I'm not sure why idealism is on there. Idealism is not a position on whether or not there is an external world, but about whether that world (external or not) is independent of any minds.

we go too far if we draw the conclusion that there is a way things are that is independent of us that we can know or talk about in a meaningful way. — Fooloso4

Then what is...

Do we experience it as it is? No. — Fooloso4

...?

That sounds an awful lot like someone talking about the way things are that is independent of us. You're describing one of its properties - that it differs from the way we experience things. Another of its properties is apparently that we cannot 'see' it. Another is that it is responsible for our sense data...

That's a surprisingly comprehensive description of something you apparently can't say anything meaningful about.

I hold a similar position to @Fooloso4 in as much as what we call reality is of a human perspective - which doesn't make it unreal or not real... it just means that the representation is specific to our apparatus, cognition and worldviews, etc. The idea of 'as it really is' seems to me to be intellectual quicksand, however. It can surely only ever be something in relation to something else? Do you think this is bad thinking?

That sounds an awful lot like someone talking about the way things are that is independent of us. — Isaac

If I understand you correctly you are claiming that by denying that we can talk about the way things are independent of us I am talking about the way things are independent of us?

that it differs from the way we experience things. — Isaac

No, I am saying that we experience it in accord with how we are. That is not to say that it is some way independent of us, but simply that we cannot experience in some way other than the way we experience it.

That's a surprisingly comprehensive description of something you apparently can't say anything meaningful about. — Isaac

In that case, you can congratulate yourself for your surprisingly comprehensive description. It is yours not mine.

The idea of 'as it really is' seems to me to be intellectual quicksand, however. It can surely only ever be something in relation to something else? Do you think this is bad thinking? — Tom Storm

Yes, that's right.

We cannot at the same time conceive of such a thing as a 'world as it is' and claim such a world is independent of our machinery of conception. I clearly just used such machinery to conceive of it.

The moment we include any creation, any theory, model or idea within our arsenal of concepts, it is of us, not outside of us.

Is there an external world? Yes.

Do we experience it as it is [not experienced by us]? No.

Is our knowledge of it an accurate representation of it? We try — Fooloso4

:up: :up: :up:

I voted "the question is too unclear to answer". If I were asked "do you experience a world that seems to be external to your body?" I would answer 'yes'.

It is unclear as to whether the question assumes some further substantive reality than that world seeming to be external to the body we all seem to experience.

It is unclear if it is being asked whether the external world in question consists of solid three dimensional objects independently of human experience and understanding.

The question seems like it is generated by "philosophy for dummies".

The moment we include any creation, any theory, model or idea within our arsenal of concepts, it is of us, not outside of us. — Isaac

So, would you say the world is external to human experience or not?

Yet Kant is an idealist. The structure is in yo head. So there are "real" facts, but their origin is not the external world. So that's why I said the "epistemological" part doesn't necessarily make a difference. It is needs both the epistemological and metaphysical for a complete picture. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I think we can't separate those two if looking at the poll.

I'm not sure why idealism is on there. Idealism is not a position on whether or not there is an external world, but about whether that world (external or not) is independent of any minds. — bert1

It is there as an option and I think is important to consider of, nonetheless as I pointed out yesterday, the option of "idealism" receives zero votes. It is true that some users thought on such option but they weren't that sure to choose it and then, they opted for another neutral position.
We have to highlight how the theories and thinkers have changed. Back in the day, Platonism (thus, idealism) was one of the main basic roots and now most of the people go for skepticism or non-skeptical realism.

I'm not sure why idealism is on there. Idealism is not a position on whether or not there is an external world, but about whether that world (external or not) is independent of any minds. — bert1

I think the predicate "external" in this context is assumed to be synonymous with "independent of any minds". I don't see in what sense you / idealists mean that an "external world" might not be "independent of any minds" – such as the primordial universe before (the physical instantiation / embodiment of) "any minds" was possible – necessarily external of and independent of all minds, no? :chin:

I think the predicate "external" in this context is assumed to be synonymous with "independent of any minds". — 180 Proof

That is correct. I'm now regretting NOT selecting 'idealism' as that is what I actually believe.

I have repeated a passage in Bryan Magee's 'Schopenhauer's Philosophy' many times here:

'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.

