↪Wayfarer
At issue is what counts as a measurement. You presume it must involve a conscious being, because you want consciousness to be a substance within the universe. Others have different ideas. Again, mere speculation. Shut up and calculate. — Banno

Sorry to butt in again. But your disparagement of "mere speculation"*1 is a knock on theoretical Science and Philosophy, and not appropriate for a post on The Philosophy Forum. I suppose, like many TPF posters, you view Philosophy as a red-headed step-child of Materialist Science, with aberrant genes inherited from its disreputable parent of institutional Religion.

But probably views General Philosophy*2 (born in ancient times & cultures in opposition to irrational beliefs & gossipy rumors) as the parent of Modern Empirical Science, born in the 17th century in direct opposition to Authoritarian Theology, and focused on Reductive rather than General understanding.

A materialist measurement views the physical yardstick as the judge of accuracy and factuality. But who made & marked the stick with arbitrary increments (meters vs yards)? The etymology of the word "to Measure", comes from Latin "mensura", and the root "mens-"*3 refers back to the Mind that created the the concept of rational regulation of an undifferentiated world*4. So, Way is philosophically correct that, absent a "conscious being", no measurement takes place in the material world. :smile:


*1. Science and Speculation :
"Despite wide recognition that speculation is critical for successful science, philosophers have attended little to it. When they have, speculation has been characterized in narrowly epistemic terms : a hypothesis is speculative due to its lack of evidential support"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-020-00370-w

*2. General philosophy, also known as metaphysics or ontology, explores fundamental questions about the nature of reality, existence, and knowledge.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-distinguish-the-general-and-technical-world-of-philosophy

*3. The Latin word mens expresses the idea of "mind" and is the origin of English words like mental and dementia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens

*4. Measurement problem :
A thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat illustrates the measurement problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

Berkeley had a clear position. According to him the explanation for the persistence of things and the fact we all perceive the same things was that God has them in mind. If you want to participate in discussion and debate that purpose is defeated if you can't or won't declare and argue for a clear and consistent position. I'm not saying that discussion and debate is what philosophy is all about, just that it you want to do that, then have something unambiguous to present.

What @Wayfarer does on here seems to me to be more social commentary, a kind of moral crusade, than philosophy.

Surely that would be the object of your experience? — bert1

Anscombe points out that the terms swapped roles some time around the 1950's

Berkeley had a clear position. — Janus

He did and he deserves a lot of credit for that. I wish he'd gone panpsychist like Sprigge instead of wheeling God in to look at things when we weren't.

Oh! That's interesting. Which is the most recent convention? Are you being old fashioned or current street?

I avoid those words if possible because of their ambiguity and the philosophical baggage they drag along behind them. Usually it is better to use the clearer notions of direction of fit.

"The mind is the subject of experience" is inept or even deceptive. Experiences are had only by minds, so what might seem profound is little more than tautology.

...disparagement of "mere speculation"... — Gnomon

Oh, go ahead and speculate. Just don't mistake speculation for fact.

↪Gnomon
Berkeley had a clear position. According to him the explanation for the persistence of things and the fact we all perceive the same things was that God has them in mind. If you want to participate in discussion and debate that purpose is defeated if you can't or won't declare and argue for a clear and consistent position. I'm not saying that discussion and debate is what philosophy is all about, just that it you want to do that, then have something unambiguous to present.

What Wayfarer does on here seems to me to be more social commentary, a kind of moral crusade, than philosophy. — Janus

When was the last time you saw a philosopher present an idea that was not ambiguous to someone? Empirical observations can be unambiguous when the physical object can be pointed to. But the topics we discuss on this forum, such as Justice, are inherently ambiguous due to the difficulty of transferring an idea in one mind to another mind, by means of language. Linguistic philosophy was proposed as an answer to that very problem. Unfortunately, just as empirical scientists have been frustrated in their search for the material Atom --- can you point to a hypothetical quark or its constituent color or flavor? --- philosophers have been seeking the linguistic or logical Atom for millennia.

Do you really think Berkeley's "clear position" was unambiguous, when it was immediately attacked by Materialists and Deists for its unstated assumption of miraculous interventions? You set a high standard for philosophy to meet. Years ago, when I left my church, a few members to ask "why?". When I gave my crude philosophical answer, one responded that "you are setting a high standard for God to meet". To that, I could only reply that the Monotheistic religions themselves set a rigorous standard for the "true God", so He could be distinguished from idols and false gods.

