Note that the most primordial beetle of all beetles, so to speak, is conscious awareness itself. The question is asked, “Does conscious awareness occur in myself, in humans at large, in other lifeforms?” To which Witt replies, “It would be a beetle in a box, so who knows and who cares? It’s irrelevant.” — javra

The point of the Beetle box analogy was only to dispel the idea that there could be a meaningful inter-subjective notion of sensations in the form of Fregean referents. Yet recall that Witt likened the sense of the word "pain" to a picture of a boiling pot containing real boiling water - in other words, one understands so-called "other people's" pains directly; partly through observing a person's behaviour and partly by drawing upon one's own experiences of pains. Therefore the concept of objective sensation referents is redundant in that it isn't needed for understanding or justifying the existence of so-called 'other minds' (the word 'other' being responsible for most of the grammatical confusion).

Alternatively, to solve this sort of problem using the smallest number of brain cells and the least amount of graphics, restate the given premises formally, using a single variable x of universal type U

i) ∃x:U , A(x) ∧ B(x)
ii) ∀x:U, S(x) ⇒ B(x), which is equivalent to ∀x:U, ¬B(x) ⇒ ¬S(x) which immediately gives D.

Then state the theorems

A) ∃x:U , A(x) ∧ S(x) (which can instantly be seen to not be derivable from i and ii)
B) ∃x:U , A(x) ∧ S(x) (same as A)
C) ∀x:U , S(x) ⇒ ¬A(x) (instantly recognizable as not derivable)

We already know what happens after death, have the cadaver farms to prove it, and it ain’t pretty. — NOS4A2

That 'we know' what happens after death in the sense to which you refer, is a valid, albeit tautological conclusion relative to the biological definition of death. This 'conclusion' however, is not a conclusion in the sense of an empirically inferred contingent proposition, given that it is more or less a restatement of the premise that death means biological extermination in the sense that is ascertainable by third-parties.

Such behavioural definitions of death are therefore not in conflict with the supposedly conflicting conclusions arrived at via other definitions of death in relation to other conceptual frameworks, such as solipsism, phenomenology and presentism which present a different tautological conclusion.

It's amusing how much air-time the BBC has devoted to shaming Boris's breaking of Covid rules, given that five years ago they barely raised an eyebrow over the BMJ's study that linked 120 thousand deaths to needless Tory austerity and benefits custs that even provoked UN condemnation - policies that the BBC were happy to promote in the name of journalistic neutrality, the same BBC that has previously devoted thousands of hours to climate skepticism and the benefits of Brexit.

Yes. Another way of putting it in order to sound less speculative, is to remark that the predicate 'being conscious of' has the grammar of an indexical, like 'this', 'here' , 'now' etc. It doesn't make sense to speak of two 'nows', let alone a succession of them, because 'now' isn't an observable referent. Rather, 'now' is an ostensive means of referring. Likewise, it makes no sense to speak of consciousness as changing, appearing or disappearing, for in all of those cases what is being referred to are various observations that one 'is conscious of' .

Think of time as an umbrella concept for the following notions:

P) Process. (meaning observable change and concurrency).
H) History. (meaning memories, records and archives )
C) Causality (meaning modal logic)

Are these three concepts irreducible, or does one or more reduce to the others?

Consider

C = P + H. This is essentially the Humean notion of causality.

P = C + H. This is equivalent to assuming that laws of physics exist.

H = P + C. This is presentism in which the past is said to not exist.

I see "mind-independence" as theoretical equivocation that results from ignoring praxis, because whilst theories can be presented aperspectivally, the use of a method cannot be.

For instance, traditional theories of causality identify the causal order with the temporal order. And yet methodologically speaking, I usually observe effects before their causes.

From a logical perspective, the beginning of time can be chosen arbitrarily. All one has to do is reorder their knowledge accordingly. One can choose the beginning of time to be right now, by conceptually separating the temporal order from the causal order, and then choosing the temporal order to start now.

think that you are talking about another kind of beliefs, since you involve society. I'm talking simply about "belief" as a concept and referring to individuals: "an acceptance that something exists or is true". It is something very very, but very, simple. — Alkis Piskas

Sure. I am only suggesting to make things even simpler by dispensing altogether the idea that beliefs are properties of individuals, given as you say, that an individual's beliefs are merely what the individual considers to be true.

