whether or not this activity is in itself philosophy, you must agree that it does, or can, bring the decider into contact with philosophical issues.

Such confrontations happen throughout everyone's life.

What about suppositions? Is this a missing category? Suppositions cut across reasoning ("Suppose the following is true, then what follows?") and storytelling ("in a world where...").

Are these directives? ("entertain this thought in your head"). But this is an order that has no force. It is an activity the listener may take up, at their choice. Are they declarations? The speaker is declaring a suppositional reality into existence? Or do we really need a separate category?

Knowledge is adequately justified belief, whether or not it is true. — T Clark

This is untrue (and therefore, not knowledge).

Did the ancient Greeks know the earth was the center of the universe? This is bad English. It is proper to say, they believed, or thought they knew.

If I wanted a lecture I'd visit the university. I came here for a discussion. If you can't even be bothered to justify your assertions, then there's no point continuing. Things are not the case simply because they seem that way to you. — Isaac

Whatever dude. You are wrong, obviously wrong, and I made it abundantly clear. If your can't admit it, that's on you.

If you can't address the arguments I made, you can say so. No one will think less of you (in fact they would think better). But instead you leave in a huff. What more can one expect of a pro Russian anti vaxxer?

I'm not 'confusing' them, I'm arguing that they amount to the same thing. — Isaac

You are absolutely confusing them.

But, using this analysis, "I know where my hat is", when used to describe a high degree of confidence in my belief about the whereabouts of my hat, is exactly the right use of the term, and so it is true that "I know where my hat is", because I used the term correctly. Even if my hat turns out not to be there. — Isaac

"I know where my hat is" is a perfect exemplar the verb "know". Nonetheless, if the hat is not there, it is an incorrect claim, no matter the degree of belief.

The ancient Greeks did not know the world was the center of the universe. They merely thought they knew, with complete and justified confidence. And they made this claim in absolutely perfect Greek.

Ah, you've misunderstood my example (or I've been unclear). In your example, I couldn't possibly justify my statement because I'd never been to the city before. — Isaac

No, you misread mine:

Consider, we are in a city we haven't been to in 10 years — hypericin

You have a foggy memory there is a pub at the end of the road. The memory was wrong. But by chance, a pub was built there in the last month. You were right that there is a pub at the end of the road. But you were wrong that you knew it.

Given that Gettier Problems were presented to show that the JTB definition of knowledge is insufficient, having to add a fourth condition to overcome them shows that the JTB definition of knowledge is insufficient. — Michael

Fair

I've never found such decisions hard at all. — Tom Storm

Hmm, maybe it is the fact that I have always been philosophically inclined that has made these kind of decisions nightmarishly hard for me!

"I like this home. At least I think I do. But do I really know that? What if it is a passing whimsy? How do I distinguish my preference of the moment from a stable preference that will endure 10 years from now. I won't even be the same person by then! So how can I make this decision for a person I hardly know? Do I really even want a house? It is the largest purchase I have ever made, how do I justify spending the accumulated capitol of a lifetime on one? Is home ownership even my preference, or a socially normative one? Why do I really want one? How do I know there is not something drastically wrong with the house. There is an inspection, but is that sufficient evidence? How can it rule out every problem? Is the inspection not an instance of motivated reasoning? And it does not rule out horrible neighbors, a dog that barks at 3am, a wildfire that will destroy it in 5 years. The world is entering a phase of chaotic change, is it rational to tie oneself completely to one location in what might be a new and unpredictable epoch..."

These are the thoughts that will actually, frantically, go through my head, with my exasperated realtor wondering why I am passing on yet another perfectly good house. I have never bought one!

n ordinary life, epistemology is of little consequence - in picking a partner, choosing a home or selecting a car, working out what university degree to do, or which job to take, what shopping to buy - we do not worry about the problem of induction, or the correspondence theory of truth, or philosophy in general. — Tom Storm

I completely disagree. All of these life decisions are fraught with epistemological and philosophical considerations. It is what makes decisions so hard. If philosophy were a quaint exercise confined to certain abstract questions, it would be utterly uninteresting.

