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...

(I found a long and difficult critique by a writer called R Scott Bakker, a philosopher and science fiction author. The gist of this criticism is that Deacon fails to account for 'observer dependency', which undermines the entire premise of his enterprise. But I'll leave that for others to decide.) — Wayfarer

I'm somewhat familiar with Bakker's 'blind brain theory' and his notion of metacognitive illusions. He is an eliminativist roughly along the lines of Dennett. What do you think the idea of "observer dependency' you have imputed to him consists in and explains or entails?

Yes. Every aspect of the world interacts with every other such that no laws , rules or fixities constrain it. Instead, interactions produce new interactions which produce new interactions. The cosmos is in the business of reinventing its past constantly. The ideality of this continual self-creation does not depend on the mind of a human subject. We are simply a participant in it, but a participant who can rapidly reinvent worlds. The fact that there are no laws constraining future possibilities on the basis of a fixed in place history does not mean change and becoming means chaos and arbitrariness. On the contrary, we live in natural and social circumstances of relative stability and familiarity. One does not need a universe of already fixed properties in order to be able to anticipate new events. — Joshs

If you are denying that we observe countless regularities and invariances in the world then I think you have your eyes firmly shut. If that is not what you are saying, then I have no idea what it is you do want to say.

This is a very common axiomatic claim. — baker

It's not an axiomatic claim but an inference to what seems to me to be the best explanation.

This is indeed a very common belief about how we exist, especially in Western cultures. It's how we are often taught to think of ourselves and to take such thinking for granted. — baker

No, not simply a common belief, but a reflection on how we (or at least I) actually experience things.

As if your're not fixated by this same idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver; it's just that your particular idea of this absolute authority or lawgiver is different than some other people's.
Not having such an idea would probably make one insane. — baker

I'm not fixated on the idea of an absolute authority or lawgiver, I'm simply commenting on what is uncontroversially the case regarding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of absolute authority.

Not having such an idea of absolute authority might make you insane—I can't comment on that except to say you should speak only for yourself or others who have confirmed your bias in reference to themselves.

So this modifies Wayfarer’s idealism somewhat into a play better the ideal and the real in which neither side has priority. — Joshs

This play is undoubtedly characteristic of the ways in which we conceive of human perception, experience and judgement. Do you want to suggest that it has an actuality beyond that?

This was well understood by Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most clear-headed philosopher of the twentieth century. One of my favourite quotes of Wittgenstein's is this one: "[Conscious experience] is not a something, but not a nothing either! (from Philosophical Investigations) — Michel Bitbol

Of course this is true, and also true of digestion, respiration, metabolism, abstraction, conceptualization, visualization and other bodily processes.

While still the human breaths the spectral homunculus looms forever...

Nice! And all these questions and stories come and go round and round...we are Sisyphus...ceaseless seers and doers of poetic philosophy...

So, the "Cave" is a nice allegory. a shadow on its own walls with no absolute meaning.

From a perspective outside both, treating mind as an observed phenomena, which we can't actually do, as we're not outside it. — Wayfarer

To say we are "inside" mind is to beg the question. We don't experience ourselves as being inside a mind, but as being inside a body which is inside the world. We don't experience our minds as being radically free or absolute but as being constrained and contingent upon our bodies, which are themselves dependent on physical resources: air, water, food, and conditions: principally gravity and light.

There are many things we cannot observe, simply because they are not observable phenomena; for example, digestion, respiration, metabolism and the precognitive interactions between body and world.

Nothing other than an expression of your own belief, or non-belief. — Wayfarer

If you look at the general history of human culture it is fairly clear that humanity has been labouring under the "aegis of tutelage", fixated by the idea that there must be some absolute authority or lawgiver. The horrific crimes against humanity which such absolutism has given rise to are hardly questionable. although of course it is possible to bury one's head in the sand in denial.

:up: :strong:

How does mind dependent on mind....not conform to your description of it being 'radically contingent'?

