A Logical Behaviourist would dispute that minds aren't observable. After all, we didn't learn the concept of 'other minds' by being shown the private contents of people's skulls or by psychically observing their souls in an ethereal realm. Ergo, our concepts of other minds are reducible to the behaviour we observe and our reactions to behaviour.

Ergo, the presence of other minds is falsifiable.

A toddler puts their hand into a fire and get burnt. Their mother says:

"Fire is always hot"

Which is another way of saying

"It is a fact that fire is hot"

But don't these two statements only mean

"Don't put your hand into the fire!" and other heat-related normative speech acts???

Why should the meaning of the laws of science be any different from this???

In other words:

Why should we believe in a De jure - De facto distinction????

Doesn't collapsing this distinction circumvent Hume's problem of Induction???

Suppose someone insisted that they didn't believe in the existence of facts. What would they be missing?

I imagine objections

"it is a fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris"
"It is a fact that Peano Arithmetic, if consistent, has undecidable propositions"
"It is a fact that nothing with positive mass can travel at the speed of light"

But in all of these cases the objection merely consists in re-affirming a statement, as if the statement by itself isn't up to the job somehow.

Doesn't this imply that talk of 'facts' merely consists in speech acts that attempt to enforce a normative behavioural response on behalf of the listener by declaring scepticism to be illegal?

in other words, isn't the following a fact?

"Facts are true de jure, but are not true de facto"

Similarly, imagine a world without change - no movement, no chemical reactions, absolute motionlessness (heat death of the universe?). In such a world, time would be meaningless and it'd lose its value as part of the space-time frame of reference. — TheMadFool

Is stillness something we can even imagine or perceive?

To my mind 'constancy' or 'stillness' is never present in sensation nor in the imagination since they are always unstable, while 'sensed change' is synonymous with 'experience'.

This to me implies that our public meaning of "stillness" is merely a social directive to ignore the presence of change when it is considered to be unimportant for whatever purpose is at hand.

Therefore it seems somewhat strange as to why process ontologies and the relational notion of time haven't dominated philosophy from the very beginning.

I would say that reasoning is merely habits of thought, trained partially under external supervision, that have been found to lead to survival advantages when precipitating action.

It is tempting to conclude that reasoning is successful for epistemological reasons, namely because reasoned-thinking mirrors the structure of nature in some way, but that doesn't make sense due to being a circular argument that depends on reasoning to both define the 'mirroring' relationship and to justify why it leads to success.

Perhaps we could say that the "habits of thought that mirror nature" are by definition the habits of thought that bestow the most benefits to society, thereby dissolving the question as to why reasoning is successful, albeit at the cost of sacrificing the notion of epistemology by redefining "truth" to mean "success".

While nobody appears to be in agreement as to what philosophy is, if we understand philosophy in terms of its psychological benefits, we could say, loosely speaking, that philosophy is the development of mental habits that bestow psychological benefits to the individual, i.e. it is a generalised form of cognitive-therapy.

So how can the present be ambiguous if it is not a concept of perspectival experience, while having no definition in physical theory, except as an arbitrarily chosen time-slice that is mentally equated with experience?

Isn't it due to the fact that the notions of "stillness" and "change" are phenomenally ambiguous and do not possess a simple relationship with their corresponding physical notions?

In fact, are "stillness" and "change" privately deducible experiences?

How can I tell if my immediate and unshareable experience is static or dynamic?

What does it mean to speak of error here?

"Esssence is expressed by grammar."
"Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is"

I think Wittgenstein's central point here was deflationary in the sense of identifying essence with grammatical expression. which is to not take kinds seriously in any transcendental sense that is independent of our way of speaking.

In contrast, suppose somebody said:

Essence is represented by grammar

This leads to Hume's problem of induction but in the context of the classification of objects.
For to state that grammar is a representation of essences raises the sceptical question "what is it about the previously witness examples of each essence that necessitates how this object is to be classified?"

This question, along with other Humean problems of induction can be thrown out by replying that essences and the notion of necessity are normative notions pertaining to what we say and do rather than referring to independently intuited features that the individual sees.

Which I suppose is complementary to the empirical idea of epistemic selection.

is to talk of 'the present' necessarily to speak of a concept?

e.g "I call all of what I see around me the 'present' "

Isn't our concept of the present as discussed in public discourse an entirely different usage, that typically involves pointing to a spatio-temporal axis and saying "the present is at this location" when making plans?

That still fails to explain how we came up with the concept of causality. Saying that it's a habit of mind is not explaining the concept. — Marchesk

The word "concept" is ambiguous, as are "relations among ideas" and "matters of fact".
Must the content of a concept be thinkable, or are concepts only demonstrable on a case by case basis?

