He obviously knows a lot of stuff in detail, and his heart is in the right place, it seems to me. But the general idea of transhumanism hardly seems plausible, unless one greatly inflates what science has achieved and what it can tell us about the world.

On the other hand, I'm always a bit surprised by how common it is for scientists, philosophers or intellectuals in general, to deny or disagree with so called "mysterianism". That there are things that we cannot know, because we are creatures in nature, should be obvious. Saying this does not stop enquiry in any way, people can choose to study whatever they wish, but it would be a mistake, I think, to believe that anything we study, will in the long run provide answers for most of our most elementary questions.

But of course, I could be way wrong.

I think Carnap brought it up and I'm probably butchering his exact idea he has a point. If you think to yourself, what do actually end up concluding? Not that you exist. What follows from "I am thinking" is that "thinking is going on". What thinking is, is quite obscure. We do it all the time, but it's hard to say what it amounts to. You can ask, how can there be thinking without existence? That's likely true, but it doesn't immediately follow from thinking.

This is a problem is science and philosophy, you can't defeat skepticism, there is no final indubitable proof. But let's say that you have very high confidence in the fact that you exist. That's fine, in that everybody who's alive believes the same thing. But say you encounter someone, a friend or a random person, saying "I exist, and I know it for certain." It would be a strange statement to say or even try to argue for. Can you prove this to other people? Well, if they're around you, they'd have to assume or take it for granted that you exist. But as an argument, I don't see how you can proceed. We have to take things for granted, otherwise we couldn't do anything.

Am currently in Spain, where I am from, is a good philosophical question. Dominican/Spanish/American :)

Actually, I might be able to help. I would not have discovered the Spanish version (which is sadly just selections from the whole book, some 300 pages out of what 800 to 1000 pages?), if I had not stumbled onto Mainländer through reddit. Long story short, the official translation should be out next year, but, a very enthusiastic person, translated whole portions of the book in English. It's not perfect, but it's quite good. I'll send you the link to the work and, by all means, check out the site, plenty of good Mainländer stuff there.

Here's the link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/comments/93778q/pdf_of_the_english_translations_of_mainl%C3%A4nders/

Enjoy!

:rofl:

Yeah! It's hard to read cause' it's so, so dark, but he has interesting things to say in terms of metaphysics and epistemology. :)

Philosophy of Redemption (Spanish edition) - Phillip Mainländer

As I understand it, via Sean Carroll's work, if you die here, you may well be alive in many other universes, but that would not matter in the sense that you are closed off from causal interaction with the other "you's". The problem with Many Worlds, is that, there is no evidence that could be gathered that offers proof of its validity. It's a speculation based on a scientific equation that seeks to establish determinacy. It could be false, in that the universe may be indeterminate deep down.

It's true, in the sense that we construct the world according to our cognitive capacities. The claim is much more difficult to defend if you say that there was nothing "out there", before you came into being, because, for one thing, this would mean that you could exhaust you understanding of the world merely by analyzing the phenomena in consciousness, but we cannot exhaust understanding of things just by thinking about them, which must mean that there's something "out there", which doesn't depend on me.

Then there's the issue of science, which aims to describe the world absent people. And at least physics, is extremely successful, even if we still don't understand what 95% of the universe is made of, aside from naming them "dark matter" and "dark energy" respectively.

Plenty of people we don't know, die all the time fighting for they believe in. Socrates happens to be a vivid example in our imagination because Plato wrote about it, and Plato's writing survived for thousands of years. Of course, many of those who die for what they believe in may not call themselves philosophers.

Philosophy is a way of thinking about things, usually in a deep manner. If this resonates with you, and if other people think you are a philosopher, then you are one. At least, that's how it looks to me.

Will watch it for sure. Thanks for sharing.

If you find something interesting let me know. I don't have a clue either.