(leaving aside the fact that if everything is contingent, then it is impossible to avoid nihilism.) — Wayfarer

Everything we know points to mind (as an activity) being dependent on non-mind, on material existence/ existents. There are two understandings of nihilism: Nietzsche understood Christianity, and any notion of revelation, of received or imposed meaning, as being nihilistic in the sense that it nihilates the radical human capacity for creating meaning.

On the other hand, nihilism in the positive sense is simply the lack of received/ imposed meaning which grants to humanity a great freedom and creativity, The world itself, even apart from humanity, is replete with local contingent meanings, and there is no evidence for the reality of any global absolute meaning; a fact for which we ought to be most grateful, else we would be nought but slaves.

It is the fact that humanity has been mesmerized by a futile search for absolute meaning that arguably has led to the appalling neglect of this local world we share with all the other beasts and a functional sensible rational understanding of its needs.

I read it as suggesting that reality is exhaustively characterized by manifestations of matter and the absence of matter, eschewing the idea of anything transcendent of matter. Matter is able to manifest its own absence, a material absence that matters. not an unknowable immaterial presence. Makes sense to me.

We observe various activities, properties and relations of entities; so these there are indeed observable differences, and hence distinctions. between these various attributes and the entities who manifest them.

Do you deny that properties and activities can be observed?

What emerges are new compounds with new properties. Think about what happens when you combine sodium and chlorine, or hydrogen and oxygen, or the complex chains of proteins that are involved in the emergence of life. According to our best scientific understandings the phenomena we see in the Universe today are nearly all of them emergent phenomena. It's not just consciousness: consider for example photosynthesis, transpiration, respiration, digestion, metabolism and self-organization. These are not objects, they are properties and/ or activities, just as consciousness is. There are also emergent objects or entities: galaxies, stars, cells, crystals, hurricanes.

"How do you combine a bunch of building blocks and get something completely new that wasn't in the blocks to start with?" Intuitive answer is you simply don't. Same as how you don't get an ought from an is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are countless examples of emergence in nature. Why should we think that particular arrangements and complexities of matter/ energy cannot produce novel qualities? For a start, think about chemistry. How reliable do you believe your intuitions are on this?

The alternative to both is found most explicitly in that grandmother of philosophy, Mary Midgley, but can be seen in other Oxbridge philosophers from the middle of last century. It's simply that we use different types of explanation in different situations, that we need not, indeed ought not, commit to there being a single monolithic explanation of everything. — Banno

:100:

OK. Forget the business about DNA. There are many people in my life who I meet only sporadically. I don't know what happens to them when I'm not there; I may or may not have sporadic second-hand information about what has happened to them. When I meet them, how do I know they are the same person? (You can stipulate, if you like, that I assume that there is, in fact, a continuous causal history covering the time when I was not there. I will stipulate that I don't know what that history is.) — Ludwig V

Do you recognize them as being the same person? You might assume a "causal history", even without (obviously) being able to know the details—but does that matter? Surely if there has been a causal history, then there has been a causal history and that fact is not dependent on your knowing it, knowing its details, or on you assuming it .

Of course, you could be mistaken, there might have been no causal history, but that would mean they are not the person you thought they were, merely someone who resembles them. That would probably be pretty unlikely, though, if they were able to recount details about your shared past that you had good reason to believe only the person you thought they were could know.

The Kuhn-Popper split is one of philosophy rather than science, and the two views definitely cannot be accommodated within each other, any more than postmodernism can be accommodated within realism. They both talk about the allegedly ‘same’ world outside of our schemes, but in terms sharply different from each other. — Joshs

It seems to me that the changing of paradigms could, at least in practice, if not sociological theory, be mapped onto falsification.

