I will have to come up with five more pictures that excludes at least a third of the picture of the "ngoe" being green and excludes "ngoe" being an odd number. — RussellA

And as Wittgenstein pointed out in the first few pages of PI, you would thereby, already be participating in a language game, and so trying to explain meaning by making use of meaning.

Then he cut to the chase: Stop looking for meaning, and instead look at use.

You are committing a fallacy of Ambiguity. You are using "truth" as an ideal (absolute)... — Nickolasgaspar

That made me laugh.

...truth and knowledge are observer relative evaluations, limited by our current observations. — Nickolasgaspar

What is that, if not an absolute definition of truth?

Or this:

So our observations can not change the (Ultimate) unknown truth.... — Nickolasgaspar

Seems to me you have your diagnosis arse-about. Its not I who is working with an "absolute" truth. Pretty unimpressive.

Cobblers.

You are making the cosmological argument again, with all its implicit logical flaws, but replacing god with a vacillation between energy and law, as if the existence of either of those were any better understood than the existence of the world.

And you dress this in the language of pseudo-science.

Doing philosophy is not making up just-so stories. While science may tell us how things are, it says nothing about why things are. And the reason for that is that the why is not something found in the world, but consists in what we do in the world. Meaning isn't found, it is constructed by us.

"Ngoe" means at least a third of the picture is green? Or the picture is an odd number from the left?

There is an excellent and informative article in Wikipedia, the Private language argument that I always refer to. — RussellA

Thank you, although I disagree. I wrote a large part of the article, most of which still stands, back in 2006. But it now has multiple issues and really needs a re-write; especially if it leads to the sort of mistaken understanding you express here.

That no one can know another's private language is not the argument, but just the setting out of what a private language consists in, for the purposes of presenting the argument. A private language is a language understandable by only oneself.

The private language argument is that such a thing cannot be understood in a coherent fashion. That there can be no private languages. That such a thing could not count as a language.

Wittgenstein does not argue that "nobody can know another person's private experiences" so much as to point out how talk of private experiences is problematic. If you read beyond §272 you will see an argument that such colour inversion cannot be made to work. So

279. Imagine someone saying, “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to indicate it! — PI

Take a look at the diagram in the OP. In so far as the indirect realist sees, and is the only person to see, the brown blob, it is private to them. If this is so, then the indirect realist sees and talks about only the brown blob, and not the shared world. That is, the indirect realist is using a private language, one that refers only to the brown blob that they construct.

What the private language argument shows is that if this were so, the indirect realist would not be able to talk about the world at all.

Summarising, what the private language argument shows is that one cannot construct a private language that is about one's private sensations. If indirect realism holds that what we see is not the world but a private model of the world, then one could not construct a language about that private model.

Treating this as a reductio, we do have language about the world, and therefore we talk about the world, and not about our private world-models. At least that form of indirect realism is wrong.

This is the argument I paraphrased as

When the indirect realist says "I see the Earth", they are referring to the brown thing.

When the direct realist says "I see the Earth", they are referring to the Earth. — Banno

The core of realism, probably also to no avail, but for comparison, is simply that there are statements that are true, yet not known or even believed.

Things such as those we haven't found out yet, or are mistaken about.

That is, there is a world that is not dependent on our understanding of it.

Notice how this addresses similar issues and uses similar terms to @Wayfarer's account, but that the two slide past each other in terms of the problems they are trying to solve?

Hence the views seem irreconcilable...

This suggests... — Wayfarer

slides to

...support a view... — Wayfarer

It isn't as convincing as you suppose.

And what is it you think this oft-quoted piece argues?

Space and time lost their status as phantasms of the mind at least as long ago as special relativity.

I can't see this ending well.

Tallis' argument is that Hoffman uses evolution to undermine evolution. It looks cogent to me. Either there was a past in which evolution occurred, and an idealism that denies time is wrong, or time is a phantasm, and evolution no more than a just-so story.

Which objects do you know of that exist, but do not affect us? — Manuel

:wink:
There's the rhetorical slide.

How odd. I must say I'm disappointed. What is it you found positive...?

It's a form of idealism because it is only through the way objects affect us, that we are able to form any picture of the world at all. As I quoted Hume before: — Manuel

But a realist could - would - agree with this.

An idealist worthy of the title goes the further step of saying that only through the way objects affect us are there objects at all.

...and immediately I regret having made the offer.

The idealism I defend, posits that the world we belong to, this world here, is only intelligible to creatures with the capacity to use cognitive faculties to make sense of that world. — Manuel

So the world is intelligible only for those for whom it is intelligible.

Yep. Not exactly Berkeley, is it.

What is it that makes this a form of idealism, I wonder, since it seems to be something with which a realist would agree unproblematically?

