In conclusion the subjective idealist is a solipsist who cannot make sense of the statement "I am mortal". Yet why should this be absurd by your criteria? After all, the solipsist is not only against holding views that he cannot disprove, he is even against attributing meaning to such views. — sime

The solipsist thinks they are eternal and their experience will never end? How is that not completely unfounded?

The Idealist can posit the two items experienced - the car that you see and the car that hits you- and say that usually seeing one is followed by feeling the other. He need not posit the existence of a car that exists in between these two states, nor need he say that all three are "the same" car.

The same with the piano. The Idealist says that there is the piano that you see falling towards you, and there is the piano that strikes you in the head, but he need not postulate another piano which exists when you aren't perceiving it, nor that all three are "the same" piano. — PossibleAaran

The idealist can make this move, but there is also the possibility that experience just ceases. Other people will infer that the falling piano or oncoming car killed you. The examiner might say poor sap didn't even feel it.

So the idealist has to include the possibility that not looking will result in no longer experiencing, for no reason at all, since there is no unperceived death event.

There is something to be said against views which we can't disprove but are absurd. Let's say that instead not existing, the piano turns into a pink elephant that squashes you, but then turns back into a piano when people find your body. Can you disprove that possibility? No, but it's silly and absurd on the face of it.

I can feel the oxygen as I inhale it, can I not? If you say "no. You cannot tell from inhaling that what you inhale is oxygen molecules", then fair enough, but the existence of the molecules can be securely inferred from the perceptible properties of air. — PossibleAaran

There's a thousand different variants of this. Someone slips an odorless, tasteless poison into your drink when nobody else is looking. They leave the room.

Now the poison should cease to exist just like the paper, right? You drink from the chalice and next thing you know you're vomiting blood and being rushed to the emergency room where the doctor figures out what poison was used and counters it to save your life. So somehow that unperceived poison came back into existence.

Now if you can do away with experiences being causally connected to one another, and say that you there was no reason you went to the emergency room, then you can maintain your doubt.

I can't do that. I find it to be a reductio. Of course the poison, the paper, the piano, the train wheels, etc. all exist unperceived. That makes sense of why our experiences do seem to be causally connected in a way that papers remain in drawers when nobody's looking.

Close - but no cigar — Wayfarer

How many qualia can dance on the end of a cigar?

If the experiment had been performed in reality, which it hasn't, that might prove the existence of the fire in those contrived circumstances, but the existence of regular objects in regular circumstances would remain unproven. — PossibleAaran

Thought experiments are used in philosophy. And this one can be performed in the real world. But you can change it to an actual situation where there was a fire but nobody was aware of it, because they were asleep or it was in another part of the building, and they suffocated.

you employ the same tactic sometimes employed by Marchesk. That is, to answer my question by asking other questions in the hope that my original question then sounds ridiculous. — PossibleAaran

Well, it is ridiculous when taken to it's logical conclusion. If the paper in your drawer no longer exists unperceived, then the piano falling toward you no longer exists when you look away.

Because how can the unperceived world be of any threat?

incorrect. — Wayfarer

Humans are angels in animal bodies ???

-we exist (can't imagine a substantive dialogue between a being who believes he and the other exists and a being who believes his own self and/or the other does not exist); — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Well, the solipsist argues that others do not exist. And then the Buddhists and other like-minded folk say the self does not exist. Descartes can be criticized on the grounds that he assumed there was an I to the experience of having a doubt, given that he was supposed to be entertaining 100% radical doubt.

the symbol "1" represents a particular quantity; — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Or it exists platonically independent of any actual quantity.

words uttered aloud are associated with thoughts in the mind of the utterer and are not random sounds; — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Alternatively meaning does not exist in the head (semantic externalism), and language does not reference private states (Wittgenstein). You also have the behaviorists and the eliminative materialists.

The exchange of ideas is probably mostly referencing that essential core. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

An exchange of ideas happens, but what that entails is very much up for debate, as almost everything can be called into question or interpreted differently.

