Reality is not 'just an experience'. It's a constructive activity which synthesises elements of sensory data with the categories of the understanding to generate the phenomenal experience. — Wayfarer

That doesn't answer the question, though. All we know is experience, and we can argue that how we experience things is mediated by our physical constitutions, our sensory apparatuses, and to some extent by cultural conditioning. But that whole story is derived from our experience of a world full of objects of sense and people who agree on what they sense. Same goes for physics. All the experiments its theory is based on are done with "publicly accessible objects"; we rely on the measurements and results they show to derive the theory in the first place.

As you know, I respect many elements of Platonist/Aristotelian philosophy.

The basic sketch I give is ultimately Kant's - his categories were adopted from Aristotle as can be seen here. Of course it is true that the ancients, and Kant for that matter, had no idea of what modern science would discover but unlike many others here, I don't accept that this has rendered classical philosophy obsolete. Rather they're in need of commensuration - interpreting them in such a way that they're intelligible in today's context.

All the experiments its theory is based on are done with "publicly accessible objects"; we rely on the measurements and results they show to derive the theory in the first place. — Janus

They're not, though. That is the whole point of the 'observer problem'. That is why Einstein had to ask his friend Michael Besso, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' It is precisely the status of the observer-independence of the objects of physics that has put this all into question.

Kastrup (a different idealist thinker) simply argues that all we experience is real - it just isn't physical. So signs and fossils and DNA and an oncoming bus - are all important readings on a dashboard that hold real consequences. They are mind when observed from a different perspective. But this stuff is very elusive and cannot be demonstrated other than undermining materialist ontologies. — Tom Storm

I agree that we can kind of coherently imagine the world of publicly accessible objects being ultimately, fundamentally either mind or matter, or neither, but some kind of hybrid. But we don't even know if our ideas about mind and matter, which are conceptions derived from ordinary everyday experience are relevant beyond that everyday experience. This is the notorious "language on holiday" phenomenon that Wittgenstein says we are bewitched by.

So, we can make up our stories about mind independently existent physical objects or ideas in the mind of God or collective unconscious or whatever, but they are all just stories we tell ourselves, some of us preferring one and others preferring others. For all intents and purposes we know there are publicly accessible objects, whatever their "ultimate constitutions" might be; and we don't even know if that idea of ultimate constitution is coherent.

They're not, though. That is the whole point of the 'observer problem'. That is why Einstein had to ask his friend Michael Besso, 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody's looking at it?' — Wayfarer

That's a separate question, and as a metaphysical question ultimately unanswerable (obviously) question. We're are talking about objects that are being looked at such as the instruments of measurement used in physics experiments. If physicists did not absolutely reliably discover the same readings, no physics would be possible. Same goes for the whole of science.

If physicists did not absolutely reliably discover the same readings, no physics would be possible. — Janus

You're just talking out of your comfortable assumed realism. Science suggests otherwise. Anyway - duty calls, I have a commercial assignment to start, so I'll bow out for now. Cheers.

You're just talking out of your comfortable assumed realism. Science suggests otherwise. Anyway - duty calls, I have a commercial assignment to start, so I'll bow out for now. Cheers. — Wayfarer

You're misunderstanding me. All I'm saying is that for the purposes of human experience and understanding there are publicly accessible objects and that physics and all of science, and really everything about human life, relies on that fact for their coherence and even for their very existence.

I'm not making any claim as to their ultimate reality, because such "ultimate" claims based on our everyday experience, which as I said includes all of science, cannot be shown to be justified or even shown to be coherent. Anyway happy working on your publicly accessible commercial assignment... :wink:

:100: :100: :100:

So, we can make up our stories about mind independently existent physical objects or ideas in the mind of God or collective unconscious or whatever, but they are all just stories we tell ourselves, some of us preferring one and others preferring others. For all intents and purposes we know there are publicly accessible objects, whatever their "ultimate constitutions" might be; and we don't even know if that idea is of ultimate constitution is coherent. — Janus

Very nicely put and reasoned.

All I'm saying is that for the purposes of human experience and understanding there are publicly accessible objects — Janus

There are no objects publicly accessible or otherwise outside the cognition of sentient beings. Science makes no assumptions about the matter, but Bernardo Kastrup, Donald Hoffman and Chris Fuchs are scientists. Pinter's only other books are on algebra and set theory. No need to bring in God, 'ultimate truth' or Wittgenstein, it is one of the things that has become apparent through 20th C science itself.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own. — Arthur Eddington

And I understand why that view gets a lot of pushback. We rely on our sense of reality to get our bearings and anything which challenges it has to be resisted. But challenging your sense of what is normal and real is what philosophy is for.

Hoffman's impetus for his book was the idea that our perceptions of "how the world is' are what may be holding us back in science. If we assume the world we experience closely resembles the world that actually is, chances are (at least if you buy the research he cites) that we're wrong, possibly at a very fundemental level. Evolution has left us with a perceptual and conceptual tool kit entirely at odds with the goals of science.

