Quite blustery, but demonstration of more accurate understanding of Special Relativity is what I was hoping to see. So like I said, if you can provide that, get back to me. — wonderer1

I demonstrated a very accurate understanding. But you requested math, which is not necessary for an accurate understanding of the principles involved. Therefore you demonstrated an inaccurate understanding, thinking that math was a requirement. And still you refuse to state your argument. Please state your argument.

being prepared to sustain engagement as long as is required to either arrive at agreement or agreement to disagree. — Janus

I don't think I can be accused of dodging. I write a lot of responses.

What I mean by such realism (the kind I reject) is the postulation of 'aperspectival stuff' being primary in some sense, existing in contrast to ( and prior to ) mind or consciousness. — plaque flag

That's pretty well what I'm also rejecting.

Metaphysically, realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences. This idea is best clarified in contrast with positions that deny it. For instance, it is denied by any position that falls under the traditional heading of “idealism”, including some forms of phenomenology, according to which there is no world external to and thus independent of the mind. — plaque flag

:up: But the way I have worded the OP, I'm trying to avoid the implication of non-perceived objects ceasing to exist, so as to avoid the necessity of positing a 'Divine Intellect' which maintains them in existence (per Berkeley).

consciousness is just the being of the world given 'perspectively ' — plaque flag

I've always thought that the designation of humans as 'beings' carries that implication.

So, saying that stuff cannot exist without a perspective, to my way of thinking, conflates existence with cognition. I see no reason to do that, and it just seems logically and conceptually wrong. — Janus

All of our 'experience' of the world features it surrounding our sentient flesh. But we tend to look right through our own looking. Russell writes of a crowd seeing an event and then hardly noticing that they saw the event from this or that position, unless that position happens to be relevant. We are such practical, linguistic creatures, then we [ tend ] to 'look right through.' And physical science is a supreme achievement in this direction. But this immense convenience tempts us into paradox.

We pretend that we can mean more by 'physical object' than something like a permanent possibility of perception. I think that the nearest mountain will survive me (of course), but what that means is that I expect others to be able to perceive that mountain, after I'm gone, pretty much they way I did, when I was still around. Part of the experience of such objects is a sense of their being-experiencable-by-others.

I see no reason to do that, and it just seems logically and conceptually wrong.

FWIW, I realize it's a bold position, but 'just seems' is only a report of an initial reaction. It doesn't show how the position is wrong.

We are such practical, linguistic creatures, then we ought to 'look right through.' And physical science is a supreme achievement in this direction. — plaque flag

Except for the blind spot of science, which ironically is a product of that same tendency not to be aware of our own seeing. Isn't that the main point of Husserl's critique of naturalism?

Typo. Meant to write 'tend.'

That's pretty well what I'm also rejecting. — Wayfarer

Well I think my own view (and Husserl's) is very close to a certain side of Kant --- that part in the CPR where he writes about beings on the moon.

But what is the thing-in-itself if not a transformation of the traditional atoms-and-void into something darker and more elusive ? Something radically aperspectival ? Even time and space are made part of the curtain that hides Reality from us. A gulf or moat that is declared eternally uncrossable in principle. Anti-experiential, anti-perspectival. Basically non-sense in the sense of anti-sense or pure negation of experience.

I quote Locke and Hobbes to show that Kant is very much part of a sequence, pushing things to the limit, until Fichte and Hegel went all the way, returning to a now sophisticated (direct) realism. Objects do not hide behind themselves. The subject and the object are one.

But the way I have worded the OP, I'm trying to avoid the implication of non-perceived objects ceasing to exist, so as to avoid the necessity of positing a 'Divine Intellect' which maintains them in existence (per Berkeley). — Wayfarer

I think this is solved with J S Mill's permanent possibilities of perception. It's a semantic twist, really. The point is that what we mean by the existence of the independent object is that it's there if we look for it, etc. If X, then Y. The bullet can kill me even if I don't want it to. If I die, my children can still live in this house. And so on. Possible and actual experience. What else is such 'existence' supposed to mean ? And what about ancestral objects ? If I had a time machine, I could look at the dinosaurs. That sort of thing, even if I can't have a time machine. Sort of like science being at least in principle testable, even if there's not currently enough energy for an experiment. I'd say reality is at least in principle experiencable (which we might speak of as present experience in terms of actuality and possibility.)