Suppose for example that somebody claims to not understand infinity. So we provide him with a verbal definition, say

" [1,2,3,...] represents an infinite collection, where the dots allow us to write [1,2,3,4,...] and so on"

The learner then queries

"what do you mean by 'and so on' "?

At this point all we can do is demonstrate to him a finite number of applications of our rule of infinite expansion, and hope that he continues to use our rule in the same way. To verify this, we might test his understanding of the rule of infinity on a finite supply of test questions and then breathe a sigh of relief if he passes all the tests.

But where in any of this process did we teach to him and confirm his understanding of what we want infinity to mean?

And the problem is the same when teaching what is meant by the word "necessary", for we can only teach a concept with a finite number of examples and by appealing to the words "and so on". Hence an exhaustive a priori definition of the word "necessary" cannot be given such that it's meaning is water-tight before all of its uses.

Therefore, and especially considering human fallibility, physical uncertainty and mechanical breakdown, the very notion of "necessary consequent" is not only non-demonstrable it is also under-determined thereby permitting exceptions.

Hence to say that "B necessarily follows A" is in some sense compatible with saying "B doesn't necessarily follow A".

Constant conjunction (also known as correlation) isn't causality. They are two different concepts. — Agustino

Right, although judging by how many people wrongly equivocate Hume's skeptical conclusion with "correlation doesn't equal causation", we should be careful to avoid the potential conflation of constant conjunction with the 'inferred' notion of essential correlation.

Perhaps we should say:

1. The constant-conjunction of A and B refers to the sampled correlation of A and B over a finite history of observations, that happens to equal 1.

2. Hume's problem of induction also implies that a correlation parameter cannot be rationally deduced from a sampled correlation, regardless of the value of the sampled correlation.

For just as we cannot rationally infer causation, we cannot rationally infer correlation.

What's interesting is that Hume felt the need to explain our concept of causation with a causal psychological explanation. Perhaps because past constant conjunction alone wasn't enough to get the concept into our heads.

Turning to Darwin next, we can further explain our habituation to causation with an adaptive explanation. Animals who came to expect constantly conjoined events to continue their conjoining were better at predicting when and where there would be food, mates or danger, and thus had more reproductive success, passing that psychological tendency on. — Marchesk

The use of the word "explanation" sounds misleading, since Hume accepted the skeptical premise that the concept of causal necessity isn't reducible to "relations of ideas" (the analytic a priori) or to "matters of fact" (the synthetic a posteriori).

Hence the concept of causal necessity cannot be "explained" to the skeptic in terms of what is thinkable, and this must include the idea of psychological association in terms of an analytic or synthetic explanatory hypothesis.

If Hume is to be consistent, his notion of "psychological habit" or "custom" can at most refer to the empirical observation that historical experience of repeated trials with identical outcomes is often observed to co-occur with present expectations for similar outcomes in the future - expectations which we might call "judgements of necessity".

But to avoid contradiction the empirical co-occurrence of identically repeated empirical trials with judgements of necessity cannot itself be considered to be a "causally necessary" relation, and therefore "judgements of necessity" cannot be synonymous to either "observed matters of habit" or to histories of identical trials.

To conclude, "psychological association" can only refer to the empirical background conditions in which judgements of causal-necessity are typically observed to follow, but cannot constitute a theory of causal judgements. Causal-necessity isn't so much of a thinkable idea but a feeling of compulsion that one sometimes feels subjected to.


Secondly, although Darwinian selection provides a naturalistic explanation of our inferential capacities, it cannot augment Hume's classical skeptical argument since naturalistic explanations beg the very notion of causal necessity that is in question. Indeed it isn't even the case after granting the notion of causal-necessity that evolution is guaranteed to improve any of our empirical inferences.

Skepticism is the tendency for beliefs in representational theories of perception to collapse into beliefs in direct-perception and vice-versa.

I don't like discussions of skepticism in relation to idealism or realism, since both idealism and realism have been interpreted through the lens of representational metaphysics, and it isn't clear that either position constitutes a substantial ontological thesis.

I were having a discussion on another thread about opinion vs. fact. It seems to me this is the same issue. Every statement made by a person is a subjective opinion. Alternatively, in my subjective opinion, every statement made by a person is a subjective opinion. In my opinion, those statements are equivalent. — T Clark

But that would appear to assume that the target of the person's opinion has been identified correctly.

Suppose for example that you meet a stranger who insists that the world will end tomorrow. If his ramblings are literally interpreted as his words suggest, we might be inclined to refer to his beliefs as subjective. Yet on some biological level his utterance is merely a stimulus-response to his current environment relative to his current mental state. Once the underlying set of circumstances that provoked his verbal response is identified, then couldn't it be said that his opinion when reinterpreted as referencing this underlying set of circumstances is in fact objective?

