Well, it's akin to asking why any physical stuff has just the properties it does.

Again, you didn't at all understand the comment I made.

You won't accept that it's possible that you didn't understand it. When I started steps of demonstrating that you didn't understand it, you responded with insults rather than confronting the possibility.

Thank you both for missing the point so thoroughly, and yet concisely — Wayfarer

No problem. Thank you for making the point so well. Good discussion.

If you mean follow the example of actually attempting to provide cogent arguments — Janus

Sure. So let's start with this: This is a strawman having sex with a red herring. Of course we attempt to provide cogent arguments. That has never been the point at issue. You seem pretty obtuse sometimes; perhaps willfully so?

Is that how you mean?

Should I follow your example instead? (Or maybe you'd prefer I be dishonest?)

You seem pretty obtuse sometimes; perhaps willfully so? It should be obvious I was referring to to what Marchesky said: — Janus

Geez. You passed that test of your understanding with flying colors. Exactly as I expected, lol.

You're an incorrigible yet ridiculously arrogant moron.

Start with this:

. Of course we observe all those things; — Janus

Of course we observe what things?

the question about how things are in themselves is the paradigmatic example of a question that we cannot even coherently formulate. — Janus

If you think you can't coherently formulate it then you can't make claims about not being able to know it.

but part of the problem with not knowing what it's like to be a bat is that no description is going to put you into the state of having a sonar experience. — Marchesk

Exactly, and sometimes it seems like that's what critics are demanding.

This is a strawman having sex with a red herring. Of course we observe all those things; that has never been the point at issue. The point is that the things we observe and the things we say about those things are always inextricably relative to our experience and tell us and say nothing definitively decidable about any supposed 'reality' beyond that. I say "definitively decidable" because obviously we can, individually, decide what we want to think about it, but that is, and can be, no more and no less than a preference-driven individual decision. — Janus

I'm surprised that you're commenting authoritatively despite not actually understanding the comment.

Not really, though.

If you're just claiming something about stuff you're making up/imagining, it has little weight, little bearing on anything except for the fact that you're also imagining people who think you're consistently harebrained.

Because many of them like Chalmers want a science of consciousness where it's taken seriously, and they think there is a strong correlation between brain activity and consciousness, so it would be informative to map that out. — Marchesk

My impression has always been that the folks who stress that there's an "explanatory gap" would feel that way no matter what explanation is forwarded, especially because they'll give no clear criteria for what fhey require of explanations.

Well, it will certainly undermine the very basis of realist arguments. — Wayfarer

How would it undermine a realist argument? If we're going to claim things about how brains etc. work, we need to be able to observe brains, other people, etc.

Neurophenomenology is this mapping between rich conscious descriptions and brain processes. It allows for a chipping away at the explanatory gap between the hard problem and neuroscience, which may end up suggesting the cause and not just an in-depth correlation. — Marchesk

I think it's worth asking why are people who think that there's an "explanatory gap" likely to accept explanations that are "mapping between rich conscious descriptions and brain processes"?

Not a question to argue, but as to your view: you may have noticed a news item from Florida about a public school principal who explained that instruction on the Holocaust was conditioned on, had to be conditioned on, sensitivity to parents who did not "believe in the Holocaust - implying (strongly) that the Holocaust was a matter of belief/opinion and not of fact. He's suspended, and maybe by now fired. If you're the superintendent of schools in that city, what do you do with him? — tim wood

(a) Tell him that he's welcome to express his opinion,

(b) Tell him that I agree with him that epistemologically, it's always a matter of believing one thing or another, though belief isn't contrasted with facts--facts are what we have beliefs about,

(c) Explain that regardless of his opinion, his school, just like all the other schools, is required to teach about the Holocaust in history class, regardless of whether he or any parents believe that the Holocaust occurred or not. The point of teaching things in school isn't to kowtow to beliefs that parents might have. If they don't agree with something, that's their problem.

The point that I'm making is that things that are however they are, things that we can't do anything about--such as physical laws (or brute physical facts, at least)--are a category error for talking about consent.

The realm (relative to conceptual conventions) for talking about consent (a) requires agents who are capable of granting or withholding consent (in general, including about possible future states they might be in, even if they're not conscious at the moment in question), and (b) at least for saying that something was done to them nonconsensually, requires that what was acting upon them was another moral agent, where we're not simply talking about things like observational approval, but something with direct (so, physical violence or manhandling for example) or indirect-but-causally-linked effects (so, for an example, effects from poisons or toxins that someone put in an environment) on the agent in question.

Thus, consent isn't an issue for whether you'll get hurt if you decide to jump off of a building. But consent is required for whether you'll allow someone else to push or propel you off of a building. And consent isn't required when a snake bites you, say, since we don't consider snakes to be moral agents.

Is the problem with math or a subset of math infinity? — TheMadFool

The problem is that mathematics is a way that we think about relations. The world isn't required to match that.

