Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[GE Morton]

You're asking me to prove a universal negative? You should know better than that, TP. "The burden of proof lies with he who holds the affirmative."

Ignoring how stupid that convention is, "Phenomena only occur in your mind" or "You only have evidence for phenomena occurring in your mind" are "affirmatives," not "negatives."

Er, no, TP. There is ample evidence that phenomena occur in your mind. My claim is not that that it does not occur elsewhere, but that you have no evidence that it does. If you contend that it occurs elsewhere, the burden of proof lies with you --- produce that evidence.

[Peter Holmes]

Begs the question. What does 'exists as...' mean?
Well, there would be no human judgements as to moral rightness and wrongness.
The claim that existence has a mental aspect begs the question. And I identify as a later Wittgensteinian - so, no, not a logical positivist by any account.

Belindi, if you have evidence for the existence of abstract things, by all means present it. The absence of evidence may not mean an existence-claim is false. But it does mean that to believe the claim is true is irrational. And I think talk of abstract things is an inherited, lazy piety which doesn't stand up to rational, skeptical scrutiny for even a second.

I used 'exists' in the sense of asserting there is a mental aspect of being and also a physical aspect of being, and moreover we experience both of those aspects of being.

I know that's what you're asserting. But I'm challenging what the expression 'a mental aspect of being' means.

My evidence for the existence of ideas is 1. Introspection 2. Correlations of my private ideas with publicly observable brain-mind activities.

1 What is being looked into, and what is doing the looking? How can 'you' look into your mind? And what does it mean to say you find ideas there? What exactly are they, and in what way do they exist? 2 Can you give an example of such a correlation? And the expression 'brain-mind activity' raises all sorts of questions.

We happily talk about about 'having ideas', 'having the same idea', 'keeping something in mind', 'being in two minds', 'sharing our thoughts', and so on - and the meaning of those expressions is perfectly clear. The idea that we're talking about abstract things has always been a peculiarly philosophical delusion.

Evaluations concern physical entities such as viruses and apples, and also ideas such as moral codes.I can't understand how you can deny you are mental as well as physical. I am sure you experience qualia you don't write like a robot.

Again, I think the expression 'I am mental' is mystical nonsense.

Moral codes are like other institutions which have mental aspects and physical aspects. Morality itself is an idea which is useful but has no physical being apart from musings e.g. "Is morality a coherent idea?" I have no evidence for what my brain-mind is doing when I feel myself thinking that question, I am not a neuro-scientist. Perhaps a neuro-scientist has published what a brain -mind does when it thinks in symbols.

Begs what question?

Your conclusion is that abstract things exist. So you can't just assume they do exist.

[Peter Holmes]

Understood. The question is indeed what universals and abstracts 'amount to' - what and where they are. As you know, I think the mind as an abstract place where abstract things are or occur is, like all abstract things, a metaphysical fiction

The mind isn't "an abstract thing." The mind is, however, a catchall term for a number of concrete, particular things (and specifically, a subset of brain functions from the spatio-temporal reference frame of being the brain in question) where abstraction takes place, among other things.

So you think that what we call the mind is just some specific brain functions - electrochemical processes - synaptic firing - 'where abstraction takes place, among other things.' So I think you're not saying that abstract things exist.

so the mental-extramental distinction with regard to existence makes no sense.

It easily makes sense. It's simply a distinction of location and spatio-temporal reference point. It's very similar to making a distinction of a refrigerator versus things that are not a refrigerator, especially a la a spatio-temporal reference point of being the refrigerator as opposed to not being the refrigerator. Surely you agree that makes sense? Mental/extramental is the same thing. It's just a location and spatio-temporal reference point distinction.

Okay. Fridges and not-fridges are real things. Again - no claim that abstract things exist. I've obviously misunderstood your argument.

And I don't see that 'obtaining' is any different from 'existing' from a physicalist point of view.

Sure, they're synonyms.

I guess we've rehearsed our disagreement pretty thoroughly. I think we need to consign the myth of abstract things - including concepts, propositions, meanings, and so on - to the dustbin into which the enlightened discarded gods and devils some time ago.

Again, if you can make sense of concept, proposition, meaning, etc. talk, if you separate what the terms would refer to, etc., then you would simply peg what we're actually referring to. It's just as we do with gods and devils. We can make sense of that talk, and we can peg what we're actually referring to--god being an idea that people have, a way to account for things like the creation of the universe, etc. You can't just get rid of that if you can make sense of the talk. It's just that you deny that god is a being that exists independently of us and you talk about what it really is instead--the idea, etc.

