Do you see the difference in that, and this: the world of my cognition. The empirical world you are now cognizing must be the same world I am now cognizing, else there must be as many empirical worlds are there are cognizers, which is absurd. The world of your, or my or anyone’s, cognition, on the other hand, is singular and private. If you were to say the world of your cognition did not exist before you were born you’d be correct without equivocation, but the empirical world of my cognition remains existent and unaffected. — Mww

I am not sure about this. I believe that 'our' empirical worlds are similar. They might have the same structure owing to the fact that, as humans, we share the same sensible and cognitive faculties. But there is a fundamental 'privateness' of my experience that suggests to me that my empirical world is indeed 'mine'. This doesn't imply, of course, that we can have an intersubjective agreement.

We haven’t yet agreed the world, or reality, whichever, is mind-independent? I should hope we have, in which case, if in any time your mind didn’t exist the existence of a world is irrelevant, and for the time in which your mind does exist…..it doesn’t but suffice it to say you have one…..the world was already there awaiting your perception. Or, which is the same thing, the world is given, in order for you to even have perceptions for your mind to work on. — Mww

But if the 'world' is given and is knowable I am not sure how transcendental/epistemic idealism isn't a form of direct realism.
I would say that epistemic idealists do not hold any views about what is 'given'. The empirical world is always constructed, 'given' in a secondary sense. That is, we can analyse and study our empirical world so for empirical knowledge the empirical world is given. But this doesn't negate the point that in transcendental idealism the empirical world is a representation/construct of sensible and congnitive faculties of the mind.

But perhaps I'm not grasping something about transcendental idealism.

The gist of the first Critique is, basically, one shouldn’t worry so much about the answers he can’t get, but more the questions he wouldn’t even have asked if only he’d thought about it a bit more. — Mww

But aren't these qurstions precisely those relating the world 'in-itself'? That is independent of forms of sensibility and categories (which are both mental)?

The common rejoinder is that it isn’t the exact same thing. A bug’s world is different from a fish’s world. But that’s not really the case, is it. The world from a bug’s perspective is different than the world from a fish’s perspective, but the world itself, is what it is regardless of either. Same with all other beings, I should think, or there comes mass contradictions. — Mww

Well, I guess that this is true if one assumes a transcendental idealist position.

But if one accepts that there is an intelligible external reality which can in principle be known (and we know/understand in part as it is possible to us), then, there are no different 'worlds' here but different understandings of the world, one perhaps more correct than the other.

Havin’ fun yet? — Mww

Yup :smile:

Then how are you supposed to convince me of what you say with such confidence if it has no demonstrable consequence for anything. If there is no demonstrable consequence for anything, how am I to be convinced that what you are saying actually means something and not just a bunch of words strung together like:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Sure, I understand all the words. Sure, is grammatical. I can read it...

But am I saying anything ... ?

Then how are you supposed to convince me — Apustimelogist

I put the case as best I can but understand that most people are not going to persuaded by it. The OP asks a rhetorical question, ‘does anyone really support a mind-independent reality?’ If a ‘mind-independent reality’ is to be questioned, how could that be made subject to empirical demonstration? Could it?

I believe that 'our' empirical worlds are similar. — boundless

As do I. I have no reason yet, to think they are not, allowing for differences in experience.

They might have the same structure owing to the fact that, as humans, we share the same sensible and cognitive faculties. — boundless

Or, they may seem to have the same structure, because they do.

But there is a fundamental 'privateness' of my experience that suggests to me that my empirical world is indeed 'mine'. This doesn't imply, of course, that we can have an intersubjective agreement. — boundless

Unless it is the case your experiences are of representations of the empirical world, and not the world itself. The representations, then, are indeed your own, born of your own intellect, from which the notion that your experiences are indeed your own receives its justifications.

Fundamental privateness of your experiences, yep; fundamental privateness of the empirical world….nahhhh. Share-sies, dude. This land is your land this land is my land and all that kinda hippie prophetizing, donchaknow.
————-

But if the 'world' is given and is knowable I am not sure how transcendental/epistemic idealism isn't a form of direct realism. — boundless

Transcendental philosophy presupposes direct realism. There is an inescapable duality intrinsic to that method.

I would say that epistemic idealists do not hold any views about what is 'given'. — boundless

I’m ok with that, although I might quibble regarding the view they would all say that it is given. No views on what is given, but holding with the view that something is given.

we can analyse and study our empirical world so for empirical knowledge the empirical world is given. — boundless

I disagree. For empirical knowledge, the empirical world is given. To know is to know about something. The analysis and study from which knowledge follows, is of representation of the empirical world, which are constructs of the human cognitive system. A.K.A., experience.

…..in transcendental idealism the empirical world is a representation/construct of sensible and congnitive faculties of the mind. — boundless

The empirical world is a representation, the conception of the totality of real things of possible experience. But the empirical world is not a thing we know; we know only of representations of things in it. And because it is a mere conception, there is no sensibility involved, no intuition hence no phenomenon, which explains why knowledge of it is impossible.

In Kant and the Enlightenmrnt era natural philosophy, the world is a general conception, having all possible existent things subsumed under it. The ancients called such conceptions Universals.
————-

But if one accepts that there is an intelligible external reality which can in principle be known (and we know/understand in part as it is possible to us), then, there are no different 'worlds' here but different understandings of the world, one perhaps more correct than the other. — boundless

Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. If this is your position as well, perhaps we’ve just been tangled up in words. And maybe a scattered misplaced principle here and there.