Magee goes on to say:

...in practice it is surprisingly difficult to get transcendental idealism taken seriously, even by many good philosophers. Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it, whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' ‚ a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson's to Berkeleianism.

Likewise, G. E. Moore mused that, if idealism were correct, then the wheels of the train would dissappear when all the passengers were boarded, due to their not being perceived.

So what is going on here? My argument is that the ideas of what constitutes existence and non-existence are too simplistic. I don't believe that any mature idealism actually claims that the object (whether it be 'an apple' or the entire world) literally vanishes when not being perceived. What I think idealism is arguing is that any idea we have of existence (and so, non-existence) is in some basic sense a mental construct - vorstellung, in Schopenhauer's terminology, vijnana, in Buddhist philosophy. That is what the massively-elaborated h. sapien forebrain does with all that processing power - it generates worlds. And seeing that, as Schopenhauer says in his very first paragraph, is the basis of philosophical wisdom.

The idea that, outside perception, everything simply ceases, is to try and assume a viewpoint with no viewpoint. We can't imagine anything - not the apple, not 'the world' - outside the framework of concepts, somatic reactions and sensory perceptions within which the statement 'x exists' is meaningful. For the purposes of naturalism we assume a mind-independent domain of objects which has nothing to do with us, but that is a pragmatic judgement, not a metaphysical principle, and as such, one that surely quantum physics has well and truly torpedoed beneath the waterline.

So that's the sense in which I endorse idealism, and I should have checked it.

Quoting Schopenhauer and Brian Magee on Schopenhauer, excellent :up:!

The idea that, outside perception, everything simply ceases, is to try and assume a viewpoint with no viewpoint. We can't imagine anything - not the apple, not 'the world' - outside the framework of concepts, somatic reactions and sensory perceptions within which the statement 'x exists' is meaningful. For the purposes of naturalism we assume a mind-independent domain of objects which has nothing to do with us, but that is a pragmatic judgement, not a metaphysical principle, and as such, one that surely quantum physics has well and truly torpedoed beneath the waterline. — Wayfarer

Nice! I will say though by mentioning quantum physics, you are going to allow other people to smuggle red herrings as they try to prove your “amateur” understanding of QM wrong. Your argument can stand without it though I get why you included it.

Thanks!

by mentioning quantum physics... — schopenhauer1

Yes, I know. :roll: But I've done the readings, I'll defend my ground.

I'm not an idealist, but I think I understand the ontology more charitably than G.E. Moore and I also understand its attractions. I still think the most engaging, pellucid accounts of idealism I've encountered are those of Bernardo Kastrup - mainly via the odd paper, his blog and his engaging series of Essentia Foundation lectures on Analytic Idealism on YouTube. I haven't yet attempted the key books.

My argument is that the ideas of what constitutes existence and non-existence are too simplistic. I don't believe that any mature idealism actually claims that the object (whether it be 'an apple' or the entire world) literally vanishes when not being perceived. What I think idealism is arguing is that any idea we have of existence (and so, non-existence) is in some basic sense a mental construct - vorstellung, in Schopenhauer's terminology, vijnana, in Buddhist philosophy. That is what the massively-elaborated h. sapien forebrain does with all that processing power - it generates worlds. — Wayfarer

I think this is an elegant summary. Is it not the case that for 'object permanence' to hold (your car not vanishing when it is locked up in the garage), it needs some kind of guarantor for its 'ongoingness'. We seem to require some form of cosmic or universal consciousness or mind-at-large which holds the objectivity or scope of reality we inhabit.

I suspect it is this bit that is a big stumbling block for many, it's not just down to the fact that humans don't have access to some Archimedean point and essentially co-create reality.

Do you have thoughts on this mind-at-large? Schopenhauer calls it a striving blind, instinctive will. Berkeley, of course, calls it God. But clearly it doesn't have to be a God surrogate.

I appreciate the citations and your reflections on (transcendental) idealism. Still, there's that confusion, or conflation, of ontology with epistemology, which plagues even Kant-Schopenhauer-Magee, that yields conceptual incoherences such as (e.g.)

(A) "mind" must be an idea of itself that has an anxiliary idea called "world" (which is, in effect, solipsism (the noumenon?))

or

(B) 'world is an idea' (shadow?) of a mind in a world (cave?) with 'other minds' (which is just an unparsimoniously convoluted route back to ... naturalism).

