Interesting links; now I understand what you meant by emerging.

Is it ‘misplaced’ or ‘might be misplaced’?

I'd say it is misplaced, at least in philosophical parlance, just because we cannot decide whether it is misplaced or not, and the idea that it might be well placed but we could never know seems kind of incoherent.

So the real world in the naive sense is not "out there independent of us" but whatever gives rise to our everyday world is. And to say this is to espouse a kind of realism. — Janus

Yes, the kind called ‘shifting the goal posts’.

:up:

This is why "eternal", in the sense of Christian theology, has the meaning of outside of time, non-temporal, never changing, while "eternal" in the materialist or physicalist sense means endless time — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes an important distinction.

So, the corollary here would be "I believe in physicalism, but I don't know if physical reality exists?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's close to what I've already said. Perhaps - 'I believe physicalism is the most likely reality, but I can't know this for certain.' I'm not sure proclamations of absolute truth can be made about anything.

Interesting links; now I understand what you meant by emerging. — Mww

I don't have time to read right now, but I looked and saw this in the heading:

"The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things."

I don't think we are entitled to claim that any more than we are its obverse. And one thing is definitely wrong there in my book: observations are of things. Of course, it might not be things as we understand them to be that give rise to the perceptions we count as observations.

Yes, the kind called ‘shifting the goal posts’. — Wayfarer

It's not shifting the goalposts if "real" is counted as meaning 'having actual existence regardless and independent of our opinions and perceptions.

... not only is Berkeley refuted, but so is the entire Oxford English Dictionary. — sime

Yeah. Meaning is use in a language game (vide Wittgenstein).

So the real world in the naive sense is not "out there independent of us" but whatever gives rise to our everyday world is. And to say this is to espouse a kind of realism. — Janus

:fire:

Here are the apparent self-evident truths of reason that Berkeley appeals to [ ... ] From these it follows that any world our sensations constitute perceptions of would[world] itself be made of sensations and thus would be made of the sensations of a mind. — Bartricks

Composition fallacy. Refuted. (All too easy.) Like I said, kid, the Bishop begins with faith (i.e. "worldview"), ergo his immaterialist dogma. Also, despite having read Bishop Berkeley, you don't understand him (or philosophy) well enough, kid, to recognize his rationalized – reasoning from, rather soundly reasoning to – "spiritualism". :pray: :eyes:

:up:

Er, you haven't refuted his argument. Saying "refuted!!" does not constitute a refutation. Thinking otherwise is called the 'dumb' fallacy. Just naming fallacies is called the 'ignorant idiot' fallacy. Now, try and refute him properly without committing either the dumb fallacy or the ignorant idiot fallacy.
Here's what you do: you construct an argument that has the negation of one of his claims as a conclusion and apparent self evident truths as premises.

:rofl: Incorrigible to the last.

Ah, the emoticons. Tell me, for a hobby do you ring doorbells and run away?

If science says something that is obviously wrong philosophically, follow philosophy because it can define what truth is and science can't. — Gregory

Has philosophy settled the question of what truth is? Last I checked there were several positions still being argued for. Unless the deflationary one won out, but then I doubt there would be a conflict between scientific claims and philosophy if that were the case, since truth claims depend on the domain in a deflationary account.

Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations. — Wayfarer

So what is the fitness consequence of my actions if it's not a snake? What makes evolution the proper account if we can't say there are real snakes and trains? I think Hoffman undermines his use of evolution here as an account for our mental categories.

The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

That's one interpretation of QM. Decoherence, Many Worlds or Pilot Wave would probably say that macro-scale objects do exist out there independent of us. I'm not terribly worried that the double slit experiment says classical objects don't exist independent of us, since that experiment doesn't work for objects at our scale, unless it's some special supercooled liquid.

One should simply follow reason.
In practice what this means is that worldviews should turn up in the conclusions of arguments, not the premises. The premises should be self evident truths of reason (or apparent ones). — Bartricks

What if your reasoning is flawed? What if your premises are faulty? One should start with a scientific understanding of the world, since it's built on centuries of very careful investigation by many smart people. And then see what sort of philosophical view best fits that, and what gaps are left, etc.

So for example, earlier in this thread you gave Berkeley's reasoning for why objects extended in space can't exist, because of infinite divisibility. This ignores what modern physics has to say about subatomic particles and limits to length. It probably also ignores the resolution to Zeno's paradox in math.

:up:
:up:

So for example, earlier in this thread you gave Berkeley's reasoning for why objects extended in space can't exist, because of infinite divisibility. This ignores what modern physics has to say about subatomic particles and limits to length. It probably also ignores the resolution to Zeno's paradox in math. — Marchesk

Mathematicians do not have a resolution to Zeno's paradoxes, they just use a work around. And what modern physics says about subatomic particles, is to some extent a product of that work around, because physicists use it. But of course, modern physics is incapable of providing an understanding of subatomic particles.

So we ought to conclude that the work around which mathematics uses, is not very good.

What? So you seriously think you should start with a worldview and then proceed to reject views that conflict with it? Okay. Jeez, you people haven't a clue. You're just a bunch of dogmatists. That's clearly not how you find out what's true. It's called 'making shit up'.

