This seems self-evidently wrong.

Plum claiming we know good and evil from birth is both counter to the evidence, and is somewhat incoherent in it's own terms. What established those 'facts' as they must be on your account?

Unfortunately,the only answers that don't rely on pure, individuated intuition is either functional (not ethical) or it doesn't exist. I take the latter view, but am open to the former. Collective agreement, or co-operative functionality isn't an ethical fact (either case). Morals are developed as a result of the internal comfort or discomfort of S in the face of a moral consideration. This covers it. On this formulation, morals and ethics need no further explanation. Merely, discussion and accepting social groups as morally-aligned rather than 'right' or 'wrong'. Its bizarre that people feel the need to establish an objective moral where there isn't even a chess move open to start that discussion on the facts. It's also irrelevant. Just live among people with whom you generally agree morally. That seems to be, if we set aside what would be considered at the very least, morally unhelpful violence in order to assert one's moral view on others, what history has amount to, socially speaking. I note here, though, that religion as an absolute poison of the mind, has convinced many people that a shitty book can establish the right to carry about hte above. Think what we may, but empirically, using fictional accounts to hoodwink children seems again, at the least, morally unhelpful on any account.

That said, you may find this interesting: It's a book by a prof. of Moral philosophy at St Andrew's - but also, the head of the Phil department I'm in here in NZ.

He argues that teh way to support a purpose of the Universe is through, essentially, theistic reasoning to objective morals - and then just jettisoning the Theism as unnecessary. It would get some way to your position, but it certainly makes clear that human morals are essentially irrelevant to even a successful argument for the account.

Heidegger’s point that a science presupposes as its very condition of possibility a set of metaphysical assumptions about how the world ought to be understood. — Joshs

Unsurprisingly, another horrible point from Heidegger that doesn't capture anything about hte scientific enterprise.

That just means the good never forms without us. But I disagree if the quote from Amadeus means the good never forms. There is an object, a definition, that forms, from our experience, called “good.” — Fire Ologist

In some sense, I agree, but hte idea that its an 'object' to be passed about is, to me, incoherent even on views other than my own. Other than PLatonic Forms things like Love, Good, Apprehension - these are not 'things' they are properties of people or acts. I do not think properties can be considered objects. That said, I lean toward some form a property dualism so maybe i'll have to eat crow on this soon enough

Perceiving a tree "as a tree" only makes sense to me when we're referring to those who know how to use the phrase. — creativesoul

You may enjoy Chamlers treatment of intensions when speaking about logical possibilities. In his view, the intensions differ - so 'that tree' as a primary intension picks out hte tree you are currently looking at. As a secondary intension it would pick out 'that tree' where it obtained in any possible world. He extensively uses Kripke to establish why this is relevant for understanding some of these issues (consciousness, perception and what not).

If the cat is perceiving what we perceive, it's a tree.

Do you agree with this, namely that the notion of good in inherent in the primacy of experience — Shawn

No, but I think you're in the right ballpark. I think the notion of good is something inherently informed by experience, but its not something that arises from 'experience' already-formed. Notions are human, and they develop over the course of experience/s.

If the only thing that exists is experiences, then how are the questions different? "Why is there experience?" would be precisely the same as "Why is there anything at all?" — Apustimelogist

Hmm, I don;t think this is quite right. While I understand exactly why you've landed there, its seems entirely right to say in world A' there is only cognition. But that coginition arises as points of view which can still conceptualise (and indeed may phenomenally experience) seemingly external objects. Indeed this would be the case if Idealism is true in world A (ours). All you need is awareness of that fact for the two considerations to come apart adequately:

1. Why is there anything, rather than nothing?; and
2. Why is anything conscious, rather than everything being unconscious?

Neither is applicable without hte other as a background consideration, but they address two specifically different problems and would require very different answers. Both are given in experience, so we need not question the existence of either, so the order in whcih we address the questions is not all that interesting. It could have been world A' and that's what's at odds here because our experiences would be the same as tehy currently are (though, based on current data this simply isn't the case so we have no real basis to claim this).

You'll also note (though, it's a little cheeky doing this) that both conceptions are phenomenal experiences which still need explaining. Why anything gives rise to an experience is exactly the same question under any theory but Dennett's really. He just thinks its not even happening lol.

