The single, only thing I have posited I have access to is sense data. Not sense organs. Not external objects. Sense data. That is it. — AmadeusD

What I have been asking is on what basis do you conclude that you have access to sense data? I presume that you, as we all do, experience a world of things, animals, plants and people etc., that are external to our bodies; so, I'm asking how that common experience leads you to conclude that you have access only to sense data and not to the things, animals. plants and people, etc. If you are interested in continuing this conversation, then lay out the reasoning that leads you to your stated conclusion. If you are not interested that's fine, I don't care.

I'm bemused by what I see as your inability to adequately explain and justify your position, or acknowledge your resultant inconsistency and confusion, but I'm happy to leave it there as we seem to be getting nowhere fast.

:up:

I assume the organs of sense are producing the sense data. — AmadeusD

Since your assumption is based on the assumption or inference that you have access to your sense organs, then why would you not infer that you have access to external objects in general? I'm not claiming that you should be certain, I'm merely referring to 'inference to the best explanation'—are you certain that you don't have access to external objects?

I remember seeing an interview with Gore Vidal (who had an extraordinary life), he said that there were plenty of golden moments over his long and successful life (he was round 70 then) but he would never want relive a single one of them. I found this fascinating and immediately understood. — Tom Storm

I would want to relive my best moments, which I have generally enjoyed, just as I want to listen to music or poems, view artworks and sometimes books or movies that I like over and over, I would expect , although the events in the relived life might be the same each time, that my sensual, emotional and intellectual responses would be subtly different, just as I see and feel new things in artworks at each occasion of viewing, reading or hearing.

Even if my life were to be exactly the same on each recurrence, I would still choose it, provided I was unable to remember past iterations.

I think it really is a matter of disposition, and that globally pessimistic and optimistic dispositions may even simply be driven by different brain chemistries. It is common enough for humans to rationalize their own experiences and mind-sets after the fact.

However, I think I'm just biologically disposed to appreciate the long strange trip humanity is on. — wonderer1

:up: I'll second that!

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place
from either the side of the subject or the side of the object… Philosophers tend to talk about the will as if it were the most familiar thing in the world. In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without pluses or minuses. But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice.

:100:

but if I had the choice would I want to do it all again or not be born at all? I suspect I would choose the latter. — Tom Storm

That's interesting...I. on the other hand, would always choose to do it all again. I've had hard times, but my underlying disposition is one of loving being alive.

It seems to me that this difference of disposition speaks to there being no fact of the matter as to whether life is worth living.

I can't understand my experience under other circumstances. — AmadeusD

So, you can't understand your experience unless you assume that you have access to external objects, and yet you deny that you have access to external objects? Seems like a performative contradiction to me.

How do you know we have a brain or any organs of sense if you have no access to an external world?

On what basis do you conclude that we have sense-data?

You misunderstand. I'm not denying that new areas of study can result in profound changes to human life. Many, if not most, of those changes are on account of the supercharging of technological development. The discovery of fossil fuels was arguably a significant driver of that, and the thermodynamics involved in the development of the steam engine and then the ICE have nothing to do with advances in Quantum Mechanics.

That interesting...I enjoy the language in BM. The only other book of his I have read, many years ago now, is The Road. Over the last couple years I have rediscovered a passion for fiction, after many years wasted ( :wink: ) reading philosophy. As the old saw would have it "there is no accounting for taste".

I am motivated to read some more of his work, so I'll put Suttree at the top of the list on account of your recommendation. :smile:

They're both paradigms, as per Kuhn's terminology. Quantum physics represented a significant departure from classical physics, particularly in its rejection of deterministic, Newtonian mechanics and its introduction of probabilistic and wave-particle duality concepts. — Wayfarer

Newtonian mechanics never purported to deal with the microphysical, so they are not really bets understood as different paradigms, but as different areas of investigation.

The so-called Copernican Revolution came about as a result of more accurate observations made possible by the invention of the telescope and advances in telescope technology.

Sure, you can call these different paradigms, but I think the terminology is a bit overblown and potentially misleading.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy — Maw

I picked up a secondhand hardback copy in mint condition at a beachside book shop when travelling a few weeks ago and I've been reading it...a most powerfully evocative work!

The previous one was the shift to the Copernican solar system and the ensuing 'scientific revolution'. — Wayfarer

I see both as being merely openings up of new areas of study due to advances in technology, and of course new areas of study are going to involve new ways of understanding.

I wasn't asking you to "go over it again" but to provide an actual argument. If you don't want to do that, that's fine... I don't care.

Sense data. — AmadeusD

To posit sense data you are relying on the idea that our senses give reliable access to the organs of sense, so it seems to me that your position entails a performative contradiction.

That, to me, does not constitute access to them - but, it sounds like we agree, just not on terminology. — AmadeusD

If it doesn't constitute access to external objects, however limited, then what do you think it does gain access to?

