he first two because (unless eternalism is true) past and future things don't exist, and the last because of special relativity (i.e. the light cone). — Michael

They did, or will exist, and GR suggests that they do. Also, the future is conjecture or projection for us, not knowledge. It's past events you're questioning, which can be a femtosecond or 5 light years.

That's the very thing I'm questioning. What kind of connection is there between our brain activity (and our vocalisations and writings) and some other physical thing millions of miles away such that the former is a thought (or a statement) about the latter? It seems to me that if no sensible account of this reference-connection can be made then the very realist claim that we talk and think about things which are ontologically independent of our thoughts and speech is an incoherent one. — Michael

Does it make any difference if it's 5 feet away versus 5 million miles? (I don't recall the sun's distance from Earth). Light takes time to travel regardless. Talking about a tree, a star, tea in China, it all takes time to get to us.


The kind of connection is all the physical events leading up to our knowledge.

And, again, we can (presumably) think about things to which brain activity doesn't have a physical connection, e.g. future, past, and distant events. — Michael

Why isn't there a physical connection to things in time or space? I don't get that at all. The sun isn't inside our brains. It's several million miles away, and 8 minutes old by the time we see it. But we talk about it, study it, predict it, explain it, etc.

But there's a physical connection between our brain activity (which is us thinking about the Sun) and things that aren't the Sun. — Michael

Sure. But those are likely cultural. I can think about a unicorn. I didn't invent the idea of unicorns. It was out there in the cultural landscape. Anyway, cognitive science would have something to say about all this.

Sure there's a connection (according to the realist). — Michael

But not according to anyone else? The sun is just an experience that has nothing to do with our talk of the sun? That sounds rather Landru-like, and it was one of the least convincing things he ever argued for.

The ontological separation of thought and subject does seem problematic, especially if one is a physicalist and reduces thoughts to brain activity. We have this physical thing here which is the Sun and this physical thing here which is brain activity, but what is the relationship between the two such that the latter is a thought about the former? Is there a unique kind of physical connection between the two? — Michael

This is a matter for the sciences to sort out, ultimately, not philosophers. It's a matter of how human beings learn, form concepts about what they learned, and communicate them.

You've already alluded the the physical connection. We're physical beings in a physical world, so of course there is a connection between the sun and our perceiving it, and then talking about it.

If it's all physical interaction, then it's just a matter for science, right?

Working on Meillassoux's argument — Cavacava

I like how Meillassoux used death and finitude to get around correlationism. That's rather creative. Death by various means is problematic for idealism, or at least the subjective kind. If God's keeping tabs on everything, then death can happen just fine. But if nobody is, then people just stop experiencing for no reason sometimes. And then what? Does the idealist have a coherent answer? Is it okay as long as there is some other experiencer around?

What about just "I am suffering, therefore suicide."

Seems perfectly logical. Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck. — dukkha

How much are you suffering? Are you being stretched on the rack? Are you scraping by in the zombie apocalypse? Did someone put you in the dungeon and throw away the key?

Usually people consider suicide when they become seriously depressed, their suffering seems unbearable, or their situation seems hopeless. Often it's a psychological issue or a physiological one. But just every day life doesn't usually make one consider suicide. Continuing to experience the only life you are certain to have seems like a better choice than not experiencing anything.

But if it was truly subjectively indistinguishable, it would just be a choice between continuing to experience the suffering of real life, or for your real life experience to become far more pleasurable. Almost everyone would pick the latter. — dukkha

Not if when choosing they knew it could cause great suffering to other people. You would have to not care about the fate of others. It doesn't matter that you won't care upon entering the machine. What matters is when making the decision.

What matters in making the moral judgment is whether the imaginer can tell the difference, not the imagined. — The Great Whatever

The imaginer can tell the difference when choosing to enter the dream machine. The not being able to tell the difference afterward is just to maximize the experience. What's being lost here is the ethical consideration of entering, not the situation after.

But ultimately they found out no? So that defeats the whole point you're trying to make — Agustino

They did, because the main characters on Star Trek always find a way out of every predicament, but one character, the bad guy of the episode, didn't. He thought he escaped into the wider universe, but they were running him on simulator. Granted, he was a holodeck character who gained sentience, but he knew there was an external world, and was trying to get the crew to find a way for him to be transported to it. So the crew fooled him into thinking he had.

Does this actually make sense though, to defer current pleasure for future ones? — dukkha

Yes, if you don't want to end up homeless and bankrupt. Or not achieve any life goals. If you don't care about those things, then well go for it.