Well from this perspective, it isn't a true metaphysical problem which is why illusionists may be more interested in the meta-problem of consciousness instead, aiming to explain what it is about human cognition and computation that leads to these limits of explanation — Apustimelogist

I'm not quite sure I'm understand thsi reply. To clarify my statements there, I'm driving at what I get clear in my first response above - that the 'other' question simply ignores the one of consciousness - it has no explanatory power even if sufficiently answered (for clarity, the position is that htis is true of idealism though clearly true for other theories too). I think it is patently wrong to hand-wave away consciousness. Things like reductive functionalism are simply infantile theories in the face of the serious problem we have with why consciousness arises (or ingresses) from/in the physical at all. |

This is not my understanding of the hard problem. The issue is the reducibility of consciousness to physical explanations. If you remove the physical from the equation then there is no hard problem. The issue I was talking about in the quote you replied to effectively also amounts to a problem of irreducibility but between different experiences. — Apustimelogist

Ah i see waht you mean. Yes, but I think you're mis-understanding the profundity of what you've written there. If consciousness does not reduce to the physical (it doesn't seem to, at this stage) we have a serious problem akin to having to explain ghosts. If consciousness fails to supervene on the physical then we have zero notion of how it arises or what causal relationship it has with the physical world. We would still need to understand experience in terms of something else in world A' because our awareness must be of something. There is also the problem noted above, in that world A' may be phenomenally exactly like A intimating that even in an idealistic universe a 'point of view\ can consider why it's mental activity results in it consciousness apprehending whatever it is menta...ting...?LOL.

That said, you're right that it's formulated that way because we live in world A, but that doesn't change that it is a live question in world A' too. From where does consciousness come? Why is there any conscious experience. Chalmers goes over a few objections from that camp and rejects on similar grounds - that they simply ignore the core issue.

The kind of idealism I have in mind is just that everything in the universe is mental — Apustimelogist

This was what I took it to be. This entails no external objects as nothing could be non-mind. All comments hold (whether correct is in the air lol).

Can you elaborate the differences in realism for science vs. perceptual representations? — Apustimelogist

Sure. So, this is a little bit like (i think) the two questions about existence and consciousness I canvassed earlier.

One question here is going to be (or more accurately "How do we produce conscious experiences of the external world?") but another, separate and probably more profound question is "How could we know that anything in the external world is actually as-it-seems? Even if we have 'direct' perception we still have the issue of Descartes Demon and all that fun stuff - whereas the question around scientific realism addresses the problem of whether our perception is of actual things. In world A' we may have direct perceptions of things which are not actually things, for instance. It is a false perception, but its a direct relation with the mental substance that it arises from. Even in world A, we might have indirect perception yet trust that our scientific instruments are relaying the actual behind our perceptions. This is definitely open to a charge of being a bit incoherent, but I'm unsure that's entirely warranted. We bypass shitty sense perception for better data (which we trust) all the time. Principle holds here.

So in the Scientific sense, are we even metaphysically able to ascertain the world as-it-is? And for Perception its do we, humans, naturally, perceive the world in direct causal relation (regardless of whether the world actually allows for accurate measurement. You can see that one couldn't be a scientific antirealist and a DRist. That would imply our eyes were better visual organs than the trillion-frame-per-second camera in a mechanical sense.

P.S: I've just come across this article for school and the opening lines are very much apt:

Why does the Universe exist? There are
here two questions: (1) Why does the Universe exist at all?
That is, why is there anything rather than nothing? (2)
Why is the Universe as it is? — Derek Parfit

You can keep question one, and simply swap question two for the more specific version: Why is anything in the Universe conscious? To essentially outline the two distinct questions that idealism would still post. Consciousness not supervening on the physical simply doesn't explain it as the majority of cognition is not accompanied by any experience.

I’m talking about human beings, which are not vague, blurry sets of whatever. I happen to identify as one. What further facts do you require? — NOS4A2

You have essentially stated the 'further fact' (in the conceptual sense, anyhow) in this: ||

I’m talking about human beings, which are not vague, blurry sets of whatever. — NOS4A2

(A couple of examples of what some posit as the 'further fact' are immaterial souls, Descartes res cogitans (though, that's disputed I believe, as I'm positing it anyhow) or the identity of say a base-code having been input to a simulation (as unlikley as that theory is)).

Hmm, fair enough. If that is your view, then you do not think you can accept that "human being" reduces to the lower-level facts about ourselves such asbiology, mentation, cognition, environment, memory, (adapt)ability, (ir)rationality etc.. etc.. In this sense, you must hold (for your stated position to hold) that there is something other than these things in which "NOS4A2" consists(the conceptual further fact)).
What is that in which you feel you consist? You "identity" as a human being, which is merely to say you are emotionally comfortable with using that label based on your own terminology and, most likely, something akin to my above approximation in italics. Sure. We can, in that sense, allow for a human to identify as a cat, if we like the description. To be clear, what I am saying (and seems self-evident) is that the notion of human being i've italicised in my reply here is in fact, a vague bundle of seemingly weakly-connected attributes that have only a relational property and not a further coherence into some objective identity. They don't really establish any stable, temporally-relevant 'identity' without some further discussion of what identity consists in.