I've always thought that the designation of humans as 'beings' carries that implication. — Wayfarer

When I read (for instance) Husserl's Ideas II (which is thought to have inspired Heidegger in a pretty direct way), it made me remember the way I understood life when I was younger. The vivid sensuality of youth makes it hard to forget embodiment and perspective. But we are trained into an undeniably practically powerful tradition of taking objects radically independently.

This is so much the case that we talk of the hard problem of consciousness. We somehow find it obvious that [today's version of ] atoms-&-void can exist unproblematically prior-to-us and independently in some fundamental way.

This is despite the fact that all of our experience features our own sentient flesh continually at the center of the world. Of course I see the bodies of others as objects in the world, but the deepest part of the other, the true radical otherness of the other, is that they are also the very being of the world, the same world from another point of view. Interpentrating worldstreamings. The body of the other is a kind of avatar or vessel for some strange perspectival worlding of the world. Very strange and yet so familiar. Many many quasi-copies of the world with no original.

Anyone who supposes that if all the perceiving subjects were removed from the world then the objects, as we have any conception of them, could continue in existence all by themselves has radically failed to understand what objects are. — Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Bryan Magee

:up:

This is in line with my view, and J S Mill's and Berkeley's, I think. Objects 'are' possible and actual experiences.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead' — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

I tend to agree, but there's a reason I avoid the word 'consciousness.' I really think the way to go here is a kind of monism. It's not that consciousness is one of two necessary ingredients, the other being proto-stuff (thing-in-itself batter.) No. I say so-called consciousness is being pure and simple. The 'pure witness' is no longer more subject than object, even if we find it at the center of an empirical subject, which is to say intensely entangled with sentient flesh. We have something non-dual that's intimately associated with an empirical subject. And world-streaming is care-structured, hence the naturalness of 'transcendental ego' talk. But this will tempt us to stop short of identifying being and consciousness.

We are such practical, linguistic creatures, then we [ tend ] to 'look right through.' And physical science is a supreme achievement in this direction — plaque flag

I was right with you up until 'physical science'. I want to back up to this point, as it's central to my concerns.

There is an Aeon essay, The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience, which I started a thread about here some time back.

When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we don’t tend to see the experiences that underpin them. We do not see how experience makes their presence to us possible. Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that bestows absolute knowledge of reality, independent of how it shows up and how we interact with it. ...

That of course is the main point made by phenomenology. They go on

Scientific materialists will argue that the scientific method enables us to get outside of experience and grasp the world as it is in itself. As will be clear by now, we disagree; indeed, we believe that this way of thinking misrepresents the very method and practice of science.

Which is exactly what I was trying to get at with:

What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth. — Wayfarer

(Incidentally, that Aeon essay, by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, is to be published as a book in March next year.)

This is in line with my view... — plaque flag

I tend to agree.... — plaque flag

Well, that's a relief! I'll take my wins wherever I can get 'em ;-)

Let me clarify. 'Looking right through' is genuine practical achievement, even while being an ontological disaster. I mean we literally train to ignore what phenomenology therefore has to excavate. So that 'what is ontically closest is ontologically farthest.' Too intimate, like water we swim in, clothes we wear. We forget that our body just always happens to be there, right at the center of the world that flows around us.

.....As I think I've already mentioned either here or some other place - it's something I mention often - the canonical source for the idea of that 'the eye cannot see itself' is not something found in the Western tradition, as far as I'm aware. It's found in the Upaniṣads. There's an erudite and witty French philosopher of science named Michel Bitbol who has written some excellent articles on that point. But it's not something that I think you find in mainstream philosophy or philosophy of science.

I quote Locke and Hobbes to show that Kant is very much part of a sequence, pushing things to the limit, until Fichte and Hegel went all the way, returning to a now sophisticated (direct) realism. Objects do not hide behind themselves. The subject and the object are one. — plaque flag

Again from Eastern philosophy, you will doubtless recall the Zen koan, made into a song, 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.' That also is about the transition from naive realism (first there is..) to critical philosophy (then there is no...), and the 'return' to seeing 'things as they truly are' (then there is...)

Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that bestows absolute knowledge of reality, independent of how it shows up and how we interact with it. ...

I tend to blame a sort of hitchhiking bad metaphysics rather than science itself. Good clean science just creatively postulates and confirms patterns in experience. And shuts its mouth about anything beyond. Mach was a first rate philosopher, for instance, not just a scientist, and William James was all kinds of things, including a serious psychologist. Note that Mach studied psychophysics. He wrote a beautiful little book about space, very protophenomenological, influencing Einstein of course.

