However, you might have a more restrictive notion of what it would take to resolve a philosophical issue than I do. You may even have a more restrictive notion of what counts as a philosophical issue in the first place. — jkg20

My notion is that it a consensus can be reached by professional philosophers. Ongoing debate tells me a consensus has not been reached regarding many issues, and so the last century of analyzing language has failed to be as successful as originally intended.

Wrong to us, yes. But this itself assumes some correspondence theory of truth about something "out there." — Xtrix

You don't need correspondence for realism to be the case. Deflation is another option. But setting aside the question of realism, ancient cosmology has been shown to be wrong epistemologically, without making any assumptions about what science tells us regarding the nature of reality.

It's no different than the flat earth people, except the ancient people didn't have the as good of evidence to work out that the world was round (and yet some did manage to do so). And the world being spherical (roughly) is something verifiable.

On the other hand, all action and investigation is conducted on the basis of tacit meanings -- otherwise it'd be a matter of pure instinct. — Xtrix

The point is that debating meanings does not resolve debates such as realism/idealism, because the nature of the world does not depend on our language usage. Nor does our ability to know, for that matter.

Right, in that case it was "consistent with the universe" too. — Xtrix

But it wasn't. Their cosmology was wrong.

That alone makes examining how words are used a useful activity for philosophers to engage in. — jkg20

I haven't seen that it's been very successful in resolving philosophical issues.

"Consistent with our universe" is meaningless. Maybe it implies some correspondence idea of knowledge, I don't know. — Xtrix

It is meaningful when you take into account the cosmology of the ancients who believed in those deities compared to cosmology today. Yahweh literally sat on a throne positioned above the visible stars, which were angels. Heaven was located in outer space. The earth had corners and the sky was held up by pillars, with a firmament that separated the water above from the Earth below. Hell, or Sheol, was a literal cavern in the ground where the dead went to wait.

The supernatural or spiritual realm wasn't some separate other plane of existence. It was part of the same cosmos.

They don't exist? Do numbers exist? Depends on the meaning of "existence" -- which is a word, with various meanings. Guess that matters. — Xtrix

I'm not interested in substituting discussions of philosophical issues for debating semantics. If that's what philosophy amounted to, then it would be a sub-discipline of linguistics.

Sure, if we're going to debate the existence of numbers, it's helpful to state what that means and what's being argued. But to insist that the debate is over the definition of existence, numbers or math is to misunderstand the argument.

Regardless, your claim was that words and word usage doesn't matter. That's still completely wrong.. — Xtrix

It matters for how we say things and what we mean. It doesn't matter a lick for what is the case.

That's just not true. If it were so easy as simply being a "matter of what kind of world we live in," then we'd all still believe in Ishtar and Yhw and a geocentric universe. — Xtrix

We wouldn't because they don't exist and aren't consistent with our universe, but the kind of world we live in is no simple matter to figure out. That's why we had those crazy beliefs, and it's why philosophy kind of started with skepticism.

If I understand Wittgenstein correctly (and I might not), then it is not the subjective experience of dreaming that determines the meaning of the word. Obviously, we are all taught how to use language, including words such as 'pain', 'dream', and 'remember', by others who cannot access one's private sensations. This all relates to Wittgenstein's remarks on the misguided notion of a private language. — Luke

But It has to play a role because we talk about our subjective experiences. It would be absurd to relate my dream to you if my dream played no role in the language game, because then what the hell would I be talking about and how could you understand it?

But maybe I misunderstand the private language argument.

What's the problem, exactly? Someone has to tell us what "consciousness" is. Likewise with "God's existence." Why is that not a "hard problem"? It certainly was for centuries, but that essentially drifted away. — Xtrix

It was for centuries when monotheistic religions dominated culture, but now that people are free to argue against God's existence, and there are lots of good arguments at least calling it into question, the problem is not hard for non-believers.

Consciousness is a different matter because we all see colors, feel pains, hear sounds, etc. But those don't form the scientific theories we use to understand the world and the workings of our own bodies.

In neither case is it a matter of definition or word usage. It's rather a matter of what kind of world we live in.

But as I've pointed out elsewhere, the very notion of subject/object, "inner and outer worlds," mind and body, etc., already presume an understanding of what it is to be. They themselves operate in the context of an ontology. In the West, at least, that ontology is still very much Greek. Until we understand this point fully, we're operating in a blind alley.

(This is not to say these problems don't exist, or that they're "wrong," by the way.) — Xtrix

This is a good point, but the problems still exist even if you reframe the debate, as you mentioned in parentheses. It doesn't make the fundamental issues with perception, consciousness and language go away.

It's true that I'm part of the world, not a mind ontologically separated from it. But that doesn't mean my experience of the world is some unfiltered omniscient window onto things as they are such that I can dismiss philosophical concerns over knowledge and what exists.

It's too bad The Great Whatever and Landru Guide Us no longer post here as they were two of the premier defenders of idealism and would have had something to say to all the rock kicking going on in this thread. I notice that Wayfarer doesn't even bother anymore. There was another prominent idealist whose name I forget.