I should probably note that it's occurred you may be doing something I've run into a few times (and that's not wrong or bad or anything negative). If you are speaking on how one identifies then we're at cross-purposes. I am speaking on the debate around how it is that one could be the same person three years part, say. In what does identity per se exist for a human? If you're not, wonderful, that is helpful :)

I don't know exactly what you mean for experience to compliment activity. — Apustimelogist

Behaviour viz adaptation, metabolism, sensitivity (in the physical sense) do not entail experience. Yet, we have experience. It appears to be something over and above the physical facts, on it's face. This is what I mean. Experience accompanies behaviour.

If everything is experience, there is no hard problem because the problem just becomes "why are there experiences?" — Apustimelogist

That literally is the hard problem. Perhaps you have an erroneous idea of what it is? The hard problem consists in this exact question.

then this is no different from "why does anything exist?" — Apustimelogist

AS above, clearly this is not right.

And maybe people similarly-minded to Dennett actually want to turn the hard problem of consciousness into this kind of more trivial hard problem - i.e. the reasoning going something like - Why does anything exist? Can we even answer that? Do we have to make up an additional metaphysical substance of consciousness that needs its own separate answer? — Apustimelogist

Agreed, but that's pretty senseless. Its just ignoring one problem for another. Dennett, as it goes, actually denies qualia. So, that's novel, but even less coherent that ignoring hte problem, I think.

only come about in idealism when you postulate something like observers that have a way they seem to themselves, via their own experiences, which is different to how they seem from another observer's perspective. — Apustimelogist

It's very hard to see how this could matter. If one is having an experience, that's all that's needed. The framework in whcih is sits isn't relevant the Hard Problem. It is the experience per se that needs explaining.

Obviously, this construction has an inherent indirect aspect to it in the sense that there are experiences out in the world and then your own experiences which seem to be about those experiences but are not the same - they are separated. — Apustimelogist

This is hte empirical notion of how perception produces experience (and leads to the problem this thread has instantiated. Using hte word 'perception' for both the experience and the process it arises from is ridiculous).

At the same time, without indirect mediation I feel like there would be no need to identify brain processes and experiences or distinguish internal experiences from external stuff. — Apustimelogist

I think is true, and is weakly entailed by my positions on the above passages of yours. Indirect causal processes result in experience. That much is known in experience. We can't access anything other than experience, so it seems were stuck with the Hard Problem however we slice it. The indirect nature of perceptual awareness is just another spanner for the likes of Banno who are deathly afraid of being less-directly acquainted with objects than they'd like to be.

So I think in that sense hard-type problems in idealism do presuppose indirect realism (including external objects to be realist about which are qualitatively different from internal perception). — Apustimelogist

An idealist rejects that there are external objects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at here.

So it appears you already anticipated the answer I gave about why idealism doesn't necessarily have a hard problem of consciousness. — Apustimelogist

It isn't clear to me - what I was doing with that passage was cutting off, at its base, the chess move you tried to make earlier in the post around an Idealist holding that external objects exist. They don't, but this has nothing to do with teh Hard Problem. Is it the experience per se that needs explaining.

For instance, if realism is a concept that can be attributed to mathematical scientific theories, why can't it be attributed to the representations and models built in machine learning? — Apustimelogist

Because you're misattributing what 'realism' stands for within each framework. Perceptually indirect/direct realism is not the same debate as that among scientifici realists/antirealists or moral realists/antirealists. You could be a scientific realist, and just deny that we have adequate acces to the world for our experiments to mean a huge amount. Or just take the probablity response to Hume hook line and sinker.

I agree that this “perception of a perception” is confusing and unnecessary. It’s a large part of the reason why I am not an indirect realist. — Luke

As was pointed out several times in the first 20 pages of this thread, this is purely a mistake in terminology.

If we, instead, actually f'ing do our jobs and improve our tools, we can use terms like the below:

1.The act of turning ones eyes: To look at -->causes
2.The act of processing visual data: To perceive --> causes
3. Having the resulting conscious experience: To see.

These aren't airtight as more specific terms could be invented, but if we use them, we can see that the debate is actually not a debate. Being a Direct Realist is a position which requires that (2.) is (3.) which is patently is not, and can't be explained in terms of. The conscious experience is simply not reducible to either of (1.) or (2.).
Hand-waving aside, there has been no response whatsoever in this thread that even tries to solve this problem in Direct Realist terms. Hell, literally hte best-known and respected proponent of Direct Realism has to (literally) hand-wave away the problems of perception, claims to be a Direct Realist, then gives an intentionalist account of perception, while utterly and completely overlooking the lack of connection between object and experience. It isn't even touched.

(ala Searle above, is the reference to make sense of this part)Ironically, one of his biggest arguments is the exact same as mine above - except he is so obviously wrong in his own terms, its hard to understand why this book is around.

"The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything."

This is him making the mistake he's arguing everyone else makes.