If we had a perfect understanding of each other's utterances, wouldn't we be only talking about stimulus-responses?

It is a problem if you are trying to have a discussion with someone and they keep throwing the word or the idea of "subjectivity" as a way to keep the discussion indiscussible — Perdidi Corpus

Isn't "indiscussibility" the very definition of subjectivity?

On the other hand, what isn't ultimately discussible?

For one to claim that another person's uttered judgement is subjective seems to me to express one's incomprehension of their utterance, and is this lack of comprehension of their utterance that is the reason why their utterance cannot be further discussed.

If an utterance is understood, either it is comprehended to be a valid judgement even if it is considered to be a wrong judgement, else it is comprehended to be a context-triggered verbal expression that cannot be interpreted to be a truth-apt judgement, in spite of appearances.

As another example, roll two dice and look for a sum of thirteen. We know beforehand that result isn't possible, but can we demonstrate through a series of trials how the unlikeliness of the outcome increases over the series of tests? — AngleWyrm

Yes, we can *demonstrate* provided we carefully understand that our "demonstration through a series of trials of the unlikeliness of an outcome" refers to our behavioural disposition in response to the trial outcomes we are getting, as opposed to understanding this demonstration in the usual way as being solely reducible to the dice roll outcomes in themselves.

For we cannot *represent* solely in terms of a collection of repeated trials the unlikeliness of rolling 13.

In my opinion the cause of Hume's problem of induction is the result of failing to recognise that induction and inference refer to the behavioural adaptation of an organism in response to the environment. When recognised as such, it makes no more sense to seek logical justification for our empirical inferences than it does for our digestion.

I don't see any reason to suppose that a person's self-reported beliefs when narrowly considered as a form of verbal-behaviour are qualitatively different from, or prior to, any other form of behaviour that is correlated to their holding of those beliefs. The cognitive therapist's working principle that the verbal behaviours of a patient represent the causal origin or explanans of the subject's broader behaviours seems sorely misguided to me.

Self-reported beliefs more often than not, chase the environmentally reinforced behaviours associated with them along with the psychological needs of the individual, while the self-reported spiritual salvation of the manic-depressive can instantaneously change to existential despair with only the passing of a cloud over the sun.

I think the confusion is caused by conflating universal statements over an open domain with propositions. Consider the statement

A. "All Creatures discovered in the Atlantic Ocean between 2018-2020 are not mermaids"

This should be regarded as a proposition, precisely because it is falsifiable.

But the open-ended infinite statement

B. "All Creatures are not mermaids" isn't falsifiable, and hence describes nothing , at least, nothing detached from the culture of scientific practice.

Rather, B is an instruction to scientists to exclude mermaids from consideration in their foreseeable scientific endeavours. Moreover, since B cannot be inferred on the basis of finite evidence, B ISN'T an inference, rather, B represents our pragmatically determined science-policy concerning the course of our future investigations on the basis of our finite experience of the past.

It is precisely for this reason that I don't believe in any universal laws of nature in the sense of them describing nature "in itself". Rather, any purported "universal laws of nature" are merely social imperatives that describe how scientists out to frame falsifiable hypotheses that in being falsifiable are necessarily finite and non-universal.

For example, statement B above is a permission-note that allows scientists to create propositions similar to A in the course of their investigations.

One potential point of difference between Wittgenstein and Hume concerns the notion of "habit". For Hume, are his remarks concerning the psychological association of mental impressions a thesis about his own experience or merely a description of own his experience?

Speaking of my own case, it isn't obvious to me that i call a banana a "banana" due to mental habit, but i might offer it as psychological explanation. Likewise it isn't immediately evident to me that my understanding of colliding snooker balls is based on repetitive familiarity, for me that would again be a psychological thesis.

Wittgenstein made this point in the blue book, that we often interpret our personal actions through the lens of rules or mechanisms as a post-hoc justification or explanation of what we did when defending our actions to others, even if we we did not consciously follow a rule or experience obeying a rule when performing our actions.

Also recall that the Later Wittgenstein even went further to say that one's conscious experience could not be generically described in terms of "following a rule" or "obeying a law", for rules can be variously interpreted and hence cannot be grounded in other rules, while words such as "following", "being guided by" and "obeying" imply no particular experience.

It is therefore only meaningful to say whether or not our experiences are obeying a particular rule if we can be shown in the individual case what constitutes obeying and disobeying the rule by something external to our immediate imagination and supposed "use" of the rule.

