Consider "this sentence is true". That doesn't say anything, as TS says, there's no substance. It's like saying 'this sentence is a sentence", "this chair is a chair", etc.. — Metaphysician Undercover

SEP's counter to this is the sentence, "This sentence is not in Italian", which is not meaningless, but is in the same form as the liar sentence. And in ordinary language, people sometimes do say things like, "Now this car is a car!"

Also, there is this very big counter to the claim that the liar sentence is without meaning:

"This sentence is meaningless."

Which would be true if the liar sentence is meaningless, but then we get ourselves into another regress.

"this chair is not a chair", or "this table is not a table" — Metaphysician Undercover

But we do say things like that on occasion. For example, "This party is not a party", meaning it's a party in name only. I'm pretty sure I have said something akin to "this chair is not a chair" when being forced to sit on something uncomfortable that served as a chair. I've also said, "I'm not myself today", which would seem to be a violation of the law of identity, but clearly it's not meant to be taken in literal terms.

A bunch of natural language words does not a contradiction make, no matter how much it may feel as though they do. — andrewk

We use the word contradiction in natural language. That politician is stating contradictory things, or you're contradicting yourself, etc. This is the first time I've heard that contradiction is only a term applicable to formal logic. The dictionary and everyday use of the word would lead one to believe otherwise. I can make a contradictory statement in natural language quite easily. The unicorn is both pink and invisible.

If the only problem is that the sentence feels unintuitive, and the things one feels like one ought to be able to deduce from it feel as though they would contradict one another, then that's not a problem of psychology, not of symbolic logic. — andrewk

I don't understand what feelings have to do with this. The liar's paradox presents a logical contradiction. I can't always be lying if I'm telling the truth, so that's clearly false, but if it's false, then I'm telling the truth, but then if it's true, I'm lying so ....

How can it prima facie not be a contradiction?

Perhaps we make a basic "existential" choice whether or not take radical skepticism seriously. It's like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock. — R-13

Idealism isn't skepticism. It's a response to skepticism, in that an alternative metaphysics is being proposed such that one can't doubt that one is kicking a rock or waving hands in front of their face, because they are ideas in the mind.

Contrast this with materialism, where an experience of thing can be mistaken. I could be a BIV thinking I'm kicking a material rock, or material rocks might be just a how we humans perceive clumpy hard things, or what have you. The reality could be entirely different, once you propose that reality is different from experience. Metaphysical realism brings with it the specter of skepticism.

Berkeley was defeated by G. E. Moore. Many people hate idealism. — mosesquine

If waving one's hands was enough to defeat Berkeley's arguments, then surely kicking a rock would have been as well?

Both totally mischaracterize idealism.

Yes, it's like your brain and your body have different ideas.

I suppose so.

What is an essence? — Banno

The properties that make a thing a certain something. What is the essence of an electron?

Mass, charge, spin, and whatever else distinguishes electrons from other particles.

What makes a cat different from a dog?

Biological species are less exact, but the genetic and phenotypic properties of a feline that are unique. The big difference between an electron and an animal species is that the first might not be made of simpler parts, while the second is made of many simplers. But that still results in unique properties such that we can classify animals.

don't think that's much of a challenge though, unless one simply doesn't understand what similarities are, and one wants to pretend to not be able to understand any explanations/"in other words" descriptions (such as "(family) resemblances") etc. of what similarities are. — Terrapin Station

So what are similarities? Every single electron in the universe is similar because it has the same mass and amount of charge. Mass is similar because it attracts by the same relationship, for all bodies of mass, across the entire cosmos. How does one account for such universalities in science?

An electron is an electron because it has certain properties that all electrons "share", or however you want to put that.

Apo and Streetlight in a similar thread to this months ago said that everything starts off the same, and then because of symmetry breaking and what not early on, things differentiate.

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining.

Is that convincing? How would a proponent of universals respond?

Just as a fun side-bar, who do you think is the "true" hero of LotR? My brothers and I figured it out in our late teens, and many years later it was verified to me when I read a letter Tolkien wrote to his son shortly after WWII in which he explicitly mentions who he meant the true hero to be. You can find it in his collected letters edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Any guesses? — Real Gone Cat

Gollum, because he saved Middle Earth by biting off Frodo's finger with the ring on it at the last moment.

So, instead of a deserted blob, it's a bunch of particulars.

But what is the relationship between particulars such that some particulars are more similar than others. We conceptualize because the world can be conceptualized, because of similarity.