What if there isn't an 'underlying logic'? I mean there's no intrinsic reason why there need be. what if 'know' as in "I know my keys are around here somewhere!", is different in meaning to 'know' as in "she knew where her keys were". — Isaac

I'm not sure that's true, but if this is the case, that's totally fine. I'm not committed to the meaning of words being rigid. Natural language is allowed to do that. Then, I'm only interested in the latter sense here.

The word 'know' would never be used if used according only to the principle of true facts with true premises. — Isaac

No no no, you are confusing truth condition with condition of use. The truth condition of "to know" is nontrivial and very debatable. But the condition of use is both variable between people, and might be as simple as a feeling of confidence that something is so. These are totally disjoint things. And this question of "what is knowledge?" is here asking about the truth condition, not about the conditions of use.

All these debates and claims we make on this forum are complex, with very complex truth conditions, if we were confined to making true claims only, we would be paralyzed, and say nothing. And even then, we could only limit ourselves to making claims we felt were true with absolute certitude. We would still be wrong 95% of the time.

When I claim "I know the pub is at the end of the road" I simply mean that if you walk to the end of the road, you will find the pub there. So if the pub I thought was there had been knocked down, but later replaced by another, I don't see a problem with saying that I 'knew' there was a pub at the end of the road, since, if you walk to the end of the road, you will, indeed, find a pub there. — Isaac

I disagree. "I know there is a pub is at the end of the road" is distinguishable from the statement of bare fact, "there is a pub at the end of the road". The truth condition of the first is not that of the second. The first adds additional constraints to the truth condition: "There is a pub at the end of the road, and additionally I stand in a knowing relationship with that fact".

Consider, we are in a city we haven't been to in 10 years. You say "I know there is pub at the end of the road." We go to the end of the road. There is a pub with signs of fresh construction, and a "grand opening" sign. You say, "I knew it!". This would be a joke. Because, while there is in fact a pub at the end of the road, you absolutely did not know it.

An analysis of knowledge is either an analysis of what the word 'knowledge' means - how we use the word, or an analysis of what the word ought to mean - how it would make most sense in some particular context, to use it. — Isaac

"Knowledge" and so many other words are like "obscenity" in one of the trials in the 60's: The judge couldn't define it, but he famously "knows it when (he) sees it".

We make these distinctions easily enough, without knowing how we do it. What, if anything, is the underlying logic? This is the task of philosophy as I see it, in answering these "what is" questions.

In every day use, knowledge is most often simply a category of belief we have a high confidence in — Isaac

But this does not cut it, even by the standards of every day use. Sure, if you have a strong conviction, you might claim to know something. But if you had said, "I know my keys are around here somewhere", I can ask, "In retrospect, did you really know it?"

• If in fact the keys were in the car, you did not know it.
• If you knew it because you are a Pisces, you did not know it, even if they were around here somewhere, and you are in fact a Pisces.
• If you knew it because you remember leaving them on a table, when in fact that memory was from yesterday, but they did fall out of your pocket here anyway, you did not know it.

We make these intuitive judgements independently of how strongly you happened to hold the conviction that your keys were around here somewhere.

You are proposing an equivalence between supported theory (the world is older than 5000 years) and an unsupportable theory (that men did not like hairy women). — god must be atheist

I am proposing an equivalence between arguments: they are equivalent, and equally weak. You can (incorrectly) claim sexual selection is unsupportable. But not because, "what if it all just happened at once?". This is a miracle, and as an explanation, compared to the Darwinian model, it is fantastically unlikely trash.

My counter point will be this: mutations occur randomly, and at times in groups. The more intelligent, more verbal, more sexy humans of today may have mutated from proto-humans all at once in these aspects: sexual features, sexual preferences for looks, intelligence, and verbal skills.

Who is to say this has not been one whopping mutation? — god must be atheist

Who is to say that god didn't create all the animals in their present form 5000 years ago, and leave fossils in the ground to tease heretical archaeologists.

I contest that this question can be decided.

