They were in clear sight and the crew could make out individual details through telescopes. But the indigenes showed no response whatever to the appearance of the ship. — Quixodian

I don't believe that story because even animals can see and respond to things they have never encountered,

The pygmy story is more plausible, but I think that is probably apocryphal too.

But even in that context, our understanding is conditioned by cultural consensus. — Quixodian

Our understanding may be somewhat conditioned by a degree of cultural consensus, but there is much we disagree about, so I doubt there is any overarching cultural consensus about anything.

Since we have already discussed this, I will be brief here: I disagree that we cannot come to know things at all in-themselves. — Bob Ross

Since the very idea of "in itself" denotes that which cannot be known by us, I think what you are saying cannot be substantiated. Intellectual intuition may give us insight into the ultimate nature of things, but we have no way of knowing whether it does or doesn't, so it remains a question of faith. And faith-based beleifs cannot be argued for, because there is no publicly available evidence for them.

I'm not seeing any relevance of your questions to what I've said, so unless you can show me some relevance, I have nothing to say at this point.

'The Many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common' ~ Heraclitus (quoted in John Fowles, The Aristos) — Quixodian

Yeah, I don't agree with that at all; I think all the evidence points to the fact that the only world we share is the publicly accessible empirical world.

Those who have faith in transcendence may have that much in common but comparative religion shows the tremendous differences in interpretation, so it can hardly be called "a world in common".

So, I think that quote is just a nice little bit of fluff that has nothing to do with any justifiable argument for anything.

FWIW, I think Husserl makes a good case that even familiar objects have a kind of transcendent infinity. I can't see this lamp on my desk from every possible angle in every possible lighting and so on. — plaque flag

True, you could not see the lamp from every possible angle and lighting, but you could in principle see it from any possible angle or lighting.

I am familiar with the idea of the phenomenon as appearance or representation (indirect realism) which is given completely and certainly. This is the idea that I can't be wrong about how things seem to me. It's a classic and respectable thesis, though I've pointed out my objections. — plaque flag

Right, but that's not really what I'm saying. I'm not saying that we just see appearances, but that we just see things as they appear, and can appear, to us. I'm not really concerned about whether we can be wrong about how things appear to us, that seems to be a separate, and unrelated, question, but there might be a connection I'm not aware of.

More positively, I think we can put seemings and toothaches with doves and quasars on the same plane of rational discourse. Instead of dualism, we have a radical pluralism, you might say. — plaque flag

This reminds me of Justus Buchler's radically pluralist ontology, although I'm not saying that he would necessarily agree; it's too long since I read him and then only cursorily. I think there are things which are publicly available and things which are not, but I don't think of any of them as unreal or non-existent on account of that difference. For me the difference just consists in the degree of determinability with which we can talk about different things.

For me the point in this context is semantic. I suspect that experience informs what we can mean by words. So I, anyway, don't know what I'm saying if I talk beyond my experience. — plaque flag

I allow for the possibility of intellectual intuition, but I do not hold that anything purportedly issuing from that constitutes any inter-subjectively corroborable evidence for anything. So, as an example the idea of an infinite being could just be the dialectical counterpart of our experience of finite beings, or it could be an intellectual intuition of something transcendent: the problem being that there is no way to tell which is the case.

So, people can be convinced of transcendent things by experiences and intuitions they have had, and we can dismiss those as mere interpretations, or wishful thinking or whatever, but since we have no way of knowing what such people have experienced, we are not really in a position to judge as to the validity of the faith that they might have on account of such experiences.

On the other hand, they have no justification for considering their experiences to be valid evidence of anything for anyone else. We all live with our own private mythologies, and I would not have it any other way.

So the stuff our language intends --- the stuff of experience we can talk about meaningfully, -- ought to be embraced as real rather than as mere appearance. But this does not mean we pretend that we do or can ever know it exhaustively. — plaque flag

I don't intend to imply that appearances are not real. I think they are real on account of real pre-cognitive effects on our senses. In principle we can know exhaustively whatever is accessible to our senses, both what is available naturally and what is available to our senses however augmented technologically. We have no way of knowing what is not, even in principle, accessible to our senses, but I see that as no reason to claim that there is nothing more than what can be known, in principle, via the senses. In other words, I think that from the fact that there can be nothing else knowable to us than what is accessible in fact and in principle to the senses, it does not follow that there can be nothing more tout court, nothing more that exists.

