How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge? — Corvus

There's a layer of underlying assumptions, but once you accept those assumptions (and they're all pretty reasonable), scientific observations become more and more trustworthy the more scientists make those observations. This isn't only the case in science, in all sorts of venues in life, people will trust a story about something happening if more people also say they saw the same thing happen.

You use the phrase "objective knowledge", but it should be explicitly noted, 100% certainty in science is not attainable.

can you show me an example that you think I wouldn't see a difference in?

I've read a lot of scientific material and I don't see what you say is there

Because they want to have control over people. — baker

sorry, my question was ambiguosly worded. Im not asking you for what you think their motivations are, I'm asking you what has led you to believe they are doing that. I haven't seen any of that myself, so I don't know why you have that belief, it's not obvious to me how you came to believe that - or what evidence you might show me that might lead me to believe the same.

Well, you can always dismiss my experience — baker

I haven't read any specific experiences from you to dismiss.

The speaker of such statements doesn't say, in first person singular, what he thinks, feels, intends, wants, but makes claims about the other person, esp. about their inner life. — baker

And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?

Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost. — baker

Do you think that's unjust in some way? What specific examples of this unjustness have you experienced?

Possibly because you think like they do already. So you don't feel imposed upon. When scientists say "we", you feel included in that "we". Not everyone does, though. — baker

When scientists say "we think X", why are you interpreting that into "You think X, because you think what we tell you you think"? Surely you can just accept that scientists think X, and you disagree - scientists in general don't imagine nobody disagrees with them.

I have read the words of a lot of scientists, many many words by many scientists, and this doesn't ring true to me in the least.

Let's add some observations then:

Stanford seems to think Sartre self-identified as an existentialist

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20the%20major%20contributors%20are,embrace%20a%20conception%20of%20radical

only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly self-identified as “existentialists.”

Josh provided this quote from Sartre to support that:

In Existentialism and Humanism Sartre writes,

The existentialists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself . . . what they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before any essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective.” — Joshs

I don't think you need to ask the whole population to verify if there are no existentialists, surely you just need to find one person who says they are.

Sure, the definition of existentialism is a bit vague. THAT'S potentially part of a good argument for why nobody is an existentialist - nobody can be one because it's not well defined. I'm not saying that is an argument I agree with, but it's much closer to being at least something with some meat on it, compared to "Nobody's an existentialist because these 4 people denied they are"

Please prove why the logic wouldn't work out. — Corvus

Because other people than that short list of people could be existentialists. "These people denied they are, therefore nobody is" isn't much of an argument. My gramma denies she's a Muslim, therefore nobody's a Muslim.

I think it would be nice if, at the very least, there was a base layer of normalized words with universal meanings. Unfortunately, I think with the nuances that come with philosophical thinking, it's borderline impossible to have a truly unified language. Language is built on layers of relationships and metaphors, and from the time we're all babies, each person is building a completely distinct set of relationships and metaphors from any other person.

You asked the question, for people like me to answer, and someone like me answered. Do you have anything more enlightening for me than "nah"?

This would be a violation of the premise, that only the inputs and outputs are artificial, and the experiencing entity itself is left to itself. If you posit that even your memories are open to direct manipulation at any time — noAxioms

It doesn't have to be "at any time", it can just be at the start. And presumably a baby could be hooked up to the machine anyway, without any concern for their memories, no?

Thanks. So it looks like Sartre has actually affirmed his "existentialist" categorization.

Why wouldn't you then remember being hooked up to the machine? You only have memories of a world where such a machine is not possible (yet), so an actual transition from reality to VR is not plausible. — noAxioms

I don't think so. If someone made such a machine, that someone could know enough about a brain to manipulate memories too. They can manipulate your entire experience of your world, why not your memory?

Because a few people widely considered to be existentialists denied the label, that means there are no existentialists? I don't think the logic is working out on that.

Do you have sources on Heidegger denying the label? I see that Camus and Sartre have.

I'm confused about what would it take to qualify as direct perception to those who argue for indirect.

Anyone here have an answer? — creativesoul

Niave realism. The qualia of our experience is not something manufactured in our head, but is just reality-as-it-is.

I don't see it that way

Only thing we can be sure of is the subjective experience we have. We are experiencing it no matter what be it in reality or dream, physical or real and illusion or real. — Abhiram

That's how I interpret "I think therefore I am"

is Dr. Popovic himself a reductive materialist, or a materialist at all?

I think you can.

I can imagine a society of ai robots, who all are determinists and think their ais are deterministic, who have policies for how they treat robots in their society who do things that are distinctly contrary to the values of the society as a whole, and the well being of the members of that society.

For various "crimes", they can decide to exile, destroy or retrain ais that commit those crimes - this is what "accountability" means to these deterministic robots, and I don't think there's anything irrational about it. I don't necessarily think they need a concept of free will to do this either.

One thing about this society that's different from humans is that their sense of accountability and justice does not include pain for pains sake, punishment for punishments sake. Consequences aren't there to inflict pain on the perpetrator, they're there to fix the problem and protect other members of the society.

you could be — Beverley

yeah, in other words "I am". You've not figured out a way around the "I am" part of it, and you're stretching quite hard.

Not if the thoughts are not yours. — Beverley

Yes, even if the thoughts "aren't yours". In order to perceive thoughts handed to you externally, you first must *exist*.

