It is more or less common knowledge that the conception of what a particleis today is different than it was in Democritus' time, but the point is that we are still thinking in terms of particles.

particles are 'excitations of fields — Wayfarer

In fact, the model of the atom is now a 'particle zoo' — Wayfarer

Is matter 'really' a wave, or is is 'really' a particle? — Wayfarer

And what of the famous wave-particle duality? Is matter 'really' a wave, or is is 'really' a particle? Neils Bohrs answer was, basically, 'it depends on what experiment you perform'. In some contexts it manifests as a wave, in others as a particle, but what 'it' is, remains unknown (and futile to speculate about). — Wayfarer

Sure looks like we're still thinking in terms of particles or quanta, even if not unequivocally so.

I am referring to intelligent design by humans which is intelligent design. — Andrew4Handel

We know human technological artifacts are designed for specific purposes; they are utilities, tools, machines. Although natural systems. including animals and plants, behave in more or less invariant ways, we cannot say they are designed for any specific purpose; they are not utilities, tools, machines.

The same goes for the Universe as a whole. If something within a system is a tool or machine, then it has a purpose for something else within the system. In the case of the Universe as a whole this is impossible, since there is nothing outside the system that it could be the tool or machine for.

He's lacking conclusive justification, that's true. But I'm not sure that justification must be conclusive. If that is the case, the J clause and the T clause will have exactly the same content and it's clearly a presupposition of the JTB account that they will be different.

I'm still puzzled about this. — Ludwig V

What then could be the general criteria to justify thinking there is or could be justification for belief in any particular case?

Right, it seems that only those who are discomfited by uncertainty are troubled by perceived failures to commit. Avoidance of views seems to be the most realistic philosophical approach.

We can take skepticism as far as we like. Excluding extreme skeptical possibilities is ultimately arbitrary, but useful enough.

If the chances of being wrong are extremely remote then it seems reasonable enough to speak in terms of knowing, but the threshold remains arbitrary.

For me if there is no certainty then there is no knowing and I'm happy to speak in terms of having varying degrees of reason to believe or doubt, rather than in terms of knowing or certainty.

If the house is not there then he does not live in a non-existent house — Fooloso4

"Where do you live" means 'where have you been living most recently' not 'where will you live'. The very question presumes that circumstances have not changed.

He knows where he lives, but doesn't know whether his house is still there, even though he has very little reason to doubt that it is.

If the glimpses are very closely timed then he knows where his car is in between glimpses.

Of course we can question whether he can be absolutely certain it is his car even when he stares at it. There could be an elaborate plan to fool him. But such a thing would seem to be vanishingly unlikely. Or he could be hallucinating, but then we would be in Cartesian territory where skepticism knows almost no limits.

I prefer to accept less stringent criteria for certainty and I equate certainty with knowledge and uncertainty with varying degrees of doubt and belief.

If someone asks Al where his car is and Al says that he does, is he mistaken? — Fooloso4

Yes, unless he is looking at it.

:up:

I find Sellar's idea of discursive categories useful: "the space or reasons" and "the space of causes".

The first is also the domain of qualities and 'why' questions while the second is the domain of quantities and 'how' questions. Conflating the two seems to be a perennial human stumbling block.

The inability of science to deal with the qualitative character of human experience is a feature not a bug.

Space/time/causality is the necessary conditions for Will’s playground which is not prior but one and the same as Will. They are never disentangled. The Will is “dreaming itself” (maya) immediately.

Schopenhauer did not deny that goals could be met. It was just the never ending nature of the goals, and the fact that one never truly got satisfaction from obtaining the goals so I don’t think that interpretation is quite accurate in terms of completion. — schopenhauer1

The most primal experience, I would say, is of embodiment. Body as experienced is primordially spatio-temporal and causal (in the sense that we find we can act in and on the world). Before all else we are a dynamic and vulnerable body-mind in a dynamic and dangerous world.