To me, however, it isn't granted. It's a mystery that 'cries' for an explanation (which in turn might 'cries' for another and so on). — boundless

Fair enough. We will just have to agree to disagree.

If that is the case, it seems to me that the 'mental' is somehow fundamental (at least as a fundamental aspect of physical reality as some panpsychist affirm) — boundless

My use of the word physicalism is maybe misleading, but I like using the word because it captures where my side of these arguments leans toward.

I agree with some that the "physical" as a metaphysical category is difficult to make substantial because at the end of the day, we just construct models of things in the world from what we can point out and is plucked out of what we see empirically, which we do through "experience".

Everything we model boils down to (counterfactual) regularities or structures in experience, and I cannot further specify about experience other than the fact that they are informative. I would even say that there is no other property I can draw out of my experiences other than the notion of informativeness - i.e. making distinctions.

But nonetheless, our epistemic activities lead to a hierarchy of models explaining how the world behaves in increasingly general (i.e. fundamental) ways that, in principle, supervene on each other in a way describable in terms of coarse-graining as an epistemic consequence of the resolution of our perceptual / observational / technological apparati. At the end of the day, any models we construct about the world that survive just end up being either subsumed under "physical" or supervening on what is subsumed under "physical", so the physical as a metaphysical category seems vacuous because we just use it to subsume all our successful models.

Obviously, all our epistemic activities and their consequences are embedded and enacted within experience - surely experience is fundamental? But the aforementioned models of the natural world are the only ones we have, and they tell us that experience relates to the events described in those by the same kind of coarse-graining. Experiences are not as fundamental as the things being described by our models of the world at more fine-scaled levels of description, and with more causal generality. There is a kind of dual-nature to this insofar that experiences are structures that both: 1) supervene on brain activity; 2) In virtue of how experiences model the world, we can also say that they are about structures beyond our sensory boundary that supervene on other finer-grained or general structures beyond our sensory boundaries. Structures are just what we can consistently distinguish about the world beyond our boundaries. Perhaps the kind of dual-aspect thing, and other information processing properties elicit the intuition we have for dualism or ontologically separate mental "stuff".

My view of physicalism is more akin to a naturalism that asserts these models as the only ones we have. Because of the hard problem and perhaps other reasons (God? Religion? Spirituality? Supernatural? Parapsychology?), people try to assert additional models. The problem is that reality fails to give persistent indications of these things. But people still assert them, and naturalism (physicalism) is mostly a stance against that.

Human knowledge has not given us models of the mental that do not just relate to more fundamental descriptions through coarse/fine-graining. There is no evidence for mental substance (or similar category) that is separate from what our other physical models describe, and can make a difference to what those things describe. Nothing else is added beyond fine/coarse-graining of information. If the mental and cognitive fits into our hierarchy of scientific models via coarse-fine graining, it is then hard to make sense of them as more fundamental since they are not the most general or fine-grained way of describing what happens in the world. The mental supervenes on interactions at the bio-chemical level. At the same time, bio-chemical models are embedded in and describe or enact structural relations through our "experiences"; all physical models do this and so there is no sense that my physical models are talking about some kind of "substance" inherently incompatible with the nature of experience itself; they just track structural relations through whatever perspectival manifold or space our epistemic activities are furnished on. Experience itself is difficult to articulate anything about other than the property of informativeness or distinguishability (e.g. direct acquaintance), which has structure.

Experience is structure. What physical models pick out about the world is structure. There is no inherent incompatibility when no intrinsic "substance" is attributed to either the experiential or what physical models are about, but we know that the structures of experience cannot be the bottom. And in principle, more elaborate structures (than naive experience) that describe brains, cognition and their relation to the world beyonds their boundaries may be able to better explain why experiential structures are limited in certain ways with regard to information about what they supervene on, and why our own explanations about them are limited. These limitations may be why we seem to have intuitions that there is something more to the mental beyond their place in the hierarchy of models about reality.

But to emphasize, all I have been talking about is this notion of structure. So there is an inherent agnosticism (or even rejection) about fundamental metaphysics, and even a skepticism about there being anything to say about it beyond what our intelligible models of reality say. These intelligible models are just the ones I have been talking about all along, with the physical at the core on which other models supervene or relate through coarse/fine-graining.

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical.

From this, there is no sense in which the mental can be the most fundamental as a model of how the world works, imo.

Woops, premature post.

you are conflating the belief with an 'external world' in generale and a 'physical world' in particular. I would say that abandoning the second is certainly counter-intuitive and probably incorrect but not necessarily 'irrational'. — boundless

I'm just suggesting that we innately believe (intuitively, not deductively or verbally) there is an external world. Classifying it as physical, material etc depends on some later learnings.

I would say that if one denies the existence any kind of external reality (solipsism) or affirms that, at most, there might be something else but we do not interact in any way with that is irrational.

I agree. That is contradicted by our basic intuitions.

If knowledge about the 'physical world' is empirical, it is true IMO that, in fact, what is directly known to us are sensations and perceptions (i.e. sensations organised within a conceptual framework). It seems to me that he is right that we can't conceive anything 'physical' with no relation with the 'world of experience'. — boundless

I can accept that there is SOME relation to the world of experience. It's iterative: we start with out innate instincts, then have experiences we interpret through the lens of our instincts, creating a revised lens through which the next tier of experiences are interpretted. Rinse. Repeat.

you would agree that 'the world we experience' is, in fact, a mental construction of sorts. In which case, an external 'physical' world would be somethin we haven't direct access to and we have no way to verify if it is really 'there' or not ( — boundless

Agreed.

