It was Wayfarer that was trying to conceive of an “order out there”, so I pointed it out that it’s useless to talk about such a thing because you’ll never have access to it. — khaled

There is an argument that says the world must be ordered, for the simple reason our understanding is very seldom in conflict with it. With that being granted, and granting that “logical principles are not out there” is true, as you say, then we are given a method for explaining why there is seldom any conflict between experience and that which is the extant objects of it.

I agree with wayfarer if he says it is conceiveable that there is order out there, which makes perfect sense iff it is we who order, which, of course, we do. But it isn’t reason, it’s intuition, the subconscious part of the human cognitive system, responsible for it.

So....there is order out there, because we put it there. Or, it could be that we just recognize the world as it conforms to the order we ourselves have. Either way, and no matter what, without us and our system, the world, ordered or otherwise, is ontologically, epistemologically, and completely, irrelevant.

The reason there even is metaphysics, is because it is impossible to tell whether the world is ordered with the absolute certainty we think for it, or the world is as it is and our thinking conforms to it. So all we have with which to judge, is the least contradictory of two established doctrinal methods: idealism or materialism. Anything else is some combination of both with one or the other the superior.
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I would say the argument that our reasoning capacities can be trusted since there is evolutionary advantage in having good reasoning is valid. But not the argument that our reasoning or senses are complete — khaled

In general, yes, they can be trusted. We seldom experience a thing today, and then worry about what our experience will be tomorrow, of the same thing. Still, humans are famous for errors in judgement, that being one of reasoning’s capacities.

As weak as they are, I think our sensory system is complete, insofar far as we are affected by the external world with the system we have. We’d be more or differently affected with a better of different system, but then, we wouldn’t be human.

As for our reasoning being complete....hell, I wouldn’t know about that. There would have to be something to compare it to, seems like. Other intelligent species might have a more complete system, but how would we find that out?

My two thalers worth......

Are you an academic? — Nelson E Garcia

(sidelong glances)......who, me???? Nahhh......no formal training. I couldn’t sit still long enough for the superfluous stuff. Plus, there was the......you know.....the draft.

Thanks for the offer.

Actually.....that’s not half bad, gathered from the “about the book” section. Most of it is within, or amendable to, my metaphysical disposition.

On the other hand, I reject the “facts of intelligent design” and “supernaturally imposed programmed features” out of hand, whatever their associations, and tentatively withhold judgement on “force surface”......not quite getting the gist of that one.

Do you have time to read a book? — Nelson E Garcia

Yeah...about that. Theses days, I got all kinds of time, but I seem to have lost a great deal of interest. So, yep, got time, but maybe not inclination.

Hmmm.....I don’t know Barth. Still, for me at least, “most influential” isn’t going to be a book anyway, but a “most influential” book isn’t going to be a novel.

Man, I could have sooo much fun with that......

L
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Sorry. I just had to, doncha know.

I don't have access to "the reason that orders the world" so I don't care about it. — khaled

I don’t care about that which orders the world either, and I do not have access to it. But I wouldn’t say reason orders the world in the first place, which grants me access to it, whatever its composition or use.

Reason doesn’t organize.....order.....the world; it only informs me of the consistency and legitimacy of the ordering. And THAT I certainly do care about.

How can a singular superlative be a list?

A firm requirement of existence is for existents to include traits and details which the external world lack, — Nelson E Garcia

Self-contradictory? If existants require it, but the external world doesn’t have it.....how does an external thing meet its own requirements?
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what is cognized is not something located in the external world — Nelson E Garcia

Agreed. What is cognized is representation of that which is in the external world. But that which does not exist in the external world cannot affect sensibility, therefore cannot be represented, hence cannot be cognized.
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the external world is constituted by force (different levels of force) — Nelson E Garcia

Dunno so much about that, but......

appearances or details do not exist there independently, it is only stimuli promoters what lead to appearances or details when mind does its job using the five human senses. — Nelson E Garcia

....this is agreeable, insofar as “stimuli promoters” are merely the matter of extant objects. In effect, appearances logically reduce to stimuli promoters. There’s no significant difference between something appearing to be “round”, and that which promotes perception to respond to the conditions of “round-ness”.
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if a question is needed for the topic to be valid — Nelson E Garcia

What is this “force” you’re talking about? I suppose one could say extants in the external world “force” themselves upon sensibility, iff any of them are in fact perceived. But if that’s the case, how is that I still cognize my four-legged childhood companion “Sparky”?
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No existence without an actualizing mind, is Berkeley’s dogmatic idealism; attribution of “traits and details” is Kant’s transcendental idealism, albeit by means of reason, not mind. “Force” may be original to you, but the rest is well-worn.