That's interesting and it seems to follow from the general argument. But then the concept of form seems to become extremely elastic, as in we'd have to speak of the Form, and not forms in the plural. It seems to dissolve our notion of an object as a particular entity, as in a television and a book are different objects.

But then do we do away with objects all-together? The problem for me is that I can't think of form in the abstract absent initial instantiation. And I am no nominalist, I tend to side with Scotus, Peirce and Haack, existence and real are different, I believe universals to be necessary to make the world intelligible. So if we think of form in the abstract, I'm not left with any positive notion that I can use, outside its application.

Yes, I think we do. But the way it works is a mystery for us - we simply lack the brain power to understand how it could work. But that you can do otherwise than what you did at any moment, seems obvious. This doesn't help us understand why we don't change what we often should in the way we act or think, nor why other people don't either.

If a person is arguing that we lack free will seems to me like that person is denying something that they can't understand, so it's easier for them to deny its existence than admit we have no idea how it works.

If there is a change in reaction and behavior, then that already indicates the ability to act on reasons, which you can reject. Like, someone could come and prove to me that the blue sky I see is actually everybody else's "red". I can't help but seeing a blue sky. So the actual answer won't affect me in practice, though I would be shocked.

There's been experiments done on people in which two different groups of people were told that they have free will and the other were told they had none. The one's who believed they had no free will behaved more recklessly and thought to themselves "I can't do anything about it". Those who did believe they had free will behaved normally. I wish I could find that study quickly.

Of course, this is no proof of anything, but it's worth noting.

Let me ask a question. If they could prove to you that you did not have free will, would you act any differently?

How would you change if someone could prove to you that we actually have free will?

How you answer these questions are of some importance. Probably the only important thing that can be gotten ought of questions of these types, or so it seems to me.

Socrates was an example. He wrote nothing. I think the only minimum requirement is to have read at least one philosopher, ancient or modern and then continue on the types of issues that person was wrestling with. But this is my first impulse.

Even this minimum requirement may be superfluous. As long as you try to be rigorous in terms of being honest with yourself and you try to look for answers instead of going through it the easy way - some aspects of New Age for example, aren't very serious - you can be considered a philosopher. The burden would be on those who disagree to say why anyone needs anything more to be considered a "real philosopher".

Well, which God? There are too many to list, outside the Abrahamic tradition. Would I like to believe in the God of the Old Testament? Absolutely not. Nor the New Testament God for that matter. Would it be nice to think we go on to another better life after this one? That's hard. It sounds good, but eternal existence may be too much for us to handle.

It would be nice to speak to some of the great figures of the past... Oh well.

I'm way late to your most excellent post. I think Bertrand Russell is exactly right about mathematics and ignorance. There are elements in Platonism which are very appealing to some, in particular me. The thing is, or one of the problems it faces, is that we have to posit almost an infinite amount of mental objects to account for what we see in the world. The general line of thinking here is not so much that for example, all "trees" fall under our concept or Platonic notion of Tree and likewise for "apples" and "horses" and many of the classical objects of thought. The issue is, what do we do about new objects? What do we say about, say, laptops or plastic or anything else that did not exist previously? Are we going to have to postulate ideas for all these objects?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you final point, but, even though I agree that we need some kind of Platonism to make sense of manifest reality, I'm not convinced that most of these objects can fall under the scope of science, in any deep theoretically illuminating type of inquiry.

Good post. But how to correct it? That's a really difficult question. What surprises me in certain circumstances is that despite knowing better, our minds still insist that we obsess over things which it makes no sense to obsess about. Either do something that will fix or alleviate the situation, if you can't or don't want to or whatever, then stop worrying, because there are solutions. If there are no solutions, then worrying does nothing either. In short, worrying is most of the time quite bad. Yet we still do it. It's pretty ridiculous.

Against the conceivability of p-zombines? I don't think you can argue against conceiving such a thing. The only arguments against p-zombies would have to be practical, because anyone can think of anything. In practical matters, I think it's safe to say we know nowhere near enough to be able to build such a thing. We don't understand how nematodes (small worm) turns to one side instead of another side. If we have trouble understanding why a worm moves to one side, how can we possibly build a p-zombie?