We do satisfy our desires (sometimes). but of course satisfaction is temporary, everything in a temporal world is temporary because everything is changing constantly. The desire for permanent satisfaction is thus absurd. If we give up that desire we may become, ironically, satisfied in the moment which never ends.

1. Someone (call him Al) has parked his car on Avenue A (out of sight now) half an hour ago. Everything is normal, the car is still there, Al has a good memory. Does he know where his car is?

2. Every day, a certain percentage of cars gets stolen. Does Al know, right now, that his car has not been stolen and driven away since he parked it?

3. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe with a similar crime rate, Betty has parked her car on Avenue B half an hour ago. Betty is cognitively very similar to Al (just as good a memory, just as much confidence about the location of her car). Her car, unfortunately, was stolen and driven away. Does Betty, who believes that her car is on Avenue B where she parked it, know that her car is on Avenue B?

4. Having answered all three questions, would you like to revise your answer to any of them?

5. Why? — Ludwig V

Al knows where he parked his car. That's it. You might say he knows there is a better chance that it is still there than not, given the statistical likelihood of having your car stolen (I have never had a car stolen in over 50 years of driving). I think this points to the inadequacy of JTB, because, according to ordinary criteria of belief justification, it seems that Al is justified in believing his car is where he parked, and if the car is there then on that basis we would say that he knows that it is there. But if it is not there then he would not be said to know it was there. This seems too arbitrary to justify switching from saying there is knowledge to saying there is not knowledge.

I would not revise my answer because the way I see it we only know that which we can be certain of (not feel certain of, mind, which is not the same). I only know my car is there when I see it there. The old chestnut, "seeing is believing" should be "seeing is knowing".

And the distinction between "knowing" and the feeling of knowing. When I follow the proof of a theorem I know the theorem is true according to the rules of the game, and I have a feeling of knowing. But when I park my car out of sight I only feel that I know where it is. So it is conditional knowledge. Most of life is lived in a complex of probabilities.

But then I have the feeling of knowing what I have written is of no consequence in this forum — jgill

For me what you said does have consequence. You are equating knowledge with certainty, and drawing a distinction between being certain and merely feeling certain, and that is exactly the point I have made. But I know what you mean: it won't be of any consequence to the JTB dogmatists. :wink:

ARE the forms and the phenomenal representation of them mediated from the PSR "primary" along with the WILL? He did say, the World as Will AND Representation, afterall. If it is primary with the Will, how could the Will be "objectified"? It was then ALWAYS objectififed. — schopenhauer1

As I understand it Schopenhauer, like Kant, posits that it is via the primal understanding that every event is caused (PSR) that we (and animals in simpler and non-self-reflective ways) are able to make any sense of experience.

Imagine if everything was completely arbitrary and disconnected, just a succession of images and impressions without any connection or continuity between them; it would be James' "buzzing, blooming confusion".

Buddhists have a much broader definition of what constitutes 'experience', based on the experience arising from the jhanas. Even though Buddhists themselves wouldn't describe those states in terms of 'the supernatural', the Buddha himself is described as 'lokuttara' translated as 'world-transcending'. And the jhanas clearly exceed the boundaries of what would pass for 'empirical experience' in the modern sense. — Wayfarer

Would the jhanas not be states of mind or concentration, rather than experience or perception of any particular thing? Empirical experience or perception is characterized by being of publicly available objects. Dreaming is a state of mind that one might call "world-transcending', but it is a temporary state. If samadhi states are sustainable, or even may become permanent, then this would count as world-transcending in the sense that worldly experience is dualistic, or at least understood dualistically. I think our ordinary experience is non-dual and that it is the experience of duality which is a kind of illusion: "samsara is nirvana".

What you behold is a comprehensive display of the things before you, and this display is given to you as a single, undivided experience.

