Tables are tables by convention. We verbally agree that instances of table exist, then I'll accept your word unconditionally about your table. But there are no tea cosies or tables anywhere else in the universe because we are not there to say so.

You can come to my place and check the reality of my table. — Olivier5

Everyone will. Or they can accept your absolute credibility as an eyewitness. And that would be true for every other alleged table in the world. Unfortunately not all people are as credible as you are, or they might mistake a footstool or divan for what they take to be a table. Who can tell?

My table would appear as objectively real to anyone seeing or touching it, yes. — Olivier5

I'll have to take your word for it, won't I? So will everyone else. But is that necessary? Is that existentially more evidential than having at a football stadium successive columns of people stand up and raise their arms to create the illusion of a wave? What if some people don't stand up, is there still a wave?

the table is real enough for me — Olivier5

Is your table real enough for anyone else who does not eat off it?

Intellectuals gave us Machiavelli and Marx, and Lenin has shown how to wield those ideas as weapons. If the CIA wants to create public opinion then it ought to be active on TikTok and TPF. Maybe I could get one of those cushy jobs.

which, in fact, we do not need in order to survive and thrive in the world, so why does that matter? — 180 Proof

To survive we only need enough partial knowledge to guess right about the next step, if we are wrong we pay the price. To do philosophy, it matters. We can only see physical projections from material objects that happen to land on the retina. Therefore direct realism cannot be more than a useful simplified model that roughly imagines our naive conceptions of the world.But indirect realism introduces physiological and psychological mechanisms that we can't explain. Therefore, direct realism.

Whereas materialists of all stripes believe that the objects of perception have intrinsic reality - the kind of reality that persists independently of any perception, sensation or judgement. — Wayfarer
Patently false. Again. :sweat: — 180 Proof

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume considers the common-sense view that we directly perceive material objects, such as a table. This sort of naïve realism is, Hume says,
destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are the only inlets, through which these images are conveyed. (Enquiry, XII.I.9)
He then argues:
The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we move farther from it: But the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration: It was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind. — Gary Hatfield (upenn) for SEP

Being limited by having only eyeballs to see the material world, such as it may be independently of our existence, says nothing whatsoever about the reality or lack of reality of that world. But it does show that we cannot possibly have direct irrefutable knowledge of that world. There are many alternative ways to prove this point, especially through quantum physics or any other science for that matter. Perhaps that may be what science does the best.

America objects all the same to Russia selling gas and oil to Europe because it's about billions of dollars — Apollodorus

Russia has plenty of oil and gas to sell to anyone who pays. Isn't the US objection really about the many billions of euros that are flowing back up the pipe to arm Russia rather than about the already low US oil and gas prices?

certain interest groups in America or Britain — Apollodorus

You need to name those 'certain interests' if you want to be taken seriously. The oil companies are owned by a million stock holders

But now it would be as if Austria would demand "a sphere of influence" over Hungary and the Czechs and Slovaks. — ssu

Maybe not Austria, but the Hungarian rightist government still thinks it should be granted its 'greater' pre-WWI borders. This is the gut feeling Putin has for Ukraine and many Ukrainians are sympathetic to Russia.

From Biden's perspective, Russian direct interference in the American election process in an attempt to install a neo-commie puppet regime might be enough to welcome an economically and politically productive war against Russia. What are the options? The end of democracy in America in 2024 or another world war.

Nah. They'll work it out if they haven't already. Science moves on.

This is the first bang, followed by the hot bang. What's wrong with it? Where it says stars are 20 billion years old? Do you have a link? — Raymond

You would have to read a critical but fair history of modern astronomy to get a picture of how the current theories evolved against the background of slowly accumulating observational results. Back then it was war between powerful and prestigious mathematical theorists hanging on to Einstein's coat tails and young unknown astronomers whose painstaking observations were put to doubt by the lack of agreement with grandiose theoretical speculations. Lerner's book even if obsoleted by later results makes for an interesting read.

As for the early scramble for the oldest stars, I'm afraid I've misplaced my notes from the 80's and arXiv.org doesn't go back that far in astronomy. But this article on Methuselah gives a flavor on a smaller scale.