Hence putting aside all thesis about what causality is and referring only to lived experience, how do we even arrive at Hume's problem?

I don't normally behave in a matter that is epistemically coherent with the sun coming-up tomorrow because I have a reason to believe it, and neither am i aware of following a habit. I simply act in a certain fashion and then the sun comes up, without me having a reason for my behaviour. And the scientist after giving all of his verbal justifications acts similarly, without reasons.

Your notion of fairness seems to assume that individuals make independent and voluntary choices that are independent of their environment, peers and upbringing. If that thesis is false, such that anyone given the same resources and opportunities would make similar incomes then how would you define what is a "fair" distribution?

And even if such a distribution is "fair" according to some moral definition of fairness pertaining to the individual, does that necessarily imply that wealth shouldn't be re-distributed? After all, what is "fair" for individuals might not be "fair" or beneficial for the collective, or vice versa.

I believe that the Later Wittgenstein would have understood causality more through the lens of epistemological behaviourism in the sense of it being demonstrable through our "use" of epistemic judgements, as opposed to viewing causality as a metaphysical 'thesis' about cognition, nature or reason, or as a concept empirically reducible to mental pictures or propositions.

For example, suppose that while out bird-watching Bob suddenly declares

A. "All swans are white".

As Hume might agree, in spite of appearances A is NOT an empirical proposition about swans. And if we were to have a clear understanding of what Bob meant by this sentence we would either have to continue to observe Bob, or we would have to ask Bob for further information. He might for example reply "Having seen twenty swans, I have given up searching for a black swan and have decided to go home"

Likewise if group of physicists declares that "particle A always follows particle B", we can tell what they mean by watching their behaviour when they perform future experiments.


Like with any rule or principle of necessity, what we mean by causality cannot be verbally represented but only behaviourally demonstrated, similar to how a mathematician cannot linguistically represent what he means by "infinity", for it is a rule pertaining to the behaviour of the mathematician and it is not an object that the mathematician is pointing at.

The only definition of 'real object' I can think of that isn't a circular definition and that doesn't beg-the-question of the existence of a mind-independent word, and that cannot be doubted by the skeptic, is that a 'real object' is purely a synonym for an object associated with feelings of compulsion.

Suppose Bob loses his beloved gold watch and that he imagines it in great detail as he ransacks his office for it. A skeptical colleague interrupts him and asks " what makes think that your imagined gold-watch has a bearer? After all, you cannot physically see a watch, so you are only imagining an 'idea' of a gold watch in the same way you might imagine a unicorn or a fairy" Perhaps bob in exasperation replies "my imagined watch obviously isn't my ACTUAL watch!". The skeptic of course responds "But now you are only thinking of an 'actual' watch. And what makes you think THAT has a bearer?"

The answer of course, is that "realness" has no logical justification in terms of truth-by-correspondence . For bob to say "my imagined gold-watch has an actual bearer" is only to express his motivation to search.

A realist kicks a rock and howls in pain to refute the idealist. The idealist says "there you see, i told you the rock is nothing more than your idea of it" (The idealist charges the realist with 'truth-by-correspondence'. The realist charges the idealist with denying facts).

Suppose Bob then experiences waking up and has no real memories of possessing a gold watch. If he concludes that the above scenario was all a dream, he is likely to stop searching for a watch and to conclude it wasn't real after all. But not necessarily. Perhaps he grew up in a superstitious family where dreams were interpreted literally. He might even keep searching in the spirit of wishful thinking and insist that the gold-watch might be real. But this changes nothing about our understanding of realness, for "realness" still reduces to bob's behavioural tendencies.

To say "i conclude that my gold watch isn't real" expresses a change of heart and nothing more. Logical argument and rhetoric of course *can* lead to changes of heart, hence the reason we might hope to use logic to convince the delusional. But here logic is purely a rhetorical device of persuasion that appeals to a persons sense of coherence and familiarity. Using logic here isn't qualitatively different to cajoling somebody through charm or threatening them violence.

So there is nothing essentially wrong on thinking of 'archetypes' as real, if in saying that one is expressing one's motivation.

To me, reason is a tool and morality is the material we use reason on. Isn't that the working analogy for philosophy?

If I understand you correctly, your view is somewhat similar to my OP - that reason is good. This is what I'm questioning here. — TheMadFool

Yes, i think it is a deeply flawed analogy, for we don't possess a single form of reasoning but have evolved many different games of reasoning-behaviour that constitute a family of coping strategies for surviving in different sets of circumstances.

Using reason to solve a problem is equivalent to comparing actions taken in similar situations of adversity and to estimate their utility in a new situation. And our logical acts of comparison, deduction and prediction are not themselves unique forms of behaviour, and they possess no justification beyond the utility of their behavioural consequences.