The 'thing' controlling the thoughts that you perceive of as coming from you could be the evil demon that Descartes spoke of, or pretty much anything — Beverley

And even if that's true, you're still "perceiving thoughts" and therefore you still are. So the conclusion "I am" still follows, even if "I think" actually just means "I'm perceiving thoughts that are put in my head" (which I have no problem describing as "I think").

they agreed to something, they feel something is right, or they have unconcealed something from the hidden. — Corvus

These seem like concepts of truth to me. Maybe they hadn't developed certain vocabularies about truth that modern philosophy has, but... if they agree with one statement about the world and disagree with another one, does that not imply at least a most basic concept of truth?

Because, in reductive materialism, there no difference between "I am stressed" and "My hypophysis is ejecting adrenaline" in what those phrases refer to. — Lionino

I don't know that that's the case. Reductive materialists don't necessarily reject emergence (reduction and emergence are two sides of the same coin, after all) and thus, while they might think their stress is caused by their body releasing adrenaline (and the adrenaline wouldn't be the stress itself, it should be noted, it would just be one of the proximate causes of the stress), they might still accept the multiple-realizability of conscious states, and accept the possibility of stress that isn't caused by adrenaline.

Do you think that if men and women, boys and girls, were all freely allowed to behave in "masculine" and "feminine" ways without any massively negative social consequences, that the transgender issue would disappear? Would that be an alternative world, you think, where the people who are currently transgender wouldn't feel the need to identify as transgender, and take HRT or do other sex-change type decisions?

The 'I' is the weakness in this statement. It is not 100 percent certain that the person thinking is you. — Beverley

I think it is

I have sympathy with the semantic/non-naïve direct realist intuition that we are in fact connected to the external world, and I agree with Michael that epistemologically it and indirect realism are equivalent. — hypericin

I agree with all of this. Maybe I should loosen up on "experience", and allow those words you said, like "raw experience" and "qualia" (some raw experiences aren't qualia exactly, I think) to be what I'm referring to. If I did, then yes, your experience of a baseball game would be - I guess - "indirect". Even now I'm hesitant. Not because I'm not wanting to call the whole baseball experience an experience, but because when you list out all the direct experiences that are part of that experience -- all the qualia and first-person thoughts - it's still just a bunch of internal, immediate stuff. Yes, it's internal and immediate stuff that is ultimately *caused* by external, non-immediate stuff, distal stuff - and the relation of your experience to that distal stuff is thus indirect - but if you ignore the "distal stuff" question and just focus on the experience, then... is it?

Then again, the experience itself feels like you ARE experiencing distal stuff. You don't feel like you're watching a baseball game in your head, you feel like you're watching a baseball game out there. And both senses are true in their own contexts, I guess.

I don’t think colours and sounds and smells and tastes “map” to objective features at all — Michael

You don't think seeing red is correlated to any facts about the things you see red on? Because that's all "map" means here. It means the colours your experience correlate to real properties or features etc.

You seem all over the place now.

Most Christians (definitely not all, but most) would disagree with the statement you think everyone knows.

Ah, the good ol' head in the sand approach. The existence of Christians is groundless rumour or opinion.


There are people on this forum who don't believe mind comes exclusively from the brain. Take your head out of the sand and look around.

so do you agree or disagree with that text from me that you quoted?

If you disagree, then what standard definition of "everyone" makes true the statement "Everyone knows consciousness emerges from the brain"?

I think you're in the wrong thread

Futher to my previous post, if I want to use the word 'experience' to only refer to those raw things we have immediate access to, the qualia, then I would say we don't "experience" a baseball game at all.

We experience the visual qualia, and we experience the series of thoughts which include the thought "I'm watching a baseball game" and "this game is fun / this game sucks" and etc.

Thoughts are raw experience, qualia is raw experience, "baseball games" are not raw experience.

And I guess that's why you want to call it an "indirect experience", while I'm kind of inclined to just not use the word "experience" for it - I mean, I would if we were speaking colloquially of course, conversationally, but in this conversation I feel pulled to not use the word 'experience' for things other than those raw things we experience.

is that if one has no free will (whatsoever), then there is no accountability — Bob Ross

Many incompatiblist determinists would disagree with this on purely practical terms. If we imagine humans as decision-making machines in a deterministic world, it's clearly the case that some of these machines *do* make decisions to hold other machines accountable for their harmful (or perceived-harmful) actions - they punish those machines, imprison those machines, etc. - and even if you assume incompatibilist determinism is true, it's not a given that those consequences are irrational to impose (any ineffective pain caused by those punishments would be, though).

Full disclosure, I'm a compatiblist. And quite frankly, I think the difference between a compatilblist and the type of determinist who would argue what I said above is PROBABLY a semantic difference of opinion, rather than a real one.

I have no idea what point you're tryinig to make with this.

For me, it's quite simple: You and I both, at this point in time, know that not everyone agrees / knows that consciousness emerges from the brain. Including a lot of people who presumably have qualified opinions on the matter, like expert philosophers and even many scientists believe in souls (many scientists are religious).

That's all there is to it.

"Everyone knows consciousness emerges from the brain" is an untrue statement for any standard or colloquial use of 'everyone'.

I think calling it "sensory experience" is too presumptive, as it assumes you're sensing something. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but like... imagine the phenomenal experience of seeing a yellow square, and then imagine the phenomenal experience of hallucinating a yellow square. Phenomenally, they're the same experience - but would you call the second one a "sensory experience"? Maybe you would, I don't know. Maybe I should, I don't know. I feel uncertain about using that word though.