Materialism also has a clear position : if I can't see it or touch it, it doesn't exist. Which is why physicists persist in their quest for the fundamental Atom of Materialism. Today, mathematical physicists are resigned to the notion of an immaterial mathematical Field as the fundamental ground of reality. Yet, even that amorphous hypothetical entity has, in practice, been divided into four or five sub-fields, and dozens of sub-sub-fields. And you accuse of ambiguity? Hasn't philosophy itself, from the beginning, been a moral/ethical crusade? :nerd:


Linguistic philosophy is the view that many or all philosophical problems can be solved by paying closer attention to language, either by reforming language or by better understanding our everyday language. The former position is that of ideal language philosophy, one prominent example being logical atomism. ___Wikipedia

So, Way is philosophically correct that, absent a "conscious being", no measurement takes place in the material world — Gnomon

Thank you once again. I will bring it to bear on the topic of the OP. The basic point of my argument is that we do not really see 'what is'. We're unaware of our own sub- and unconcious machinations and as a result we project them onto 'the world', an inevitable consequence of our ego-centred individualist culture. That is the point of 'awareness training' and philosophy as a spiritual discipline, is the attainment of self knowledge. Much of what goes under the heading of philosophy nowadays comprises methods to rationalise the human condition, although what philosophy really should be doing is critiquing it. That is the context in which the question of the fairness or otherwise of 'the world' should be assessed.

"The mind is the subject of experience" is inept or even deceptive. — Banno

That humans and other sentient beings are subjects of experience is both obvious and central to any philosophy, but somehow you still manage to obfuscate it.

There's a current article on Aeon about the wasteland of analytic philosophy, Philosophy was Once Alive.

both obvious and central — Wayfarer

Philosophy reflectively-critically examines whatever is assumed to be "obvious and central" (e.g. intuitions, folk psychological ideas, values, etc) no?

I meant demonstration of your claims about is/ought. I am not sure what you mean to convey from that teleology link as it's conclusions seem weak and non-committal to me. Points it mentions about equivalences of least action to dynamical laws seem notable in this respect.

I generally don't like the idea of teleology in terms of purpose. I will comment on how they define in the article:

"Teleology involves the invocation of final causes, or ends, in the explanation of some
target explanandum."

I am not sure what "final cause or ends" here means but I am not directly opposed to explanations that in some sense zoom out or appeal to higher order or more global or more abstract patterns and regularities or to longer time-scales, etc, etc, etc. However, I am inclined to think that these explanations are emergent from blind, dynamical behavior at the local level and zooming out as opposed to something else (i.e. more top-down, however you would want to think of that).

That said, I don't see how talking about patterns of phenomena with more abstract, global descriptions implies anything about oughts. The fact that a system tends to behave in a certain way doesn't imply that the system ought to behave in a certain way.

You mean experimentally? - https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343 — apokrisis

I have no issue with delayed-choice or any other kind of entanglement scheme. I advocate an interpretation of quantum mechanics which has formulations fully capable of producing these behaviors. What makes delayed-choice paradigms seem metaphysically strange or problematic is the collapse postulate; but in a stochastic interpretation, particles (the hidden variables) are already in definite states and there is no physical collapse. No physical collapse? No problem.

We must remember that collapse was added to quantum mechanics in a completely ad hoc fashion because physicists wanted definite measurement outcomes in the theory; but it was never a necessary part of the development of an empirically adequate quantum theory.

From the stochastic perspective, this ad hoc addition happened because physicists conflated the quantum state with a physical object when it is should be seen as a piece of machinery that is really talking about probabilistic behavior and nothing more. The Schrodinger equation evolves the quantum state like a diffusion equation evolves a probability density function for some Brownian particle's diffusion behavior, the kind of probability distribution that can be realized empirically by repeating an experiment ad infinitum. Anyone can see that a diffusion equation and probability density function is not in conflict with Brownian particles occupying definite positions.

That humans and other sentient beings are subjects of experience is both obvious and central to any philosophy, but somehow you still manage to obfuscate it. — Wayfarer

If what this says is that people have experiences, then we agree, and I don't think it's me doing the obfuscating.

I generally don't like the idea of teleology in terms of purpose. — Apustimelogist

That's fine. In line with those articles, the shift is to understand finality in terms of global constraints, not as some kind of futurised effective cause.

Cause must come before the effect, never the effect before the cause, right?

But as a systems science proponent, I work with the expanded causality that started with Aristotle's four causes analysis. A system is a hierarchical structure of relations where global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees then act – in their generalised statistical fashion – to (re)build the world-system that gave rise to them.

So global constraints are the embodied version of Aristotle's formal and final cause. And local degrees of freedom are the embodied version of his effective and material causes.

Good old "cause and effect" is just how all this complexity looks at an average scale of observation, such as would exist in our own world as we imagine it to "really be" – a place of medium-sized dry goods.

Still no ought, intentionality, consciousness or value

:cry:

Firstly I haven't said there are no ambiguous claims from philosophers, but I don't believe philosophy in general is rife with them. So that said, how about you give a good example or two of what you take to be an ambiguous claim from a well-known philosopher.

Looks like a gem of an article, but I can only see the first page on JSTOR. 1974, well before Chalmers. Makes the same point I did about skepticism raised by @apokrisis.

The 'Dan' he refers to...

Thank you once again. I will bring it to bear on the topic of the OP. The basic point of my argument is that we do not really see 'what is'. We're unaware of our own sub- and unconcious machinations and as a result we project them onto 'the world', an inevitable consequence of our ego-centred individualist culture. That is the point of 'awareness training' and philosophy as a spiritual discipline, is the attainment of self knowledge. Much of what goes under the heading of philosophy nowadays comprises methods to rationalise the human condition, although what philosophy really should be doing is critiquing it. That is the context in which the question of the fairness or otherwise of 'the world' should be assessed. — Wayfarer

While I largely agree with you here, I think that we can still make correct judgement about the 'unfairness' of the world that actually help us to better our awareness of our 'sub- and unconscious machinations'.
For instance, if we consider, say, the 'unfairness' of diseases, the fact that this world actually does not match many of our idealisations - 'how we wish we it should be' - we arrive at a more disillusioned and mature view of both ourselves and the world itself.
The fact that the world is 'imperfect' is actually a good motivator for spiritual practice, I think.

This "knower" (i.e. perceiver) Bishop Berkeley calls "God" which, not by coincidence I'm sure, is functionally indistinguishable from Gnomon's "Enformer". An infinite regress-of-the-gaps. :sparkle: :eyes: — 180 Proof

I disagree. It depends on how you interpret the 'subject of experience'. It might just be a formal property of experience. The subject never appears as an object of experience but this does not mean that it is non-existence or a substance that is independent from experience.

Consider ...

"The mind is the subject of experience" is inept or even deceptive. Experiences are had only by minds [subjects], so what might seem profound is little more than tautology. — Banno

Yeah, after all an 'experience' is something mental. So, in a sense, I can agree what is said.

But let's consider the structure of our experience. Experiences of course have contents, which might be called the 'objects of experiences'. But they all share a quality, a 'privateness', a 'sense' (for a lack of a better word) that they are experienced by 'me'.

Let's start by this: what is this 'me' according to you? does it ever appear as a particular content/object of experience? If so, when?

What do your questions have to do with either the OP or what I have written in this thread? I have not stated or implied that "mind" or "subject" "experience" does not exist, only that imo these terms have been misused by antirealists (immaterialists) such as Wayfarer, Gnomon, bert1 ... and now, it seems, you too.

It is the subject to whom all this occurs or appears. The ‘unknown knower’. — Wayfarer

mind is not ‘a thing among other things’. — Wayfarer

That humans and other sentient beings are subjects of experience is both obvious and central — Wayfarer

The first two are logically obvious and metaphysically central, yes. That being said, there are various ways to affirm the conceptions of subject and experience, but I for one, am having trouble affirming the conjunction of them with each other:

……superficially, iff it is the case there is only and ever objects of experience, from which there must be as many experiences as there are objects, it is self-contradictory for there to be subjects of experience, for the “I” which represents the cognition of self or subject, must always be singular;

……while notoriously forbidding….a euphemism for the likely-ness for mistaking its intent…..the Kantian exposition detailing the cognition of the self as subject, re: B407, “Paralogisms….”, prohibits self from being thereafter cognized as extant object, it does not follow, at least from such exposition, that self is subject of experience, and self, being already denied as object of experience, leaves an apparent transcendental paralogism;

……taken at face value, “subject of experience” is a synthetic proposition, insofar as the conception of subject or self cannot be found merely in the conception of experience itself, but on the other hand, the proposition is an a priori judgement, insofar as the concern is the synthesis of abstract conceptions. Synthetic a priori propositions are first and foremost principles regulating understanding by the use of the categories in relation to appearances. But the self or subject is never an appearance, hence cannot have empirical conceptions subsumed under it as schemata, hence cannot be regulated by the categories, from which follows the impossibility of it being a judgement with respect to experience, for which the categories are the necessary ground.
—————

All that being said, I admit your reasoning for “humans (minds, selves, subjects) are subjects of experience” is probably justified from the mere historical scarcity of your making of unjustified claims, if only I were to understand how such reasoning comes about, my personal cognitive prejudices notwithstanding.