Anyway do you have any idea where I f***ed up in my reasoning? — TheMadFool

If we're concluding that it's impossible to move then obviously we're going awry somewhere. Probably there isn't an infinite amount of points to cross.

Argument of antinatalism- not having children. There is no one who is deprived of anything. There is no one who exists to need...anything actually. — schopenhauer1

?? The reason that I quoted this: "The quality of life of a yet to be born child is not a totally unknowable, transcendent mystery" is because that's the claim I was addressing. I wasn't addressing any broader claim or argument than that.

I was talking about the tortoise and Achilles paradox and a cousin responded. Coincidence! Strange. — TheMadFool

Strangely "cousin" is a relational term.

That is not the issue at hand. The issue is, no one needs to assess anything, if they don't exist. — schopenhauer1

The issue at hand according to whom?

Strangely Terrapin is a type of turtle. — TheMadFool

Why is that strange?

It doesn't matter.. the assessment of good/bad for something that does not exist. — schopenhauer1

Again, it might matter to people who exist.

It.. what is it here? — schopenhauer1

You know what you were talking about with "it" when you wrote "Nor would it matter," don't you?

But it might matter to people who do exist. You have to ask them to know.

They don't exist. — schopenhauer1

Whether something matters is up to the people who do exist. So you can't say something doesn't matter in an unqualified way.

Nor would it matter — schopenhauer1

Depends on who you ask. Mattering is something each individual will make an assessment about, and they can't be right or wrong about what does or doesn't matter to them.

the impossibility of having to traverse an infinite number of points between the two. — TheMadFool

When you get to a point such as that in your reasoning, it's a cue to say, "Oops! I must have f-ed up somewhere, at least in some assumption I made."

The quality of life of a yet to be born child is not a totally unknowable, transcendent mystery. As humans, we know the harms (and potential harms) potential humans will face, and we can choose to mitigate these entirely (at least in our own children's sake) by not reproducing. — Inyenzi

You don't know what any individual is going to think about what you consider harms, especially relative to things they consider to be positives.

What are your thoughts on the matter? — Patulia

I'm not in favor of immigration restrictions aside from screening for wanted criminals or people with known terrorism associations.

And I'm a free speech absolutist, so I have a problem with suspending the teacher, too.

What is the knowledge-justification method in epistemology? — alcontali

That doesn't really make sense though. Epistemology looks at what knowledge is, what justification is, etc. Looking at knowledge and/or justification of looking at knowledge and justification doesn't add anything. It's not as if epistemology leaves those things unanalyzed.

The way I see it, there are two additional dimensions: one relates to value, and the other to meaning. We experience the world not just from a particular perspective in spacetime, but also from a particular evaluative perspective. This perspective comes from the unique sum of our past interactions across spacetime. So too, we experience the world from a particular perspective that positions each of us uniquely in terms of how all our evaluations of experience interact to construct meaning. — Possibility

Just to make it clear (I know you're not commenting on this, but I could see things going off track easily), when I use "perspective" in this context, I'm not talking about the conscious perspective of a person. I'm using the term in more of a "point of reference" fashion, which is why I often try to substitute that phrase instead.

All of those, then? — bongo fury

In my opinion the questions were kind of a mess in context and every term there would have to be sorted out, which would be a ridiculous amount of work that's not necessary if you're not clear on the idea. Hence why I referred to something else and explained it to you in another way instead.

But, like a photograph, it (the perception/mental picture) is a more or less direct trace of physical events, and the opposition are claiming otherwise? They are claiming it's less realistic, like a painting? — bongo fury

They're claiming that literally you're not perceiving something external to you, but instead, you're "perceiving" (that is, your mental awareness is of) something that's exclusively mental. Something that was created by (your) mind. And they're claiming that you have no way to be aware of anything other than things created by your mind, so you have no way at all of not only determining those mental creations' relationships to something external to you, but that you'd have no way of even establishing that there is anything external to you.

If so, then I have to be quite annoyingly arrogant and say "you're both wrong!" (like Homer Simpson, tragic I know.)

But yes. I say: "none of those". Mental pictures are a myth. One as old as real pictures, and probably responsible for all the mutual incomprehension in this kind of discussion. (I did warn you.) — bongo fury

My view is that there's no good way to reason to the idea that one is only experiencing something that's a mental creation (a "mental picture"), so there's no reason to believe that that's the case.

I wouldn't say that "mental pictures" are a myth with respect to imagining things, remembering them, etc.

But if you don't think that either some form of idealism or representationalism OR something like direct realism is how things work, then what would you say is going on/how would you say that perception (or whatever you figure it is) works?

So "you" are just a perception in your brain? — Harry Hindu

No. The idea wasn't that "you" is a subset of perception. Perception was an example of a mental "mode."

