Perhaps you can find those that call themselves 'direct realists' that do this, but to me this is the wrong way to go and misses what's good in 'my' take on direct realism.
— plaque flag

What's your take on Direct Realism ? — RussellA

I was thinking about this while making coffee this morning. The OP touches on something that comes down to who you are rather than empirical or logical foundations.

This is why a scientific approach, or even adhering to standard viewpoints from philosophy of mind (like multiple realizability issues) are ignored in favor of presenting hypotheses.

As if the question in the OP was really: Could Direct Realism be Conceived in Such a Way that it Works? It's speculative philosophy driven by identity. I am this, so that needs to work.

Apparently Socrates got a lot of mileage out of being picky about the definition of justice. You could think of philosophy as an exercise gym and trying to pin down definitions is one of the machines.

If you stand at the door to the gym and claim that defining things is stupid, you probably don't need to go in and work out. Just go home and work in your garden or something.

(e.g. Schopenhauer), — 180 Proof

yep

Heh. That's not a thought I want to dissolve. I'm admitting it's the weak point in my thinking! :) -- it's something I see as a serious problem if I were to take my posited categories as the real. I'm making up another set of categories to offer to solve one set of problems, but admitting that these are provisional [EDIT:and] are for a particular line of thinking rather than universal. — Moliere

Gotcha. :smile:

I'm not sure how direct perception of other minds works -- it's a bit odd. There are prima facie reasons to believe it, but it's definitely against usual way of thinking of things and a hard case. — Moliere

I don't think we can have direct perception of other minds. We need representations. The people from SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) spend time wondering about it.

Sounds about right to me. So no need for a mind at all to hold them, right? — Moliere

Yea. I don't think they're the type of thing that can be held.

Is that any wonder that what we like to call the mind would respond to the molecules of the world? — Moliere

I think we've known this for millennia, wine, and all that. My only point was that those who are claiming that thoughts reduce to bodily activities that can be read by others is wrong. Thoughts and feelings are there even while there are no voluntary muscle movements.

But you still have a body, yes? So no need for a mind to hold the thoughts? — Moliere

I don't think a thought is like a blob that dwells somewhere. Thoughts come and go, like little moments of reflection. Parcels of awareness or recognition. I think this is the conventional view.

Whatever they are, they exist even though the body of the thinker is paralyzed. We know this because we regularly give neuromuscular blockade drugs that stop everything except autonomic activities. If we don't also give sedatives to put the mind asleep, the patient will hear everything that's said, and worse, feel everything that might be happening, like surgery.

So the notion that thinking is something the body does is just wrong. Brain, maybe. Body, no.

We know how thoughts work because our bodies have thoughts all the time, — Moliere

You can still have thoughts while your body is paralyzed, though.

because reality, as far as it could logically be open to us, is knowable through direct perception, experience, mathematics, and science. — Jamal

Rationalists like Leibniz and Descartes would have agreed whole heartedly. The Empiricists would caution that a fair portion of our logic is grounded in absolutely nothing, so let's not depend heavily on that to let us know what the world is. Let's take the fragments of appearance which are available to us and make do without the divinities the Rationalists require in order to assure that we're not all lost in dreams.

:up:

Of course. And I'm an ambitious fucker. I'm trying to drop some memes. I'm not preaching against the softwhere but making it a theme within which to show off and gather prestige coins. — plaque flag

Why?

Presumably more intelligent and creative (and aggressive?) groups dominate other groups in the long run, which would seem to require a relatively more intense but still controlled expression of individuality — plaque flag

The Jews have the oldest known living culture. Opinions vary about what their secret might be.

Sure. You can't really dispense with the self though. Unless you want to become a homeless lunatic living under a bridge babbling and being hit in the head by rocks thrown by kids.

do understand of course that claims about the we are attributed to the I that makes them. This is as common as any discussion about the rules of a situation. — plaque flag

No, it's that "we" means a group of individuals. Yes, the ego is an idea. It's a kind of construction. Monotheistic divinity reinforces the primacy of the ego. The burning bush told Moses that its name was "I am.". Genesis 3:13.

However you come to realize that the ego is a kind of fixture of the mind, it's startling, yes. Where does it leave you though? For me, the landing place is Schopenhauer.

Not so sure. 'I' seems to be the sign for a 'virtual' bearer of social responsibility, a 'player' on the 'stage,' which is associated with a particular living body. It exists within the tradition at the root perhaps (any exceptions?) all traditions, that of the unified voice, the ego, the individual.A body learns to be an 'I' [singular]. One ghost per machine. — plaque flag

I sense some hatred of the ego here. What's that related to?