"This shift is to move from the object-directed intentionality of the perceptual experience to treating the visual experience itself as the object of visual consciousness. I do indeed have a conscious experience when I see the table, but the conscious experience is of the table. The conscious experience is also an entity, but it is not the object of perception; it is indeed the experience itself of perceiving. [...]"

This is not only counter to what actually happens in perception, it is clearly an attempt to escape from the problem of conscious experience qua experience and instead substitute in it's place the 'perception of an object'. Which is not an experience, and he admits is not a constituent of experience - yet advocates speaking as if that's the case.

Then your position is entirely incoherent. Unless you hold a further fact view, your position rests on denying what is required for it's coherence viz. if a further fact does not obtain, then necessarily identity consists in a bundle of vague, blurry sets of intensions/intentions and memories.

I have provided adequate counter in each of my replies. It is not that interesting to see you deny them, and it is an out-right red flag that you would introduce a line like this:

I don’t really care about your fee-fees. — NOS4A2

Neither my feelings being in play, or your misapprehension of their presence bears here. My objection goes through, currently as you have not even attempted to address it. Please refrain from random underhanded Twitter insults. When you prevaricate, it is hard to converse. This has nothing to do with my feelings, and i'd appreciate you rising to the level of a decent interlocutor, if you're going to respond.

I have genuinely no clue how you could possibly grok this from my rejecting an actual source, based on its track record of being a steaming pile of shit with no import for anyone but its captured audience - has anything to do with 'tribalism'.
It used to present some good journalism. It no longer does.

Your response just tells me how tribal you must be at-base.

and yet there is no trace of anyone 'programming' or 'guiding' us anywhere. — jasonm

I'm unsure this is an argument. It may also be empirically wrong, and we misdescribe, or mislabel the evidence of such.

Similarly, why don't we sometimes notice violations of the laws of physics? — jasonm

A huge number of people claim this is so. I can't possibly vet every claim. So, it's an open question.

Are we talking about computers that are bigger than the universe itself? Is this possible even in principle? — jasonm

I'm not sure where the intimation comes from. In principle, there is no reason why we couldn't produce simulations either larger, or more complex than our own. Seems implausible, though.

Nevertheless, I think the best answer comes from Occam's Razor: "Explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more." — jasonm

I am not entirely convinced this is the best Razor to use when it comes to speculative cosmologies. It seems fairly clear that if anything other than materialism via random distribution at the big bang is true, it must necessarily be a theory which Occam would reject, prima facie.

Rabble Rouser. Youtube.

It's hard to deal with this level of sheer prevarication.

Do you hold a further fact view about agents/identities/persons?

However, atheism couldn't possibly gain you any divine favor, and therefore it is irrational to hold atheist beliefs. — Scarecow

Religious beliefs are, on the whole, irrational.

Hurdle has been stumbled upon.

That consciousness literally extends outside of the head and touches the world is kind of why the problem of consciousness is a big deal for some. — Moliere

And if one rejects this? I don't think this is true, personally. Consciousness does not extend at all.. It couldn't, on any account of it i've heard. That some pretend that consciousness is something even capable of 'literally' touching the world is probably one of the more embarrassing aspects of human theorizing.

I think it does. If you are like an idealist and the world of experience is just the world, then I don't think there is a hard problem for them in the way you imply. For there to be a hard problem I think there must be a kind of dualism where what is going on outside the head differs from inside the head (presupposing indirectness that would not be there for the idealist where the nature of the world as it is is right before their very eyes). — Apustimelogist

Italicised: No theory has an explanation of why experience compliments activity. Idealism still cannot answer the hard problem. It just shifts from having experiences of 'the world', to having experiences of one's mind. But the problem of experience remains. Hand waving ala Searle does nothing for this. Some pretty intense discussions that pretend to have answered the question (Consciousness Explained, anyone?) are clear misapprehensions of hte problem, attempts to ignore it by stealth. I think this is hte case here.
Onto the discussion we're actually having LOL - I do not understand why The Hard Problem presupposes anything. The problem may be answered by evidence that Consciousness is continuous with matter, and therefore there is no hard problem. Experience is a brute fact of reality.

The bolded, appears to me, an absolute fact as long as one is not an Idealist. There is the world. There is inside the head.

Why can't I just talk about some kind of representations an A.I. has? — Apustimelogist

I'm not entirely sure what's being suggested here. AI doesn't have conscious experience, that we know of. It cannot 'talk about' anything. It can relay complex outputs from even more complex matrices drawn from human-derived information (in all cases).
A human, ipso facto, has conscious experience. THis is the mystery we are talking about. Not information processing. Not awareness. Not input-output reactions (like learning). experience. It is entirely missed in these discussions, which are essentially ignoring experience and trying to explain how the brain produces behaviour. We have no issues explaining AI behaviour. BUt experience isn't even in the frame.

I agree that this “perception of a perception” is confusing and unnecessary. It’s a large part of the reason why I am not an indirect realist. — Luke

As was pointed out several times in the first 20 pages of this thread, this is purely a mistake in terminology. It's not accurate at all, so let's maybe not use it...

