This relation is symmetrical. The world is also the world that appears coloured to such creatures as us. — Akanthinos

True, but we could also apply this to various illusions.

The stick is bent in water is false even though the light being refracted by the water makes it appear bent. And thus begins the appearance/reality distinction.


Is the following statement about the picture below true or false?

The surface of A is a darker shade of gray than the surface of B.



False, they're the same shade, which I verified with my color picker: RGB( 126,126,126 ).

The truth in this case is different than what it appears to be to us.

Just as up until recently you couldn't have ADHD. — Baden

But you could still have the symptoms of ADHD. You would just be called something else like "scatter brained" or a free spirt, or lacking in the character needed to see tasks through.

Conditions still exist regardless of what label society wants to use for them, or whether they're even recognized.

As usual, the missing words are being white “to us”. Truths are always ultimately psychological facts, not ontic ones, as they require that reality has the further thing of a point of view. — apokrisis

I don't agree with the always part, but your overall point does raise a problem I still have with deflationary notions of truth.

We can all agree that snow looks white when we see white snow. We can also agree that science tells us pure snow reflects all visible light into our eyes, which is why we see white.

But in a philosophy discussion, the question we typically want answered is whether the snow is actually white.

As such:

Ontologically speaking, the snow is white is true if and only if there is real, mind-independent snow that has a property of being white in a way that snow appears white to us.

It's not good enough to go look and see that the snow is white, because appearances can be false. And on a scientific understanding of how vision works, the snow only appears to be white to us. The colored in world we see around us isn't how the world is, it's how it looks for conscious creatures with visual systems like ours.

Can we get by without it? I think we can. — Banno

If so, then this would be a case where Wittgenstein was right about philosophers abusing language.

I pointed out that "every effect has a cause" cannot be either proved, nor disproved. How does what you have said relate to this? — Banno

Which means we can't know whether it's true. But it's also possible there is no truth to be had in this matter, depending on what one thinks about statements which are unprovable.

So we are agree that there are things we do not know. — Banno

Right, but that's different from whether there are things we cannot know, because of some limitation to our ability to know. We don't know whether there is life on Mars, but humans are capable of finding that out in time. We also don't know whether there is life in a galaxy 5 billion light years away, but we might not ever be able to know that given it's distance.

But what is a "state of affairs"? And why bother to introduce it? — Banno

Because statements about things like the color of snow or the location of cats is about things which aren't statements. And if those things are what the statements say they are, then the statements are true. So you have a condition in the world referenced correctly by the statement.

It's a general form of what constitutes a true empirical statement.

So are there things you do not know? — Banno

There are things no human knows.

Or are we embarking on some word game? — Banno

If I ask you what the number of hairs were on Julius Caesar's head before he died, is that a word game? Would we ever be able to know?

How could you know that this is true?

How could you show it to be false?

So where does it stand? — Banno

Depends on whether truth can be something which is unknowable to us.

What makes "The snow is white" true is the snow being white. That's not a justification. — Banno

But this seems odd. You have a statement and then you have a state of affairs. The statement is true if the state of affairs is what the statement says it is.

State of affairs might be controversial, so substitute in actual, non-linquistic, intersubjective, empirical snow. That cold stuff that falls out of the sky on winter days that we ball up and throw at people which is usually white.

What has justification to do with truth? — Banno

Well, it's how you determine whether a statement is true or not. Or, it's what makes a statement true.

The snow is white. Okay, so something makes that true or false.

Birds [evolved reptiles] and reptiles, have two different brains in a line, running in series. — 3rdClassCitizen

And octopuses have nine brains - a central one with and one for each arm.

But which, if any, of these are the Truth, as opposed to true? — Banno

Because the criteria would be different for each one? There is no one standard of justification that applies to all statements.

Perhaps truth is much simpler than philosophers tend to claim. Perhaps there is nothing to say about Truth. — Banno

Even if this is so, we might still want to ask whether a particular philosopher got it right. For example, Was Meillassoux correct that post-Kantian philosophy left philosophy (at least the continental side) in a state of correlationism where the world appears to us as if there were dinosaurs living millions of years before humans evolved?

Was Kant right that what gives rise to our sensations is unknowable? Is it true that what we perceive is not what is the case?

At which point we're asking for a metaphysical truth about the world. If it's not the world, then it could be a truth about our condition or language use. Is it true that meaning is use? Is existentialism true? Is morality objective? Is consciousness subjective? We want to know the truths about these things, even if philosophers fail to convince us they got it entirely right.

What would that difference be? — Bitter Crank

How fast 13.7 billion years flies by?

"Life goes by so fast when you're alive." my mother said. — Bitter Crank

So it slows down after your dead? I'm not sure about that. Seems like the first 13.7 billion years flew by. But maybe not existing is different than being dead.

After Finitude and Meillassoux comes immediately to mind.

