I guess. I mean, it personally doesn't cause me difficulties, but then again, I rarely use the word because of all a sudden conversations like these pop up and are fraught with accusations of vagueness, confusing words with things, dealing with false aspects of the world, denying the utterly obvious and so on.

I personally like "manifest reality" or manifest properties, the given. They likely won't lead to a science as is currently practiced, but it's the stuff of novels, art, delight and so forth.

What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things.

It matters at the level of determining action, but the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory perceptions in the mind simultaneously (and without judgement) is the key to understanding. — Possibility

The use of ‘qualia’ as a consolidation of conscious experience into definable objects, seems to me a step in the opposite direction. — Possibility

Funny that you say that, I recently finished re-reading C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order. He was the person that introduced "qualia" into the philosophical literature as we understand it today, and in effect, he was arguing that these things are helpful in so far as they are guide to actions.

As for "seemingly contradictory" perceptions, I think you are right. Language is good for ordinary use, it becomes problematic when we try to do some kind of metaphysics with it, we force the world to conform to word use, which need not follow.

Recognising categorisations such as better, naive, weirdness and sense as value structures under certain experiential conditions can help us to keep an open mind. — Possibility

I agree. And saying that all this is weird is just true, because it is.

We always have cognition, but sometimes we have cognition alone, meaning without perceptions. Any mathematics done in your head, without transferring it to speech or paper or whatever, is cognition alone. Something else that seems to have bit the modernization dust....a priori knowledge. Can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t measure it, get rid of it. — Mww

It's interesting you mention math. I'm going down the rationalist road for the time being and questions arise. What you say is true, but I wonder how such a claim could be tested. In principle, yes, correct.

In practice, as in, imagining a baby locked in a space it can't move or have perceptions nor sensations other than darkness and growing in such horrid environments, would such a person develop math skills?

I guess it might, but I don't know. I think experience here plays some minor role in the flourishment of even basic math skills.

Maybe it’s as simple as hardware vs software. — Mww

Maybe. But it's not clear to me what is software and hardware here.

Mr. Mww, nice seeing you puzzled for a change. :cool:

No explanatory gap in sensibility? Well the senses themselves don't cogitate. So there's no puzzle by itself here.

With cognition, problems do arise. Why do we have these senses and not other ones? Why not just have cognition alone?

Most importantly, why is that what we sense differs so much from the phenomena that causes the sensing. Such as photons hitting the eye, looking red and blue. Or vibrations in the air sounding like intelligible words or music.

Vibrating matter feeling like clay, or wood, etc. , etc.

So yeah, it doesn't make sense from this perspective.

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. — Janus

Fully agree. I was remembering a nice line from Cudworth saying "it's as if these objects taunt us", which they kind of do. I mean, we began this journey seriously, back in Greece when people noticed that a stick bends in water!? No, we see it bent, the stick is straight.

Fast forward to the scientific revolution and we see "action at a distance", which doesn't make intuitive sense at all, and it governs the planets, not only apples.

By now nothing makes sense, especially all this quantum weirdness. But as you say, we just can't shake off this naïve image. But if we lacked it, or any version of it, we would have no science.

It's very, very strange.

By the way, I was arguing with everybody/nobody not meaning to pick on you or anything, just to avoid any misunderstandings.

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.

:wink:

end rant/

I don't have any problems with the way you are presenting (ha!) your arguments here. Like, we can say we directly perceive a river, by virtue of the way we are so constituted.

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.

Representations in the Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense.

We do re-present what directly hits our eyes and ears into an intelligible image that we can understand. We take whatever is "out there" and make intelligible.

If we didn't "re-present", we would have no world and no cognition. Cognition is only possible given biological constraints. Or we could be an amoeba of some kind, but we're not.

Call it whatever you like, but the manifest world is the most clear thing we are acquainted with out of everything.

Just because we cannot give an account of how the stuff of physics could possibly result in colour pheneomena or sound phenomena or tastes or anything else, does not mean what's manifest is problematic.

It is only by studying the given that we have science at all, not the other way around.

Perhaps. But with distance comes time. Time is not with us.



What you say makes sense. The thing is, who would front the money?

You'd have to have a high percentage of trained people being sent anywhere in space, to be prepared for how to deal with upcoming challenges. So you can train the poor and disenfranchised, but the money is key.

The rich will do whatever they can. Either a remote luxury island, a bunker or a space hotel.

I suppose we have to go by "baby steps", next big thing is going to be the James Webb telescope. That's going to be really informative. One can only hope all goes well in launch and in destination.

I mean, the only evidence we have of intelligent life is here, with us being the only creatures capable of explicit reflexive consciousness. So if there is intelligent life out there, something of which I'm not nearly as confident as I used to be, then it would stand to reason that it would similar to us in several important respects.

One of those similarities, one would guess, are the basic needs of life. I don't know if we can or cannot trust ourselves.

I'm under the impression now that size matters. Once you're speaking about massive cities with tens of millions of people, sustained political organization seems ever more difficult, as we can see now.

But even this would not be the biggest difficulty, it's simply that space is so damn big. It would take 4.3 light years just to reach our nearest neighboring star system.

Andromeda, the nearest galaxy, would take 2.5 million years, travelling at the speed of light to get to. That's just too much.

Earthlings (baseline, unmodified by extensive biotech / nanotech) cannot live in space, only visit briefly if they intend to return alive (healthy) to Earth. — 180 Proof

Well, I mean, I know of some guy around here, like to throw knowledge around. I'd say that one can try to experiment living in space for a long time for memento mori. :joke:



Speculation here is pretty wild. I mean, the International Space Station worked relatively well for some time. But it seems to me that on practical affairs, we'd want to make the space travel we currently do, more comfortable and suitable for us.

Hell, going to Mars would take like 7 months in very close quarters with people you'd eventually want to kill or something.

Self sufficiency is still a long ways away on this planet, never mind Mars.

But this is crazy rambling really, I mean, we can't freakin' get together to beat a quite (comparatively) weakish virus (in terms of % death rates).

Doing something significant in Mars or the Moon, seems impossible....

You beat me to making this thread. Thanks for posting.

I'm quite excited to see what we may discover here.

:up:

A and D look to me as the least problematic or most attainable for a short term project, D in so far as shielding technology is concerned.

The James Webb telescope, due to launch in a few days, includes shields that will block virtually all sunlight to prevent it being fried by the sun, as it's going to deploy quite a bit removed from Earth.

I think we're going to be quite surprised to see what it discovers.

I said that a colony on Mars might not be the best medium term goal for space exploration, because of several quite severe complications associated with such a project as of today.

Maybe in some years it could be feasible. Maybe.

The politics is not possible to remove anywhere. I'd happily bump up NASA's budget to 2%-4% of GDP, and slash military spending 50%. This still guarantees the strongest army in the world by vast quantities and frees up money for people in need.

Besides fascinating priceless info, we might learn practical things here on Earth by continuing space exploration.

But any massive space program involving lots of people will involve politics, if a concrete actionable plan arises, then we can talk about political organizations and the like.

Everyone who says that we should focus on Earth is correct. It is not controversial and is evident.

What I'd like to point out, that does bother me quite a bit, is that there need be no mutual exclusivity between discovering and exploring space vs. taking care of things in Earth. What we as a society spend on Space related stuff is NEGLIBILE, compared to all the waste going to banks, military, etc. etc.

Keep in mind that NASA's budget, for instance is 0.5% of the US budget. That's nothing given how much money is used.

Having said this, maybe not a settlement on Mars, but having a concept of how to have many people survive in space for years, might be worth it. Not to mention all the wonder stuff with new telescopes and robots giving us priceless information on our universe.

It's often presented as if it's because we spend money on space that we don't have nice things here on Earth, which is just false. Space exploration is a human miracle.

Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof

That I can agree with. :cool:

He's a very interesting guy. Not as well known as he should be.

Haven't seen popular work from him in good while though.

Isn't that person dependent?

I mean, we may want to be consistent on all areas of knowledge we know a little about but there may be no way of reconciling these areas in a consistent manner. As in, deep down there are say quantum fields and way above that atoms. But then I think that I can't deny that I see that red apple in the corner.

But atoms or fields don't have colour. I'd like consistency, but I can't find it here.

I think that, the more honest a person is, the more willing they are able to change what they think in line with new evidence, or, failing that, good arguments.

Russell did this a lot, and to his merit, acknowledged doing this. And he was an extremely important and productive thinker.

But consistency for the mere sake of it, may not always be attainable.

Very interesting breakdown. I'll have to get around to Schelling and Fichte especially, someday. Now I have a vague notion of what they're arguing for.

Much appreciated.

He does talk about it, but it is out of the custom that has arisen in philosophy, it's not as if he loves the use of the term. Not implying that you are saying this.



"Qualia" simply highlights the qualitative aspects of life, those aspects which we experience directly and immediately and form part of our ordinary life. That (a few) people consider something as obvious as this as problematic, is embarrassing. Here Strawson is 100% correct, I know of no other idea in the whole of philosophy that shouldn't be less controversial than this. It's astonishing that it can be a cause of controversy.

If the term is troubling, then you can say "sensible properties", or "appearances", manifest reality, etc.

Well, these things are inescapable. One thing is to claim neutrality from bias, another thing is to not have any, which is likely not possible.

It makes sense to think that personality factors into one's choice of accepted approaches to philosophy. How far does this factor alone determine these things, is likely not possible to say.

Paris is spatial. So is the sentence. You can't say "Capital of France" absent space. You need a world with people who speak to each other and can understand such things as "the Capital of France".

Another issue is if you want to say that the Capital of France is a property, as opposed to a fact.

The thing is that properties of objects are spatial. You may try to highlight a property, but it includes space, you can't take it out.

Changes can occur in the object, or in the perceiving subject. It depends on each specific circumstance.

It's a state you're in.

It is possible to be in peace and calm in a noisy environment. It's much harder to achieve, but doable.

Yes, you can find consistency and some scientists like to be able to think in terms of reduction. The thing is, almost all physicists would agree that, based on physics alone, you would never be able to predict a biological phenomena emerging, much less a complex mammal.

And we may call physics "physical", but I like to point out that these things are discovered through equations and then verified by observational evidence. The issue is that I cannot think of something less "physical" than mathematics. So we have an ideal theory formation (equations we come up with) combined with physical observation. Looks like messy metaphysics to me.



It's strange. I often feel I understand a human being better when I'm told why they did something, say, I discover John was mad or Jane was excited, because John was fired and Jane got promoted.

But this "understanding" is way different than understanding a scientific theory.

Science is a way to organize experience in a repeatable manner, such that we have some confidence in the mind-independence of some phenomena. Of course, this independence cannot fully be actualized, but postulated.

One problem with relying too much on science as a worldview is that it must overlook personal (private) experience. I suspect this is part of the reason why psychology as a science, has not made as much progress as other fields, the phenomena get too complex eventually.

I don't know if it's even possible to negate a metaphysical perspective.

:up:

The short answer is that we don't know.

A longer answer is that the term "identical" isn't useful here, a brain is not like experience. We in fact can see this empirically, we see brains outside of heads, lacking experience. Or in the cases in which a person is conscious and a surgeon sees inside the brain, the surgeon sees the brain as it appears to his experience, and not experience itself.

All we can say, at this point, is that the brain is a necessary condition for experience. But the how this is possible question, might well be beyond our capacities to understand, which is very plausible.

To the extent that you don't share or speak about your idea at all, then they belong solely to you.