Like our principles of morality, we learn what rational thinking is through reward and punishment.
— sime

A fine point. But the normative nature of reason is quite different from that of morality. We ought to be logical because being so reveals truths that are necessary for our survival. However, logic, as yet, hasn't revealed any reason why we ought to be good. — TheMadFool

I mean it deeper than that. Even what we call 'pure logic' and its mechanical application is a matter of us following normative principles that are not represented in the rules of the logic itself. We draw attention to the normative essence of logic when we teach logic to somebody by practically demonstrating how they *ought* to apply a formula.

Logic doesn't merely involve oughts, it is only oughts.

Recall that no matter what linguistic instruction we give somebody in our explanation of a rule and its application, they might always apply the rule "wrongly" in a way we never intended. Rules by themselves cannot justify how one interprets other rules. We ultimately ground our intended interpretation of rules in behavioural habits established through rewards and punishments.


The equations of physics say nothing to the scientist about the world independently of how he ought to apply them. And he does his best to avoid miscalculation on *pain* of failure. But the miscalculation isn't distinct and separable from the pain of failure - there aren't "two' separate things - rather the definition of miscalculation involves pain of failure.

Now why should it be assumed that reason involves different criteria of normativity to morality?

Why should logic and logical thinking be considered to be a distinct type of behaviour to morality and moral thinking?

Yes, and the definition of the standard metre is no longer the length of a particular platinum bar contained in a Paris vault, but the distance light travels in a vacuum in a precise time interval ideally measured by etc etc

In short our metric units are essentially imprecise and are in practice unrelated to a particular standard.

The deeper problem relates to Wittgenstein's observations concerning our notion of sameness. For our notion of when two things are "identical" *isn't* in the sense of them being equivalent in a precisely empirical sense, but in the practical sense that they can be substituted for one another in a language game.

Like our principles of morality, we learn what rational thinking is through reward and punishment.

Therefore doesn't the justification of all applications of reason, even purely mathematical reason such as 2+2=4 and scientific reason such as E=MC^2, boil down to ought-justifications of the type "I ought to lock the backdoor when leaving the house"?

In other words, isn't the confusion of the paradox a result of overlooking the normative basis that is ultimately needed to justify the use of *any* law or rule - even those laws which are supposedly purely empirical or of pure reason?

If neoliberalism is merely synonymous with the monetization of all human activity, the automation and outsourcing of human labour, and the coercion of human culture for profit, then I don't see why that is necessarily a problem provided society and the welfare state provides strengthened consumer rights, adequate health services, appropriate welfare provision and democratic representation for affected individuals.

If what we refer to as neoliberalism is an inevitable part of cultural and technological progress, then all that is needed is a strengthened social democracy, or even a democratic socialism to compensate the adversely affected, presumably something that requires a global universal income that in turn necessitates global social democracy.

The isolationist inclinations of Trump supporters don't seem to remedy the problem of neo-liberalism but to make its inevitable effects much worse.

Why is neoliberalism undesirable?

No, it's not about that, but the thing is that you're not the first person in your age group 50+ who I've met who thinks exactly the same way. You all miss the golden days of the fall of the Berlin wall, how we are all becoming one humanity, New Ageism, etc. etc. There is a reason why you cannot stand Donald Trump, and that is precisely because in some regards he is dynamite in the neoliberal system. He is part of what both Democrats and Republicans agree that is inadmissible. All the other disagreements between the two parties are superficial compared to this fundamental agreement. — Agustino

lol. what on earth was bad about the fall of the Berlin Wall? Wasn't that even the bi-product of america winning the cold war and putting itself first? IF the Berlin Wall had collapsed under Trump's watch, are you telling me he wouldn't be taking all the credit for it?

And in terms of policies that Trump supports or is prepared to sign, and the politicians and media organisations he works with, how exactly is it that he is dynamite in the neoliberal system?

Or do you just mean that he's hastening america's demise and expanding the sphere of influence of China and Russia?

You also said, "All meaning requires...and agent to draw the correlations/associations between them," but again this is something Wittgenstein would have said in his early philosophy (Tractatus), but it's not something that he would have said in his later philosophy (PI). You seem to be saying what many have believed throughout history, that the meaning of a word is associated with some thing, or some object out there in reality. — Sam26

While i'm not myself within this camp of opinion, there are many self-proclaimed Wittgensteinians who interpret Witty's supposed "private language argument" as a 'transcendental argument' for the existence of the external world that attempts to turn the language of idealism against itself. And this interpretation sounds along the lines of what I understand creative soul to be saying.