So to hold off on reaching one's goal (intrinsic 'goodness'), so that you can reach the exact same goal 4 days from now is nonsensical. You could have just not waited and reached the very same goal. — dukkha

Delay gratification is usually so you can achieve more pleasure, or whatever it is you value than you can in the moment. Or it's to avoid pain and undesirable ends later on.

Also, you will never actually get to the future anyway as you never leave the present. — dukkha

Well, it's late 2016 and I'm years older than when when as kid I wondered what the future would be like, so I would say you're wrong about that.

The only time you can possibly experience pleasure is right now. — dukkha

How does anyone accomplish any goal that's the slightest bit unpleasurable if now is the only consideration? Imagine you wanted to win a marathon. You know that you need to train for it, and then pace yourself accordingly on that day, and then not give up when you're tired late in the race. You have to push yourself, but in a smart way. You do all that for the anticipated feeling of winning the race, or setting a personal best, or just the fact that you were able to run 26.2 miles.

How do you do that just living in the now? Lots of people do this sort of thing, btw. I would say almost everyone in life delay gratifies at some point to achieve something more desireable, or just to avoid disaster. You can't function beyond that of a spoiled child in this life without doing some delay gratification.

I believe that the experience machine thought experience is subject to a kind of logical fallacy that is common in many thought experiments. The problem is something like this: we want to construct a thought experiment which, by stipulation, involves a situation in which we can't distinguish between two things (being hooked up to a machine and real life). But also by stipulation, the thought experiment itself asks us to distinguish these two things. So it is that the experiment only remains coherent so long as we slide from one to the other in our reasoning. — The Great Whatever

But I can make perfect sense out of an episode of Star Trek where the crew ends up stuck inside a Holodeck program that goes wrong, where the program makes it look they exited the holodeck back to the ship, but are actually still inside the program, since the Holodeck is capable of fully fooling the senses.

I believe this was the plot of at least one episode.

I believe OP is arguing against a subjective idealism where the only minds that exist are human minds (and possibly, some animals). Whereas the drugged water for Berkeley's idealism continues to be 'held' in existence by the mind of god. His whole argument makes no sense if he's arguing against Berkeley. — dukkha

That's correct, which is why I mentioned subjective idealism.

And one other objection concerning long term planning. Plenty of people do engage in long term planning to achieve some goal they highly desire. Professional athletes, musicians, business owners, writers, do this sort of thing. They may put themselves through a great deal of self-discipline and even agony to accomplish their goals. You can't be highly successful in many areas in life without doing so.

But that would be a direct contradiction to what Cyrenaic philosophy proposes. There would be no highly successful people if everyone followed that philosophy. But they don't. Why not? Because I think plenty of people reject hedonism, certainly the "crude" kind of the Cyrenaics. They consider their long-term goal to be more worthy of pursuit than any short term pleasure, even though the future is uncertain for all of us.

Someone in this thread mentioned the pleasure machine, which is a version of the dream machine. In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher chooses to betray the human resistance in order to be put back into the Matrix as someone rich and famous, provided that he not remember anything about his portrayal, or the real world.

Most people find such an act abhorrent, and if I were given the choice of hooking myself up to a dream machine in which I get to live the most pleasurable life possible, but at the cost of horrible suffering for people I know, I would not do it, even if I forgot. It would be wrong, and most people throughout history would agree.

But the Cyrenaic philosophy does not allow for such ethical considerations. It's similar to making a will. Why bother worrying about others after you're gone? You won't get to enjoy it. But we do. If I knew with certainty I would die tonight, I would not maximize my pleasure, rather, I would make some plans for those who know me post-mortem.

From what TGW wrote of the Cyrenaic view of the good, it would seem perfectly consistent for my good to be your bad. If it causes me pleasure to torture you, and all goods are subjective and only definable by each individual, then there is nothing wrong for me to torture you, as far as I'm concerned. I have no ethical reason not to. It gives me pleasure. You will disagree, but so what? There is no objective measure by which you are right and I am wrong. For me, is right to torture you. For you, it's not, but I'm not concerned, and cannot be concerned, with what you consider to be bad.

Secondly, we learn from a very young age that instant gratification in all things tends to lead to very bad results. I could empty my bank account right now, max out my credit cards, and have a rip roaring time today. But I know that I will be regretting and paying for that decision for weeks to come. So I employ some modicum of self-control.