As I discern it, Wayf, mind is nonmind-dependent insofar as it is embodied, ergo nonmind (aka "world") is not "mind-dependent" and is much more than just "my idea" in the way (e.g.) the territory must exceed in every way (re: dynamics, complexity) mapping of that territory. Kantianism sells that 'the territory is mapmaker-dependent' story (i.e. "world" is mind-dependent) which – like epicycles, etc – I'm still not buying. :smirk:

I still think the most engaging, pellucid accounts of idealism I've encountered are those of Bernardo Kastrup - mainly via the odd paper, his blog and his engaging series of Essentia Foundation lectures on Analytic Idealism on YouTube. — Tom Storm

I rather like him, I read (actually, listened to via my Audiobook sub) Decoding Schop's Metaphysics and have listened to part of More than Allegory, plus read various of his articles. He's actually building up a pretty substantial body of publications.

Do you have thoughts on this mind-at-large? Schopenhauer calls it a striving blind, instinctive will. Berkeley, of course, calls it God. But clearly it doesn't have to be a God surrogate. — Tom Storm

Buddhists would say that all attempts to conceptualise the 'real' in terms of mind-at- large is again a form of objectification or 'eternalism'. As you know, Buddhism generally rejects the idea of a creator deity and 'higher self'.

One of the Pali texts has the Buddha saying:

By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "non-existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, "existence" with reference to the world does not occur to one. — Kaccayanagotta Sutta

But then, in Buddhism, the 'origination of the world' is a psycho-physical process, not the act of divine creation. He goes on

"'Everything exists': That is one extreme. 'Everything doesn't exist': That is a second extreme. Avoiding these two extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma via the middle: From ignorance as a requisite condition come fabrications.... — Kaccayanagotta Sutta

And from that to the 'chain of dependent origination'. Due to attachment and 'clinging' the ordinary person doesn't see things as they truly are. And so on. Sorry for the excursion into Buddhist philosophy but it does provide an alternative kind of idealism (later fully elaborated in the Yogācāra and Vijñānavāda schools. I might add, I first encountered Kant through T R V Murti's Central Philosophy of Buddhism, which is what made these connections for me.)


:chin:

As I discern it, Wayf, mind is nonmind-dependent insofar as it is embodied, ergo nonmind (aka "world") is not "mind-dependent" and is much more than just "my idea" in the way (e.g.) the territory must exceed in every way (re: dynamics, complexity) mapping of that territory. Kantianism sells that 'the territory is mapmaker-dependent' story (i.e. "world" is mind-dependent) which – like epicycles, etc – I'm still not buying — 180 Proof

(Sorry about losing your formatting)

I tend to agree with you. Of course, the transcendental idealist has a ready answer for this: your notion of the embodied and of the non-mind is yet another example of uncritical transcendental realism that unjustifiably thinks it can get beyond the “correlation” and beyond the field of possible experience created by the subject in the first place. Thus, they would say, you’re begging the question, assuming the nonmind in order to prove it.

So doesn’t it come down to a meta-philosophical choice? Just as we might refuse to play the game of Cartesian scepticism and make a choice to begin in the world rather than in our heads—and in doing so show how the very idea of beginning in the head is historically conditioned, rather than trans-historically self-evident—we can similarly refuse to play the Kantian game and say yes, ok, we can only experience what we can experience, but I am convinced from experience and science that there is something nonmind to be experienced in the first place.

:up: Thanks. I imagined that Buddhism and Hinduism have a rich source of potential ideas in this space - Schop certainly thought so...

The hardest part for me is trying to conceptualise what all 'reality' being the product of mentation actually means. Why does it appear as it does - as physicalism? Why do we have the laws of physics we appear to have? What is physical suffering? More banally, why do UV rays cause skin cancer and just how can this phenomenon be understood as consciousness - mind when seen from a particular perspective? It's challenging to fit it, even provisionally.

No question is begged because nonmind is entailed by mind; which is more reasonable to conceive of as the dependent variable of the other is the crux of the issue for me, Jamal. So it does come down to a philosophical choice: the conceptual incoherences (sketched above) which result from conflating ontology with – reducing ontology to – epistemology and thereby eliminates 'the "world" as mind-dependent' of transcendental idealism as a rational option and leaving, by default, the pragmatic alternative of 'mind as world-dependent' of naturalism (or "transcendental realism" as you prefer) – incoherent or pragmatic? I choose the latter.

