What's an example of an alternative? The objective world is not manufactured by experiencing it.

Again, to also revolve around other things wont make 'The earth revolves around the sun' false

You wish. But to also revolve around other things wont make 'The earth revolves around the sun' false.

Objective truth means that a statement has the property of referring to something which is the case independently of our beliefs or statements.

For example, "the earth revolves around the sun" is true by referring to what is the case, and objective by being true independently of whether anyone says or believes it.

By asking "what is the nature of truth" we might want to investigate and discuss conditions which satisfy the possibility that a statement is true. It is pretty much the nature of philosophy to ask questions about the nature of things.

To see "..the real mind-independent apple as it is..." means to see it directly. The apple of your mind-dependent experience is the mind-independent apple that you experience. — jkop

This is circular. I asked what it means to see a thing directly and you said it's to see a mind-independent thing as it is. I asked you what it means to see a mind-independent thing as it is and you say it's to see a thing directly. So, currently, the very notion of seeing a thing directly – of seeing a mind-independent thing as it is – is vacuous. — Michael

There's "currently" a seeming circularity in your refereeing of my replies, but not in my replies.

it's largely just a debate about how we should use words? — Hoo

If there is ambiguity in our talk we should debate how we should use the words. Or else we'll just end up talking past each other, using words in different senses without realising it.

All perception is veridical, unlike hallucinations, in which nothing is perceived, only experienced. It would be unnecessarily ambiguous to speak of 'non-veridical' cases of visual perception, for example, when there is no vision, only experience of vision. In veridical cases something is both seen and experienced.

Also optical illusions are veridical in the sense that something is both seen and experienced, such as light, reflections, refractions, atmospheric effects and so on. A brain in a vat would never see, for example, the optical illusion in a photo-realistic picture, because seeing the illusion requires seeing something which is really there, such as real light, real patches of paint etc..

To see "..the real mind-independent apple as it is..." means to see it directly. The apple of your mind-dependent experience is the mind-independent apple that you experience.

If it's orange but it appears to you as red then you're seeing it wrong. — Michael

Seeing it directly means that it couldn't appear red when it is orange. Only appearance as representation could be wrong, but naive realism denies that perception would be representational. So, evidently, you have yet to understand naive realism.

The "perception" possessed by a brain in a vat would only be representational, i.e. a simulation.

And its theory on perception is that, in the veridical case, the properties we perceive an object to have are properties that the object has even when we don't see them. — Michael

Its theory of perception is obviously not a theory about the properties we perceive an object to have but about the nature of perception: that it is direct.

For example, that when we see a red apple we're not seeing an intermediate representation of an apple inside our minds but the real mind-independent apple as it is. This does not mean that the apple would somehow have to appear red also when we don't see it, in the dark, for instance. If this is what you believe of realism, then you simply don't understand realism.

What is mind-dependent is perception: e.g. seeing the apple is to be consciously aware of its presence in your visual field, for instance, and its colour. It's possession of the colour, however, only means that it will reappear under the same or similar conditions which satisfy the possibility to see colours.

on whether or not the apple being red is perception-independent. — Michael

Category error. Being is not seeing. Apples are seen as red. Naive realism is a theory of perception, recall, not ontology.

That's a false dichotomy, for neither realism nor naive realism reject perception or its dependence to there being something with which we can perceive the world (e.g. a mind and certain background capacities). Realism (concerning ontology) states that what exists is not dependent on the existence of a mind. Naive realism (regarding perception) states that we perceive objects and states of affairs directly, i.e. not via some copy or picture conformed inside our minds. "Meanings just ain't in the head." with regards to Putnam. But one might add that without the head there ain't any perception.

He started as a naive realist, moved on to internal realism, and then ended up defending natural realism. — Michael

..or in his own words: How to Be a Sophisticated "Naïve Realist" (2011)

That's a selective truth when referring to the book, but misleading when referring to Putnam's stance on realism. As I said, he ended up defending naive realism.

Like a true philosopher Putnam was guided by argument, not intention, and ended up defending naive realism.

Feminism is, or ought to be, activism for increasing female literacy, social recognition of problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence, and for changing rape law, unequal land laws etc..

But instead of working practically with changing legislation, educating the population, funding safe houses for persecuted women, etc. many "feminists" seem to believe that speaking seditiously among themselves at conferences or in feminist publications would matter somehow.

This is arguably the result of the influence of bad philosophy (e.g. Foucault and other formerly fashionable postmodern thinkers).

Obviously naive realism is true.

Putnam decisively refutes the skeptic idea that we might just be brains in a vat. For example, in Reason, truth, and history (1981).

Apparently it's available online at https://www.archive.org/stream/HilaryPutnam/PutnamHilary-ReasonTruthAndHistory_djvu.txt

The rejection of meaning has some illegitimate benefits which might explain its appeal. Without meaning anything goes, and any criticism can be dismissed as "meaningless" and so on.

Hilbert's hotel is also fully booked, recall, and a paradoxical thought experiment. Moreover, if a finite hotel has nowhere to expand to, then an infinite hotel is simply impossible.

A finite hotel which expands can be fully booked at time t1 and take more guests at time t2. In Hilbert's Hotell of infinite rooms, however, it seems that all rooms are booked at any time.

It occurs to me that most of us are first attracted to philosophy out of genuine curiosity, for truth and beauty as ends in themselves, not means for power as preached by marxist or freudian ideologues. For them there is neither truth, nor beauty, only the power of sophistry or satisfaction of attitudes.