If we, instead, actually f'ing do our jobs and sharpen our tools, instead of wallowing in our prior failures, we can use terms like the below:

1.The act of turning ones eyes: To look at -->causes
2.The act of processing visual data: To perceive --> causes
3. Having the resulting conscious experience: To see.

These aren't airtight as more specific terms could be invented - but at the least they actually delineate the three aspects of the process of perception and do not conflate terms such as 'perception' being a process, and an experience (it's not the latter).

So, use the above terms because they're better than the ones your using, at the very least. We can see that the debate is actually not a debate. Being a Direct Realist is a position which requires that (2.) is (3.) which it patently is not, and can't be explained in terms of. The conscious experience is simply not reducible to either of (1.) or (2.). There is nothing in the facts that explains the experience or even derives it, fundamentally, from the inputs.
Hand-waving aside, there has been no response whatsoever in this thread that even tries to solve this problem in Direct Realist terms. Hell, literally the best-known and respected proponent of Direct Realism has to (literally) hand-wave away the problems of perception, claims to be a Direct Realist, then gives an intentionalist account of perception, while utterly and completely overlooking the lack of connection between object and experience. It isn't even touched.

(ala Searle above, is the reference to make sense of this part)Ironically, one of his biggest arguments is the exact same as mine above - except he is so obviously wrong in his own terms, its hard to understand why this book is around.

"The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything."

This is him making the mistake he's arguing everyone else makes.

"This shift is to move from the object-directed intentionality of the perceptual experience to treating the visual experience itself as the object of visual consciousness. I do indeed have a conscious experience when I see the table, but the conscious experience is of the table. The conscious experience is also an entity, but it is not the object of perception; it is indeed the experience itself of perceiving. [...]"

This is not only counter to what actually happens in perception, it is clearly an attempt to escape from the problem of conscious experience qua experience and instead substitute in it's place the 'perception of an object'. Which is not an experience, and he admits is not a constituent of experience - yet advocates speaking as if that's the case. That final sentence is a doozy in terms of how utterly ridiculous this man is. The sentence reduces to: The conscious experience is the experience of perception, but perception is not an object of experience.
This is such an intense example of stupidity, I cannot understand how this has been taken seriously for so long.

I note you have not replied to any of my objections to that very point.

Again, I understand the objection. But your position is entirely incoherent and unless you are happy to bite the bullets i've outlined, Why would I take it seriously as your position? Do you bite those bullets, or are you just having a stab at a theory?

Unless you bite the bullet that an agent is something other than a collection of causes and effects, I'm not interested. If you don't bite that bullet, your position isn't even available to you despite your discomfort.

What causes are you speaking of that go into an agent and determine his actions? — NOS4A2

I've posed you several questions. I await thsoe answers before embarking on another avenue.

Is there some other cause besides you that raised your arm? — NOS4A2

You'll notice, upon any amount of reflection, you've stated an effect and asked there's a different 'cause'. So, I could leave off here. But..

If you’re saying the agent who he was 1 second ago caused the action, then so much the better. The anterior state to the agent is still the agent. — NOS4A2

I'm not, though I understand the objection I think it fails the first hurdle: You have to have a further fact view about hte agent for this to be coherent. Unless you can delineate out hte agent from 'its' prior causes, we have no discussion. Do causes go 'into' an agent, and then die? Leaving the agent at it's own whim? This seems absurd unless you're using theology to explain it. What happens to these causes? Are their effect non-existent qua conscious motivator?? It doesn't seem to me open to claim causation is real, but doesn't effect conscious agents.

You've used Vox as a source. Its probably better you have me on Ignore in this case.

In terms of perception I'd say AI demonstrates some of the more dry and functional ways of putting "perception", but I don't believe the internet is conscious for all that. — Moliere

THis is a really interesting thing to think about. IN some regard, I deny its possible - there is, intuitively, a definite difference between inputs to a biological system, and inputs to a digital system. I would think the Hard Problem is where it lies. So, back to vagueness hahaha.

I am not sure I would say that the hard problem is the crux of the problem - if anything, the hard problem probably presupposes indirect realism. It's also an interesting question whether indirect realism is a construct that can be applied to things that don't have experience. — Apustimelogist

In principle, I think I'm getting you - though it's not all that satisfying to me to say that the hard problem presupposes anything. It's just a gap in our understanding; I don't think it supposes anything other than we currently don't know. Are you able to elucidate how you're posing this element?

The bold: Yes, very interesting, but I think its a straight forward: no. If there's no conscious experience, there's nothing to compare with mind-independence. Though, this goes to the Hard Problem, again. We can't know whether that's true, in any particular case, I don't think.

guess under that definition I could equally ask whether anything could count as direct which seems quite difficult imo under modern understandings of science and partly why I wasn't sure what people were meaning by direct realism. — Apustimelogist

I'll admit, I have no problem with supposing nothing is direct with regard to experience. Just less mediated, in certain ways.

I'd believe that if we recreated the conditions for creating perception then we'd produce the same results — Moliere

A lot of people take this line, but it seems plainly available to deny that there's any necessity between awareness and experience.

2020 was probably the most clean and fair in US history) — Mikie

:death:

Of course. I've been monitoring this rather weird left-wing authoritarianism for a while now.

NZ is so small its almost a joke, and doesn't really matter.
Luckily, one of my courses next semester (ours run Feb-June and July-Nov) has this disclaimer on the course guide page (that I, naturally, cannot locate to quote**) which basically says if you take this course, you're agreeing to hear people's views you don't like, and its up to you to deal with that. I quite like that the Phil department at UoA at least isn't particularly far down this avenue yet. Hopefully, it remains so.


** Found it:

"This course will treat you as adults. We will discuss a wide range of themes which may well challenge some of your beliefs, and we expect you to be civil and reasonable when engaging with this material."; and

"Trigger Warnings
The University doesn't support a blanket policy of trigger warnings. Trigger warnings may be appropriate for in-depth or graphic depictions of events. In this course, we will refer to a wide range of horrors, atrocities, and distasteful events as examples. We don't believe passing mention of controversial issues generally requires trigger warnings. They may include:

Murder, sexual assault, child abuse, maiming, suicide, torturing people and animals, war crimes, massacres, oppression of individuals and cultures, sexism, racism, terrorism, cancers, abortion, euthanasia, religion, political events, sports, magic, alternative medicines, autism, mental health, disabilities, natural disasters, and anything else that may occur to the lecturer, tutor, or other students.

We will also encourage you to question taboo topics. However, because almost all subjects can be discussed, we expect higher standards of understanding, empathy, and tolerance between people on sensitive topics."

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/academics-defend-cambridge-race-row-professor-s-right-to-free-speech/ar-AA1o0qP4?rc=1&ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=85a87ead231f4d52992d66edcc734f2a&ei=17

Cambridge Philosophy faculty member is being fired for having views. Rational views.

Simple example: 500 years ago, were iPhones possible? — Benj96

Yes. I have factored in everything you've outlined, and it doesn't touch my objection.

A extant 'world' cannot also not exist, and still instantiate any properties (such as existing). So, one or other of these options violates the 'possibility' condition.

Begging the question is when you assume your conclusion. E.g., something like: "our perception of objects is indirect because we don't perceive things directly." — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is what I pointed out you did.

There are many variants of chess, but what constitutes a legal move in a given chess tournament is still objective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You have assumed objectivity by saying that which chess moves are legal moves is objective. Yet, your job was to show this to be the case, not state it. There's no description of why that's the case.

If your position boils down to your further paragraphs, then I simply reject that you've done anything at all to outline objectivity in these cases. They were weakly related, in any case, but they do no nothing but illustrate collective opinion.

BY eg, this would apply equally to your claim that:

If I raise my child to be a craven, licentious, covetous, and vicious glutton there is a sense in which people in my community can point to what I've done and talk about a "harmful upbringing," without having much difficulty agreeing with one another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is nothing, whatsoever, objective in this, other than a statistical fact about agreement among members of a community. If this is what you take objective to refer to, alrighty. Not I.

It’s a source-hood argument. If his action is not determined by anything else, how is it compatible with determinism? — NOS4A2

I don't think you've quite groked what I'm using to object** - It says nothing about hte 'reality' that it seems indeterminate. The point being, that you feel the source of your decision is internal (in the sense that it is world-independent) has nothing to do with what's actually going on.

Which, obviously, on the contrary account it is, in fact determined and cannot be otherwise. This would be to deny causal relations entirely. If they hold, they hold. All actions/events have prior causes. If you're suggesting that an agent is able to conjure ex-nihilo motivation to act out of literal thin air (in fact, out of Ether) i'm finding that hard to grok. It leads to absurd notions like acting out a reactive behaviour you have not been caused to have. We, generally, call these breaks downs in causality mental illness (though, you'll not this does not change the causal relationship qua relationship, merely qua resulting behaviour - a misfire, as it were, on the causal basis).

Is the suggestion that there's some further fact about decision-making that separates it from the physical facts underlying the brain and body?

** if you in fact have understood this, and your response was the all the same, I'm unsure where to go. That seems to ignore the objection.

You post has no content. — Banno

Not sure what you're going through mate, but I really hope you come out of it better off :) You sometimes say things with substance, and I'd hate to think you'd devolved into a 180-style fuddy-duddyness.

I would ask whether anything could ever count as indirect under this view. — Apustimelogist

I would answer: Patently, yes. Unless we are irrational reductionists, there is no direct link between most things in the world and our experience of them. This is, in fact, the hard problem - and hand-waving away using arguments like this seems to me to entirely side-step the question, and assumes that the very concept of 'direct'ness is somehow intensional and not something which can be ascertained 'correctly' seems both unsatisfactory, and under-explanatory. We have facts that are not explained. Such as experience. Which you're using. To make the claim.
It's a really weird position, when one steps back. Though, i take it that since thinkers like Wittgenstein and Haabermas are taken seriously, this may be an uphill (albeit, risible) battle.

We don’t perceive both the object and the representation of the object. — Mww

(using this is a prompt - I'm not replying to your argument or position, just fyi, below:

This is a really, really good point that It hurts I didn't think to bring up. The DRist must hold that we experience both a physical object, and an empirically different representation of it in consciousness.

If that's the case, I'll need something separating the two in my experience. Otherwise, thsi is a ghost. And not even a very good one. It's totally opaque. There is no such connection in experience.

Yes it does, quite 'directly'.

"Empirical" works for me. Mostly I just mean -- what would I believe, given what I know? A very limited case of "possible", but one we use. — Moliere

Indeed. In that section he's discussing A-level and B-level intensions for words which refer (in that context of supervenience) and distinguishes them so that A-level intension is how the reference a priori such that the reference gives logical necessity to that which it refers.
B-level being that which picks this concept out in the world as it is. Or "as the world turns out" as its put there. I think you're actually slightly closer to the bone, though.

It sounds to me you're giving a fairly vague account akin to compatibleism. Nothing in your account counters determinism - just illustrates that decisions appear to originate in an agent without prior cause.
That seems incoherent, on it's face, though. Further, the agent is deluded, on the accounts determinists wield. This is not implausible at all, and fits with your account.

There's three kinds of possibility I want to distinguish: Logical, metaphysical, and a third kind that I'm having a hard time naming but "actual" works. — Moliere

Empirical works well here too - Chalmers has a great discussion in his explanation of Supervenience in The Conscious Mind.

I often just have to pick an action for no reason just so I don't piss the other players off any more than I already have. — Patterner

Genuinely - get into poker. Getting 'in the tank' is a common thing and the reason some tournaments take a week to play out. Decisions are long, arduous processes in poker. Think you'll enjoy.

is still objective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yet, arbitrary (in the sense needed to be accounted for here, i think). You can't index harm to an arbitrary set point to evoke 'objectivity'. That's kind of a demonstration of begging the question no? Its objective because you chose that as a quality in its description.

Of course, you're correct that what constitutes harm is, to at least some degree, bound up in the virtues, and the virtues are bound up in a given context, but I'm not sure how this leads to their not being at all objective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This smells like talk about primary and secondary intensions ala Chalmers.
The concept 'harm' seems to only pick out that which is subjectively held to be the case in the real world. Some think 'harm' can consist in discomfort, or dislike. This is where trigger warnings appear. Some think 'harm' can only come from some arbitrary line in the sand about losses and gains in a utilitarian sense. Harm certainly doesn't have a rigid referent in the actual world. This says to me, it couldn't conceivably have a secondary intension that picks out anything analogous. So, i say it's implausible to suggest that harm has an objective meaning, other than from a subjective pov (i.e experiences, for me, will either meet, or not meet my internal benchmark for having received harm). 180's explication here merely lists some subjective factors that can go to that internal benchmark in a subject.

I think I would need to see that the word 'harm' has some a-level intension that referred categorically to something - which it doesn't seem to.

If you were right, and indirect realism is the only view compatible with the physics and physiology of perception, do you honestly think the folk here would have continued denying the science for over sixty pages? Is your opinion of your interlocutors that poor? — Banno

Yes. As it so happens, he's right and you've ignored it the entire thread long. Such is life.

I think Searle may agree with that sentiment. — creativesoul

You mean the dude whos career rests largely on literal hand-waving?

drop colour and re-phrase this in terms of shape. What happens? — Banno

Nothing changes for the argument, but you get less comfortable. This is beginning to show a rather nice pattern.

For my part, the issue is that some folk think there is a need to justify that they see this text, even as they read it. — Banno

"see"
"read"

And your position is that everyone who has well and truly knocked your position out of hte park are somehow linguistically stuck. Hehe. It would be funnier, if you were more humorous.

See what happens when one irrelevant comment is made? It becomes the focus. Easy to avoid the difficulty that way, I suppose. — creativesoul

I'm not sure how to explain the irony of this, in response to what I said. Quite a good chuckle here.

I strongly suspect you and I have different opinions on what the issue is. — creativesoul

Yes, very much agree. And I strongly suspect your 'opinion' on what the issue is sidesteps the issue. You can be fairly sure of this, reading your other responses.