As I think I've already mentioned either here or some other place - it's something I mention often - the canonical source for the idea of that 'the eye cannot see itself' is not something found in the Western tradition, as far as I'm aware. It's found in the Upaniṣads. — Wayfarer

I wouldn't be surprised if the East had it first, tho I'd check the Christian mystics for a premodern grasp?

FWIW, I think what Wittgenstein was getting at (and I'm defending) is some version of tat tvam asi. My own take might be dry and secular, relatively speaking, but I really think there's a discursive approach here. One can reason to the conclusion.

As I mentioned earlier, if consciousness is really just the being of the world, then the eye not seeing itself is the fact that being is not itself an entity (the 'ontological difference.') There's something like the actual 'thereness' of things and also our weird articulation of this fact, invoking the concept of being which is of course an entity.

:clap: :pray:

Again from Eastern philosophy, you will doubtless recall the koan, made into a song, 'first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.' That also is about the transition from naive realism (first there is..) to critical philosophy (then there is no...), and the 'return' to seeing 'things as they truly are' (then there is...) — Wayfarer

:up:

I don't think I can be accused of dodging. I write a lot of responses. — Wayfarer

I haven't explicitly accused you of dodging. That said, I do have the impression that you are prone to withdraw when the going gets tough.

I see no reason to do that, and it just seems logically and conceptually wrong.

FWIW, I realize it's a bold position, but 'just seems' is only a report of an initial reaction. It doesn't show how the position is wrong. — plaque flag

I said why I thought it is wrong; it conflates existence with cognition, and I don't think that conflation is helpful. Also, it is not a general feature of philosophy to prove that positions are wrong. So, I'm not here to convince you, just to tell what I think and why I think it, and to hear others' accounts and comment on how I might agree or disagree with them.

I do have the impression that you are prone to withdraw when the going gets tough. — Janus

It might be a matter of deciding what challenges are worth responding to. There are plenty of times in these debates where people are talking past one another.

I'll be honest with you: there have been many times where I thought I have posed salient and difficult questions regarding what I have understood to be your position, only to find that no response is forthcoming.

Of course, I acknowledge you have no obligation to respond, and I don't really mind. There are some commonalities between our ways of thinking but there are also significant divergences. I'm one who likes to thrash these things out, but if you don't want to, that's OK too.

Fine, I have no problems with your criticisms, thank you for them.

:ok:

Kant's radicality makes the brain itself a mere piece of appearance, not to be trusted. He saws off the branch he's sitting on. Hoffman does the same thing. — plaque flag

:up:

It seems to me odd that Wayfarer will say that universals have mind-independent existence, but he will not admit that ordinary objects do. As I see it universals, or generalities, are only possible on account of the observed differences between, and commonalties shared by, objects. — Janus

:up: :up: Universals / generalities are abstracted from concrete particulars.

My argument is simpy that the mind or brain assimilates sensory and rational information and from this constructs what we understand as 'the world'. — Wayfarer

"The world" for me (dream)? for us (culture)? for all (nature)? :chin:

I'm not denying that there is a world apart from the mind, but saying that whatever we think or say about that purported world absent any mind is meaningless.

Yes, "meaningless" logico-mathematical (i.e. view from everywhere, or subject/pov-invariant) rather than "meaningful" linguistic-narrative (i.e. view from being there, or a relative / perspectival point-of-view).

NB: subject/pov-invariant is, of course, synonymous with "absent any mind".

Anyway, 'unknown unknowns' are "meaningless" and yet ineluctably encompassing, even constraining, of "whatever we think or say ... absent any mind" or not. What you call "meaningless", sir, seems to me the most meaningful thing we (philosophers & poets) can think or say about the world. :fire:

I'm struggling to understand what about this is controversial or confusing, it seems very straightforward to me.

It's that you (idealists) metaphysically prioritize meaning (i.e. mind (e.g. ideals, idols) over – in denial of – more/other-than-meaning (i.e. more/other-than-mind (e.g. practices)). I'm afraid this puts the proverbial cart before the horse ...

What I'm arguing against is the commonly-held view that mind is a product of physical causes. That is the general view of evolutionary naturalism, is it not? — Wayfarer

IMO, not for philosophy in general or metaphysics specifically. Naturalism simply excludes, or coarse-grains, super-natural concepts or entities from arguments and models.

I hold to a view that the mind transcends physical causes.

So you're an epiphenomenalist? Bodies are, in effect, mind-less automatons (deluded that they are more than that)? Or is it your position, Wayfarer, that "physical causes" are mere illusions, and that all events are intentional?

But I'm also not wishing to appeal to theism.

