The subjective/objective distinction didn't even exist until the 18th century or so, — StreetlightX

I could have sworn the Cyrenaics made that distinction. There's also the modes of the Pyrrhonian skeptics.

Agrippa's Third Mode:

5-3 Pros ti:
Arguments from relativity. X only ever appears such-and-such in relation to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it. Suspension on how X really is follows. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#SkeIdeEarClaGre

Skepticism and idealism of various sorts predates the 18th century. Hinduism has the concept of Maya where the world is an illusion from the mind of God. Then there's the Butterfly Dream from China.

Early Christianity had the gnostics, with their beliefs in personal gnosis. Some of them believed the material world was an illusion.

What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with? — StreetlightX

To answer this more specifically, the difference between appearance and reality. Thinks aren't always as they seem. The naive view of things is often misleading.

What concerns? And why are you concerned to begin with? — StreetlightX

Same concerns humanity has had since the ancient schools of philosophy in India, China and Greece, if not earlier.

and an archetype of a subjective statement:
Fred believes that common salt is composed of chlorine and sodium. — Banno

Or, Fred feels like it's hot in the car, Jill thinks it's cold, but Raymond feels just right.

Or, Fred believes the salt is poison from his partner, who is an alien doppleganger.

Or, Fred dreams the salt is a bunch of tiny elves cranking his taste buds.

Or, Fred is convinced that salt is no more than how it appears to him.

Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. — StreetlightX

Warding off epistemological concerns would be one motivation. Wasn't Wittgenstein trying to dissolve issues like solipsism by arguing for the necessary public nature of language?

Rather than the mind receiving the truths of the outer world into its inner world, minding is about forming embodied and adaptive points of view. Mindfulness is the larger thing of that relation in action. — apokrisis

This still doesn't dissolve the distinction. It just redifines objective and subjective into adaptive points of view versus the world itself. Unless you want to espouse some form of anti-realism where there is no world independent of adaptive points of view.

Which would be hard to believe, given what science tells us about the universe.

We could say, "It's conceivable that everything is identical re the ice, temperature, etc. yet the ice wouldn't be slippery." P-zombies are "conceivable" in the same way as that. — Terrapin Station

Problem here is that the slipperiness of ice is logically entailed by knowing the physics and chemistry. to imagine a physically identical world without the slipperiness is to fail to imagine an identical world. Nobody has succeeded so far in showing how this is the case for consciousness.

Identity theorists say that consciousness is identical to certain mental states. But for sake of argument, I can image a physically identical world lacking that identity. It's called all the other theories of consciousness.

I'm not sure exactly what an identity is supposed to be. Is it the neurons firing a certain way? Is it their function? Is it the information they compute? Chalmers himself proposes a theory based on informationally rich processes, but it's a property dualism, not an identity.

If physicists and computer scientists developed a consciousness chip that computed conscious states, would we say the electrons moving through the silicon are identical to having a conscious experience? I don't know how to make sense of that.

However, I think that "phenomenal consciousness" or "qualia" is a harder nut to crack than vitalism. Again, I am not agreeing with Chalmers et al., I just don't think that it is as obvious, as you say. There is something odd about consciousness that calls for a careful conceptual analysis. — SophistiCat

That's for sure. And Chalmers does discuss the difference between vitalism and consciousness. Vitalism was tenable before biology could fully explain the behavior of life. But there is something odd about consciousness in a different way that requires us to think carefully about it. Knowing the science of how our bodies or the world works doesn't resolve the riddle.

50 times later being drunk isn't quite so amusing. — Bitter Crank

Getting drunk is still fun. It's the hangovers that become less amusing over time. Particularly when you're supposed be doing things other than lying in bed wondering why you still find it amusing to wake up feeling terrible.

If you're an identity theorist as I am, those two are not contradictory. Not that I share the view. I think that only some physical "stuff" is mental stuff, I'm not a property dualist, etc. — Terrapin Station

I'm curious, would an identity theorist have to reject Chalmers p-zombie world as being conceivable?

Not really. Again, facts aren't mind independent. Which, gives me the suspicion that Wittgenstein still held onto Kantian transcendentalism in some sense of the Tractatus. — Posty McPostface

In that case, the totality of the world is the categories of my mind coming into contact with the various sense impressions.