However, if someone thinks that AI will one day teach us about intelligence, or even that an AI will be smarter than a human being, then there's no argument to be had, I think.

Finally, we might do better in studying people who sleepwalk, which is something that actually happens and seems to resemble zombie behavior.

It's probably clear, but if your name is the reason for the word "sadism", you must have been a unpleasant person to be around. I've read a few pages from his novels and I've heard a few lectures about him and I'd say that he was cruel, sick person. Some people may enjoy looking into the very dark aspects of human nature, if they do, Sade is excellent. I've had my fill of dark stuff, so it's a skip for me.

Probably describing nature. Or a version of it that fits our mode of cognition. "Understanding" is a very complex term and it's not entirely clear what it means. You can raise your arm, like anyone else. Do you understand how you do it? Some say yes, clearly I do understand it, I just raise my arm. Other may say I have no clue how I do it. I fall into the latter camp.

As for the theology question, no. Theology covers needs for many people that can't be covered by what physics says, in terms of karma or heaven or meaning. Maybe a subset of scientists find the mystical in science, but I'm not sure many people have that sensibility.

Isn’t all representation a creative act? Or are you arguing for innate hard-wired categories as an explanation of instinctive behavior? — Joshs

Maybe I'm not being clear to myself! :)

I personally don't see those two options you provided as mutually exclusive. I suppose that the latter is what I have in mind. It's more or less classical rationalism, with some distinctions, of course.

The world and the phenomena in it, incite and orient our mind to recognize such objects as being such objects: a book as a book, a river as a river and so on. There's something "out there", which activates some part of our innate capacities such that we say that the object we see is a river. However, the river need not exist. Again, we could imagine a child living in the desert or in the snowy mountains, which has never seen a river, but knows what it is. It's a bit like never seeing snow prior to a certain age, yet you know what it is when you first see it in the actual world (as opposed to on TV, or seeing a picture, etc.)

What I think is wrong in this tradition is to think we can exhaust the ideas by merely thinking about them. For that we need to investigate the object which produces these effects in us. If we knew enough we wouldn't even need to investigate anything, but we don't know enough.

I think that Colin McGinn covers this pretty well in his recent book Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within. I think this innate knowledge is a mystery, then again, everything is under closer examination.

Yes, what they say could be true. There's a very good book on this topic called The Gap by Thomas Suddendorf, he covers "killjoys" and "romantics", it's very interesting.

Fine, for the sake of argument, let's grant them concepts more or less similar to ours. This doesn't touch the problem of innateness. Whatever a dog represents as a ball or food, isn't learned, it's represented, learning doesn't arise.

In either case representations aren't learned. They grow in the mind.

In this way a chaos of visual, auditory and tactile sensations which constantly bombard us becomes sorted into stable objects. Other animals must also construe perceptual order out of constantly changing sensory stimulation. So we invent constructs but the world teaches us whether those constructs are useful or not are by either validating or invalidating our constructed patterns that we attempt to impose on the world in order to make sense of it’s changes. — Joshs

I agree that we are constantly bombarded by sense data. But we sort them out into stable objects, not the world.

Suppose I see something on the the floor, lying around in the grass, I think it's a snake. So I tell other people to avoid stepping on that area. However, another person points out to me that what's there is actually not a snake, but a stick. Other people come and verify this second account, indeed it was a stick all along, not a snake. Nothing changed in the world, my perception of what I saw was wrong.

You would say that the world was the one that "taught" me that my concept was wrong, since other people came along and verified I misjudged that object in the world. But nothing changed in the world, my perception was wrong.

You could then say, other people knew that was a snake because they've seen one before and maybe (not necessarily) they've mistaken them for sticks as well, but the world showed them that the concept they had was wrong. The concept was wrong, but the world did not teach them it was wrong. People discovered that they were using the wrong concept to describe something in the world.