Everything is not seen at once; the eye flits around in ordinary waking consciousness, noticing this, then noticing that, so I'm not sure what is meant here by "single, undivided experience". There may be "gaps" where nothing is noticed in between noticing particular things, but there seems to be no breaks in the sense of being totally unconscious conscious ( except in deep sleep states or anaesthesia), no moments where there is absolutely no awareness of anything at all, whether external phenomena or bodily sensation or emotional response, so perhaps that is what is meant.

Yet you can say that it is within this domain of the subjective unity of experience, that we 'make sense' of experience. Isn't this where the observation of cause and effect actually takes place? Isn't this the domain in which order is sought and connections are made? And where is that domain? Is it 'out there', in the world, or 'in here' in the observing mind? Or both? Or neither? Not claiming to have an answer, but I think it's an interesting question. — Wayfarer

So, I can't think what "the subjective unity of experience" could mean other than that we have a sense of continuity of awareness, and in relation both to the world of objects and bodily sensations, there is a general sense that everything "fits" into an overall conceptual web of relation between the self and other things and processes, both external and internal, due to an experienced impression of familiarity. Psychedelics can break down that ordinary sense of familiarity, a sense which after all is a kind of culturally acquired illusion.

To me the "in here" and 'out there" dichotomy stems from the ordinary understanding of being a sensate body in a world of sensed objects. The "internal sensations belong to the body, and what are perceived as objects in the environment are perceived as external to the body, since the body is experienced as being in a world or environment, and we can feel our bodies "from the inside" so to speak, but we cannot ordinarily feel objects from the inside..

Much more beyond this basic understanding could be said about this difficult topic, and this is precisely the domain of phenomenology as I understand it. On the other hand all phenomenological analysis can give us are different perspectives from different starting points or assumptions, and all such perspectives are going to be dualistic in character and will have their own aporias. I think this is because all discursive dualistic understandings of what is intrinsically non-dual must be, in the final analysis, aporetic. It's like trying to chase or even eat your own tail; and a fitting symbol of this is the Oroubouros.

It was basically introspection writ large. — schopenhauer1

Probably true, but is there any warrant for postulating that what we think we find introspectively is universal?

It's something, sure. Schopenhauer conceived of Will as this something. — schopenhauer1

To my way of thinking Schopenhauer was "off" for positing that this "something" we cannot help imagining without being able to have any definitive idea of what it is, is something definite, i.e. Will. It is an anthropomorphic or biomorphic projection of the idea of human unconscious or animal instinct on his part, and as far as I can tell he has no grounds for such a projection whatsoever. I would change my mind if someone could demonstrate convincingly that he did have justifiable grounds, but I am yet to encounter such a demonstrative argument, or even the whiff of one.

Spinoza had essentially the same idea with his "conatus", and I don't think his position on that fares any better; in fact I consider it the weakest aspect of his philosophy.

That is why I say that it is 'the idea of the non-existence of the world' that gives rise to the perceived necessity of there being a 'mind-at-large' which is thought to sustain it. It is thought that in the absence of this global mind, the world would not exist if not being perceived. But, says the Buddha, that is to fall into the 'polarity' of supposing that the world either 'truly exists' or 'doesn't exist'. 'When one sees the arising of the world' means, I think, attaining insight into the unconscious process of 'world-making' which the mind is continually engaging in. It is seeing through that process which is the aim of Buddhist philosophy.

(I expect you might find some discussion of this in the book you mentioned on non-dualism by David Loy — Wayfarer

Yes, existence and non-existence is just another dichotomy of dualistic thought. I'm not sure how well it maps against the idealism/ materialism polemic though, since in my understanding, , the world exists in either case, as ideas in the mind of God or actual consciousness for different forms of idealism, pace Berkeley and hegel respectively, or as an ever-changing configuration of matter/ energy in the case of materialism. Materialism takes different from too, from naive realism to ontic structural realism and others.