And no, no one can prove your claims wrong, because it’s metaphysics. But your claims can be argued and theoretically refuted given some generally identical initial premises but operating under different systemic conditions from them.

Have fun with it, I say.

A reader, or, start from scratch, never mind the title: “Cartesian Meditations”, 1931.

You probably don’t need to start from the beginning, as I did, so if not........never mind.

(Chuckles to self)

Yeah, I get that a lot, as you can tell from the fact my comments far outnumber my mentions.

(Insert enthusiastically appreciative picture-thingy here)

I was think of experience as just awareness if things. — frank

Which is fine, in the General Grand Scheme of Things. But then....what would consciousness be?

In the Reduced Critical Scheme of Things, where only one conception can relate exactly to an idea, experience and awareness cannot both represent things.

SO...............there’s Frank, walking down the street, only hears a BOOM!! Frank can indeed tell himself he is aware of a sound, but he cannot tell himself of the thing that made the sound, because he only heard it. So he cannot say, even when aware of the one, that he is aware of the certainty of the other. So Frank has no experience of a particular thing relating to the sound. So Frank’s notion of experience as awareness doesn’t hold, in the Reduced Critical Scheme of Things.

Now, Frank is certainly authorized to tell himself he has never ever heard a sound that didn’t have a thing immediately connected to it, he’d be correct, he could just walk on, and his notion of experience as awareness, in the General Grand Scheme of Things, holds.

The question becomes, for those bothering to ask it.....under what conditions is it possible for the General and the Critical Schemes to be completely irrelevant. And that can only occur if experience of things and awareness of things, are at all times and under any conditions, exactly the same, without exception. Which is, of course, quite unfounded, for it is completely logical to be aware of some things for which there never has been a corresponding experience.

How are you using it? — frank

Experience: a posteriori cognition by a subject as mediate ends, by means of sensation;
Awareness: immediate affect on the subject by means of sensation, such that a posteriori cognitions become possible. Experience absolutely requires awareness, but awareness does not absolutely promise experience. Which reduces to the validity of pain awareness absent experience for its immediate cause.

It is permissible for pain to be a component of experience, which is different than to say pain is an experience. Which is what all the above jaw-flappin’ was about.

Over there:

BOOOO!!!!....another damned Kantian. Spouting like, super, like, you know, old-guy stuff, nobody really understood to begin with, and therefore long since upended by disassociative anti-intellectualism.

Over here:

YEA!!!....another Kantian. Recognizing the paradigmatic shift in critical metaphysics, the proverbial crate and barrel of all current epistemological intellectualism.

I’m over here.

but I could still in principle verify that collapse has not occurred for me. — Kenosha Kid

Sure, because it wasn’t you that measured. This is the quantum elaboration derived from the metaphysical truism....only experience is empirical knowledge.

Pain is thought of as an experience, not a behavior. — frank

Plus side:
Agreed. From somebody else’s observation of my behavior if I’m in pain......it is possible I can project a behavior directly inconsistent with the pain I feel. When I go to the doctor, it is possible to inform him of effects having nothing to do with the cause. Senseless to do, but proves someone’s observation of my behavior does not necessarily correspond to the pain I feel.

From my own point to view, it is entirely possible that the behavior I exhibit is an intentional disguise for the pain I feel. If it’s, say, the most important game of the year, and the coach knows I’ve pulled a muscle in my leg, I may falsify my behavior to an extent sufficient for his observation to allow me to play, even if it hurts like hell. ‘Course....if I screw up....well, that’s on me, but.....the point stands.

Everyone probably has the diversity of experience, when, e.g., a twist of the ankle, once in public, once in private. I’m here to tell ya, even with the exact same degree and occasion of pain, I’ll cuss like a sailor, throw things and kick the dog in private, but exhibit an entirely different behavior in a crowd. But I can’t distinguish the pain in the one scenario, from the pain in the other.

Another may/may not know that I feel pain, in direct accordance to my display/disguise of it, but only I may know of it, regardless of any display at all.

Still, these days, people do associate pain with behavior, first because of the rise of psychology, in which case the rest of us are merely being told some arbitrary truth of Nature’s Way, and second because humans have become a tribe of whining crybabies, looking for sympathy they may not deserve.

