The only reason for being an atheist is because you don't believe in any gods. That's it. There's no merit or value. It just is. One might feel good about being intellectually honest, or not having to go to Church, Temple, etc. But really it's just lacking belief for whatever reason.

How could that mutual dependency make sense? I see how we need the universe, but how does it need us or the "I"? — Twain

The universe doesn't need us. We're born, humans evolved, space is vast, life inhabits all sorts of habitats we don't. Also, we depend on things like air, food, water, the right temperature range and what not to survive.

So unless one thinks all of that is merely an appearance in the mind, the universe doesn't need us.

What is the argument for possible worlds? It sounds a bit crazy, but I would need to see the argument.

And scoffing is very important to us. I like to scoff. Sometimes it turns into a scoffing fit. Great word that, scoff. — Bitter Crank

Sounds like the start a new school of of philosophy.

Is that the only option? God or Positivism? — Banno

God as a positivist idealist.

If I want to know what you felt like, I am always going to be using my experiences. That's the entire point. — TheWillowOfDarkness

And your experiences are unlikely to ever be exactly the same as mine.

If I think concepts reflective of the content of your dream, I'll know it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You can't know that it was my dream, or even a dream, without me telling you. And this also depends on the extent that concepts are capable of faithfully reproducing experiences.

So, I would say we do ultimately get all those things from observing 'external' nature; and this of course in conjunction with observing the nature of our mental processes; which are also surely part of nature, properly conceived. — Janus

Sure, mental process are part of nature. The problem here is that mental processes can be about things that are not part of nature. Our understanding of the world can have mistaken notions. Our experience of the world can be mistaken. It's clear that problems arise between language and the world. Simon Blackburn called it a "loose fit" between mind and world. What constitutes identity? When is something a pile? Can you have non-simple objects? Are forms required for knowledge? Does time flow? Do we look out on the world perceiving things as they are? And so on.

I think it is a mistake to think that there is any subject-object split in reality. The only split is mental or logical. — Dfpolis

However we wish to categorize the matter, even in reality there is a difference between subject perceptions of the world, and subject-generated experiences independent of perception. Dreams exist in the real world, but they are still different from perception.

You can relate to what it feels like to be me. Exist with the right experiences, you"ll feel the same. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, but I don't exist as you, so I don't have the same experiences.

To know your dreams, like anything, I just need the right concept. I could know what you dreamt without you even speaking to me. All I would need is to have the right experiences, to exist knowing the concepts which reflected your dreams. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But you can't know this without being told.

I can know what someone experienced in the sense of "what it felt like." — TheWillowOfDarkness

There are limits. I can't know what it's like to give birth, since I don't have the right kind of body for that, and no concept is going to allow me to have that exact experience. I also don't know what it's like to be blind from birth. It gets worse as we go from the differences between humans to other animals.

But you do raise a good point about language allowing us to have the same or similar experiences, within certain limitations.

Good rebuttal, but I think it confuses the process with the conceptual apparatus that makes it possible.

We don't get numbers, operations or equations from observing nature. Two, plus and equals don't exist as objects anymore than a perfect circle or PI does.

We create symbols to express the ideas they represent. And we write these down or use tools like calculators because it's difficult for us to do complicated math and logic in our heads.

We also developed concepts like infinity, hyperspace, or counterfactuals. These don't come from sense data.

I don't see a genuine divide between the deductive and the empirical. — Janus

We don't learn about logic or math from observing the world. They developed out of our conceptual reasoning. As such, they are a priori. Empirical knowledge is a posteriori. This has been recognized since at least Plato, even if it was put in different terms.

Btw it speaks to the victory of materialism/atomism/ reductionism that our direct experiences can be considered spooky when they are still our access point to the world. — JupiterJess

That's a good point. However, the subjective/objective split still leaves transcendental idealism on the table.

I think eliminativism could mean that the folk terms used to describe our experiences aren't suited to a laboratory because they are rough stereotypes/social constructs. — JupiterJess

I'm sympathetic to that. Notice that in these cases ordinary word use is based on faulty assumptions, and so getting clear would actually mean eliminating terms.

However, the laboratory settings is still objective, regardless of what better terms we come up with to use in place of the folk ones.

And from reading and hearing enough of philosophers like Dennett, it's clear that the goal is to eliminate the subjective as a real category, which is a lot stronger than replacing words.