Yeah...I said the links were interesting, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I agree the implications contained in them are all that meaningful.

“To see the Universe as it really is” means nothing to me. And while I accept the counterintuitive tenets of QM, decoherence never enters my consciousness of grocery lists, road rage or the abysmal foolishness of talking heads. And while it is a mathematical fact toaster ovens will create an interference pattern just as do photons, the scale of the experiment to prove it is currently quite impossible, which reduces to....so what????

So, yes, “scientific idealism” is emerging, which itself reduces to no more than to, “....raise a loud cry of danger to the public over the destruction of cobwebs, of which the public has never taken any notice, and the loss of which, therefore, it can never feel....”.

He sometimes gets dangerously close to the line of undermining his own argument at times, at least by my reckoning. However, overall I think he has a valid argument and summons plenty of good evidence to support it.

For me, part of the apparent "self-refutation," appears to have been due to unexamined assumptions I had absorbed in my studies. I didn't have the ability to easily parse out natural selection as a general theorem from the physicalist ontology that comes with modern biology as extra baggage. I found myself thinking the same thing at that part of the book: "what snake?" But the failure here, for Hoffman anyhow, is due to my assuming that a "real threat to fitness/real selection pressure" = physicalism and all it entails, or that it at least entails all the entities of biology existing as they are currently put forth in the mainstream view.

However, there is no logical reason that you can't have a selection pressure that is constructed by the mind as a "snake," and still have no snake. Sort of how the altimeter of a plane isn't its actual altitude and its hitting zero isn't the selection pressure of the plane crashing itself. The altimeter might be the only information a pilot has access to at night. The argument is that weare flying at night and mistake the altimeter for the ground itself.

Which at least isn't contradictory. How convincing the empirical case is will probably vary between audiences.

However, there is no logical reason that you can't have a selection pressure that is constructed by the mind as a "snake," and still have no snake. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The question is if anyone there would see a snake what could it even mean to say there "really" is no snake? If we say it's "really" just a configuration of energy or fundamental particles or fields or "something" atemporal even beyond those things, how would such judgements not be every bit as derivative of and dependent on our perceptions as the snake or the selection pressure for that matter?

So, yes, “scientific idealism” is emerging, which itself reduces to no more than to, “....raise a loud cry of danger to the public over the destruction of cobwebs, of which the public has never taken any notice, and the loss of which, therefore, it can never feel....”. — Mww

Nice, is that yours or is it a quote from, or paraphrase of, the Great Burgermeister? I cannot see how it makes any difference what metaphysics or ontology science assumes, or religion for that matter, not to mention everyday life, so for me the whole debate is a "storm in a teacup". It's unfathomable to me how impassioned the polemicists become, as though they are protecting something upon which their well-being, even the well-being of the whole of humanity, somehow depends.

Edit: Thinking further on this, it seems this is the crux of the issue: the supporters of idealism think that materialism will eliminate religion, that it produces an atmosphere in which religion cannot breathe and survive, and the materialist-minded folk think humanity will be fucked unless religion is jettisoned. Personally I don't buy either of these opinions.

But the failure here, for Hoffman anyhow, is due to my assuming that a "real threat to fitness/real selection pressure" = physicalism and all it entails, or that it at least entails all the entities of biology existing as they are currently put forth in the mainstream view. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is evolution acts on biological entities. It's the reason we have the theory. To explain how there are different species of life forms over time. If you say there is no real snake, then why posit evolution as an explanation for whatever gives rise to the perception of snakes as a threat?

However, there is no logical reason that you can't have a selection pressure that is constructed by the mind as a "snake," and still have no snake. Sort of how the altimeter of a plane isn't its actual altitude and its hitting zero isn't the selection pressure of the plane crashing itself. The altimeter might be the only information a pilot has access to at night. The argument is that weare flying at night and mistake the altimeter for the ground itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But in this example, why suppose there is flying at all if the data from the altimeter is all we have to go on?

So you seriously think you should start with a worldview and then proceed to reject views that conflict with it? — Bartricks

I seriously think we should examine the world we experience and use that to guide our reasoning, instead of just reasoning from first principles. Science is empirical first and foremost.

Has philosophy settled the question of what truth is? Last I checked there were several positions still being argued for. Unless the deflationary one won out, but then I doubt there would be a conflict between scientific claims and philosophy if that were the case, since truth claims depend on the domain in a deflationary account. — Marchesk

Wittgenstein in his book On Certainty: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."

To doubt the world is to doubt everything because the world is everything we experience. We have a priori knowledge of the world. This is the foundation at which doubt procedes/ Truth is the correspondence between reality and the mind, and also it applies to truths that lead to full knowledge because all knowledge falls before the Absolute. You doubt that truth exists by claiming to have the truth. That can't be done. It's circular.

Physicalism is a factual truth-claim. It's the claim that the physical, which is mind independent, is ontologically more primitive than experience; that the physical supervenes on everything that is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about phenomenology?