I also want to say that although that position is what seems reasonable to me. I don't think there is any imperative that it must seem reasonable to you, because in matters that cannot be determined either empirically or logically, I think what is acceptable or rejectable comes down to personal assessments of what seems plausible or coherent.

I haven't said or implied that immediate responses cannot be conditioned by reflection or cannot be intentionally trained. It seems to me you are changing the subject.

When we recoil from the fast approach of a flying object, the autonomic system is processing info no less than when we reflect deeply upon, say, a complex moral dilemma. The difference, I believe, consists in the resolution of the cognitive processing per unit of time. Deep reflection is high-res processing whereas instinct is low-res processing. — ucarr

I agree they are both information processing. But the immediate response does not consist in reflection on the information. When there is reflection, the active outcome cannot be predicted with certainty, whereas the immediate response consisting in acquired habit, is much more predictable. For me, that is the salient difference between intentional action and simple internally directed action.

It's important to be honest with others, but this is trickier, for reasons I probably don't need to go into. — plaque flag

It's interesting you say that, and it may be different for different people, but I think it is easier to be honest with others, an honesty of expression which may or may not consist in, go along with, being honest with oneself. In other words, I think it is easier to honestly express the views we are conscious of holding, than it is to determine whether the views we consciously hold are coming from a place of honesty or dishonesty, meaning from a place of impartial rationality as opposed to other motivations.

Determining this comes down to self-examination and the attempt to make conscious what might be unconscious motivations that may be misleading me. That all said, I want to emphasize what I've already acknowledged, and admit that this is only coming from reflection on my own experience, and it may well not be the same for others,

My issue is: why do we insist that the familiar world is appearance behind which lurks some Reality ? As far as I can tell, it's only by taking brains and eyes in the familiar world seriously that we can find indirect realism plausible, but indirect realism says those same brains and eyes are mere appearance.

I sincerely don't think this objection has been addressed sufficiently by indirect realists. — plaque flag

I think the assumption is based on the known fact that we cannot be conscious of the processes of self and world arising. We inhabit our cognitions, and we know they cannot be explained in in terms of themselves: thus, we cannot but assume that something more that we cannot be aware of is going on.

The alternative is phenomenalism, which seems to be incapable of explaining anything.

Is it impossible for a brain to be trained to run two personalities? It'd probably be difficult, but maybe possible, if folks were mean enough to experiment on children that way. Two discursive selves would be held responsible for the coherence of two different sets of beliefs/claims. Maybe there's Weekend Willy and Weekday Walt. — plaque flag

The well-documented cases of multiple personality disorder show that one person may experience being multiple personalities. From the common perspective it is one person, and the multiple personalities are a disordering of what is the 'normal' order.

It seems reasonable to think that animals also have a sense of self, not many senses of many selves, judging by the general predictability of their behaviors.

The resolution to this "hidden dualism" is to recognize that the brain and its functions are also representations and, thusly, the brain-in-itself is not what one ever studies in a lab. E.g., neurons firing is an extrinsic representation (within our perceptions) of whatever the brain-in-itself is doing.

The next step is to realize that the brain-in-itself cannot be quantitative (for quantities never produce qualities and we know directly of qualities as our conscious experience). — Bob Ross

I agree with you that when we study the brain, just as when we study anything else, we are studying the brain as it appears to us. We have no idea what it, or anything else, is in itself apart from how it appears to us.

Quantities and qualities are merely different categories of appearances, we don't know what quantity in itself or quality in itself could be, so again, we cannot come to any warranted conclusions about the in itself.

The in itself is simply the dialectical counterpart of appearance, and that's all we can say. We know that we cannot be conscious of whatever gives rise to the network of interrelated appearances we call the world, but it seems obvious that it cannot give rise to itself, so we cannot but assume that there is something behind the veil.