'Animism' instead? :eyes:

The argument from authority is a weak form of doing philosophy in my view; we need to learn to think for ourselves. — Janus

Absolutely. Concur 100%. You’ve considered a certain authority’s philosophy as wrong in at least a particular instance, which makes explicit you’ve thought in opposition to it.

I have always thought that Kant is wrong about space and time: if there can be things in themselves, then why not space and time in themselves? — Janus

So….he was mistaken in that he didn’t attribute real existence to space and time? Or, you think he should have? The theory holds that things-in-themselves possess real existence, and are the origin-in-kind of that which appears to sensibility. From which follows that to attribute the same conditions to, e.g., space, originating from space-in-itself, we should be able to represent the constituency of it, which is merely the arrangement of its matter according to form residing a priori in intuition (A20/B34), which is what is done with any other sensation. But the matter of space, according the antecedent conception of it, can be nothing other than an infinite aggregate of greater or lesser spaces, from which follows there is no determinable object possible to intuit at all. In common parlance, no phenomenal representation is at all possible for that which has infinite composition, but equally without any substance whatsoever. And here arises the requisite concreteness of that which appears, insofar as without it, we are presented with “…. For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd.…” (Bxxvii)

On the other hand…..there’s always an other hand…..the thing-in-itself is never that which appears, or is always that which could never appear, and, space is never that which appears, and, never could be, so perhaps they are a sort of in-themselves after all.

All that being said, and speaking without recourse to relevant authority, how do you think space-in-itself to be conceivable? How was Kant wrong with respect to his treatment of it?

'the eye cannot see itself' — Wayfarer

(Sigh)

Overlooked, or outright dismissed, is our brief exchange on pg. 14, re: brain/appearance.

Pretty common knowledge the brain has no nerve endings as pain receptors, hence we cannot feel our own brain. Hardly likely we’ll ever smell it or taste it, and seeing as how there’s something drastically wrong if it ever makes a sound we can hear, and the implication we’ll actually see it carries some serious consequences as well, it becomes absurd to then suppose our own brain, in which resides all our mental goings-on, can be an appearance to our own sensibility.

The brain sitting on the bench? Sure, there can be a valid phenomenal representation of that. And the comment expressing Locke’s qualities? Of which Kant deems it reasonable to admit the totality, concerns “actual existence of external things”, which…..DUH!!!!…..cannot be my own brain.

What’s really cool, is the converse. The brain on the bench can be an appearance without contradiction, but it cannot contain my thoughts without being one.

Kant didn’t saw off his own branch. He made it so you can take it home and make a killer table out of it, when his peers and successors burn down the tree.

You may be surprised like I was to see how much the brain already figures in Descartes, and therefore, presumably, in Kant.

...the mind does not immediately receive the impression from all the parts of the body, but only from the brain, or perhaps even from one small part of it...

...when I feel pain in the foot, the science of physics teaches me that this sensation is experienced by means of the nerves dispersed over the foot, which, extending like cords from it to the brain, when they are contracted in the foot, contract at the same time the inmost parts of the brain in which they have their origin, and excite in these parts a certain motion appointed by nature to cause in the mind a sensation of pain, as if existing in the foot; but as these nerves must pass through the tibia, the leg, the loins, the back, and neck, in order to reach the brain, it may happen that although their extremities in the foot are not affected, but only certain of their parts that pass through the loins or neck, the same movements, nevertheless, are excited in the brain by this motion as would have been caused there by a hurt received in the foot, and hence the mind will necessarily feel pain in the foot, just as if it had been hurt; and the same is true of all the other perceptions of our senses...

...as each of the movements that are made in the part of the brain by which the mind is immediately affected, impresses it with but a single sensation, the most likely supposition in the circumstances is, that this movement causes the mind to experience, among all the sensations which it is capable of impressing upon it; that one which is the best fitted, and generally the most useful for the preservation of the human body when it is in full health...

...when the nerves of the foot are violently or more than usually shaken, the motion passing through the medulla of the spine to the innermost parts of the brain affords a sign to the mind on which it experiences a sensation, viz, of pain, as if it were in the foot, by which the mind is admonished and excited to do its utmost to remove the cause of it as dangerous and hurtful to the foot...
— Descartes

http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations/9.htm

I add some crucial passages from the TLP. [Of course this is not at all about the authority of anyone, but a nod to and an employment of their admirable concision and focus.]

The world and life are one.

I am my world. (The microcosm.)

The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.

The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.

Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?

You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.

And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.

Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the "world is my world".

