Also relevant is certain empiricists, like Berkeley, claiming to be unable to visualize e.g. triangles in the abstract, and so claiming to have no general idea of them. — The Great Whatever

Step 1 in avoiding philosophical mistakes:

Resist the urge to generalize from yourself to all others.

I wonder if men are worse visualizers than women, or tend to have more p-zombie tendencies. It wouldn't surprise me if women generally had a greater depth or subtlety of feeling than men. — The Great Whatever

Men tend to be more autistic, but Grandin is an autstic woman. From her writings, she seems to have trouble understanding other people's feelings. The nuance of social situations have been difficult for her.

Men also seem to identify less with their bodies than women (experience a greater degree of dissociation). I wonder if this motivated philosophers in the past to think of the soul or mind independent of the body.

I tend to suspect that philosophy is heavily influenced by human biology. Notice how often visual language is used. Wasn't the notion of matching up propositions with pictures a primary motivation of the Tracticus?

I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.

<snip>

Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific steeples; there is no generalized one. Images of steeples flash through my mind like clicking quickly through a series of slides or pictures on a computer screen. On the other hand, highly verbal thinkers may "see" the words "church steeple," or will "see" just a simple stick-figure steeple.

http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html — Temple Grandin

I find that fascinating, because I'm a poor visualizer like Michael. My guess is that if Dennett was like Grandin, his philosophy would go in a different direction. But then again, he probably wouldn't be a philosopher.

ndeed the machinery of the world seem to have little room for them. — The Great Whatever

Maybe that's because the machinery of the world is understood as an abstraction. So, materialism has a mind/body problem, because the mind was taken out of it in order to get at the objective properties.

If all you're saying is that there are great variations in phenomenological experience, I do think that's an interesting scientific fact, but I don't know how it matters to this philosophical question any more than the well accepted fact that there are great variations in how well different people's perceptions work as well as their intellect in deciphering the meaning of their experiences. — Hanover

It may guide different philosophers intuitions about the mind. As I stated in an earlier post, I've read that some philosophers were skeptical that people could do visual rotations in their head. This is probably because those philosophers were poor visualizers, not because nobody is capable of doing so.

And for those philosophers like Dennett, who deny that there is any experience whatsoever in the head, it's all external (there is no Cartesian Theatre), one has to wonder whether they have aphantasia.

I once read an article by a guy who claimed dreaming was a purely linguistic phenomenon – that there was nothing to dreaming but reporting that one dreamt the next morning. Pretty retarded. — The Great Whatever

That's an example of doing bad philosophy.

The guy in the article says he doesn't dream, but self-reports of dreaming frequency are well-known to be unreliable. — The Great Whatever

Dennett in his early career defended the notion that dreams are a coming-to-seem-to-remember upon awakening. That we don't actually experience dreams while asleep, but rather the false memories are creating during awakening.

That's prima facie absurd for most people who have decent recall of dreaming, particularly lucid and semi-awake dreaming. Also, the dream studies support dreaming as an experience while asleep. But it's interesting how far distinguished philosophers like Dennett will go out of their way to deny subjective experiences.

omeone responded and said this was a bad way of speaking, that it's just thinking about a song, you can't actually 'hear songs in your head' and that this was a philosopher's confusion etc. etc. But the first guy was like, no, you don't get it, people literally have a quasi-auditory experience of music. — The Great Whatever

I get songs stuck in my head as well. It's not a philosophical confusion either. I literally have a quasi-auditory experience. Anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong, although maybe they don't have such experiences. Most people do, I suspect. Which is why the phrase is popular.

Do aphantasiacs dream? I thought everyone dreamed with the exception of a rare genetic condition that prevents sleep (which leads to death eventually).

What about inner dialog? I have an inner dialog going throughout the day. It's hard for me to imagine other people not hearing their own thoughts, outside of meditation. Aphantasics don't hear their thoughts? Do they have memories? Can they tell themselves a story?