Other animals also have concepts for nature as well as social interchanges in their communities. They don’t have the complex verbal language that we do but they do have simpler gestural and auditory language. When your dog responds to a command , or anticipates your next behavior( taking him for a walk) based on your currents actions (bringing him his leash)he has formed a concept. — Joshs

Animals don't have language in any sense of the word. They can communicate, sure. But that's not language. The have cries that signify things like this is edible, this is dangerous, come here and so on. I'm obviously anthropomorphizing the cries. They probably have categories of some kind that allows them to interpret something as a sound for something specific like food or predator, etc. As for dogs when they respond to a command, they are repeating a behavior which they have associated with that command. One command is for them to sit down, for example. They do an action which the human has shown leads to a reward, or a desired outcome. They always had the capacity to do this, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do it.

When turtles are born, they immediately rush towards the ocean. When a baby elephant is born, they immediately start walking, even if it takes them a few hours to get it right. It's all innate. There is a world, but that world is entirely interpreted by the relevant creature. You can't think of an apple and become satiated, nor of fire to get warm. You need to go to the place which, on occasion of sense data, you take to be an apple or fire.

but even these biological structures are shaped and realized in relation to an environment — Joshs

Partly, yes. What we see is a representation of that environment, not the only one. The one which we construct, categorize and make sense of. But we are the ones that do it, not the world.

All of the concepts you mentioned (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, books, grass, etc., etc.) are constructed via interaction with a world. There are no innate concepts or perceptions. — Joshs

"Objects" in the world incite and elicit responses from us, but the world can't teach us what a tree is or what danger is nor what a book is. We have the concept book, tree and we apply it to certain objects in the world. A dog does not have the concept tree, nor does a wolf or an owl. In fact, most of the exotic animals we know of, we don't even encounter ever. We might get the idea from another person describing it, or from a book. Yet we've never experienced it.

Not only animals but most of the world, we never experience, yet we know what these things are. Our exposure to the world is way too brief to account for the richness of the reply we have of it.

If we have no innate concepts, how would we get them? You'll say from the world, but a similar creature to us, an ape, does not get any concept, which is not to deny it has a rich experience of objects. So here we are two creatures exposed to the world, one has concepts the other does not. Apes extremely likely have a construction of there own, but not in concepts.

Do we access existence or do we construct it? Does our knowledge mirror an independent world or do we construct that world , contribute to its development? — Joshs

I think we largely construct the world. I don't think our manifest experience mirrors the world, though science appears to do so, in some respects.

How can we bring anything to the world
prior to experience? — Joshs

Really?.

All our concepts (tree, large, planet, rock, danger, river, person, pleasure, interesting, book, left, right, animal, dust, grass, etc., etc.) , our ability to experience anything, language, the capacity for all our senses - all of these are innate. The world helps activate them, but the world doesn't "teach" us to see or to conceptualize.

Yes, I agree about what you say about "things", but I think there's independent existence absent human beings. But I don't think we can access this independent existence.

What do terms like ‘information’ and ‘given to us’ imply here? It sounds like the world as an independent reality that the idealist subject organizes according to internal categories. But aren’t the subjective and the objective
merely poles of an indissociable interaction , before any a priori subjective formalisms or empirical realities? Isn’t this the primordial a prior , that of radical interaction of the subjective and the objective? — Joshs

I'm not entirely clear what you're describing. I'll attempt to reply as I understand it. The term "information" here is taken as a convenient label to describe everything that we can cognize or assimilate in terms of interactions as well as all the aspects of the world which we ascribe meaning to. You could use the term "sense data" as well. The given, as I see it, is what the world implies, what we take to be the world. Right now, for me, it includes a room, many books, a TV and so on. If I look out the window I'll see a few tress, maybe a few people, etc.

