Do you know any better ones (not joking)?

Look to discord. forums are the past.

I try, but it seems like every other place is a Nazi/Communist recruitment center or a place to post pornography of cartoon characters or talk about having bipolar disorder...

Well, then post on here. I was being tongue-in-cheek, it's not that bad. I feel like the thing you said about posts being bad was weirdly placed. It seemed to say something like: I don't need to respond to you, because this is a lame place!


Maybe, maybe. But then you're between a rock and hard place. And I don't know where to direct you

I feel like the thing you said about posts being bad was weirdly placed. It seemed to say something like: I don't need to respond to you, because this is a lame place! — csalisbury

I think your posts are pretty good, but the OP is bad. I was just puzzled by why you thought my comments were irrelevant, since they have to do with the topic discussed in the OP exactly. Maybe you wanted to talk about something else, not the OP, and were disappointed the conversation didn't steer the way you wanted?

Between the indubitability of experience and the necessity of a cause, why does one have to take precedence?

I was just puzzled by why you thought my comments were irrelevant, since they have to do with the topic discussed in the OP exactly. Maybe you wanted to talk about something else, not the OP, and were disappointed the conversation didn't steer the way you wanted? — Snakes Alive

Here's the post you're referencing:

It's true that that's how we're accustomed to think of it by default. I don't think there's any possible way to answer transcendent questions about whether that way of seeing it is the right way.

The point is that the Cartesian turn allows one to see it the other way – a way that one initially does not even understand that one can see it. In that sense, it's not like learning a new true proposition, but being able to see where once one was blind. You get a new ability. The Cartesian is also right that in some sense this is the way it was 'all along.' You can of course choose to ignore this new ability and have faith that it is just an aberration, and the old way of seeing things is the 'right way.' But it's just that – faith.

I sincerely - I'm not saying this rhetorically - don't know what this post means. I can't connect it to the broader discussion.

But it's replying directly to what you said.

Should the title read, Appearance vs Reality vs The World?

Why don't I try just having this, so there can be no misperception as to what I'm replying to:

It's not true that the sun is small and here. It's large and out there. etc — csalisbury

That's how we are accustomed to think of it – but there's no reason to think that way is right.

Do you understand that?

I'd say that we're accustomed to thinking that the sun is large and out there. But I'm not trying to be difficult. I went to post something in agreement, but it's too significant a thing to smudge.

[edit] oh, unless your point was that there's no reason to think the sun is large and out there?

So I agree, but that was my whole point. We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. I take Descartes just to have noticed this.

So I agree, but that was my whole point. We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. I take Descartes just to have noticed this.

Before we go further, I just want to make sure I understand. Your ultimate response to the idea that 'seems' talk is based on 'is' talk is to challenge the idea that experiences are experiences 'of' something? Is that fair?

No, my response to that question is as it was before: that one is syntactically derived from the other has nothing to do with epistemology. This was in response to your post above.

i already responded to that point, thoroughly.

talk to you in the morning, if then

And I responded to the response.

WTF is with all the questions about how basic dialogue works?

youre a diamond in the rough bb

The OP seems okay to me, just a bit impenetrable without a certain background. It's taking about how we consider knowledge in relation to our experiences.

The major point is about how we consider the distinction between what exists/is true compared to what appears our experiences.

Descartes makes a split between reality and appearance. We find ourselves in a space in which appearances are consider seperate to reality. On the one hand, there is what appears, which can be anything and is true in its appearance. While on the other, there is reality, things which are true outside of appearance (e.g. the desert which is there when I see a mirage).

The OP is taking this distinction to task for seperating appearance from reality. While it's correct to make a distinction between our experiences and the world which doesn't appear, it has an unfortunate effect of implying appearances are outside reality.

To avoid the issue, the OP is suggesting we consider appearance differently. Instead of this making of them opposed to reality, we instead understand them to be part of reality, shifting the question from "appearance Vs reality" to "Our appearances are part of reality. What of reality do they show or do not show?"