Other than that, by describing them as MVHPHs, you nicely described half of the males of the currently surviving specimens of the human race. — god must be atheist

:rofl:

So, do you not believe in sexual selection in other animals as well? Or is it just humans? Not that either are in dispute, afaik.

It is not an all or nothing thing. Ugly people/animals still get opportunities to mate. Sexual selection just needs to provide an advantage, both numerically (how many times do I get to mate?), and qualitatively (how good of a mate can I get?). The offspring of good mates will have this same advantage over the offspring of less favored individuals.

Clincher: Think about it another way: let's suppose that you were right. Therefore the "unsexy" gene ought to have been eliminated from the gene pool by now — god must be atheist

Everyone you see is the product of rampant sexual selection. All the really "ugly" genes, unfavorable to sexual selection, have been weeded out already. How attractive do you think a hairy, minimally verbal proto-human would be to you? What you perceive as ugly is one point on a very narrow band, compared to possible physical and mental variation.

How do you explain that some features are attractive to you, and others are not? How did that happen?

There is another logistics-related argument against "only the best-looking and sexiest" survive. Or humorous, intelligent, etc., as the case might be. — god must be atheist

To be sure, unattractive "borons" still have sex, now, and most likely prehistorically. All that is required is that the sexy attributes provide an advantage. You are arguing against sexual selection in its entirety, which is a non-starter.

The problem is that less funny guys dated less good looking girls, and Borons (boring morons) dated ugly girls. They all had children, who survived to adulthood. — god must be atheist

Modern conditions are a mere blip, and irrelevant to our evolutionary history. This might be true today, where huge, concentrated populations, and monogamy, are the norms.

But we evolved as tiny, polygamous populations. There, fucking of the fittest reigns.

Don't think of wright and wrong. Think of how harmful it is. If one's moral view creates harm than good, then it is immoral. On a lesser intensity, it is offensive. — L'éléphant

This doesn't really help. One person's harm is another's good.

It is the attempt to use argument and reason alone to derive truth, in those shrinking domains where this is considered a legitimate undertaking. These domains just lack a better method.

Academically, the legitimacy of this activity is bolstered with vast amounts of canon.

Intelligence correlates poorly with creativity, well with humor:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20157303?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentswo

Here is one which both describes the link between humor and verbal/logical reasoning, and... completely supports my theory!!
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/attachments/95822/humor-predicts-mating-success.pdf

Correlation is not causation would have been a better way of putting it — I like sushi

Correlation is all that is required here

So, my concern would be that it is the creative element in better humour rather than some underlying ‘sense of humour’. — I like sushi

Except, they have studied both. Humor is more correlated

Plus if some people have a bad sense of humour they still find each other funny and mate just as much. — I like sushi

Unattractive people also mate, so what

Not to mention that ‘emotional/social intelligence’ is not actually ‘intelligence’ (as in the ‘g’ factor).
5h — I like sushi

Humor correlates with spatial, verbal, and logical intelligences

There is no evidence that humour correlates with humour. It does have some relation to creativity though, but how significant that is is probably still a matter of research and investigation. — I like sushi

You speak with authority, I guess you have conducted a comprehensive review of the relevant research. But a cursory search does not support your findings. Just an example, which cites multiple papers:

https://www.lifehack.org/378304/there-any-link-between-humor-and-intelligence

Humor is a proxy for intelligence, and a vehicle for sexual selection.

It's a cliche, the hot girl with the inexplicably ugly guy. Why is she with him? "He makes me laugh".

We are all the products of runaway sexual selection, which selected for intelligence, by means of humor. Humor is the origin of human intellect. This same process selected, secondarily, for taking pleasure in hurmor: after all, it was the females who enjoyed humor the most who selected the funniest guys. They bore both the funniest and smartest guys, and the smartest girls who loved their guys the funniest. These outcompeted their duller contemporaries, both due to the intelligence for which humor is a pretty reliable marker, and because of the growing population-wide preference for funny men, resulting from this same process.

Just my theory.

Do you know that, personally?