The notion of one's self is an example of another mental "mode."

and presumably you think that if you perceived this rock from every possible reference point then you would see everything about this rock. — leo

No, exactly NOT that. It's not possible to see "everything" about anything. There are a number of simple reasons for this, including that (a) at any given moment, you can only experience one perspective, and all perspectives are different at different points of time, (b) you can't experience any perspective that's not your own, and most are not your own. This includes that you can't observe the rock from the surface of the rock, you can't observe it from inside the rock, etc. (and each point on the surface, the inside, etc. is different anyway). You can obviously observe the surface and the inside, but you're not doing so from the perspective of being the surface or the inside. It's always from a perspective that's in an extensional relation to it instead.

Now replace rock with brain. If you perceive a brain from various perspectives, if you measure its temperature, density, electrical conductivity, electrical activity, nothing tells you there that this thing perceives or thinks anything at all, even if you somehow observed it from all reference points. — leo

This is wrong in that if you observe it from the perspective of being that brain, you experience the mental properties. If you're not the brain in question, you can't observe it from that perspective. If you are the brain in question, you can.

Just the same thing goes for the rock. You can't observe it from the point of reference of being the rock. Because you're not the rock.

Now you could say that a brain is how perceptions and thoughts of others appear to us from our perspective, but then our perspective shows us a tiny part of what's there, and looking at a thing from all possible reference points is still showing only a tiny part of what it is. — leo

Yes, you're always experiencing things from a very limited number of reference points. This does not at all imply anything like idealism however.

other brains have perspectives we don't have or can't have. — leo

Yes, obviously.

And then it seems quite premature to classify a particular reported experience as some hallucination or delusion, rather than as an observation from a reference point we don't have. — leo

It just depends on what is being claimed and the support for the claim.

In other words, we don't see things as they are from a particular location at a particular time, we see things from a particular location at a particular time from a particular brain. — leo

There's no difference there. "A particular location at a particular time" is always some location, some thing which is the point of reference. A brain is as good as anything there.

So, what's the theory of knowledge of the theory of knowledge?

I don't think that makes any sense as a nested question.

Perception of the tree is an activity of the (embodied) brain which receives the sensory stimuli, and synthesises them into judgement 'tree'. — Wayfarer

I've pointed this out many times over the years, but if you wind up positing that we can't observe what things like trees are really like, if we can't posit that we can simply observe external things like trees, we certainly can't posit that we can observe things like brains, eyes, nerves, other people (or even the surfaces of your own body), experimental apparatuses to test how perception works, etc. So one winds up undermining the very basis of one's argument. (At least if one is trying to formulate this argument on any sort of scientific grounds.)

See this post of mine from a different thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/297414

As I explain there (specifically with respect to representationalism), the idea from the opposition (opposed to direct realists like me) is that you're only aware of (or only "perceiving," though I wouldn't say we're talking about perception in this case, hence the quotation marks) something created by your mind, where it's not possible to know how that mental content is really connected to anything else (assuming that the opposition is proposing something else in the first place--if they're representationalists, they are proposing something else; if they're idealists or solipsists, they may not be).

So the difference is between perceiving (or "perceiving")--so we're talking about on the phenomenal/awareness end of things--something that was created by/something that originates in our minds, so that we're literally "perceiving" mental content in this first case, versus something that wasn't created by/didn't originate in our minds, but that's rather external to us/external to our minds.

Another way to think of it is another analogy. We have a camera. The question about the photographs we produce with our cameras is this: is the content of the photographs that we produce solely the camera itself (is your supposed picture of a tree in your yard really just a picture of the camera?), where there's no way to know how the content of the photographs is correlated with a real, external tree, assuming that we're positing such a thing, or is the content of the photographs we produce something external to the camera? (Note that we're not asking if the photograph of a tree is literally/identical to a tree, we're asking if it's "directly" a photograph of an external tree, rather than a photograph of the (internal workings of the) camera.)

Is it (is perceiving the tree) experiencing a mental picture of the tree? — bongo fury

No. There's no reason to believe that it's perceiving a mental picture of the tree rather than perceiving the tree.

That you never said your perception is representative of the tree is fine. I'm asking what your personal basis is for believing that you're perceiving something that has been transmitted from a tree.

You asked your question, which you insisted be answered, in the hypothetical, as my position has never been that I know my perception is representative of the actual tree or that it emanates from the tree. As I've said, I cannot speak of the noumena. — Hanover

The reason I asked is that you wrote this: "My view is that I'm perceiving whatever has been transmitted from the tree . . ."

So for the first part of that, you believe that there's a tree that's transmitting something to you. I'm not asking you about a hypothetical. I'm asking you about something that you said is your view.

Since you've said both that you believe things like trees are unknowable and that there's a tree that's transmitting something to you, I'm asking you what your personal basis for believing that you're perceiving something that has been transmitted from a tree. Again, this isn't a hypothetical. It's a question about things you've said that you believe, things you've said are your view.