The title of this thread is an update: disagreement is real; but it exists in spite of everybody essentially being in agreement. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I essentially disagree with this.

LOL, what absurdities some metaphysical standpoints commit adherents to! :s — Janus

Indeed. There were huge disputes over some of these absurd commitments back on the old site.

Something just occurred to me. Can you classify a visual experience as a perception if your perceptual system doesn't exist since nobody's perceiving it?

So, all the 'machinery' that we believe gives rise to perception, and that is never itself perceived during acts of perception, does not exist? — Janus

Apparently your eyes and brain don't exist when nobody's perceiving them, but you can still have a visual perception.

For example, Materialism doesn't hold up well in discussion. — Michael Ossipoff

I think it holds up pretty well. Trouble is when it comes to mind, at least consciousness. But that's a small part of the entire universe, so I'm not as sold on the hard problem as I used to be.

But, it is my understanding, nobody has ever observed any such "causing" happening. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Seems awful like experience things causing other things all the time. Sometimes I'm wrong about what's causing what, and confuse correlation for causation.

So a person's story has a beginning (birth) but not an end? Appealing to reincarnation to continue experience is no better than appealing to heaven. Neither are demonstrable.

Does a fire continue to burn even when no one is looking? A critic of Stace had said that it must do so, because when you return to the fire after ten minutes, the wood has turned to ash, which is just what happens if you stay and watch the fire burn out. Stace pointed out that this argument assumes that the law of causation operates continuously through time, whether observed or unobserved, and this is obviously part of what needs to be proven. — PossibleAaran

Let's say you're shut in a vacuum sealed room with a fire. Both you and the fire are consuming the limited oxygen in the room.

Then a partition is put between you and the fire that blocks your from seeing, hearing or smelling the fire. It ceases to exist as a perception. Furthermore, there is a timer that will let you out before your run out of air, but only if the fire on the other side of the partition is no longer consuming air.

What happens? Do you survive or does your air run out? How would Stace answer that?

And there's many alternatives to this like introducing a poisonous gas you can't perceive or emptying the oxygen from the room, all setup to be automated with nobody else around.

And really, why would the question of needing air come up at all? Why would you die of needing something (oxygen) you can't perceive?

The hiker didn't see the rock, but did any body else see it? If so, then the example is compatible with things only existing when perceived. If nobody saw the rock hit the hiker, not even the hiker (perhaps he was asleep), then how can anybody say with any degree of reliability that the rock actually did hit him? This hasn't been explained. — PossibleAaran

If you found a flattened hiker who had camped out next to rock face, then it's possible they didn't see or hear the falling rock. If it crushed them quickly enough, they may not have felt it either.

In that case, how could a non-existent rock do that? Or to put it into idealist terms:

How do we connect a rock we perceive to have crushed a human being with the cause of that human's death?

We can do it with realist language quite easily. But the idealist can't reference unperceived objects. We can't even reference the sleeping human here, because they might be unconsious, and without another perceiver, non-existent.

So you end up with the silliness that a non-existent rock crushed a non-existent human resulting in a perceived corpse and rock. That is, if things go out of existence when not perceived, and pop back into existence when perceived.

To go full subjective idealist mode, you just have a crushed corpse for no reason at all, where friends and family who identify the corpse with someone previously known will no longer experience interacting with that person as a living human. You get to avoid the stuff going in and out of existence, but then experience has these gaps to it and experiences happen without cause.

IOW, you ditch inference, and with it, explanations of any sort that aren't strictly deductive. You just have one experience following another for no rhyme or reason.

Wouldn't it be neat, if, say, a piano was falling down towards you, and you could look away, et voilà, the piano would no longer exist? — jorndoe

Exactly. If you look away from a falling rock, does it cease to exist until it crushes you, and then goes back to not existing once you die? What if you don't have time to experience the crushing? Does the non-existent heavy object not cause you to cease to exist?