The (strictly) 'ontological' idealist would say that the 'fact' that we imagine that the 'external physical world' in terms of the 'world of experience' is a reasonable reason to deny that there is something different from either minds and mental contents. The epistemic idealist would say that the same 'fact' leads us to the conclusion that we can't know anything about such a 'world' (note that Kant, in my understanding, rejected traditional metaphysics because he thought that it could not give us true knowledge... not sure about what he would say to someone who asserts that he doesn't claim to have certain knowledge but confident, but not certain, beliefs...). — boundless

Based on your description, I'd consider the strict ontological idealist irrational, because he has no rational basis to defeat his innate belief. The reasoning seems to be: I'm possibly wrong therefore I'm wrong.

The epistemic idealist could be rational, but only if he applies that this skepticism consistently - which entails general extreme skepticism.

Personally, I don't think that Bradley's argument is decisive or anything like that. But, certainly, it is not something to be overlooked. — boundless

If this just means we should be willing to question everything, I'm OK with it. I'm not OK with jumping to intellectual nihilism.

What do you think about this [matrix scenario]?

Excellent analogy. I see your point- it makes perfect sense.

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical. — Apustimelogist

That sounds close to logical positivism—reducing reality to what our best scientific models can express, and treating everything else as non-serious. But positivism has been mainly abandoned due to its internal contradictions. Most notably, the claim that only empirically testable claims are meaningful isn’t itself an empirically testable claim so it is, as the saying goes, hoist by its own petard.

And more broadly, the assumption that metaphysics supervenes on physics is itself a metaphysical position—one that treats physical science as a final vocabulary. But that’s a philosophical stance, not a scientific result. But as you said before you will only be persuaded by an empirical argument, everything else, you say, is 'empty words'. Part of the same contradiction noted above.

The problem is that reality fails to give persistent indications of these things. But people still assert them, and naturalism (physicalism) is mostly a stance against that. — Apustimelogist

And that's because you look exclusively through the 'objectivist' stance that characterises scientific positivism.

I'm not OK with jumping to intellectual nihilism. — Relativist

So, you believe that 'idealism' (or in modern terms 'constructivism') is nihilistic, because it denies the external world?

I'm not OK with jumping to intellectual nihilism.
— Relativist

So, you believe that 'idealism' (or in modern terms 'constructivism') is nihilistic, because it denies the external world? — Wayfarer

No. It's an implication of mistrusting our basic instincts, our senses and our cognitive structure. If those are denied, no beliefs can be justified- that would be intellectual nihilism. Does anyone take idealism that far? I don't know. I was just identifying what I think would be going too far. My point is better understood in the context I wrote it:
"If this just means we should be willing to question everything, I'm OK with it. I'm not OK with jumping to intellectual nihilism."

I was bookending it between a innocuous extreme and a noxious one.

But to emphasize, all I have been talking about is this notion of structure. So there is an inherent agnosticism (or even rejection) about fundamental metaphysics, and even a skepticism about there being anything to say about it beyond what our intelligible models of reality say. These intelligible models are just the ones I have been talking about all along, with the physical at the core on which other models supervene or relate through coarse/fine-graining. — Apustimelogist

Thanks for the post. Not sure if I understood the whole of it (some parts are beyond my grasp...), but I hope to have understand the gist of what you did write.

Anyway, it seems to me that you are saying:

(1) Experience is structured and we have cognitive/perceptual structures that allow us to make intelligible models of the 'world';
(2) Experience is not self-enclosed, i.e. we need to posit something 'outside' of it, which grounds both experience itself and the structure of it;
(3) That 'external world' has its own structure, otherwise we could not get an intelligible 'world of experience';
(4) We can't have access to knowledge about the intrinsic and fundamental properties of that world.

Assuming that I am not misrepresenting you, it boils down for me to how we understand (4). The agnosticism that you refer for me is an indication that your position would be best described with a general label 'realism', rather than naturalism or physicalism (if we understand these two terms in an ontological way). That is, you posit the existence of an external, structured 'reality' about which, however, we can't know very much.

Also, you share with many physicalists the skepticism about something like some claims about consciousness, spirituality, religion and so on. I guess that, if you want to call 'physicalist' your position IMO you are fine doing that. But, again IMO, from a metaphysical 'classification', I would think that your position should be called a form of 'realism'.

Regarding the 'hard problem', I do believe, however, that it is a very profound problem and, like intelligibility, to me suggest that the 'mental' must be in some sense fundamental. I have found no explanation of the propeerites of consicousness in 'physical' terms that have been satisfying. Emergentism, for instance, at a certain point seems like saying "and somehow we get consciosness" due to the fact that there seem no physical properties in virtue of which we can 'derive' consciousness. Other models like epiphenomenalism seems to just contradict experience (consciousness does have an effect on our body). And so on.
But I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

I'm just suggesting that we innately believe (intuitively, not deductively or verbally) there is an external world. Classifying it as physical, material etc depends on some later learnings. — Relativist

And I'm suggesting that even the ontological idealist actually believes in an external world. It's just a very counterintuitive picture of that world but it's nevertheless true that there is an external world (the other minds).

I agree. That is contradicted by our basic intuitions. — Relativist

Ok!