I'm not sure what "primordial a priori" would mean in this context. There's this thing we call the world, there are subjects, and the a priori should be what we bring to the world prior to experience. But it looks to me that, on close scrutiny, experience cannot be disentangled from the a priori consistently or clearly. We can still speak of after experience or a posteriori for convivence and as a way to let others know that "this experience, event, whatever X" occurs on occasion Y.

But the whole causal structure must be determined by the way we organize the world. In principle, if we knew how to stimulate the brain properly, know everything we could about the world, or maybe if our dreams were accurate enough. But that's in principle, in fact we won't reach these levels of understanding, I don't think. Beside that, I can't think of something more a priori than that, in that there's nothing to say, no world or anything.

Things become more complicated, however, if we consider things in themselves. In that situation, I think I can point to something beyond what out best science can say, at least conceptually. So it's a kind of a posteriori a posteriori. :p

According to Schopenhauer as well as to his biographers, he developed his thought before reading the Vedas and after reading Kant. He just happened to read the Vedas after he finished his main work, and he found remarkable similarities in it with his philosophy.

He does base himself on Kant, as he says several times. But I also think he's more profound, but I'm in a minority position here.

Maybe I'm being too semantical here, but I don't think we are machines in any relevant sense of the word. You can say we are biological organisms that decay in accordance with the laws of nature and it would be strictly speaking true. On the other hand, listen to your favorite music, watch your favorite film or re-read your favorite novel. Is that "mere" biology? Sure, we aren't extra-biological, but speaking of favorite music and the like in terms of biology seems to really mis-describe the situation.

Having said that, it doesn't diminish your feeling of going to less with time.

Schopenhauer has it right, to me. The world is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. No objects without subject, but more interestingly, no subject without object.

The interesting question to me, is part of the title of this thread, namely the "a priori". Nevermind definitions. In actual lived experience, it's not at all clear to me that we have a good grasp of what is not a priori, in principle. In other words, if we had enough information, we would know everything we could know about how the world is given to us. But we don't, so we investigate it. But what we investigate must have a "correlative" in our nature, because otherwise we couldn't make any sense of experience.

So I actually think that all speculative views have some serious clarifying to do when it comes to the a priori. It's a really hard question to elucidate.

I mean, you're older than me by quite a bit, so I can only speak out of *** so keep that in mind. Inherently, I don't see anything wrong with that. The main problem I see is those other people that care for you, all of them. If you don't have a say in what you want for your life, then nothing makes any sense at all.

But you seem to suggest that your SO will be fine. If you think that's the case, then do what you wish. Maybe I'm going through a dark phase - which I actually am - but, I worry more about getting throughout the next few weeks, never mind years. No financial problems or anything like that, just general disorientation. If you find something you like to do, that's the point of living, it seems to me.

As I just mentioned, 10 years can go by quickly, but it is a long time. Who knows what will happen tomorrow, never mind a single year?

As to your statement about our consciousness being a mass of deteriorating biological mass, sure, you can describe that way, if you wish. You can also think of it as nature knowing itself. Or you can say it's all a total mystery and our labels are placeholders for ignorance. Or we are just machines, destined to doom. It's a matter of preference in these questions, not matters of fact, I think, simply because we are so ignorant. But that might just be me.

That's interesting. I don't intend to sound polemical, I'm actually curious, what would you mean by "concrete"?

But is it not right and humble to honor reality? Without instruments we, whether by design or evolution, only perceive a thin slice of the reality around us, not a mind those things beyond our ability to yet perceive, or those things that may forever be beyond our horizon. We are only human. We can deceive ourselves by thinking we are beyond reality, when the contrary may be more accurate. — Paul S

I think it makes sense to be proud of, and be humbled by, what science has achieved. Whether you are speaking about any part of physics or astronomy or anything else, it's remarkable we have achieved this much, given who we are. On the other hand, we can only appraise or appreciate physics or astronomy, within the context of the world we experience.