The 'We' is tacit in the use of that old tribal sign 'I.' — plaque flag

And vice versa.

Nice quote ! — plaque flag

True story.

The shadow’s wrong. — Mww

It's more of a reflection than a shadow. Did you notice that it reverses direction depending on how you look at it? Sometimes looking at the feet or below the picture will make it change direction. If you're on a cell phone try turning the cell phone a few degrees to the left or right. That'll do it.

I felt the thread needed more visual illusions.

over the last 10 years, the role of right-wing youth movements has grown even more central, helping to establish the guiding narratives and elevating some of the most visible faces of conservatism today

In America, blue collar workers, feeling completely abandoned by the supposed progressive party, are now devoted conservatives. Weird times.

If none of that makes sense it’s because I’m thinking on the fly. — Jamal

My on the fly thought is that throughout human history there's been an steady increase the rate of change and it's now moving to the vertical part of an exponential curve so that generation gaps are widening.

What that means for conservatism is that one generation's conservatism was the progressive view of the previous generation. The result is that everything is getting scrambled.

Cool, thanks

A Russian guy once told me: "You know what your problem is? You don't have enough problems."

If you play the guitar by yourself, you'll get better over time, but you'll be limited. If you play with others, your skill level will explode.

But only if you learn to listen.

If you were an idealist, you'd tell me that my assumptions about the material world around me are the product of training. You'd tell me I'm indistinguishable from a chat bot with all my talk of concrete.

You're a metaphysician. I'm an ontological anti-realist.

A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions. — plaque flag

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that.

Strange. I thought you were describing pretty why 'private language' doesn't make much sense. — plaque flag

Private language doesn't make sense. Most of us have private sensations, though. It's two different uses of "private."

You know exactly what sensations are ? Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytics — plaque flag

If you don't know what sensations are, I probably won't be able to explain it to you. I definitely know what they are, though. I have them all the time.

metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. — plaque flag

I'll take your word for it. I'm not sure what metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk is exactly. I know exactly what sensations are, though.

It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open. — plaque flag

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations.

But what role is 'sensation' playing here ? Does it clarify or obscure ? — plaque flag

Does it cause confusion for you?

It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles. — Andrew4Handel

I guess the question is: how would you confirm that odor-x that you're sensing now is the same thing you've smelled before? If you could attach it to some category like "herbal" or "plastic", then it would be easier, right?

What I have noticed is that there are many interpretations of what the private language argument is and that Wittgenstein does not present formal arguments. — Andrew4Handel

That's true. It's not actually an argument. It's just a set of observations.

The language became private when only he understood it. People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them. — Andrew4Handel

It would help if we replace "private" with "unique and unsharable.". That's what Wittgenstein meant. It's hard to even conceive of a unique, unsharable language, that only you know. How could it have developed?

Imagine that you have some sensation that is unique only to you and there's no way to communicate what it's like to anyone else. The private language argument suggests that you might not be able to remember this sensation for lack of any external foundation for naming it.

More likely, your awareness of sensations is shaped by the language community you grew up in, since naming and remembering are grounded there.

gave the example of Einstein earlier. He formulated private ideas about physics/time/light and he didn't need to share them so they could have stayed unique to his own mind. — Andrew4Handel

He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep the rules straight. That's the intuition behind the private language argument.

I don't know the actual philosophy conservatives hold in their own minds — Vera Mont

I think it would help if you named a particular conservative.

:up:

Are they any good?

"Like public, social cases of representation such as writing or mapmaking, intentional states such as beliefs have truth-value; they entail or imply other beliefs; they are (it seems) composed of concepts and depend for their truth on a match between their internal structures and the way the world is; and so it is natural to regard their aboutness as a matter of mental referring or designation. Sellars (1956, 1967) and Fodor (1975) argue that intentional states are states of a subject that have semantical properties, and the existent-or-nonexistent states of affairs that are their objects are just representational contents." SEP

So some philosophers will say that intentionality is essentially a kind of representation, semantic in character like the hard copy of a novel represents a story. If we focus on the "mention" part of use-mention, we're focusing on the form of our representing activity. If we focus on the "use" part, we mean the thing being represented.

The article goes on to discuss whether qualitative states (like redness) are representations in this sense or not. If you're interested, we could do a reading of this article.

When you think of the Big Bang, you just mean inflation, right? You're not adding a singularity to it, are you?