For logically we get

I believe(x) implies x is true, and
x is true implies I believe(x)

implying that belief predicates of the first-person are redundant in merely asserting what is the case.

Of course, the above analysis appears to be wrong to most people, with beliefs appearing to be indispensable, due to the fact that we say that previously held beliefs can be proven "wrong". But this is just a turn of phase in which we reinterpret the past as referring to the present for the sake of maintaining our linguistic conventions.

Nevertheless, it remains an intuitively useful fiction to externally predicate beliefs and goals on behalf of third-party agents when attempting to predict or control their behaviour, as for example in machine learning when informally analysing a reinforcement learning algorithm in terms of "goals" and "belief states"

I share your point of view, as I see Trivialism as a corollary of truth-conditional semantics, which can be the only scientifically respectable semantics from a causally objective point of view. But i am inclined to express that position by saying that beliefs are concepts defined by, and pertaining to, the social convention of language, as opposed to properties pertaining to the psychological states of individuals.

For example, society is unlikely to attribute false beliefs to Amazon Alexa if she said something or acted in a way that we call "untrue", because in her case society considers itself to have causal understanding of her stimulus-responses.

A proposition is usually taken to be the intentional object of a belief, by definition of both "proposition" and "belief". By this understanding, they are internally related on a conceptual level and neither concept can be understood without the other, as opposed to each concept existing independently and being contingently related through external happenstance.

Part of the confusion might stem from the fact that in logic, propositions are expressed using a formally recognizable linguistic structure in the form of composable predicates, terms and quantifiers, leading to the paradox of the unity of the proposition, which indicates that the meaning of propositions isn't syntactically decomposable into reusable terms and predicates in the way that logical analysis appears to suggest.

The mutually dependent definitions of belief and proposition also invites scepticism regarding the existence or utility of belief concepts. For example, in Wittgenstein's remarks concerning what turns an arrow sign into a pointer, he comments to the effect that the a priori phenomena that we might associate with the propositional attitude of an observer of the arrow (e.g feeling that the arrow is pointy), is only partially relevant, if at all, to the observer's eventual use of the arrow.

Likewise, Bertrand Russell identified the intentional object of a state of hunger to be whatever food is eventually used to satisfy the hunger, as opposed identifying the intentional object with the imagined food that a hungry person thinks about before eating.

Beliefs and other propositional attitudes don't objectively exist.

For example, I notice a person standing at a bus stop. Unless I subjectively empathise with the person who is doing the standing, I cannot form the proposition that the person is waiting for a bus . Objectively speaking, I can at most hypothesize a causal explanation as to their standing behaviour, an explanation that refers only to their past behavioural conditioning and makes no reference to belief-states or to future-contingent phenomena such as whether or not a bus comes and the person gets on it.

I am more than willing to interpret the person as waiting for a bus, via an instinctive act of empathy, but in doing so I am mixing together my own beliefs regarding the person with my concept of their beliefs.

Science is a practical means for relating and translating different perspectives, and isn't descriptive of perspectives per-se, due to the fact that perspectives are a meta-logical concept that are external to the inter-subjective concept called 'scientific investigation'. Science isn't troubled by the fact that our perspectival uses of language come into conflict with our shared linguistic conventions , because science's concerns are only inter-subjective.

You never lose awareness during sleep, for you cannot meaningful assert that you are unconscious in the present. Rather, when awake you have no memories about being previously asleep, which you call "being previously unconscious". And when we say that a subject is 'presently unconscious' "because" he isn't responding, the word "because" isn't being used in the sense of the justification of a hypothesis , but in the sense of defining what is meant by the word "unconscious" from the perspective of external observers.

So to answer your question, sleep is a useful 'private' model of death in that both concepts pertain to the concept of amnesia and nothing else.