Consider this dream anecdote from Oliver Sacks regarding one patient:

Patient is a user of cocaine, and PCP to get high. Vivid dream one night, dreamt he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smell. Waking, he found himself in just such a world. "As if I had been totally colour-blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world full of colour." He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision (" I could distinguish dozens of brown where I'd just seen brown before. my leatherbound books, which looked similar before, now all had quite distinct and distinguishable hues") and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory (" I could never draw before, I couldn't "see" things in my mind, but now it was like having a camera lucida in my mind - I "saw" everything as if projected on paper, and just drew the uotlines I "saw". Suddenly I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings.") But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: "I had dreamt I was a dog - it was an olfactory dream - and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world - aworld in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell." And with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half-forgotten, half recalled.
"I went into a scent shop", he continued "I had never had much of a nose for smells before, but now I distinguished each one instantly - and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world." He found he could distinguish all his friends - and patients - by smell: "I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, of any sight face". He could smell their emotions - fear, contentment, sexuality - like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell - he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell. — Oliver Sacks from The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Now I don't know what it's like to experience the world in such a sensory state, but I can understand the story. So again, there's something wrong with saying that we can't talk about the beetle in our own box.

That was funny!

An obvious rejoinder to the beetle-in-the-box is that we talk about our dreams, whose content is inherently private, since nobody else can experience what we're dreaming. The content of our dreams is epistemically closed off from others unless we talk about them.

If that doesn't count as private, then I don't know what does.

Or, more seriously, perhaps it is the Second Law of Thermodynamics that pushes the universe at this point of its evolution to form more and more complex structures, up to and perhaps beyond intelligent life (all to hasten its eventual heat death...) — SophistiCat

That's a really interesting thought.

Or perhaps dinosaurs could eventually produce a highly intelligent species. If they could produce something as un-dinosaur-like as birds (and some birds are pretty intelligent!), why not? — SophistiCat

Maybe so. There was a Star Trek Voyager episode where they came across advanced aliens who were descendants from Earth's dinosaurs, and left the planet for some reason before the big extinction event. I guess they just didn't leave any evidence behind for humans to find millions of years later, unlike fossilized bones and tracks. But it's just a fictional story.

What does he say, and what do you think, minds and experiences are? — Galuchat

Dennett thinks that subjectivity in terms of the Cartesian Theater or the Hard Problem are an illusion. A trick of language or the brain. There's nothing going on inside other than physical and biological processes, and whatever functional or computational roles they carry out. We are the equivalent of philosophical zombies, and he said as much in one talk I watched on Youtube.

I think there's something to subjectivity that is very hard to account for with an objective explanation. That's why Dennett is an eliminativist about qualia instead of trying to provide some sort of reductionistic or emergent account. But I don't see how you can entirely eliminate qualia, or whatever you want to call it. There's something to subjectivity. Something possibly fundamental.

In Dennett's case, no mental experience may be a fact. — Galuchat

In Dennett's case, the mental is redefined to be something objective, such as the functional role it plays. He's never said we don't have minds or experiences, only that they're not what some people (including myself) think they are.

Dennett also considers himself to be a quasi-realist about certain mental content. You can adopt the intentional stance in regards to other people, whereas you adopt the physical stance for rocks, the design stance for chairs.

if you didn't know better, would you expect fish to evolve into something like us? — SophistiCat

Maybe not if the tape was rewound, or another planet.

Second, dinosaurs are not extinct. Look out the window and you'll likely see some. — SophistiCat

I think the meaning of the dinosaurs going extinct where the big ones occupying all the niches that kept mammals to a small size.

The Kardashians came from Planet 9 in Outer Space and descended from crotch lice. — Bitter Crank

Truly a great example of convergent evolution.

This has taken a silly scifi turn, but it is an ongoing debate in biology (not the Kardashian part, I sincerely hope).

Or maybe we'd all look like ET and there'd be flying bicycles. — Hanover

Or have acid for blood.

Two of the biggest adaptations that led humans to evolving the way they did was the brain and the stamina humans have. (our ability to generate a thin layer of sweat) I don't see how these would develop in a world dominated by massive reptiles. — yatagarasu

Also that our ancestors came out of the trees. I don't know that the Velociraptor line would have gone to the trees for long enough to develop the kind of hands we have.

Let me just say that the marsupials would not be able to compete with the placental mammals and would have died out had they not been cut of from the the rest of the world "down under", so they would not be a good canonical example. — Harry Hindu

Kangaroos seem like they would do just fine. But there are other examples from outside Australia. Elephants were mentioned in the book. There's only been a few species of elephants and no example of convergent evolution of elephant-like organisms. They appear to belong to a unique line. Same can be said for Hominids, although we do have closer living relatives in the great apes. The closest living relatives to Elephants are probably Manatees and Dugongs.

Also, this debate has implications for the potential success of SETI. If biological determinism is the case, then it's more likely SETI will detect an alien civilization at some point in the future. This is because we would expect any planet that supports complex life to eventually evolve a similar enough species to ourselves.

However, if evolution is more on the contingent side, then the likelihood is greater we're alone in our region of space (however many light years out SETI could reasonably hope to detect a civilization). This is also brought up in the first chapter. But again, it raises the question of whether it's science or philosophy, and what the boundary is between the two for such matters.

Okay, so it doesn't have to be expensive, because there are completely unrealistic alternative options which you guess were a lot cheaper, — Sapientia

Those options weren't always unrealistic. Do you mean in contemporary society? That we're not just going to take the guilty from the court room to the platform for a quick, speedy and cheap death?