In the end, we have to face the fact that this question, "does anything exist if unperceived", really doesn't make any sense at all, because "to exist" refers to how we perceive things. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this fundamentally confuses how we come to know about the world with the way the world is itself. Just because we can't get outside ourselves to imagine exactly how the world is without us observing it does not entail that the world cannot exist without us perceiving it.

It can simply be a limitation on human imagination. But even then, we do possess powerful abstraction capabilities so that we can model the universe mathematically without any observer. We do have a theory of general relativity that deals with that.

But you’re still speaking from a realist perspective - whether scientific or not. — Wayfarer

Well, Berkley had the same sort of perspective in that he didn't saysay the light bouncing off a flower into your eye is an interpretive act. Rather, the omni-observer, God, is around to keep the rest of the world there as we would have perceived it.

By idealism you mean the Kantian variety where what is perceived might be entirely different than what caused the perception.

ur knowledge and experience is actually constituted, made up of different facets, all of which come into play when we see ‘the object’. And they are therefore constitutive of whatever we know of reality. That’s the sense in which reality is ‘dependent on perception’. — Wayfarer

But if you don't want to this to collapse into skepticism, you have to allow that our perceptual facilities do provide some accurate information about how things really are.

Why would we have eyes to see if what is seen isn't what's really there? That doesn't mean our senses gives us a completely accurate view of the world. They don't (and sometimes they mislead us). But you don't have to go all the way to the other extreme and say we can't know anything about the external world, trapping us inside the veil of perception (and interpretation).

Either science can be done on the world despite our perceptual limitations, or the ancients skeptics were right. I think given the huge success of science that the skeptics were premature in doubting so thoroughly.

But for those who haven't been 'through the looking glass', the question can only be dealt with from the perspective of scientific realism. — Wayfarer

I'm asking whether it's coherent to think that only the thing I'm experiencing right now exists given how that thing or part of the world is interdependent with the world in all sorts of ways. This also applies to me. I see, but what about the eyes I see with which I'm not perceiving?

You don't even need to bring science in to the equation. You can just note the interdependence of everything in the world from a phenomenal point of view.

It might be, for all we have said so far, that O exists when I perceive it but the moment I stop perceiving it, it ceases to exist. I am not assuming that this is true, and so I am not 'idly speculating'. What I am saying is that this has not been ruled out by anything we have said so far. You have not suggested any reliable method by which we could determine whether something exists when unperceived. — PossibleAaran

Here's another related way to go about this. Has anyone died from something unperceived? Yes, quite often. One example would be going on a hike and being killed by a falling rock. The hiker may not have seen or heard the rock.

Another would be dying from some disease, particularly in the past or places without access to medical equipment. You get sick and die from something nobody perceives. How does that work if the microbes, cancer, etc. doesn't exist?

What does it even mean to get sick if the cells in your body don't exist? If the organs aren't there, because nobody perceives them? Are you just a shell secreting mucus and blood?

Do you poop with no intestines? Did that food disappear without being digested? Will you really starve if you don't see food ever again? Why would that be?

What about the hypothesis that God causes O to exist and when I look away, God destroys O? What about the hypothesis that it is a law of nature that whenever we look in a certain place, O is created, and whenever we look away, O is destroyed? — PossibleAaran

Let's say that when nobody is observing the rest of the universe, all that matter is destroyed. So you get in a car while nobody is doing astronomy, and the driver steps on the brakes. What happens? Do you feel the rest of the universe opposing your change in motion, or just the Earth and Sun and maybe Venus if it's up?

The trusty old Samuel Johnson refutation. — Wayfarer

With some science and Heidegger thrown in. A big part of the perceived world is the interdependence of all the things we perceive. For example, how is it that I stay warm on a sunny day while I'm not aware of the sun? If the sun's not there because it's not being perceived, then what keeps me warm?

Is it coherent to say that you can have a perception of small part of the world without the rest of it existing to support it, including the body that's doing the perceiving?

