And do you agree Descartes never really disprove the BIAV? Except by bringing God in. — GLEN willows
The new one is heinous though. — GLEN willows
You seem to be justifying the unimportance of establishing how justification how works by declaring it to be impossible in terms of an authority that's uncheckable even in principle. You also refer to our lives, without it being clear how a ghost trapped in its own private imagery could make trustworthy claims about other ghosts...if trustworthy makes any sense is this world of dreams without contrast. — Pie
I didn't claim that there are other minds; why would I? Those who are in doubt, or deny there are other minds, are making the extraordinary claim idly without grounds to do so. Like you are / have.What is your grounds for other minds that doesn't PRESUPPOSE other minds? — GLEN willows
Cite where I have made an "argument from authority". FYI: corroborating one's arguments with others' arguments / positions is not fallacious as you seem suggest, "newbie".And before you make any other "arguments from authority" ... — GLEN willows
I've said that our lives, phenomenologically speaking, consists in images. — Janus
So you claim, but this is metaphysical theory, which could only be defended or justified in terms of universal rational norms.But day to day, we do not experience stable objects; we experience a flux of imagery. — Janus
We know that it is the more primordial experience of imagery that makes this co-creation possible. — Janus
Yes. You keep making claims about the private minds of others, which should not be possible, unless the entities in those minds are part of the usual explanatory nexus. — Pie
So you claim, but this is metaphysical theory, which could only be defended or justified in terms of universal rational norms. — Pie
We don't know this. — Pie
We're all, in a sense, talking to ourselves! — Solipsist
it's simple phenomenology. — Janus
I don't deny that sense organs are affected, ... But that whole story is abstracted from the more primordial experience of being in the world ... a world of images, sounds and bodily sensations. — Janus
https://gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htmlAnd others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! ... Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs—?
That's not always a good thing ! — Pie
Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs—?
The part where you said that ? The part that I quoted? — Pie
I don't deny that sense organs are affected, ... But that whole story is abstracted from the more primordial experience of being in the world ... a world of images, sounds and bodily sensations. — Janus
Phenomenology, intelligently practiced, is always a good thing. Anything at all unintelligently practiced, is not a good thing; so there's little of substance, and much of the bleeding obvious, there.Right you are! Good job! — Agent Smith
Phenomology, intelligently practiced, is always a good thing. Anything at all unintelligently practiced, is not a good thing; so there's little of substance, and much of the bleeding obvious, there. — Janus
The external world, for us, is an inferential extrapolation from the repetition and commonality of experiences of everyday things. We have very good reason to think that it exists, but we only know what it is for our inferential imaginations, nothing beyond that. — Janus
There is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter, an oppos-tion which is often brought out as follows. Material objects are situated in a common field, known as ‘space’, and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as ‘minds’, and there is, apart maybe from telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s minds and inoperative upon them.
What sort of knowledge can be secured of the workings of a mind? On the one side, according to the official theory, a person has direct knowledge of the best imaginable kind of the workings of his own mind. Mental states and processes are (or are normally) conscious states and processes, and the consciousness which irradiates them can engender no illusions and leaves the door open for no doubts. A person’s present thinkings, feelings and willings, his perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically ‘phosphorescent’; their existence and their nature are inevitably betrayed to their owner. The inner life is a stream of consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that stream might be unaware of what is passing down it. ... Besides being currently supplied with these alleged immediate data of consciousness, a person is also generally supposed to be able to exercise from time to time a special kind of perception, namely inner perception, or introspection. He can take a (non optical) ‘look’ at what is passing in his mind. Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes of his inner life. This self-observation is also commonly supposed to be immune from illusion, confusion or doubt. A mind’s reports of its own affairs have a certainty superior to the best that is possessed by its reports of matters in the physical world. Sense-perceptions can, but consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused.
On the other side, one person has no direct access of any sort to the events of the inner life of another. He cannot do better than make problematic inferences from the observed behaviour of the other person’s body to the states of mind which, by analogy from his own conduct, he supposes to be signalised by that behaviour. Direct access to the workings of a mind is the privilege of that mind itself; in default of such privileged access, the workings of one mind are inevitably occult to everyone else.
For the supposed arguments from bodily movements similar to their own to mental workings similar to their own would lack any possibility of observational corroboration. Not unnaturally, therefore, an adherent of the official theory finds it difficult to resist this consequence of his premisses, that he has no good reason to believe that there do exist minds other than his own. Even if he prefers to believe that to other human bodies there are harnessed minds not unlike his own, he cannot claim to be able to discover their individual characteristics, or the particular things that they undergo and do. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.
As a necessary corollary of this general scheme there is implicitly prescribed a special way of construing our ordinary concepts of mental powers and operations. The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters and higher-grade performances of the people with whom we have do, are required to be construed as signifying special episodes in their secret histories, or else as signifying tendencies for such episodes to occur. When someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. Only his own privileged access to this stream in direct awareness and introspection could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or incorrectly applied. The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth. Yet it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct concepts being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the logical geography officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of, and prescriptions for, other people's minds.
...
It is an historical curiosity that it was not noticed that the entire argument was broken-backed. Theorists correctly assumed that any sane man could already recognise the differences between, say, rational and nonrational utterances or between purposive and automatic behaviour. Else there would have been nothing requiring to be salved from mechanism. Yet the explanation given presupposed that one person could in principle never recognise the difference between the rational and the irrational utterances issuing from other human bodies, since he could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes of some of their utterances. Save for the doubtful exception of himself, he could never tell the difference between a man and a Robot. It would have to be conceded, for example, that, for all that we can tell, the inner lives of persons who are classed as idiots or lunatics are as rational as those of anyone else. Perhaps only their overt behaviour is disappointing; that is to say, perhaps ‘idiots’ are not really idiotic, or ‘lunatics’ lunatic. Perhaps, too, some of those who are classed as sane are really idiots. According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect. It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. — Ryle
Solipsism is where you end up when you can't prove other minds. — GLEN willows
I dispute that. Only normative rationality and shared premises could support such a bold claim, yet you make the existence of anything outside your dream a mere hypothesis. — Pie
What is "ridiculous" is assuming a perspective for which there are not any grounds to assume and then use such an groundless assumption as a conditional or premise.
↪GLEN willows Epistemic warrant (of assent) does not require that claims (re: e.g. other minds) "be certainly established". Reasonably, there are not any grounds to doubt that there are other minds. — 180 Proof
Right you are! Good job! — Agent Smith
I'd rather preserve my mental resources for more creative, poetic pursuits, in the interest of intensifying the richness of the stream of imagery that is my phenomenal life. — Janus
it's just too anal. — Janus
:up: — Pie
So it's a bad theory that serves no purpose, hackneyed poetry basically, 'describing ' the world by denying it ... — Pie
You've confused yourself again. Go try and score points elsewhere, MU. — 180 Proof
I've said that our lives, phenomenologically speaking, consists in images. Out of the repetition of these images we fabricate world of stable objects. But day to day, we do not experience stable objects; we experience a flux of imagery.
So, the objects are mental creations; purely conventional. And that's what science deals with. Nothing wrong with that and it obviously has practical uses, but that is not where life, experience and poetry are to be found. — Janus
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