We get into problems when speaking of "over there" and "next to me" or "close to my hand" and so on. If you aren't spatio-temporally located, how can you give coordinates to that rock? — Manuel

I don't have to give coordinates to know that something is on the ground at my feet, something else is over there, and something else is further away again in a different direction, and so on.

The objects we interact with directly (though mediated by our sensory organs and intellectual apparatus) are not "external" to us. — Manuel

They are external to our bodies, though. Of course the way a tree looks is mediated by the visual apparatus and the light conditions, the way a rock feels depends on the skin as it does on the rock, the way the cicadas singing sounds depends on the ear as it does on the cicadas and the wind or absence of it, and so on, but none of that says anything to deny that the tree is "over there", the rock is on the ground at my feet, so I have to bend to pick it up, and the cicadas are at various distances in different trees.

a position described as naive realism. — Wayfarer

No naive realism is the idea that the eyes are "windows" through which I "the perceiving soul" look out onto a world that exists out there exactly in every detail as I see it. This is obviously wrong since other animals (and to some extent even other people may) see the world differently than I do,

The point you're not seeing about Dennett is very simple: there is no in-principle difference between beings and things. — Wayfarer

The point you're not seeing is that if you want to support your claims about what Dennett is proposing you need to quote Dennett, not somebody else's opinion about what Dennett proposes. Is he that much of a "bogeyman" for you that you cannot bear to read him at all?

How can it be right to say the external world is an hypothesis, when we all experience a world external to our bodies — Janus


I'm intrigued to hear how you think we do that. Because from where I'm sitting, nothing of the external world is, for instance, in my brain. Cut me open (please don't) and there's no aforementioned flower in there being experienced.

If you're thinking some kind of perfect divine insight, okay that's your belief system and I'm not going to try and talk you out of it, likewise for some exotic everything-is-one-consciousness-type belief. — Kenosha Kid

The fact that nothing of the external world is in your brain is the basis on which it can be said that there is an external world. (In a sense of course internal and external are arbitrary; if you try to think of the world from no one's perspective, then there is not absolute internality and externality). But we are speaking here from the human perspective (of course) and the surface of our bodies defines the boundary between internal and external.

When I said we experience a world external to our bodies I meant that we experience ourselves as bodies interacting with a world that is outside our bodies. So you interact with the flower, touch the flower, smell the flower, see the flower, hear the tiny sound as you break off its petals one by one. As a child you can interact with the flower as soon as you notice it is there; which is not difficult if the flower is brightly coloured. You don't need a model of the flower in order to notice and interact with it; it reveals itself to you, to the body, promordially.

That's why when Dennett tries to explain consciousness, it sounds like he's explaining it away, while wishing to keep the term instead of just embracing eliminativism. When Dennett says of course he's not denying consciousness, he means the functional definition of it, and not conscious sensation. — Marchesk

I don't believe that Dennett denies sensation. I'd have to see quotes that show him saying that to be convinced of it. I take Dennett to be saying that of course we experience sensations, see colours, and feel all kinds of emotions; of course we can be conscious of our experiences, but that the naive thought that feelings, sensation and consciousness are not physical is based on our "folk" intuitive presuppositions concerning what it means to be physical, which leads us to posit an incoherent idea of mental substance.

Pseudo Dionysius describes the kataphatic or affirmative way to the divine as the "way of speech": that we can come to some understanding of the Transcendent by attributing all the perfections of the created order to God as its source. In this sense, we can say "God is Love", "God is Beauty", "God is Good". The apophatic or negative way stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being. The dual concept of the immanence and transcendence of God can help us to understand the simultaneous truth of both "ways" to God: at the same time as God is immanent, God is also transcendent. At the same time as God is knowable, God is also unknowable. God cannot be thought of as one or the other only.

I would say instead "Love is god", "Beauty is god", "Goodness is god", because these are things we know and, at our best, make to be our gods and practice.

Likewise "Immanence is god", "Transcendence is god", "The knowable is god" and "The unknowable is god", because these are things we think and imagine and at our best, make to be our gods and practice.

If it doesn't bother you then there's nothing to "get over"; which does seem to be the case judging from the blithe tone. :wink:

nothing meaningful can be spoken about the divine essence as it is beyond the vicissitudes of becoming, birth and death (in other words, beyond existence). — Wayfarer

You've contradicted yourself; you've said something purportedly meaningful about "it"; that it is divine, is an essence, and is "beyond existence".



Ah, the laughs, they never end...