Minus side:
Pain is not an experience, in the truest sense. Experience is always of a known cause, pain is not. One will have a direct corresponding pain or pleasure given an experience which is its cause, but one will not necessarily have a direct corresponding experience caused by pain or pleasure itself, re: a simple headache.

Interesting read, as well. Thanks to you too.

Interesting read. Thanks for it.

Chomsky is too modern, too political, and FAR too analytic, for me, so what about Schopenhauer do you find disagreeable?

I asked how to know a mental state, such that it couldn’t be anything else. But you referred me to experience. Am I to infer that the only thing a mental state can be, is an experience?

Apparently I cannot have a mental state of driving a GT40 at 150mph. Never having done that, never having seen it done, thus having no experience of it, in the context of your pain and music, how is it possible for that sentence to come to me?

Then it must be that imagination is a mental state, but imagination is not experience, therefore, experience is not all a mental state can be.

Because you stipulated simplicity, I won’t pursue the correctness that a toothache is a feeling, not an experience. Just sayin’.......

So yeah, I think there are a few paths open in TI. — Manuel

Depends on whose T.I. you’re talking about. Won’t be Kant's, because.....

“...My chief aim in this work has been thoroughness; and I make bold to say that there is not a single metaphysical problem that does not find its solution, or at least the key to its solution, here....”

The paths open, are the changing of it, by finding a metaphysical problem it doesn’t solve or isn’t able to solve. Seems like a lot of trouble.

The knowledge of mental states is not available to us? — RogueAI

I don’t think so, but it’s fine if you do. Hell.....I don’t even know what a mental state actually is. How would I know it, such that it couldn’t be anything else?

I think some conceptual work can be done in TI — Manuel

Such as? Synopsis?

Could you humor me and mention some names? — Joshs

Be happy to, but I don’t know any of them. Heard of ‘em, though. Those guys.....in general, whoever denies the workings of science.

I don't think Schopenhauer would've minded that he be labeled a TI. — Manuel

Probably not, considering.....

“...The whole actual, that is, active world is determined as such through the understanding, and apart from it is nothing. This, however, is not the only reason for altogether denying such a reality of the outer world as is taught by the dogmatist, who explains its reality as its independence of the subject. We also deny it, because no object apart from a subject can be conceived without contradiction. The whole world of objects is and remains idea, and therefore wholly and for ever determined by the subject; that is to say, it has transcendental ideality....”

....even if I can’t find a reference where he actually calls himself one, as does Kant, practically, in CPR A370, “From the start we have declared ourselves in favor of this transcendental idealism...”, which grants immediate acknowledgement for objective reality, while at the same time withholding knowledge of it in itself.
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But I don't think I've seen an argument that refutes "things in themselves" that is satisfactory. Probably because I think it is true. — Manuel

Agreed, and because, or, iff, the human cognitive system is in fact representational, and iff our empirical knowledge is of those representations alone. Otherwise, some new theory is required in order to refute it. Somehow. Ain’t been done yet, but maybe just because nobody cares anymore.

Your claim is dualistic. — RogueAI

Absolutely. Making no bones about it.

You're saying that brains cause experience, which is to say that for any mental state, there's a causal brain state. — RogueAI

I never said anything like that. Never mentioned a mental state. That’s a knowledge claim, and I’m showing that particular knowledge is not available to us. I said the the brain enables us to think the brain is responsible for experience.

Hmmm.....now that you bring it up, I’ll add, it is we that give brains mental states; the brain does not give them to us. Technically, the brain is wholly at the mercy of natural law, whereas it is not so obvious that mental states are. I mean....if mental states wholly followed natural law, why would we need two instances of the same thing? Nahhhhh....better that mental states are wholly at the mercy of logical law, and even if that begs a whole buncha nagging questions, at least we’ve got someplace from which to start explaining the ground of experience.

do you think physicalism can survive an infinitely long explanatory gap? — RogueAI

The set of Planck limits? Dunno about an infinitely long explanatory gap, but we got it right now. I don’t hold so much with Penrose’s quantum tubules, but I do more so with the interference problem, in that attempting to penetrate to the piccoscale with instruments might just disrupt the very thing we’re trying to look at. I know there are pictures of clefts.....blew my mind, that did.....but to assimilate all involved clefts into an instrumental observation of the experience of bungee jumping? Can you even image the size of THAT helmet???

Besides, if it is possible that natural law relinquishes it intrinsic certainty at some infinitesimally small scale, why couldn’t they relinquish it at the scale of 30B synapses/mm3? Seems reasonable to me, but then......I’m me.