We can imagine various possibilities, but what we cannot know is whether those possibilities are all merely associations derived from our experiences of the world of appearances or whether there is a kind of intellectual intuition that may allow us to glimpse behind or beyond it.

Whatever we might think about that must remain a matter of faith, we can live our lives believing one thing or another about what is behind the veil, and it is the imaginative diversity that situation and the role of faith affords, that makes the in itself an important, indeed central, part of human life.

The very first thing that any proto-organism has to do is enact the boundary between itself and the environment. — Quixodian

The boundary is not enacted by the proto-organism; it is always already enacted to enable the existence of the organism before it can do any of its own enacting.

Or was it just far more convenient to train a brain to be one person ? — plaque flag

One brain per body, no?

:cool:

The claim I am resiling from is that possibly developments in mathematics were catalyzed by the discovery of fossil fuels. Of course, there was always wood as a fuel, and the discovery of fire was obviously important but happened eons before the advent of science as we understand it. Technology, on the other hand has been progressing from the earliest human times. There was apparently a precursor to the steam engine in the first century AD. I still believe that the development of science would have been much slower without fossil fuels, but of course I wasn't wishing to deny the importance of mathematics and geometry in science.

Yeah I probably had hold of the wrong end of the stick there.

Sounds about right!

I think the scientific revolution was fueled by advances in mathematics. — Fooloso4

Possibly advances in mathematics were catalyzed by the discovery of fossil fuels, but I do agree that mathematics played a part, particularly in physics and chemistry.

Would the scientific revolution, considered as being predominately an industrial and technological revolution, have been possible, or if possible, nearly as rapid, without the discovery of fossil fuels?

We may differ a bit on this issue. To me the in-itself is something like the 'reflection' of a worldless-subject. It's a limiting concept like the worldless subject that, for my money, isn't worth the trouble. — plaque flag

In the sense that we cannot really do anything with the 'in-itself', I agree. I also agree that when we try to imagine the existence of the world prior to humans we project our (necessarily) anthropomorphic cognitions. On other hand I think it is implausible in the extreme to think that the prehuman world did not exist or that its existence was "human-shaped", even though we are unable to think its existence in prehuman terms (obviously).

For me the importance of the in-itself and the noumenal consists in its sustaining the realization that existence is, no matter how familiar it may seem, ultimately ineluctably mysterious. It is this that allows for, as Kant argued, faith, and I also think it allows for all kinds of wonderful metaphysical speculations, which seem to me just fine provided they are not taken too seriously. It seems to me there is also the humour of absurdity in this ineluctable mystery of existence—and to me that is enriching despite, or perhaps better, just because of, its indeterminability.

Do I believe uni-cellulars act intentionally? Yes. I remember high school biology films showing uni-cellulars avoiding a charged probe acting in the role of a cattle prod. — ucarr

I'm thinking of intentionality as planning, as having reasons for action, not simply as response to environments. Thinking and deliberate action: I believe some animals can do it, so it's not only a human thing.

But it does presuppose naturalism, does it not?

I don’t know if it’s humanly possible, as you mentioned. It does seem like the best we have, but even the best makes some very basic assumptions. — Mikie

I see the naturalism of science as being methodologically necessary. I mean it just really cannot take metaphysics into account; it can only work with what can be observed, and the ways, mathematical and logical, we have of reasoning about what is observed as well as our capacity to create imaginative scenarios that can be worked up into testable hypotheses.

As ↪Janus says, philosophy is thinking for oneself, carrying the tacit implication that he’s not being stupid about it. — Mww

I can only aspire not to be stupid about it, and hope that I'm not being (too) stupid about it. :smile:

Right, we don't create the world, we construct it from pre-cognitive influences we cannot become conscious of. So, we are more like demiurges than creator gods, writ small.

I like to think that the transcendent subject is basically just the human species. — plaque flag

I like this idea; I think it's right on the mark. A disembodied transcendental subject cannot evolve or be affected by anything. If we think about the in itself, the "precognitive influences" I mentioned, as utterly changeless, then we have a huge, insurmountable problem' how to understand how a world of unimaginable diversity and constant change could emerge from an utterly amorphous changelessness.
We can't know the in itself, even if only by stipulation, but I believe we can think more or less coherently and plausibly about it.