Are you able to have bodily feelings or emotions without also having some thoughts along with them? — baker

I do, being human. I think with a little reflection you will agree. For you to experience the itch of a mosquito bite, must you constantly think, I'm itching? If so, this must be the most distracting event possible, precluding all other thought and activity.

To feel fear, one must already have certain beliefs about the workings of the world and the meaning of life. — baker

Obviously false. Babies and animals feel fear.

How do you know?
Is it because he merely can't speak or write, due to the stroke, or is he truly mentally disabled? — baker

I stipulate that he has lost the ability to think: to self talk, and to visualize.

If one measures oneself the way a not particularly compassionate external observer might judge one, then the result is going to be truly meagre. — baker

This person has lost the ability to measure anything.

What one considers to be an acceptable reply to these questions depends on one's intention for asking them — baker

I am interested in the nature of self, and of sentience in general. Is the self fundamentally composed of all the sensations it feels, internal and external? Or is there something more?

Back to topic!

One thing I didn't consider: without thoughts, we still have bodily feelings, and emotions. These are both egoic in the sense that they mark a "me" as distinct from the sensory world. Unless I am dissociated, this pain is my pain, and I am frightened.

But then, suppose we subtract these. A hapless individual suffers a stroke. As the cerebral artery occludes, his train of thought fades away, his mind is utterly empty. He is terrified, but is unable to mentally formulate his situation in any way. He sees, he hears, he is afraid, he has a throbbing migraine. That is his experience. Can you empathize with this state?

Then, his migraine fades away, replaced by an all encompassing numbness. Yet even numbness is a feeling, what he feels is nothing. His terror is replaced by a corresponding emotional blankness. He sees bright lights passing above him. He hears the doctors comment on his condition, but can't seem to understand. He smells the antiseptic odor of hospital, and tastes copper in his mouth. That is all. No thoughts, no feelings, no sense of the body. Can you empathize? Is this being strictly speaking still sentient?

Sadly for our subject, the cerebral artery, a mighty river in more halcyon days, is now barely a stream. Sight is gone. Taste is gone. Smell is gone. Hearing is gone. What is left? Is it a unperturbed sea, as per ? I contend, there is nothing left at all. Our hero is now a vegetable.

So, in objective idealism, ideas are still ontologically basic, but there is no question about them not being real when you aren't thinking about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So really I was conflating realism and materialism.

Berkeley dedicates much time to illusions and hallucinations because these are the obvious objections to his system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wonder how Berkeley would respond to this question: how do I know that the red I see is the red God sees? For all I know he sees blue when I see red, or he hears an electric guitar when I hear the violin. So I might be hallucinating my whole life, and yet the world appears entirely self-consistent. Must he dogmatically insist that God ordains that everyone perceives in the same way?

Similarly, how could he address animal perception? It is very unlikely that animals perceive the same way subjectively that we do. Must god simultaneously perceive in the manner of every sentient creature? Or must Berkeley insist that animals lack subjective experience?

It seems that Berkeley has replaced the dualism between material and perception with a more ad hoc dualism between mortal perception and God's perceptions.

You are conflating realism and idealism as the same things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Huh? I am?

When you take off the rose colored glasses in Berkeley, the world doesn't change, you just don't have tinted glasses on — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still don't see how this case is resolved for Berkeley. The world is real, and mental, and we access it via phenomenal perception. No reference may be made to a material reality which underwrites the perception. So, is reality rose tinted or no?

The forum is presently dominated by fools with little to no grasp of basic philosophical or logical notions and yet with thoroughgoing confidence in their opinions; by those who have failed to learn how to learn. — Banno

It must be a comfort to be in such good company!

Sure, the models change. But this is unproblematic for the realist. Because, the models, be they theoretic or phenomenal, are not reality. So the fact that they change is not particularly puzzling.

But for the idealist, there is no such remove between the phenomenal and reality. So, when the rose colored glasses are worn, the idealist is committed to say that reality itself changes. When such a result is arrived at, it is time to discard the theory.

he point about the rose colored glasses is particularly apt. That IS the argument against physicalism. Just reframe it: "if you assume you have an abstract thought model that explains reality, and you interpret all experience using that model, does that mean your model is actually a reflection of reality?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Except, your models of the world do not change when you put on and take off rose colored glasses. But your perceptions do. How do you consistently model a world where esse is percepi and rose colored glasses exist?