To borrow from Berkeley's anti-representationalist ontology, all concepts, including "mind" and "brain" are reducible to ideas, where "ideas" (or in modern parlance, "qualia"), share the grammar of indexicals likethis and that, i.e. "ideas" are the medium of empirical understanding, and in themselves are neither substances nor representations, in spite of the fact they are presented that way during communication. Perhaps we can say that "ideas" are the very conceptual material of what we call "substances", "relations" and "representations".

The problematic part of Berkley's ontology (as I interpret Berkeley) , are "spirits" that refer to subjects with respect to which ideas are relativized, a move which appears to translate the dualism between mind and matter into a dualism between minds and ideas, and Berkeley apparently didn't consider third-party subjects as being reducible to ideas of the mythical first person "subject", and i'm not sure as to why.

You might understand the paradox differently to me, but for me the paradox concerns only the concept of length, and since points are volumeless they cannot contribute to the paradox. Not to mention the fact that the OP's visual demonstration of the paradox only made reference to line lengths and a limiting argument.

From this perspective, the paradox is reproducible by using a point-free topology consisting of the lattice of right-angled triangles with rational-valued endpoints, with an analogous dissolution to what i mentioned above.

This paradox shows that intervals dx are not the same as x. All dx tògether have length 2, because you lay them together mutually orthogonal. Points can't be laid aside mutually orthogonal. The continuum can't be constructed from points x. But it can from dx's. — Raymond

Only finite intervals exist in the standard euclidean space, but this doesn't matter because infinitesimals aren't even quantities, meaning that limits and their approximations never meet in the plane, which resolves the paradox.

Whatever. As I mentioned in another thread, a simple isomorphism between physical reality and mathematical structures provides a way of saying they are the "same" without being identical. But if this is truly what Tegmark had in mind he overdid his arguments - as do some posters on this forum. :cool: — jgill

But if meaning is use - which is essentially a structuralist standpoint - then it isn't clear to me that maths and physics aren't identical, at least partially, in a tautological sense. From the perspective of use, the meaning of Newtons Laws of motion, for instance, includes the mathematical activities which are used in their application. Conversely, the meaning of "2 + 2 = 4" can be understood to include the physical experiments that verify it.

What i was mostly objecting to earlier was Tegmark's aperpsectival take on the conceptual overlap that is a consequence of his scientific and metaphysical realism.

Differentials are funny things. They are not points, but infinitely small pieces of a continuum. The small stairs has the same length as the big one. The smooth diagonal has a different structure as the infinitely small stair. You could put the differentials in a variety of ways together around the diagonal. Mutually orthogonal, like a stairs, or in a general zig-zag pattern, which will lead to a total length bigger than sqrt2. Maybe even an infinite length. Can one project all parallel differentials placed together to form an infinite line, squeeze together on the diagonal? If you rotate all dx on the infinite line 90 degrees, can the be layed side by side on the diagonal? — Raymond

Differentials, i.e. infinitesimals cannot denote regions of Euclidean space, due to the fact the reals are an Archimedean field, which prohibits the definition of infinitely small intervals. Yet infinitesimals are indispensable to analysis, due to the mathematical importance of potential infinity, of which they are the reciprocal concept.

According to Cauchy

"When the successive numerical values of a variable decrease indefinitely so as to be smaller than any number, this variable becomes what is called infinitesimal , or infinitely small quantity... One says that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small when it's value decreases numerically so as to converge to the limit zero"

In other words, an infinitesimal should not be understood as being a quantity, but understood as referring to a variable that refers to a non-infinitesimal value chosen at random from a monotonically decreasing process whose limit is zero. In practice, the use of an "infinitesimal" is analogous to running an algorithm that generates it's respective process, then stopping the algorithm after a finite random amount of time and using the last value obtained as the value of the infinitesimal variable (which is necessarily a non-infinitesimal quantity)

More generally, the (ε, δ)-definition of a limit of a function f(x) at some point b has a similar interpretation, namely as a process denoting a winning strategy in a sequential game played between two players. Player one first fixes a value for L, then in every round of the game player two chooses a positive value for ε and player one then chooses a value for δ in response. If δ is such that |f(x) - L| < ε whenever |x - b| < δ , then player one wins the round. If player one has a strategy for winning every round, then the limit is L. But all meaningfully defined games must eventually terminate, which in this case is when player two decides to quit, making the eventual value of |f(δ) - L| a random positive quantity determined by player one's last move.