I don't believe we are disagreeing at all. I also think things are just the way they appear (and can appear, with the augmentations of our senses afforded by equipment like telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopes, colliders and so forth).

Those "things" of the senses are of a collaborative nature; they exist as affects between what appears to us as the body and what appears to us as its environment, replete with other bodies, animate and inanimate, photons and other phenomena.

Thanks for the link; I'll check it out.

My suspicion is that science largely shines (for most) by the reflected light of technology that just works. A crude power-worshipping pragmatism is the working attitude of, well, all of us maybe in our typical sub-scientific mode. I'm not trying to pose as above it. I'm ambivalent. — plaque flag

I agree, our faith in science is based on its technological applications. But then there is a basic observational aspect of science which is just an amplification of our ordinary observations of the world. For example, "It is raining", "water flows downhill" and countless other everyday observations which can be definitively corroborated or falsified.

I'm ambivalent about science too, though, if it morphs into a scientism that claims that everything about animals and humans can be empirically determined. For me it's back to the noumenal, 'the ultimate nature of things cannot be determined"; metaphysics cannot be a science.

Nonetheless I think all these pursuits, science, phenomenology, metaphysics, have things to tell us about ourselves and the world around us.

That's interesting; when I visualize a circle it's just a space enclosed by a line and has no colour.

I guess I reject scientific realism if understood in terms of a truly independent object. I challenge it as semantically troubled. — plaque flag

:up: I agree.

That's an interesting question regarding whether phenomenology should be counted as science. Husserl's 'back to the things' seems to echo the sciences' methodological focus on the things being investigated, while bracketing what might seem imaginatively or intuitively obvious about the natures of things.

I think science deals with things as they appear to us, so we are always there in science, and it cannot tell us about any imagined "absolute" nature of anything. We are obviously capable of thinking that things have absolute existences and natures, completely independent of us, what those existences and natures might be is something completely inaccessible to us. We might even question whether the idea is even coherent.

Phenomenology does not investigate the nature of the things themselves as they appear to us, but rather attempts to investigate the nature of the appearing itself. I think it follows that there cannot be the kind of strict intersubjective corroboration, which is possible in science, but there can be intersubjective assent to, or dissent from, its findings in the form of 'yes, that's how it seems to me" or 'no, that is not how it seems to me'.

Science is naturalistic in that it brackets the question of the supernatural for methodological reasons, and that works...spectacularly well. So, it is not that science has a blind spot regarding the metaphysical or the role of the subject, but that those questions are irrelevant to its most effective methodologies.

I was thinking more along the lines of pre-critical ancient schools of philosophy with their (unquestioned) doctrines and spiritual exercises as described by Pierre Hadot. It would be closer to ethics, to the project of coming to understand how to live well.

I agree that other disciplines will feed into that, including science. It seems, though, that the sciences of, for example, nutrition and exercise have more bearing on the question of how best to live than QM or cosmology.

I have no argument whatsoever with that.

That's true. But is it absurd to go counter-factual and say that a belief would show in action (where thinking counts as an action) if appropriate circumstances arise? Or are you saying that there is no necessary relation between belief and action?

Your examples don't include bedrock beliefs, and I'm inclined to think that my belief that I have a hand or two shows every time I pick something up, so they couldn't occur on this list. Is that right?

The examples on your list all seem to be things that I have learnt or at least thought about, at some point. Would that be a necessary condition? — Ludwig V

I think that certain kinds of beliefs are necessarily associated with action. Beliefs about what we are capable of, about the nature of humans and the animals, plants and soils we deal with.

I'm not sure it makes sense to speak of (some at least) "bedrock beliefs" as beliefs. Regarding the example you gave, I would say we use our hands before we form any explicit beliefs such as "I have two hands", and even then, it seems to be more of an observation or realization than a belief.

