So rather than assuming that laws are invariant I think the more common assumption is that they are good enough for now until someone comes along and points out where we messed up, and on and on the scientific project will go. — Moliere
It's not that everything is reducible to some amorphous and expansive idea of "the physical" but rather that everything is reducible to physics. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Hume's argument against induction would appear to apply to past events as well though. So inductive arguments about the past get the axe too. "The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776," or "lunar eclipses have been predictable" are the types of statements we believe because we trust the source that is telling us them or because we remember the past events. However, why should we think any source of information is reliable? It certainly can't be because they have been reliable in the past. Why should we think our memory is reliable? If you cannot demonstrate that you have a reliable memory using only deduction, it seems to me like you are SOL. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Very good quote. Of course Hume didn't have the opportunity to understand this, but the quote suggests at least intuitive recognition on Hume's part, of how deep learning is manifested in human thinking. — wonderer1
I don't think this follows, because all the documents we have point to nature behaving in the past as it does now
This doesn't touch my physicalism, because I don't see everything as reducible to physics. I don't know of any physicalist, who if given the choice, would say that they believe everything reduces to physics, as against everything reduces to the physical. Now I could easily imagine a physicalist saying in a sloppy way that everything reduces to physics, but I would simply intepret that as a figure of speech that is commonly used to refer to the physical (at least in some crowds).
What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
What's the purely deductive argument that secures the premise "documents we possess are a reliable record of past events?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yet many have regarded it as one of the most profound philosophical challenges imaginable since it seems to call into question the justification of one of the most fundamental ways in which we form knowledge. Bertrand Russell, for example, expressed the view that if Hume’s problem cannot be solved, “there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity” (Russell 1946: 699).
Just to be clear, I agree with you 100%, and Hume obviously had a pragmatic sense about this too. I'm just saying that if you accept his argument about induction being unjustifiable and irrational, it strips away almost everything. You have to focus on if there is a purely deductive argument because induction, all induction, can only be justified by using induction itself. It can't be deductively justified. — Count Timothy von Icarus
unless we are silly enough to believe that induction should be deduction, or that there are no such things as more or less plausible ideas.“there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity”
What's funny is that these is an inverse problem, the "Scandal of Deduction," where you can also show that deduction generates absolutely no new information. — Count Timothy von Icarus
A number of writers make a distinction between physicalism and naturalism on the basis of the inclusion or exclusion of the role of subjective point of view in the determination of the object.
— Joshs
If the object is defined as 'the object as perceived' then of course it is trivially true that the subjective point of view would be a determinant. But if the object is defined as 'that which interacts with our senses resulting in perception' then the subjective point of view would be a result, not a determinant…
The argument that claims that because it is a mind which says that there are existents which are mind-independent, it follows that there can be no mind-independent existents, is a very weak argument which trades on conflating what we say with what actually might exist independently of our saying. As far as I can tell this impoverished argument (in the West at least) comes from Schopenhauer. — Janus
If we are realists and hold that the world is “out
there,” independent of us, and that knowledge means
grasping it as it is in itself, then it seems that two
possibilities are open: either we can achieve this
knowledge or we can’t. The point of traditional
pre-Critical epistemology is to teach us how to push
our minds beyond their natural limitations so that
they can limn reality itself. As Leibniz promised,
if we can leave behind the restrictions of the body
and senses, we can come to think with God’s head,
at least to some degree. Skeptics, of course, take the
other option, arguing that we can never surpass our
all-too-human ways of knowing. We should give
up dreams of transcendence and make peace with
common life’s beer, billiards, and backgammon.
But Kant opened up a third path: the world of
phenomena is the one we live in, the only world we’ll
ever know in this life, so we should stop treating it
as second best. We can substitute intersubjective
agreement among ourselves for agreement with
reality in itself. This would be a new kind of truth,
one that is a lesser truth, perhaps, but a truth nonetheless, the only kind fit for creatures like us.
The Speculative Realists believe that it is Anti-Realism that represents the childish view, for it amounts to a kind of cosmic narcissism where being exists only in correlation with us or, in Heidegger’s terms, that being can only be in our clearing. This makes the world less our home than our nursery room where everything is organized around us. The Pre-Critical Realists mistakenly thought that we can only find genuine reality elsewhere, in a transcendent realm. But the Speculative Realists argue that we don't have to look to some beyond to find what exceeds our grasp; everything has an inner essence we are not privy to. For the Speculative Realists, studying this world is not setling for second best, but neither should we setle into a completely domesticated world.
Rather, we should resettle in more interesting places, away from the anthropocentric city, to study the interactions that take place among beings far away from our prying eyes. I find this line of thought intriguing and I take their warning about the danger of conceptual solipsism, but I'm still too much of an Anti-Realist to embrace Speculative Realism whole-heartedly. It seems right to me that we always bring our thoughts to any consideration of the world as it is independently of us, which automatically compromises any absolute independence. But the Speculative Realists are right to point out that the Anti-Realists may have exaggerated the comprehensiveness of our pre-forming of experience. If experience were so fully pre-digested by the ways our minds process information, we could never experience surprise. Specific, ontic surprises, sure, but not radical surprises that violate and transform our very notions of what is.
If the Pre-Critical Realists tell us not to settle for
the tawdry shabby world we find ourselves in, and
the Anti-Realists tell us to settle into this world as
our home, and the Speculative Realists urge us to
resetle elsewhere, Transgressive Realism emphasizes the way reality unsetles us. We can never settle down with a single way of understanding the world because it can always unexpectedly breach these. Such experiences do not get squeezed into our mental structures but instead violate them, cracking and reshaping our categories.
This violation is the sign of their externality since everything we conceive remains the offspring of our concepts and so retains a family resemblance with them. Rather than the wholly independent noumenal realm that Hegel rightly rejects, these are experiences that we have but which shatter our ways of understanding experience, exceeding our comprehension but not escaping our awareness. Transgressive Realism, I believe, gives us a reality that transcends our ways of thinking, but not all access to it, offering a middle path that lets us have our ineffable cake and partially ef it too. These aporetic experiences enter our awareness, not through the pathways prepared by our minds but in spite of them, transgressing our anticipatory processes.
A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.” Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth' for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's than either of them is to Newton's. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong.(Kuhn’s Postscript to Scientific Revolutions)
But is the exercise really meaningful if it doesn't reveal some new, third type of analysis? — Count Timothy von Icarus
One thing of relevance is the deeply subconscious basis for our intuitions, and the fact that those aren't something that we can turn around overnight — wonderer1
According to various schools of Indian philosophy, every action, intent or preparation by an individual leaves a samskara (impression, impact, imprint) in the deeper structure of the person's mind. These impressions then await volitional fruition in that individual's future, in the form of hidden expectations, circumstances or a subconscious sense of self-worth. These Samskaras manifest as tendencies, karmic impulses, subliminal impressions, habitual potencies or innate dispositions. In ancient Indian texts, the theory of Samskara explains how and why human beings remember things, and the effect that memories have on people's suffering, happiness and contentment. — Wikipedia
They’re known as saṃskara or sankhara in Indian disciplines: — Wayfarer
Direct insight into saṃskara is obtainable through insight meditation (vipasyana) and other meditative disciplines. No brain scanner required! — Wayfarer
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