Ah well, if you think he's right then that settles it. We were all just waiting to hear what you reckoned about it. I should publish immediately before someone scoops your research.

I'd like to see a poll about that. — Pfhorrest

It's not a polling issue, it's how the brain works.

You don't have to know anything about philosophy to practice neuroscience (or vice versa) but these were drawn as counter-examples to the claim 'You can zap a brain with electricity and change what a person is sensing and feeling', and other materialist claims. — Wayfarer

Exactly. You absolutely can zap a brain with electricity and change what a person's sensing and feeling. There is zero doubt about this in neuroscience. You've presented fifty year out-of-date science which isn't even about 'sensing and feeling' without understanding the wide and complex issues because it ticked a few boxes in your pre-conceived ideas. Trawling through the pop-science books until you find one which sounds a bit like the thing you're trying to prove is not 'understanding the issues'.

I'm counting being uninterested in checking your beliefs against the senses as "ignoring empirical evidence".

Plenty of people ignore claims that there is empirical evidence to the contrary of their beliefs, rather than actually check if those claims pan out. That's being unresponsive to reality. — Pfhorrest

What claims? Scientific ones? If so then no-one except the scientists involved check them out against their senses. I can't think of any beliefs that people hold which can be demonstrated to their own senses to be wrong and they refuse such demonstrations.

Those are inseparable conditions. To think that something is correct is to think things contrary to it are incorrect. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. No one in real life thinks things are correct or incorrect, it's a philosophical construct to engender ideological purity. People believe things with (ever changing) degrees of certainty, which means that no-one is 'wrong' they just have a different assessment of the degree of certainty.

Agree. I am not a neuroscientist. The sign on the door says 'philosophy forum'. If being a neuroscientist were a qualification, it would be another forum altogether. — Wayfarer

Then stop invoking issues within it that you do not understand in your 'philosophical' musings.

I've read the books I mentioned, and I feel qualified to comment on them, as they're written for general audiences and they don't rely on having knowledge of neuroscience. — Wayfarer

Well you're clearly not because neither of them are saying what you claim they're saying.

Everyone has direct access to a small part of the world -- that's what sensation is. (This hinges on the direct realism covered in the previous thread on the web of reality). Ignoring empirical evidence from your senses is being unresponsive to the state of the world. — Pfhorrest

Nobody ignores empirical evidence from their senses in the construction of their beliefs. It's what our brain does, we can no more stop it from doing so than we can stop our heart from beating. If you can show me a non-clinical case of someone ignoring evidence from their senses in forming a belief I'd love to do a study on them.

You really have a problem with anybody ever thinking they know anything, don't you? — Pfhorrest

You didn't claim you knew something. You claimed other people didn't. That's what pisses me off, the hubris in thinking everyone else has got it wrong. If you can't see the horrific places that thinking everyone else who doesn't follow your ideology is actually objectively wrong have lead to, then God help us.

A minority, people like Dennett, deny that there is anything to explain.

I think, so far, Dennett's inspiration has led you to see complexity in something as simple as the taste of a pumpkin (or whatever). Taste is influenced by your sense of smell, which is the only sense processed by your frontal lobes, the seat of emotion. That's why aromas and flavors are frequently accompanied by direct and primitive emotions. Some of that is the result of cranial reflexes. Notice sometime that certain smells can give you a sudden flash of being somewhere else, in your past. — frank

What the fuck kind of argument is that? Dennet tries to deny qualia need explaining but lilacs remind you of your childhood so...what? What on earth has any of that got to do with the article or with the 'hard' problem?

So far what should have been an interesting exegesis has been nothing but an Herculean attempt by fdrake to get at the issues (nothing to add, some really good insights there though) which has been met by a lot of vague hand-waiving of a level more suited to the smoke-hazed dorm-room. "Yeah but...like...I can smell lilacs, man? Crazy init?"

It is now known that neuroplasticity enables the brain to regain from a lot of damage by re-purposing. In those cases, the mind changes the brain — Wayfarer

Unbelievable! Anyone even dare to have an opinion on consciousness and you leap to "have you read the literature", "you don't understand the issues" and here you are invoking fucking neuroscience in your crackpot opinions. Are you a neuroscientist? No. Have your read 'the literature' about neuroscience? No. Do you have the faintest idea how neuroplasticity actually works at a cellular level? No. are you qualified to even understand Penfield or Eccles, or the various counter-arguments? No

The depths of duplicity you'll stoop to to push your agenda astound me. Implying that the philosophy around consciousness is so complicated that people can't even talk about it without immersing themselves in the literature, but neuroscience? Oh that's easy, apparently we can all a crack at that on the basis of a couple of newspaper articles. Ridiculous.

