Taking colour as an example, the colour that I see isn't the colour that the bird sees, — Michael

Many a philosophical conundrum derives from considering a limited set of examples. That's the case with "colour" here. You and the bird see the eggs differently.

Yet you both see the eggs.

We se the eggs differently. We see the dress differently. It would be absurd to conclude that therefore there are no eggs and there is no dress.

We all agree that what we see is constructed by our brains. And so we go back to the first question asked in this thread: constructed from what?

You say that "The external world is just a mess of wave-particles"; why include "just"? I agree, and I think Isaac does to, that "The external world is a mess of wave-particles"; and we add that our brain is able to take the continuity in those wave-particles and construct cups, eggs and dresses.

And note that it is our brains, plural; hence the mess of wave-particles is what explains how it is that you and I and the bird overwhelmingly agree as to there being eggs and nests and sand. Without that external world-mess of wave-particles that agreement becomes inexplicable. Indeed, it is difficult to see how @Joshs "patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual contexts of interaction" can happen unless those patterns are available to both your brain and to my brain; indeed, unless there is a medium for us to speak and write in, how could we share these patterns? There has to be something in which those patterns occur.

Sure, you and I and the bird act towards some of the external world-mess of wave-particles as if they are eggs; but that does not mean that there are no eggs. Exactly the opposite. Other examples may make the point clear: money and mortgages and property and universities only exist because we act as if they exist; and yet it would be wrong to suppose that therefore they are just imaginings. "just" does not do them justice.

It's as if the "realist" is supposing that the direction of fit is only world-to-mind, and the idealist that it is only mind-invents-world. We agree, slowly, that it is both, that minds impose order on the world, and can only do this because there is a world that is independent of mind.

Here's an example I gave elsewhere. On the table is a cup with one handle. The realist and the idealist agree that "the cup has one handle" is true.

In the cupboard is another cup. The realist says "The cup has one handle" is true. The idealist says "the cup has one handle" does not have a truth value.

In the end the musings here come down to a choice between which logic it is appropriate to apply to our situation.

If there's no bird, but just a collection of wave/particles responding to another collection of wave/particles and imagining it's a bird. then how do we know how bird's see things? — Janus

I’m not saying that there isn’t a bird. I’m saying that birds aren’t the external world causes of experience. Waves/particles are the external world causes of experience. It’s a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being these waves/particles.

It would be absurd to conclude that therefore there are no eggs and there is no dress. — Banno

I don’t conclude that. See above.

Then it is hard to see what substantive disagreement you have with @Isaac.

This seems to be the salient issue: there is a world that is a mess of wave-particles; and there is a world that is eggs on a beach. They are the same world.

Now we could pull Davidson in here and show the equivalence of conceptual schema, but that should not be necessary.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a bird. I’m saying that birds aren’t the external world causes of experience. Waves/particles are the external world causes of experience. — Michael

It’s a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being these waves/particles. — Michael

You seem to be contradicting yourself here; specifically, if you say everything consists in configurations of waves/particles and that objects are convenient fictions, then is that not reducing everyday objects of perception, as well as our perceptions of them, to 'really' being these waves/particles?

You'll find it rather more difficult to justify other minds than the ground you walk on — we walk on.
I don't walk on experiences-of-the-ground, I walk on the ground, and experience doing so.
What is the ground if not "physical"?
Believing those other minds you've become familiar with means believing "physicalities".
Isn't it kind of extravagantly self-elevating to reduce all to mental monism?

We usually go by established scientific models — it's not that the models = the modeled, but good enough for many situations — among the most successful epistemic endeavors in history (the Internet, GPS, cholera eradication, Mars rovers, type 1 diabetes, long list).
Science doesn't derive morals, art, the Kama Sutra, ... But has a few things to say about the ground. And walking.

Solipsists, speak up. :smile:

What is the ground if not "physical"? — jorndoe

And what is that exactly? :cool:

And what is that exactly? — Tate

Exactly? Who knows. We have some decent models. No omniscience, though. Other than that, dirt, asphalt, grass, rubble, sidewalks, rocks, granite, ...

Exactly? Who knows. — jorndoe

:chin:

'm still unclear on what you mean by 'inherent or intrinsic reality'. — Isaac

Doesn't physicalism/materialism say that objects possess inherent reality, that they're real irrespective of your or my observation? And isn't that assertion central to the gist of the whole debate?