I can accept that there is SOME relation to the world of experience. It's iterative: we start with out innate instincts, then have experiences we interpret through the lens of our instincts, creating a revised lens through which the next tier of experiences are interpretted. Rinse. Repeat. — Relativist

Yes, it seems reasonable. If one believes that there is an external physical world it must have some structural similarities with the 'world of our experience'.

Based on your description, I'd consider the strict ontological idealist irrational, because he has no rational basis to defeat his innate belief. The reasoning seems to be: I'm possibly wrong therefore I'm wrong. — Relativist

I can see why you are saying that. But I disagree that this is a real problem for the ontological idealist. As I said, the ontological idealist would retort that he's not denying the external world. Rather, he simply asserts that everything is mental and there is a plurality of interacting minds.

The epistemic idealist could be rational, but only if he applies that this skepticism consistently - which entails general extreme skepticism. — Relativist

Ok! But I would even say more... if the epistemic idealist position is strictly followed it would imply that skepticism or even an 'illusionist' position where nothing that is understandable according to, say, plurality, distinctiveness and so on is ultimately real. After all, if those concepts are valid only in the context of the 'empirical world', then, they might well be unapplicable outside of it. And if one accepts that the 'empirical world' and the associated mind are not ontologically fundamental (which would imply a negation of empirical idealism BTW), then, I see no other conclusions as saying that either fundamental, ultimate reality is a oneness or neither one nor many.

If this just means we should be willing to question everything, I'm OK with it. I'm not OK with jumping to intellectual nihilism. — Relativist

Yes, I would say the first. But, maybe, we can't know 'ultimate reality' or even 'reality as it is'. Not sure if that would be intellectual nihilism for you. I don't. Intellectual knowledge would still have its own merits.

Excellent analogy. I see your point- it makes perfect sense. — Relativist

Thanks. BTW, I believe that the 'shared dream' analogy is even better than the 'Matrix' one.
Note that if the dream is shared, then, there is still an external reality. After all, other minds are not mental contents. If you like, ontological idealism is quite similar to this scenario (with the difference of course that the 'shared dream' is not dependent on technology).

Or, they may seem to have the same structure, because they do. — Mww

Agreed. I have a tendency to use 'might', 'may' far too often even in casual conversations. So, yes, sometimes even if I am sure about something I use the hypotheticals/conditionals.

Fundamental privateness of your experiences, yep; fundamental privateness of the empirical world….nahhhh. Share-sies, dude. This land is your land this land is my land and all that kinda hippie prophetizing, donchaknow. — Mww

Well, it depends on about we understand the word 'world'. Yes, Kant believed in an external reality but he did believe that we don't have an unmediated knowledge of it. In fact, to us what is 'given' it's an already pre-ordained world, the empirical world, which is already modeled in sensible and intellectual categories (like space, time, pluarality and so on). I wasn't saying that the empirical world is 'private' in the sense that is a creation of our mind. But certainly, it's not either the external reality as it is, otherwise Kant would agree with the naive idealist (a thing that I doubt). If it's not the external reality, then, you must say that it's at best partly internal (private*) and partly external.

Transcendental philosophy presupposes direct realism. There is an inescapable duality intrinsic to that method. — Mww

If that were the case, then, what's the point of transcendental idealism? You might say that it is direct realist in the sense that the empirical world is the external world as is given to us already organised by our mental faculties. But if Kant had said direct access to the external world in itself, then, why a positing a distinction between the empirical world and the world in itself?

I disagree. For empirical knowledge, the empirical world is given. To know is to know about something. The analysis and study from which knowledge follows, is of representation of the empirical world, which are constructs of the human cognitive system. A.K.A., experience. — Mww

Ok, I think I agree here.

The empirical world is a representation, the conception of the totality of real things of possible experience. But the empirical world is not a thing we know; we know only of representations of things in it. And because it is a mere conception, there is no sensibility involved, no intuition hence no phenomenon, which explains why knowledge of it is impossible. — Mww

OK, I see. But if the empirical world is a 'representation' then it can't be a 'direct realism', except in the sense that we have direct knowledge of the representation. Direct realism asserts that we have direct knowledge of the 'world in itself'.

In Kant and the Enlightenmrnt era natural philosophy, the world is a general conception, having all possible existent things subsumed under it. The ancients called such conceptions Universals. — Mww

Well, (some of) the 'ancients' believed that the world was actually mind-independent, except in the case of the Mind of God. In a sense, then, they would agree that the woruld is a 'general conception', only in the sense that it is the creation of the Divine Mind and it is an intelligible structure that reflect that.
However, they would disagree with Kant's skepticism about 'how the world is in itself'.

Pretty much what I’ve been saying all along. If this is your position as well, perhaps we’ve just been tangled up in words. And maybe a scattered misplaced principle here and there. — Mww

I am not sure if we agree. In fact, I still do not have a 'stable' view on all of this. I am tentatively leaning on something like 'some of the ancients' view' in the past paragraph.

But yes, I believe that we got some misunderestandings because we used (and use) the words differently and from your response it seems to me that we have a similar understanding of what Kant thought, which would be very good for if it is true :smile:
To be fair, probably I am using the words in an imprecise way (after all I do not read anything written by Kant from ages...)

Anyway, it seems to me that you are saying: .... — boundless

I think this is more or less an acceptable interpretation.

I would think that your position should be called a form of 'realism'. — boundless

Hmm, I think it is compatible with realism and anti-realism, because I am just appealing to our models, claiming that our best models of reality don't point to the mental as fundamental among the things they talk about.