The challenge for nominalism is accounting for similarity without falling back into universals.

What in hell does it mean for the human condition to be a logical entity?

An empirical question that would shed light is whether the brain uses the same resources to imagine, hallucinate, and dream that it does for perception. For visual experiences, is there a visual ability that gets used by all of them? If so, that lends credence to the brain creating a virtual world of sorts, and not direct perception.

that the human mind is beyond the description of any formal system due to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. — Question

I don't think that's the fundamental issue. I think it's that an objective description is abstracted away from first person experience. So the question is whether a third person description can account for first person.

Now some think if you can the mechanisms resulting in consciousness, then there's nothing more to explain. Basically, consciousness becomes brute, or beyond explanation, since explanation is third person. Or identical to those mechanisms.

So then the question becomes whether a simulation of those mechanisms results in consciousness, or whether consciousness is identical to certain biological processes. And furthermore, can we know whether other kinds of simulations would lead to non-human consciousnes? Is that a question that can be answered? Which is also related to asking questions about animal consciousness.

If we lack an explanation, then I'm not sure we can answer those sorts of questions.

Yes, but God, by definition, is always thinking about everything. — John

Why would God need to think? It occurred to me a while back that God has no need for intelligence, because there are no problems God needs to solve. Intelligence is for animals, who are limited by their bodies and environments. They have challenges to overcome to survive.

God has none.

If consciousness is decidable then solving the problem of other minds simply means discovering the correct algorithm of consciousness. — m-theory

How would one go about showing that consciousness is decidable? I take it that if it is, consciousness can be computed, which means a Turing machine can be conscious.

Although, it makes me wonder. Would an abstract algorithm be conscious, or just the instantiation of it?

Why is this one real as opposed to the others I'm not experiencing where I instead went to sleep instead of replying to your post, now? — Question

Because in this one you're replying to the post. In another one, you're sleeping. What you're asking is why you're experiencing posting and not going to sleep. That's because you're not that "version" of you. That other you experienced it.

t doesn't matter if it's 5 or 5 million feet away. What is the connection between brain activity and some other physical thing such that the former is a thought about the latter? — Michael

Obviously, thought would need to be physical in a way that's connected to the physical thing. Computation is one such attempt to do so. How can a computer compute an action based on some event not inside the computer, or some event that doesn't exist now?

he first two because (unless eternalism is true) past and future things don't exist, and the last because of special relativity (i.e. the light cone). — Michael

They did, or will exist, and GR suggests that they do. Also, the future is conjecture or projection for us, not knowledge. It's past events you're questioning, which can be a femtosecond or 5 light years.

That's the very thing I'm questioning. What kind of connection is there between our brain activity (and our vocalisations and writings) and some other physical thing millions of miles away such that the former is a thought (or a statement) about the latter? It seems to me that if no sensible account of this reference-connection can be made then the very realist claim that we talk and think about things which are ontologically independent of our thoughts and speech is an incoherent one. — Michael

Does it make any difference if it's 5 feet away versus 5 million miles? (I don't recall the sun's distance from Earth). Light takes time to travel regardless. Talking about a tree, a star, tea in China, it all takes time to get to us.


The kind of connection is all the physical events leading up to our knowledge.

And, again, we can (presumably) think about things to which brain activity doesn't have a physical connection, e.g. future, past, and distant events. — Michael

Why isn't there a physical connection to things in time or space? I don't get that at all. The sun isn't inside our brains. It's several million miles away, and 8 minutes old by the time we see it. But we talk about it, study it, predict it, explain it, etc.

But there's a physical connection between our brain activity (which is us thinking about the Sun) and things that aren't the Sun. — Michael

Sure. But those are likely cultural. I can think about a unicorn. I didn't invent the idea of unicorns. It was out there in the cultural landscape. Anyway, cognitive science would have something to say about all this.

Sure there's a connection (according to the realist). — Michael

But not according to anyone else? The sun is just an experience that has nothing to do with our talk of the sun? That sounds rather Landru-like, and it was one of the least convincing things he ever argued for.

The ontological separation of thought and subject does seem problematic, especially if one is a physicalist and reduces thoughts to brain activity. We have this physical thing here which is the Sun and this physical thing here which is brain activity, but what is the relationship between the two such that the latter is a thought about the former? Is there a unique kind of physical connection between the two? — Michael

This is a matter for the sciences to sort out, ultimately, not philosophers. It's a matter of how human beings learn, form concepts about what they learned, and communicate them.

