I can see no good reason at all to believe that, because I can see no genuine problem with the notion that they originated independently of our experiences. — John
Awareness does not dependent on being thought about or recalled in memory. And it is most definitely a conscious experience. I don't need to think about how the stove was hot for it to be hot. I just feel that in the moment. — TheWillowOfDarkness
They haven't "originally" occurred independent of our experiences at any time though. They are part of causal system all bound-up together. Ancestral events prior to us cannot be given without our experiences. — TheWillowOfDarkness
You are missing that, in that instance, the statue is named. You began by pointing at a statue. The object you were thinking of has been there all along. Similarity, Brassier begins by talking about Saturn. What object someone is pointing at is always, assuming a coherent claim about the world is made, given in talking about some state of the world (statue, Saturn, etc.,etc.). — TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't think the mere appeal to prehistory suffices, though, which is all these criticisms ever amount to.
The past, if you like, is like a rule of thumb: it's a schema for extending the way something can be manipulated 'backward.' It's projected by experience, not something that was 'really there' as if before it. — The Great Whatever
In the moment, even experience is timeless. I don't place any of my experiences in time until I've passed into a different state of experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness
before homo sapiens, via radiocarbon — mcdoodle
I've presented my reasons for thinking that Meillasoux' argument fails, that the so-called "problem" with ancestrality is a faux problem. — John
What Meillassoux goes on to fret about, as I understand him, is that in a certain scientific schema, we 'know' beyond reasonable doubt - indeed we can 'know absolutely' - that certain events happened in certain time-scales before homo sapiens, via radiocarbon dating, and that because of this, all we think we know about contingency and necessity has to be rethought. For myself, that's where I don't follow him. — mcdoodle
I hope you don't mind an inconsequential quibble, but radiocarbon dating relies on carbon-14, which has a rather short half-live (5,730 years), and isn't reliable past 62,000 years. A variety of other isotopes enable radiometric dating all the way back (with ever coarser resolutions) to several billion years in the past. — Pierre-Normand
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