Now I could die tonight, and miss out on one last opportunity for maximum pleasure. But that uncertainty about the future doesn't change my calculation to avoid weeks of regret.

So it would seem that consistent application of Cyrenaic ethics is psychopathic and highly irresponsible, leading to a very self-destructive life. The kind that someone with terrible impulse control and no empathy might want to live.

Now the Cyrenaics may not have lived that way, which tells me they either didn't fully embrace their philosophizing as a way of life, or there's so more nuance there than I'm allowing. I guess the admission that there had to be some planning for even the attainment of temporary pleasure is one such nuance, but there would need to be quite a bit more.

he indexical would refer to Bitter Crank in that case. — Terrapin Station

And what if you were Swamp Bitter Crank?

think this natural assumption comes from the ancient idea that the eyes are the 'windows or doors of the soul' through which the soul 'looks', or 'goes', out into the world and brings back the objects into itself. — John

Also, it just seems that way as a matter of experience. It appears that I am looking out at the tree as I walk by it, not that light from the tree is hitting my retina in 2D, upside down, where my brain has to right it, infer the depth, and put me into a visual space that coincides with my walking motion, what I'm hearing, etc.

For Wittgenstein, to understand the use of a word, in the manner that is relevant to philosophy, it is necessary to understand the role that sentences involving that word play in our lives. His claim in this case is that those sentences which philosophers take to express substantive statements about realism and idealism play no role whatsoever in our lives. The metaphysical sentences have no use, and so there is nothing to be understood—they are strings of words without a meaning. Wittgenstein's hope is that once we see that, in a given metaphysical dispute, both sides are divided by nothing more than their different battle cries, both parties will realize that there is nothing to fight about and so give up fighting. — John

I don't think Wittgenstein was right. First of all, I think ordinary language expresses naive realist views. Secondly, science has an awful lot to say about what goes on when we're not around, including the deep past and far off into space. That seems to be a bit more than just making useful predictions. As if science is an attempt to explain the world, not just provide useful predictions. And thirdly, people with an interest in philosophy, including professional philosophers have continued to have metaphysical debates, even while knowing what Wittgenstein had to say on the matter.

And finally, I believe even Witty himself was not entirely convinced that you could do away with philosophical issues by understanding how language works. That the puzzle of philosophy continued to bother him.

This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

That's very interesting, but I have a hard time reconciling it with ontological considerations. So if I adopt scientific realism, and I'm wondering about the nature of black holes, then is there something about black holes which can't be known? That we can't say at all what black holes are, independent of our astronomical experiences?

Such that advances in theoretical physics about the interior of black holes will only ever be about black holes in relation to how we humans perceive and think about the world? That there is something apart from that which is what black holes are, but can't be understood by us, or even aliens (based on how the perceive and think), or our machine overlords in the future?

Is the nature of black holes inherently unknowable?

I always thought ontology is about what exists, whether that includes minds, material things, forms, etc. And maybe with the qualification of what fundamentally exists, such that the many categories of things can be reduced to the four elements, water, atoms in the void, instantiations of the forms, ideas in the mind, whatever.

So being in an ontological sense, without making any commitments, is just about what fundamentally exists. Are objects like houses part of one's ontology? Not for mereological nihilists. So a building doesn't exist, ontologically speaking, for a mereological nihilist. It has no being. For an idealist, a building exists as a perception. A panpsychist, though, would say that a building is something that has it's own experiences.

But being might differ for existentialists, whose overriding philosophical concern is the nature of human life, and not what a building is.

Who the brain makes us out to be is dependent on the body that we are. — Bitter Crank

Agreed, very good post. Silicon Marchesk will not feel the same fatigue, hunger, thirst, cravings, kinesthesia, etc. Silicon Marchesk probably won't be subjected to the same sort of moods, being devoid of chemical influence. He won't be able to get drunk or high, or have a sugar rush, etc. His body image will quite different hooked up to a robot. Uploaded minds won't be the same without a meat wrapper.

People like Ray Kurzweil are a little too eager to leave the flesh behind. We don't know to what extent an emulated mind is going to deviate from its meat twin. I kind of suspect that an uploaded human mind would end up acting insane. It's interesting, though, how much popular scifi presents scenarios where people switch bodies or get uploaded into a computer, and they still act like their old personalities, as if the body is just a container for the mind, waiting the right tech to make the switch.

I suspect this all goes back to the Greeks, who came up with the idea of an immaterial soul, separate from the body, which influenced Christianity and Western philosophy. Also, the idea that the body is inferior to the mind, something to be abstracted away from to achieve purity of thought.