Regarding the 'hard problem', I do believe, however, that it is a very profound problem and, like intelligibility, to me suggest that the 'mental' must be in some sense fundamental. I have found no explanation of the propeerites of consicousness in 'physical' terms that have been satisfying. — boundless

My line on this has always been that I think that there will always be things a brain or mind cannot explain, and so arguments like the knowledge argument or inverted qualia or whatever don't need to be construed as having any ontological import. From my perspective, saying that the mental is fundamental is about as informative as saying that structure is fundamental - I don't think these views are distinguishable, and I would rather lean to the latter rather than the former, if just to have a story to tell about things in reality. But it doesn't really say much.

I don't think saying that the mental is fundamental really solves the hard problem either. All resulting metaphysical views have an issue with the problem that our direct experiences seem to look completely irreducible to descriptions that science says are more fundamental because they seem to occupy a higher scale of reality. Panpsychism doesn't solve that, it just reframes the problem in a different way - the combination problem - which requires also something like a strong emergence of macroscopic experiential phenomena, which imo kind of has the same properties as substance dualism. The problem is for me that there is no scientific evidence of something like this strong emergence, which would result in epiphenomenalism also. So I don't think the problems you have with certain views are not necessarily resolved by panpsychism.

That sounds close to logical positivism — Wayfarer

Well it is not.

And more broadly, the assumption that metaphysics supervenes on physics is itself a metaphysical position — Wayfarer

No, its just what the body of scientific knowledge looks like, and thereis no evidence to the contrary.

But as you said before you will only be persuaded by an empirical argument, — Wayfarer

Its about not including things in my account of things that don't have any difference. Its fine to say that we view the world from specific perspectives based on our brain machinery and how it interacts with the world, in the sense that there is information about stuff in the world, information for making predictions, that the brain does not have access to or is not able to utilize. In principle someone could have a different brain that can utilize this information, or use technology to gain access to things we ordinarily wouldn't.

But to say that there is a world out there, it is not the same as we perceive, yet there is no way to unveil what we cannot perceive, is meaningless, especially when we perceive the world through physical interactions. Its like saying there is something out there that the mind-independent world is like which has no physical consequences and no mental consequences either since we are talking about the noumena. I don't see a reason to entertain this anymore, its not saying anything. On the otherhand, if something like what a clock measures can find broad agreement, where discrepancies seem to be about our limited access to the physical world rather than the mental, there is no reason to think this is still obscuring some kind of further aspect of time in the mind-independent world which has no way of affecting anything we do anyway.

And that's because you look exclusively through the 'objectivist' stance that characterises scientific positivism. — Wayfarer

I like LSD and The Doors as much as the next guy, they just don't tell me much about the way the world that I see with my eyes is.

Kant believed in an external reality but he did believe that we don't have an unmediated knowledge of it. — boundless

Agreed. So what mediates between the external reality in perception, to empirical knowledge in experience, if not the intelligence directly affected by that reality. Again, that intrinsic dualism pervades the method.

In fact, to us what is 'given' it's an already pre-ordained world, the empirical world, which is already modeled in sensible and intellectual categories (like space, time, pluarality and so on). — boundless

Ok, as long as pre-ordained just means the world is what it is, regardless of how it got to be what it is. But the world isn’t already modeled, insofar as the mode of our cognitive system is representational, which just is to construct a model, mentally, in conjunction with the effect an object has on the senses, physiologically.

But if the empirical world is a 'representation' then it can't be a 'direct realism', except in the sense that we have direct knowledge of the representation. Direct realism asserts that we have direct knowledge of the 'world in itself'. — boundless

I’m not a fan of these -isms. Guy doesn’t like things the way they are, he just creates another -ism to cover what he thought was missing in the one before it. I take the two words, direct and real, and the only situation where those two go together without contradicting each other, is the relation between things in the world, and our perception of them. We perceive real things directly. What more needs to be said?

….what's the point of transcendental idealism? — boundless

There are three: establish the validity of synthetic a priori cognitions, which in turn establishes a non-self-contradictory method for acquiring empirical knowledge, contra Hume, which in turn defines the limits of pure reason contra Berkeley’s brand of dogmatic, re: purely subjective, idealism.

….probably I am using the words in an imprecise way…. — boundless

….and I am probably being overly precise.

:100:
(All your posts in this thread.)

So touching to see the camaradie amongst the forum positivists.

Someone doesn't have to be a positivist to disagree with your ideas.

Of course not, and that was not why I described your views as positivist. It was more in response to posts such as:

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical — Apustimelogist

Which meets the description of positivism. (I’ve also posted a separate OP on the subject.)

I think this is more or less an acceptable interpretation. — Apustimelogist

Good!

Hmm, I think it is compatible with realism and anti-realism, because I am just appealing to our models, claiming that our best models of reality don't point to the mental as fundamental among the things they talk about. — Apustimelogist

Ok. Anti-realism about models perhaps, but it seems to me that you are pretty certain that there is an external, independent reality.

From my perspective, saying that the mental is fundamental is about as informative as saying that structure is fundamental - I don't think these views are distinguishable, and I would rather lean to the latter rather than the former, if just to have a story to tell about things in reality. — Apustimelogist

Interesting that you too see the similarity here.