Can I have a visual perception while my eyes don't exist (because nobody's perceiving them)? I don't actually see my eyes when I'm looking, unless there's a reflecting surface.

How do I know that this piece of paper still exists when I put it away in my desk and leave the room? — PossibleAaran

Because it's there when you reenter the room and open the desk. If you doubt that, you can set a camera to record a video or snapshots of the paper while you're away. And from there, any scientific experiment for determining the existence of the paper in your absence would show it was still there.

You could set up some indirect domino rube goldberg scenario to trigger a bunch of events if the paper is still there after you've left the room. Which ties into what holds the world you perceive together when you're not perceiving it. If you look up at the sky, is the ground still holding you up? Does your heart still pump blood while you're not aware of it beating? Does the back of your head exist when nobody's looking at it?

How far do you want to take the skepticism? Because it can go all the way to the current perception for me right now, and leave everything else as unknowable.

they are not given equal weight to all arguments — Andrew4Handel

Not all arguments deserve equal weight.

For example I think discussions about the nature of mind can be influenced by peoples metaphysical commitments and to some extent they have ruled out alternatives and or are committed to rejecting alternatives. — Andrew4Handel

Sure, but what if there's good reasons for one's metaphysical commitments?

I suppose the difference is between looking for evidence of black swans — Andrew4Handel

But what would the black swans look like in the case of God? Would it look like the show Supernatural?

guy running her to the side of the road with his car while she was riding a bike and then masturbating in front of her — praxis

That's two criminal offenses in one incident. Did she get his license plate and report him?

Freaky, and probably not the sort of thing any dude needs to worry about. — praxis

I did have a guy at a park who was staring me down when I went into bathroom, enter it and come to my stall. But at least he backed off when he saw I was taking a dump. I do get that uncomfortable feeling from gay guys at parks staring me down that women might feel on a regular basis. Only rarely, but I do get this feeling they strongly want action and they're trying to assess my interest.

I don't like it because I'm a total stranger, but maybe I'd feel different if it was an attractive female? Of course I'm not innocent in this matter either. I'm just not attracted to guys, particularly at parks. It's not harassment, but it does help empathize with what women might go through, for a brief moment.

Okay, but why are you talking about guilt? Is anyone but you talking about guilt? Especially guilt that one 'should' be feeling? Or is this just a bunch of introjection now projected outwards? — StreetlightX

But there is some societal guilt or shame for being privileged. I remember this college event for a club I attended. We were all white. This one guy called someone who stole his backpack a "nigger". Everyone's response was to shame and then ostracize him. I was distressed by this. Yeah, white people aren't supposed to use the N word, but people make mistakes and it was in context of being angry at someone for a legitimate reason. We could have just corrected him and let it go at that instead of basically unfriending him on the spot.

Thinking back on that and other ways white people often act publically about other white people exhibiting racism, it makes me thing well-meaning people feel some shame and need to prove publically that they're not guilty of sins of their ancestors, or KKK demonstrators.

And it's pretty clear that we aren't going to stop producing plastic anytime soon. — JustSomeGuy

Can plastic be made out of hemp?

In all such matters, I refer you to:

The oceanic gyres serve as a large dump for plastics of all kinds. But maybe we can CRISPR some critters into eating it.

By design that spectrum is very large. What unite the people that are on it is that they are all somewhat dicks and can be shielded from just retribution by their power and position. That's why Franken got burned. — Akanthinos

But what about Keillor. Is touching a back sexual assault, or is there more to the story?

I've had women grab my ass on a few occasions. It wasn't wanted, but I didn't feel like it was assault. It was just a little awkward.

I've also had a few gay guys hit on me, and try and talk me into something I had no interest in doing. But I don't consider that harassment either. However, if that's something I had to face on a regular basis as a woman, particularly at work, but also in public places minding my own business, then I would want to speak out about it, too. That would cross over into ongoing harassment.