Are you your body, or are you something apart from your body? — Bitter Crank

I'm my body, and embodied cognition is largely correct, but ...

The cells of a nematode worm have been fully mapped, including its nervous system. That mapping has been emulated in a Lego Mindstorm robot, which is able to move around a room and avoid obstacles, just based on the emulated worm nervous system, with however they did the feedback from the robot sensors.

IOW, the robot wasn't programmed to move about or avoid walls and what not. That's the worm neural connection doing that. The people involved in the project even said they don't understand how the connectome works.

Which raises the question of whether if a few decades from now, when we have enormous computing power available, and if and when the human brain is fully mapped, can we do the same for a person?

What then?

Why are you conflating these things? — StreetlightX

So your point is that ontology is the destination, not the starting point, otherwise you end up with intractable disagreements.

I

What kind of thing is X such that it can even be spoken about in terms of an inside and an outside to begin with, or a beyond or not-beyond at all? — StreetlightX

I take it that on the account of realism, X is whatever makes up the world regardless of whether we know or perceive it. That could be ordinary objects, matter, information, math, some neutral stuff, whatever. But typically, it's the stuff of physics.

For idealism, it is either the various experiences we have (or any mind has), or the fundamental categories of thought for Kantians which structure or experiences, such as space and time.

I understand the fundamental crux of the debate to be whether man, or some kind of mind, is the measure of what exists, or whether what exists has it's own structure independent of what anyone thinks or experiences.

So for a scientific realist, The Big Bang, star formation, evolution, continental drift, etc. happened regardless of what we think about it, and it gave rise to us, incidentally. So our thinking should conform to how things went down, as best it can.

I take the debate as meaningful in the same way Meillassoux does, in that if idealism is the case, then we can't really mean that there were dinosaurs before us leading up to us. Instead we have to mean that it appears to us humans as if there were these creatures walking the world before us, and something, likely a large rock or ball of ice, killed most of them off, allowing for our small, furry ancestors to get on with it, and now we're here.

But it only seems like that to us, because we're correlated to the world or our experiences based on how we think. That sort of thing is worrisome to me. It means our best scientific theories aren't true. They only appear to be, because of whatever epistemic standards we've adopted in the current age, which cold change (see any of the many Landru posts about this in the previous forum).

What i'm saying is that it's a challenge along the lines of illusion or hallucination, because it potentially breaks down the difference between veridical perception and internal experiences. Difference not in veracity, but kind of experience, or where it's taking place, or how it's been generated. Meaning, it's a challenge to account for direct perception.

would have thought the fundamental issue of schizophrenia was the ability to recognise one's thoughts and internal states as being one's own. Hence 'a voice told me to do it'. What appears to be lacking is the integrative facility, i.e. the facility that integrates different thoughts, sensations, perceptions and judgements into a coherent whole; hence the popular (but frowned-upon) expression 'split personality' — Wayfarer

Sure, but the interesting thing is losing the ability to discriminate what's going on in your head from some potential outside source, so that it seems like the TV is putting thoughts into your head, or you're hearing or seeing something out there which other people don't.

It's as if a normal functioning brain needs to discriminate between the source from external and internal, and if it doesn't then your perception of reality breaks down and the two overlap. That sounds like a potential challenge to direct realism.

My dreams, hallucinations etc. are nothing like experiences of real things. — Terrapin Station

I recall reading something interesting about Schizophrenia were schizophrenics lose the ability to tell the difference between what's in their heads, and what they're perceiving. Apparently, the brain flags stuff that's generated internally.

That's highly suggestive, if it's true. I did come across that article in Scientific American or Nature years ago.

Wrong. A realist believes, at minimum, that some real things exist, at least at some times. That doesn't require believing that things continue to exist when no one sees them. — Terrapin Station

You're not a realist if you don't believe that, because otherwise, your position is no different from anti-realism, as I'm sure Michael well tell you, or SEP, if you look. The central point of realism is mind-independence.

That's like saying that some cards are hearts and some clubs, so you need something more to justify that some cards are hearts. — Terrapin Station

No, it's like saying I directly experience hearts, but sometimes dream of, hallucinate, have the illusion of, falsely remember, imagine, clubs.

Platonic number theorists believe that number is real and not material, i.e. a real idea. — Wayfarer

It's a bit confusing, because Platonists are considered realists about math. The anti-realists in the debate would be conceptualists or nominalists, so they would say that numbers and their relations are ideas in the mind, or social constructs, not independent ideas in some Platonic realm.