As soon as you express it though and another person hears it, you'll be stuck with the problem of not knowing if your idea was tainted by another persons idea, which you forgot about, or absorbed indirectly. Most of the time, even when you do think you have a unique idea, then you realize someone else said it long ago, often (but not always) better than you did.

The really interesting issue, the really mysterious one, is a persons first idea. That one comes from within. The only "learned" thing here is the word you use, not the idea. Innate knowledge is very tough.

Fascinating.

Well, in a sense. I mean, everybody has a metaphysics, scientists included. They just don't have a particularly good metaphysics.

So take a scientists who believes in only what the evidence shows. The world is made of quantum fields. That's what the evidence says exists at bottom. It's a fluctuating space that vibrates. It's a physical thing that we'll never see, can only get at thorough (physical) mathematical equations and offers no hints that a rock, much less an organism would ever arise.

That is a metaphysical view. That's a strange belief to anybody, even if it has evidence.

Absent evidence, we resort to reasons. Someone can give you a reason for thinking that idealism is better than panpsychism, you weigh those reasons based on your experience and proceed to adopt either view, or you can reject them both.

The issue I see with your use of "physical" here, is that it stands in for publicly observable phenomena, that is a thing many people can point to and see.

That leaves out an awful lot. But, this specific issue aside, you can say that metaphysical ideas are not subject to testing, only reasons.

Yes.

Then again, we don't know much about creativity at all and we can say it's as real as anything else. I mean, we all have it to an extent and it leads to discoveries on some occasions.

I suppose the surprising thing is that we even manage to have theories that "connect" us to the world at all. There's no reason to suspect any advantage in terms of survival based on science creation.

We have not (all of us, or most of us) agreed as to what metaphysics even is.

Jeez man. I suppose we are only left with the option that "metaphysics" means, whatever anyone chooses it to mean.

I don't know if this obscurity is due to the topic itself, which could be the case, or if simply we are just confusing ourselves.

I can certainly see the appeal of using "physics" as ones metaphysics, and then forget about all the other issues that will arise. Or, as is said, "shut up and calculate."

The thing is that ordinary use varies, and there is a sense of knowledge that answers the JTB criteria. The truth criterion is justified by locutions such as "I thought I knew that P, but I was wrong" (i.e. I didn't actually know that P). Or "A thinks that she knows that P, but she is mistaken." — SophistiCat

Sure. As is the case for most words.

But I agree that JTB picks out at best some, but not all ordinary senses of knowledge. — SophistiCat

Yup.

I don't see the benefit of saying knowledge must be JTB.

As I see it, insisting on JTB forces an unnecessary constraint on what knowledge is. It can lead us to conclude that people who study ancient Mythology, pre-modern science and much common sense belief to not be knowledge at all.

Heck, even all our current beliefs could turn out to be wrong, and we would know nothing.

It's better to let go of this constraint and simply use the word knowledge as we tend to do in ordinary life, which usually does not pose much problems in discussion, outside of specific cases like this.

But that's just me.

Yes, a fine balancing act indeed. The problem is finding arguments against what I believe, say, a Cudworthian innate-ism - I won't go into the details here , that deserves a thread- but I genuinely (I think) try to look for arguments against it, there are some but I'm not confident they touch the main issue.

The other metaphysical idea, does have more holes in it (things in themselves), those arguments are better, but not definitive in a way that I could abandon them.

That's my version. Others adhere to say, modern materialism, or panpsychism surely go through a similar process, as you do too, I'd wager.

It's a bit like adopting a stance in modern physics actually, you go through an intense phase of thinking about the problem, then you have an idea which you think is best: "many worlds", "Copenhagen", etc. It should be hard to change your mind, given the time invested.

I think this is a good idea. If I remember rightly from long ago reading Peirce spoke this way. Hume point out there is no deductively valid reasoning to support our belief that the so-called laws of nature will continue to hold sway. On the other hand there is an enormously complex and coherent scientific picture, and no well-documented exceptions have been observed. — Janus

Yes, Peirce and Hume are correct. For all we know, tomorrow gravity could work differently, unlikely to happen, but not impossible. If we take multiverse ideas seriously, then different "laws" might reign. There is no great word for this, "law" sounds too sacred, "habits" sounds to anthropomorphic, but better overall.