If it were not for our conceptions of "strange", "massive", "puzzling", "beautiful", "elegant" and so forth, science would be meaningless: just a set of numbers on a piece of paper or a computer screen.

But in truth, there are no colors. We abstract them as a part of the full visible spectrum. We quantize them when, strangely enough they may not even be truly quantizable. — Paul S

I mean, I think it depends on what you take "just" to imply. Sure, we can only see a portion of the colours we can detect with our instruments and knowledge. Yes, what we call "red", might be "blue" for me and "like blood" for you. That's not pertinent to our appreciation of colours. Whatever the word "cyan" represents to you, to me is the most beautiful colour, one that I would be quite sad if it disappeared.

Likewise with music. You can say sound is "just" acoustic waves. They "just" happen to be pleasant to us. It's "auditory cheesecake" as Pinker called it. But if that's what you say to yourself when you listen to your favorite song, then we have very different conceptions of what reality encompasses, mind-independent or not.

We can say exactly that about these objects. If a particle behaves deterministically, we do not say it has no free will. We say it behaves deterministically - the result of its actions are predetermined the moment its makes an action. — Paul S

Ah, I see. Yes we do, you're right, but it's probably not the correct use of these words "determined", "free" and so on, as it incorporates human elements into the universe. If the universe were deterministic, it would be misleading to say "The universe has no choice or lacks freedom." But this is just word play on my part.

Yeah, pretty much, but the color is arbitrary. — Paul S

Perhaps. But I don't think it's too controversial to say that this arbitrary aspect of colour is the most important things for people, it's part of what makes our experience of the world rich, irrespective of how
they are instantiated in nature.

I don't side with any one Philosopher on all things, but I will say from what I know of eliminitavism, they are right on that I think. Abstract thought is just that - the creative fabrication of abstraction. It is not true reality. — Paul S

Then our disagreement is plain and perhaps irreconcilable. Reality is an honorific word. We don't say that's the real deal or the real truth meaning that there are two kinds of deals or two kinds of truth, we are just using the word "real" to emphasize something.

Science, if the theories are on track, aims to tell us how the world is mind-independently. That's different from saying the manifest image is an illusion, it's a representation. And this in turn is different from saying that science tells us how the world is "in itself" - I don't think science achieves that. But that last point is debatable.

I suspect the topic of consciousness and illusion will get us stuck.

Sure, you can "teach" me to fear something not innate in a sense, given that today we don't believe in such things.

But it wasn't too long ago in historical terms that we did believe that witches and demons existed, so some of the properties associated with them must be innate to. Our skins can burn, demons burn skin, our senses deceive us, witches deceive our senses, etc.

Of course, all this in general depends on if you believe the empiricist account of learning is true, but I don't see good reasons to accept it as being accurate in basically any species.

I don't know how to quote properly here yet. So thanks for correcting my Many Worlds explanation, I should've looked it up instead of relying on my memory. It's appreciated.

Let's adopt Many Worlds then. Sure. Other me's can and actually do every possible action, within the framework allowed by our bodies. In this world I raise my left arm, in another world "I" raise my left arm, in yet another "I" raises both arms, etc. But in this world, the only one available to me, I can't do these things simultaneously. Since I don't know about the other me's, nor can they influence me (if I understand Sean Carroll's version), how am I not free?

"...if they behave deterministically, then we are deterministic" That's the argument I don't follow. Why? Do particles have reasons, goals or motives in any intelligible sense? Particles themselves are not happy, ugly or painful, yet we can be happy, we see pain, we see the ugly and the beautiful. We can say these things about manifest objects, but not particles.

"Different frequencies of light produce colours"

Yes. Is there anything *in* the light frequencies that are colourful? No. Colours are produced by frequencies of light interacting with our mind/brains, and maybe other things we aren't cognizant of, but that doesn't explain the experience of seeing a blue ocean or a red rose. At least, I don't see it as an explanation that makes sense. It happens yes, but it doesn't make sense.