You've already alluded the the physical connection. We're physical beings in a physical world, so of course there is a connection between the sun and our perceiving it, and then talking about it.

If it's all physical interaction, then it's just a matter for science, right?

Working on Meillassoux's argument — Cavacava

I like how Meillassoux used death and finitude to get around correlationism. That's rather creative. Death by various means is problematic for idealism, or at least the subjective kind. If God's keeping tabs on everything, then death can happen just fine. But if nobody is, then people just stop experiencing for no reason sometimes. And then what? Does the idealist have a coherent answer? Is it okay as long as there is some other experiencer around?

What about just "I am suffering, therefore suicide."

Seems perfectly logical. Everyone still living is blue-pilled as fuck. — dukkha

How much are you suffering? Are you being stretched on the rack? Are you scraping by in the zombie apocalypse? Did someone put you in the dungeon and throw away the key?

Usually people consider suicide when they become seriously depressed, their suffering seems unbearable, or their situation seems hopeless. Often it's a psychological issue or a physiological one. But just every day life doesn't usually make one consider suicide. Continuing to experience the only life you are certain to have seems like a better choice than not experiencing anything.

But if it was truly subjectively indistinguishable, it would just be a choice between continuing to experience the suffering of real life, or for your real life experience to become far more pleasurable. Almost everyone would pick the latter. — dukkha

Not if when choosing they knew it could cause great suffering to other people. You would have to not care about the fate of others. It doesn't matter that you won't care upon entering the machine. What matters is when making the decision.

What matters in making the moral judgment is whether the imaginer can tell the difference, not the imagined. — The Great Whatever

The imaginer can tell the difference when choosing to enter the dream machine. The not being able to tell the difference afterward is just to maximize the experience. What's being lost here is the ethical consideration of entering, not the situation after.

But ultimately they found out no? So that defeats the whole point you're trying to make — Agustino

They did, because the main characters on Star Trek always find a way out of every predicament, but one character, the bad guy of the episode, didn't. He thought he escaped into the wider universe, but they were running him on simulator. Granted, he was a holodeck character who gained sentience, but he knew there was an external world, and was trying to get the crew to find a way for him to be transported to it. So the crew fooled him into thinking he had.

Does this actually make sense though, to defer current pleasure for future ones? — dukkha

Yes, if you don't want to end up homeless and bankrupt. Or not achieve any life goals. If you don't care about those things, then well go for it.

So to hold off on reaching one's goal (intrinsic 'goodness'), so that you can reach the exact same goal 4 days from now is nonsensical. You could have just not waited and reached the very same goal. — dukkha

Delay gratification is usually so you can achieve more pleasure, or whatever it is you value than you can in the moment. Or it's to avoid pain and undesirable ends later on.

Also, you will never actually get to the future anyway as you never leave the present. — dukkha

Well, it's late 2016 and I'm years older than when when as kid I wondered what the future would be like, so I would say you're wrong about that.

The only time you can possibly experience pleasure is right now. — dukkha

How does anyone accomplish any goal that's the slightest bit unpleasurable if now is the only consideration? Imagine you wanted to win a marathon. You know that you need to train for it, and then pace yourself accordingly on that day, and then not give up when you're tired late in the race. You have to push yourself, but in a smart way. You do all that for the anticipated feeling of winning the race, or setting a personal best, or just the fact that you were able to run 26.2 miles.

How do you do that just living in the now? Lots of people do this sort of thing, btw. I would say almost everyone in life delay gratifies at some point to achieve something more desireable, or just to avoid disaster. You can't function beyond that of a spoiled child in this life without doing some delay gratification.

I believe that the experience machine thought experience is subject to a kind of logical fallacy that is common in many thought experiments. The problem is something like this: we want to construct a thought experiment which, by stipulation, involves a situation in which we can't distinguish between two things (being hooked up to a machine and real life). But also by stipulation, the thought experiment itself asks us to distinguish these two things. So it is that the experiment only remains coherent so long as we slide from one to the other in our reasoning. — The Great Whatever

But I can make perfect sense out of an episode of Star Trek where the crew ends up stuck inside a Holodeck program that goes wrong, where the program makes it look they exited the holodeck back to the ship, but are actually still inside the program, since the Holodeck is capable of fully fooling the senses.

I believe this was the plot of at least one episode.

I believe OP is arguing against a subjective idealism where the only minds that exist are human minds (and possibly, some animals). Whereas the drugged water for Berkeley's idealism continues to be 'held' in existence by the mind of god. His whole argument makes no sense if he's arguing against Berkeley. — dukkha

That's correct, which is why I mentioned subjective idealism.