Models are reflections of reality. Perceptions are also models, and they also reflect reality. But they are perfectly pragmatic, without any commitment to accuracy beyond pragmatism. The physicalist models are the products of very hard work deducing what it is perceptions reflect. As direct contact between minds and reality is impossible, models are all we have. They are not reality. But they may model it more it less faithfully, and capture features more faithfully that what our built in models, perceptions, provide.

If you are a bat, or if you take a hallucinogen, is the world then radically altered? Obvious nonsense, not worth serious consideration.

The mind is essentially a function that maps sensory data to the virtual world of qualia. There is no other reasonable way to understand our place in the world.

If so and if, however, it doesn't make sense to say "perceiving is perceived", then "perceiving" cannot be; therefore "to be" has to be other (more) than "to be perceived". :eyes: — 180 Proof

"Being" and "perception" are categories, there is nothing wrong with claiming that these categories are in fact coincident.

There's a theory that Putin and Trump express obvious lies as a means of domination. The relentless bullshit creates a fog of abuse. — frank

I think this is why right wingers gravitate to obvious liars: it is a sign of strength and status, to be able to tell such lies. The stronger one is, the bolder the lies one is able to tell.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. — Joshs

It feels like you are reading way too much into the "precise" verbosity favored by professional philosophers. He is merely covering is bases. Would anything essential be lost rephrasing that quote as:

"Does a complete physical description and understanding of the brain imply consciousness? If it does not, consciousness must be aphysical."

There are no high metaphysical claims about realism here.

Would you similarly object to the statement:

"Does a complete physical description and understanding of biology imply life? If not, life must be aphysical."

I grant you that the with consciousness we are attempting to examining the very same process or entity by which we examine that process or entity. However, there are two sides of this equation, the third-person examination, and the first person phenomenon we are trying to explain. A third person scientific elucidation of the brain is no more problematic than any other subject. The problem is the bridge between the third person understanding and the first person phenomenon of consciousness.

If it were uncontroversial then how us it you are questioning how it happens? I'm with you on the questioning it, just not with you in saying it's uncontroversial. — Harry Hindu

It is uncontroversial that it happens from physical processes. Those who dispute that are properly marginalized.

The controversial part is how.

Consciousness is a word with Cartesian dualism baked into it. And that is why those who bang on about "consciousness" find that its usage leads to a feeling there is some unbridged explanatory gap. — apokrisis

Only by rejecting Cartesian dualism does the explanatory gap even arise. I also reject the Cartesian Theater, I believe we as conscious beings are the "images", and that the images arise from the physical brain. There is a dualism, between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. We are aware, by definition, only of the conscious parts, the parts which have representation as "images".

And yet, I cannot account for how these images arise from physical processes, despite knowing that they do. The explanatory gap results from the collapse of Cartesian dualism as a respectable philosophical position.. If Cartesian Dualism were allowed, there would be no gap, matter would be one kind of thing, mind another.

The fact that consciousness arises from brain processes is utterly uncontroversial. The philosophically interesting question that remains is how can it be that such a thing can arise from brain processes... A question to which science remains largely silent.

Eyes in the back of your head is it? — unenlightened

we are riding in the back of a pickup truck, trying to guess where we are going by looking behind.

[

Time does move backwards; or rather we move backwards through time. You can tell because we can see where we've been, but not where we're going. — unenlightened

Rather, from our perspective, we are moving forward while able only to look backward.

It is causality, not time, that has a direction. Time is the space in which causality evolves. If time "ran backwards", we wouldn't notice, because our memories would still be consequent of causally prior events.

we intellectually add in our minds more than is actually there? — TiredThinker

Of course we do. Our appraisal of something as beautiful is a property of our minds, not the thing. But we project this into the thing.

What about fractals? These are infinite spaces that you can explore on a computer. Their instantiation in a computer realizes what was an abstract infinity.