If we want to have a metaphysics these seem to be the only two possibilities to choose from. In Loy's book Nonduality, he points out that Nagarjuna's philosophy, the Madhyamika dialectic, abjures all and any metaphysical views on the grounds that any view, being dualistic in character, simply fails to capture the non-dual reality. Gautama is also renowned for discouraging metaphysical views of any kind.

The interesting corollary seems to be that dualistic views have only an empirical provenance, and any claim that any such view could have significance beyond the empirical context is nonsensical. Surprisingly this seems to be consonant with some aspects of logical positivism, although of course the positivist idea that empirical hypotheses and theories, which go beyond merely observational claims, can be verified, is itself nonsensical.

I find this idea of the nonsensicality of dualistic views projected into the metaphysical context most compelling, as I think you already know, since I have been flogging it for quite a while now. Of course the wrinkle in the fabric is that duality/ nonduality is also a dualistic dichotomy, so it seems that all metaphysical roads lead to aporia. This is probably why the Buddha discouraged any concern with philosophy and advocated practice designed to quieten the dualistic tendencies of the mind in order to enter nondual consciousness and see things afresh from there.

But saying it's a matter of taste is again tantamount to making it a matter of opinion, which it isn't. — Wayfarer

I agree that the ultimate truth, if there is one, cannot be a matter of taste or opinion, but what humans think is the ultimate truth is inevitably so, it seems to me. Thanks for the book recommendation: I think I may have already downloaded that book, but in any case I'll take a look when time permits.

Some varieties of meaning making (ontology) seeming to be more aesthetically pleasing than others. — Tom Storm

Exactly, and as the old adage tells us: "There's no accounting for taste".

I don't disagree with your point that all knowledge is in a form conditioned by the nature of human perception, intelligence and judgement: I think that is indisputably obvious.

But this: "What we need to grasp is that all we know of existence — whether of the rock, or the pen, or the Universe at large — is a function of our world-making intelligence, the activity of the powerful hominid forebrain which sets us apart from other species"

I think goes too far. All our knowledge is in a form conditioned by our world-making intelligence, but the content is a function of something beyond that intelligence.

And this:" So, asking of the Universe ‘How does it exist outside our observation or experience of it?’ is an unanswerable question.

So there is no need to posit a ‘supermind’ to account for it, because there’s nothing to account for."

is just another dualistic position, the converse of which would be that it could be, for all we know, an answerable question. And we do come up with different mutually exclusive answers, but we cannot ascertain which answer is the more correct or even if the notion of any answer couched in dualistic terms (as all our answers inevitably are) could have any bearing at all on a non-dual reality.

The element of truth in the idea that there is nothing to account for because the question is unanswerable is contextual and a matter of interpretation. like the element of truth in its negation. All discursive truths are dualistic, and thus inadequate to a non-dual reality, but then dualistic truths are all we have that can be stated.

This is Hegel's perspective, as I understand it, and the reason he rejects Kant's noumena. If the noumenal cannot be anything more than literally nothing for us then it cannot be part of the discursive conversation. It cannot be the basis for any conclusions about the nature of reality.

You seem to want to have your cake and eat it: that is you say there is nothing to account for, that it is an unanswerable question, and yet you want to draw firm discursive conclusions from that idea. From our necessarily dualistic intelligence we want to account for the fact that humans (and animals) share a common world and the only two possibilities we can think of are a mind-independent actuality or an actuality produced by a collective or universal mind.

We know there can be no way of definitively choosing between those two possibilities, but one or the other might seem more plausible. What seems more plausible to individuals comes down to what their grounding assumptions are, that is it is a matter of taste; and there is no way to show that it could be anything more than a matter of taste.

It still remains that if whatever it is that appears as the world and its objects is not a collective mind then, since it is independent of individual minds, it follows that it is mind-independent,

As you should know, I think the world and its objects are a collective, that is an inter-subjective, representation, so of course I am going to agree that the empirical world is in that sense mind dependent. But whatever it is that appears as the empirical world cannot be said to be mind-dependent unless God or some universal or collective mind is posited.