“....all causation, that is to say, all matter, or the whole of reality, is only for the understanding, through the understanding, and in the understanding. The first, simplest, and ever-present example of understanding is the perception of the actual world. This is throughout knowledge of the cause from the effect, and therefore all perception is intellectual....”
(WWR, 1.1.4., 1818, in Haldane/Kemp, 1883)

I can’t read that as anything but indirect realism. He does say “actual world”, implying an objective reality, but that actual world is “in understanding” because of intellectual perception. Thus, it looks like the world isn’t directly there, otherwise we must have a head full of actual world objects, but only intellectually there, hence is indirectly. The world is mediated by intellect, mediated is the same as contingent upon, which is the same as indirect. Can be viewed as indirect?

Schopenhauer didn’t like Kant’s ding an sich, so went on his merry way towards working around it. Representation is internal; the object represented is external, with respect to the subject. Subjects can only know the representation. If the representation can be external, and knowledge is still only possible by means of them, then the thing-in-itself is representable and therefore knowable. POOF!!! Kant is refuted, but....oh oh.....transcendental idealism, for all present intents and purposes a Kantian creation, is sustained.

Not to infringe on your understandings herein; you’re probably quite comfortable with them as they are. Just carryin’ on the conversation.

Hey.

Thanks.

Additions/changes welcome, if you’re so inclined.

Sorry, shouldn't have added the bud. — frank

Heck no. That didn’t bother me. I’m just not agreeing with what you said (it very much is indirect realism, and the body is in no way representation of Will), but didn’t quite understand why you said it. So I decided to leave it alone.

I'm reminded of people typing on computers connected to the internet that science cannot possibly work... — Kenosha Kid

Those guys.....deserving of little mention and even less respect.

“...For although education may furnish, and, as it were, engraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose is, in the absence or deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse. Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy....”
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And I, yours.

Respect.

What is the causality you're talking about? How matter causes experience? — RogueAI

In general, yes. How amazing, a.k.a., fantasmagorically convoluted, is it, that because some sufficient neural network is not yet enabled, we are permitted to say we have no idea how the brain causes experience, but that only because some other network is enabled that permits us to say it. Taken a step further, we find that the brain tells us both, that it is responsible for experience, because we’ve already thought so, but at the same time cannot tell us how, because those thoughts have never come about. We, being rational agents, on our own accord, go even further, and rightfully assert that if we do not know a thing, it is possible there is either no thing to know, or we are simply not equipped to know it.

Aaaannnndddd.....the brain falsifies itself. Figuratively.

Then the argument comes up, that philosophy is just making stuff up, which is exactly what it is. I know, cuz I just did it. But we’re allowed, because the brain won’t inform us of making-stuff-up’s pathological uselessness by informing us of the truth of it all. And maybe.....just maybe....it doesn’t because it can’t.

Again, the dualist will admonish against claims regarding insight into ourselves, for which there is a plethora of justifiable speculation, in juxtaposition to claims about the mechanistic origin of ourselves, for which there is barely any insight at all. In short, we have been given what’s necessary for insight into ourselves (brains/matter), but not yet what is sufficient (causality).

Now, the pure undifferentiated idealist does have something interesting to say, if he is so bold as to invoke the cum hoc ergo proper hoc argument, in that it is because we don’t think in terms of natural law, that unknowable mitigating factors are proved, which demand explanation, over and above mere brains. And of course, under those conditions, an explanation will be impossible.

Anyway....didn’t mean to butt in. Ok, fine. I did. Now I’ll butt out.

Excellent commentary. If I may......

In reality, I don't know what it is like to be a bat and never will. — Kenosha Kid

.....I would ask, can we also say we don’t know what it’s like for our neurons to fire? Assuming, of course, that what happens after, is not the same as what happens. If granted, it is easy to see why the dualist maintains that the conscious subject is not to be found in the objective apparatus.

OK. Thanks.

It's trickier than just adding idea to matter to equal a thing. — frank

That’s Schopenhauer, not Kant. The use of “idea” is an earlier translator’s choice, because “vorstellung” can be and was translated as representation in later publications. Taken as representation, Schopenhauer follows Kant, but taken as idea, he does not. The world as will and representation is a direct affirmation of Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason, but the world as will and idea is something quite different.

But whether adding idea, or adding representation.....neither of those is what the respective authors want us to take away from his theory. In both, objects become something else, which makes adding to them, a misunderstanding.
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TA? The only TA I am familiar with is transcendental aesthetic or the transcendental analytic, in the CPR. I guess I’m not grasping the point you’re making with this part. Neither of those speak to ideas, or packages, or pairs of opposites. Unless you’re taking a shallow dive into dialectics, but that’s TD, not TA.