Recall Wittgenstein's comparison of the meaning of a word with something you walk up to.

Aren't such examples of "meaning as use" the essence of transcendental arguments for realism?

If the nouns of one's language are spoken in order to convey information, either to oneself when one talks to oneself in introspection, or to other people when one speaks to others, then the nouns of one's language must be referring to something outside of one's immediate experience when one speaks - for otherwise one is merely re-signalling one's immediate experience in a private language that is defined purely in terms of his immediate experience - a pointless task surely?

Ergo, to be motivated to say a noun with the objective of discussing the existence of a fact is part of what it means to assert that something exists externally to one's immediate experience. Hence, the realist hopes, scepticism of the external world in the sense of doubting that nothing lies outside of one's immediate experience, is meaningless and nonsensical. For to doubt the external world is to already objectify it.

The reason I don't fall for this argument and doubt that Wittgenstein would have supported it, is because I understand Wittgenstein to be a verificationist in spirit who sought to treat illnesses of the mind as opposed to legitimising pseudo-philosophical problems.

For it is nonsensical for a verificationist, who rejects both the meaning of non-empirical premises and the meaning of non-empirical arguments based on pure reason, to speak of non-empirical truths that cannot eventually be grounded in first-person experience, since all so-called 'truth's must be verifiable either a priori in the imagination or a posteriori in the sense of walking up to and confirming something. The above transcendental argument I presented above isn't an empirical argument based on philosophers actual use of language, and neither is the absolute notion of an external world empirically meaningful.

Perhaps we could say, transcendental arguments are potentially useful therapies for treating anxieties over idealism, while skeptical arguments against realism are potentially useful therapies for treating nihilistic despair over realism.

But since the arguments used in both philosophical therapies not empirically verifiable arguments, they purely consist in propaganda with an intended remedial effect.

Yes, video-gaming, artificial intelligence and the information age are likely to be causing a metaphysical shift in our default cultural assumptions, mostly i believe for the better.

The problem with the past-century's default assumption of a finite single life or "permadeath" in gaming terminology, is that there is no logical incentive for an individual to act morally towards the world.

If everyone is going to permanently cease to exist, then why should it matter whether one looks after the planet and their fellow citizens and treats the rest of society with the undue care and respect that society has not reciprocated towards them? unless, that is, one believes there is no escaping the world, even in death...

One can argue that unless existence is perpetual and that individuals are in some sense metaphysically equivalent and bound to their world, there is no logical justification for morality.

one directly sees indirect realism
— sime
This sounds like a contradiction. This sounds like you have direct access to reality to describe it with such detail and with such confidence, not indirect access. — Harry Hindu

yes, *I* have direct access, in the sense that I cannot imagine what it means to have indirect access in my own case. Yet it is natural for me to describe everyone else as having indirect access, since I observe other people as being objects that are distinct from their objects of perception.

So I am afraid, it is direct realism for me and indirect realism for everyone else.

And surely you would agree. For isn't it obvious to you that my words can only refer to my representations of your world that I cannot possibly know or even meaningfully talk about?

Of course, your version of "my" corresponds to "you" - an object over there- in my field of perception.

And of course, MY version of "my" corresponds to nothing.

And of course, if anybody is rational they will agree with my statements as written, but draw exactly the opposite conclusion.

And the only reason this is appears inconsistent to the realist is because he insists on the semantic symmetry of propositions whose subject is the first-person; he assumes that enlightened individuals would all be in verbal agreement with each other when discussing the truths of philosophy; that their propositions of epistemology would all be phrased in terms of "we know this" as opposed to "I know this" whereas "you know that"

But the realist overlooks what is directly in front of his nose. For when describing one's use of words in relation to one's own experiences, one directly sees indirect realism when one watches other people perceiving their surroundings, whereas one can only think like a direct realist when it comes to one's own experiences. For one's own experience is the very basis in which indirect realism is interpreted.

Even if this doesn't count as a critique of Kantianism, it does count against skepticism. And it shows how rudimentary perception can work on a direct realist account. — Marchesk

I'm not quite sure how that follows, for neuroscience and machine learning are both representationalist and neo-Kantian in the sense of being functionalist, at least in terms of their surface grammar. The upshot is that representations are internal and their designated truth labels are external and they aren't typically considered to be part of a unified single entity.

It might be enlightening to read about Kant's theory of cognitive judgement on the SEP to understand the precise differences of modern neuroscientific thinking to Kant's transcendental idealism.

If I recall correctly, Kant's views of perception are somewhat similar to direct realism in the sense of being roughly deflationary about consciousness in terms of its contents, but with some minor and irrelevant differences that relates to the normativity of judgements. In truth his views were probably somewhat vague and ambiguous but i believe they are deflationary in the critical sense of rejecting truth by correspondence in the empirical sense.