And further "whatever it is" cannot be anything for us other than the empirical world, which means we cannot rightly say it is mind-dependent or material.

Individual minds, that all operate under the same conditions and parse experience in the same way. Mind is ‘collective’ in the sense that we’re all members of the same language group, culture, and so on. Hegel made a lot out of that, didn’t he? — Wayfarer

So,are those "conditions" mind independent? We know they are independent of any individual mind, and if there is no collective mind, then how would they not be mind-independent?

if individual minds "parse experience in the same way" that explains how we experience things in similar ways generally, but it cannot explain how we all see the same things at each corner of the table. Nor does it explain how my dog sees the ball landing where I see it, since the dog is not a member "of the same language group, culture, and so on".

But then, I'm also sceptical of what Kastrup and his followers call the 'mind-at-large', which plays a role suspiciously like that of God in Berkeley's philosophy. — Wayfarer

Without the idea of a collective mind, how to explain the easily deduced fact that we all see the same things in their respective locations? For example, if I place an apple on one corner of a table, a cup on another, a flower on another and a dog turd on the last; assemble fifty people and ask them what they see on each corner, they will all agree. Collective mind explains this, as does realism; so it seems it must be one or the other.

Even my dog obviously sees the ball I've thrown in the same place I do, which is evidenced by the fact that he runs to where I see it land.

I pretty much agree with everything you say there, but I do think the Universe is a special case. We can draw, photograph whole objects of the senses from different perspectives, including galaxies (at least in principle) and we can make actual or virtual computer 3D models of objects of the senses, including galaxies, but this is not the case with the Universe. It is a counterintuitive "object"; it either has no boundary (is infinite) at all or it is bounded in a way we cannot visualize.

We don't/can't perceive whole objects. — Bylaw

In one sense this is true and in another not. Most familiar objects we can move around to see the object from all sides. From any perspective view we can see the edges of objects; where they visually begin and end, so to speak.

Of course unless we dissect something we see only the surface. We don't see the microphysical constitution of objects, but we can tell what material they are made of by sight and by feel and sometimes by sound, smell or taste.

So much changing of the subject and so much confusion on your part it's too much trouble to address, so I'll let it go. Good luck finding any clarity on your unnecessarily tortuous path.

Perhaps the bigger puzzle is how do we decide whether a puzzle, such as the puzzle of consciousness, is an impossible puzzle or not. — RussellA

Again I see this as coming down to definition, If you define consciousness as something like the felt sense of being or existence, something experienced subjectively, then a third person understanding of it would be impossible in principle.

How could you establish a causal relation between the physical body, understood causally, mechanically and the elusive, impossible to pin down nature of the experience of being conscious?

It would seem the best that could be hoped for would be determining the neural correlates of various states of consciousness as reported by subjects , but that doesn't answer the so-called hard problem.

That's the detective in me speaking. — Agent Smith

You didn't mean 'defective'?

As I explained, those are not true boundaries, they are just what appears to be a boundary through that particular sense. And, since sounds and smells are sensed, but you say they are not objects, your whole general category, "objects of the senses"' breaks down. What is sensed is stimuli, as you now admit, not objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

What is a "true boundary"? Just as there are no perfect circles. rectangles, triangles or perfectly straight lines in nature, there are no perfect boundaries. However that doesn't matter. because we perceive edges and surfaces, and our notion of a boundary is based on those perceptions. The notion of a perfect boundary is abstracted from those perceptions, just as the notions of perfect geometrical shapes are abstracted from perceptions of allotments, paths, buildings and wheels and so on.

Sounds and smells. like the visual images and tactile sensations of objects are stimuli. but the former are conceived, and hence perceived, as being effects of the actions or processes associated with the objects we can feel and see. The idea of objects of the senses does not require that all sensory stimuli be conceived and perceived as objects; to claim that would be a lame argument indeed.