Again, no disagreement. I honestly can't make out what we were arguing about. My apologies.

[Terrapin Station]

Ignoring how stupid that convention is, "Phenomena only occur in your mind" or "You only have evidence for phenomena occurring in your mind" are "affirmatives," not "negatives."

Er, no, TP. There is ample evidence that phenomena occur in your mind. My claim is not that that it does not occur elsewhere, but that you have no evidence that it does. If you contend that it occurs elsewhere, the burden of proof lies with you --- produce that evidence.
[/quote]

If you're claiming that there's no evidence that it occurs elsewhere, then you're saying all evidence shows that it only occurs in the mind.

[GE Morton]

If you're claiming that there's no evidence that it occurs elsewhere, then you're saying all evidence shows that it only occurs in the mind.

No, TS. That is a non-sequitur. "All available evidence shows that X occurs at P" does not imply "All available evidence shows that X does not occur elsewhere." The first proposition is making no claim about what may or may not occur elsewhere. It is only making a statement about what occurs at P.

That there is no evidence that it occurs elsewhere does not imply that it does not occur elsewhere. Hence, if you claim it does, you need to produce that evidence. And brush up on your logic.

[Sy Borg]

Beneath all of that is the question - what is real? I have much sympathy for the argument that we do not perceive the real world. However, it's unlikely that we have everything wrong, but that is possible too if our fundamental perceptions of space and time are not correct.

The problem is more fundamental than that. It lies in the assumption that there is a "real world" beyond the world we can perceive (in the broadest sense of that term), and that our theories and conceptions of that "real world" are "right" or "wrong" depending upon how closely they approximate that "real world." That is a question that can never be answered, because we don't have, and will never have, direct access to that "real world."

Our models are not reality, only useful approximations. The answer to the question, "What is real?" is a work in progress. There is definitely a lot of reality going on that we do not perceive so, in that sense, we definitely do not perceive reality, only an efficaciously filtered version which allowed us to survive and procreate. For example, there is no advantage to being able to see most gases because life would be a fog. Our perspectives are intrinsically biased.

[Peter Holmes]

This is patent nonsense. Things that exist are different from terms or constructs with descriptive or explanatory utility. A thing that exists has no decriptive or explanatory utility. You're conflating the way things are with what we say about them.

Peter, you don't seem to grasp that the only evidence you have for "the way things are" is the phenomena that occurs in your own mind when you see, feel, hear (etc.) something. If you understand "reality" or "the way things are" to be anything beyond that, you're speaking of something you know nothing about, and cannot possibly know anything about. You're indulging in mysticism.

You can, of course, hypothesize an external reality as the cause of those sensory experiences that you have. That is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and some version of it is indispensible if we hope to explain those experiences. But that hypothesized reality remains a hypothetical one, not one of which you, or anyone, can claim direct knowledge.

And yes, I conflate "the way things are" with what we say about them. All that we know, or can know, about what exists, what is real, WITHOUT the intervention of concepts, words, theories, all of which are linguistic constructs, are those sensory phenomena. We need no theories, or even language, to be certain that those exist (as Descartes realized). But if we claim that is all that exists we become solipsists, the sole inhabitants of a very small universe that is utterly inexplicable.

So we hypothesize a much larger universe, and populate it with all manner of entities, processes, "natural laws," and such abstract entities as space, time, universals, minds, gods, demons, spirits, and endless other constructs, all of which aim to help bring some order, some predictability, to the kaleidoscope of sensory phenomena.

When you say, "You're conflating the way things are with what we say about them," you imply that you have some knowledge of "the way things are" that differs from "what we say about them." You have no such knowledge, and cannot. And of course, your statement is itself an example of "what we say" about "reality."

Yes, reality is what we say it is --- provided that what we say improves our understanding of what we perceive.

So, back to the issue: demonstrate that abstract things exist. Just saying they do is useless. The burden of proof is yours.

I've given several examples of that earlier. E.g., that Alfie can find his keys after Annabelle tells him where they are demonstrates that knowledge exists. You dismiss that because you've decided to restrict the word "exists" to a certain class of entities only, and demand that propositions asserting entities of other classes satisfy the truth conditions applicable to your "pet" class --- a restriction that is arbitrary, pointless, and woefully at odds with the everyday uses of that term.

Oh, please. So did the ether and miasma 'exist' until a better explanation came along? This is rubbish.

Nope. Because we now have better explanations, and when you adopt a new explanatory theory for some realm of phenomena the entities and processes postulated by the old theory get banished from the universe --- not only in the present, but for all time, because we naively believe the current theory is timeless and universal (which it almost certainly will eventually prove not to be).