As far as I'm aware, Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was a nominalist. — Posty McPostface

Problem being that nominalism is a bit hard to square with saying the world is a totality of relations and properties, since you're going to have a lot of the same properties and relations repeated all over the place.

Atomic facts are those things and relations you talk about. Contrast this with sachlage and sachverhalten. — Posty McPostface

And what's the difference between atomic facts and hylomorphism? Was he unwittingly committed to a form of universals?

That's a really good idea. I agree. — unenlightened

But is it true?

It means that facts have a greater ontological significance than things. Atom facts that is. States of affairs are important too. — Posty McPostface

That sounds really difficult to square with a world made up of particles and forces. We can talk about atomic facts of .a table, such as it's color, solidity, constitution, etc, but it's the physical stuff which makes it what it is.

Thus affirmation of truth is an expression of agreement, but truth is somfin' else. — unenlightened

Maybe we should use different terms. One is truth, the other is agreement. Or one is truth, the other is states of affairs, or whatever.

But, after all the world is the totality of facts, not things. Facts are not mind-independent though. On a hard reading, you can designate facts as having ontological significance superior to things. — Posty McPostface

I don't understand what that means, at least not as a materialist.

I'm not saying that agreeing that something is true makes it true. I'm saying that when we say something is 'true' we are merely an expressing an agreement. There's a subtle difference. — Purple Pond

That seems to setup a double meaning for truth. One being how things are, the other being whether we agree with a statement on how things are.

This isn't the place for philosophy — Michael

I disagree with that common saying!

don't, and the reason why is because I view morality as a way of people being able to flourish and how we can get along with one another to do so. — LD Saunders

And I happen to agree with you, but then that's the version of morality that's generally accepted today. We were born into cultures that tend to value equality and tolerance. But if we had been born into Sparta or Rome, we might not think so.

The problem is locating that objective moral view point which can be the arbiter between different cultural views on morality.

Setting up a society along the lines of Nazism is objectively worse than establishing a society along the lines of the current US Constitution. The Nazi society will crumble and kill many millions in the process of doing so. — LD Saunders

I don't know what makes it objectively worse. Many people agree that it's a lot worse, and the bloodiest war in history was partly fought over that. But where outside of human opinion can we locate that?

The difference with physics is that the world determines how right or wrong we are. But it doesn't do that for morality, because the world isn't moral. Biology isn't moral either.

Any problems? — Purple Pond

I disagree with your notion of truth.

Both. They aren't mutually exclusive. — Posty McPostface

My temptation is to say that only things have ontological existence. Facts are generated by minds. Facts are a product of language, and language is dependent on the evolution of social animals like us.

The reasons for this are quite simple --- everyone could be wrong, or one person could be wrong, and the others right, or more than one person could be objectively right. — LD Saunders

Alright, but I don't know what it would mean for everyone to be wrong about morality. What would the right morality consist of independent of human beings, or some other social animal with moral views?

My argument would be that morality is whatever rules we adopt in order to cooperate as social animals. We can and do argue over which rules to uphold, which to change, and which to get rid of over time, but there isn't anything beyond those rules, our biological needs and desires, and our social existence.

Objects are simple, they are the simplest constituent part of a fact that occupy space, but nowhere does Wittgenstein give an example of an object. They are simply requirements of his logical analysis. They are not things like, apples, trees, cars, mountains, numbers, properties, etc. — Sam26

So early Wittgenstein actually thought reality consisted of atomic facts and not things like apples, trees, people, etc?

Because people disagree over moral issues, then morality must be subjective. — LD Saunders

Right, but I think it's more that because different cultures disagree on moral issues, and there is no confirmed commandments from on high, therefore morality is culturally determined, instead of some external objective reality.

What does not kill me makes me stronger. — Michael

Like aging after 25, which I guess does eventually kill you, if nothing else does it first.

As Thomas Paine pointed out, a past generation has no right to rule over the present generation. Why would they? — LD Saunders

But what's the alternative to this? Each generation gets to form a new government and make their own laws?