All the sophisticated stuff—yeah, I can acknowledge that, where "seeing more clearly" could be understood to mean 'identifying more features', but I was talking about bare seeing. Have you ever looked at a flower, or anything else, for that matter, when under the influence of an hallucinogen?

William Blake's "To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower " ?

So, here we have another sense in which a child might see a flower more clearly, more vividly, on account of not being distracted by all the sophisticated stuff; but that would be yet another discussion.

It's very, very strange. — Manuel

:up: Indeed it is!

A 'bachelor' is not a thing outside of language community declaring it to be a thing - felicitous use of the term 'bachelor', that's all I'm saying there. — Isaac

That's not true; being a bachelor means that you have not gone through various processes, at the very least, being wed, whether in a church or a civil ceremony or a registry office.

No, you have a better model of a flower than you did when you were born, and so can see it more clearly. That's the correct analogy. — Kenosha Kid

How is the model "better" ? Are you seriously claiming that I can see a flower more clearly than I could when I was five years old, because that would be the implication of your 'ever-improving' model claim? Or is it not that I learn, at some early stage, to recognize flowers as distinct from other objects in the environment, and once I do that i can see flowers with as much clarity as I will ever achieve?

:rofl: — Kenosha Kid

That all you got? How can it be right to say the external world is an hypothesis, when we all experience a world external to our bodies within which we conduct our everyday lives, prior to even thinking, let alone theorizing, about it?

It's just that this topic becomes more controversial than it should be, in my opinion, in terms of doubting that we see colours or listen to music - in some obscure manner to be sure, it drives me crazy. — Manuel

Me too!

Or we can say we mediate our presentations and say our perception is indirect, if direct perception is taken to mean that what we experience in everyday life, is what exists absent us. Which makes no sense. — Manuel

I agree that it makes sense in one way, to say that our perception is indirect, if that is just to say it is mediated. I also agree it doesn't make sense to say our perception is direct, if that is taken to mean that the eyes are like "windows" that we look out of onto a world that is 'out there' in every detail identical to what we see. It is on the basis of the science of perception that we have come to see that this naive view is mistaken. On the other hand the naive view, for all practical purposes, is very close to our everyday experience, which probably explains why it is so hard to shake.

:ok:

Sure, you can talk about us representing in that way. But if perception is understood to be representing something unknowable (which is in itself a contradiction) then the point that we don't know anything outside our representings stands. The idea that we don't know anything outside our representings comes from an analysis of our representings, taken as if they are veracious. It's a performative contradiction.

If the external world is a hypothesis, however compelling, however confident in it we are, then statements about it are statements about our beliefs in it. — Kenosha Kid

The external world is not an "hypothesis", but is where we live every day.

If all we know are "models" then we know nothing about perception because when we study the eye, the nervous system and the brain we are not really studying those at all, but we are merely studying "models" of some unknown things that appear as eye, nervous system and brain. The irony is that it is on the basis of thinking that we are studying the actual, eye, nervous system and brain, that some conclude that all we perceive are models.

I'm comfortable with the fact that our models of reality will likely always be deficient and only ever be that: ever-improvong but never perfect models. — Kenosha Kid

So, you think we are better able to see (and I don't mean understand, but simply see) the world today than the ancients were, on account of our "better models"? I have a better model of a flower today than the ancients did, so I can see it more clearly?

I don't disagree about observing, but then I didn't speak about it. I am conscious of the representation. I am not conscious of building the representation. To that extent, then, the representation is presented to my consciousness, which is the humunculus you refer to. — Kenosha Kid

This is confused. You are not conscious of a representation, you are conscious of a flower. And it is not a representation in any case, but a presentation (a re-presentation refers to something which has been previously presented, but the flower has not been previously presented, except in different presentations of it). The flower is presented to your consciousness. The flower displays its qualities; which you can then talk about.

You cannot do that if you limit yourself to talking about the referent of 'the red flower' only. The flower is well understood. My experience of it is not. — Kenosha Kid

The problem is that proponents of "qualia" end up saying that we don't experience the flower at at, but that we experience only "quales" that represent it instead.

And why was he drawn to such a position? Because dreams are a great example of a cartesian theater in the brain. You can't simply export the movie to the external world as Dennett likes to do with perception. — Marchesk

Did Dennett say that was why he posited that dreams are "coming-to-seem-to-remember"? We all know there is, for example, a visual field and that it is produced in the cerebral cortex.We all know we can visualize things and remember things, so why would the fact that we dream necessitate a "Cartesian theatre". type explanation?