The question is if anyone there would see a snake what could it even mean to say there "really" is no snake? If we say it's "really" just a configuration of energy or fundamental particles or fields or "something" atemporal even beyond those things, how would such judgements not be every bit as derivative of and dependent on our perceptions as the snake or the selection pressure for that matter?

I feel like this is similar to the objection raised earlier. Saying something cannot or is highly unlikely to be right does not require you to know what the correct answer is:

Hoffman goes through the objection I think you are getting at, i.e. that his argument is self refuting, in his book. "If you say we don't know the real world, how can you know we're wrong?"

The answer is that the logic of his argument is "if p then not q." This does not require one to have a full, absolute definition of p. "-X * -X is a positive number," does not require one to have defined X. The logic of multiplication is that two negatives multiplied together produces a positive number.

The logic of his argument is the same. Fitness versus truth theorem is saying that natural selection will favor representations geared towards representing information in terms of fitness. You don't need to define what truth is to have a theorem that says selection will favor representations that do not favor it.

One example he uses is a simulation where a "critter" has to find food to survive and reproduce. One set of critters sees the absolute value of food in each cell they can move to. The other sees only a color pallet, darker if a square has more food than the one it is currently on, lighter if it has less food than their current location. This second model gets the critter more useful information with a fraction of the information.

And this is also how our sensory systems actually seem to work. Wear color shaded glasses and your perspective will quickly adapt to them.

See above and the earlier part of the post:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/715874

He takes a que from Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." The core idea there is that, regardless of whether the central dogma of genetics holds up, or even the entire field of biology, we nonetheless have a theorem of how intricate complexity that seems to suggest a "designer," can come about with no such designer. The concept of natural selection works just as well for understanding why we see the types of physical things we do as it does for evolution. We don't see exotic matter (composed of four and even five quarks) because it isn't stable. This is also why we don't find certain elements or molecules in nature. Ockham's Razor suggests natural selection over design when it comes to complex systems.

The theorem of natural selection, "Darwin's universal acid," can explain selection even if most of what we think we know about the world is wrong.

The only thing you need for this sort of selection is the assumptions that:

1. Living things can die
2. Living things inherit traits
3. Living things can only store a finite amount of information, less than the total of the enviornment and have finite computational capacity

Er, and how on earth is Berkeley not doing that?

Again, try and refute him without assuming a materialist worldview.

If you can't, then all you're doing is insisting materialism is true and then interpreting everything accordingly. That's silly. It's no different from just assuming Christianity is true and interpreting everything accordingly. Which is what you'd have done 200 years ago on "Ye Philosophy Forum"

feel like this is similar to the objection raised earlier. Saying something cannot or is highly unlikely to be right does not require you to know what the correct answer is: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, I agree, but my point was more that it doesn't seem to make sense to say something isn't right if we can't say what its not being right could even mean.

So we could say that a snake is really a configuration of energy or quantum fields, but in any case that would just be another description, and we have an idea what that means. But if we say it is "something" that defies all categorization because it is "beyond" all our categories of judgement and modes of intuition then we would not be saying much, if anything.

But if we say it is "something" that defies all categorization because it is "beyond" all our categories of judgement and modes of intuition then we would not be saying much, if anything. — Janus

Pinter's book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, again. This is the first paragraph in the introduction:

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

— Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 1)

What the observer brings *is* the picture:

When we open our eyes and observe the world around us, we don’t see a smooth, evenly distributed continuum, but a scene that is sharply and unambiguously divided into separate objects. Each of these objects is familiar to us, we know their identities, and we are able to name them. To the animal [i.e. sensory] mind, the world is subdivided into separate, discrete things. Without a separation into independent parts, nothing would be comprehensible, there could be no understanding, and thought would not be possible.

...Common sense has us believe that the world really does consist of separate objects exactly as we see it, for we suppose that nature comes to us ready-carved. But in fact, the animal visual system does such a thorough job of partitioning the visual array into familiar objects, that it is impossible for us to look at a scene and not perceive it as composed of separate things.

— (p. 67)

Pinter makes the point that the scientific 'view from nowhere' comprises nothing more than, or apart from, the formal relationships of objects and forces, but without any features:

with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible features. In fact, every feature which might impact the senses—hence produce an impression of some kind—is absent because in this hypothetical universe there is no life and there are no senses. Everything material may be there, but not the senses. As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.

— p.118

Thoughts are real, but in a different sense to the formal objects of scientific analysis:

Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.

— (p. 52).

Which is, of course, the meaning of the hard problem.

Pinter advocates for a form of dualism but it's exceptionally clear and quite simple. It has really helped me to understand the sense in which the world is 'mind-generated' - not the world in its entirety, not the whole vast universe of space and time, but 'world' as, and insofar as it is, a meaningful whole - which is the meaning of 'cosmos' - and in which the mind plays a fundamental part. We see everything 'through' that projected, 'mind-created' world, which is, on the one hand, not objectively existent, but on the other, the very basis of our own experience of the world.

Wittgenstein in his book On Certainty: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty." — Gregory

This is incorrect, and Wittgenstein was obviously wrong with this principle. In reality, we go ahead and act when we are still in doubt of the outcome. Certainty is clearly not a requirement for acting.