In a sense, yes. Though I'm not sure that "arbitrary" is the right world. I have an impression that the experiences seem to fit in to whatever religious/metaphysical framework the experiencer already has. Which is not to say that they may not change how the ideas are expressed and the aspects that are emphasized. — Ludwig V

I used the term 'arbitrary' to indicate that I think mystical and psychedelic experiences can be rationalized in terms of any religious/ metaphysical framework.

That's certainly true. Though aren't some experiences - "bad trips" - paranoid fantasies, which may be life-changing, but not in a good way. That's why I say they have to be assessed, in the end, by their results in the ordinary world. — Ludwig V

My experience is that bad trips may either be indicative of underlying psychoses or be just due to existential anxieties. So, I have known many people who have taken many trips, but no one whose subsequent ongoing psychosis or extreme neurosis could be definitively attributed to the use of psychedelics. That said, I don't doubt that the use of psychedelics can in rare cases trigger incipient psychoses.

It seems to me that there is awfully good evidence from entheogens that some capacity for 'spiritual experience' tends to be a physical characteristic of human brains. — wonderer1

Yes. I agree, having experimented extensively with entheogens myself, and I think the 'spiritual' aspect is a 'feeling' phenomenon which does not support any claim about the metaphysical nature of reality. Religious and metaphysical conclusions are arbitrary, culturally driven, after the fact add-ons.

This is something which I think is so obvious, but those who wish to believe in something transcendent can never seem to, in the face of all the compelling evidence, bring themselves to accept it. Wishful thinking and confirmation bias and the scotomas that go with them rule among the spiritually and religiously minded.

But the fact that some people have such experiences seems undeniable. Dismissing them all as frauds or unbalanced is as implausible as claiming that all such experiences are genuine. In the end, it will come back to common sense and everyday life to sort the sheep from the goats - and the criterion is not truth/falsity. — Ludwig V

Mystics undoubtedly experience something they attempt to evoke in their writings. It is the postulated ontological or metaphysical implications of what is experienced that are questionable and that have nothing at all to do with philosophy, due to their vacuity.

This is not to say that the experience itself is not rich and cannot be inspiring, even life-changing; it is necessarily vacuous only in the propositional. not the poetical. sense.

Ethics do not depend upon a transcendent lawgiver but are based on the pragmatic need to live harmoniously with others.

On the other hand, you may live your live differently if you believe in an afterlife; indeed, you may accord it more importance than this life, and even devalue this life.

:100:

(i.e. ideality is merely abstracted from materiality) — 180 Proof

:up: Yep.

You presume or stipulate that our experience is in our minds rather than of our bodies. Even if I accept your stipulation that experience is "in our minds" it certainly doesn't follow that what gives rise to that experience is in our minds; in fact, it seems we are consciously blind to what gives rise to our experience.

:up: I'll repeat what I have already said: physicalism is true if there are mind-independent existents, in other words if there is no mind at large, no mind that has not emerged in complex life-forms. We don't know for certain if there are mind-independent existents, but all the evidence, all our experience, seems to point to it being the case.

So, there is no category of apriori facts? — Wayfarer

"A priori facts" as far as I can tell are generalizations derived from experience. They cannot be discovered in the first place without concrete experience.

Deductive truths are inferred from rational principles. That It is true of any triangle doesn’t need to validated by observing every particular . — Wayfarer

This is hand-waving. I asked how it was discovered and confirmed that the sum of the squares on the two sides of a right-angle triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Once discovered, that it applies to all triangles is no different, in principle, than that 2+2=4.

Your comment is of little use if you don't say why you don't agree.

Is a fair, if rough-and-ready, way to say that I can't really disagree, but i see the degree of mediation(provided by the senses) as enough to say we don't have access to the External Objects. — AmadeusD

If you are saying we don't have access to external objects except insofar as we can sense them, then I would agree.

Kant's is still an idealism. — Wayfarer

Kant's is an epistemological, not an ontological, idealism.

Because we can assume we wouldn't get any cognition of objects without their being 'actual' objects, given how we understand our sense organs to work. We can't get cognitions out of nowhere.. so we infer (and, rightly, imo) that there simply must be something 'out there' bumping against our sense organs to produce the data which is interpreted to give us our cognitions. — AmadeusD

I won't reply to the other passages in your post, because I think this is the nub of the issue. Our understanding of the way our sense organs work (as with all objective sciences) is based on the assumption, not the certainty, that we have reliable access to and understanding of external objects.

In other words, we know how they appear to work. We cannot assess this knowledge in terms of accuracy other than to gauge the overall coherency and consistency and predictive success of our scientific accounts because we have nothing other than what appears to us to compare it with.

I think the plausible account is that we have access to external objects insofar as they can appear to us via our senses, but no access to understanding their natures beyond that.

An atheist says there is no rational or empirical reason to believe in the existence of God, whereas an agnostic says there is no rational or empirical reason to believe that God either exists or does not exist.

in other words, the difference from the agnostic in what the atheist says is that there is every reason not to believe in the existence of God, and further, following from that, every reason to believe in the non-existence of God.

