I don't understand what passion has to do with causality.

As I've said many times on many threads and I will say many times more - metaphysical systems, of which science is one, are not right or wrong, there are more or less useful in particular situations. — T Clark

Do you think any other metaphysical system has a more useful answer than evolution as to how humans came to exist?

Actually, I'm not that interested in useful since a creationist can easily argue that their faith about creation is useful to them. Do you think anymetaphysics than science (really naturalism) has a more true answer?

I don't think what I have asked for is certainty at all. All I have asked for is that the Realist have some account, which he can at least convince himself is true, of how human beings can have any reliable basis at all for the belief that Realism is true. — PossibleAaran

Wouldn't realism being the most likely inference from experience qualify? We don't need to posit demons or computer simulations. We can just say the things in perception continue to exist while not being perceived, along with other things we can't perceive, but we can infer from things perceived, like elementary particles.

That goes well with science, which doesn't infer demons or simulations or brains in vats, but does infer plenty of unobservables that make good sense of what is observed, along with object permanence.

whatever it is, sounds good to eat. — Wayfarer

It does. Certainly better than the tofu-turkey I had recently.

Also, someone made a shrimp-eating addendum to Stove's worst argument. So if anyone manages to eat a trout-turkey, then we can be sure it exists.

I rather like the idea of doing philosophy through eating. Vision has been abused for centuries. Time to take a culinary turn.

That's a good answer, and some philosophers are committed to living things being an exception. Living things can have parts.

Seems to me the same argument can be made for machines.

The problem with things like rocks is we can easily get into sorites issues. How many mineral parts are needed to make a rock? Is it the same rock after it's been weathered? If you have a bunch of rocks piled together, do they form a rock heap? What's the fundamental difference between a heap of rocks, and the rock minerals inside a rock?

Are these "priors" not temporally prior? If the "prior" is necessary for the existence of the thing, then isn't the prior necessarily temporally prior to the existence of the thing — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, but it's not the the temporal priority that is sufficient, it's the nature of the prior. If the universe was filled only with inert gasses, then their prior existence would not lead to any chemistry.

So Kant wouldn't have said anything to a hand waving argument either?

Neither would Wittgenstein, but for a different reason.

If you analyze "logical priority" you will see that the only valid way that something can be prior to another is that it is temporally prior. — Metaphysician Undercover

Some things can't come to exist without the priors. Babies exist because of mothers. Life exists because of chemistry. Chemistry exists because of physics. In fact, chemistry has a close mathematical relationship to physics. The physics of atoms dictate that molecules will form under the right conditions.

Are you saying that our experiences are objective? I'm not even sure what that means. I would have thought that personal experiences are the essence of subjectivity. — T Clark

Some of our experiences are subjective, but it's not clear how perception should be classified.

Which is begging the question. Who says being in the world is primary (other than Heidegger)? — T Clark

Heidegger makes the argument that we're always actively doing things with goals in mind which make sense in terms of a world, and it's only by abstracting from those activities that you can put yourself in a position to have radical doubt, which is an act of forgetting your constant worldly activity.

Or something along those lines, as I understand it.

Since we can't step outside of our perceptions, there's no reason to supposed we're inside an objective reality. It's merely a philosophical exercise in what sort of wild scenarios we can imagine which aren't incompatible with our experiences. — T Clark

A Heideggerian critique of that might be that our being in the world is primary, and so abstracting away from that to ask radically skeptical questions about our perceptions of the world is to make a fundamental mistake.

You're asking this question by starting out saying objective reality exists. We're not in a situation were we can do that. We can only imagine the possibility. — T Clark

This is assuming that our perceptions are subjective, and thus there is an objective gap that needs to be crossed to get at an external world, if it exists.

But one might start over by rejecting the notion that perceptions are subjective, or at least deny that perceptions make us aware of subjective objects (sense datum).

I think you are a victim of a failure of imagination. It is a common intellectual malady to believe that words and the world are the same thing. — T Clark

I can understand the brain in a vat argument. But I'm not sure that's the same as being in the world. Maybe we're just imagining that an envatted experience could be indistinguishable from an embodied one, because we don't know enough to rule it out.

I studied Hume under David Stove. He was a great guy, and a terrific teacher. Very sympathetic to me, who was kind of a rebel without a clue. But I don't think Stove 'got' Kant at all. — Wayfarer

Really? That's interesting. What would be Kant's response to Stove's worst argument critique?

think what the realist does, and this is something Schopenhauer is explicit about, is that s/he forgets to take account of him or herself, the sense in which all of our knowledge of the world is mediated by the senses, assimilated by the understanding, and represented in the intellect. Realism, generally, doesn't critically reflect on the nature of experience, and the contribution the mind makes to it. — Wayfarer

Also known as Stove's worst argument?

