I dont see how it could be answered from any "level", since it cannot be answered from our experience, by stipulation.

If nothing is hidden, then what colors do tetrachromatic birds see which we don't? — Marchesk

We only know what others experience by report or by analogy to, or extrapolation from, our own experience. Same with animals, minus the reporting.

So the in itself of others' experience shares the same epistemic status as the "absolute" constitution of things, it seems to me.

Hence "that which appears to us in itself" leads nowhere, signifies nothing.

The question is ill-formed. Antigonish. — Banno

That's one way of looking at it. Some would say that the fact we can ask the question signifies an imaginative capacity to at least grope for an intuitive answer. Also seeing the ultimate nature of our existence as an absolute impenetrable mystery may lead to a very different orientation to life than dismissing the whole question as nonsense would.

My question is, what is it that is hidden here?

We have quite detailed descriptions of the process. — Banno

Yes, we do, and nothing that appears in our investigations is hidden. It is only that we can ask the question as to what that which appears to us is in itself that leads to the notion that there is anything hidden.

Most science is iterative. When there is a major paradigm shift (ala Kuhn) though, it tends to be that philosophy or mathematics is getting involved more directly in science. For example, two of the biggest "revolutions" across the sciences since the second half of the 20th century have been the emergence of chaos theory and information science. Both have shaken firmly held convictions in multiple fields about "the way things are" and remade prevailing paradigms. For a specific example, information science has dramatically changed how biologists define life and challenged the central dogma of genetics (i.e. that genes are the primary, perhaps only movers in evolution). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That makes sense. Relativity theory is another example, where non-Euclidean geometry played a seminal part in its genesis. Evolutionary theory is an example where philosophy perhaps played a significant role in that the idea of a creator was already in question, and the valorization of empirical investigations;searching for material conditions to explain observed phenomena, well under way.

I suggest we call the hidden state that causes us to see the cup, a cup. — Banno

The hidden state or better, processes, that cause us to see the cup are the whole set of conditions: environment, distance, position, cup, lighting and our visual systems ( have I forgotten anything?).

But it's obvious they are seeing different colours; that is already given in the example, and it can readily be explained by pointing to differences in the visual systems of the two people; without any need to claim that they are seeing two substantively different things, If one saw a dress and the other a dog, then that would not be explainable in terms of systemic differences in the two visual systems.

Seeing is what is meant when we say "person A sees a red dress" and "person B sees a blue dress."

To take your approach, the grammar is clear; they're seeing different things. — Michael

I don't think it's in accordance with common usage to say they are seeing different things. They are both seeing a dress, and presumably of the same shape, but one is seeing it as red and the other blue. If one was seeing a dress and the other a dog, they would be seeing different things.

If your sensation represents the event that happened in the past to be happening in the present, then the sensation constitutes an illusion. For what it represents to be the case is not, in fact, the case. — Bartricks

By the same kind of reasoning if your sensation presents the Earth as being flat, when it is in fact spherical, then the sensation constitutes an illusion.

Feeling the event to be present is no more a "failure of sensation" than feeling the Earth is flat; the event seems present when you experience and the Earth seems flat as you experience it.

Moreover, if you reasoning or feeling convinces you that you have a good idea what is going on in my head then your reasoning or feeling constitutes an illusion.

You haven't answered my question - if there's a giant ball and you're tiny by comparison and are stood on a tiny bit of it, how would things look from there? Flat, yes? So there's no illusion. — Bartricks

If the effects of events take time, the information about events takes time, to reach the perceiver who will naturally perceive the event as occurring, being present, when its effects have already acted on her senses and been registered in her brain, that's exactly what one would expect and hence there's no illusion of presentness, just as there's no illusion of flatness in the earth seeming flat. It's a good analogy; if you don't agree then explain why you don't think it is a good analogy.

Huge anuses don't get sore Fartracks. And they don't attempt to engage with imaginary arguments either.

A thought experiment for you: imagine Tony has lived a perfectly decent life of his own free will. So, he doesn't deserve to suffer, yes? And now he's on fire. Presumably your view is that his suffering really is undeserved. — Bartricks

Neither deserved nor undeserved. When it comes to misfortune it's a category error to think in those terms. It is only in the context that punishment has been inflicted on the grounds that it is deserved that it makes sense to speak of it being undeserved.

Hah. Well, with someone like him, one does not debate. — Manuel

I've had several tries at it, but it doesn't work.

Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Kant surely deserved on too, as do Plato and Aristotle.

The problem, then, is finding a suitable candidate after the middle of the 19th century. Russell did win one, as merited, but not for his intellectual contributions. — Manuel

I agree those philosophers were pivotal to the development of modern philosophy. But then what about Spinoza, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Peirce, James, Dewey and others I haven't mentioned.

Who said it was a jab at Janus ? Although that does have a nice alliterative ring to it. — Tom Storm

It has other associations if you combine it with Bartrick's cute nickname for me: "Hugh Janus".