And one other objection concerning long term planning. Plenty of people do engage in long term planning to achieve some goal they highly desire. Professional athletes, musicians, business owners, writers, do this sort of thing. They may put themselves through a great deal of self-discipline and even agony to accomplish their goals. You can't be highly successful in many areas in life without doing so.

But that would be a direct contradiction to what Cyrenaic philosophy proposes. There would be no highly successful people if everyone followed that philosophy. But they don't. Why not? Because I think plenty of people reject hedonism, certainly the "crude" kind of the Cyrenaics. They consider their long-term goal to be more worthy of pursuit than any short term pleasure, even though the future is uncertain for all of us.

Someone in this thread mentioned the pleasure machine, which is a version of the dream machine. In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher chooses to betray the human resistance in order to be put back into the Matrix as someone rich and famous, provided that he not remember anything about his portrayal, or the real world.

Most people find such an act abhorrent, and if I were given the choice of hooking myself up to a dream machine in which I get to live the most pleasurable life possible, but at the cost of horrible suffering for people I know, I would not do it, even if I forgot. It would be wrong, and most people throughout history would agree.

But the Cyrenaic philosophy does not allow for such ethical considerations. It's similar to making a will. Why bother worrying about others after you're gone? You won't get to enjoy it. But we do. If I knew with certainty I would die tonight, I would not maximize my pleasure, rather, I would make some plans for those who know me post-mortem.

From what TGW wrote of the Cyrenaic view of the good, it would seem perfectly consistent for my good to be your bad. If it causes me pleasure to torture you, and all goods are subjective and only definable by each individual, then there is nothing wrong for me to torture you, as far as I'm concerned. I have no ethical reason not to. It gives me pleasure. You will disagree, but so what? There is no objective measure by which you are right and I am wrong. For me, is right to torture you. For you, it's not, but I'm not concerned, and cannot be concerned, with what you consider to be bad.

Secondly, we learn from a very young age that instant gratification in all things tends to lead to very bad results. I could empty my bank account right now, max out my credit cards, and have a rip roaring time today. But I know that I will be regretting and paying for that decision for weeks to come. So I employ some modicum of self-control.

Now I could die tonight, and miss out on one last opportunity for maximum pleasure. But that uncertainty about the future doesn't change my calculation to avoid weeks of regret.

So it would seem that consistent application of Cyrenaic ethics is psychopathic and highly irresponsible, leading to a very self-destructive life. The kind that someone with terrible impulse control and no empathy might want to live.

Now the Cyrenaics may not have lived that way, which tells me they either didn't fully embrace their philosophizing as a way of life, or there's so more nuance there than I'm allowing. I guess the admission that there had to be some planning for even the attainment of temporary pleasure is one such nuance, but there would need to be quite a bit more.

he indexical would refer to Bitter Crank in that case. — Terrapin Station

And what if you were Swamp Bitter Crank?

think this natural assumption comes from the ancient idea that the eyes are the 'windows or doors of the soul' through which the soul 'looks', or 'goes', out into the world and brings back the objects into itself. — John

Also, it just seems that way as a matter of experience. It appears that I am looking out at the tree as I walk by it, not that light from the tree is hitting my retina in 2D, upside down, where my brain has to right it, infer the depth, and put me into a visual space that coincides with my walking motion, what I'm hearing, etc.

For Wittgenstein, to understand the use of a word, in the manner that is relevant to philosophy, it is necessary to understand the role that sentences involving that word play in our lives. His claim in this case is that those sentences which philosophers take to express substantive statements about realism and idealism play no role whatsoever in our lives. The metaphysical sentences have no use, and so there is nothing to be understood—they are strings of words without a meaning. Wittgenstein's hope is that once we see that, in a given metaphysical dispute, both sides are divided by nothing more than their different battle cries, both parties will realize that there is nothing to fight about and so give up fighting. — John

I don't think Wittgenstein was right. First of all, I think ordinary language expresses naive realist views. Secondly, science has an awful lot to say about what goes on when we're not around, including the deep past and far off into space. That seems to be a bit more than just making useful predictions. As if science is an attempt to explain the world, not just provide useful predictions. And thirdly, people with an interest in philosophy, including professional philosophers have continued to have metaphysical debates, even while knowing what Wittgenstein had to say on the matter.

And finally, I believe even Witty himself was not entirely convinced that you could do away with philosophical issues by understanding how language works. That the puzzle of philosophy continued to bother him.