So this is an example of a statement that isn't just the case here and now, but also the case indefinitely. What did you assume to assert this? — Harry Hindu

It.

The difference I suppose is that people persist in holding views that have already been shown wrong in philosophy — Pfhorrest

Come on then, let's have the list, let us all be enlightened by your solomanesque wisdom on the matter.

I've never heard of this as begging the question. Pretty much every theorem ever proven would be an example, since the definitions of all terms must be such that they yield the conclusion of the theorem exactly. — Kenosha Kid

Maybe. But it's really not that complicated. Any logical argument you bring to bear to show there are eternal absolute facts can only do so by assuming the truth-preserving relationship of the modus it uses is itself an eternal absolute fact. There's nothing wrong with that, no cause to stop theorising or throw logic away, but we assume it, we cannot prove it with itself.

In order to demonstrate that a position is begging the question it only need appear to be the case here and now and the position holds. It doesn't require that my conclusion is an eternal and absolute fact, it might turn out not to be the case tomorrow, that wouldn't make any difference to the refutation today.

An eternal fact is not defined as "a statement that is true irrespective of when it is evaluated of which there must be at least one" — Kenosha Kid

The begging of the question is not that the definition contains the assumption that there must be at least one such, it is in the assumption that it the properties of the mutually exclusive and exhaustive set thus presented is an 'eternal fact'.

The two facts in question are not premises or definitions. — Kenosha Kid

They seem like both to me.

If it is sometimes absolute but not always, it is not eternally absolute — Kenosha Kid

...seems like both a premise (of your reductio) and a definition of what 'eternally' means. Likewise with the statement about absoluteness.

So we end up saying that there must be eternal absolute facts because we have the words 'eternal', 'absolute' and 'fact', and this is just what they mean. I'm not necessarily saying there's anything wrong with that, by the way, just that it's question begging. We cannot state it without already assuming it in the language we use to state it, we haven't discovered anything new, just the assumptions we work with.

Yes, reductio ad absurdum. — Kenosha Kid

You performed the reductio on the conclusion, not the premises. Your premises are definitions which, by experience are neither absolute nor eternal.

If it is sometimes absolute but not always, it is not eternally absolutely. If it is in some cases eternal, in others not, it is not absolutely eternal. — Kenosha Kid

Are those two facts absolute and eternal?

The qualia denier seems to have two options as a result: either deny there are any sense data, which seems very unlikely; or deny that sense data have properties... — Luke

I don't think this is quite true. One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. The project seems somewhat reminiscent of changing God into an ineffable feeling in order to preserve the notion when clearly it has been twisted out of all recognition from the standard use.

We can already describe quite adequately the associated mental activity which accompanies the reception of sense data. It's called our response. I'm not sure what benefit there is to reifying it to 'qualia', but, given the history of the term, I can see much unnecessary confusion and distraction in doing so.

Take a synaesthete. When they see the number 4, they hear a high pitched ringing. They test this a million times looking at a million number 4s. Is their belief that number 4s make ringing noises more justified than if they'd done only a thousand such tests?

Firstly, yes, I've read both, and secondly why are you referring me to literature? I just asked what the nature of this knowledge was. Has that suddenly become impossible for you to say anything at all about without full recourse to literature. It's going to somewhat undermine the purpose of a philosophy forum if philosophy can't be discussed in shorter than book-length format.

I don't. The justification lies in someone's responsiveness to however the world is, not on knowing how in particular the world is. — Pfhorrest

How do you measure responsiveness to how the world is without knowing in advance how the world is? How could you possibly know what anyone is responding to?

Edit - who are these people unresponsive to the way the world is?

Those are events. I was asking what the knowledge consists of. After drinking vodka, what us it that I know that cannot be known without drinking vodka. And don't answer 'what it's like to drink vodka' because that's not a thing (there is no single fact of 'what it's like to drink vodka').

That's just a repetition of what you said. I'm asking why. What are the things you know from having an experience which are not knowable without having it?

You won't really know what it is like to kick the ball unless you do it yourself. — Wayfarer

Why not?

Statement E = There are no absolute eternal facts

E is either true or false — TheMadFool

You've begged the question. It being the case that E is either true or false assumes that there are absolute eternal facts (ie E must be either true or false). Without that assumption you cannot have the premise that E must be either true or false, E might be true sometimes but false others.