Recall that passage I quoted from Pinter:

Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Pinter is not saying that the object does not exist, but that it's identity qua 'cup' is imputed to it by us. He extends that argument to all of the objects we perceive. This, and many of the points being made by others here, are very similar to arguments from the Buddhist philosophical teaching of 'emptiness' (śūnyatā) which likewise says that particulars have no intrinsic existence but exist in relation to other things ('arising due to causes and conditions') and their reality is imputed by the observer. Whereas the whole thrust of materialism or physicalism and in some ways naturalism is to insist that the objective domain has an intrinsic reality which is not connected to anything we think about it. (I should note I did an MA in Buddhist Studies about 10 years ago.)

Notice also this issue is central to interpretations of quantum physics. It is why Einstein was compelled to ask the question 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when we're not looking at it?' I'm not going to argue that it does or doesn't, but point out that Einstein was compelled to say this by what was happening in physics during the 1920's, which threw his kind of scientific realism into doubt. That was essentially the background of the Einstein-Bohr debates which occupied many later decades (see Manjit Kumar 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. Within that milieu, Heisenberg functions as a kind of modern representative of Platonism.)

I asked that way round because I'm already aware of things you think are inherently/intrinsically real (numbers, lass of logic) but I still can't see from those examples alone where you're drawing the line between real and not-real. — Isaac

This is a very tricky point, because whereas above, we're discussing something very like relativism, and also touching on Buddhist philosophical ideas, this kind of thinking is much more associated with Platonism and the broader tradition that flows from it (including Aristotelianism).

In ancient and medieval philosophy it was assumed that there was a 'scala natura', which is that the world has an hierarchical structure, with matter at the base and the divine Intellect at the apex. So the reason that numbers and geometrical forms were 'higher' is because they were further up the scale - nearer to the source, as it were. It is of course true that this understanding was essentially abandoned in the transition from medieval to modern, in which the whole idea of there being a qualitative dimension or 'scala natura' was rejected along with Ptolmaic cosmology and Aristotelian physics.

But in any case, what I've come to understand is why the pre-modern or classical tradition esteemed mathematical and rational truths. It was because they retained a sense of them being 'higher' or 'nearer to the source' than material objects. Notice this paragraph from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

Now, I think that is a sense which overall has been lost to modern and certainly to analytical philosophy. During my studies I've been piecing that story together. I notice that there is a controversy (hardly noticed outside academia) about the status of numbers, whether and in what sense they're considered real. That's the debate over Platonism in mathematics (see SEP). But that's a subset of a much larger debate over the nature of reality - whether it can be understood in terms of objects, or relations (e.g. ontic structural realism) or numbers (e.g. Max Tegmark).

The way I've begun to integrate these ideas is in line with a kind of analytical idealsm, in which maths and what the medievals called universals are uniform structures of reason. That is they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. It is not quite the same as conceptualism, which holds that all such things are in individual minds, because I believe that they are the properties of any and all minds.

The way I've begun to integrate these ideas is in line with a kind of analytical idealsm, in which maths and what the medievals called universals are uniform structures of reason. That is they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. — Wayfarer

In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? Why not go all the way and make both the natural world as we experience it and our mathematical concepts relational, contextual and contestable? Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction?

Sure, you and I and the bird act towards some of the external world-mess of wave-particles as if they are eggs; but that does not mean that there are no eggs. Exactly the opposite. Other examples may make the point clear: money and mortgages and property and universities only exist because we act as if they exist; and yet it would be wrong to suppose that therefore they are just imaginings. "just" does not do them justice. — Banno

The problem though, is that the thing created by the mind, or brain, (I'll call it an image for now), need not even be at all similar to the supposed aspect of the real world which we assume that it represents. And minds or brains also created the "mess of wave-particles" as a type of image. We ought not assume that anything created by the mind or brain is in anyway similar to the external, real world.

For example, we know that the word "egg", and the word "cup", have no real similarity to the supposed real world things that the words represent. So why would we think that the visual image that the mind or brain creates, which we assume as a representation of a real world thing, is in any way similar to what the real world thing actually is. Just like a word, the visual image might be simply a convenient symbol.

, I suppose, idealists to who their experiences = reality, that question is settled?

, I suppose, idealists to who their experiences = reality, that question is settled? — jorndoe

I don't think so. Neither group appears to be saying anything. It's all physical, it's all ideas, it's all information, it's all frog.

...the thing created by the mind, or brain... — Metaphysician Undercover

What's that, then?