That being said, I agree that ontological idealism is false, and tried desperately to argue against their positions in the past when it seemed idealism was the leading metaphysics of the forum at the time. But the scales have decisively tipped in the other direction since their departure.

So to even it just slightly, a problem for metaphysical realism is that it's prone to skepticism, which the simulation and BIV arguments demonstrate. If it's possible the world of perception is somehow an illusion, then idealism is less easy to dismiss. And really it goes back to the ancient problem of perception all the way up to the modern debate over consciousness, with stops along the way at Descartes, Hume, Kant and the more recent indirect/direct realism debate.

This is the point of the conditional, that if the word has a use in these people's language, then the word "beetle" would not be the name of a thing and this thing does not belong to the language game at all. The word would not be used to refer to anything in particular, but would only refer generally to whatever is in a box, which could include nothing. As Wittgenstein says: "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something" — Luke

The obvious rejoinder to this is dreams. Our own dreams are the equivalent to a beetle in a box as nobody else can experience a dream we have. And yet we can easily communicate dreams we remember to other people.

So how does that work? People do legitimately dream and they do legitimately talk and write about dreams remembered. We can't check their accuracy. But we can certainly understand what is being related, more or less.

And dreams are certainly private. Yes, we have tools today to tell when people are dreaming, more or less. But we can't tell what the content of their dreams are. Maybe someday dreams will be read out by some sophisticated scanner and machine learning software, and posted on Youtube for everyone to see. It won't be exactly the same as having the dream (the original emotions and feeling of the dream is exclusive to the dreamer), but we will at least get to watch them.

But until then, they are beetles in a box of our sleep.

If reality has no common natures,.why should numbers share a nature necessarily? — Gregory

Their universality, if they have a mind-independent existence. I'm pretty sure numbers being real would entail that nominalism is false. Maybe there aren't tree universals, but three of anything would be the same exact number.

According to the eternal inflation model, which I tentatively accept as the best science we have at the moment, nothing caused the universe to expand initially because there is no initiation, runaway expansion has always been the normal state of the universe going back potentially forever. The big bang was a random temporary slowdown of a small part of it, which became our known universe, which has been slowly accelerating back up ever since and will someday resume that runaway expansion like everything else beyond it. — Pfhorrest

So there's an infinite inflation where a finite part had a temporary slowdown?

I'm not very satisfied with that idea. I'm not even sure what it could mean. At what point during the infinite inflation was there a temporary slowdown?

I have a problem with real infinites, so maybe that's it. Infinity sounds like a concept humans created, not an actual quantity of something existing. I thought that if you end up with infinities in physics, that was an indication that something went wrong.

It seems to me the entire question of "why is there something rather than nothing" is just a result of a mistake in our reasoning. We tend to subconsciously reify categories and relational terms into ontological "things". In this case, we turned relative absence into it's own absolute thing "nothingness". — Echarmion

But you can just change the wording to ask, "Why does anything exist"? Which doesn't need to reference some ontological nothing.

Questions (and answers) are not separable from semantics. — Janus

Rearranging words to answer a question either shows the answer to be trivially true or it isn't a meaningful answer. It's just a word game.

Compare that to asking questions about cosmology. You don't rearrange words to find an answer.

Because there can be. — Pfhorrest

But why?

Forget about modal realism; there couldn't have been nothing simply because nothing cannot be; it's a contradiction in terms. — Janus

That's just semantics though. We don't need to talk about nothing existing. The question is why anything exists.

If modal realism is true, then the “innate potential for reality to exist” just consists of the trivial fact that there is no possible world at which there is no world, i.e. at every possible world there is some world, so some world or another existing is not only possible, but necessary. There couldn’t have been nothing. — Pfhorrest

Then the question becomes why does the innate potential for reality exist? Why are there possible worlds?

I don't even understand how Adam's act of eating from the tree of good and evil was evil if he didn't know what evil even was until he ate the apple. — Hanover

It was gaining that knowledge which was the problem. They were then kicked out before they could eat form the tree of life and live forever like the gods.

In the Book of Enoch, 200 angels sin by having sex with human women and then teaching them and other men about secret knowledge from the heavens, such as metallurgy, what sort of roots to eat and so on. That and their kids were giants who ate up all the food and started eating humans. So then El decided to send a flood.

It's a Pandora's Box tale. Christians changed the meaning to be about original sin, the devil and rebellion.

I believe David Chalmers wrote a book related to that called Constructing the World. He focuses on the idea of scrutability where you start off with a few basic assumptions and build up your metaphysics.

Yeah, physicalism isn't the same thing as materialism. — Pfhorrest

But physicalism is understood in the realist sense of materialism. There is some kind of mind-independent stuff making up the world.

then phenomenal experience is just the input into our function of signals from other functions of that structure, which in turn have their own inputs that constitute their own phenomenal experiences, and outputs that constitute their behaviors, which constitute all of their observable, empirical, physical properties. To do is to be perceived, to perceive is to be done unto, and to do or perceive or be perceived or be done unto is to be. — Pfhorrest

I don't see where the functional turns into the phenomenal. You have every bit as much a hard problem with functionalism as you do with materialism.