In other words, empirical doubt about the 'external' world 'as a whole' might be impossible for Kant, but not necessarily rational doubt concerning the transcendental reality or significance of the empirical world, since after all, Kant speaks of transcendental Noumenal entities that are rationally deducible, even if they are unimaginable and empty logical entities without empirical meaning and significance.

Hence it appears that direct realism, at least for Kant, even if eliminating empirical doubt 'as a whole', cannot defeat rational Scepticism.

According to utilitarianism there seem to be two ethical arguments for committing murder:

1) The "Utility Monster" argument: Perhaps it is the case that the pleasure and happiness a murderer experiences by killing somebody outweighs the future pleasure and happiness lost by his victim and the grief caused for the victim's family and friends.

2) The "Benevolent World Exploder" argument : Perhaps the most compassionate action to minimise future human suffering is to commit genocide and wipe out the human race.

The problem of course is how to define and estimate the net-utility of a person's continued existence as a whole - a utility value which should take into account how the individual feels about his own life, and the expected net-utility of that person's potential offspring and their offspring etc.

Is it even meaningful to talk about utility in the absolute way these arguments demand?

For while we can estimate *the relative* utility of an individual's actions by observing the average choices they make when repeatedly presenting to them the same set of choices with their associated consequences, there isn't any means by which to evaluate whether or not being dead is a "good choice", since this state cannot be re-entered and re-evaluated.

My conclusion is that murder and suicide, in being non-repeatable events cannot be assigned a utility value on behalf of individual victims. Utility can only compare states of satisfaction of the living, who on average appear very much opposed to the consequences they experience with respect to murder and suicide.

All forms of pattern recognition involve a priori representational assumptions. Unsupervised learning is no different. In fact machine learning nicely vindicates neo-Kantian ideas of perceptual judgement, even if not in terms of the same fundamental categories, nor from categories derived from introspective transcendental arguments (Kant was after all, targeting philosophical skepticism about the self and the possiblity of knowledge of the external world, and not the scientific problem of how to understand the behavioural aspects of mental functioning that concerns a merely empirical affair)

But yet from this neo-Kantian perspective, consider for example a nearest-neighbour image classifier consisting of nothing more than a disordered collection of images. Without any a priori assumptions it is impossible to even talk about this image collection as containing a pattern by which to classify new images with respect to that pattern.

This was the basic observation of David Hume. Raw observation data by itself cannot justify empirical judgements as claims to knowledge. Kant merely pointed out that raw observations alone cannot even constitute empirical judgements, which as machine learning nicely illustrates, requires innate judgement in the form of synthetic-a priori responses.

Generalisation from experience requires metrics of similarity for perceptual pattern matching, together with categories of perception for filtering the relevant information to be compared. Neural networks don't change this picture, even if perceptual filters are partially empirically influenced. Decisions still need to be made about the neural architecture, its width, depth, the neural activation responses on each layer, the anticipatory patterns of neurons and so on.

All of this constitutes "synthetic a priori" processing.

Thank you fdrake and others!

Just one last thing:
Where does the law of excluded middle fit into all this?
A statement must be either true or false.

So if it is unprovable, within a formal axiomatic system, and you cannot decide it's truth value even by going outside the system, what value do you assign to that statement?
How does this fit within the context of Godel's theorems? — guptanishank

LEM is irrelevant, since Godel's Incompleteness theorems don't use it, that is to say, his proof is entirely constructive and syntactic without invoking ~~P -> P.

Recall that Godels results weren't at all surprising to Intuitionists who rejected LEM twenty years in advance of the publication of his incompleteness theorems precisely because they rejected the the assumption that logic has transcendental significance beyond the step-wise empirical construction of its formulas in accordance with intuition. Why on the basis of this intuition ought it be expected that for any well-formed formula P in the language of an axiomatic system that we must derive P or ~P?

Since it is nonsensical to imagine proving the consistency of an axiomatic system that captures arithmetic, it is equally nonsensical to imagine the existence of true yet un-provable statements.

Godel sentences are not "true but unprovable" for this reason. For to assume that they are true is to beg the question of consistency, an assumption without which it is impossible to assign any meaning to godel sentences, for they are no longer necessarily non-derivable.

When reading popular accounts of Godel's theorem, there is always this whiff of a shady magical trick being pulled before the reader's eyes. And this magical trick is when authors like Douglas Hofstadter attempt to sell mystery to the reader by saying to the effect "forget about this boring and logically impossible-to-verify disclaimer about logical consistency that we cannot meaningfully assert, or the related fact that completed infinity doesn't really exist - *cough* look at this weird "self-referencing" Escher picture!"

