternative model to a more reasonable status. — Isaac
There’s a certain duplicity here, coming from someone who makes constant appeals to empiricism. — Wayfarer
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