Gertie wrote
There's a lot in there, I'll have a go.
There is no way of testing ''the way things really are'' except via our conscious experience of them, and applying rules/patterns we have found to be consistently predictive. What we discover is that our experience of the way things really are looks more like it evolved for utility rather than being being perfect and unlimited, and even if we somehow combined every subject's first person pov to construct a model of reality, it would still not be perfect or complete.
Just to be clear, this question is PRIOR to assumptions about any talk about what is "really" going on in terms of the way semantics may be in part reducible to pragmatics or how evolution may have been determinative. The latter does not attempt to explain qualitatively what the world is, only seeing how what is there may have been conducive to survival and reproduction. I think, with you, that our relation with the world is essentially pragmatic, and that knowledge relations are just this. but then, more than this. Epistemology is not reducible to pragmatics; in fact, pragmatists like Rorty, James, Dewey, they talk in naturalistic terms, but their pragmatic foundation provides nothing for an ontology beyond the pragmatics. Rorty was NOT a naturalist at the basic level, for naturalistic terms are defined within the structure of the future-looking dynamic. The meaning of 'cat' for example, has no recourse outside the understanding's problem solving encounters with things "out there" that deal with that look like cats, for the meanings are confined to problem solving consummations: I know what cats are in that I have had encounters with the world that were early on, perceptual problems dealing with basic things like grass and trees and food, and, as Rorty tries to prove ALL knowledge is socially constructed, and these problems were modeled for me by people and the language use around me. A tree became a tree when I successfully internalized the signifier (sound) "tree" and associated it with those things out there like others do.
But this changes nothing for explanatory needs that arise. I may think language itself is simply a tool, as Quine put it (a naturalist, Quine was), but what language is "about" is not, and this goes to the issue here, pragmatics exclusively. Language and logic define the formal possibilities of the understanding, but it is indeterminable in the end, like everything else. I mean, I cannot tell you what logic IS because this belongs to the foundational givenness of the world. Pragmatics may tell us how thinking works in a basic way, but it ends there.
But we can also think of ''the way things really are'' differently to the way physics models reality. We can think of reality as something which exists in the form of the relationships of its parts. That seeing your cat on the sofa is as real a way things are as particles and forces, just manifesting a different level of granularity/resolution. But when you close your eyes that part of the relationship changes.
Particles and forces? How does one identify what a particle is? Or a force? And relationship of parts puts the knower, a "part" on one end and the known, my cat, on the other. But assuming the knower is a part, of sorts, one begs the question; what are these part-to-part relations about? In the model you bring up, this would be causality. And also, this talk about particles and forces subsumes human epistemics under a more broadly conceived notion of phyiscalist thinking, and so it fails to address the matter at the basic, philosophical level, which is epistemological. Prior to talk about particles and the rest, there is talk about how these get there meanings, and this refers us to the world. But it is our relation to the world that makes these terms possible that is in question. In other words, basic epistemic relations cannot be explained by something that presupposes a basic epistemic relation.
Knowledge - or knowing, is itself a type of experiencing. The seeing of the cat on the sofa, is how you know the cat's on the sofa. You know the cat has four legs (hopefully) because you've seen them, that she gets hungry and her scratches hurt because you've experienced these things. Other things you know from experiencing hearing or reading. But as above, we've discovered humans are imperfect and limited perceivers and thinkers, imperfect and limited knowers.
Even so, we have an incredibly detailed and vast physicalist model of the world, which is at least third person falsifiable, by other flawed and limited humans. And this model, barring current gaps, potentially explains and predicts everything we can experience of the universe. So it's reasonable to infer our knowing at least correlates to the way things really are well enough for our model to work for us.
If you want to frame the question in terms like this, then nothing really changes: Science is, of course, very successful in predicting outcomes, given that it is its very nature to do so (the scientific method is essentially a forward looking structure). So, let's begin: here I am, there is my cat: How does the latter epistemically get to the former?
Except that model doesn't encompass or predict conscious experience itself. Either as fundamental or something we'd predict to emerge from physical processes. To describe experience as an in or out of body experience tries to locate it in that spatial physicalist model of bodies, without knowing how it fits into the model, or if it really does. If conscious experience is an emergent property of physical brain processes in terms of the physicalist model, then in a sense that's where it's located, even though it 'extends outwards' to encompass your cat. But as discussed, 'your cat' is a unique knowing experience to you from your first person pov, and other humans will have a slightly different knowing experiences of your cat (mine only goes as far as reading about it on the sofa), and physics will give us another description, and that too is derivable from limited and flawed human experiential knowing.
This "extending outward" seems to be important. And it is the physicalist model that is mostly in question here. I would ask the "flawed and limited" be set aside for now, for the claim here is more fundamental: it is about the
possibility of an epistemic "outwardness." How, that is, can it even be conceived? At all? This is first an apriori question about knowledge relations and what can make sense. The actual observations in play do not solve the problem, but simply give us the conditions in need of explaining. Consider it to be not unlike explaining anything else in science, except here, there is an unknown, an anomaly that is not constructed out of empirical paradigms, but epistemic ones, and so we have to deal with "S knows P" and the justificatory conditions for this to make sense. Belief and justification fill the void, generally, but affirming P has never been released from justification:
talk about P and the conditions for knowing P cannot be separated. This is one way to look at it.
As I say, you can think of experiential knowing not as flawed and limited, rather as the way you and other humans interact with cats and everything else. It's as real as any other interaction, like billiards balls colliding. There may be another physicalist, idealist, or whatever way of describing that reality too, but we don't have first person direct perfect knowledge of what that is.
You are thinking like a person whose modes of inquiry are committed to a single model. My question to you is, how do epistemic questions like this even make sense? It is not as if science has a working concept, for the concepts it does have are grounded in physics, at the basic level. So what does physics say about epistemic relations? Nothing. Idealism? This brings all things into subjectivity, to put it simply. Kant's "out thereness" belongs to the analysis on the transcendental aesthetic, but he leaves the noumenal world at an impossible distance, and entirely out of the reach of thought and perception. Here, we acknowledge that when I see my cat, I am not confined to conditions like this, that I am aware of the cat being out there is a Real "out there".
I don't know what you mean by 'spirit' or what that adds, or on what basis you think this is a religious topic, you'd need to explain that more.
Well, this comes after it becomes painfully clear that epistemology is a sui generis concept. Causality is NOT a knowledge bearing medium, something of epistemic delivery. You see, epistemology is literally impossible here.
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