's nonsense. I look at a distant hill and I can't even see the whole of it. I don't see each rock, each tree, each molecule, or each atom, and I don't see the whole back side of it. — Metaphysician Undercover

You don't need to see every detail in order to a whole object from some perspective. You can move around many objects so as to see them from all sides, and in principle you could do this with a star or even a galaxy. If you got close enough to see the individual stars of a galaxy you would no longer be able to see the whole galaxy. that is you would not be able to see the shape of the galaxy from a particular perspective if too close.

Your objections are remarkably pointless I have to say! I think you need to try harder and stop shifting the goalposts or distorting what is being said to you..

We can predict reality's behaviour accurately. — Andrew4Handel

We can predict the behavior of some of what appears in our empirical world accurately. The empirical world is reality for us, and it is a collective representation or model. Can we accurately predict, or even talk about, anything beyond that?

Philosophy is self-reflexive and dialogic. What others have said is not separate from what one says about world, existence, reality and truth.

Original ideas and concepts have always been the exception. — Fooloso4

Yep. What is variously said about world, existence, reality and truth manifests the limited number of ways in which humans can model those ideas, which in turn is mediated by language and its limitations. As I recall having read Hegel somewhere say: "it is the same old stew, reheated".

So it is not surprising that there is very little conceptually new under the sun.

In language, there are impossible puzzles, impossible problems and impossible objects. — RussellA

It seems to me that such puzzles, problems and objects are artefacts of linguistic reification. Of course whether or not an insoluble puzzle should count as a puzzle, an insoluble problem as a problem or an impossible object as an object just comes down to definition or stipulation, so it is not definitively decidable, and I would consider that question itself to be a pseudo-problem on that account, and to be merely a matter of what you or I might variously think is the most coherent and consistent way to talk about it.

So if I were to say " An "insoluble puzzle" is not really a puzzle" what could I mean to say beyond "Calling an "insoluble puzzle" a puzzle is not the most useful way to talk about it"?

Objects of the senses have visually or tactitlely determinable boundaries. Visual objects have edges and tactile objects have surfaces. Sounds and smells are not objects, but stimuli.

We can look at distant galaxies and stars and see the whole of them, although of course only from our perspective here on Earth. Those objects have assignable locations relative to Earth and to each other. The same cannot be said for the Universe. You are clutching at straws.

As with Windows Free Cell game 11,982, some puzzles are insoluble. Why should we think that all puzzles are soluble. — RussellA

Does an insoluble puzzle count as a puzzle at all?

All that aside, I, for one, fully accept that there is a such a thing as the 'philosophical ascent', although whether I personally will ever succeed in getting to the first base is well and truly moot. — Wayfarer

The way I see it there is the possibility of philosophical insight and understanding, but the idea of "ascent" is tendentious and potentially misleading.

You might, in a sense, " get to first base" if you can give up the idea of getting to first base.

That is a weak rejoinder. With any object of the senses the boundaries are determinable, and an object of the senses has a location. Where is the universe located?

To be an actual (as opposed to conceptual) thing is to be an object of the senses which means to exist in relation to other things at some place and for some time. Where and when and in relation to what does the universe exist?

Everything is not itself a thing, which means it is no-thing. So everything is nothing. But no-thing is not nothing. So everything is not nothing.

Also no thing is everything...there is othing that is everything, so...nothing is everything...QED

Wordplay!

By "equal" is meant 'same'. No two things are exactly the same, but similarities and differences between things are observed. From this evolves the idea of same kinds and different kinds.

If things resemble one another to greater and lesser degrees, then the idea of perfect sameness is naturally extrapolated, just as the imperfect rectangular form of a building, or an allotment of land, or the imperfectly circular form of a wheel or the imperfect straightness of a path or road lead to the conceptual extrapolations of the perfect geometric forms of the rectangle, the circle and the straight line.