And in a world where knowledge increases from one generation to the next, — LD Saunders

Which hasn't necessarily demonstrated that humans are wiser.

simply means we should try to discern what the intent was among a handful of people in an earlier generation who knew far less than we do now. — LD Saunders

Knew less about what, though? How best to balance power in government? What sort of democracy is workable? Do we know better now? Yes, we know a lot more about science and technology than they did. But do we know better how to govern? I suppose the grand experiment has played itself out for a couple centuries in multiple countries now, so maybe there are some better examples to take from?

Sure, but we're talking about the structure of the government, not who gets to be a citizen and vote.

If today we find the Electoral College and Senate to be too undemocratic, they can be done away with via constitutional amendments, if the states agreed to go along with that. Problem being that states are still a fundamental unit of organization in the US.

What I can say is that the process we have in the US appears terribly flawed, where the Court is placed in the center of the political process, supposedly representing a wisdom beyond the grasp of the democracy. — Hanover

The US government wasn't setup to be a simple democracy. It is a constitutional republic of states where the Senate represents the states, and POTUS is elected by the electoral college.

A lot of people are unhappy with that arrangement now, wishing for a more representative form of the actual population. But that's not what was intended by the framers of the constitution.

I think you should consider greed to be the reason for this? :chin: — Pattern-chaser

I don't. I consider our level of technology as the reason for it.

And if thinking of hands is existentially dependent upon and external world? — creativesoul

Then there has to be an external world. But that leaves several radical skeptical scenarios as possibilities.

Are you here to ask about Marxist theory you've read or be taught Marxism? The former is reasonable, the latter is not. — MindForged

More to argue against abolishing private ownership, but what you posted brought up questions as to what Marx meant by a post scarcity society.

In context of the OP and your response, to argue against abolishing private ownership as a means to achieving post scarcity.

I think it's pretty clear he wasn't talking about a society that had then-presently existed. It's part of his theory, that in a communist society scarcity is eliminated from the economic system. — MindForged

And that's an inspiring sentiment, but did he give any compelling reason for why communism would eliminate scarcity? Maybe a better question would be, what did Marx mean by that? Because industrialized societies since his day have shown that human wants expand with the possibility of new goods and services.

Private property has been eliminated at this point — MindForged

Private ownership, or just ownership of capital?

What he's saying is that under socialism there will be an abundance since the economy isn't operating under scarcity. There's more than enough for everyone, basically. — MindForged

Was Marx envisioning a fully automated society? Because a post-scarcity society has never existed.

I'm sympathetic to that view. Constrained math has a relationship with reality. Aristotle's view was more correct than Plato's. The in-between position seems more reasonable.

I like this:

hat we are getting at with mathematical physics at least is the objective point of view - the one from the perspective which would be the Cosmos contemplating its own rational structure. — apokrisis

What reason is there to believe that one can dream of hands prior to thinking about them? — creativesoul

None, but it opens to door to having experiences of hands that are not external in other scenarios that could possibly be the case, as far as we know.

As such, Moore's argument isn't an argument to trot out against Bostrom's ancestor simulation argument, or a Boltzman brain.

That's a convincing response.

So the statement is not self-contradictory because it requires additional axioms to reach a contradiction. — andrewk

Okay, but those additional axioms aren't based on facts about the world. They're just further steps in logical reasoning based on the definition given.

This bachelor is married' would not be self-contradictory, even though the statement 'No bachelor is married' is used as a canonical example of an analytic truth. — andrewk

I don't understand this. Saying the bachelor is married contradicts the definition. I took the point of contradiction to mean analytical statements have their truth contained in the definition or rules of the respective concept or statement. So we can derive all sorts of mathematical or logical truths that don't rely on facts about the world being added to the mix.

Such doubt is belief based. All belief consists of meaningful correlations drawn between different things. — creativesoul

Right, and there's your argument in the other thread which I said I agreed with. But, what the dream argument shows is that it's possible to have an experience of my hands without them being external. We can differentiate between dreaming and being awake, but that possibility of having non-external hand experience still remains. Which means there could be radical scenarios in which it's actually the case.

As such, Moore waving his hands about doesn't defeat the skeptic, it just reinforces that such doubt is radical. But the skeptic can just reply, "Yeah and so what? I already knew that skepticism was radical to common, everyday sense."