But, nevertheless, there is a valid distinction to be made between the first- and third-person perspective. In other words, me seeing Alice kick the ball is completely different to me kicking it. Of course, to you, then both me and Alice are third parties, but the point remains. — Wayfarer

The theory already accounts for that. Wayfarer kicks the ball, Andrew M kicks the ball and Alice kicks the ball are all different events. The distinction is already made without invoking first and third party distinctions.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Deduction is, to my reckoning, the relationship between premises and conclusion such that the latter follows from/is a consequence of the former. It differs from consistency in that two propositions maybe consistent but don't constitute a deductive argument. — TheMadFool

Yeah, that's my understanding of it too. I wasn't questioning your understanding of deduction I was questioning it's application to knowledge about the state of the world. This bit...

We needn't worry about deductive arguments as they're foolproof justifications — TheMadFool

They're not foolproof justifications, they don't help at all. Let's take an unknown state A and an inference about another state B, which I'll call 'b. If we have the logical relationship 'if B then A' about the state of the world, we can deductively conclude A because B. But by definition we do not know B either, we only know 'b. If we could directly know B we wouldn't be trying to deduce A we'd just directly experience it.

Now imagine I have a belief ~A, I also have a belief 'if B then A, and a belief B. I carry out the deduction 'if B then A, B, therefore A'. But this clashes with my belief ~A. So I carry out the deduction 'if B then A, ~A, therefore ~B. But this clashes with my belief B so I carry out the deduction... and so on. We've no way of knowing whether my belief ~A counts as a theoretical conclusion (and so should be discarded by the first deduction), or as a premise (and so B should be discarded by the second deduction).

Once again we need to distinguish between believing there is good evidence to the contrary and there actually being good evidence to the contrary. If we don’t, then we have to concede that every belief anyone ever has is equally justified, i.e. there is no such thing as epistemic error, because as you say, everyone THINKS they have good reason to believe as they do, but often they don’t. — Pfhorrest

I wasn't asking about the motivation. I'm sure you're desperate to distinguish these things (I'm less bothered myself). But motives are beside the point. If you can tell what the state of the world actually is (that it actually contains or doesn't contain evidence for a belief), then justifying the belief by this method becomes completely unnecessary. Why would we be at all concerned whether our beliefs were justified or not, we can just directly check whether they're actually the case or not. Justification ceases to be of any importance.

The whole point of justified beliefs is that they're more likely to be true than less justified ones. The use of justification is premised on the fact that we don't have direct access to the way the world is and so have do deal with more or less likely beliefs about its state. You can't then propose a method of justification which relies on us knowing directly the way the world actually is (whether it does or doesn't contain evidence for our belief). We need a method of justification which concedes the same premise as motivated us to want one in the first place.

The answer is, do not harm or force burdens onto others unnecessarily, and without the ability to ask — schopenhauer1

No it isn't because the question of morality is 'how can we all live together?', and your answer has us cease to do the very thing the question seeks.

If you believe unicorns are in your back yard and would continue believing that despite evidence to the contrary, but as it so happens there are unicorns in your back yard, you didn’t really know that. — Pfhorrest

1. Why not? And 2. Who on earth believes something despite also believing there's evidence to the contrary (sufficient to counter that belief)? A few forms of severe mental illness might do this but I can't think of any real cases off the top of my head.

If you would be responsive to evidence to the contrary, and there just isn’t evidence to the contrary because your belief is correct, then you know something. — Pfhorrest

This just describes everyone. You're not distinguishing one group of beliefs from another here. People do not just spawn random beliefs out of thin air, they believe them because they have some reason to. If they persist despite evidence to the contrary its because they find that evidence insufficiently compelling on the basis of some other belief.

What it sounds like you're describing is people who persist in their beliefs despite evidence which you find sufficiently compelling, and it sounds a lot like you just want to find ground on which to diminish those beliefs in the light of your judgement of the evidence.

But once you've got away from actually knowing and into ways the world actually is you've removed the need for justification altogether. Why use (or even introduce) the actual state of the world {there being no reason not to believe there are unicorns in my back garden}. Why not just the state if the world {there being unicorns in my back garden}?

"It is justified to believe there are unicorns in my back garden if the state of the world is such that there's no reason in it not to believe that" seems absolutely no improvement on saying "It is justified to believe there are unicorns in my back garden if the state of the world is such that there are unicorns in my back garden".

I don't get why you'd choose the former over the latter. If you're prepared to talk about actual states of the world, why not just talk about the state of the world which the belief is about, rather than the state of the world wherein it is absent of reasons not to believe the belief in question?

So...

This thread is about my account of in which circumstances someone does actually know something, whether or not they or we can know for sure that they know it. — Pfhorrest

...they know A if A is in fact the state of the world, they don't know it if it isn't. What's wrong with that?