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world. — TLP

https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)#5

A highlight:
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

There is only world, but physics and ontology look to this or that aspect. of it, ignoring the rest, which can result in the confusion of making some of it a kind of unreal appearance.

Here is Kant at (in my view) his most phenomenological and empiricist.

Possible experience can alone give reality to our conceptions; without it a conception is merely an idea, without truth or relation to an object. Hence a possible empirical conception must be the standard by which we are to judge whether an idea is anything more than an idea and fiction of thought, or whether it relates to an object in the world. — Kant

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap78
[chapter 78]

This 'good' side of Kant can be 'read against' his 'bad' side. And that's of course what happened with Fichte and Hegel and others, who followed this 'empirical directive' (Braver).

More in that direction:

Transcendental idealism allows that the objects of external intuition—as intuited in space, and all changes in time—as represented by the internal sense, are real. For, as space is the form of that intuition which we call external, and, without objects in space, no empirical representation could be given us, we can and ought to regard extended bodies in it as real. The case is the same with representations in time. But time and space, with all phenomena therein, are not in themselves things. They are nothing but representations and cannot exist out of and apart from the mind. — Kant

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap78
A little farther down than the first quote...


Here's some outright correlationism in Kant, a little further down:

The objects of experience then are not things in themselves, but are given only in experience, and have no existence apart from and independently of experience. That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. For that which stands in connection with a perception according to the laws of the progress of experience is real. They are therefore really existent, if they stand in empirical connection with my actual or real consciousness, although they are not in themselves real, that is, apart from the progress of experience. — Kant

To me the point is that objects get their meaning in or from actual and possible experience. But indirect realism is the wrong way to understand this, for this conflates the psychological or empirical ego with the deeper 'nondual' transcendental ego which is no longer more subject than object. This is where Wittgenstein in the TLP and Mach in The Analysis of Sensations and James in Does Consciousness Exist? are all helpful.

Note that Kant allows for what Husserl calls an empty or signitive intention. Well before Kant's time, people could form the idea of lunar inhabitants. And this fantasy or idea was itself real as such an idea. The 'picture theory' is relevant here, and it's a good analogy for signitive and potentially fulfilled intentions.

We might understand Kant and Husserl to be doing 'critique of language,' sorting intentions into buckets which include the square root of blue or round squares on the one hand and that which makes sense as potential experience on the other. J. S. Mill's phenomenalism is best understood in terms of elaborating what we mean by physical or worldly object.

We understand the couch to tend to wait there in the living room for us. Any human being will see it and be able to sit on it. But my daydream, indeed existing in the same world ( because it plays a role in justifications) is not similarly [ ''directly' ] accessible to everyone. So we have [only ] practical reasons for sorting entities into the generically available extended kind and the differentially accessed unextended kind. But all of these entities exist in the same conversational-practical nexus -- in the same 'rationalist' 'flat' (one layer) ontology. All entities (toothaches and tarantulas) have their meaning in a unified flow of experience interpenetrative arranged-around-sentient-beings worldstreamings.

Anyway, 'unknown unknowns' are "meaningless" and yet ineluctably encompassing, even constraining, of "whatever we think or say ... absent any mind" or not. What you call "meaningless", sir, seems to me the most meaningful thing we (philosophers & poets) can think or say about the world. — 180 Proof

I like to think about the encompassing as the darkness that surrounds a campfire. Or the dark woods that surround a torch on the trail. I've been walking through the woods at night lately with just a little Catapult Mini, which throws a tight beam, so I can get a look a the doe at twenty yards whose glowing eyes call my attention to her. I found myself next to five of these beauties on a trail just recently, and in the silence before dawn.

Anyway, I perceive (interpret) this surrounding darkness as a deep blanket of threatening-promising possibility. I hear a rustle in the leaves 'as' a kind of blur of maybe. On the level of feeling, I love this fringe or frontier. Exploration is a (the?) reason to be born (a post facto justification maybe.) The 'meaningless' is, in this sense, the creative nothing or the birth of meaning. Any ontology has to tell the truth about the 'Horizon', of becoming. Being is 'really' an endless becoming.

Here's a beautiful sentiment:

Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. — Haldane

My objection, despite my embrace of the sentiment, is that this is a logical absurdity, a bad check. It's like that joke about twelve-tone music being 'better than it sounds.' The emotional value of such an impossible Frontier (what people like about the Kantian X ) is obvious to me, but any pointing beyond all possible experience reads like mystified paradox to me -- which may have genuine motivational value but still lacks content otherwise.

:fire: