It can be a difficult topic. I don't have a problem with the notion of objectivity, namely giving reasons or looking for causes that can be found in nature. What causes something to heat up? The molecules speed up in the object, creating heat. That's an objective property of the world.

As for the idea of "the One", perhaps this can be illuminating in certain instances for the individual capable of having these experiences.

My intuition is not so much that we can't be objective, we can in many instances, but I tend to believe that there is a deeper cause for phenomena which cause things in nature, which we cannot conceptualize. I think this grounds the relations we see, but we don't know or understand the nature of this relation.

Which is why we always keep asking "why" questions.

Sure, it's not as if denying a personal experience or even a kind of bias in philosophical orientation, will help you see things more accurately. I mean, in some cases it might, many times though, one reaches ones point of view through personal experience.

I just don't see how we could even go about trying to find a perspective-less view to see things as they are in a natural state, not affected by any representations. But then are there "things" left at all?

It's very obscure territory.

I don't know. Maybe.

Then again, it might also be the case that in simply having a perspective, intelligent species cannot, as it were, get out of a perspective to view nature from a "view from nowhere", as Nagel puts it, to see how things are without an interpreting mind of some kind.

I'd guess that I could say that such a species could have more certainty than what we can achieve, but perhaps not perfect certainty. However, this is pure speculation.

In the empirical world, there are no guarantees in regard to final evidence, much less to "ultimate statements or judgments" about the nature of the world and the relationship we may have with it via our knowledge.

It's been established since Newton, explored by Locke, Hume and Priestley (among others), that our innate ability of understanding does not reach such high ambitions as understanding the world nor of being able to give an account for it that we can intuitively comprehend.

It's not impossible that another intelligent species somewhere else in the universe (of they exist), could have such a capacity of understanding which we lack. But we're stuck with what we have, which is plenty.

It's true, it seems defining free will causes some people to think one is going against the laws of nature. As if we knew that much about them to rule out that determinism must always follow, or that the idea of tyechism, or absolute chance, as Peirce said, is not something that could be considered as part of nature.

But why make it so difficult? Freedom is the ability to do so and so. It's situation-dependent and rarely as radical as someone ignoring all morality and killing people for fun.

Either we can do so and so in X circumstance, or we choose not to. We can be prevented from doing something by force or by moral reasoning.

Freedom is about being (as Descartes and Leibniz phrase it) "inclined and suggested" to act appropriately given a situation, but not forced to do so. I could speak about the colour of my shirt at length, but it's not relevant to the discussion. And so on.

Ethics would be kind of pointless if free will is not accepted (in some form).

Law would dish out punishment or reward, but the reasons given wouldn't make sense. Because even if you say you're doing it for societal purposes, one is assuming that people have a choice in obeying the law.

If they have no choice in obeying or rejecting the law, then it's as if the law did not exist.

I agree. And those who deny it assume we do have some form of it.

Otherwise, why argue to make a point? There's no reason to, there are only causes.

If they do argue, they assume I'm willing to change my views. But if I'm willing to change my views, I have to judge and choose each reason accordingly.

I think so too.

Why accept reasons though? There's no reason a person was killed, there's no reason to judge, it just happens.

If you remove free will for everyone, then there's not even a point in going to trial. Either get locked up immediately or not.

If there's no freedom, then it's kind of "involuntary manslaughter", there was no choice. And the judge and jury have no choice either. They do or do not put them in jail, for no reason.

I think such views make the law redundant.

I suspect that despite your comments to the contrary, the existence of free will, will (no pun) arise.

But, putting that aside, and assuming there isn't, there's no answer. For you could argue that, given no free will, I as judge, have no choice but to hold you accountable for your actions, given the risks involved in letting you go.

On the other hand, given that you are not responsible for what you did, then it makes no sense to me as a judge to punish you, because what happened could not be avoided, and locking you up wouldn't would be unnecessary punishment for an unavoidable outcome, so I'll be gracious and let you go.

But these options don't really make sense, so the assumption of no free will has to be modified or admitted.

Well, it kind of depends on what dualism one espouses. This article argues that some people are what are called substance dualists: there are two kinds of stuff in the world one which known and understood, the physical (and this is false) and one which is not understood the mental or spiritual.