In doing this, we deflate and remove the issue of how to get from appearances to reality. Appearance are of reality and show (or do not show) parts of reality we are interested in.

I want to claim this as thinking of us. Though, here I am posting on a forum, so I guess the past is sometimes the future.

The problem with insisting that there is no such distinction and thus to reduce (in a sense) perceiving to believing/disbelieving tends to show up when trying to account for perceptual error -i.e. not the mere withholding of full assent to a proposition, but a genuine belief, based on vision say, that something in the environment is a certain way visually when it in fact is not that way. In those cases, the pressure to move from "something appears to be F" to "something actually is F" remains. — jkg20

I agree with this so far as it goes, but I wonder just how far it does. After all, are we not already operating in the sphere of 'is' claims here? That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity.

The problem then isn't that we can't know reality prior appearance, but we can't even discuss a reality without appearances. — Hanover

The above applies to this as well: while this may well be true, the (Cartesian) problem remains diffused: if we can't discuss a reality without appearances, then the problem of trying to make the move from appearance to reality is not one, insofar as they are something of a package deal. There might be another, separate problem, about how to understand the exact status of each in relation to the other (something like: "is there a reality without appearences?)" , but this would not be the same problem as the one being addressed. It's important, I think, to keep these two issues apart. Snakes seems to be making a similar conflation, although his confusion seems to be deeper.

imagine a world where electric lighting has not yet been invented. In this world, all colors appear exactly as they are. Green looks green in natural light, and so on. With the invention of electric lighting however, colors can now appear to look other than what they are. — StreetlightX

Have you seen those amusing cups that (appear to) change colour when hot water is poured in?

Imagine a world where hot water has not been invented. In this world all colours appear exactly as they are...

It's a pretty sophisticated scientific understanding that distinguishes the tie that 'appears' to change colour from the cup that 'really' changes colour. So sophisticated as to appear arbitrary., and one can imagine the talk being, "Ah, sir, this is a marvellous colour changing tie that is blue indoors and turns green outside."

It is the set up of the thought experiment that is important - "colours appear exactly as they are". In such a world, one would not make a distinction between appearance and reality because they would be indistinguishable.

If mirages could quench one's thirst, they would be oases. In this case the distinction between appearance and reality imposes itself. One is obliged to face the reality of the unreality of a mirage, and likewise the reality of the reality of the oasis as one drinks or does not drink.

Reality imposes itself.
Reality imposes itself as distinct from appearance, and it is the reality of the unreality of appearances that obliges us to make the distinction or die of thirst. One does not question the reality of dying of thirst, except from the comfort of an armchair with a cup of whatever appearance close at hand.

the problem of trying to make the move from appearance to reality is not one, insofar as they are something of a package deal. — StreetlightX

Exactly; perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - Dreaming of thinking, 'perhaps I am dreaming - ...'''''. It stops making sense, and so it must be a dream that I am dreaming, that I am dreaming, ... and that doesn't make sense either. Not just something of a package, but totally a package. Reality and unreality only have any sense at all as a distinction, so global doubt makes no sense, even to a lucid dreamer; to know/feel that all this is a dream is already to have a sense of reality.

global doubt makes no sense, even to a lucid dreamer; to know/feel that all this is a dream is already to have a sense of reality. — unenlightened

This just means global doubt couldn't be a baby's first thought.

1) We don't know enough about consciousness to know if there is such a thing as a "first thought"

2) The adult is still free to wonder if she might have been mistaken in her former confidence about wakefulness

3) Sellars probably does undermine the argument from illusion, which means we're talking about sense data, not dreams.

2) The adult is still free to wonder if she might have been mistaken in her former confidence about wakefulness — frank

Of course. If I think, "all this is a dream" as anyone can, it is to hypothesise a wakefulness that is absent.
But if all this is a dream, then a hypothesis, (that all this is a dream) within a dream is doubly dreamy, not dreamily realistic.