So on reflection, the philosophical paradox raised by the OP is resolved purely through careful inspection of the limit concept; for to say that a sequence of finite staircases comes "arbitrarily close" to a diagonal line, is only to assert that a staircase randomly drawn from the respective process comes boundedly close to the diagonal line, where the looseness of the bound is a monotonically decreasing function of the staircase's position in the sequence.

It's all too easy to accidentally commit the fallacy of absolute infinity.

This is the stupidest discussion I have ever seen on the forum... Well, that's not true. Pretty stupid though. Here's my favorite:

In my opinion, the philosophical paradox is only solvable having gained an intuitionistic understanding of the continuum and of point-free topology, due to the fact that intuitionism is better fitted to the phenomenology of mathematical judgement. — T Clark

hehe You're welcome. But stupid or not, the paradox is due to intuitions that aren't compatible with the definition of the classical Euclidean topology. Rather than insist that our intuitions are wrong and that the mathematics is right, we can instead insist that our intuitions are right by switching to an arguably more realistic axiomatization of geometry in which the paradox is dissolved or doesn't arise in the first place, such as computational geometry or intuitionism.



Can you honestly intuit an extensionally infinite staircase that is arbitrarily close to a diagonal line yet remains different in length? The concept of differentiation is similarly philosophically problematic, due to the ghost of departed quantities.

Tegmark's views are in part the logical corollary of swallowing the subjective-objective distinction, according to which perspective isn't real and only "inter-subjective" laws for translating Lockean primary qualities are real.

His views are also funny, not only for abusing Occam's razor in such a crackpot fashion, but that a parameter-less "model" of physics is a contradiction in terms; for it is the parameters of a model that correspond to the model's falsifiable propositions, that are revised via fitting the model to data. An infinitely adaptable model that has no parameters makes no predictions and is functionally similar to the largest possible fishing net.

The general thrux of Tegmark's remarks can be interpreted as a Modus-Tollens argument against scientific realism. i.e. that his argument is valid, but that his conclusion is false, implying that his premise of a mind-independent universe is false - which is already an empirically obvious false premise to those who aren't blinded by a dogmatic understanding of scientific jargon.

Both idealists and realists can agree with the Ontic-Structural Realism of Tegmark. For example, British idealism's doctrine of internal relations is in logical agreement with OSR, without jumping the shark to conclude that only unthinkable and unperceivable mathematical structure exists in a way that is divorced from the Lockean secondary qualities of perception.

In my opinion, the philosophical paradox is only solvable having gained an intuitionistic understanding of the continuum and of point-free topology, due to the fact that intuitionism is better fitted to the phenomenology of mathematical judgement.

Consider for example, that it is impossible to visualise or perceive an extensionally infinite staircase, or a perfectly straight path, or vanishingly small point, or a precise angle. The instability, ambiguity and uncertainty that characterises mental imagery and perception complements the realities of mathematical undecidability and finitistic reasoning that intuitionistic geometry recognises and which classical geometry ignores, while Brouwer's theory of choice sequences parallels how one visualises or recognises "infinity" (i.e. as a finite random truncation of a vaguely sized process).

As the pollution of the supposedly sacred Ganges river demonstrates, the sacred lies in the realm of ideas and relates to the physical realm only to the extent that the recognition of those ideas is physically contingent.

Sime, you're wrong about the arrow example, and about a "look up table." Let's see if I can make this clear. Wittgenstein asks in (PI 454), "How does it come about that this arrow -----------> points?" Any sign, be it a word or an arrow, only has an application, a use, that we together as a people, i.e., in socially given situations, give to it. "This pointing is not a hocus pocus which can be performed only by the soul [the soul, as used here, should be understood as the inner thing, the subjective]. So, it seems to me, and not only me, but many other interpreters, that Wittgenstein is saying the exact opposite of your point. This is clear throughout the PI, starting at the beginning when he talks about language-games. — Sam26

" This pointing is not a hocus pocus which can be performed only by the soul "

Does not support your thesis or yield the conclusion

"Any sign, be it a word or an arrow, only has an application, a use, that we together as a people, i.e., in socially given situations, give to it."

unless by that you mean

"Any sign, be it a word or an arrow, only has an application, a use, that a person gives to it."