Edit: According to MPR, sounds like there might be more to the Keillor case that they haven't made public. So maybe it was more than a back pat.

As species got more and more intelligent, nature was finding better ways to contribute to increases of entropy. (Intelligent systems can be observed as being biased towards entropy maximization) — ProgrammingGodJordan

As some species get more intelligent. The keyword there is some. Intelligence is a favorable adaptation for some species. But those species aren't even the majority of life on this planet. Bacteria, plants, fungi, viruses and insects vastly outnumber mammals, birds and cephalopods. And they've been around for far longer.

So it's hard to see how intelligence is the end result of evolution. It's not even clear that it's a good long term adaptation for humans. We might go extinct because of our intelligence.

The options and the conscious decision are all which exist in the moment of decision. — bahman

I take it you're no fan of Freud. The brain and body also exist in the moment of decision.

So now we need three unjustifiable principles to certify our knowledge as true: Causality, the future will be the same as the past, and that the unexperienced is the same as the experienced. — tom

The problem has always been certifying our knowledge. If all we have is deductive logic, then we'll never know much. If the demand is certainty, Descartes got as far as the self before he had to bring God in to save the day.

I am consciously aware of situation and can decide too about whether I should move my hand or not. — bahman

But you're not consciously aware of what all goes into making your decision.

Because at the age of 47 I am pretty sure one normal lifetime will be enough for me. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Wow, really? I would be down with a few centuries, at least. Humans live such short lives as it is, compared to other time scales.

But he is pointing out that there is no logical support for the belief. — andrewk

You mean deductive logical support. Inferential and probabilistic reasons can be given for it. It's seems perfectly rational to me to infer that we have this habit of mind because causality exists, which permits an evolutionary account.

As I said, Sunyata has a good argument behind it and materialism backs it up. — TheMadFool

It all depends on whether one is convinced by mereological nihilism, and the project of reductionism in the sciences. I tend to think that objects can consist of parts, systems can consist of individual behaviors, and the self can exist as certain brain activity with a cultural context.

I don't think I have to say that only subatomic particles or fields exist. One can argue for that, but I'm not sold on it. I also tend to think that social structures like companies and governments exist. It's about the emergent complexity of various systems that result in objects, selves, social arrangements.

If you just look at an individual ant, it's behavior is pretty dumb and mindless. But an ant colony engages in impressive endeavors, which consist entirely of dumb ant behaviors interacting with one another. Do we understand ants as only the individuals? Is an ant colony not a thing in the world? If so, we're going to run into huge difficulties explaining how ants survive.

Pertinently, AGI/ASI can theoretically solve any task, given sufficient compute resources, including tasks performed by bacteria! — ProgrammingGodJordan

It's not whether AI can solve tasks performed by bacteria, it's the likelihood that bacteria will still be around long after the last machines rust away. All of human civilization is but a tiny blip in the history of life.

It's an interesting question as to whether the end result of human civilization is AI.

But personally, it's not my goal to create AI, and even if I had the means to do so, I would only do it to benefit myself and other humans, not as an end in itself. If it's my life or AI, I choose my life, and I choose humanity. I don't care about machines beyond their utility or interest to humans. When not consuming scifi, I prefer the augmented intelligence route over artificial, where it's always humans that are being made smarter, instead of being replaced.

Why? Because machines don't care about anything, don't feel, aren't conscious. They're just tools.

As for life in general, I don't see why intelligence is preferable to other strategies. Ants or bacteria may long outlive bigger brained mammals and their technological creations. Despite all our success, bacteria still have us way outnumbered. It's a bit egotistical to think we're the central focus of life.

Horseshoe crabs have been around for 400+ million years in a similar form. Why would that be if super optimization is the goal? There could be planets where the most sophisticated form of life is something like a horseshoe crab or jellyfish. Maybe Earth is an outlier.

Kurzweil is an interesting thinker, but he always comes across as someone who thinks because they're an expert in one domain, that makes them an expert in all the others.