3) Sellars probably does undermine the argument from illusion, which means we're talking about sense data, not dreams. — frank

I await with interest your spelling out the difference between sense data and dreams, without recourse to reality.

Of course. If I think, "all this is a dream" as anyone can, it is to hypothesise a wakefulness that is absent — unenlightened

True, but global skepticism does not positively assert that this is a dream, and so is not hypothesizing anything.

I await with interest your spelling out the difference between sense data and dreams, without recourse to reality. — unenlightened

That's an interesting challenge, but I'm not sure why you're setting it for me. I endorse Sellars' attack on the argument from illusion. What you're pointing out is exactly what undermines it.

Sellars does nothing for global skepticism, though. For the doubter "real" is simply honorific. Comprehension of the concept of error is grounded in the one thing no thinking entity can doubt: "Cogito"

I think you underestimate Sellars. If "real" is honorific, then "unreal" is no less so, and 'doubt' is itself a mere fancy.

To construct thought as the real (from doubt) is to make a prison of thought, from whence nothing else can be contacted, and even God is remote. Thus Cartesian certainty is exactly the dream from which one needs to awaken.

I agree with what you're saying. It's just bypassing my point. As Searle commented, the odd thing about solipsism is that I can easily disprove yours. I have no means by which to disprove my own.

I disagree with your characterization of the Cogito as 'thought constructed as real from doubt.' But if we stipulate that we're going to call that a Cartesian view, then I agree with you.

Right, and there was an analogous kind of self-awareness when the empiricists noticed that you could come to 'see' things as just rearranged as different sizes in the visual field, instead of representing objective distances. We just naturally see these things as distances, but we only do this by means of the visual field being stimulated in this way, and when one turns to epistemology one 'sees' this again. Usually one sees 'through' it. — Snakes Alive

But does that work as well with the other senses? Overly relying on vision can distort one's philosophical "picture".

Csalisbury brought up the sun as a counter example. One reason for thinking it's not just a small object in the visual field as opposed to far away is because the sun is a hot object that only manages not to burn (and irradiate us) because it's far away. An active volcano is not simply small in the visual field, it's at a distance or it would be burning us up.

The point here is that one's epistemology needs ot integrate information from all the senses across many different scenarios, and not just propose one possibility based on how vision works. Otherwise, you end up with a "distorted view" of how we experience and know about the world.

We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. — Snakes Alive

This is confused. Our perceptual experiences are about things or events, but the experiences themselves are a mental activity. There is an important distinction to make between the activity of perceiving and what is being perceived.

I'm interacting with some legos, seeing them, feeling them, putting them together. The interaction is not the legos. That's what I'm doing. The legs are something else as evidence by the fact that other people can interact with them.

That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity. — StreetlightX

Exactly. For example., It can't all just be a dream, because a dream implies a waking world. If I"m always in a dream, I can't fall asleep to dream or wake up to stop dreaming. So then dreaming collapses into what's real.

The only way around that is to propose that someone else (God I guess) is dreaming me, meaning that God must be able to wake up and realize she was dreaming. But that's just something we invent because we can distinguish between being awake and dreaming.

Similarly, it it were all just appearance, then appearance stops being an appearance. But we already have an appearance/reality distinction because there are appearances to contrast with what's real, just like we awake from the dream realizing it was a dream.

Reality is necessarily primary. All skepticism is parasitic upon it.

I disagree with your characterization of the Cogito as 'thought constructed as real from doubt.' — frank

I think it's fair. The doubt is constructed via a conception of an evil demon; the indubitability of the self is concluded from the fact of the constructed doubt, and the reality of doubt as thought can only result in the reality of self as thought. I think, therefore I am... thought. There's nothing else to be(ing) at this point.

If only he had started with doing instead of thinking. I fuck about, therefore I am a dick. Which leads naturally to carnal knowledge as the fount of all wisdom.