One could say that the philosophical work is exactly in sorting out how we want to denote this or that -- in your example, the acceptable boundaries of use for the words "objective" and "subjective", or whether these or other terms are better. After all, what in the split needs resolving? What would it mean to resolve the split? Aren't the words "objective" and "subjective" simply being put to use, and insofar that we agree on their usage we have nothing more philosophical to talk about? — Moliere

Sure. Linguistic analysis would be good for that. We might want to get rid of "in here" and "out there" in philosophical language because it can be misleading. Replace it with something better. Maybe point that the container idea of mind is also misleading. Or whatever. Maybe we don't know how to think properly about how the mind interacts with the world, and linguistic analysis can point that out. Also, ongoing research in science can help clear things up. But it doesn't make the subjective and objective distinction disappear.

but it would seem that the "in here" isentirely public. Just as we know about the tree in our backyard, it would seem we can know when subjective experiences exists and their character. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't know how experiences can be entirely public. I have to tell you about my dreams or inner dialog for you to know anything about them. Unlike the tree in the backyard, you can't just go look.

what is the status of your experiences and language use? Are these merely "subjective" such that they have no objective important? Are we prevented form saying it is true you are experiencing something else? More to the point, how does anything we might talk about, which is a "something of our experience" true if our subjectivities don't constitute something which is true and can said to report truth? — TheWillowOfDarkness

We're able to express our subjectivity in language, to an extent. I can't relate to you exactly what it feels like to be me, but since you're human and we probably share a similar enough culture, then you can relate in a lot of ways.

Of course this is a rhetorical device. But to me the device in this context does appeal to a commonality of experience even as it insists that one's own is unique. There's something paradoxical going on. Your words propose that I will understand what you're proposing because I will experience things that way too. And I do! — mcdoodle

Right, and I'm not a solipsist. We do understand a lot of each other's experiences. But not all. We also misunderstand. I don't know to what extent I can walk in someone else's shoes.

It becomes more difficult when we think about other animals. Thus the what it's like to be a bat question, and how difficult it is for us to figure out whether dolphins and whales really employ language.

I think it helps a lot that as humans, we have similar experiences, and can put that into language. We can also read each other pretty well.

It might better be captured by saying we are embedded in language. — Banno

Landru, is that you?

The process of doing math is an empirical one of working with symbols in accordance with strict rules, in order to discover previously unknown results so I count it as an empirical practice. — Janus

I thought empirical was perceptual. What you're talking about sounds deductive. Doesn't logic work the same way?

Math isn’t perceived. It’s conceptual. We can apply it to the empirical with great results, which raises interesting questions.

so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical

I’m not entirely sure this is true for science. Consider some of the speculative theories in physics, debates involving thought experiments, different interpretations of QM that physicists have come up with, the question of biological determinism vs contingency in evolution, and so on. Also, the widespread use of mathematics.

If science was exclusively empirical, we wouldn’t have theories. Unobservable entities like quarks wouldn’t be posited. There would be no laws or constants.

I don't believe so. — Sam26

It sounds to me like some people's interpretation, even in this very thread, of the later Wittgenstein is that he was trying to cure the philosopher in us from the need to do philosophy.

I understand that you don't. Do you know whether Wittgenstein thought so?

Sounds poetic. I like it.

I'm wondering what philosophers have thought this? — Sam26

The logical positivists*? Carnap, Quine, Stove?

But I had fans of Wittgenstein in mind, not necessarily professional philosophers.

edit: *positivists not empiricists

But how are they being used now? — Banno

How the words were used then or now doesn't help us when we want to know whether it's the sun moving or the Earth turning, or something else that accounts for the appearance.

With time, we want to know what accounts for the appearance of regular change, such that we can have yesterdays and tomorrows.

Shitty Russians posing as philosophers of depth. — StreetlightX

Obligatory: In Soviet Russia, dog explains you!

philosophical problems are real - are only real - when they have a well-formulated grammar that makes sense of them. — StreetlightX

Sure, but that's a lot different than the claim that linguistic analysis can potentially dissolve philosophy problems across the board. That philosophical inquiry is itself an abuse of language. That philosophers for two and half thousand years have been misunderstanding language.

Regarding time, the question was whether a well-formulated grammar would show us that no such philosophical issues actually exist.