Ya lost me, bud. “Everpresent situation”? Dunno what that is, sorry.

All that intro is the groundwork for empirical knowledge, and as groundwork, we are not conscious of its operation. All that happens before conscious thought, which is shown by “...undetermined object...”. Ideas, on the other hand, are conscious thoughts insofar as we are aware of our ideas. So it is that ideas are not part of the groundwork of empirical knowledge, for ideas are not a product of sensibility. Ideas are not phenomena, which gives us the extension that ideas do not have objects that belong to them as intuitions, but only as conceptions.

As far as the duck/rabbit is concerned, it is the case that either the duck or the rabbit is given as sensible phenomenon. As far as our knowledge goes, it doesn’t matter which one it is; it just cannot be both simultaneously, and, it must be one or the other. Enter the conscious part of knowledge, found in the understanding, which is the source of concepts. If either one of the phenomenon is the immediate representation in intuition, then understanding relates the arrangement of that form (via imagination, if you were wondering) to the concept understanding thinks as belonging to it, and we cognize one or the other, each of its own time.

The duck/rabbit thing is not a fluke of perception, a “fancy of the mind”. There actually is a duck form and a rabbit form manifest in the illustration, thus it is not contradictory for understanding to synthesis one concept or the other, to it. Same with that table/little ol’ lady double perception. Even if a purposeful deceit, understanding compensates. But the system is not perfect, as the checkerboard/cylinder shadow illusion recently, and as far back as Plato’s equal lines, show. Those, and that damn dress. Leave it to a human, perhaps the most intelligent agency on the planet, to intentionally confuse himself.

isn't idealism about the part ideas play in the makeup of the world? — frank

It was, generally, until Kant, and is still, from some more modern quarters, re: Royce via Hegel. For whatever all that’s worth.

I think the bottom line is....idealism is a doctrinal theory, but ideas are conceptions born of reason alone. And by attempting to quantify the empirical domain of the world, that is, to determine its makeup, with that which has no empirical content, there is immediate contradiction.

But it remains that all theories begin with either observation, or an idea that warrants a possible observation. If the latter, the theory may sustain itself pending empirical proof, or it may never obtain the certainty of experience, which is what an empirical proof actually is. SR, for instance, began with the idea of the simultaneity of relativity from a measly train station, of all things, but needed 35 years for observational justification. But even so, SR is not a condition of the makeup of the world, but only justifies a particular kind of intelligence’s particular kind of relation to it.

So, no, I don’t think ideas play a part in the makeup of the world. There’s a rather long segment in Kant that admonishes us to let established word/concept relations stand undiluted. From that, it may be best to let “makeup” of the world denote the substance of its constituency, and if so, and by the same token, if ideas have no substance, then it follows ideas cannot partake in the constituency of material things, such as worlds.

Odd, isn’t it, that realism is complementary, but idealism is not? If a thing is thought to be real, it cannot at the same time be thought unreal; it is, or it isn’t. Idealism, on the other hand, has a multiplicity of conditionals, such that a variety of idealisms are all logically feasible depending on and consistent with their respective initial conditions. Absolute idealism (Hegel) does not immediately negate subjective idealism (Berkeley); transcendental idealism (Kant) does not immediately negate monistic idealism (Leibniz). A modified idealism is nonetheless an idealism.

Idealism is methodological human cognition writ large, and because it is absurd to suppose humans do not think, by whichever name under which it is manifest, it is equally absurd for the idealism which follows from it, to not be. As such, while it may be rational to object to idealism’s initial conditions, it is always irrational to object to idealism itself.

If proper idealism is an epistemological doctrine, not ontological, it follows that the more cognizant juxtaposition with respect to it, is internal/external, which reduces to thought/experience, and not ideal/real. It is not contradictory for thought to contain both the ideal and the real, but it is contradictory for experience to contain both the ideal and the real.

So....do humans in fact think, experience, know? Dunno, maybe not. No empirical proofs. But it doesn’t really matter, does it. Even if wrong, best to be the least possible wrong.

I agree philosophy is unavoidable.

Ok. Thanks. While I hold with an inherent dualism with respect to human cognition, and primacy of reason rather than mind, I think T.I already contains epistemic idealism. It is, after all, we that tell the world what it is, not the other way around. All the world ever does, is present itself.