I don't think saying that the mental is fundamental really solves the hard problem either. All resulting metaphysical views have an issue with the problem that our direct experiences seem to look completely irreducible to descriptions that science says are more fundamental because they seem to occupy a higher scale of reality. Panpsychism doesn't solve that, it just reframes the problem in a different way - the combination problem - which requires also something like a strong emergence of macroscopic experiential phenomena, which imo kind of has the same properties as substance dualism. The problem is for me that there is no scientific evidence of something like this strong emergence, which would result in epiphenomenalism also. So I don't think the problems you have with certain views are not necessarily resolved by panpsychism. — Apustimelogist

I agree that panpsychism by itself doesn't solve the hard problem for the reasons you allude here. It certainly mitigates it, however. If some kind of 'rudimental' mentality is there in the more fundamental level of physical reality, we IMO have a more consciouness-friendly world than the usual 'physicalist' position. One might think that 'consciousness' exists as a 'latent potential' in panpsychist position (which is fully actualized in conscious beings).
And, in fact, I believe that some form of panpsychism are probably the most credible option for a 'naturalist' account of mind which, in turn, however renders the usage of the terminology 'physicalism' dubious, however.

Anyway, since I lean more towards the 'idealist' side of things, I do not endorse panpsychism.

Agreed. So what mediates between the external reality in perception, to empirical knowledge in experience, if not the intelligence directly affected by that reality. Again, that intrinsic dualism pervades the method. — Mww

To summarize the position one IMO can also say: there is an external reality but how it appears to us is shaped by the intellectual and sensible faculties of the mind. And it's impossible to 'disentangle' the contribution of the mind to the way the world appears.

But the world isn’t already modeled, insofar as the mode of our cognitive system is representational, which just is to construct a model, mentally, in conjunction with the effect an object has on the senses, physiologically. — Mww

I wonder how however this is consistent with the larger framework of the transcendental idealist philosophy. I think that causality is also a conceptual category for Kant in which we 'ordain' experience. The world in itself is not the 'cause' of the empirical world.

We perceive real things directly. What more needs to be said? — Mww

But the way we perceive them is probably not the way they are. Naive realism asserts that we perceive things as they are. Direct realist asserts that our perceptions give us direct access to the external world in itself and we can know how the world is independent on the mental representations.
So probably Kant would agree that we somehow perceive 'real things directly' but we can't know whether they really are as they appear to us.

There are three: establish the validity of synthetic a priori cognitions, which in turn establishes a non-self-contradictory method for acquiring empirical knowledge, contra Hume, which in turn defines the limits of pure reason contra Berkeley’s brand of dogmatic, re: purely subjective, idealism. — Mww

Ok, I see.

….and I am probably being overly precise. — Mww

Well, the advantage of being overly precise is clarity.

Ok. Anti-realism about models perhaps, but it seems to me that you are pretty certain that there is an external, independent reality. — boundless

Well, as it happens often in philosophy terminology can be confusing.

If by 'realism' one means that our models do have necessarily correspondence with reality if they 'work', I guess that yes your view might be classed as 'anti-realist'.

But 'realism' and 'antirealism' have also an ontological meaning. In the most general sense, 'realism' in this context means that there is an independent reality that is in principle knowable. 'Anti-realism' is the denial of this (and I saw it used as a flat denial of any kind of independent reality).

Well I think any non-positivists, physicalists, naturalism-ists can say that too.

I just wanted more clarity on the meaning of space and time as about in the head, not outside it. Clearly, what we perceive is embedded in what is going on in our heads. Clearly we cannot perceive / experience everything, every event in the physical reality outside our heads that makes a difference that has an effect on other things in reality. But nonetheless, I think what we do experience, or at least a significant amount of it has a broadly consistent mapping to specific things that actually go on. To me, that is enough to say that we see real stuff in a weak sense. I think there is no observable intrinsic fact-of-the-matter about representation, only a dynamic statistical coupling between brains and the world which a scientist or philosopher can cash out as representation. The coupling is enough. If I think of veridicality weakly in terms of a kind of coupling or mapping then there is not really a sense that I could exhaustively couple a system to the rest of reality and have it miss anything about reality. When stuff is missed, it because there are couplings missing that give us novel information. Space and time can also be seen in terms of these kinds of couplings, at least the concepts we have made reasonably precise by measurement (i.e. objective time). My subjective sense of space and especially time may be more fallible or is different for various reasons (e.g. speculatively: because time and space are inferred through informational properties of the brain which can be easily perturbed, e.g. if I close my eyes, I lose some of the information required to specify physical space (at least at some allowable resolution) and become more reliant on say body information than I normally would; if subjective time could plausibly related to information flow (e.g. something like entropic time by ariel caticha, possibly), then information processing in my head may distort my sense of time).

So maybe there are discrepancies between objective time "inside" and "outside" as it were but only in some sense that informative couplings have been missed to some part of reality. Good example is obviously relativity phenomena like time-dilation. Maybe the way brains work or learn over time mean that mappings or couplings can be established or parcelled out in different ways; but nonetheless these are just different mappings to events that actually occur, and they are overlapping or inter-relatable so that even though I may be measuring in inches or centimeters, because they are being mapped to the same stuff in reality, there is no sense that these different perspectives are telling me anything new or different about space. And there is nothing else to know about space beyond my sensory boundaries unless that thing to know about space makes some physical difference (because space is physical) to observations and theories and experiential perceptions.