We already see this with how difficult it is for us to wrap our minds around the way very large and very small things work. So it might be that to take the next step we need to challenge even more deeply engrained ideas, for example, the idea of discrete objects and systems, the idea of linear cause and effect, the idea of three dimensions + time representing a faithful interpretation of how the world is.

I don't think these ideas get you off into the territory of unanswerable metaphysical questions; they're still very much in the realm of questions science attempts to answer. The world we see in physics, with non-locality, informational content corresponding to 2D surface area, not volume, complimentarity, the creation of mass, etc. suggests he's on the right track.

Kant's noumenon-phenomenon concept is ripped to shreds by the novacula Occamia. Why 2 when 1 is enough?! Veering towards idealism here.

it is one of the things that has become apparent through 20th C science itself. — Wayfarer

There is no science outside the cognition of sentient beings, so our science is no more placed to make pronouncements about what might purportedly lie "beyond" human cognition than anything else. You can't have it both ways.It seems safe to assume, given the reliable commonality of human cognition, that for every object of perception there is "something" relatively stable and invariant that explains that commonality.

It is really just a preference for different locutions that determines whether we refer to "somethings' or just use the names of the perceived objects instead. Bottom line is we don't and cannot know, so it comes down to what strikes us as plausible, or, since it is of no consequence anyway, we can just rest comfortable in our ignorance.

I think we can acknowledge that we are inevitably limited by our cognitive faculties, because they get trained in the three-dimensional;macroscopic world of perceived objects, including our own bodies, and that we have no way of visualizing wave/particle duality or the curvature of spacetime. The lack of ability to visualize these things does not seem to be holding us back.

The lack of ability to visualize these things does not seem to be holding us back.

It doesn't? I won't pretend to be an expert on these things, but I've read enough histories of physics and recent books by physicists to know that problems with our replacement for Newtonian absolute space and time began to show strains almost as soon as it replaced to former paradigm. The idea that we are stuck and need a conceptual transformation to move forward seems quite common in the field.

Polls of of physicists show not a single interpretation of quantum mechanics has majority support among practicing physicists. The theory with the most support, Copenhagen, is considered incoherent non-sense by most of the physicists who more closely study quantum foundations. That seems like a pretty serious problem.

Despite plenty of evidence that Copenhagen is incoherent and that quantum events don't stop occurring at arbitrary scales, we still have deep problems with projecting our inherited world view onto the world. E.g. the double slit experiment being done with large macro molecules, entanglement involving 15 trillion + atoms, macroscopic drumheads being entangled, quantum activity being involved in photosynthesis and other biological phenomena formerly marked off as safely classical, non-locality (supposedly not violating the speed of light only because a suspect definition of information has been inserted into relativity as an ad hoc fix), observed FTL propagation in quantum tunneling, observed instances of violations of the conservation of energy, etc.

Indeed, sets of experiments using photons to test a modified version of the Wigner's Friend thought experiment seem to suggest that the entire idea of a publicly available objective truth is suspect. Our world of discrete objects and systems that exhibit haecceity seems like it might just be a trick of data compression and heuristics selected for by evolution without veracity in mind. The apparent truth we experience would then be merely the result of probabilistic trends, our science a profound set of misconceptions that nonetheless gets enough right to have idealized laws that allow for useful estimations. Which is of course, something that has proved true before. A core assumption of Newton's Laws is that matter is conserved. We know this to be a false assumption at the very core of the paradigm, but it still gets enough right to be useful; the issue then becomes mistaking useful for true (a problem evolution also seems to have in shaping perception).

In his book "The Lightness of Being" Frank Wilczek talks about how many profound discoveries in physics have resulted from taking known formulas that describe phenomena and restating them in various ways in order to think about them differently. In these cases the big discovery is not the discovery of a new pattern in nature, it's taking a pattern we've known about, in some cases for a very long time, and flipping it in ways that cut against our intuition, but nonetheless end up giving us new insights.

I think this is what Hoffman is getting at. If we don't take into account the fact that the world "out there" is very different from the world we experience, and don't allow for the fact that our models are selected for based on how well they fit our intuitions, which themselves were not selected for on the basis of accuracy, we risk getting stuck.

Science arbitrarily cutting chunks of being into "systems," is a good example here. We talk of neurons giving rise to minds often without much more than a footnote explaining "well yes, brains actually do no thinking without a body, which has an amazing amount of influence on cognition through the endocrine system and other mechanisms, neurons don't create a mind without the myriad poorly understood activities of glial cells (The Other Brain is a good book on this), and brains also don't create minds without interactions with the enviornment." But since the phenomena we care about doesn't exist without these other factors, they seem like poor exclusions. The discrete objects/systems schema we inherited, which finds little support in science, remains ubiquitous. Even more ubiquitous is the idea that "the laws of physics," are these rock solid descriptions of how the world "out there," works. They aren't, and we know this. They're idealized models we find easy to work with because of the inherited nature of how our minds work. Add a third body into our models of gravity and they fall apart.