That’s quite agreeable.

:cool:

How about the following consideration: Of course there is an external reality, I notice that at the latest when I drive my car in front of a tree. But what do we do with external reality? We don't image them like a camera obscura does. We transform reality into a neural modal reality. We don't know how 'close' our neuronal reality is to the outside world and will never know, because we can only think with neurons. So we can't make a comparison. In addition, our brain constructs our reality, so it turns stimuli into a holistic spatio-temporal scenario. It creates this theater of consciousness, which we believe is identical to reality and, above all, that we can - transcendently - recognize it.
What an illusion!

I think the predicate "external" in this context is assumed to be synonymous with "independent of any minds". I don't see in what sense you / idealists mean that an "external world" might not be "independent of any minds" — 180 Proof

You may be right, but to my mind 'external' could just mean 'not me'. On a Berkeleyan system, there is a world external to me, and possibly external to my mind, but not external to God's mind. On a Spriggean idealist panpsychist scheme (which may satisfy realist intuitions better), there is an external world, but the entities in that world exist by virtue of their own minds. There's a lot of possibilities that hold that there is a world out there that is independent of me, and perhaps independent of any one particular mind, but each thing in that external world is itself dependent on one or more minds in one way or another. So idealism, depending on how it is construed, can be consistent with the existence of an external world. I think it important to distinguish these two senses of external (external to me or a particular mind, and external to any/every mind) as I think idealism is sometimes wrongly dismissed because people think it rejects the idea of a world external to me. Not that I'm necessarily an idealist, I'm undecided.

If I understand you correctly you are claiming that by denying that we can talk about the way things are independent of us I am talking about the way things are independent of us? — Fooloso4

Yes. That it is something we cannot talk about is one of its properties, you are therefore talking about it. I listed a few other properties. That it is external to us is another property about which we can talk.

Then there's the perpetually occult property of its containing objects that are 'as they are'...

So, would you say the world is external to human experience or not? — Janus

I think it's both. When we use the word 'world' in that context it encompasses both the variable products of human experience and the proposed causes of those experiences.

Trees are in the world. They are obviously to some extent a product of human experience (I doubt a creature at a radically different scale to us would identify such an object), but it is also constrained by factors external to our experience, otherwise we'd have no entropic factor in our models, no uncertainty.

That it is something we cannot talk about is one of its properties — Isaac

That we cannot talk about something independent of us is not a property of that thing as it is independent of us. That is not a statement about the world, it is a statement about us.

:ok: Gotcha.

Two cents. Or in this case….. kronenthalers.

We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition….

Because the topic is an objector’s misunderstanding of a “Kantian demonstration”, and without an intrinsic dualism the demonstration wouldn’t be Kantian at all, there are exactly two “impossibly deep levels of presupposition” with respect to empirical conditions, the first being the treatment of space and time concerned with intuitions, and the second being the categories concerned with conceptions.

…..and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them.

Them being the concepts as we normally use them, as we usually use them is in regard to the whole of the empirical world, the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect being the difficulty with which transcendental idealism always contends.

All that reduces to….the original disposition of the intellect is mere observation, from which arises the assumptions of the inborn, re: non-critical, realism, that the empirical world is in space and time.

Transcendental realism says it is, but, of course, it is not, and by which the untaintedness of transcendental idealism is justified. And THAT, is what Kantian transcendental philosophy, in the form of speculative pure reason, proves, given the validity of those aforementioned presuppositions.

As stated, Magee didn’t say, so I took the liberty. Hope you don’t mind.

The hardest part for me is trying to conceptualise what all 'reality' being the product of mentation actually means — Tom Storm

I make a tentative distinction between 'being' and 'reality'. The root of 'reality' is 'res', meaning 'thing'. So reality is the totality of things, and in that sense is the object of scientific analysis. But 'being' encompasses oneself, one's 'way of being', so it has a broader set of meanings. Much of Aristotle's metaphysics revolve around the various meanings of 'to be' (and, I learn, one of Heidegger's early influences was Brentano's study of the meaning of being, which remained an over-arching theme.)