Weightings in neural networks. You are thinking in terms of brains containing representations, but neural nets are not representational.

In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? Why not go all the way and make both the natural world as we experience it and our mathematical concepts relational, contextual and contestable? Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction? — Joshs

Wow. Nice reversal.

I'd like to add here, though I maybe already said it: what is gained by saying "material" in between "external world"?

Does it add anything that is not a distraction from a more problematic issue? Because we are now discussing some version of materialism, instead of the world.

, well, when they say experiences = reality, they are saying something consequential.

I notice that there is a controversy (hardly noticed outside academia) about the status of numbers, whether and in what sense they're considered real. — Wayfarer

What could be derived?

well, when they say experiences = reality, they are saying something consequential. — jorndoe

What's the consequence?

What's the consequence? — Tate

Say, omniscience, contra ...

Exactly? Who knows. We have some decent models. No omniscience, though.

Say, were I to claim my experiences = reality, I'd be reducing my neighbor a bit heavy-handedly. Solipsism. Maybe there are noumena after all — other minds? Per the comment above, "physicalities" comes before those other minds I've become so familiar with anyway. (It's not like I'm walking on other minds (just the ground), though I might like to walk all over the solipsists. :smile:) Besides, if anything significant differentiates dreams, hallucinations, etc, and perception, then it's the perceived. And the unperceived could kill you regardless.

Say, were I to claim my experiences = reality, I'd be reducing my neighbor a bit heavy-handedly. Solipsism. — jorndoe

Not if you have a god to ground your dreamy universe.

Maybe there are noumena after all — other minds? Per the comment above, "physicalities" comes before those other minds I've become so familiar with anyway. — jorndoe

What warrants this assertion? I think you're begging the question, and committing the dire crime of underestimating the wit of the "it's all Frog" philosophers.

We all put our shoes on one at a time, eat breakfast, go about the day, occasionally pondering how to make our favorite philosophy work. We're all the same.

, a god? Where does a god appear in someone claiming experiences = reality? :brow:

I can't experience someone else's self-awareness, since then I'd be them instead. I can experience someone else's hands when they use sign language (before their keen mind that I've become so familiar with). I can experience walking on the ground outside. Right?

But hey, if you want to scoff at metaphysics, then I'm all :up:.

Wait ...

the "it's all Frog" philosophers — Tate

Did you mean it's all goat? :D

god? Where does a god appear in someone claiming experiences = reality? :brow: — jorndoe

You seemed to be describing some kind of subjective idealism, so I gave you Berkeley's solution.

But hey, if you want to scoff at metaphysics, then I'm all :up: — jorndoe

Well that was easy!

Wait ...
the "it's all Frog" philosophers
— Tate
Did you mean it's all goat? :D — jorndoe

Don't be ridiculous. It's Frog.

In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? — Joshs

Notice in your own question the assumption of there really being an internal and external world.

The question I'm grappling with is related to the question of how causal relationships obtain, as discussed in the thread 'Logical Necessity and Physical Causation.' Chris Fuchs makes a remark that quantum physics is 'a law of thought'. That is actually Kantian in spirit, because in Kant, causal necessity itself is an a priori necessity, that is, it is grounded in the operations of reason.

Pinter again:

It appears that nobody today—not psychologists, not philosophers, not thinking laymen—are fully aware of how “magical” it is to see in Gestalt wholes. It gives us knowledge of many things in the same moment, all bound together in one act of conscious awareness. It presents us with an almost godlike overview of wide, stretched-out vistas. Gestalt vision can bring us a view of a whole vast landscape of rivers, villages and distant mountains, all in a single glance. Actually, it does far more than that: A Gestalt picture does not merely bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 33). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

He notes that this ability to subjectively perceive a unified vista is also the subject of the well-known neural binding problem. He too brings in QBism:

The scheme presented in this book provides a foundation for quantum bayesianism. As explained in the previous chapters, there is a radical divide between the physical world removed from observation—that is, the universe outside the range of any observer—and the aspects of reality created by the minds of living observers. It has been argued that it is the mind that divides reality into distinct, separate objects and creates the shapes and structure of solids. The mind organizes phenomena into complex and comprehensive wholes, and by doing this creates most of the reality that we perceive. In addition to this, the mind lures every individual into believing that what is perceived is present in the external world with the very features and qualities that our brain has assigned to it. Our biologically-designed model of reality is thus superposed on the physical stuff of the world and structures it. It is with this reality that we interact.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 158-160). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

So 'external objects' are still constructions - vorstellung in Schopenhauer's logic - within this 'mind-made world'. The mistake that is always made in respect to dualism is to ask how the mind could exist, or what it could be. This invariably seeks to locate the mind with respect to the objective domain, as some purported force or agency on a par with the physical - the so-called ghost in the machine. But the mind is what organises the objective domain into meaningful wholes ('gestalts') and their relationships. So it is not anywhere 'in' the objective domain or even objectively existent (which is why eliminativism seeks to exclude it, not noticing the role that it has in formulating even its own science, as per this paragraph in Schopenhauer.)

Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction? — Joshs

You still have its 'unreasonable effectiveness' to consider. Again that is discussed in the other thread I mentioned.

Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts — Joshs

So why would those patterns emerge variable? What causes the variance?

Do you remember the dress that some people see as black and blue and others as white and gold? Same stimulus, different colours experienced.

Your account of colour would make this, and things like Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis, incomprehensible. — Michael

I don't see how. I'm saying that 'green' is a property of a hidden state which cause most humans in most situations to respond in the way we describe as 'seeing green'. It doesn't require that these hidden states have this effect on everyone, nor does it require that they have this effect at all times in all contexts.

Doesn't physicalism/materialism say that objects possess inherent reality, that they're real irrespective of your or my observation? And isn't that assertion central to the gist of the whole debate? — Wayfarer

Yes, but I'm not clear what you mean by it in talking about idealism.

The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup

This is what I'm saying is simply wrong. The atoms do collude together to form a teacup. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. That's why one of the available gestalts is that of a teacup. Because the atoms do indeed form the shape of a teacup. They also form the shape of dozens of other things which we ignore, choosing, instead, to focus on the teacup option. But it's wrong to say they're not in the form of a teacup just because they're also in the form of many other options.

Einstein was compelled to say this by what was happening in physics during the 1920's, which threw his kind of scientific realism into doubt. That was essentially the background of the Einstein-Bohr debates which occupied many later decades (see Manjit Kumar 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. Within that milieu, Heisenberg functions as a kind of modern representative of Platonism.) — Wayfarer

And yet I couldn't just walk into a physics department and propose my own version of what's happening at a quantum scale, could I? Why not? Because the range of possibilities is constrained. It's constrained by actual measurements (such as those from the large hadron collider). Measurements I'm unaware of but which constrain the choices of physicists about the nature of reality. The reason why only learned physicists can speculate on such matters. So there are intrinsic properties of reality, it's just that they are insufficiently specific to distinguish between the competing theories.

they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. It is not quite the same as conceptualism, which holds that all such things are in individual minds, because I believe that they are the properties of any and all minds. — Wayfarer

So...any closer to an idea of what isn't "real as the constituents of rational thought"?

. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. — Isaac

We see them as teacups, because our culture drinks tea. Another culture might have similarly-shaped object that is called by a different name and is used for another purpose. So its identity is not intrinsic, but imputed to it by us. The teacup obviously has no sense of its own identity, being an inanimate object.

And yet I couldn't just walk into a physics department and propose my own version of what's happening at a quantum scale, could I? — Isaac

The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.

But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective. — Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows

The results are somewhat constrained, but not completely. And that is why the question of the interpretation of physics is still very much an unsolved issue.

By the 'constituents of rational thought' I'm referring to such things as the rules of logic and arithmetic, and so on. Not just any random thought that pops into your head.

I don't see how. I'm saying that 'green' is a property of a hidden state which cause most humans in most situations to respond in the way we describe as 'seeing green'. It doesn't require that these hidden states have this effect on everyone, nor does it require that they have this effect at all times in all contexts. — Isaac

The "green" in "seeing green" doesn't mean the same thing as your suggested "green" as a property of a hidden state. The former is what most people understand colour to be. When I say "the colour that I see isn't the colour that you see" I'm not saying "the property of a hidden state that I see isn't the property of a hidden state that you see."

If colour was the property of a hidden state then how do you make sense of two people seeing different colours when looking at the same thing? What does "colours" refer to here?

This is the problem when you try to use the same labels that we use to refer to features of experience to also refer to the external world causes of those experiences. It leads us susceptible to equivocation. There's a very big difference between saying that the green that I see (in the context of "seeing green") is some external world thing (a naive view of perception) and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see green. And by the same token, there's a very big difference between saying that the cup that I see (in the context of "seeing a cup") is some external world thing and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see a cup.