I've said this too many times here to go into details again, but, first of all, this physical stuff which is claimed is known so well, isn't, we postulate 95% of the universe as being made of dark matter and dark energy, we don't know what they are, but if we don't postulate that, then the 5% we can describe, doesn't hold.

If you then actually examine what the evidence says, you discover that physical stuff is waaaay stranger than our intuitions of it being "solid, touchable stuff", in fact, it's almost completely insubstantial.

What's also insubstantial, that is, not touchable and strange? The mind, which we don't know much about, other than we have it and are acquainted with it better than anything else.

So out the window with substance dualism. Now we have the world, with many properties (the mental, the biological, the chemical, the sociological). So one can be a monist-pluralist and say there's many kinds of things which are at bottom made of the same stuff, or you can artificially say that the mental is not physical and somehow has to be fundamentally different from the rest of the world.

Nothing follows if there is another life after this one in terms of monism.

How is identifying as a Democrat equal to CNN being left? They always endorse the "centrist candidate", Obama, Clinton, Biden etc., which would be called "moderate Republicans" by the early 1990's standards.

They (CNN, MSNBC) loathe Sanders and AOC and other leftists, meaning economic leftist which is where power really belongs. If a person is pro-choice or for legalizing drugs, OK.

Democrats today would easily be to the right of most right wing parties in big European counties in economic policy.

Now, if you mention Democracy Now! or TYT or some other non corporate news, then I'd agree.

CNN leaning left is a bit like saying The Washington Post attacks Bezos frequently.

Yes that's true. Though as you suggest, we don't know if it's something specifically beautiful about the faces or some other factor. Babies might have more base reactions such as pleasant or unpleasant before they develop an idea as complex as beauty. Maybe.

Well, there are those arguments from symmetry, which seem common-sensical more than evolutionary, but I'm not sure that says much.

Neutral faces? I suppose these are cases of closer to neutral or further away. But I was replying to the idea that beauty being the lack of ugliness. It seems to me beauty is something positive.

Aesthetics is really hard. My initial idea is that the "beautiful", either a human face, a song or a painting is related more intimately with something positive than merely speaking about the absence of ugliness.

Absence of ugliness would lead me to think of neutrality, instead of beauty.

Of course, we add "more to what is actually there" in almost everything. What a human being considers a beautiful face may be (to some extent) subjective and obviously not shared by a squirrel or a cat. What is beautiful is something which excites that inner part of us that finds beauty in things.

I don't understand, why is it that we have to be able to see both sides of the limit, to know you're reaching (or have reached) a limit?

I don't think this follows, nor do I think it is the correct way of approaching this problem. A few examples should suffice: we cannot conceive, conceptualize, the size of the universe. Heck, we have serious trouble thinking about how far away Pluto is from Earth, not to mention the universe.

We run out of brain power if we think about how long it would take us to travel to Proxima Centauri. We can write down "4.26 light years", but it's way beyond our capacity to grasp, unlike say, I have three flowers or lemons in my hands.

The others are far easier to point out: we have no clue how the brain produces thought. Nor how willed action is possible.

So we already see things we can't proceed in our understanding of, but there are ways to work within these limits. Beyond that, we can't even ask nor even frame sensible questions, which might be sensible to another species.

Alternating between:

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke

New Essays on Human Understanding by G.W. Leibniz

And, of course, fiction:

Sunflower by Tex Gresham

Very, very cool. Everything perfect so far. Good thing we don't have to wait too long to get some data, some 6 months or so, which is not bad in terms of astronomical time.

I suspect that we might have to revise some of the best theories we have after we see results from this one. If I had to guess, either the big bang did not occur quite as we think it did, or we may appreciate better what dark matter/energy may be - that is, if it exists.

It's going to be awesome to watch, no matter what.

I think smoking a lot of weed made me a Heideggerian for a while

Deeper experiences with shrooms and the like suggested to me that they could be used to justify or anchor any belief to anything you may want to believe is true.

Which can be misleading. But if it helps you deal with stuff, or gives you insight, then that's good.

Concentration of power, probably.