Yes, I can make sense of the fact that there is stuff about reality that I and no one else can see right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't in principle mappable or coupl-able. Seems what you are saying is that there is some sense in which any kind of coupling misses something about the physical reality of time. But to me, that doesn't make too much sense because it seems to be saying that there are events out there that don't affect anything. In quantum theory, maybe there is an interesting exception in the sense that couplings disturb reality, but from my perspective of quantum theory, this isn't intrinsic to how reality (fundamentally speaking) works but just reflects a kind of very persistent kind of physically confounding effect not in principle different to the kinds of measurement confounds in any other kind of science; for instance, observer or hawthorne effects or demand characteristics in psychology (one might note, for example, that methods like weak measurement and other ways of getting weak values can be seen as approximating information about the undisturbed quantum state, so in some ways this is an example of avoiding measurement disturbance comparable to if one had some kind of technique for avoiding demand charcteristics [like observing someone who doesn't know they are being watched]).

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical — Apustimelogist

Well, I have come to the conclusion that if we cannot say more about reality than models that in some sense couple to it, there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics than those models themselves, which happen to be the scientific ones. I don't think science is in principle different from the rest of knowledge, so I wouldn't inherently rule out other areas; you can talk about history, anthropology, the study of religions, the analysis of sports as valid areas of knowledge, but its clear they are further away from the topic of metaphysics than physics is - and historical events, human behaviors sit on top of physics.

but it seems to me that you are pretty certain that there is an external, independent reality. — boundless

Well, this seems a given unless you have a more nuanced definition of what you mean by external, independent reality (or the converse).

If some kind of 'rudimental' mentality is there in the more fundamental level of physical reality, we IMO have a more consciouness-friendly world than the usual 'physicalist' position. — boundless

I definitely see this point; but I think doing this unnecessarily specifies the metaphysics without adding anything in return since I don't think the notion of experiential or mental has much in the way of interesting properties to articulate other than the fact that it has structure. Why would I bring along additional connotations that come with "mental" or "qualia". I am trying to say that I cannot say anything further about the fundamental metaphysics; saying it was mental would get in the way of this and arguably would commit me even more to the prospect of strong emergentism which I don't find evidence for.

One might think that 'consciousness' exists as a 'latent potential' in panpsychist position (which is fully actualized in conscious beings). — boundless

This would make me commit more than I wish and it seems to suggest some kind of ontology that I would like to see scientifically backed-up, which I don't think is the case.

Anyway, since I lean more towards the 'idealist' side of things, I do not endorse panpsychism. — boundless

How does your panspychism and idealism differ?

If by 'realism' one means that our models do have necessarily correspondence with reality if they 'work', I guess that yes your view might be classed as 'anti-realist'.

But 'realism' and 'antirealism' have also an ontological meaning. In the most general sense, 'realism' in this context means that there is an independent reality that is in principle knowable. 'Anti-realism' is the denial of this (and I saw it used as a flat denial of any kind of independent reality). — boundless

I would say I allow realism but in a thinner, looser, more deflationary sense of a consistent mapping or coupling to the outside world without requiring much more than that. When those mappings become systematically erroneous, we might, it then becomes possible to conceptualize them as not real. But I do not think there are systematic, tractable, context-independent nor infallible ways of deciding what is real or not real. And I think people all the time have "knowledge" which is some sense false or not real but persists in how they interact with the world due to ambiguity.

We perceive real things directly. What more needs to be said?
— Mww

But the way we perceive them is probably not the way they are. — boundless

Doesn’t matter what they are; our intelligence tells us how they will be for us.

Naive realism asserts that we perceive things as they are. — boundless

I don’t favor that position.

Direct realist asserts that our perceptions give us direct access to the external world in itself and we can know how the world is independent on the mental representations. — boundless

I agree that our perception gives us direct access to the external world but not in itself, and I reject the rest.
(On second thought….our perception is how the external world has direct access to us. The first makes it seem like we go out to it, when in fact it comes in to us.)

So probably Kant would agree that we somehow perceive 'real things directly' but we can't know whether they really are as they appear to us. — boundless

Agreed, but without the “probably”. From the beginning, that’s his general introduction to the part on sensibility. Also, “appear” in his use is mere presence, as in “given”, and not “looks like”. So to say they may not really be as they appear, doesn’t make any sense. And if you already were aware of that distinction, there remains the further condition that perception has no cognitive power, so to say that which appears may not be as it appears, indicating it may not really be this or that thing, or some thing with this or that set of properties, makes no sense.

In effect, and to make a long story short….we tell things what they are. All they gotta do, is show up.

Someone doesn't have to be a positivist to disagree with your ideas. — Apustimelogist

When @Wayfarer is presented with arguments that refute his ideas and which he has no answers to he resorts to labelling them as "positivist" in an attempt to discredit and dismiss them. If you disagree with his ideas he can only assume that you do not understand them. He is not an intellectually honest interlocutor, I'm sorry to say.

When Wayfarer is presented with arguments that refute his ideas and which he has no answers to he resorts to labelling them as "positivist" in an attempt to discredit and dismiss them. — Janus

I will say that your posts reflect a positivist attitude when they do. I could, if I was bothered, find any number of examples of that in our discussions in years past - science as the arbiter of what is real, the subjectivity of religious or spiritual maxims, which might have poetic or affective value, but convey no truth. And so on. I'm not the least 'intellectually dishonest', I go to great lengths to explain and defend my views.