I could be wrong but I thought black holes were theoretical entities which were posited on account of our understanding of the laws of nature. I believe I've read that they have subsequently been observed, but I'm not sure. (I could search that but I can't be bothered). — Janus

Yeah, they exist. They even were able to picture one (due to the light if a nearby star): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01155-0

I like Spinoza's deus sive natura ("God or nature'). For us nature is God indeed (but I don't agree with the pantheistic reading of Spinoza's idea) I agree that the great philosophers would likely have very different views if they were alive today..

I don't think what science tells us about the world should be blithely ignored or that we should believe in certain metaphysical notions just because they might "feel right" (which could just amount to serving our wishes regarding how we might like things to be). — Janus

This sounds correct to me. I don't see any good reason to be suspect of nature. Everything is a natural thing, I see no scienticism here, nor denying all those very profound experiences most of us have, which we cannot explain.

I think that, despite our best efforts to the contrary, we end up adopting a metaphysics we like. Maybe we are uncomfortable with the idea, but then one accepts is it as a very good direction to go in.

All that's to say, nature is mind-boggling. That's a good thing, to me.

I wonder if much of these discussions about science being this or that could be alleviated by speaking of "habits", rather than "laws", as this latter term implies something of which there can be no exception.

But we know circumstances in which such universal "laws", break down, in black holes or near the singularity. We might discover more exceptions when the James Webb telescope goes to space (hopefully) in a few months and takes extremely high resolution images.

I personally don't see the problem in substituting "God" for "nature". That's what makes sense now, I reckon a good deal of the traditional figures in philosophy (perhaps not all) would've agreed, given how things have changed.

In a certain sense, yes.

Metaphysics is merely the extension of Reason into un-mapped territory, beyond current understanding, or beyond the scope of empirical evidence — Gnomon

That's part of it, until it becomes part of empirical investigation, then it's stops being called metaphysics.

Metaphysics arises from the mismatch between what we can experience given the creatures that we are, and the craving that we have for knowledge which we cannot fully attain.

Schopenhauer's will a sound idea. Also Cudworth and Kant's "things in themselves", which are quite legitimate problems, which are very hard to clear up.

Currently Reading:

The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon

Re-reading:

A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality by Ralph Cudworth

Even though I very much enjoyed this book the first time through, this time now there's so much more to take out of it, it truly is a goldmine of knowledge and insight. I can surely see why Chomsky thinks these ideas are richer than Kant's, in some respects at least.

It's a bit of shame he's not much, much better known. But, being a very dense theologian does not help.

The problem arises immediately when when you counterpose "thought" with the "physical world". One must explain why thought cannot be physical. What is it about thought specifically that prevents it from being a physical thing?

The distinction to make is between dependence and mind-independence, and the question is, are there things independent of physical minds (this is a provocation, but merited)? There are many ways to slice this question, I'll simplify to two options:

Either there is not something independent of mind or there are things independent of mind. I think there are things independent of mind, because we cannot come anywhere near close to exhausting concepts by thinking alone. And there are things we discover which we would not come up with absent empirical investigation.

But the world is a postulate, used to make sense of experience. As for God, I don't see how this helps much, unless specified some specific function.

The noumenal anchors us in realism. That the thing in itself is unknowable doesn't mean it's meaningless or nonsense. It serves the purpose of rooting reality in the world, not just in our head. — Hanover

That's how I see it too. It would be rather strange indeed if the things we saw, for some reason, looked as they do to us, absent us. That is, river and stones would like as they seem, absent us, with all the colours, textures and the like. Surely not the everyday concepts "river" and "stone" would be around though.

If we postulate things in themselves, then we can say there is something that exists absent us, which does not depend on mind.