If idealism were simply the belief that 'the world exists in your or my mind' then that would be a valid criticism. — Wayfarer

Indeed, idealism has to become far more sophisticated, to invent universal minds, gods, or quantum mini-consciousness in order to avoid mere inconsistency.

Are you, Wayfarer, serious in a defence of the arch-scientism offered by Hoffman, because it gives some small solace to idealism? You hussy, you!

So, it very much depends on what "idealism" one defends. — Manuel

...and few have the courage to set out an argument.

So I'll steal one from Tallis. Idealism, one way or another, has it that there is nothing that is not related in some way to mind. Hence things only exist if they stand in some relation to mind.

Now evolution and quantum mechanics and cosmology posit that events occur over time, and that they happen to discreet individuals.

But if idealism is true, then there can be no time, nor individuals, in the absence of mind.

Specifically, evolution presupposes individuals evolving in the aeons before people evolved to discuss them. It posits that there are things that happened when there was no mind around to stand in any relation to those things. Idealism is therefore incompatible with evolution.

As Tallis points out, Hoffman uses evolution to justify a view of idealism that is incompatible with evolution.

Anyway, the clowns are here now, so this thread will go for another twenty or thirty pages without saying anything new.

I'll offer an open invitation to anyone who would like to defend Hoffman in a debate thread.

...to make idealism a respectable position in the sciences, which it should be. — Manuel

Trouble is, idealism is incoherent. Hence it is incompatible with science.

How can one reconcile the scientific view, say that the the universe is billions of years old or that natural selection functions on individuals, with the idealist view that nothing exists without a mind to believe it exists?

That's an argument almost directly from Tallis, by the way.

In summary, seems to me that the realist/antirealist distinction and the objective/subjective distinction are very different, but that your account does not recognise this.

Why not? — frank

Why?

I think we can make true statements about the unobserved tree, based on our other observations.

So we look at the tree, and see it has three branches, and then turn our backs and decide to prune the middle branch. Even when our backs are turned, I'm quite happy to say that the tree has a middle branch.

This is what we do.

We do not turn our backs and then find ourselves unable to decide which branch to prune.

Of course, instead of pruning the tree one might decide to play at philosophy...

Yep.

...the fact that the unobserved tree is unknowable. — frank

Well, I wouldn't count that as a fact...

Or as anything, much.

The computer analogy breaks down quickly, so while it has its pedagogic value, it is limited. — Manuel

Oh, I agree. But it might serve as a pedagogic device against certain over-stimulated interpretations of Hoffman - for @Art48, and @Janus, perhaps.

Cheers.

I was most intrigued by the idea of future LLM's writing and then implementing their own code. I'm not sure how to think about this.

As they stand, LLM's are implementing a very complex algorithm. And an algorithm that re-writes itself is still an algorithm.

But a self-editing algorithm might be able to achieve some sort of quasi-stability, a "strange loop"...

Perhaps with the implications Hofstadter envisioned.

Well, since the unobserved tree is "unknowable" and all that, and given that we can still talk about it when our backs are turned to it, why not just keep talking of the "tree"?

Not for pragmatic reasons, but because there is no reason to talk otherwise.

(I'm not reaching for pragmatism here, so much as for parsimony).

The idea is that snakes and trains are like icons on a computer desktop. The icon for a Word document is really on the screen but it is not the Word document itself, so in that sense is somewhat unreal. The reality of the Word document is computer bits. Janus and Wayfarer make a similar point. — Art48

"But it is not the word document itself".

What exactly is the word document "itself"? The one in RAM? The one saved? The one printed? The one emailed?

When I click on the icon, the document opens, When I move it to a folder, it will (usually) be int hat folder when I go looking for it later. When I trash it and empty the trash, the document is gone.

The icon is as good a candidate for being the "real" word document as are the things in RAM, on the hard drive, on paper or emailed.

Choosing one of these to call the "real" document is fraught.

I wouldn't have thought you would be so keen to give primacy to quantum mechanical descriptions over our regular intentional descriptions.

I think point is that it is the experience of the object that is real. — Wayfarer

Isn't he just playing with the word "real"?

...the salient point is not that the rock as appearance is not real, but that we have no idea what is behind appearances. — Janus

Just a suggestion. Let's call whatever it is that is behind the appearance of the rock, a "rock".

not to be take too literally. — Art48

Meh. Not to be taken too seriously, either.

Your thread is a classic of how language can lead one up the philosophical garden path.

This eternal return to the apple appearing red fucks up the discussion by trite repetition.

Try talking instead about the apple "appearing" smooth.