Which is logically coherent, and avoids the unintelligible requirement of social consensus with respect to meaning and truth, that you often appear to imply.

Notice the context of the PI 454, in which he barely mentions social consensus. He is merely remarking on the distinction between what is said or thought a priori in relation to a sign (e.g the sign's stipulated definition) in comparison to it's actual a posteriori application. The difference between the definition of a sign and it's eventual application - that is under-determined by the definition, undermines the possibility of any theory of semantics, whether private or public.

​"Infinity" is a striking example of a word whose use necessarily belies any stipulated definition. Our convention defines "infinity" as meaning boundless, endless, or larger than any number..., and yet any particular use of the sign of "infinity", such as in an executed computer program, eventually halts and involves strictly finite reasoning and demonstration, - in apparent contradiction to it's stated definition as being "endless" - until that is, it is remembered that the actual uses of the phrases "boundless energy" , "infinite love" and what have you, are also finitistic...

In other words, "infinity" and "going on forever" can be considered as synonymous, but no two applications of either are the same, for they halt at different times or finite numbers, if at all.. Hence the synonymous definition of infinity is a misleading tautology that says nothing of implicative relevance and isn't the semantic ground of anything. This is the logical content of the so-called "private" language argument, and as demonstrated, applies equally to the shared definitions offered by public languages.

The "private language argument" isn't "no private meaning, therefore only public meaning", but rather "no private theory of meaning, therefore no public theory of meaning either".

The concept of "potential infinity" partially circumvents the above issue by defining "infinity" to be an indexical referring to a fallible promise of a future finite number (as is done in computing), but fallible promises, by definition, lie outside of what is determinable by convention,implying the meaninglessness of a theory of so-called "infinite numbers" except as an empty syntactical construct.

Wittgenstein undoubtedly noticed that what is true regarding the definition of "infinity" is also true of every sign in every language, complementing Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. For example, we say "Bachelor" is a synonym for "Unmarried Man", but no two individuals use the expressions synonymously. Synonymy isn't use - except when writing definitions.

And since the sentences of our language are infinite, we cannot even ground the linguistic notion of synonymy in personal or social conventions without appealing to a notion of logical implication, which leads to vicious regress if we think of logical implication as being reducible to convention. This observation of Quine in his attack on "truth by convention" predates the post-humus publication of PI by nearly two decades, and Wittgenstein was likely influenced by it. It rules out every stripe of meaning-theory so that neither phenomenalism, physicalism nor communitarianism can serve as semantic or epistemological "givens".

Your logic is on the right lines, imo. In phenomenological application, "Nothing" is only used to refer to the irrelevancy of an experience with respect to some objective, as opposed to referring to absolute absence of experience. Therefore, with some grammatical distortion one could say "experience is logically necessary" , by virtue of "experiential nothingness" referring to ... nothing.

Another source of conflict and confusion, especially among Bayesian statisticians, concerns the distinction between uncertainty and imprecision.

The typical breed of Bayesian accepts premise A.

Premise A: Tomorrow's weather is physically certain, but epistemically uncertain.

On the other hand, a modern physicist with a distaste for folk-psychology (and hence for conventional epistemology and Bayesian statistics) might reject A in favour of the "direct realist" premise B:

Premise B: From the perspective of today, tomorrow's weather is physically imprecise.

Here, physical imprecision refers to the fact that the physical information constituting "today" does not imply a precise weather-outcome tomorrow and that any accurate model of today's information translates this physical imprecision into an imprecise estimation.

I would disagree. Its raining is an axiomatic statement based on an independent variable. That is, it is independent from belief. If it was a belief, they would pose it as an opinion such as: I think it is raining. Calling water falling from the sky a "good justification" for a belief that it is, in fact raining is a bit of an understatement. — john27

People have a confusing tendency to say "I believe X" when exhibiting doubt or a granting concession that one might be wrong - the very opposite qualities to the supposed meaning of "belief".