You said they were talking about galaxies moving farther apart. Now it's equations? Nevertheless, neither talk about equations nor the relation between galaxies is talk about the nature of the universe, whether it is finite or infinite. It's not physics but philosoohy.

The squiggles and lines are constituitive for written words, but insufficient for being words. What written, spoken, or otherwise signed words have in common, and which makes them into words, is their causal history, not their design.

i'm referring to is the existence/inexistence of any sort of objective doctrine — Albert Keirkenhaur

Many objective doctrines are assumed in our talk. For example, that we exist, talk, occupy space, share a network of things to talk about that have properties, behave according to laws of nature and so on. These are objective in the sense that anyone can check their truths: e.g. that we exist, talk, occupy space, share things to talk about etc..

So what makes you think that the existence of objective doctrines would be an issue even?

Should Mother Teresa have been tortured for being a sadistic religious fanatic? Allegedly she talked those who suffer into thinking that suffering is something positive.

The physicist is then not talking about the universe but galaxies in it. The distance between galaxies may expand or shrink regardless of whether the universe is finite or infinite. But an expanding (or shrinking) universe can only be finite, for physicists and lay people alike.

An expanding universe is finite, or else it would not be expanding.

The lack of good reasons won't stop some people and corporations from opposing fair use. Some lawyers specialize in protecting old monopolies by suing kids for sharing records or films with eachother, and there is illegitimate monitoring of use and sabotage of user's equipment such as in the Sony-scandal. Opposition to fair use is also present in the legally binding agreements that one is typically required to accept in order to be able to use software, online services etc.. These typically prohibit "unauthorized use", and their source code is typically closed, which makes it impossible to legitimately change, repair, or improve their functionality. Granted that there exists non-constructive or destructive forms of hacking, and businesses which thrive on the threat, but all hacking is not destructive.

It sounds reasonable to me. I take 'inherent meaning' to suggest some sort of 'global meaning'. If there is no global meaning there can still be local meaning, which is just what we mean by 'meaning'. There are plenty of other things that work locally but not globally. — andrewk

I take 'inherent meaning' to suggest some sort of presence of meaning, for example, in the use of words. To use words for rejecting the presence of meaning seems just stupid or fake (as in posturing or trolling by making seemingly hopeless, paradoxical, or perplexing claims).

There is a sense of 'hacking' which refers to the activity of accessing relevant mechanisms and source code in technical devices so that the user can fully control them or improve them even instead of having the devices control the user by being defect by design or sabotaging fair use.

Accepting that there is no inherent meaning. . . — Albert Keirkenhaur

Accepting that "..there is no inherent meaning..." with words assumed to mean something seems kind of stupid or fake.

Some art likes to challenge our habits of interpreting the meanings of things, for when something appears ambiguous, obscure, or meaningless we will unsurprisingly assign it more or less arbitrary meanings.

But things do not need to be assigned meanings to have meanings. Meanings are found as we interact with things, and what we assign them are names or descriptions which refer to the meanings we found.

The use of an unconventional or more inexact way of expressing a statement does not make its truth into a different kind of truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salva_veritate

Values relate to people's beliefs. For example, the belief that being charitable is more desirable than being greedy. A belief is personal, hence others can believe the converse: that being greedy is more desirable.

What can be socially constructed, however, is environmental pressure which pushes more persons to comply to a belief which might increase their social fitness, evade persecution and so on.

Did anyone bring up insufficient blood flow to the heart muscle? It'll break your heart.

There was an interesting article about the history of creativity a couple of years ago in The New Yorker. Here's a quote from it:

In the ancient world, good ideas were thought to come from the gods, or, at any rate, from outside of the self. During the Enlightenment, rationality was the guiding principle, and philosophers sought out procedures for thinking, such as the scientific method, that might result in new knowledge. People back then talked about “imagination,” but their idea of it was less exalted than ours. They saw imagination as a kind of mental scratch pad: a system for calling facts and images to the mind’s eye and for comparing and making connections between them. They didn’t think of the imagination as “creative.” In fact, they saw it as a poor substitute for reality; Hobbes called it “decayed sense.”

It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.” — Joshua Rothman

So, it seems that throughout the modern era "being creative" basically meant being imaginative, and a person could thus use his/her imagination to be considered creative regardless of whether it resulted in the production of stuff, such as books, pictures, or other objects.

Nowadays a person is "creative" when s/he produces stuff (e.g. decorates, knits, draws, paints, photographs, writes etc.), or has a "creative job" (e.g. design, communication, entertainment, producing fine arts and so on).

So, perhaps the meaning of creativity has simply been redefined again? Furthermore, it seems to be referred to as a means for the production of stuff, or the accumulation of certain capacities, and as such it seems unsurprising to me that it could be automated.

But it ain't the romantic/modern version of creativity.

Does what you read, and your interest in philosophy in general carry over to your "everyday life"? — anonymous66

Consider what Bertrand Russell says on the nature of thought:

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.

My everyday life consists of comfortable habits, relations to people and established institutions etc.. So perhaps I should not carry over my interest in philosophy to my everyday life....

"They only show a small part, and call that "the world."" Link

The alleged benefits of listening to Mozart, for instance, is a popular belief. But the music of Mozart is often or always considered good; we might as well include a good night's sleep, or a good tour in the mountains, for anything good tends to have beneficial effects. Children who often experience good tours in the mountains probably develop different brains too.

The claim that music, or certain structures in music, has beneficial effects on the mind seems self-fulfilling if it is assumed that the music is good (and simply false when the music is bad).

Music interacts with the body and causes an experience in the mind. The experience connects the music with the mind. Anything becomes connected with the mind by experience, and any experience may shape the mind.