You should probably include the threat of nuclear war to that list.

but it’s more about selfhood in the sense one perceives oneself right? — Ignoredreddituser

Yes. It's how it feels like to be a subject of experience, which is the only real clue we have of this idea, which we then attribute to other people.

The objection from how I read it has to do more with an objective fluxing so it’s probably more in like with Strawson’s episodic view. — Ignoredreddituser

It's hard. If you press me, I might say that it's not objective, not an "ontological fact". I think it's epistemic, pertaining to how we view this phenomena, which doesn't make it "less real", just that "selves" are not mind independent facts of the world.

In any case, I don't see how we can attribute "causal connection", strictly speaking, to a person. For it could well happen that a person who does something, in another instant can become another person, say they get hit in the head, or have multiple personalities or acts very differently in front of different people.

Galen Strawson goes over this in his own philosophical thought, as well as proposing a good
(edit) interpretation (edit) to Locke's thought.

He distinguishes (essentially) between two types of "selves": diachronic and episodic. It seems these are the two poles in which people fit into and of course, some are in between.

Diachronic people take selves to be long lived periods of time, in which it would be intuitive for them to say "that was me 10 years ago on vacation".

Episodics, on the other hand, have no such notion of continuity in that, after doing any thing, they don't feel as if it was them who did what they did, or thought what they thought.

If this is the case for a good deal of people, there is no fact of the matter on these topics. What grounds personal identity includes many factors outside causality, including other people, culture, the type of person you are, etc.

Sure, but there is also a clear sense in which there is a difference between introspected "contents" and publicly available objects. In any case the point of this thread is to determine whether Dennett is correct in his characterization of phenomenology as consisting in mere introspection. — Janus

Ah, then I misread the OP, I thought you were asking if we thought that phenomenology was merely introspecting into one's mind, not to evaluate Dennett's critique.

I don't profit from him nor can I talk much about him without getting very annoyed, so, I'll take my bow.

Apologies for my clumsy reading.

Oh yeah, there's plenty of exciting new technology around the corner.

Well, it's kind of like saying eyes are required for vision, and vision requires eyes. How do we know that the eye isn't the puppet that keeps our sight going?

It's the simple observation, observed throughout all history, that a person whose brain is sliced in half, or pierced through with a bullet or arrow, or a head rolling from a guillotine, results in a bit of loss of awareness, and reports of experience cease coming from those (dead) persons.

There are many things we do not know about mind and how it relates to brain and the relationship between the world and the mind/brain, which is crucial, and is not well understood. And we can attempt to frame questions in terms of what types of experiences we can and cannot have, given that we are human beings, not gods.

We can also speak about "things in themselves" - negative noumena - which is as far deep as I think reason can go in terms of foundations for experience.

If you want "something more", then you can perfectly well adopt substance dualism and admit of the existence of the soul, in addition to body, adapted for modern times.

I think we have plenty to consider with what we have.

I'm sorry about your chronic pain, I hope it gets better.

A brain is necessary for experience, if you remove the brain, you can't have experience. People may claim that brain activity has ceased, but if people are reporting NDE, then clearly brain activity is still going on.

Unless they would be willing to say that experience does not depend on brain, but on something else, like blood circulation, or something like the soul of times gone by. But these ideas of soul don't hold up anymore, it was vitally united with the issue of God and all that context.

If they can report things other people in the room are doing, then a serious, medical/profesional account must be given, otherwise, to quote Hume:

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

More real than reality translates to more real than what there is. What's more real than what there is? You'd need a new approach to make this question intelligible.

You can say that there are different ways of experiencing the world, it is not inconceivable that an alien species could see aspects of the world we cannot experience.

Or you can ask what is it that grounds reality.

NDE's don't mean much if there's still activity in the brain, no different than a dream. What would be surprising is experiences once there is absolutely no brain activity left. But nobody's come back to say anything, so, don't hold your breathe.

And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing. — Janus

:cry:



This is clearly one place in which @Joshs is at home and can teach us many things (agree with him or not) as he usually does.

My simple-minded take would be that speaking in terms of subjective and objective, while fine in our ordinary dealings with the world, can be problematic in this area of philosophy.