The next question I would ask, in what sense do such principles exist? Is the Pythagorean Theorem 'out there somewhere' - a popular expression for whatever is thought to be real. To which I'd respond in the negative - such principles are not situated in space and time, neither are arithmetical primitives or the other fundamental constituents of rational thought. But due to the influence of empiricism on philosophy, the nature of such principles must be relegated to the subjective or attributed to what you describe as 'brain phenomena'. — Wayfarer

How do you think the Pythagorean Theorem was discovered/ confirmed if not by observation and measurement?

I don't think 'precognitively' is accurate. We aren't affected by anything but sensation. The sensation is not the things in the external world. — AmadeusD

We infer that there are physical processes which give rise to cognitions, perceptions. We cannot be conscious of those processes in vivo, but we can observe and analyze and theorize about how it all works; that's what science does.

In cognition or perception, we encounter things which appear to be external to our bodies. For examples, we see animals, trees, mountains, clouds we don;t see sensations. We infer that these things are presented to us via sensations, but we are conscious only of the things, not of the sensations that we infer preoduced our awareness of the things,

Presented to the mind. But only sensuous data is presented - not objects. (having come back to add this, I think we're probably agreeing there?) — AmadeusD

Again, my view is that we are presented with objects, not with "sensuous data", the latter idea is an after the fact interpretation, so I don't think we are agreeing.

Is this to say that there is, in fact, a direct link between our impressions and whatsoever caused them? I think that can be inferred, because otherwise we couldn't have cognition on this account. But, that isn't to say there's anything superficially the same about htem. I think that's the issue i'm trying to zoom in on. The 'external' object never appears to us, in any way. — AmadeusD

I think all our experience makes plausible the idea that our perceptions are caused by the actions of things and environmental conditions on our senses. The actions themselves never appear to us in vivo but only the external objects do; so our views seem to be diametrically ooposed on this.

Oh. I'm really sorry if it's come across that I'm denying an external world/external objects. It just requires that we have zero access to them and cannot gain access to them. My account requires them to exist, though. I think that covers the remainder of your post lol. — AmadeusD

No need to apologize, we are both just presenting ideas. The question I have regarding what you say here is as to how it is we could have an idea of an external world/ external objects if we had "zero access to them"?

It doesn't appear to us. It appears to our sense organs. Our sense organs then present something which is not the external world to our mind. We don't know the external world. — AmadeusD

Your idea that something is presented "within the mind" is based on an interpretation of the objective sciences of perception and neuroscience. I agree that the evidence seems to indicate that we are precognitively affected by the external world, by things that exist beyond the boundaries of our skins, and that we cannot be conscious of that affection. But it is tendentious to think of our perceptions and judgements as being somehow separated from those precognitive processes, which, as far as we can tell, are both within and without us. In this sense the external/ internal divide would seem to be an artefact of human binary thinking; a metacognitive illusion.

we cannot know the nature of what might exist beyond our capacity to sense as appearance.
— Janus

Exactly why the above is true. I'm not seeing an objection other than the issue of my, probably, illegitimately using 'internal' there. — AmadeusD

It does not follow from the fact that we can consciously know only that which appears to us, that it is illegitimate to say that there is a world of existents external to our bodies. Prior to the science of perception people probably just assumed that things are, as they appear to be, external to our bodies. The notion that things are all in our minds trades on the assumption that the science of perception is not all in our minds, but rather shows us an objective picture of how our senses are affected by the things in the world, so there is a performative contradiction involved in that interpretation.

Rather, the point is that such statements have no sense or intelligibility once you remove the life world. In that case, the statements suffer from a kind of presupposition failure, and they have no significance. They're neither true nor false. They don't refer at all. — Evan Thompson

This seems either nonsensical or trivially obvious. Of course the (human) lifeworld cannot be "removed" as long as human claims are made, because claims ensue from experience and judgement and that just is what constitutes the human lifeworld as it is conceived.

If I make a claim that there can be existence without any lifeworld, that does not constitute "removing the lifeworld", but rather it is a claim from within the human lifeworld about what may be thought to be logically possible without it. The claim that something exists beyond the human lifeworld is either true or false even though we cannot be absolutely certain about which it is.

There is obviously an internal world, and it seem empirically true that our internal world (sense) can't access the external. Are you able to pinpoint what about that you're rejecting? — AmadeusD

How could there be an internal world if there were no external world? It seems obvious that our imaginations are constrained in their ability to imagine by the sensory effects upon our bodies of what lies beyond them. We can only imagine what we have seen heard, smelled, tasted and so on. We live in and are familiar with, a shared external world, the notion 'external world' has no meaning beyond that.

We know the external world as it appears to us. Our binary, dialectical reasoning enables us to posit an existence which is independent of that appearance, and of course it is true that we cannot know the nature of what might exist beyond our capacity to sense as appearance.

Somewhat anthropocentrically you have omitted to mention the vast numbers of animals killed by automobiles—estimated to be 350.000.000 per year in the United States alone.

I think I'll steer clear of him, I don't like the vibe. — Wayfarer

:lol: Fair enough...