Considering the "big bang" theory (which I do not subscribe to) - did time exist before the singularity expanded and did the space that it expanded into exist - or is that space created as the universe expands? If we believe that the universe is expanding then our reference point for time would be measured from the point of its "creation" until its current state of expansion, or at any referential points during that expansion, and therefore can only go forward (expansion). When we see the light from a distant star we are viewing the image of something from the past - from back in time - if we could get a close-up view of that image we would be viewing history of events that occurred then - but that has already passed - all we are seeing is an image. Could I now interject myself into that image and change some event, i.e. time travel? All I can do is see the image - I am not able to participate in it. — Mason

You're not alone! The Big Bang was quickly embraced from the beginning because it gave a scientific and at the same time a theologically satisfying explanation for the origin of the universe. Yet to many enthusiasts it felt like a stretch of imagination. This was further stoked by the even more fantastic second bang or just a smooth inflation.

When astronomical observations started to come in, the numbers just did not add up. The stars proved more than twice the theoretical age of the universe. Oops. This gave rise to a wide spread amateur movement that The Big Bang Never Happened. After years of refinement ("refinement"?) the age of the universe was raised from 8 billion years and the stars were squeezed down from up to 20 billion years to more or less 13.8 billion years. :party:

The torus model looks a lot like what sprang up in my mind. But it has its difficulties (of course I say that!). — Raymond

Sounds to me, by torus you mean a geometric model. Would you consider the magnetic fields of planets, stars as torus? Black holes like the ones in the center of many galaxies appear to be torus like from a great distance but they are motivated into that appearance by equatorial accretion disks due to gravity and polar bidirectional outward streams of charged particles in a polarized field.

Charge is attached to a particle... They can't be pulled apart. — Raymond
Um, right. That's because its not "attached to" it in a physical sense (again with the physical metaphor), charge is a property of a particle, and so its not meaningful to talk about "pulling it apart" any more than it would to talk of "pulling apart" the redness of an apple from the apple.

And in any case, charge is a physical property of a physical object- no mystery there. The problem is the proposal that the mental "resides in" or "is attached to" the physical in the way that a physical property like charge does with a physical object, without itself being physical. In other words, the interaction problem, dualism's harder problem of consciousness. — Seppo

Interesting thoughts. I don't know if the analogy of apples to physical particles helps here. Apples as objects can be grounded in the certainty of common perception, if we so agree. But physical particles are only categorized by their properties and do not have any material or observable substance. The lack of identity of physical particles should also be of very serious philosophical concern.

a fairly recent take

literally the only point made in the entire post — Isaac

But you didn't make any point at all. I wish you would.

Lack of social distancing is the superspreader, and that's regardless of any variant of COVID or any other communicable disease.
College campuses are social gatherings, students are there to socialize, and it's this lack of social distancing aspect that the university is addressing.

"Virtually every case of the Omicron variant to date has been found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot,"

That's a misleading quote.
All students at Cornell are supposed to be fully vaccinated, otherwise they aren't supposed to be there.
Breakthrough cases are always to be expected with the proportions depending on 1) social distancing 2) virulence of the variant.

The main problem is the lack of social distancing. Vaccines can only help to a statistical extent and even then, only for non-idiots.

I actually find the brain performing imaging much harder to wrap my head around than it performing reason. — Kenosha Kid

I used to visualize thinking as a two step process of low-level quantum combinations and selection from complex mental structures which is then followed at times by slow linear mature reasoning.

The numerous shallow processes of imaging have been more accessible for instrumental research. Yet the puzzle seems to be how the brain manages the physics and chemistry of the structures for perceptual functional presentation to arise. This seems like a transcendental problem of fitting unlike pieces together to make a whole.

I don't know what you think constitutes "context" in this situation [...] no doubt it would make sense to check along the path you took which would include, but not be limited to, the area of the streetlights — Ciceronianus

Admittedly I am confused. Context can be a very big place. In my post I suggested three approaches, one dogmatic which applies to all situations regardless of context, and two which accepted or even manipulated a hypothetical but not necessarily relevant factor in the environment. You seem to say that Dewey would prefer the third, scientific solution, and not the initial formal mechanical attempt. Am I missing something here?

I agree with Dewey on many things, and one of them is regarding what he called "the philosophical fallacy"--the tendency of philosophers to neglect context by seeking to impose general rules upon the world. — Ciceronianus

This is only an argument against classical dogmatism as opposed to a scientific approach arising from experience. If I lost my car keys after dark Dewey would suggest that I should search in context under the streetlights because it is more efficacious. Unfortunately, the odds of success depend on the spacing of the streetlights. Science does not follow either Hercule Poirot's advice to retrace my steps from the pub nor the pragmatist's to look only where I can see. Science builds portable lights to scan at ground level which lengthen and put in motion the shadows of all lost objects along the path.