You may have a more definite view without being aware of it. That’s why I mentioned the split between Kuhn and Popper on how what’s out there impacts our scientific knowledge. This difference reflects a difference in understanding the nature of reality in itself. I imagine you have a preference between these two philosophies of science. — Joshs

It seems reasonable to think that the world as experienced and understood is an aspect or function of the "in itself' (which of course includes the 'human in itself'). But I think that's as far as we can go, because we have no way of determining just how our experience and understanding relates to the in itself, except to think that it must somehow do so. That's what I mean by eschewing definite views beyond the context of human experience and understanding; it might be plausible to think that the way we experience things is related to the nature of the in itself, but there seems to be no way that we could parse that relation in terms of rational or empirical justification.

So, I don't think science has anything much to say here, as I see all of science as dealing only with things as they appear to us. I don't see the Popper/ Kuhn "split" as a significant polemic; I think the views of each can be accommodated within the views of the other.

I have read some Harmon, Bryant, Brassier and Meillassoux. I think correlationism is apt when considering the world as 'human world'; we do only experience and understand things as they appear to us. On the other hand, we are able to imagine that things have their own independent existences, while (obviously) not being able to know the nature of those independent existences. We can exercise our imaginations on that question without fear of incoherence or performative contradiction, but definite views are out of the question. That's the way I see our situation, for what it's worth.

Direct insight into saṃskara is obtainable through insight meditation (vipasyana) and other meditative disciplines. No brain scanner required! — Wayfarer

So it is believed by some—to others it is but the augmentation of dreaming.

Just to be clear, I agree with you 100%, and Hume obviously had a pragmatic sense about this too. I'm just saying that if you accept his argument about induction being unjustifiable and irrational, it strips away almost everything. You have to focus on if there is a purely deductive argument because induction, all induction, can only be justified by using induction itself. It can't be deductively justified. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree, deduction is not induction and induction cannot be deductively proven. Our faith in induction, we might say, is expectation based on habit, and also on the seemingly total lack of counterexamples. Kant distinguished between pure and practical reason. He believed that we have pure reasons to believe certain things, some of which are not merely analytic. This is controversial today, and I think a radically skeptical argument can be mounted to question our faith in almost anything you can think of.

But it doesn't seem to me to follow that just because anything, or almost anything, can be questioned on the grounds that it cannot be absolutely certain, therefore justification is impossible. I say that because we can have practical or pragmatic reasons, justifications, for holding to certain beliefs.

So, I would say that I don't agree with Russell's idea that

“there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity”

unless we are silly enough to believe that induction should be deduction, or that there are no such things as more or less plausible ideas.

The other point is that actual deductions themselves never deductively prove their own premises, so they can hold no context-free certainty in any case.

Could it be that maths, like space and time are part of our human cognitive apparatus in some way? — Tom Storm

This makes sense to me. Space is extension and extension implies measurability, quantity. Something similar may be said of time. Space and time are also dependent on differentiation, and differentiation entails individuation. Where there is difference and similarity there is also number and category. I think it arguably all comes down to real configurations and patterns that are reflected in our cogntions and recognitions.

What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I haven't claimed there is such an argument, but documentary evidence is all we have to go on when it comes to the past. And as I said if there is cross-referential corroboration across various documents concerning observed events then we have reason to feel more confident in their veracity. And even more so if the observed events recorded are in accordance with what we would expect based on our current understandings and the calculations based on them.

I think these kinds of criticisms are based on the claim that we cannot be absolutely certain, and I think this is a strawman since it is uncontroversial that absolute certainty, if it is possible anywhere, belongs only to rule-based formal systems.

Very good quote. Of course Hume didn't have the opportunity to understand this, but the quote suggests at least intuitive recognition on Hume's part, of how deep learning is manifested in human thinking. — wonderer1

:up: The point about deep learning is well taken; what is often ignored is the fact that the sciences present a whole interrelated network of knowledge and understanding based on observations, hypotheses and experiments which is enormously complex and consistent, and obviously that much more so today than it was in Hume's time.

These words accord very well with my own experience and views, including that I also once rejected physicalism as being beyond credibility, incoherent with human experience and even self-defeating. But I have come to recognize that those criticisms were examples of simplistic thinking, lacking in nuance as well as probably driven by wishfulness.