I'm not sure I follow your point. You don't see how levels of awareness change between dream states and waking states? Moreover, there is no correspondence between NDEs and lucid dreaming in the sense that they are even close to equivalent. One knows when one is having a lucid dream, at least most of us do, and lucid dreams have a dreamlike quality that's not even close to what we experience on an everyday basis. NDEs, as I'm contending, are as reality like as you can get, in fact people claim that it's more real than real, it's hyper-real. — Sam26

No that is generally false. Lucid Dreams can be appear to be as equally real as reality. I think you are only thinking of spontaneous, low quality lucid dreams that occur when tired in nightly sleep. In contrast, wake-induced lucid dreaming that is deliberately achieved by a fully awake subject in the daytime through deep meditation or falling asleep consciously can indeed seem hyper-real. This explains why occultists have insisted on referring to them as Out-of-Body experiences, or astral projection.

There simply isn't a convincing reason to distinguish dream states from "out of body experiences" on the basis of hallucinatory/sensory phenomena.

If you don't believe me, why not try it???

This is exactly what RT is not. If there has ever been a god-like perspective then it is that of RT. How else could you explain time dilation and space contraction? Observers in their own frame of reference do not experience it. — Hachem

As i said, my understanding of SR is that it inter-translates local frames of reference that are causally connected within the speed of light of each other. But that doesn't make it a consistent theory of ALL conceivable frames of reference that lie outside of one another's light cones. Indeed SR has nothing to say about causal implications for space-like events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_and_prohibition_of_motion_faster_than_light

Yes it is, strictly speaking, nonsensical to speak of "true empirical contradictions", including the empirical consequences of special or general relativity - but that isn't the sense of "contradiction" to which philosophers appear to be referring to with the theory of relativity.

For what philosophers seem to be implicitly referring to here is an observer-independent transcendental interpretation of the theory of relativity that they are imagining in line with what their common-sense intuition about what science ought to tell us about a gods-eye perspective of nature.

Special relativity in being an empirical theory is, like with any scientific theory, only designed to account for empirical observations obtainable in the first-person. The theory shows that if our common-sense notion of causation is to be consistent without contradictory implications, then nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; SR says that for any two events that cannot physically influence one-another without interacting via faster than light signals, then it is impossible to say in an observer-independent sense which event occurs first or second, let alone whether they occur simultaneously. They have as it were, a "space-like" relation without a specific temporal ordering, a opposed to a "time-like" temporal ordering.

Hence if one interpreted SR transcendentally in the sense of trying to imagine its implications from a "gods-eye" perspective of the universe as whole, it does indeed imply contradictory states of affairs relative to our notion of causality.

Of course, this is a nonsensical interpretation of SR and forgets the fact that SR is a theory that is only supposed to be meaningful *relative* to a given frame of reference and to describe a frame of reference's relation to "nearby" frames of reference for which the ordering of causation remains unchanged.

But then what of General Relativity? Does it improve matters by giving us a god's eye perspective? i think not. For it allows different frames of references for which events are either seen as time-like or space-like. For example:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339235/causality-in-general-relativity

I'd like a more astute philosopher of science to chime in here, but I understand that general relativity only avoids 'transcendental contradiction' in the scientifically unimportant sense when it is interpreted either

1) anti-metaphysically, instrumentally and solipsistically as a computational device for describing only a particular individual observer's experiences and hypothetical observers within his conceivable future.

or

2) as a global metaphysics without any interpretation in terms of first-person experience..

I imagine idealists to accept 1, and realists to accept 2.

The anti-metaphysical stance of verificationism suggests that the most logical position on the "afterlife" is that of a soulless immortality that results by judging both "mortality" and "immortality" to be metaphysically inapplicable concepts that are empirically trivial in pertaining only to empirical matters of behaviour decided by convention:

1) Verificationism is anti-realist about time, since the meaning of "past" and "future" reduces to present empirical conditions pertaining to their assertion. Hence all observed change could be said to occur within a non-moving present that can only be said to exist 'in a manner of speaking'.

2) Verificationism is behaviourist concerning "life" and "death" since these concepts are reduced to their empirical criteria of assertion which pertain only to observed biological behaviour in observed persons and other organisms.

Hence for verificationism it would appear impossible in virtue of 1 and 2 to talk meaningfully about the life or death of a literal "first-person" owner of experience, except in the sense of a fictional person that we know of as the "first-person" or "empirical ego" which pertains only to an idea of the imagination that is derived from the publicly verified meaning of "living person" by way of analogy.