As I innately believe in the law of causation, in that every effect has a cause, I therefore believe that there is something that has caused me to perceive a "tree". I don't know what this something is, but I do believe it exists. — RussellA

This is the slightly mad bit.

That 'something that has caused me to perceive a "tree'?

It's a tree.

That's what a tree is.

Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations may be used to give insights into Indirect Realism, including his strong case against the possibility of a private language and his arguing that nobody knows another person's private sensations. — RussellA

This is a misreading of the private language argument. He is not arguing that no one knows antoehr's private sensations, so much as that if there are any private sensations then by that very fact they cannot be discussed.

And yet we do talk about the stuff around us.

Therefore it is not private.

The the private language argument does the opposite of what you suppose.

In fact I think this is a prime example of the problem. The indirect realist will agree with this, and say that this model is a representation of the tree, and that it is this model that (directly) informs our understanding. You appear to be describing indirect realism, but calling it direct realism. — Michael

To reiterate, in one version of the argument the indirect realist claims what we see is a model of the tree, while the direct realist says what we do in seeing the tree is to construct a set of neural paths that model the tree. The direct realist would not say that what we see is the model of the tree, but that what we see is the tree, and we see it in modelling it.

Arguing over the semantics of whether this should be called "seeing a tree" or "seeing a model of a tree" is a red herring. — Michael

Yep.

The Robinson article looks interesting but is paywalled, never to be read.

If a 'person' is taken as referring to a brain, and only to a brain, then a person is by definition a homunculus — sime

If a person is a homunculus then they are a homunculus. If you think you are just and no more than your brain, all I can offer is pity.

Yep.

, , ,

Here's an extract from Hoffman's book. Hoffman makes this out as showing that we are nto sufficiently critical of our perceptions. I think it also has a somewhat different import.

Our penchant to misread our perceptions, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out to his fellow philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, stems in part from an uncritical attitude toward our perceptions, toward what we mean by "it looks as if. Anscombe says of Wittgenstein that, "He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied. 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth! "Well, he asked, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' The question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if in 'it looks as if the sun goes around the earth. "1 Wittgenstein's point is germane any time we wish to claim that reality matches or mismatches our perceptions. There is, as we shall see, a way to give precise meaning to this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory: we can prove that if our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality. They just report fitness. — The Case Against Realiy, p19

Why do people say that it is natural to think that there are snakes and trains and not only quantum wave functions?

I suppose, because it looked as if there are snakes and trains and not so much as if there are only quantum wave functions!

Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if there were only quantum wave functions?

Why could it not be that snakes and trains are just what quantum wave functions look like, viewed by an evolved organism?

What exactly makes snakes and trains not real?

He addresses this in the YouTube clip when he points out everyone in the audience sees the same illusion of the cube. — Art48

And what do you conclude from this? Everyone also agrees that it is an illusion...

the ultimate reality of objects in spacetime — Art48

And what does that mean?

Put it together!

but either atheists will themselves to believe there is no God, or theists will themselves to believe there is a God. — Dfpolis

Well, no. Atheists believe there is no God, or theists believe there is a God. Will has little to do with it.

...there must be another source of their commitment. — Dfpolis

Why? As in, why must there be a commitment? Why not just a belief?

I do not think that willing requires such reflection. — Dfpolis

And when you take this far enough, will becomes no more than intentionality - directedness.

Whatever that means. — Tom Storm

That's the bit that needs to be filled in. Folk around here are reticent to do so. I suspect that's because when they do, reality makes itself apparent.

My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

But we can and do talk about the very same snakes and trains.

Hence his conclusion is wrong, and there is an error somewhere in his theory.

Materialism - the view that all that exists is matter - hasn't had a place since Newton.

So what do you think the "materialism" Hoffman is arguing against is?

What is it you think he says is "real"?

\

Ideas exist. — Art48

"There are ideas" just places ideas in the domain of the discussion. But you erroneously take this to mean that they have a place or a time or some such. That doesn't follow. You take "P exists" to imply that P has a spatial location, then when they are not found down the back of the lounge you invent a magical space for them to exist in.

If a person who has consequentialist tendencies claims there are no categorical imperatives, then they are thereby squarely a moral anti-realist (metaethically). — Bob Ross

See, that doesn't work. A consequentialist claims that the worth of an action is found by looking at its consequences. This stands in opposition to the deontologist looking at a moral rule, such as the categorical imperative.

And yet consequentialism prides itself on being "objective", as basing its morality on measurables. It is realist.

If your account has consequentialism as being antirealist, it has gone astray.

Same thing.

A new study examines all robust, available data on how fearful we are of what happens once we shuffle off this mortal coil. They find that atheists are among those least afraid of dying...and, perhaps not surprisingly, the very religious. — Study into who is least afraid of death