Makes me wonder if Daniel Dennett has aphantasia. I recall reading where someone was talking about how certain philosophers were skeptical that human beings could actually visually rotate images in their mind, even though they claimed to be able to do so. There is now experimental support for visual rotation, but the author remarked that he realized some philosophers lacked the ability to visualize, and so they assumed everyone else was the same.

Also reminds me of Temple Grandin, who is the opposite of aphantasia. She's a visual thinker, and language is a secondary means of understanding that has to be translated from imagery. She compared her mind to a holodeck. But she had great difficulty understanding certain philosophical writings. They were too abstract.

I'm a poor visualizer, but I do visualize. Would love to know what it's like to have the equivalent of a holodeck in my mind. Would really help with certain skills.

You can't get time in the abstract, you have to look to your experience. And if you actually do that (instead of mining your experience to support a thesis, examining it through a premeditated lens) its all there, very simple. The past is past, the present is present, the future is future. It's not mystical - its common sense. — csalisbury

The problem here is that GR would seem to support some form of eternalism. Our common sense has often been wrong about the world, particularly when it comes to physics. But maybe there is a way of interpreting relativistic time frames that doesn't support block theory of time?

Do any of the options (including the 'growing block') make any difference to how we act? They seem to me like unsolvable word games. — mcdoodle

It's a question about the nature of time, and one that interests scientists as well as philosophers. I don't see it as just a word game. It's not like the liar paradox. Instead, time is fundamental to the world we experience, whatever time is exactly.

On this view, there can be no fact about what would have happened to you (singular) if you had opened the Schrodinger's Cat box at an earlier time. — Andrew M

That and the cat would know whether it was dead or alive. Never knew why a cat was different from a person in this scenario, as if there's something special about human observers that cat observers lack.

I know Schrodinger's point was that it was ridiculous to think the cat would be in a superposed state of alive and dead before we look, but a lot of people have taken it to mean the opposite.

Suppose I was speaking to a crowd of people and I said, "You have a red shirt." That statement lacks a truth value unless I'm addressing a specific person. — Andrew M

Does it, though? What if ten people in the crowd had a red shirt? Does the statement fail to refer to them?

I've certainly listened to speakers use a general you to address some people in the crowd.

Maybe the problem is expecting that ordinary language propositions necessarily rely on bivalence. In the case of QM, the truth value can depend on which branch, if one adopts MWI.

suppose a consequence of my view is that the world must remain fundamentally "mysterious" or "miraculous" in the sense that it cannot be explained as a whole. — Ignignot

That was Wittgenstein's position. The issue has come up in materialist vs. idealist arguments, where the idealist can just say the materialist is moving brute from experience to the material, which still leaves the material world unexplained.

I think you take explanation as far as you can, and then what's left is mysterious, for now. Maybe it will be explained one day, and maybe not.

Actually, I was trying to say (perhaps ineloquently) that something is indeed fundamentally "brute." These are the "prime" necessary connections. They are merely descriptive. "That's just the way things are." — Ignignot

That might be the case. My concern with bruteness is that it can be placed anywhere. Maybe experience itself is brute, as a few posters on here have argued in the past. Not my position, but it did help end the discussion in their favor, because where do you go after that?

Or if this necessity is explained by other more general necessities ("laws"), then we still always have some irreducible or "prime" necessities that just are what they are for no reason at all. — Ignignot

Maybe. I don't know whether it's possible to arrive at a self-explanatory theory for whatever is most fundamental. If not, then something is fundamentally brute.

but Kant showed that even 'bare experience' is dependent on the categories of understanding, the intuitions, and the other constituents of reason, without which there can be no experience. — Wayfarer

But if we want to know why this the case, then we're faced with:

1. There is no cause for our reason.

2. Mind is the causative power.

3. Reality is causal, and the mind reflects this. To put it in modern terms, the mind evolved to expect causal explanations, because the world is causal, and creatures who understand that are more fit.

Can there be a modal correspondence theory of truth?