When's your next album coming out, Alanis? — Bartricks

:rofl: Album alanis? All bum? All anus? Hugh Janus? Is that the extent of your toilet philosophy Bortricks or is there more?

My question is can you (or anyone) demonstrate that philosophy is of benefit? — Tom Storm

It's perhaps telling that there's no Nobel Prize for philosophy.

Philosophy is about following reason, not using reason to rationalize your prejudices. — Bartricks

How much richer could an irony become?

What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. — Srap Tasmaner

It's not implausible to think that watching a spider build its web might relax you and enrich your understanding of the world, and thus enrich your life, and that these effects could contribute towards enhancement of your ability to survive and reproduce.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a bird. I’m saying that birds aren’t the external world causes of experience. Waves/particles are the external world causes of experience. — Michael

It’s a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being these waves/particles. — Michael

You seem to be contradicting yourself here; specifically, if you say everything consists in configurations of waves/particles and that objects are convenient fictions, then is that not reducing everyday objects of perception, as well as our perceptions of them, to 'really' being these waves/particles?

If there's no bird, but just a collection of wave/particles responding to another collection of wave/particles and imagining it's a bird. then how do we know how bird's see things?

Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts. — Joshs

That doesn't rule out a material or energetic context in which patterns emerge prior to there being humans and other animals to interpret those patterns as perceived by them.

Do you remember the dress that some people see as black and blue and others as white and gold? Same stimulus, different colours experienced.

Your account of colour would make this, and things like Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis, incomprehensible. — Michael

Why? Same stimulus, different people; why would you think that incomprehensible?

Again with the six second comprehension span! That's called 'individual subjectivism' about the present.

It's a form of idealism about the present. — Bartricks

:rofl:

Don't be stupid, Bloatricks; try exercising those few neurons of yours that might be working and you might find that other idle neurons join in and after a bit of practice you may even become capable of a coherent and consistent thought.Do you want to spend the rest of your life being an incorrigible fuckwit?

You might call it "individual subjectivism" and as I already acknowledged it is consistent with such a view. But it is also Einstein's view and he was no idealist. And as I said before, the materialist understanding that information about events takes time to emanate out from the source, from the actual event "in itself', is not only consistent with, but entailed by, a materialist understanding.

And it's not merely "individual subjectivism" anyway, unless you broaden the concept of "subject" to include material objects. So, from "the point of view" of the ground or the tree which is struck by lightning the event of the lightning striking is present, but again the inception of the event is not, because it is five kilometres up in the sky, or whatever.

When you say that x is present for me, what do you mean? Do you mean that it appears present to me, but may or may not actually be present? Or do you mean that it actually is present for me - that my impression that it is present constitutes its being present? — Bartricks

When I say it is present for you, I mean that it appears present for you and that it actually is present for you. Being present has no more than a relative sense. If I yell my yelling is present for me as I yell, but for you one kilometer away it will be present for you when you hear it about three seconds after I yell. There is no objective meaning to "being present" beyond that. You can spit the dummy and spray all the insults you like; it's not going to improve your position.

But, bartfuckstupididiottricks, I'm not claiming that there is any universal subjective present. What is present for me is not present for you, i.e.,that there is no objective present is what I'm saying. And that conclusion is not only consistent with materialism, but is entailed by it. It is also consistent with idealism (although not entailed by it), so your whole argument is a non-starter.

The event is present to you in both the temporal sense and in the sense of presenting itself to you when you experience it. There's not much more to be said about it than that. You want to stipulate that presentness is not individually subjective, but you haven't presented any argument for that, just that it seems absurd to you to think that it is. Einstein disagrees with you, but he was a fuckwit, right?

You're like a little kid with your "arguments": you present them, and then when others present you with reasonable objections, it's like you stick your fingers in your ears and go "Lalalalalalalalalalalala"."I'm not listening" "You're not responding to my argument" "you don't have much capacity for rational thought, do you?", and then you spray insults all over the place. I don't think I've ever seen you concede a point yet, and I've seen many points that tell against your contentions presented to you..

I think you have a lot of growing up to do, man, or should I say, boy.

. If materialism is true, then none of our iimpressions of the presentness of events are accurate. That means they're evidence that materialism is false. Not true. False. — Bartricks

If lightning strikes 10 kilometers away from me and you are right there, you will see it slightly before I do. But you will hear the thunder slightly after you see the lightning even though it might seem simultaneous to you, and I will se it several seconds after I see the lightning. We know that the sound of thunder occurs simultaneously with the lightning, they are present together where they occur.

So whose present is the real present? You, being right there, are closer to being present at the actual event than I am, being 10 kilometres away. Remember, the term 'present' has three senses: one temporal, i.e. now, one spatial. that is there and also the sense that events present themselves to us.

This is what is lost: not really truth, technically, but information. — Olivier5

That said, it is quite possible that our assumption that the past is immutable speaks to nothing more than our own prejudice. Of course we do think that is how things must be...

:100:

Goats eat everything,
Eating is asymmetric. That is, if A eats B, then B does not eat A.
Therefore,
There is at least one non-goat — Banno


I don't see how the conclusion follows. It seems to follow only that nothing eats goats.

EDIT: ah I see now. — Luke

Ah, but one non-goat won't be sufficient if eating is ongoing.

The net result is that, whilst it's all well and good to gesture towards 'action not words', Wittgenstein often becomes a wet blanket to throw over the suggestion of anything whatever that is profound in philosophy. — Wayfarer

I think it depends on how you conceive philosophy. I understand W mostly from secondary sources and a couple of courses at Uni; I've dipped into, but never systemically studied, or read cover to cover either the Tractatus or the PI. I have read On Certainty, but that was nearly 20 years ago. In any case, as I understand W, he doesn't at all denigrate religion or religious faith or ideas; his claim is that metaphysical knowledge is not possible, but that does not rule out metaphysical ideas, and their possible affective power. Such are often the inspirations for literature, music and works of art.

To my way of thinking this is similar to a part of Kant's project; to establish the limits of knowledge, although W would put it as establishing the limits of what can be said. It also bears similarity to Heidegger's destruction of "onto-theology", which I take to be a critique of the tendency to objectify, reify, ideas as real entities. Heidegger also, though, had great regard for poetry in particular. Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" also springs to mind.

It seems there are common threads in Post-Kantianism, Logical Positivism and phenomenology, and other modern philosophical streams; an odd one out being Hegel and his followers, insofar as they tried to reincorporate intellectual intuition and absolutize it in the dialectical movement of Spirit..

That's my take, for what it's worth; I acknowledge I could be way off, being no scholar, and I'm very happy to be corrected by anyone who knows the subject better than I do.

:cool: That's pretty much what I'd been thinking. Although I wasn't sure about W's take on that since I haven't studied the Tractatus.

Are you puzzling over what logical operators correspond to in states of affairs? — Banno

Not really. it seems to me that they correspond to actual (which I'm saying are also logical) relations.

So, that an evolutionary story appeals to causes does not establish that normative reasons have to be posited. — Bartricks

I've already acknowledged that not all causes, for example merely physical causes, are normative reasons. I'm saying that causes of human and some "higher" social animals' behavior are, in the sense that behavior is constrained by what is acceptable to the group, normative.

Of course logical operations are not logical operators, — Janus


How's that? — Banno

I was thinking along the lines of relations, insofar as they are actual and not merely conceptions, as logical operations ("logic" there pertaining to the logical possibility which constrains what relations can obtain), and the symbols via which we conceive them as logical operators. Again, the distinction between states of affairs and our representations of them.

For Russell, the atoms are objects and predicates, and logical operators — Banno

For Wittgenstein, the atoms are relations between objects. — Banno

The question this seems to beg is whether there any relation-less predicates, and whether relations are any different than logical operations. Of course logical operations are not logical operators, but the connection there would seem to tie in to the idea that facts are both states of affairs and the true propositions that represent those states of affairs.

I don't think either you, nor ↪bongo fury
would disagree with this. — Banno

That's true for my part, at least, I don't disagree with anything there.

Cheers.

Yes, I think in the Tractatus 'fact' denotes states of affairs, and not the propositions that represent those states of affairs.

"Fact" is used variously to refer to true propositions and states of affairs.

I don't remember their names anymore. But it was a group which W. was attending and told them he did not agree with them. — Jackson

Yes, that rings a bell. I remember reading somewhere that ( at least some) of the Positivists saw him as their mentor and wanted him to participate in their meetings, but he disabused them of the notion that they were doing something along the lines of what he was, I can't remember specific names either, and I can't be bothered looking it up.

And Wittgenstein rejected those who thought they were following his agenda. — Jackson

You're referring to those in the Vienna School who thought that?

The positivists made everyone dumber. If you want to do science, do science. — Jackson

I don't disagree. Both Wittgenstein and Popper, for quite different reasons, refused to be identified as part of that school.

I would say that any school of philosophy that understands its inquiry in isolation from the biological and cultural niches that produce it will erect arbitrary walls between it and other schools of philosophy. — Joshs

I can't argue with that!

I would say that any school of philosophy that understands its inquiry in isolation from the biological and cultural niches that produce it will erect arbitrary walls between it and other schools of philosophy. — Joshs

The difference between science and philosophy seems to be that science is a much greater complex of different investigative disciplines, and although there are changes of paradigm, in various ways within those disciplines, most of Science's progression seems to consists in building on the previous edifices of knowledge, and in shifts of focus, rather than in, so to speak, demolishing the whole building and reconstructing from scratch.

I don't think we disagree in this connection either.

So, would you say the Logical Positivists, and the Analytics whose main concern is with propositional and modal logic, are the odd ones out (are there others?) islands cut off from the diverse mainland of philosophy?