It's also interesting because many materialists who are also realists are highly suspicious of Platonism. And Platonists may or may not be realists about the physical world. They may even think the material world is actually mathematical. I would guess Plato was realist about matter being something. It was the various particulars, which were imperfect imitations of the forms, right?

And when I leave a room full of people then walk back in a few minutes later, it is as if the conversation went on without me. Weird. — Real Gone Cat

I think that's God's way of trolling us.

n other words, consciousness is like a song on an old cassette tape that stops when you press the STOP button, and starts up again from the exact same point when PLAY is pushed. To the song (i.e., the consciousness) no time has passed at all. — Real Gone Cat

Except that when the song status up again, it appears as if stuff was going on while the song was stopped. The time on the clock, the snow on the ground, the latest news, etc.

So the characteristic view of materialism is that humans, and everything else, are material entities, the consequence of physical laws, their actions transmitted via material mechanisms, and having material consequences. Furthermore, that is a view that many educated people believe in and defend. — Wayfarer

It's consistent with taking science at face values which explains the universe's development from the Big Bang where there were no minds to star formation to Earth to simple life developing until finally we get to a point where you have complex nervous systems similar enough to our own to call it mind.

The one way around all that is to interpret QM so that it is consciousness which collapses the possible universes into one with the history we observe. Humans or before us, animals, or aliens, or whatever mind collapsed it, it was just a giant probability wave, or something like that.

They'd just say that the real things we experience don't continue to exist after the experience ends. — Michael

But what makes a perceived tree more real than a dream tree for the idealist?

'd say for one because we experience real things. — Terrapin Station

We also experience unreal things, so the realist needs something more to justify what's considered real.

One problem with the argument is that dreams are epistemically distinguishable from waking experience, in that they do differ quite a bit from waking experience. It's just that usually our ability to judge is suspended while dreaming, although not always. In lucid dreaming, we do realize we're having a dream, and can take control of it to some extent. It's not like we go to sleep and experience another life just like the one we're having, such that we can't tell which is the real life upon waking. Dreams often don't make sense, they're jumbled up and weird. They don't follow the rules of waking perception.

However, the reality of dreaming does raise the spectre that all experience is going on inside my head. If I can dream of people, trees, colors, sounds, even feels on occasion, then what makes my perceptions fundamentally different? A challenge for direct realism is to account of the fact that sometimes, we do experience an internal world (this also applies to daydreaming).

This, I suppose, is the motivation for some, like Dennett (at least in the past, not sure about now), to deny that we actually dream. Instead we "come to seem to remember" upon wakening. Thus, dream skepticism can be avoided. But I find that entirely unbelievable.

So despite some pretending to be defenders of some long-lost ancient knowledge in the face of the onslaught of the Enlightenment, the concern with anti-realism is exactly co-extensive with it as sheer and utter reaction: it's only with the concern over absolute certainty does mysterianism and anti-realist sentiment gain any traction whatsoever, disfiguring the history of philosophy by transposing it's thoroughly modern concerns onto it and colouring it with a reactionary and regressive nostalgia that wishes for a time that never was. — StreetlightX

Weren't there idealists and skeptics about the external world in ancient Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy?

I don't see how the realist/anti-realist debates, or the problems of perception are new. They're rooted in very old concerns about the nature of the world, how we know about said world, and so forth.

TGW is right, concerns about the external world (or what exists) present a hard problem. One that has challenged minds, both ignorant and well read, since people starting doing philosophy.

What I call an atom is also something observable in experience. — Agustino

Not until electron tunneling microscopes were invented. Atoms were purely theoretical constructs created to explain the various forms matter takes (or to be more accurate, ontological posits), and then later, various experimental results. Now that we have tools to see and manipulate atoms, they're more than just theoretical abstractions. Also, chemistry doesn't work at all without atoms.

All that being said, atoms aren't fundamental, they're made up of subatomic particles and you have all the QM probability wave weirdness going on. Also, the particles themselves are said to be point particles, meaning they have no length or width. But more importantly, atoms, photons, electors, are abstracted away from colors, tastes, etc of everyday objects. What we know of them is physics, which is heavily based on math. Which leads to the possibility that the only real properties are mathematical properties.

Consider the table. It feels solid, looks brown and polished, sounds a certain way when you thump on it. But all of that can be explained in terms of light and sound waves, empty space with tiny atoms bound together by some magnetic force. The table of physics is very different from the table we see or hear or feel.