I just wanted more clarity on the meaning of space and time as about in the head, not outside it. Clearly, what we perceive is embedded in what is going on in our heads. Clearly we cannot perceive / experience everything, every event in the physical reality outside our heads that makes a difference, that has an effect on other things in reality. But nonetheless, I think what we do experience, or at least a significant amount of it has a broadly consistent mapping to specific things that actually go on. To me, that is enough to say that we see real stuff in a weak sense. I think there is no observable intrinsic fact-of-the-matter about representation, only a dynamic statistical coupling between brains and the world which a scientist or philosopher can cash out as representation. The coupling is enough. If I think of veridicality weakly in terms of a kind of coupling or mapping then there is not really a sense that I could exhaustively couple a system to the rest of reality and have it miss anything about reality. When stuff is missed, it because there are couplings missing that give us novel information. Space and time can also be seen in terms of these kinds of couplings, at least the concepts we have made reasonably precise by measurement (i.e. objective time). My subjective sense of space and especially time may be more fallible or is different for various reasons (e.g. speculatively: because time and space are inferred through informational properties of the brain which can be easily perturbed, e.g. if I close my eyes, I lose some of the information required to specify physical space (at least at some allowable resolution) and become more reliant on say body information than I normally would); if subjective time could plausibly related to information flow (e.g. entropic time by ariel caticha), then information processing in my head may distort my sense of time).

So maybe there are discrepancies between objective time "inside" and "outside" as it were but only in some sense that informative couplings have been missed to some part of reality. Good example is obviously relativity phenomena like time-dilation. Maybe the way brains work or learn over time mean that mappings or couplings can be established or parcelled out in different ways; but nonetheless these are just different mappings to events that actually occur, and they are overlapping or inter-relatable so that even though I may be measuring in inches or centimeters, because they are being mapped to the same stuff in reality, there is no sense that these different perapectives are telling me anything new or different about space. And there is nothing else to know about space beyond my sensory boundaries unless that thing to know about space makes some physical difference (because space is physical) to observations and theories and experiential perceptions. — Apustimelogist

Thanks for that, I only just noticed it now, for some reason it wasn't picked up in Mentions.

I think your analysis illustrates the problem Bergson was concerned about. When you say that space and time can be understood as “informative couplings” or as co-ordinate systems tracking changes, you’re describing what clocks and instruments do—they measure intervals between states. That’s fine for physics. But the philosophical point is that this doesn’t capture what time is, as in some fundamental way, it is lived. That is the sense in which it is still observer dependent.

Let me again paste in the passage from the Bergson-Einstein debate which I think is the relevant point:

At each moment, the pendulum occupies a different position in space, like the points on a line or the moving hands on a clockface. In the case of a clock, the current state – the current time – is what we call ‘now’. Each successive ‘now’ of the clock contains nothing of the past because each moment, each unit, is separate and distinct. But this is not how we experience time. Instead, we hold these separate moments together in our memory. We unify them. A physical clock measures a succession of moments, but only experiencing duration allows us to recognise these seemingly separate moments as a succession. Clocks don’t measure time; we do. This is why Bergson believed that clock time presupposes lived time.

Bergson appreciated that we need the exactitude of clock time for natural science. For example, to measure the path that an object in motion follows in space over a specific time interval, we need to be able measure time precisely. What he objected to was the surreptitious substitution of clock time for duration in our metaphysics of time. His crucial point in Time and Free Will was that measurement presupposes duration, but duration ultimately eludes measurement.

Bergson’s insight was that clocks don’t measure time; we do. What we call “objective time” (e.g., seconds, hours, spacetime intervals) depends on our ability to synthesize change into a unified experience. The sequence of tick-tock-tick has no meaning unless it is held together in memory and felt as a flow; there is no time for the clock itself. Otherwise, it’s just isolated instants. That sense of flow—duration, which is fundamental to time —cannot be reduced to or captured by measurements alone. As Bergson put it, measurement presupposes duration, but duration eludes measurement.

The point isn’t that subjective time is a distortion of the real thing, but that subjective time is the ground of our sense of temporality itself. What you're calling “couplings” only make sense against the backdrop of a temporally structured awareness. Without someone to whom change occurs as change, your "objective time" is just an uninterpreted sequence of events with no temporal character.

Which, in turn, goes back to the idealist (or constructivist) argument: the subject cannot be subtracted from the equation without also subtracting the very conditions under which space, time, and objects can be said to exist. We can behave as if there is no subjective awareness of time for practical purposes, but this conceals a philosophical sleight of hand—the erasure of the subject whose presence is in fact a precondition for the very intelligibility of space, time, and objectivity.

Where this calls realism into question is not by saying the sensed world is illusory or imaginary, but by showing that the subjective pole of experience can't be eliminated, even though it can be forgotten. And that is very much what Evan Thompson, author of the Bergson-Einstein essay, is concerned with, as he says this 'forgetting' of the subjective ground of science constitutes its 'blind spot'.

You don't defend your views with argument, rather you quote those you consider authorities, constantly presenting (often the same old) excerpts which echo your biases.

Anything which raises some difficulties for your standpoint or asks you to present arguments which show that religious or metaphysical, or even aesthetic, ideas can be validated by observation or testing or logic, and you immediately jump to the invocation of the bogeyman "positivism" even though the view you are attempting to dismiss is not unique to positivism at all.

In fact it is usually not so much a view as a request for you to back up your claim that there can be substantive evidence for metaphysical or religious views. It is a request for a descriptive explanation for the kind of evidence you presumably have in mind but apparently cannot articulate.

Positivists say that metaphysical ideas have no value, and I don't, and have never said that. But you apparently have no ear or eye for nuance.