But as far as I can see "synthetic a priori judgements" are just a long-winded way of saying "sentiments". — unenlightened

But since Hume was an empiricist, isn't he ceding ground to rationalism here by saying we have a sentiment toward causality? He's admitted there's something fundamental in our thought processes which we use to make sense of the world that doesn't come from sensory experience.

You can't get a will-be from a was, any more than you can get an ought from an is. The gaps are bridged by habit and sentiment. — unenlightened

I don't buy the argument that the gaps are bridged by habit and sentiment anymore than Kant did, even though unlike Kant, I think causality is real.

It's just obvious to me that we inhabit a causal universe, otherwise there would be no reason for it to have such a deep, uniform order to it over billions of years.

For just as we cannot rationally infer causation, we cannot rationally infer correlation. — sime

The problem is that we do both all the time. Our technology and science is based on being able to make predictions from what we consider to be correlation or causation.

It's not just that we observe past Bs following As, it's that we infer C will follow B given AB. If we know that all objects fall to the Earth at 9.81 m/s, then we can propel something into outer space with an acceleration greater than 9.81 m/s. Then given other Bs following As in chemistry, we can create the fuel to make this propulsion work. And so forth to the point that we can land spacecraft on other planets we've never been to.

That's why it's hard to take Humean skepticism seriously outside of a philosophy discussion.

Strange as Idealism is, we never found any reason to think that things exist unperceived. — PossibleAaran

What do you mean by never having found any reason? Do you mean any reason the idealist would accept? I think there are good reasons for being a realist. They might not be good enough to convince an idealist or skeptic, but that's their problem.

Interesting. So objects on the Earth cannot but be pulled at the rate of 9.81 m/s, because that is simultaneous with the Earth's gravitational field.

what was the tradition understanding?

As a realist, I would say that if we observe constant conjunction, we're observing causality. But we often have to infer the nature of it, and it's always possible to infer incorrectly or incompletely. Something is causing everything to fall to the Earth at a rate of 9.81 m/s, otherwise why would a cannon ball fall at the same rate as a feather, once you factor out air resistance? That's totally unexpected.

Oh, it might be because causality really is a thing out there in the world, hmmm, I see... — Agustino

Might just be.

If I were to take the Idealist route, I would likely answer you like this. The Idealist view is not that nothing exists unperceived by me, but that nothing exists unperceived by some mind. The starving kids in Africa obviously perceive themselves and their starvation, so the Idealist need not say they don't exist. The same with terrorists. The rain forest being cut down is obviously being perceived by the people cutting it down. — PossibleAaran

Sure, but the idealist knows about other perceivers the same way they know about laptops. I see you. I close my eyes and then open them. I see another you.

The rain forest being cut down is obviously being perceived by the people cutting it down. — PossibleAaran

I don't really understand caring about a rainforest that only exists as perception.

We have no reason to think that they don't compute when we close our eyes, but we have no reason to think that they do either, without some sort of inferential argument. Having no reason to think that it is false that X is not a reason to think that it is true that X. — PossibleAaran

But we do have cases where we open our eyes and see that the laptop is frozen up instead of delivering a result. So we have different possible scenarios upon opening our eyes:

The laptop displays a finished computation.

The laptop is frozen up.

The laptop is out of power.

The laptop has overheated.

The laptop is gone!

And so on. Brutely speaking, we can't say why any of the above happened. We open our eyes, and there's a new experience to be had. But we can provide realist explanations. The laptop is gone because someone else took advantage while our eyes were closed. Perhaps philosophical skepticism at a busy bus stop is a bad idea.

Now I don't deny that many people have things to do of a more consequential nature. If you are concerned with getting food for the starving, protecting the rainforest, saving endangered species or lessening terrorism then this kind of scepticism might seem abstract and useless. But I think if this sort of scepticism is right it teaches something very important. — PossibleAaran

If I took the skepticism about the unperceived world seriously, then wouldn't I doubt whether those issues even exist when I'm not perceiving them? As long as I'm not perceiving starving kids in Africa, terrorist cells, or the rainforest being cut down, then why should they be of any consequence? For all I know, they only exist when they come into view.

Maybe the better approach would be just to avoid seeing those issues so as to keep them nonexistent, if esse is percipi.