I think maybe this is the point of confusion. I’m not talking about transforming beliefs into anything else, but just when a belief is or isn’t justified, or warranted. — Pfhorrest

That is something else, though. It acquires this status 'justified' simply by virtue of there being another belief which references it. How does there being another belief about our first one change the functional status of the first belief in any way at all?

Take my example of believing there are unicorns in my back garden. That's just a belief. Then I also believe there's no good reason not to believe there's unicorns in my back garden. My first belief is now a 'justified' belief. What's changed about it to warrant the new name?

How could slavery and mass murder not be a harm to those individuals done to? Of course it is about harm. — schopenhauer1

Where did I say it wasn't a harm? I said the 'morality' of it had nothing to do with harm. The extent to which the people carrying out these atrocities thought they were 'moral' was to do with protecting and perpetuating their community, or carrying out God's wishes, or creating a 'pure' society...whatever. The point is that whether these things cause harm didn't even enter into the moral justification.

So...

Antinatalism, does NOT SEEK too annihilate humanity. Rather it seeks forcing conditions of harm on a future person. If that ends in annihilation of humanity, that is a resultant not what is sought. — schopenhauer1

...is not a moral theory, it's just a 'plan'. The idea that what is moral is just that which causes least harm (with a few caveats) is just not what the word means. If you want to end this type of harm then yes, ending the human race will do that. Why you would have no other objective in life than eliminating this particular type of harm is a mystery to us, but if that's what you want to do...
I find planning to end the human race just to satisfy one idiosyncratic objective pretty difficult to see as anything other than borderline sociopathic.

You’ve narrowed the possibilities you’re aware of being possible by realizing that certain combinations of things are not possible. They were always not possible, sure, but we’re talking about your awareness of the possibilities. — Pfhorrest

But you haven't 'realised' certain combinations of things are not possible, you just believe it to be the case. I'm not seeing how that makes any difference to the status of any one of those beliefs.

See the above analogy to justification of actions, I think that will clear it up. — Pfhorrest

That basically opposes the idea that beliefs need to be justified from the ground up. Fine, i'm on board with that. That's only half the claim you've made. The other half is that a mere belief becomes something more than that when we also believe there is a lack of "reason to rule that belief out". It's this second half I don't get. Why does this second belief make any difference to the status of the first.

Perhaps an example might help rather than all these As and Bs.

Say I believe that there are unicorns in my back garden. How does my additional belief that there's no reason not to believe there are unicorns in my back garden change its status in any way. It seems to me to just remain a belief. Its just now accompanied by a related belief.

Sure, but you’re still mistaken about at least one of those things, so you know it can’t be the case that all of them are true at once, and the range of possibilities is thus narrowed. — Pfhorrest

No. You always were mistaken about one if these things, they merely exhaust the set. If you've narrowed it, what was the possibility you've eliminated?

You get that opposing that assumption (or rather, the assumption that that is the correct way to form beliefs) is what critical rationalism (as opposed to traditional justificationist rationalism) is all about, no? — Pfhorrest

No, I don't get it. It doesn't sound like that at all. You suggested a belief that A can be held as knowledge (ie changes status by some significant property) as long as there is no...

reason to rule that belief out — Pfhorrest

If you agree that there being a lack of "reason to rule that belief out" is just another belief (let's call it a belief that B), then I'm struggling to see how its mere existence changes the functional status of the belief that A.

It doesn't make A more likely (there's no reason at all to think my belief that B any more likely to be the case than my belief that A so believing both cannot make each more likely to be the case).

It doesn't make A more robust (if anything it makes it more intractable)

So what does a belief that B (the belief that there's a lack of reason to rule A out) do to the belief that A to change its status at all?

I claimed that morality is done to the individual. If you want to debate that, go ahead, STOP POSTURING.. That is all that is. If you have a substantive issue with it, say it. — schopenhauer1

How on earth would we 'debate' that. What arguments could we possibly bring to the table. You think 'morality' is done to the individual, it isn't. People use the term 'morality' to refer to a wider set of objectives than just individuals. If 'morality' is just what is done at an individual scale then how is it these people use the word in the way they do and are understood? The only possible way to debate the meaning of a word is by examples of it's use.

You say it as a natural fact, as if this is how humans have developed. I mean it is true, humans need community to survive through cultural transmission of information. That is essentially what that quote is getting at. However, just because that is how we function, doesn't mean people must be born to carry it out. — schopenhauer1

Of course people must be born to carry it out, how else would it get carried out? If you mean 'must' in the sense of morally, then yes. As I've said literally all the evidence we have on the matter suggests morals are feelings generated by our biology and our early post-natal experiences. If you think morality is some fact external to our basic feelings then lets see some evidence of that.