Second point - Kant said (although this is not often acknowledged) that one might simultaneously be an empirical realist and transcendental idealist. According to Murti, whose book I mentioned, this has resonances with the 'Doctrine of Two Truths' in early Mahāyāna Buddhism (wiki.

But also notice:

Of course there is an external reality, I notice that at the latest when I drive my car in front of a tree. But what do we do with external reality? We don't image them like a camera obscura does. We transform reality into a neural modal reality. We don't know how 'close' our neuronal reality is to the outside world and will never know, because we can only think with neurons. So we can't make a comparison. — Wolfgang

:100: This is now becoming accepted by much cognitive science, although the implications are open diverging interpretations. But this is why (at risk of repetitiveness) I keep referring to Charles Pinter's book Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics. A sample:

The Eighteenth Century philosopher Immanuel Kant was the first thoroughly modern European thinker. His ideas about the human mind anticipated much of contemporary psychology: Indeed, most of the founding ideas of cognitive science are prefigured in Kant’s writings.

The process of mentally uniting many objects together into one global experience, he called transcendental apperception. Thus, transcendental apperception refers to the act of forming Gestalts. Kant had the original insight to recognize that a Gestalt is not merely a group of objects, but something entirely new and original. For example, the Big Dipper is not just a group of seven points, but is a pattern, in which the points play a supporting role. We can almost imagine the disembodied pattern without the points. He called a mental unity synthetic when it consists of being aware of a number of different things as one. There is one more element in Kant’s conception of Gestalts: In order to tie things together there must be a single common subject, or self, and her or his awareness must be unified. Kant had the insight to recognize that the self, or center, to which we attribute the experience of seeing and knowing, is itself a mental construction—something like distal attribution. (In the present case, proximal attribution.)

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 45-46). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

I think it's both. When we use the word 'world' in that context it encompasses both the variable products of human experience and the proposed causes of those experiences.

Trees are in the world. They are obviously to some extent a product of human experience (I doubt a creature at a radically different scale to us would identify such an object), but it is also constrained by factors external to our experience, otherwise we'd have no entropic factor in our models, no uncertainty. — Isaac

If I'm reading you right I agree. There is 'something' independent of any and all human experience and understanding which appears to us as the empirical world. For the sake of ordinary parlance we can say that something is the familiar world of naive realism, the @Banno world of cups and chairs, cupboards and cats on mats, or we can be more sophisticated and say that it is a quantum realm of differential energetic intensities, but both of these understandings, and others, are not independent of human experience and judgement, and we have no way of knowing how they might correspond to purportedly human-independent reality.

This would seem to make the notion of human-independent reality useless to us, even incoherent. It's a closed book to us, but the fact that there is this closed book has great significance for human life, because it renders it a profound mystery to which we can respond in any way that seems right to us, only limited by our imaginations. In that sense we really do construct our own realities.

We can also suspend all judgement on that front and see and live the non-dual nature of our experience, and become comfortable with uncertainty and undecidability; find our best lives in the ataraxia of the Pyrrhonian skeptics.

Trees are in the world. They are obviously to some extent a product of human experience (I doubt a creature at a radically different scale to us would identify such an object), but it is also constrained by factors external to our experience, otherwise we'd have no entropic factor in our models, no uncertainty. — Isaac

:100:

I think one of the typical objections to what I'm describing as 'idealism' is 'if the world is "in the mind" how come you can't bend it to your will?' But again, this is where ascertaining what the idealist attitude is actually saying is quite difficult.

I don't think idealism (at least as I understand it) amounts to the claim that 'the world is in your mind' tout courte. I take idealism to mean that there is an ineluctably subjective basis to what we instinctively assume to be a purely objective reality (that's the aspect that Kant first identifies). And as naturalism has had a tendency to try to arrive at theoretical descriptions only in terms of what is objectively given, it will not be able to see that.

But this understanding is starting to become evident in even in science and philosophy. Overall I think there's a shift away from traditional materialism (in the sense meant by Armstrong and Smart) and that the concept of mind in nature is undergoing a major change (an example being the biosemiotics that Apokrisis has so ably explained, which is inspired in large part by Peirce, who is sometimes categorised as an objective idealist.)