Heisenberg has holed that idea beneath the waterline, but most people seem to believe that it's still true. It's just that hardly anyone has caught up yet. — Wayfarer

Even if Laplace had been right, wouldn't Wolfram have dragged the idea underwater? What good is a single equation unless you can compute the result? And when it comes to the universe, you have to run the entire thing to see what happens.

Why do you think the Modern World is so weird? — Wayfarer

Because people think a reality tv show host would make for a good president?

But really, where the white coats saying the ultimate truth was only atoms in the void before the bubble chambers? You still have to deal with all those composite objects and events.

There is still a possible/impossible distinction though. But is there, really? If "an event A is impossible" means for you that you should live your life as though A will never happen, then events with an extremely low probability are as good as impossible. You live your life assuming that the air will not suddenly evacuate the room through the window, leaving you choking on the floor, even though science says that such an event is possible (and even has a well-defined, finite probability!) — SophistiCat

Right, but if we're thinking about the universe at large, then all these low probability events could be happening elsewhere, assuming a large enough universe. There would even be worlds where the low probability events are common, and assuming anything intelligent can manage to survive long enough there, it might come to a different conclusion about how low those probabilities are.

In an infinite universe, aren't we almost surely guaranteed a world where our doppelgangers walk through walls (the molecules align just right) after saying an incantation? Maybe doppleganger Jesus really did take a stroll on the water.

But all that fundamental physics stuff still turns into a mostly classical world at our size.

So I really don't buy this 'deflationary' account of mathematical ability, nor do I think it is something that can be profitably analysed through the lense of evolutionary biology or cultural history. — Wayfarer

I really do wonder about math. Tegmark has said that all physical properties are mathematical. Leaving aside consciousness and how we experience the world, it is a very deep question as to what isn't mathematical about the fundamental stuff that makes up everything else, like electrons and quantum fields. The fact that they exist? That they have spatial & temporal extension of some sort?

The poor whites & blacks have common cause, but they haven't worked together to better themselves because the rich white dudes who started modern racism didn't want to have to pay the poor white folk to work their land. But they convinced the poor whites it was the black man they should be afraid of.

It's not complicated: The United States has a long history of a very conservative politics based on protecting and promoting the prerogatives of private wealth, private enterprise, suppression of social dissent, anti-black, — Bitter Crank

The interesting thing is that black churches in the US tend to hold conservative religious views similar to those of white evangelicals, outside of racial issues.

It seems to me that the evil demon hypothesis or one where reality is just a program running on a computer are metaphysically equivalent to realism as long as we can never step outside the universe/program/demon's imagination to see what is really going on. — T Clark

Since we can't step outside, there's no reason to suppose we're inside a simulation. It's merely a philosophical exercise in what sort of wild scenarios we can imagine which aren't incompatible with our experiences. Brains in vats, evil demons, computer simulations, God's dreaming are flights of fancy. Something being merely possible isn't saying much. Maybe a cosmic unicorn farted and started the Big Bang.

If Morpheus, Neo, and the crew had never escaped the Matrix, could never escape it, what difference would it have made that it existed? — T Clark

You're asking this question by starting out saying the Matrix exists. We're not in a situation were we can do that. We can only imagine the possibility.

But to answer your question, it would matter when the machines decided to shut down the Matrix, or something happened to them such that the power could no longer be maintained, or a meteor struck the heart of Machine Ciy.

Anyway, the point is that realism doesn't require stretching the imagination like that. It can just borrow from science and experience.

Plainly, as you and I have been debating basically the same question for about 6 years. — Wayfarer

Yeah, but you're not nearly as frustrating as Landru, no offense.

Sure, but I consider that a good reason.

My eyes are open at time T1 and I see that a laptop is in state X. I close my eyes and reopen them at T2 and I see that a laptop is in state Y. It is a Realistic bias to interpret this by saying that 'it looks like something happened when I wasn't looking'. Neither what I see at T1, nor what I see at T2, yields this information. So what explains the fact that I see something different each time? It could be that there is no explanation. — PossibleAaran

The problem with this is that we understand computation to be a process. The laptop at T2 can't complete a computation without having undergone the process of computing starting at T1.

You're right that it is an inference, when we bother to philosophize about it, but it's also the common sense view we all have on a daily basis. We don't really think there are different objects every time we close and open our eyes. We just think it's one object that we don't see when our eyes are closed.

But given that we're doing philosophy, a strong reason to trust the realist inference is because when we do watch our laptops, they undergo a process of computation from one state to the next. So we have no reason to think they don't just because we've closed our eyes.