— But here's an important thing... those "phantom things" are not what we see, taste and touch; they are what our seeing, tasting and touching, at least in part, consists in — Banno
I don't see a problem with that. It appears to be consistent with indirect realism, so inside the bounds of science. :up: — frank

That smooths over the discussion at the expense of putting off sober exploration of significant philosophical issues.

Most science is concerned with the mechanics and dynamics of what can be seen, for the purpose of description, prediction, and manipulation of the external world. There is no philosophy at present that covers that activity, and it is an activity. The closest we have are vague second-hand archaic Heraclitean aphorisms.

When scientists speak folk science they resort to a peculiar form of indirect realism, as you say. The peculiarity is that it is neither of the classical forms of realism, it is neither flat one-level Aristotelian nor two-level Platonist. Scientific realism is strictly pluralist with each science in its very own fly bottle.

If you can't see what a flower really is in the first place, why bother checking — Ciceronianus

That's not how it works. If you don't already know what that object really is then you can only see an unidentified object in its place. This is the case with UFO's. It isn't possible for any object to help you out by telling you what it is, whether that be the particular flower in your vase, some random rose on the bush, or all the rose bushes.

If you don't have the concept beforehand then you can't know. To have that concept you must have already learned the abstract dictionary idea of rose with its associated word rose correctly, then you can make an educated guess that your object is a rose flower.

The word is in one abstract world, roses are in another, only the rose in your vase is a material object in space. Which one exists? They all do and they are all external to you.

But then we know objects themselves don't have colours nor sounds, etc. — Manuel

Why would we as philosophers care what some scientists think?

"Naive realism" (a/k/a direct realism) — Ciceronianus

I suggest that in spite of the a/k/a the two terms are not equivalent. Naive refers to what we see and experience without any philosophy at all. Direct realism is a specific philosophical technical term for formal philosophy that asserts the reality of what we see and experience among other things that are less naively obvious. The formal version is broader, as it also claims existence for things that are neither seen nor experienced, like numbers for instance.

there are some people who dispute the idea of "wavefunction collapse" at all — the affirmation of strife

When the river freezes the flow disappears by magic.

even the friend of Wigner's friend who observes a person looking at Schrödingers cat, can always say that it is him or her that causes collapse, no matter what the guy observing the cat directly, or the guy that observes this guy feels or thinks. Only in a theory with non-local hidden variables, the situation can be interpreted as a real, physical collapse, independent of observers. So let's hope they are discovered. — Cryptic

Isn't that equivalent to trying to explain away the physically central subjective role of all possible observation? I.e., the observer is not at the center of the Universe but the Universe is always centered on any possible observer? Perhaps that is why C is a constant, if O then c?

Can human things be described by having a cause that is neither nature nor nurture? — TiredThinker

By cause, do you mean the relative effectiveness of nature as heredity as against nurture as experience and learning being influential on the development of human behavior?

Who are traits inherited from, if not other people? Where are traits acquired from, if not the environment? Those sound like similarities to me - am I missing something? — onomatomanic

I think so. Genetic inheritance is in the genes but even inherited wealth and status are in one's family. That's about half of us given at birth according to wiki. The environment is complicated by geographic and cultural factors. It's much easier to gain the traits to become rich in a rich country than in a poor one.

So is there a third way to become wealthy, besides inheriting and acquiring? — onomatomanic

You have changed the question from a personal trait to possession of a third kind. Wealth comes from other people. That brings in the environment, both physical and social.

modular space-time — Kenosha Kid

Cool.
"This concept embodies the standard tenets of quantum theory and implements in a precise way a notion of relative locality. The usual string backgrounds (non-compact space-time along with some toroidally compactified spatial directions) are obtained from modular space-time"
and
"the principle of relative locality, a proposed generalization of the principle of relativity in which different observers see different notions of spacetimes."

is it fuzzy all the way down? — tim wood
Exactly. It all seems uncertain to me. — Wheatley

In one of the more abstract courses in college math, the prof presented much material in rapid succession with many of the proofs peppered with "it is intuitively obvious that blahblah". After class I admitted that those steps were not intuitively obvious to me and I asked for guidance. He said that those proofs were intuitively obvious to any mathematician and I would see that after a few more math courses.

