What the latter shows is that direct connection is necessary to experience a thing. It does not then follow that all things we experience are external world objects, nor that we experience all external world objects.
For your argument to hold it is necessary to show that the causes of our sensations match the objects we experience since the 'direct connection' you theorise is between an external world and a sensory receptor. But I do not experience 200,000 firing neurons when I lift my tea cup. I experience the lifting of my teacup. So the object of my experience is the teacup. You've yet to show that this teacup is also the thing in contact with my nerve endings.
Here you are only explaining how things are - that how things are is subservient to the question of what to do. Meaning as use and all that and it's what one does is explaining how things are.I take the question of how things are to be subservient to the question of what to do. We only need to know how things are so far as it helps working out what to do.
Meaning as use and all that. It's what one does. — Banno
I think most of our disagreements were the result of talking past each other.I find myself in the unnaccustomed position of agreeing with you. :yikes: — Wayfarer
We can use both meanings without any contradiction. We just have to make sure we're not talking past each other when using the term. So we can dispense with the term, "substance" and simply talk about subjects, being and material with uniform properties. Does a subject or being have uniform properties?(Also note the distinction I made earlier about the difference between the philosophical and everyday use of the term 'substance' i.e. it means something very different in philosophy than in ordinary language.) — Wayfarer
For me, the object we experience and the cause of our sensations is the same thing. This can be observed. So I think it is you who needs to show that there are in fact two different objects, because it isn’t immediately apparent that this is so. — NOS4A2
From my side, Banno's main influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Austin et al, who are influential in analytical philosophy. You could say they're the mainstream. My influences are more counter-cultural and (I think) more existential. I — Wayfarer
You can only explain how things are - that is what one does (with language). And that is how things are. What we are all doing here is trying to explain how things are. Even in saying, "it's what one does" is explaining how things are. What is "It's" in the sentence, "It's what one does" if not "How things are is" what one does. — Harry Hindu
the what we see in the second sense — Michael
Does that apple have the colour we see it to have — Michael
is the myth, the internal picture that doesn't happen. — bongo fury
As I said, philosophy wants to go to the roots, to the universal, but in this research philosophy cannot avoid to see that actually it is limited, because it is made by humans. This means that the very concept of universal is stupid: how can we, little microscopic, biased creatures of this universe pretend to get in our mind such a pretentious concept as “universal”? Whenever we think of the concept of universal, we are conditioned by our DNA, time, body, culture, epoch, geography, so, how can we think that what we are thinking is really universal? We humans are ridiculous in this pretence. — Angelo Cannata
I just find it odd that rather then being seen as a resolution of a potential error (seeing the ship's length as a feature of the observer), Einstein's work is so often held up as proof that this is the case. — Isaac
Are you saying that we don't have qualitative experiences? — Michael
That brain activity doesn't produce sensations? — Michael
Yes. What's wrong with: brain activity is sensations? — bongo fury
What's wrong with: brain activity is sensations? — bongo fury
If we were to say that the brain is a third personal concept that is generated within first person experience we could arrive at a way of keeping what is implied both by sensation and biological brain. — Joshs
How bout:
Sensation, physiologically, involves nervous system function.
Sensation, as the content of awareness, has properties that are absent from the physiological description. — Tate
Where I think the technical difference must be placed, on my present understanding, is in the point made earlier, that for me there are things that are true, yet not known, believed, or otherwise in some positive relation to our minds. I think idealism must deny this, since it insists that mind is somehow indispensable. — Banno
Via intersubjective discourse, we construct concepts like physiological, biological, physical. Even though we treat them as though all traces of our conscious experience could be removed and they would remain as independent facts, they are inextricable from first personal experience.
Meanwhile , we treat concepts like the consciousness of sensation as though they were purely inner and ineffable substances or properties, the purely inner and subjective complement to the purely outer and objective physiological facts, a special seasoning added to objects. — Joshs
But until some single interpretation comes along that makes everybody happy... — Tom Siegfried
Yes, what you call the "genuine conundrum" is metaphysical, not physics.I don’t agree with that analysis. It’s an attempt to duck the genuine conundrum which really is metaphysical — Wayfarer
Since according to idealism the world is a product of Big MInd, not your mind or mine, then on that position there may indeed be truths that are not known. Have you read Berkeley at all, or are you at least familiar with his philosophy via secondary sources? — Janus
Do you find it at all satisfactory, this rejection of an "external world" in favour of an "over mind" that does pretty much the very same thing?
We can both see the table. Do we both se the over mind? Which is a better explanation of our agreement? — Banno
A facile dismissal of the entire issue, then. Isn't there more at stake? Doesn't it really count whether you're an aggregation of physical forces, or something more than that, or other than that? — Wayfarer
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks ‘But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.’ It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if ‘the University’ stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong. — Concept of Mind - Gilbert Ryle
There have always existed in the breasts of philosophers, including our own breasts, two conflicting tempers. I nickname them the "Reductionist" and the "Duplicationist" tempers, or the "Deflationary" and the "Inflationary" tempers. The slogan of the first temper is "Nothing But ..."; that of the other "Something Else as Well ... — Thinking and Saying - Gilbert Ryle
Einstein’s work should neither be held up as the resolution of an error nor as proof of an error. Rather, it should be seen as an invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices. — Joshs
If it is true in an over-mind, it remains true in a mind. I don't see any accrued advantage in such speculation. — Banno
And when I say unavoidable, I am not referring to its reality but to it's explanatory power in idealism. Any thoughts on this? — Tom Storm
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