For there is a clear sense in which what we experience and try to analyze is subjective, it is "object knowledge", available to subjects.

There is another sense in which it is objective, you see these letters here and so does everyone else who may be reading them, likewise you can see your laptop (or phone or Ipad or whatever) and hence there is no rooms for reasonable disagreement.

I understand introspection as focusing on what my mind is doing, try to find "depth" in this "blooming buzzing confusion", but I think (some) phenomenology, at least, is carefully attending to and revealing what objects look like to us, much in a way an artist can do with her art.

Then we notice some aspects we took for granted. It's good in so far as people find this informative. I do. Others don't.

What is mathematics composed of if not the visual of black scribbles on white paper? If you're talking about what the scribbles represent, then I would still assume that you mean something real and observable, for if you didn't mathematics wouldn't be of much use. — Harry Hindu

Yeah, mathematics refers somehow to the world. They're probably symbols, but obviously no paper is needed, for blind people can do math, they interpret the stimulus through another medium either sound or touch.

What is internal self stimulation and would the baby be considered "thinking" when in this state? If so, what OF? Does hallucinating and dreaming qualify as thinking? If anything this latter example is evidence that the brain needs sensory input to function properly enough for the entire organism to survive long enough to be meaningful. — Harry Hindu

Good question. We don't have a good enough definition or conception of thinking in normal states. If you push me for an answer, I'd say yes, the baby is thinking. About what, I don't know. The best I can come up with is some kind of activity, which seeks some patterns in the dark.

I think dreaming can qualify as a kind of thinking, hallucinating sometimes may count as thinking or not, depends on reflection and explicitness.

I just don't see how that could be. My point is that you can't have one without the other. What could you be intellectualizing about if you had no sense? What form does your intellectualizing take if not sensory data (qualia)‽ — Harry Hindu

It's unclear is this example would hold, but perhaps mathematics. Or, consider the following thought experiment: suppose a baby is put in a complete sensory isolation chamber, it's not inconceivable to me that they would have internal self stimulation of some kind. Of course, I can't say if this would happen, but it's possible.

[if] the world and mind are synonymous, then I don't see much use for the word, "mind", as there would only be a world and no mind and no we. Minds and we would simply be part if this strange world. — Harry Hindu

If that is the case, then what you say follows.

I don't think we are the world though, because if we were, I see no reason why we cannot, in principle, introspect to the bottom of things and figure out all the hard problems in physics by thought alone, absent experiment. Likewise with psychology, we would be transparent to ourselves, it seems to me.

The fact that we do need experiments and that the world science discovers does not work as our intuitive psychology thinks it does, suggests to me that many aspects of the world are hidden from us, and hence existent (in some admittedly obscure manner that's hard to verbalize ) independent from us.

Hmm, I'll take another stab at this topic. It's (thoughts) related to the term "mental", it's hard to given a definition of what thought is, without using substitute words related to it.

I like Strawson's definition here of the "mental", which is "occurrent experiential episodes". The happenings that go on in your mind now and the nows that go on beyond this instant, as you "focus" on them, constitutes mental happenings.

A thought would be a mental happening that has a (inevitably arbitrary) beginning and end point, which if someone asked you about it, you could say, I was thinking about how Airplanes go through clouds or how Descartes thinks of metaphysics, etc.

Of course, what we verbalize captures a part of what goes on in our heads, as we don't express colours and emotions and the like with mere words.

I thought they did not even know where he was buried. He died completely neglected.

It's fair that know he's recognized for all he did, which was quite a lot.

Ah. Gotcha. Yeah, that's true actually about "internal" and "external" word use. Having granted that, I think that we can mislead ourselves, when thinking a bit more reflexively, in speaking loosely of "external things".

In ordinary use, it's fine, we can speak of the things external to the house, or external to the relevant situation or even external surface, etc.

Why attribute the least things possible to objects? — frank

I meant that if we want to be scientific and try to speak of things independent of us, then we have to try to strip away those things that don't help us understand the phenomena.

If a given rock is 5 feet or meters away from me, the colour of the rock, nor its texture, nor its smell, matter in relation to the distance of the object.