Also, a person's spoken beliefs often belie their actions.

The meaning of our words or concepts is established necessarily within a social construct, and it necessarily follows that meaning is not a function of an individual’s privately derived sense of meaning; assuming that a privately derived sense of meaning is even linguistically possible, as Wittgenstein’s private language comments seem to suggest. — Sam26

Any interpretation of a social convention is subjective. Wittgenstein was especially clear about this (e.g how can I know the intended direction of an arrow? how I am supposed to interpret a look-up table? ) . So there is no escape from purely private meaning, at least for Wittgenstein, even if such meaning cannot be linguistically translated.

Of course, he did understand that there is no logical room for an intermediate "private language" mediating between one's percepts and one's use of public language, recalling his attack on the Is/Seems distinction with regards to perceptual judgements.

Quantum superposition has already been logically described without contradiction using Tensor Products in Categorical Quantum Mechanics, a form of Linear Logic . Linear logic is para-consistent, so doesn't permit the derivation of anything from A and not A, otherwise known as ex contradictione quodlibet.

I'm tempted to say that Symmetry isn't true by correspondence, rather symmetry means "truth by correspondence".

This is by considering symmetry to be the same thing as an isomorphism, i.e an invertible mapping, where an invertible map is a property of a description or acts of description.

.

To sum up, Gettier Problems demonstrate that justified true beliefs can be fallible, leading to scepticism about the existence of knowledge.

But I argue that there are equally valid reasons to deny that beliefs can refer to anything but the truth, leading to scepticism about the existence of false beliefs, and hence the utility of the concept.

In my opinion, having scepticism of the second sort doesn't nullify the epistemic scepticism provoked by Gettier problems, or vice versa. After all, denying the existence of false beliefs cannot deny the reality of one's mistakes.

Arguments of the second sort are really an instance of meta-epistemological scepticism, which is to doubt the meaningfulness of epistemology as an enterprise and the idea of inter-subjective theories of truth, belief and knowledge.

In an attempt to crystallise the differences of opinion in this thread, what is everyone's view regarding the relevance of the Private Language Argument (if any) to the "The hard problem"?

In your opinion, does Wittgenstein's strategy of semantic reduction (as you understand it) successfully solve or dissolve the hard-problem? (to recall his earlier logical behaviourism)

I don't see how. You seem to be saying that I can't have a belief about the result of a coin flip because it hasn't happened yet but I'm not seeing why. — Isaac

You can have a belief in the manner you describe that refers to your psychological concept of "future". But from a physical and causal perspective, your beliefs cannot refer to the physical future and can only refer to your physical history, making your beliefs a conceptually redundant way of talking about the causes of your perceptions, from a physical perspective.

Haven't you ever had an experience where you have thought "this wasn't what I was expecting!".

What makes you think this isn't literally the case?

I don't see why not. There are psychological states regarding 'the actual lottery' as much as there are regarding 'my dream I had last night'. I can quite coherently now distinguish between my concept of what's actually in my cupboard and what I believe is in my cupboard, that's how I'm aware of the fact that I might be wrong, by holding those two concepts to be different. If someone says to me "what might be in that cupboard?" I could give them several answers, none of which correspond to what I believe is in that cupboard. I could even imagine myself opening the cupboard and being surprised by the contents. — Isaac

Right, but what has your present psychological state of uncertainty, including your memories, imagination and thought experiments, got to do with a future interaction with your cupboard?

Doesn't your self-professed ability to distinguish your beliefs from actuality preclude you from interpreting the objects of your beliefs as being in the future?

OK, so perhaps you should have said "fundamental to my definition of the actual moon" rather than "fundamental to the very definition of the actual moon"? — Janus

Yes, I'm of the view that the object of a predicate loses intelligibility if the subject responsible for the predication is dropped or replaced with the mythical subject "we".