MUH is not incompatible with physicalism (it just reframes what physical things are), — Pfhorrest

It's certainly incompatible with materialism. A mathematical ontology isn't compatible with there being stuff, so I don't see how it's physical. But I guess if we're allowed to redefine the meaning of "physical" to be whatever is consistent with physical models.

Some, like Dennett, just don't accord "phenomenal consciousness" the kind of autonomous metaphysical status that philosophers like Searle, Nagel and Chalmers think it ought to have. — SophistiCat

Dennett argues against phenomenal consciousness in all his talks and writings, because he's knows well it can't be squared with physicalism. On this, he and Chalmers do agree. For Dennett we're conscious in the functional sense, which can cause a cognitive illusion that we experience more than that.

Is this your position or your proposed reading of theirs? — bongo fury

Neither. It's a response to the idea of pictures in the head.

So you're a panpsychist informationist. Materialism is wrong, it's information.

I misunderstood your point based on previous discussions about all human activity being natural.

Oh, I get it. You come to expose the illusionists, not to praise? — bongo fury

I came to do what I stated in the OP.

Your overly long analysis simply ignores the fact that economies are part of the natural ecology of the Earth. — Janus

I don't think this is meaningful. Environmentalists, biologists, ecologists and economists would not agree. You're just saying that everything on Earth is part of nature. Sure, but that doesn't add anything when it comes to discussing pollution, climate change and the impact humans have.

If humans weren't here, there would be no plastic, no concrete jungles, no monetary systems. The fossilized plant material would remain in the ground. And the climate would be different.

There is no hard problem for a monist. — Harry Hindu

Provided you can give an adequate description for consciousness AND he world.

I agree that idealism doesn't have this problem.

A picture in the head? — bongo fury

A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In. color, with sound.

Wait, I thought we needed many people to tell us what an object is, yet now you are asking what an object is without people. You're not being consistent. — Harry Hindu

Difference between epistemology and ontology. Hard problem raises the possibility that the ontology of the world is dualistic, but it also raises an epistemological question of whether we can know what the nature of consciousness is.

This is one aspect of the modern version of the problem of perception.

They even overlap providing fault-tolerant and reaffirming information about an object's location relative to the body — Harry Hindu

Yes, and those senses still don't tell us most of what an object is without serious investigation by many people.

So it seems to me that a very important part of the description of some object is it's location relative to the body. — Harry Hindu

Yes, but that's a relation. What is an object when we're not around to sense it?

Maybe the problem (illusion) is assuming some kind of dualism, like subjective/objective, physical/mental, direct/indirect, etc., — Harry Hindu

Qualia certainly makes dualism a possibility. But there's no getting around some sort of dualism, even if it's only epistemic. There's a difference between how we experience, think and talk about the world and the world itself. Unless you're an anti-realist.

What is an "experience"? What does it mean for an object (a brain) to have, or generate, an "experience"? — Harry Hindu

i feel like this ground has been covered already.

How is the brain different from the experience? — Harry Hindu

Are you asking whether idealism is the case?

It seems to me that if you claim that it is an illusion, then you know how to overcome the illusion and see things as they truly are. — Harry Hindu

First step would be understanding how the illusion is generated. Neuroscience would have to supply that.

As for seeing things as they really are, eyes only give you limited information from a certain perspective. You need other instruments to form a proper physical description.

What is it that is being misinterpreted, and what is it being misinterpreted as, — Harry Hindu

Our subjective experiences are being misinterpreted as something which is hard to reconcile with any sort of objective explanation.

If we see light and not objects, mirages and bent sticks in water is what you would expect one to experience. — Harry Hindu

Sure, but that doesn't work for the experience of color, because physically color is a label for the wavelength of photons based on our having experiences of color. The photons themselves are not colored. It wouldn't matter if they were, because it's electrons which get sent to the visual cortex, not photons. The brain has to turn that stimulus into an experience of color.

As some people like to say in response to direct realism, the green grass doesn't get into our heads. It's not like the color green (or it's shape) hops onto photons from their reflective surface, rides the photons into our eyes, then hops on electrons to ride into the brain for us to see it. Rather, we generate an experience of green grass from the information provided by our senses.

If we're having any kind of illusion at all, we are having *some* experience, regardless of how it relates to physical reality. And the having of experiences is the definition of consciousness. — Daz

Sure, but is that definition one that is incompatible with physical reality?

Only if they possess the cognitive mechanism that creates the illusion.

Why do you ask? — Janus

Just wondering if Trump is considered a more important matter than a pandemic.

You can always prove you are conscious to yourself because you are the one experiencing the phenomena you just can't prove it to other people/ give it third person accessibility — Forgottenticket

Only if your introspection is telling you that reliably.

Because it builds on "problem of other minds" Chalmers' argument is set up in a way that it can't be refuted. He even said as such to another neuroscientist. — Forgottenticket

One might consider this a flaw with the argument

Fwiw, don't bother with Dennett if you're interested in anything mind related. if you look at his earlier psychology work he denies dreams exist during sleep ignoring a lot of empirical evidence they do. — Forgottenticket

Yeah, the coming-to-seem-to-remember. It was wrong, and illusionism needs to be able to handle dreaming.