Reminds me of Goodman's "irrealism" and his talks of versions.

I mean, we can do that, yes, but the thing is attributing the least things possible to objects, unless necessary to make sense of experience.

I actually don't mind labels much. As in, you can be a total idealist and say that we create the world with our minds. Or you can be a metaphysical dualist. If the arguments are interesting and persuasive, that's what matters. I only dismiss "eliminitative materalism", because it's just very poor philosophy.

Hmmm, I can see that argument. I think we agree that we have to consider sensations and intellect as different but closely inter-related "modalities" or "faculties", for lack of a better term. It could be that brains evolve prior to sense, it's possible.

Perhaps at some point "down the system" these things actually converge, in very primitive organisms but then they develop differently. The one thing that keeps coming to mind is that sense alone, is poor when compared to the intellect alone, in as much as we can separate them in actuality.



Oofff. Gets really complex here. I don't know how to express "here" mathematically. I guess if you add something in relation to you, say a Capital or mountain, then yes. But with nothing else to go on, over here is hard.

"There" can be expressed mathematically in so far as you have an object in mind which you can express in measurable units, as in, the Moon is 384,000 kilometers away from the Earth. But we remove here all phenomenal properties by saying this as a fact about the world.



Yeah. That's the elephant in the room. Didn't want to say this because then I'm put in a position of having to defend the existence of an external world, which I think should be taken for granted. But, it turns out, it needs a minimum of justification too.

While what you say is true, I assume that for reasons we don't know, these mathematical relations do hold to the extra mental world, such that it is true that there was a world 6 billion years ago and a "Big Bang" 13.8 billion years ago, not completely dependent on human beings.

Yeah but "over here" and "over there" are just as much mental attributions as colours are.

A different thing, in that it likely applies to the external world, are some aspects of mathematics.

Well, it's tricky. I believe they are external to me, that is something which existed prior to me, or human beings in fact.

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?

From the Cicadas perspective where is the rock? At best you could say a Cicada would react to a rough surface of some kind, something with extension.

We can be confident abstract mathematical descriptions will hold of what we interact with, beyond that, it's very hard, because perspective must enter.

I think a big part of the problem here is in the use of the world "external".

"External" means, not belonging to me (or us) and thus, extra mental.

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

In fact, it leads to a kind of forced dualism which need not arise in these instances. Not that all dualisms are bad, but, they should be avoided when possible.

What seems to be external to us is the things physics talks about and describes, chemistry too. When it comes to biology, we begin to enter into complications about what's external or not.

An open question is if the stuff physics describe what's internal to objects or is it the external manifestations (atoms and particles) of something internal to the thing (whatever it is that gives rise, at bottom, to the things studied in physics) , which we cannot access.

It's tough.

Well, depends on the type of optimism.

If it's Leibniz optimism "We live in the best of all possible worlds", then yeah, that's quite stupid. Even geniuses as Leibniz undoubtedly was, say pretty silly things.

But then if a person argues for optimism as the basis for trying to get the world to a better place and thus not succumbing to authority and what is forced upon you, then that kind of optimism is quite sensible.

It's going to boil down to the type of optimist you have in mind.

What use are the senses without cogitation? What use is cogitation without senses? Brains evolved later from nerve nets. Feelings existed before integrating them into the whole of the brain. — Harry Hindu

I suppose a very simple species would avoid pain sensations. An ingrained habit from evolution. Unless one would postulate a cognition from the most basic organic entities, which, who knows?

What good is cogitation without the senses? Well, not entirely senseless, but look at, say, deaf-blind people, they can read by only pressing their fingers over bumps on a page and get an extremely rich story out of that.

So the senses can be extremely poor compared with the cognitive reply.

Yep, I agree. If it seems you are looking at a red apple or listening to a piece of music, you are looking at a red apple or listening to music.

But then let's say you're not, what you thought was a red apple was a red ball and what you thought was music was birds chirping. It's still the case that you experienced these things are a red apple and as music, even if it turns out what was there was something different from what you initially perceived.

The "seeming" language is used as an excuse to get rid of some hard problems, like having experience. Easier to do biology if you can get rid of experience theoretically.