Or, to sum up: he problem being diagnosed is that we appear to have a significant problem of mistaking a map tailored to the way our minds work for the territory itself. As Hoffman would put it, "the Moon isn't there when no one looks because the Moon is essentially a desktop icon on the screen of perception."

But if reality were nothing like what we experience, no kind of observation would be telling us anything that we could justifiably base any theory on. For example the idea of evolution is based on the fossil record; and observation of plants and animals and their similarities and differences, and also on studying DNA profiles but according to his theory all that could tell us nothing about how species evolved, and indeed the very idea of species evolving and sharing traits and DNA would be groundless.How do you think he could address this problem? — Janus

This is a good question to me because Kant's biology is explicitly anti-Darwinian, while his physics are pro-Newtonian. (he's actually skeptical of chemistry, too, which made me laugh given my job)

I have no idea how he'd resolve these problems, in fact, but from a charitable perspective I'd imagine he'd try to integrate new scientific discoveries. After all, his attack on Hume is based on what he takes to be undeniable: Science says shit about causation, and what it says is true. Hume makes a good argument against that belief. So how to counter the argument while preserving the science?

The science always mattered to Kant, though. I mean, the dude tried to invent terms to turn metaphysics into a science -- but then argued against it. But it was at least an interest of his.

It's fairly speculative to think what Kant might think of our modern scientific world, ultimately. Especially given the diversity of opinions on Kant's thoughts on teleological judgment and how that sort of offers a way for reasonable individuals to still be, well... spiritual. Or whatever.

I think a large amount of disagreement on the aforementioned topic comes from the misunderstanding that saying "reality may be radically unlike perception," is the same as saying "no information about the noumenal makes it to perception." The latter totally undermines empiricism, the former does not.

The crux of the issue is unchallenged assumptions about the way the world is that arise as part of our fundemental nature (some analogy to Kant's categories can be made here). But we may find that these categories are not absolute, but rather the products of natural selection, in which case the Fitness vs. Truth theorem dictates that these categories are vanishingly unlikely to correspond to things in reality.

But we don't see this view in much of science. Mainstream models of how vision works assume sight is essentially processing "what photons bouncing of surfaces is like," at some fundemental level that corresponds to a "view from nowhere." Ironically, we seem less committed to our sense of smell. We don't seem overly committed to the idea that cooked meat or freshly cut grass has a smell that exists outside of our perceiving it. But sight is more closely aligned with our model of 3D space, and we very much do tend to assume that objects in space like the Moon do exist within this space when no one is looking. The question is: is talking about the location of the Moon "in space" when no one is watching as silly talking about the smell of Mars when no one is around to sniff it.

Had we evolved with olfactory and visual faculties closer to flies (who apparently don't see surfaces), we might have a very different physics. Perhaps a physics that handles distances better but has a hard time dispelling the idea that fundemental particles must have an essential odor. "The quark is a fundementaly mathematical entity, we need to stop modeling it based around concepts of aroma," might then show up in theoretical papers.

The question is: is talking about the location of the Moon "in space" when no one is watching as silly talking about the smell of Mars when no one is around to sniff it.

These all occuring within space-and-time, they are a part of the form of intuition -- part of the given. Anything empirical -- thereby subject to the categories -- is real, ala Kant.

I mean, obviously I have a particular interpretation of Kant, but in that interpretation at least -- our experiencing something does not make it real. Kant briefly mentions how it's necessary for reason to believe things are permanent in spite of our experience being the only means by which we know them. Like, it literally makes no sense to say our mind makes the world, so we believe it does not. and with that belief making sense, we may eventually come to the conclusion that -- oh goodness. Given Hume's criticism of causality, maybe our cognitive apparatus has a say after all.

The idea that we are stuck and need a conceptual transformation to move forward seems quite common in the field. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quantum theory and relativity are said to be the two most successful theories ever in terms of accuracy of prediction.

In any case, a "conceptual transformation" is not contingent on the ability to visualize anything as both quantum theory and relativity demonstrate, I think. These theories came about through a combination of mathematical and experimental advancement.

Of course imagination is also needed but imagining something like the warping of spacetime does not equate to being able to visualize it, but rather on the contrary consists in being open enough to explore the idea that something we cannot visualize could nevertheless be real.

It's fairly speculative to think what Kant might think of our modern scientific world, ultimately. Especially given the diversity of opinions on Kant's thoughts on teleological judgment and how that sort of offers a way for reasonable individuals to still be, well... spiritual. Or whatever. — Moliere

Good point! We just don't know what he would think. I think much of the animus against science is based on the belief that it reduces us to biological robots and thus eliminates ideas of human freedom and spirituality. I don't see that problem myself and I think it is based on an older more Newtonian mechanistic conception of materiality.

In any case I agree with you and tend to think Kant would adapt his philosophy to modern science if he was alive today.