The picture of intuition I have already presented is the one to be found in some Plato (perhaps the Meno and Theaetetus). According to the SEP, is also the median position to be found in modern philosophy as
S has the intuition that p if and only if S is disposed to believe p
This emphasizes the psychological disposition component of personal belief applicable to epistemology. The advantage is that my nasty reference to many scientific instrumental worlds can be ignored for the sake of argument.

There is a bug in your reply.

I take it that you agree with me (and Plato) that the assessment of any sort of knowledge based on psychological intuition has to be dead wrong?

Edit: Since most people in the Western hemisphere are asleep at this hour, I'll dissolve another take from the OP

Objection to 2: Science often makes discoveries that are counter-intuitive. In fact, history shows us that scientific breakthroughs are made by challenging traditional assumptions and intuitions. — Wheatley

This is not wrong, it's just nonsense. As I already pointed out, intuitions are private psychological hunches based on what each of us has already learned. Public scientific discoveries are almost always counterintuitive, otherwise they would have been known to the ancients' intuitions.

Science is counterintuitive because the world that scientific instruments measure is different from our inborn naive intuitions of what the world we imagine ought to be. The fault is with our subjective psychological intuitions and not with objective scientific instruments. The scientific world is totally hidden from the naive conceptions of un-instrumented primitives like us.

Philosophers like to point out different ways of acquiring knowledge. There's deductive reasoning, empirical knowledge, and intuition. Mathematicians (as an example) acquire knowledge using deductive reasoning. Scientists gain empirical knowledge by gathering data. And philosophers gather wisdom from their intuition. — Wheatley

Intuition is a subjective personal source for suggesting possible beliefs which is far from being a source of any kind of knowledge. Intuitions are deeply psychological, exactly the sort of thing rational philosophy should be distancing itself from.

Intuitions are guesses but not raw guesses. For example, mathematical or artistic intuition starts with loading one's mind with everything already known on some narrow topic. Then subconsciously, which means without rational deliberation, testing many combinations of possibilities, even while sleeping, which pop into the conscious mind suddenly with a best fit guess to a problem. The result can remembered and further developed rationally.

The philosophical or mathematical method starts with one of these private guesses made into a public hypothesis. Public hypotheses are tested by other people to assess usefulness. This sort of public knowledge can remain as a best explanation until something better or more complete comes along.

And wasn't during this time the belief in Greece that all numbers were rational broken by the observations that not all geometric magnitudes can be expressed by rational numbers? — ssu

Apparently so. Plato was considered the leading Pythagorean as well as Eleatic of his time. His mathematical preoccupation at times obscures the main discussion making either difficult to separate and follow. Part II of the Parmenides is presented as an exemplary complete lesson in a version of binary logic. Our job is to adjust the premises to fit the conclusions.

Mathematics, due to the nature of deductive proof, has the good fortune to be able to build on all of its past achievements. Cultural advances in our education allow ancient specialized research topics to now read as childish or foolish.

Plato repeatedly honored the young mathematician Theaetetus who supposedly came up with the solution to the problem of incompatibility of geometric continuous lengths and rational representation. This work is presented as Book X of Euclid's Elements. But I am even more impressed by Plato's achievement in the Timaeus of constructing ontological elements by raising the dimensions of bound geometric objects from two to three. It has even been suggested that a complete rigorous proof for Platonic solids was the purpose of Euclid's Elements.

:up:

In the beginning there is existence. Existence is not a property of anything, it simply is, eternally. It is what is. Existence has properties. — EnPassant

If existence is eternal then what do you mean by beginning? If existence simply is then what could its properties be? Without time, how can existence evolve into anything else?

Plato's metaphysics are not a closed logical system like modern maths are. Goedel has nothing to say about open and modifiable systems.

Most philosophers and that includes Socrates, Plato, et al were, my hunch is, uncomfortable with the Heraclitean position because it has sophist written all over it. After all, to a philosopher veritas numquam perit (truth never expires or, positively rendered, truth is eternal). Given this view of truth is non-negotiable to a philosopher, Parmenides, for the reason that he subscribed to eternalism, was viewed as toeing the official line and thus favored. — TheMadFool

Your hunch is supported by Plato's Theaetetus, where the alleged Protagorean subjectivist theory of sense-perception is accused of secret alliance with Heraclitean universal flux. Since the same theory is reiterated in the Timaeus, it becomes obvious to readers of both books that this unseemly subjectivist theory is Plato's own, uncomfortably adopted, whether borrowed or invented.