I was merely trying to point out that the concept on an 'unknown knower' doesn't necessarily entail a form of ontological idealism but it is, in my opinion, fully compatibile with some forms of epistemological idealism and some kind of phenomenology that does not make ontological commitments about the 'knower'. If I misunderstood you, I apologize for that.

And I wasn't trying to imply that you thought that the 'mind', 'subject' do not exist.

But anyway if you think that my questions were inappropriate I'll leave at that.

P.S. I do not consider myself an 'antirealist'. I do not deny the existence of a mind-independent reality (and actually I think that some kind of epistemic idealism or phenomenology are actually comptabile with realism). Not sure why you assumed that I'am an antirealist...

:ok: The clarifications are appreciated.

Thanks!

...disparagement of "mere speculation"... — Gnomon
Oh, go ahead and speculate. Just don't mistake speculation for fact. — Banno

Thanks for your blessing. I don't see many empirical "facts" presented on this philosophical forum. However, I do see quite a few unfounded assumptions, especially about material reality, that are used as-if factual to validate disparaging remarks. :smile:

↪Gnomon
Firstly I haven't said there are no ambiguous claims from philosophers, but I don't believe philosophy in general is rife with them. So that said, how about you give a good example or two of what you take to be an ambiguous claim from a well-known philosopher. — Janus

I'm not the one that raised the question of ambiguity in this thread. So, it should be incumbent upon the raiser to give examples. However, for a starter, the article below gives an analysis and examples of a common bane of philosophical discussions.

You seem to think that 's posts are "rife with them". Admittedly, his somewhat Idealistic worldview seems, not just ambiguous but dead wrong, to those who are committed to a worldview of Materialism and Scientism. That's the ambiguity of opposing perspectives on reality. Is that where you are coming from? :smile:


Ambiguity :
Fun fact: the word ‘ambiguous’, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ambiguous: it can mean uncertainty or dubiousness on the one hand and a sign bearing multiple meanings on the other. I mention this merely to disambiguate what this entry is about, which concerns a word or phrase enjoying multiple meanings. In this sense, ambiguity has been the source of much frustration, bemusement, and amusement for philosophers, lexicographers, linguists, cognitive scientists, literary theorists and critics, authors, poets, orators and pretty much every other being who uses language regularly to communicate.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/

Philosophy, Linguistics, & Semiology :
Saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with his notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics. His main contributions to structuralism include his notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

I'm not the one that raised the question of ambiguity in this thread. So, it should be incumbent upon the raiser to give examples. — Gnomon

I said that Wayfarer does not present an unambiguous position. It looks like I misread you to be suggesting philosophy is commonly ambiguous, whereas I now see you were suggesting it has largely been a moral crusade. So, my bad for hasty reading.

In any case I don't agree with the latter. Apart from moral philosophy, the focus has mostly been on ethics, in the sense of how best to live, with the focus not principally on relations with others, but on personal flourishing and/or getting it right epistemologically speaking.

And I didn't say Wayfarer's philosophy is "rife with them" (ambiguities) but rather that I didn't think philosophy generally is.

Admittedly, his somewhat Idealistic worldview seems, not just ambiguous but dead wrong, to those who are committed to a worldview of Materialism and Scientism. That's the ambiguity of opposing perspectives on reality. Is that where you are coming from? :smile: — Gnomon

Scientism and materialism don't seem very popular on this site and I would be hard pressed to recall members here who identify this way. Can you name any?

People who find idealism dead wrong also include Christians, Muslims and other theists who are far from sympathetic to science or to materialism.

Personally I would not say ontological idealism is 'dead wrong'. How can we demonstrate such a claim? I would say that the hypothesis makes no practical difference to how I conduct my life. That said, I am sympathetic to epistemological idealism in as much as we can argue that the reality we know is likely to be the product of our mental and cognitive structures and frameworks - a more Kantian approach, perhaps. I am skeptical of the notion that there is a capital R reality which we can uncover. Reality seems to have replaced God as a subject of transcendental hope.