Knowledge is conceptual, both qualitative and quantitative, so it doesn't consist in qualia. Your perspective on anything is your perspective of course, not mine. General knowledge of publicly available phenomena is not merely your perspective, even if your perspective accords with it.

Why don't you quote Dennett himself?

It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things. If the way you know the world is an illusion, then your understanding and explanations of the world are an illusion. — Harry Hindu

What are qualia, according to you?

You've never understood my criticisms of him so there's no point in discussing it with you. — Wayfarer

That's a typical response from you; anyone who disagrees with you must not have understood what you are saying. I understand your criticism of Dennett; it's not hard to understand given it's so simplistic; unfortunately it is misplaced, because you are not familiar with his work. In a moment of honesty you declared he was one of your bogeymen; of course this makes sense: a bogey man is a figure towards which one is incapable of rational thought.

Yet that is just what Dennett denies. — Wayfarer

No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine.

Dennett is a considerable philosopher; even if you might disagree with his conclusions. I think it's always a bad idea to reject a thinker out of hand on account of having prejudicially formed a bad impression.

That said you are under no obligation to read any particular philosopher; there are way too many for any of us to be able to read any more than a tiny percentage of all the philosophical works in existence.

If you have read and understood a philosopher and you agree or disagree with her, then you will be able to identify your points of agreement or disagreement and explain why you agree or disagree on those points.

I think wholesale rejection of a philosopher, which would only occur to you if you hadn't read their work, is bad form.

'We are aware of things', 'we experience phenomena' or however else you might want to describe perception; these are ways of thinking and talking. While we are aware of something can we aware of ourselves being aware of it, that is can we simultaneously be aware of the experience, as well as experiencing whatever it is we are experiencing?

Let's say, for the sake of argument that we can; then what would be the qualities of our awareness or experience other than the qualities of what we are aware of or experiencing? Perhaps we can also be aware of our feelings about what we are experiencing. But then what would be the quality of those feelings other than the feelings themselves? What exactly are these elusive quales? Perhaps they are reifications generated by our abstractive reflections on our experience. Or,,,?

So a belief that's well justified is 'true'?

Then what purpose does 'true' serve in 'Justified True Belief', that is not satisfied by 'Justified Belief'? — Isaac

It depends on what you mean by "justified". If no false belief is ever really justified, even though we may think it is, then knowledge could indeed be defined as justified belief, because it would already be taken for granted that any justification must be based on the truth.

But truths are also contextual, so there are contexts in which we can know that our beliefs are justified. Like the 'it is raining' example; I know it is raining if I see the rain falling and wetting the streets, the buildings, trees, cars, people's umbrellas and so on. I am justified in believing it is raining because i see that it is raining, so I can say I know it is raining.

The 'bartender/ fake id' example brought up a salient point about justification. because of the existence of fake ids a bartender could never be epistemically, as opposed to legally, justified in believing a person is 18 on the basis of an id.

So, following from this, the Gettier cases demonstrate problems of being able to determine what constitutes justification, not a problem with the definition of knowledge as justified true belief.

So for example, in some imaginable context we could even question the justification of believing it is raining; it could be a simulation, an elaborate trick, an hallucination or whatever. This is the path to radical skepticism. We could also be skeptical as to whether there really is any truth apart from our beliefs; but even this would assume that there is a truth about whether there is any truth apart from our beliefs; so the definition, based on our common understanding of knowledge that it is JTB remains untouched, regardless of whether we think we can ever be said to know anything at all.

So - would it be real were there no humans to be non-attached? Is it just an artefact of pyschology, do you think? — Wayfarer

I don't understand the question;can you elaborate.

That saying 'show me your original face' is a Zen koan, I believe. As others have commented, it's easy to repeat popular Zen sayings, but it's another matter to walk the talk. — Wayfarer

I just used it to symbolize original nature, what we are before the socialization process has worked its magic.

What you say makes no sense. We have evidence that the world is not a disc. We have images taken from space. We have satellites that orbit. We know what the actual shape of the world is thanks to instruments which have made this possible. It was not possible in ancient times, so the earth was mistakenly thought to be a flat disc.

The truth is not dependent on our knowing it. that way lies absurdity.

How could the theory that the world is a disc possibly be an example of JTB, if it is not true? :roll:

Batchelor equates the unconditoned with the state of non-attachment, which makes sense to me since our reactivity is based on concepts of what should be the case, how people and relationships should be, how I should be, what I am entitled to and so on, that have been socially inculcated (conditioned). "Your original face before you were born".

So, his interpretation (which he backs up with quotations from the Pali canon) is an non-metaphysical one

OK, but even though I've explained what I mean by "non", and what I think the nuanced (as opposed to the "straw" or stereotypical versions of) Buddhist views on that are as well, you keep responding as if I haven't explained those things, or at least so it seems to me. In any case I think we've worn this topic out, don't you agree?

Being nonreactive sounds even less alive than being non-attached. — praxis

You do understand that some reactions are liberating and others are enslaving, right? The distinction between negative reaction and positive response. It seems as though you are being deliberately obtuse. Is there any point continuing this?

Everything you've been claiming appears to be 'less' and not 'non'. Less can be great, but less is not non. 'Non' may not even really be desirable since we need to live in this world, and if we don't want to live in this world, a well-aimed bullet is an expedient solution. — praxis

No, we can enjoy non-attachment to some things, it is just questionable as to whether we could realize non-attachment to all things, and in any case that is not what is being claimed for the enlightened ones, since they are acknowledged to be attached to their practice if nothing else.

Also, you keep ignoring my suggestions that you might see it more favorably if you think in terms of 'reactivity' instead of attachment. Anyway if it's not for you it's not for you. It's not entirely for me: I have no intention of becoming a Buddhist monk or even an avowed lay practitioner, but I think the idea has practical merit. It is found in the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Stoics and Spinoza, as well.

The fact that you seem to require certainty for knowledge shows that, rather than your prior claim that "there is no problem for JTB", you in fact agree with Gettier that the JTB definition of knowledge is deficient. — Michael

I didn't say I endorse that view. Read it again: "

Depending on how you want to think about it, you could claim that any belief is not justified, since it is not absolutely certain. — Janus

JTB is just a definition and says nothing about whether we actually do have knowledge. If we do have knowledge then we do have justified true belief, according to that definition. It also says nothing about what would qualify as justification. Saying "having good reasons" doesn't ell us what would qualify as good reasons, either.

Flatearther have 'knowledge' that the Earth is a disc then. If that is how we're defining 'knowledge' in JTB you can have it. — I like sushi

You continue to misunderstand. Flatearthers do not have knowledge that the Earth is a disc, because it is not true that the Earth is a disc.

Probably my attention span which is preternaturally short. — Tom Storm

I don't think mine is much different.

So now you make appeals to consistency? — Metaphysician Undercover

I wasn't making an appeal to consistency, although obviously consistency is important to any rational thought; I was merely pointing out that the various domains of inquiry in modern science form a consistent whole.

That doesn't mean that theories in the various domains are not tested by observation. How else do you think they could be tested? The theory that mountain formation and continental drift are caused by tectonic plate movement cannot be tested by simply examining whether it is logically valid.

I've already moved on. What were you throwing away?

sounds kind of dull. — Tom Storm

OK, you've edited that, and now it seems that you mean that to be radically non-reactive would be "kind of dull". That's not the way it's portrayed. It's portrayed as a state of serenity and absorption in which there could be no question of boredom. Have you never experienced such times, or have you ever taken an hallucinogen? Do you remember when you were a child and you could play happily without any "props" other than your own creative imagination for hours?

Who mentioned philosophers? Just making an observation as a bystander to religion and philosophy. — Tom Storm

Well this is a thread started by you on a philosophy forum titled "what is it to be enlightened".

That was unnecessary harsh, and you still haven’t adequately explained non-attachment. You’ve described how people get stuck on something and then let it go. This is pretty much what we normally do, in some cases effortlessly. Non-attachment indicates no further attachment and therefore nothing to let go of once one is non-attached. — praxis

What do you mean "harsh"? I'm using stupidity as an analogy to attachment; unlike pregnancy there are degrees. I don't believe that you don't understand what it means to be attached to things; people, desires, places, possessions, ideas, or whatever. I don't believe that you cannot see that some attachments enslave while other liberate. And I don't believe that you don't accept that enslaving attachments (at least some) may be relinquished.

Or think of it in terms of reactivity if the idea of attachment doesn't suit you. If something is not as I would wish, or is inconvenient, or is hard to bear, or is painful, unpleasant, or whatever; the more I react to that obstruction of my desire, inconvenience, pain, unpleasantness or whatever, the more I will suffer from it, no?

You don't seem to be attempting to engage with the discussion, you seem to be more intent on dismissing it with inapt objections or feigned misunderstandings. I can't tell if you are serious or just trolling.