And nearly all ontologies are mystical, but yours, according to which invented things are real, is limpidly rational. Oh-kay.

An ontology is mystical if presumes entities or realms of them inaccessible to direct experience. Which is not the same as postulating entities that contribute to undestanding and predicting that experience.

Please demonstrate the existence of an abstract thing such as truth, knowledge, beauty or justice.

Answered above. But of course, I can't demonstate it if you stubbornly refuse to count anything as a demonstration other than evidence applicable to your pet class of existents. You foreclose all answers a priori.

If they're just like trees and rocks, it should be a doddle. But, of course, they aren't just like trees and rocks, and you can't demonstrate their existence.

Yes, they are just like trees and rocks, insofar as their existence is established by the explanatory value they have. Trees and rocks are themselves conceptual constructs, invented to explain a large class of regularities and relationships in our phenomenal experience.

And there's the rub. A large majority of people on the earth do indeed think gods and other invented supernatural things explain the universe and what happens. So, in your ridiculous world, gods and demons, etc, are real. (Are you for real? I have my suspicions.)

Not in MY world. But they are in theirs. Which is the "real" world? Whichever one provides, at the moment, the better, more comprehensive, more reliable explanation of the phenomena of experience. That may now be our world. But it will surely not be considered "real" 10,000 years from now (if humans are still around by then).

It can be disconcerting when otherwise normal looking and sounding types earnestly assure me that I can't be entirely sure that they or any of this passing show is real. But it's also sweet. And the hypothesised kind people who gently lead them back to the postulated big warm room for tea and crumpets are mostly compassionate.

[Terrapin Station]

So you think that what we call the mind is just some specific brain functions - electrochemical processes - synaptic firing - 'where abstraction takes place, among other things.' So I think you're not saying that abstract things exist.

Right. Abstract things do not exist as abstract things. Abstraction is a concrete, particular brain process, and part of what abstractions pick out (part of what the ideas we formulate as concrete, particular brain processes that we call "abstractions" pick out ) are complexes of particular phenomena, but there are no "abstract things" per se.

[Terrapin Station]

If you're claiming that there's no evidence that it occurs elsewhere, then you're saying all evidence shows that it only occurs in the mind.

No, TS. That is a non-sequitur. "All available evidence shows that X occurs at P" does not imply "All available evidence shows that X does not occur elsewhere."

That's not exactly what I wrote.

If all available evidence shows that P, then no available evidence shows that not-P, right?

[GE Morton]

That's not exactly what I wrote.

If all available evidence shows that P, then no available evidence shows that not-P, right?

Wrong. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

E.g., we have no evidence that there is life on Mars. But that doesn't imply that there is no life on Mars.

[Terrapin Station]

That's not exactly what I wrote.

If all available evidence shows that P, then no available evidence shows that not-P, right?

Wrong. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

E.g., we have no evidence that there is life on Mars. But that doesn't imply that there is no life on Mars.

Say that we have three pieces of available evidence.

Piece 1 shows that P.
Piece 2 shows that P.
Piece 3 shows that P.

So all available evidence shows that P.

Now, does any of the available evidence (remember, we just have those three pieces) show that not-P?

[GE Morton]

Wrong. "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

E.g., we have no evidence that there is life on Mars. But that doesn't imply that there is no life on Mars.

Say that we have three pieces of available evidence.

Piece 1 shows that P.
Piece 2 shows that P.
Piece 3 shows that P.

So all available evidence shows that P.

Now, does any of the available evidence (remember, we just have those three pieces) show that not-P?

No.

[GE Morton]

Oops, Sorry, I misread your previous comment, "If all available evidence shows that P, then no available evidence shows that not-P, right?"

That is correct.

[GE Morton]

It can be disconcerting when otherwise normal looking and sounding types earnestly assure me that I can't be entirely sure that they or any of this passing show is real. But it's also sweet. And the hypothesised kind people who gently lead them back to the postulated big warm room for tea and crumpets are mostly compassionate.

People can be entirely sure about many things --- and that certainty can be entirely unjustified, and even be entirely wrong.

[Terrapin Station]

Say that we have three pieces of available evidence.

Piece 1 shows that P.
Piece 2 shows that P.
Piece 3 shows that P.

So all available evidence shows that P.

Now, does any of the available evidence (remember, we just have those three pieces) show that not-P?

No.

Correct.

In other words, If all available evidence shows that P, then no available evidence shows that not-P.