The beliefs I highlighted are, as you point out, things we learn or have thought about. In short, I would say that beliefs that have no practical significance to me could be expected to have no effect on my actions. Will that belief, that beliefs that have no practical significance could be expected to have no effect on my cations, itself have an effect on my actions? It has had an effect on what I said, so if you count that as an action, I guess you could say it did.

But I think that is a different definition of action than the one I had in mind.

Certainly there had been scientific and technological advances, but nothing on the scope of the scientific revolution. — Fooloso4

Was that driven more by philosophy or the discovery of fossil fuels?

:up: I think this is a good OP. I'm going out soon, (it's 5PM Saturday evening here and I'm off to a "vinyl revival" two turntable DJ-ed reggae dance party) so no time for further conversation right now. I look forward to seeing some responses from others tomorrow.

Cheers... I agree it is necessarily blurry; and as far as I am aware philosophy of science is yet to establish any perfectly clear and clean boundary between scientific and non-scientific or pseudo-scientific inquiry.

The idea of a disembodied subject seems to derive from a focus on the visual. We also touch and feel, taste, hear and smell things which to varying degrees seem to bespeak embodiment more essentially than seeing does.

It also seems to be seeing that primarily discloses things as indentifiable objects and perhaps this leads dialectically to the notion of disembodied subject, at least until it is realized that we actually need to move around to synthesize the notion of an environment external to the body.

This is very cursory and needs a good deal of fleshing out of course.

Scientific practice ideally consists in unbiased and (as much as is humanly possible) presuppositionless inquiry. The abandonment of belief in what is merely imagined and what seems merely intuitively "right" with no other supporting evidence seems to be the essential element of scientific method, and what distinguishes it from speculative practices that existed prior to the advent of this new kind of scientific practice and which of course still exist today.

I think we can be confident that people believe many things; beliefs which do not make themselves evident in their actions.

For example do not many people believe in evolution, that the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System, that the Earth revolves around it, that the Moon is smaller than the Earth and revolves around it, that there are distant galaxies containing stars and planets, that the Earth is roughly spherical, that there was life on Earth prior to human life...the examples of beliefs which do not show themselves in actions seem to be countless.

Philosophy as poetry or poesis... concept creation and self-making and self-transforming?

Reflecting on my own experience I find I can think in images or I can 'hear' my thoughts as 'spoken' in English. I can only think things which can be visualized in images. I cannot visualize metaphysical speculations or things in themselves or Kant's Categorical Imperative. If I want to think about those kinds of more abstract subjects I need to talk to myself.

Where is the boundary between intentional action and internally directed action?

Single celled organisms demonstrate internally directed action; do you believe such organisms act intentionally?

We can think in images, but that is not abstract thinking. We can imagine generic objects and associate them with particulars with which they share morphological characteristics.

Quite the contrary, I post materials and ideas from many different sources in support of idealist points of view, and for more than ten years, your only response has been to shoot them down. — Quixodian

This is not true at all. What you call "shooting them down" I call "raising legitimate questions about them". From my perspective it seems you very often just stop responding when the questions become too penetrating or difficult to address.

You should know by now that I'm not pushing any particular view but rather raising what I see to be the salient and often difficult question entailed by any view. I give as much critique of naive realism as I do of naive idealism.

My theory is that secular culture works very hard to normalise this attitude, and to discourage anything that calls it into question. And as a staunch defender of secular values and common-sense realism, you feel duty bound to follow suit. Fair comment? — Quixodian

There is no one "secular culture" in philosophy in my view. Or to look at it another way, I think theology is not philosophy, or at least it is only one small area of philosophy. I am not at all a "staunch defender of commonsense realism" and your saying that makes me think that you don't actually pay attention to what I say. I support neither realism nor idealism; I see them as the two main imaginable metaphysical speculations, both of them under-determined by evidence or logic.

I understand that you personally believe in intellectual intuition, which is fair enough, but I think it cannot but be a faith-based view. I'm not saying it's wrong to hold faith-based views, we all do, but I do think it's wrong to assert that such views can be supported by evidence or logic, and it is mainly such attempts that I call out when I see them.