Something isn't good or moral just because it is natural or the way humans survive. You would then have to prove that this is indeed the case, — schopenhauer1

Why? Not that I'd have a great deal of trouble demonstrating the evolution of brain regions associated with moral decision-making, but I'm wondering why I have to prove this and yet we've not had a shred of evidence from you that morality is...well, whatever the hell you think it is, we haven't had that yet either.

It's the indignant only at this philosophy when philosophy is full of unusual ideas, that makes me think it is some sort of odd bias and thus debating out of bad faith. — schopenhauer1

Being repulsed at the thought of ending the entire human race is not an 'odd bias'. What fucking planet have you been living on?

So yeah slavery and mass murder are obviously bad, and you would think as intuitions even, but those concepts took violent wars to become as mainstream — schopenhauer1

The effort it takes to change a societal practice is neither here nor there. The 'morality' of both those practices clearly had nothing to do with avoiding harm. They had everything to do with (screwed up) ideas about how to perpetuate the communities from which they arose. Fortunately for all, better ideas prevailed. Veganism may well be the next societal change. Antinatalism is unlike any of these because it seeks to annihilate that which it benefits. The campaigns for all those changes were made for the good of the community, they all had a similar goal in common (a better society).

Mine somehow has some personal cache that the others don't because its about procreation. — schopenhauer1

Can you really not see it? Yours is advocating the end of humanity. About the weirdest thing Kant advocated was the we should never lie. The oddest thing to come out of utilitarianism is that we should all give everything away to charity. I'm flabergasted that you see ending the human race as being on a par with this level of oddity.

If harm/suffering is not involved, it seems to be rather outside morality — schopenhauer1

Then how do you explain divine command theory, Calvinism, virtue ethics...

Can't just debate.. have to make it to the man,, right? — schopenhauer1

It's always to the man. Anyone pretending otherwise is just kidding themselves. Morality makes claims about what we ought and ought not do, it constrains us and judges us. It's entirely personal and always has been.

Just want to add for clarity.

1. Private language argument - private meanings for terms don't make sense in the context of what a language is.
2. The terms 'moral', and 'ethical' are not soley used to mean only 'harm avoidance'.

Limiting a discussion about what is moral to what causes harm is just a misuse of language.

Actual suffering and benefits takes place for individuals.. even if it is in the context of a whole society with institutions, historical contingency, technology, ideas, and the like. Again, institutions et al. do not suffer. They don't carry out 0-100 years of life of actually living it out. To then go a step beyond and to say that individuals NEED to be born so that these institutions et al. can be carried forth is also immoral because individuals are thus used by society to keep it going- disregarding or foregoing the individual that is being affected — schopenhauer1

You simply restating what you consider immoral doesn't get us anywhere. We all know what you consider immoral, we've established that such a limited view is not widely shared, why are we going over this again as if it were a debate? You repeatedly telling us what you think regardless of what anyone else has said is not a discussion.

You can claim that this is just how it is, and because it exists, it must be good, but that is simply not the case. — schopenhauer1

Where have I claimed anything like this?

That's classic appeal to nature or the naturalistic fallacy. — schopenhauer1

Naming it a fallacy is an insufficient argument. You'd have to show how morality is something other than feelings which are, in part, biological.

And again khaled brought up that Kant had some what some might characterize as "unusual" conclusions. — schopenhauer1

Unusual and repugnant are two very different categories. As I was very careful to say, ethical theories can sometimes be useful when they highlight a solution to an ethical dilemma, or perhaps motivate us to do what we, deep down, knew was right. This is an order of magnitude away from reaching the conclusion that we should end the human race and, rather than doubting one's route there, doubling down and insisting it's right.

Notwithstanding that. If Kant's conclusions are truly that unusual then there is little point in discussing them either.

I can give plenty of examples of things that "we find satisfying" that might not be "ethical". — schopenhauer1

No you can't. You can provide me with examples of things some people find satisfying which others don't. The search to prove anything is objectively 'ethical' has been ongoing for two thousand years and has come up with absolutely nothing.

Argument from indignity is not an argument — schopenhauer1

You've just repeated the same unsupported assertion I called you out on before (which you just ignored). Why is what I find repugnant (like ending the human race) labelled as pearl-clutching 'indignation' and not worthy of consideration, but what you find repugnant (like causing harm without consent) is somehow raised to an objective law?