If impressing one's own face into a custard pie does not count as directly perceiving the pie, then nothing will and one's framework falls apart if it is of the materialist/physicalist variety — creativesoul

More-or-less, yep - part of why Physicalism ultimately ends up being entirely unsatisfying for 98% of people I suspect.
But as noted, this is exactly the sidestep i'm losing patience with. Your face touching the pie physically is not a perception. It isn't even the process of perception if we're going to keep confusingly conflate the two. Your conscious experience, which lies at the end of process initiated by pressing your face into a pie - which, in this case, will include several sensory experiences, is (i prefer the term experience, because that's what it is). That these are being treated as either the same thing, or somehow supervenient in such a way that they are representing the experience in both cases is baffling, counter to the empirical considerations and very much a side-step. One is a state of affairs, one is an empirically removed shadow of that state of affairs in consciousness. That this is highly uncomfortable isn't that interesting. \

There we have it. Dualism — NOS4A2

You say this like it does anything other than show me what you think of Dualism. It says nothing at all for the position, the arguments or the glaring mystery we're all dancing around.

Your taxes fund an obscure government program that kills millions of wild animals to benefit Big Ag

Nice

I think the inference I'm driving at is that to bite this bullet would be to say something impossible is also possible. That seems logically not possible, to me.
If a Universe exists where "Everything is possible" the example I gave would remove this universe - which gives the ability for the possibility mentioned to exist - and we get an infinite recursive deletion. The Universe can't exist if we're trying to instantiate that it doesn't - but hte universe is required for that instantiation, so ... Incoherence! heh

What does our biological machinery do then, if not directly connect us to the world? Sometimes the causal chain is longer than others, but it is a direct link between the creature and the world nonetheless.

Biological machinery interacts physically with distal objects.

The indirect realist uses knowledge of how biological machinery works as ground to deny that we directly perceive distal objects. If we adhere strictly to the preferred framing of folk like Michael and perhaps yourself(?), we would have to deny any and all physical contact between cows and eyes. If we extend that criterion to other senses, we would be forced to say that physically forcing our face into a pudding pie and withdrawing it would not count as directly perceiving the pie. Even if and when our eyes were/are open. — creativesoul

This is a standard-sidestep that ignores, once again, the crux of the problem. I have bolded the absolute incoherent of this position. The bolded answers all of your incredulity quite well, I think.

I understand that there's a distinction without a difference here - A hand touching a cow is obviously direct (setting aside the weird physical nature of touch actually consisting in repelling forces). Our experience of it cannot be, on any account, direct. I beginning to lose patience with the move trying to be made here that because our body directly interacts with objects (in this one avenue of sense, anyway) that somehow our mind is doing the same thing. This is patently untrue, and at this stage it seems the burden is on the direct realist to explain how this is hte case.

There's a Hard Problem of Consciousness Solver badge in it for you ;)

Odd that all that color matching can be successfully achieved by a brainless machine. — creativesoul

The absolute epitome of trying to ignore the issue

This is all just hand-waving and insinuation. When you present an actual argument I'll address it. — Janus

The wildest of ironies.
My (quite direct and detailed) argument is that hand waving is all that “your side” has in this conflict. Which is why clearing up the language is such an unreasonably effective riposte. This has been illustrated. And is now clearly instantiated here in this exchange.

“I’ll leave you to it”.

And attempting to frame things in absolute terms, as though there is a real fact of the matter, rather than merely competing or alternative interpretations and their attendant ways of speaking is a lost cause in any case. — Janus

This is what I intimate strikes me as giving up.
I do not think you're adequately grappling with the problem. AS noted, when the language and grammar are clear, and we're not instantiating multiple concepts with one term or too-closely-related terms, two things happen: your position becomes untenable, because it is utterly clear that: DR is nonsensical, unless you refuse to get to the bottom of it, and return to misusing language (for that purpose, that is).

Obviously, I agree that large parts of the framing are wrong, and that most of the exchanges in this thread (largely Banno, unfortunately) ensure that this framing is adhered to, instead of progressing - but it is entirely counter to intuition and clear language that there is no appreciable distinction, or that its an issue of interpretation. We have an empirical consideration we are trying to name. There is nothing grey about htis.

So, we have every reason to reject the whole debate as being wrongheaded from the get-go. — Janus

This may be the case, if you don't like the conclusions intimated by cleaning up the discussion - and that seems a very common way to duck out in these, admittedly very, very trying, circumstances. But i push forward... I don't like the idea that we ahve no direct access to the world. It seems patent. Its uncomfortable. The two are not linked.

We have a reliable relationship with those objects, and with the world, and that is all that matters. — Janus

While I didn't skip over the line before this one, this strikes me as giving up. It's all that matters for every-day consideration, but within this thread that is wholly inadequate, I think.

Returning to the previous line, yes. But clearing up the language gives us every reason to reject DR so I can see why this is the case :)

I am, partially, joking. I realise this isn't cut and dried.