If we adopt that form of skepticism, we might as well say the entire universe and everyone else disappears the moment we shut our eyes. That it only appears things continued on without us when we open our eyes back up.

didn’t all philosophy start off as direct realism? — Wayfarer

I don't know, but it's the default naive view people have. It would seem as if we're looking out at the world through the windows of our eyes. Of course it's not that kind of direct.

But then again, philosophers tend to get rather hung up on vision, which might be a tad misleading. We do have other senses and ways of interacting with the world. Not everything is a visual metaphor.

I don't like the term "naive realism" when applied to philosophical direct realism, because of course philosophers defending direct realism are aware of the criticisms and the biological underpinning for how our senses actually work.

It seems to be, then, that we can't have particles without fields, but that we also can't have fields without particles. To that extent, it wouldn't make sense to say that either is primary. — Blurred

Sure, whatever happens to be the case.

But what makes it more likely? There are many alternative hypotheses which explain the observable data, and I'm sure you are familiar with them. The dream hypothesis. The evil demon hypothesis. Etc. What makes these worse off than Realism? — PossibleAaran

The dream hypothesis fails because dreams are not like waking experience. The evil demon hypothesis has nothing empirical in its favor, unlike laptops and trees and what not. We can't infer an evil demon, a simulation, or being a brain in a vat from what is perceived. But we can infer a physical world. The laptop performs the computation when you close it's eyes because it's still there. Simple as that.

Let's say your laptop is performing some computation that you can't carry out in your mind. You close your eyes and when you open them, the laptop has an answer for you. How did it compute that answer while it no longer existed?

We can make the thought experiment more involved. Let's say your survival depends on the laptop performing some computation. If it fails to when you close your eyes, then a bomb goes off, killing you. You close your eyes. No laptop, no bomb, except for that ticking sound.

That's why idealism is silly. You either end up with an extremely gappy world in between perception where events somehow still appeared to have happened, or you have to invoke something like God to keep the laptop and everything else in existence. We know what Berkeley opted for.

ut now suppose I close my eyes. I am in this room alone at present. Is there still a laptop there even though no one is perceiving it any longer? If I am a Realist, I want to say 'obviously yes', but by what reliable method can I sensibly believe that? — PossibleAaran

When you close your eyes, is the room still there? The floor beneath your feet? The Earth hurtling around the Sun? Radiation from the sun keeping the atmosphere warm? Is anyone or anything there? Or just what you feel or hear or smell when you close your eyes? Does the back of your head even exist when you're not seeing it in a mirror?

Does it all come back just because you opened your eyes? Do things only exist for you as you perceive them? Does the starlight and dinosaur bones and tombstones and picture of your birth only exist when you look at them? Does whatever is causing that smell only exist when you finally see or touch it?

You can adopt that form of skepticism just like you could argue that we can't know everything popped into existence five minutes ago with the appearance of age and memories intact. And to use Russell, you could also say there is a giant orbiting teapot. But what's the point of that sort of skepticism? To demonstrate that you can be a doubting Descartes?

The much more likely answer is that our perceptions are possible because there exists an entire world full of people, objects and events to perceive that persists over time. That world is primary, not our perceptions of it.

According to an early Bertrand Russell, Scepticism arises because of the veil of perception. What we are aware of in sense perception is an image or 'sense datum', which only exists whilst we are aware of it. If this is so, we are never aware of physical objects - since these are supposed to exist independently of us. Since no one has ever seen a physical object before, but only an image of one in the mind, how does anyone know that there is a physical object which is like the image? On the empiricist assumption that our basic reliable belief forming methods are sense perception and inference, if we cannot infer physical objects from sense data, we cannot establish their existence by any reliable means. (Notice that I put this point in terms of reliability and not knowledge. This is to illustrate that you cannot escape the sort of scepticism Russell faced just by defining 'knowledge' as 'reliably produced true belief', as some philosophers have done. — PossibleAaran

Or one could attack the veil of perception and the notion that we perceive sense datum instead of the objects themselves. Direct realism has an easy answer to external world skepticism. It denies the starting point for getting skepticism off the ground. And you don't need idealism as an answer to skepticism if we're already perceiving physical objects, obviously.

The difficulty for direct realism is accounting for various aspects of perception and experience that led to skepticism in the first place. But this effort has continued to the present day. Direct realism is defended by some modern philosophers. It was never actually defeated, just called into serious question.

Do I know what quantum fields mean as a physicist? No. I don't understand the math at all, nor the experiments. Just some of the lay explanations.

But I mean ontologically the way the Greek atomists thought it was atoms and the void.