This is why it is necessary to understand why Kant said that Hume had 'awoken him from his dogmatic slumbers', and what he did as a result. That was central to Kant's philosophical enterprise. So only considering what Hume had to say about it, is only considering the prologue to Kant's response. — Wayfarer

So Kant realized that Hume's argument was disastrous to reason, and something more needed to be said.

So either the statement "the particle will be at position p at time t" isn't either true or false or something other than a reference to the laws of nature is required to explain its truth value. — Michael

Do laws of nature preclude probabilistic outcomes? The coin flip is 50/50. I can predict that in advance. But what makes it 50/50?

It goes to the question of what's behind probability in the world. Saying it's uncaused doesn't explain anything. Why 50/50 and not some other probability?

Even though the Calvinist would claim to see some goodness, they would claim that the goodness is ultimately in God, of whom we cannot ultimately understand. — Chany

I think the Calvinists make a better argument regarding God's sovereignty (or omni-nature), but it still has the problem of redefining the good to be a non-human concept. Which you can do, but the cost is that the meaning shifts.

God is all-good. Meaning, God is all-good in a way we don't understand. Which could easily apply to a God who loves torture, or anything at all, since we're no longer dealing with human conceptions of good.

That's not a "good" solution to the problem of evil, and it's easy to parody with an evil God.

The good needs to be understood independent of God, or else you end saying nothing of meaningful about the good. Good ends up being whatever God happens to be, which could be anything.

Hume's claim is that we don't see causation. We only see invariant correlation, and then infer causation – and that this inference isn't deduction. — Michael

When Hume notes that inference isn't deduction, was his conclusion that we can't know that causation exists, because it's inferential, or just that we can be wrong about what causes what?

And what was this in reaction to? Did the rationalists think we could deduce causation?

(This is somewhat side-tracking us from the problem of counterfactuals raised in the OP) — Pierre-Normand

Alright, so to get back on track, what makes a counterfactual true for a deflationary theorist? If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen. That's a true statement, correct?

Many deflationary theorists may only make some minimalist formal points about the semantics of "... is true", and hence aren't committed to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology. — Pierre-Normand

So what is the point of deflationary truth? That there is nothing metaphysically significant about truth or propositions? So all one needs to do is give a decent account of knowing, and I suppose some account of how language works, or cognition, and that's all there is to it?

I don't think you meant to say "makes the sentence white", but rather "makes the sentence true". — Pierre-Normand

I fixed it after re-reading. But kind of interesting typo. The white from the snow gets into the sentence to make it true, or something! Just kidding, or not, given some of the epic discussions on truth and perception from the old forum.

But I think they do, by means of broadly Kantian accounts of (intuition dependent) conceptual abilities and theories of judgment. — Pierre-Normand

I see. So a deflationary view of truth is based on Kantian categories of thought, or can be.

A deflationary theorist can make a further move and say, just go outside and look and you'll see that the snow is white. And indeed we will, if it is white. But that just puts us back into naive realism, before accounting for the problem of perception, questions of skepticism, consciousness, the mind/body problem, and anything else that might be a problem for knowing about states of affairs.

But she doesn't claim this to imply that there must exist two metaphysically distinct sorts of things -- abstract propositions on the one side, and concrete elements of reality (i.e. states of affair) on the other side -- that somehow problematically correspond to one another. — Pierre-Normand

She doesn't, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a sentence in a human language on one side and the state of affairs which makes the sentence true on the other. And so the question is still how the snow being white makes the sentence true, because a sentence isn't a state of affairs, no matter what theory of truth one espouses.

So deflationary theorists still have to account for how we know that the snow is white.

Eternal hell doesn't square with a perfectly good God.

The Calvinists make a good point about free will. How can God be sovereign and not in control of where people end up for eternity? You can't have it both ways.

Their problem is that the then have to reconcile the perfect good with God predestining who is damned.

What about a statement about some future (or hypothetical) quantum event? — Michael

The probability can be known in advance. Changing from determinism to probability doesn't change the fact that there is an apparent order to events, because what makes the probabilities come out the way they do?