Sure, there is a legal process. I'm saying the legal process is what ends up costing so much, and this could be shortened if the requirement for the death penalty was exceedingly strict so that we weren't worried about them being found innocent later.

I'm not sure the quick & speedy death isn't more humane than drawing it out for years in solitary confinement while giving the prisoner some false hope their case will be overturned or the state won't go through with it.

hey disappear in a puff of shame when watching a mother helplessly holding her infant that is dying a slow painful death from whooping cough. — andrewk

They sure do disappear. The only way around that is to redefine good to mean something else than what it means for humans. But then, that means God isn't all-good. God is something else.

Well it is in reality, and why should I simply take your word for it? You've fully costed a business plan which outdoes all of the competition within that market, have you? — Sapientia

I'm guessing hanging and the guillotine were a lot cheaper, not that I'm advocating that, although I'm not sure giving someone a lethal injection is that much better.

Probably the high cost comes from all the appeals and housing these prisoners in their own wing of the prison while appeals are exhausted and the state gets around to executing them.

But it could be a whole lot cheaper if we skipped most of that. I realize there's a reason for the appeals in not wanting to execute an innocent person. Thus the requirement has to be really high. There are some crimes were there is no way the perp is going to be found innocent. The evidence is overwhelming and they confess while leading police to yet more evidence.

It's expensive. — Sapientia

It doesn't have to be.

it doesn't work as a deterrent, — Sapientia

But it does guarantee that person never re-offends.

it kills innocent people, — Sapientia

This is a problem. The standard should be really high for receiving the death penalty.

and it's barbaric — Sapientia

Is barbaric some kind of moral argument? We shouldn't do things that are barbaric as a society because they're barbaric, because I guess only Barbarians did those things in the past. Unlike say, the Romans.

It would be better not to let them go than to kill them. — Sapientia

Maybe, but I'm not convinced by the moral argument against capital punishment in this case. If you murder a bunch of people in cold blood, why should you continue living?

re you suggesting that he should have been killed instead? Is that what we should do with those deemed criminally insane? — Sapientia

I'm suggesting it would be preferable to kill someone like that than to let them go because of good behavior, given their propensity toward killing, and how adept sociopaths are at fooling people.

There was this guy named Charlie Brandt who shot his mom and dad when he was 13. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him, so he was released back to his family (the father survived the shooting). He seems to go on and have a normal life, getting married. Then, 33 years later he kills his wife and her niece before hanging himself. There's reason to believe he had been an active serial killer during the years he was married.

I don't accept the justice-based arguments because I value compassion over justice, and also because, — andrewk

But compassion for whom? The perpetrator or the victims?

and also because, as Socrates pointed out so long ago, nobody seems to be able to agree on what justice is. — andrewk

There does seem to be a mostly universal desire to punish offenders who break the rules. Studies have been done on people cheating in a game where other players will go out of their way to punish the cheaters, even if it costs them.

Such arguments are based purely on a lust for revenge, and giving in to that lust strips us of all that is good in our humanity. — andrewk

But that's not true, because there is a concept of the victims having justice. That's part of the reason for sentencing perpetrators. It's not just to remove them from society. It's to punish them.

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I'm not sure what you mean by 'social justice has gotten to the point of ridiculousness'. Do you mean that society is ridiculously unjust? Or ridiculously just? Or that people who think that society is unjust have taken a ridiculously extreme view of its injustice, and it is in fact much more just than they perceive? Or something else? — bert1

There is a movement based on the feeling that social justice is being forced down people's throats in an unnatural way that is something more than making sure everyone gets equal treatment. This could also be viewed as attempts to social engineer society from the top down.

To what extent that perception is real or a product of not wanting to give up one's privileged place in society is debatable (probably both to some extent). Also, humans have a natural tendency to want to rebel against being constantly being told not say or think certain ways, even if there is a good intention behind that. It can even be viewed as an Orwellian attempt to control society by redefining language to try and make the world more just.

An example might be:

Women and men are equal, and to ensure that society treats them that way, we must erase all forms of treating women differently from men. Which comes off as ridiculous and unnatural, since there are gender differences (although of course individuals differ across both genders). But to what extent this is just a sexist reaction and to what extent it's ideology gone to an extreme is the question (again some of both just depending). But I've definitely had people tell me that the only reason girls play with dolls and boys with toy guns is because of society, which I find profoundly silly, having been a child myself where the girls were plenty free to play with the boys (allowing for individual variance).

There was a Columbian serial killer who after being released from a psychiatric hospital disappeared and his whereabouts remain unknown. He was convicted for killing over 100 girls (ages 9 to 11) in South America (having led police to 53 graves).

Maybe he stopped. Maybe not.

So in some cases a person is not responsible for the brutal murder of someone?! — Blue Lux

In some cases the Justice System screws up and convicts the wrong person.

I think death row should be reserved for the worst of the worst where the evidence is overwhelming and they're not criminally insane, which means they know what they did was wrong but don't care. Richard Ramirez and Dennis Rader being too prime examples of that.