Doesn't our experience with recognizing kinds, types, and universals in the realm of particulars count as 'psychologically useful' correlates? — Paine

Like other academic endeavors, philosophy has a pure theoretical side. You may disagree with this sharp divide, but to me metaphysics should only be interested in building and examining models. Each and every ancient philosopher in our historical surveys had a unique metaphysical outlook. It is this variety that I try to capture.

I don't think you can support that mental constructs of pure philosophy are useful in any way to a person. They are like the layout and elements of an architectural drawing. They exist to provide a range of potentialities for applied philosophy. But if you just mean applied philosophy, then some ad hoc rules of wisdom do suggest useful mindsets or courses of action, like for example not eating beans, or the golden mean, or golden rule.

Recognizing material objects is a fact of sensation. But kinds, types, universals, particulars are made up for their own sake. They're the sort of stuff only we can talk about. Forms, like those others, only have meaning to some but not all philosophers. Psychology lives in each and every and person, and even in cats.

Your description seems to suggest that the problems of Parmenides have all been surpassed by means of some complete explanation. Some of the effort in the dialogue is troubled by the consequences of complete explanations. Are 'we' beyond that now? — Paine

Unlike most science, good philosophy doesn't obsolete but its usefulness is limited to the metaphysical venue where it belongs. Parmenides was a very great philosopher who linked a simple metaphysics to a simple metaphysically loaded logic and then implied aggressively a matching (false) ontology. The One 'is or is not'. Plato expanded that not only to 'if not A then B', but also to 'if not green then not-green'. These were important steps in Western culture. All of them are valid given their premises, whatever those may be.

So do I. Parmenides and Plato are too dense a topic and I don't expand and slow down the exposition enough. For example, to

the Forms are not an invention. It's just recognition of the way we think, correct? — frank

, the direct Platonic answer is "No, not correct".

We think with our own private psychological conceptions of common cultural ideas. It isn't possible to have thoughts or conversations without using socially common ideas as these present themselves to suit specific occasions in our lives.

Ideas are cultural collections that are handed down to us. Ideas are catalogued in public dictionaries and encyclopedias. We don't personally invent any of them. We just learn them as children, or in schools, or through reading.

Plato arbitrarily takes these ideas and creates a class of mathematical or logical objects from them, called Ideas or Forms. Forms are only used to build Plato's abstract metaphysical models, and have no psychologically useful correlates.

Zeno says plurality is flawed because it means we have things that are like and unlike at the same time. — frank

Zeno's plurality is flawed because he applies the deductive binary logic of the Way of Truth to the changing world of opinion without warrant. For a discrete Form, gradual change is impossible because change must involve repeated becoming and perishing of each object in time which a Form does not possess. Opinions which do change therefore must be indeterminate in every way, and must lack identity altogether.

Parmenides' One is a perfectly uniform closed (bounded, limited) sphere, an object that can be said to either exist or not exist because it has Identity. The alternative, raised by Melissus, is that the One is unbounded and open. (Analogously, think of a circular standing wave, or an electron that extends infinitely in the electron field.) Opinion is open, continuous, formless, and indefinite, where binary logic cannot apply. Therefore everything Zeno says has to say must be flawed.

Incidentally, whatever is mythical and mysterious is also vague, indefinite and unknowable, which makes it intriguing for speculative thought. Once it is bounded with attributes, it becomes less interesting.

Really, the Forms are not an invention. It's just recognition of the way we think, correct? — frank

I think of it the other way around. Let's suppose that the Forms do not come from heaven but are a cultural heritage catalogued in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Now Ideas would take on much more meaningful reality for us. However, doing away with God's contribution would destroy the soul of Plato's Socratic philosophy which is absolute God-given morality.

I think this dialogue is about challenging the concept of the Forms — frank

That's true, but without logical clarification that challenge is incomprehensible. Parmenides only has one Form. Then that Form is kicked around quite confusingly from logic to proposition to ontology to the Absolute. Plato's middle period Forms are many little ones yet the unexplained Good mimics the great One. If this expansion doesn't work for Plato then why not?

Recall that for Parmenides, it doesn't really make sense to say a thing is not, because if X is not, then how were you just talking about it? — frank

Yes, for this One, not-One cannot even be thought of. As in looking at the Universe subjectively, from within there is nothing else, there is no outside.

Plato's view is an objective view from the outside. There are many Forms and there are some opposites to talk about. In fact, for any single 'one', others, whether opposites or not are unavoidable.