We see them as teacups, because our culture drinks tea. — Wayfarer

But we can't just see them as teacups because our culture drinks tea. Why don't I see the table as a teacup? There must be some properties that particular hidden state has that makes it amenable to being 'seen as a teacup', whereas the other hidden state has properties which make it more amenable to being 'seen as a table'. Those properties are intrinsic, not imbued by us. Our imbuing practices must use some properties to decide what gestalt to imbue, otherwise we'd have one amorphous homogeneous mass.

The results are somewhat constrained, but not completely. And that is why the question of the interpretation of physics is still very much an unsolved issue. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. Those 'constraints' are intrinsic properties. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in such-and-such a way are called 'teacups'. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in this other way are called 'tables'.

By the 'constituents of rational thought' I'm referring to such things as the rules of logic and arithmetic, and so on. Not just any random thought that pops into your head. — Wayfarer

The difference being? Is it consistency? Universality? What?

The "green" in "seeing green" doesn't mean the same thing as your suggested "green" as a property of a hidden state. The former is what most people understand colour to be. — Michael

So the expression "the post box is red" wouldn't make sense to most people? They'd say "the post box causes me to see red"?

When I say "the colour that I see isn't the colour that you see" — Michael

I seriously don't know anyone who speaks that way in normal conversation. People might say "I see the dress as green, you see it as blue". They're still talking about the colour of the dress (the hidden state we're modelling), they're not talking about the content of their minds.

If colour was the property of a hidden state then how do you make sense of two people seeing different colours when looking at the same thing? — Michael

I've answered that already. The label we apply to hidden states is based on the response those states normally produce in most contexts. The process doesn't require that such states always produce that response in all contexts.

This is the problem when you try to use the same labels that we use to refer to features of experience to also refer to the external world causes of those experiences. It leads us susceptible to equivocation. — Michael

That seems to me to be a problem caused by this odd manner of speaking about 'colours of experiences' which no one uses in normal conversations.

there's a very big difference between saying that the cup that I see (in the context of "seeing a cup") is some external world thing and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see a cup. — Michael

OK, so you agree that there exists some external world thing which causes most humans to have the response we call 'seeing a cup'.

What should we call that?

I propose we should call it 'a cup'.

So the expression "the post box is red" wouldn't make sense to most people? They'd say "the post box causes me to see red"? — Isaac

No, because as I have also said, it is wrong to say that the external world causes of experience is the postbox.

I seriously don't know anyone who speaks that way in normal conversation. People might say "I see the dress as green, you see it as blue". They're still talking about the colour of the dress (the hidden state we're modelling), they're not talking about the content of their minds. — Isaac

The "as green" and "as blue" is very much about the content of their minds. They are having different experiences despite the same external world cause. What differs between their experiences is the colour seen. If the colour seen is what differs in their experiences and if the external world cause is the same, then colour isn't some hidden state in the external world cause.

I've answered that already. The label we apply to hidden states is based on the response those states normally produce in most contexts. The process doesn't require that such states always produce that response in all contexts. — Isaac

This isn't addressing the issue. Your eyes and my eyes are stimulated by the same light, reflected by the same external world source. Yet I see red and you see green. If "red" and "green" refer to some hidden state in the external world cause then what does it mean for me to "see red" and you to "see green" in this situation? The "red" and "green" are referring to some quality of our experiences.

OK, so you agree that there exists some external world thing which causes most humans to have the response we call 'seeing a cup'.

What should we call that?

I propose we should call it 'a cup'. — Isaac

You can call it anything you like. But that external world cup isn't the cup that I see, just as a configuration of electrons that absorbs light of a certain wavelength, scattering light with a wavelength of 650nm isn't the red that I see.

X causes Y. X isn't Y. But you want to use the label "Z" to refer to both X and Y. That leads to equivocation. Saying "I see Z and Z is an external world thing" is misleading because of this. It's two different meanings of "Z". All you're really saying is "I see Y and X is an external world thing".

This seems to be the salient issue: there is a world that is a mess of wave-particles; and there is a world that is eggs on a beach. They are the same world. — Banno

I don't know what you mean by saying that they're the "same world." All I'm saying is:

1. Some object is red₁ if it causes most humans to see red₂, although some humans and some animals might instead see orange₂
2. Red₁ isn't red₂
3. Red₁ is external to experience
4. Red₂ isn't external to experience
5. We see red₂, not red₁