Still not following I'm afraid. 'Truth' is a predictive function, it says that if I act as if A I will get the response expected if A were the case. I don't see how a notion of mind-state causality affect this. We can model all the prior causes of the the belief that X and still find that acting as if X doesn't yield the results we'd expect if X were the case. — Isaac

We predicate truth about people's behaviour, e.g. "John's opinion was discovered to be true", but this shouldn't be taken to imply that truth is a property of their thoughts and actions.

Suppose a person says "I expect that if I buy a ticket I will win the lottery tomorrow, because I had a vivid dream of winning it last night".

On a causal account of belief states, the psychological state of expectation cannot be interpreted as being future directed. The object of this person's expectation isn't the future lottery, but merely the dream that they had.

So in "the cat believes the food is under the box" 'believes' should be replaced with what? Or do our epistemic conventions apply to cats? — Isaac

We interpret the cat in the manner that suits our purposes, i.e. using the same approach as we do a human being. In both cases, we aren't predicating a property about the agent concerned.

According to a causal understanding of mind, each and every psychological state refers only to the situation that caused it, implying that "belief states" are necessarily infallible or that the notion of truth is superfluous. Therefore, since beliefs aren't generally considered to be infallible, they cannot be reducible to psychological states.

Rather, beliefs exist in relation to social-conventions for classifying thoughts and behaviour. To say "John's beliefs were shown to be false" is to say "Relative to our epistemic-conventions, the belief-behaviour exhibited by John was classified as "false" - which isn't to say anything about John per-se.

Why would your perception of the moon be any more "fundamental to the very definition of "the actual moon"" than mine though? While it seems true that the properties of the moon are perceived properties; I don't think it follows that the moon must be dependent for its existence on being perceived. The way it appears depends on being perceived, but that is not the same as the ways in which it could be perceived. — Janus

Because my concept of "the actual moon" is necessarily in relation to my experiences that constitute my frame of reference, and any powers of empathy i might have for pretending to understand the moon from your perspective cannot change this semantic fact.

Beliefs cannot be real properties of brains, because the notion of epistemic-error is under-determined with respect to the neurological and physical facts of perception and action.

If I think John exists and I make a statement about John, then it is intended to be about an actual John. So I know what my statements are intended to be about. But I am not infallible. — Janus

That depends on perspective. E.g, from my perspective, your perception of the moon and "the actual moon" are mostly unrelated concepts, even though I am forced to consider my perception of the moon as being in some sense fundamental to the very definition of "the actual moon".

Anyone claiming that science can solve or dissolve the hard-problem, is not only wrong, but demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of science.

The ontological naturalism of science refers to the fact that the ontology of science is deliberately left undefined in terms of the perceptual judgements of any particular individual, in order so that scientific concepts can be universally shared and applied by scientists worldwide in a free and bespoke fashion, without laboratories having to submit their interpretations of their findings to the authoritative perceptual judgements of a particular individual. The price of this freedom and universality is experiential under-determination of scientific language, whereby no particular individual can claim to have direct and objective scientific knowledge.

To understand the existence of the hard-problem is to recall the history of the metre. Recall the platinum bar locked in the vault of Paris during the 19th century that was used to define "one metre" . If that platinum bar was replaced with a person whose judgements constituted the definition of "one metre", for that particular person the "hard-problem" of "sensing" one metre wouldn't exist, because by definition whatever the person perceived to be "one metre" would by definition be "one metre".

Eventually, the definition of "metre" was dematerialised for global convenience, and redefined theoretically in terms of the speed of light, changing the meaning of " one metre" from being a fundamentally empirical proposition referring to a particular bar in paris, to being a theoretical term with ambiguous empirical content, a term that was itself defined in terms of other theoretical terms in other units of measurements. In the process of dematerialisation across all units of measurement, scientific empiricism lost the distinction between theoretical and observational terms to became thoroughly aperspectival and theoretically circular.

The dematerialisation of scientific language therefore constitutes buying universality, semantic simplicity and practical freedom, at the cost of creating the hard-problem of subjectivity.

No, I commit to all of reality, I won't cherry-pick. What I don't commit to is the fantasy of direct knowledge of objects. — Kenosha Kid

Then why not commit to direct perceptual access of vague objects?