I don't know whether Wittgenstein though this was the case for all of philosophy, but some of his proponents have talked as if it were.

This does not mean that when someone says that the sun has set means that the sun has moved downwards, even if they believe that this is how it actually moves. — Πετροκότσυφας

The point here being that showing how the words sunset or time is used in an ordinary setting doesn't help with ontological or epistemological questions regarding the movement of the sun or the nature of time.

Or maybe you don't understand what is being said when someone says that the sun has risen or that it has set and you think that they are professing a scientific theory; — Πετροκότσυφας

Come on, we all know the origin of those words were based on how people thought the sun moved.

when in reality they are saying something akin to "it's morning, get your ass out of bed and go to school" or "it's late, go to bed or you'll be late for school when morning comes". — Πετροκότσυφας

Sure it can mean that also, but that isn't the concern when asking questions about the nature of time or sunrises.

In certain ways the one might not be reducible to the other so that one can trump the other as to what time really is. — Πετροκότσυφας

Nah, I'm a scientific realist. Thus even though the sun is said to rise and set, the reality is that the Earth turns, and ordinary language is wrong, being based on a misleading appearance.

Science has the trump card over ordinary use. If science were to definitely say that time doesn't flow, then our experience and talk of it "flowing" is wrong. It would still be useful in everyday life, though.

What is the question though? — Πετροκότσυφας

Whether a linguistic analysis of the philosophy of time can dissolve it, or leave it with the physicists.

Which would mean it's a mistake to ask philosophical questions about time. Either it's a scientific matter, or it's an everyday, practical matter.

Ok, but the fact that it's useful to use it this way and that way, might has something to do with the fact that the "nature of time" is to be used this way and that way, in order to achieve this thing and that thing, — Πετροκότσυφας

Yeah, but what is the argument here? At the very least, we want a scientific explanation of time. That still seems to leave some questions.

A horse was useful for travel. That didn't stop people from wondering how horses came to be. A linguistic analysis of how we used horses didn't help with that question.

You might as well ask those questions, but within a specific frame and for a specific purpose in mind. Do we have any difficulty to be on time for work, or use the word in different ways, because philosophers can't agree on what time is? — Πετροκότσυφας

No, but my wondering about the nature of time has little to do with whether it's useful for getting to work. Not everything is of pragmatic concern. Sometimes we're just curious, or are feeling existential, mystical, high, whatever.

There is plenty for philosophers to do, in the details. — Banno

The biggest challenge I see to your position is the ethics and how to live branches of philosophy. To borrow from Simon Blackburn, if I think fox hunting is wrong, and you think it's okay, how is analyzing language going to settle the dispute?

There's a more important problem. It doesn't sound promising for language and life in general. But this is what it seems to end up to when we're trying to find an essential meaning for such terms irrespective of how they're being used in our language (in order to meet our practical considerations). — Πετροκότσυφας

Well, if we're just focusing on the philosophy of time, it seems natural to me that humans would eventually start asking these sorts of questions.

Speaking of physics, QM does present an area of philosophical debate which isn't born of ordinary language. Maybe it will be resolved at a future time by physics.

It's interesting to note though that science does provide new material for philosophy from time to time.

The point here is that what it means, even for us, to feel wet depends on the context. — Πετροκότσυφας

I've forgotten the context of this side debate.

But that would render other instances of us saying that we feel or not feel wet, meaningless, despite the fact that we seem to perfectly understand what is being said when they are uttered. Besides, the same would apply to terms like "you" (i.e. does your clothes qualify as you?), "drop", "aware", "liquid" etc... — Πετροκότσυφας

That doesn't sound promising for resolving philosophical debates. Reminds me of mereology and sorites. Which along with identity I'm somewhat amenable to dissolving with language. Those seem more like what sort of concepts we want to use in various situations where the world doesn't care whether objects can have parts or how much they vary over time.

Like claiming that mountains do not have a height until they are measured. — Banno

I recall that 100+ page long thread.

But not having found the solution does not mean that there is none. — Banno

Right, well we would need some metric for deciding which issues have been dissolved, which ones look dissolvable, which ones we're not sure about, and which ones remain resistant.

And also whether it can be shown that some problems can't be resolved this way.

Some issues have been, to my satisfaction. — Banno

I'm sure some issues are amenable to this. Truth might be one of them. But all of philosophy? It only takes one exception.