But if you tend to side with eliminitavists like Dennett or the Churchlands, that's a whole different story.

I see the math symbols and my brain freezes. Hah. In any case, I think the question is quite interesting and can be tackled in numerous ways, as has been done.

Speaking very broadly, we have this innate structure or tendency to look for causal interactions, X being necessary for Y to occur, or emerge or whatever. Some knowledgeable in physics propose Everett's Many World hypothesis, there is determination, as the collapse happens in other universes. We have Loop Quantum Gravity, which I don't understand and then String Theory, which I understand least of all.

In many cases determinism is saved - putting aside the Copenhagen interpretation - or is looked for. As a "mysterian" myself, I tend to favor the view that we simply lack the cognitive capacity to know if the universe is deterministic or not. It's entirely possible that any of these theories gets vindicated or a new one comes in that shows us that determinism is maintained.

Maybe. But I don't think this proves much. Why? Because we have, to some extent, free will. Some may say that this is impossible, because physics. Yeah ok. I'm sorry, particles, atoms and anything else found in the subatomic world play no role in freedom: clearly new complexity emerges.

Can anyone begin to outline how light waves manifest themselves as colours in the world? It's not possible. Yet we see them, clearly: red, blue, green, yellow etc. Some may deny it, but that's like saying 2+2=5.

The same with freedom. If the basic constituents of the universe were called something else and had different properties maybe we wouldn't exist or maybe another life form might arise. It doesn't matter. The universe already had the potential for choice in it, beyond a certain level of complexity.

So is the universe deterministic at bottom? I don't know how this makes sense given that we are here to ask these questions. Shouldn't the universe simply stay at the level of elementary particles, given determinism? In any case, I think we don't have the capacity to know any clear answer to this question.

I think that Galen Strawson is right on this topic, he only mentions it but, the idea is that people can confuse "empirical" with what is "publicly observable" - what everybody can see and point to. But why should we use the word empirical solely in this manner?

If we do take "empirical" to mean "publicly observable" then we are in effect saying that our experiences play no role in our consideration of empirical data. But that is absurd, unless you favor eliminitavism. We need to include experience in what we call "empirical", to avoid confusions. So on this view, colours would be empirical data.

To clarify what you have in mind, you have to be capable of pointing out what you mean by the word "real". It's an honorific term, we speak of the "real deal" or "real truth", this doesn't mean there are two types of deals or two types of truth, we are just emphasizing something.

Having said this, given the way you pose the question, you say that Lynch feels more real than a documentary. A documentary of what kind? Animals, Politics, Sports, etc.? The only sense I can make of your question is that Lynch's work do something to you that documentaries don't.

That makes sense given Lynch's style. But then again, that seems to me to be the purpose of art: to express emotions, feelings and aspects of our conscious lives that are absent in other areas. I like Lynch a lot too, but I don't get the question too well.

I mean, that's assuming that reductionism even works. In some domains it has, chemistry to physics, but in most domains I don't see how it's possible, despite the claims of some that it can be done. I don't know what sense it has to say, for example, that the behavior of a worm will eventually be cashed out in terms of fermions or bosons or any other basic stuff of the universe. I think there are real gaps in understanding that we have as human beings. I'm not clear that all scientists have a basic belief "reduction" and that's what allows them to think about what they do.

On the other hand with religion, sure, aspects of coherentism are used, as happens in almost every area of enquiry. Last I saw a while back, philosophy of religion relied on hermeneutics - not that I follow that literature, I just stumbled across it.

As to your question. Exactly. I don't think that you need either to be able to work out any concrete problem. I don't even see how it helps, though clearly it does, since there's many people talking about these issues. I missing something in this discussion, cause I don't see how it helps understanding, outside of very select and unusual cases that are entertaining and interesting in that they highlight some aspects of human cognition: illusions, ambiguity, paradox, and so forth.