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
So, the corollary here would be "I believe in physicalism, but I don't know if physical reality exists?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting links; now I understand what you meant by emerging. — Mww
Yes, the kind called ‘shifting the goal posts’. — Wayfarer
Yeah. Meaning is use in a language game (vide Wittgenstein).... not only is Berkeley refuted, but so is the entire Oxford English Dictionary. — sime
:fire: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
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:Here are the apparent self-evident truths of reason that Berkeley appeals to [ ... ] From these it follows that any world our sensations constitute perceptions ofwould[world] itself be made of sensations and thus would be made of the sensations of a mind. — Bartricks
If science says something that is obviously wrong philosophically, follow philosophy because it can define what truth is and science can't. — Gregory
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
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.”
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
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
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
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
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
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
So you seriously think you should start with a worldview and then proceed to reject views that conflict with it? — Bartricks
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
— (p. 67)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.
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. 52).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.
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
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