We're just creatures. Inherently, and when we are wronged, or we see others wronged, part of us wishes to pay back that suffering and pain a thousand fold -- but those that hurt us are just people, that themselves were hurt, and now fear monsters. There are no monsters though, just people. — Wosret

I don't know about that. Some people hurt others because they like it, or they want power and money, or their ideological belief requires it. Not everyone feels empathy, or cares about consequences.

Mental construction is causative. It's the same as saying that causation is a habit of thought.

I don't know. Can't say I've given it much thought before.

Obviously, sex with a goat is to be preferred over child-rape. — Bitter Crank

Didn't think I'd ever see that said on here. LOL.

It's really hard to get the damn dog to hold still even when I tune him, let alone when I try an arpeggio. — Brainglitch

>:O

Past experience is an excellent guide, assuming contiguity past to future. But the challenge was to support this assumption. — Mongrel

Is the problem related to causality? If we knew that the sun would be caused to shine for billions more years, then it wouldn't make sense to say it's possible it might stop shining tomorrow.

And that is what we think is the case. The sun has the matter it needs to do fusion for a long time. In order for that not to be the case, nuclear physics would have to change. We have no basis on which to suppose to suppose that hydrogen would stop fusing under the sun's gravity, or that gravity would change.

Why think any of that is the case? Because it makes sense of the sun shining for billions of years. Otherwise, it's just one unconnected moment to the next, where the sun just happened to shine for all that time.

For example, only if we have an impoverished view of perception are we tempted to think that we can't see one thing causing another — The Great Whatever

Why did Hume think we couldn't perceive causation? Because we only see the constant conjunction and not the underlying cause? Hume assumed that if there is such thing as causation, it had to be something unperceived.

Was that because we're sometimes wrong in assuming that A necessitates B, when it was really C that necessitates B?

Seems like since Hume most people have taken it for granted that we don't perceive causation. Either it's a habit of mind (which is contradictory since habits are causal as pointed out by Csalisbury), or it's something real, but unperceivable, like universals or laws of nature, which aren't empirical.

But what if one took a different tract and argued that we do perceive causation?

Yes. To say that humans are poor at philosophy assumes some ideal way of doing philosophy that humans are not attaining. It's like saying that all humans are poor at basketball, despite players such as Michael Jordan. It presupposes some ideal philosopher (or basketball player) that no human can match. — Luke

I'm not considering the ideal. It's a comparison with other human abilities. We're naturally good at language and storytelling. Math and logic are harder for us to be good at. Memory recall is rather poor, when it comes to accuracy.

Colin McGinn in discussing the possibility that we're cognitively closed to certain philosophical answers mentioned that we're very good at technology, but there could be another intelligent species out there that's the reverse. Where they're as good at doing philosophy as we are at tool making. It's not that they would be perfect philosophers, just good at it.

It's like saying humans are bad at reasoning. No, we're very bloody good at it actually compared to every other life form we know of. — Baden

Some cognitive scientists have stated that we are bad at reasoning. That we're better than other animals is like saying I'm better at playing the violin than a dog.

But if no humans mastered playing the violin, despite putting in the effort, then we would conclude that humans are bad at playing the violin. What would be the comparison? Other instruments.

But it's easy enough to find things we are uncontroversially bad at. Crunching big numbers, memory accuracy, repetitive perfection - stuff that computers are very good at. Now you might argue that there's the comparison, but computers were made because we're bad at those things. Computers used to be human calculators. It wasn't impossible with lots of people to do heavy duty calculations, it's just inefficient and error prone.

then say someone like Wittgenstein, who ultimately I think ended up wasting everyone's time by piling a series of retarded aphorisms on the tradition that now everyone has to write Ph.D. theses about, forever. Yet Wittgenstein is 'the genius,' and for that reason, more of an idiot. — The Great Whatever

I'm curious about your critique of Wittgenstein's main contention that language is the chief cause of philosophical problems. I take it you don't agree with this at all. That most long standing philosophical puzzles exist not because language has fooled us, but because they are genuine puzzles.

What is the error that led Wittgenstein to think this?