Gertie wrote
emember Science is a methodology , one which explicitly relies on inter-subjective falsification. Within the field that doesn't need to be expressed every time a scientific convo happens.
However Physicalists do have an onus on them to explore the implications of their ontological position that eveything which exists is physical.
Scientists aren't de facto physicalists, theists, dualists or anythingists - there's a difference you're blurring.
Yes, a scientist CAN be a phenomenologist, say. Kuhn was a Kantian! But then, the things Kuhn said outraged the scientific community. But yes, the scientific method is a method, not an ontology. An empirical scientist does not have to be a physicalist.
But they are. They just think it beyond question, so never bother arguing about it.
It's a yes/no answer as to whether my experience is all that exists or not. And that answer is unknowable. Any option involving ''looking for something else'' assumes solipsism is wrong. And Physicalism is one of the ''something else'' options. But no-one has a way of knowing which ''something else'' is correct. So pointing out how you can't prove which 'something else' claim is true, including Physicalism, is easy.
In a situation where we don't even know how we could know the answer, like what is the true nature of reality, the philosophical challenge lies in making the most compelling case. Physicalism has more than most claims going for it imo, but if you believe you have a more compelling claim - what is your argument?
That is where this goes, no? If not physicalism or solipsism, then what? You know, there is an alternative. Epistemology is impossible in the physicalist model. This is not just a supposition. One has to simply want to understand how knowledge is possible. Here I am, there is my coffee cup, and there is a relation in between. So what IS this relation according to physicalist thinking? All those optical/neuronal events, say--now how, exactly does that work? The bottom line is causality. How does causality deliver knowledge? It doesn't. In fact, causality is a-epistemic, nothing AT ALL about it that makes for a knowledge connection. So it is not just a failure of adequation; it is a flat out impossibility. Causal relations generating knowledge, belief, justification ABOUT something? You might as well call it magic.
An alternative begins to be conceived by first realizing this basic insight. It is not to say that there is no such thing as knowledge. It is rather that this model is the absolute worst imaginable. I can't speak for others, but for me, it takes putting the book down, staring at the cup on the table, and asking quite innocently, how is it that I "know" something like this? What is knowledge? It doesn't travel along some medium? But ALL "traveling" has its bottom line with causality: whatever one posits as the medium must itself be reducible to this. All talk about electromagnetic waves reflecting and being absorbed, making their way into neuronal activity is essentially talk about casual relations. And causality is apriori inviolable. One cannot even imagine an object self moving. One has to be very curious here: If you've read Kant (doesn't really matter in this discussion), you know there to be something fishy about apriori features IN the physical world.
Once this is conceded, one has to stop looking for principles of connectivity. Drop the entire matter. To talk like this would be "bad metaphysics". Epistemology is something else entirely. And this means ontology is something else, for it was the physicalist model that failed to yield an epistemology, so we can longer talk about localized bodies of mass, essentially separated save through causality.
It begins with this: The world cannot be conceived apart from the perceptual act. It and the perceptual act are one. It is just that perception does not have its genesis in an object. Perception is logically PRIOR to the object, I mean, to think of an object presupposes perception. Perception and its thought and affectivity, are now ontologically foundation for all things. Or, consciousness is ontologically foundational.
To clarify - I'm using 'god's-eye pov' to mean unbounded, perfect observation. Which if we had access to would enable us to falsify our flawed and limited observations. But we don't. We each have a specific first person pov, which is flawed and limited.
It is an abstraction to consider god's eye view simply in terms of a perfected observation, isn't it? The trouble is it begins without an account of what observation really IS. When one observes, it is not as if one is this singular cognitive function more or less efficiently at work. This is not what an observation is at all; it is merely an abstraction from the full event of an experience. When the geneticist sits at her microscope and observes a multiplying cell, what is the most salient feature of this event? Certainly not the mere fact that is witnessed. Rather, it is the totality of fascination, or merely interest, or perhaps worry, fear, alarm, delight and so on, as well as the anticipation, the confirmation, etc. The point is, observation never was simply "getting things right" in some context of inquiry. The most salient feature of this observation is its affectivity, without which the entire matter would collapse in meaninglessness. Such a thing has never once been witnessed, for observation has never occurred outside of experience (you can imagine such a thing, but this is not about our actual existence).
But then, as to perfect knowledge: The question was asked by Descartes, wasn't it? I think the Cartesian approach, as a method, is right to begin with, for perfect knowledge would be free of doubt, of any kind, flaws and limitations, as you say. But Descartes was a rationalist and what we seek here is a confirmation of a world, not the abstract cogito. So what is a world now that perception (and its thought, affectivity, anticipation, affirmation and so on) is a fundamental dimension of its existence? Consciousness is now foundational, not disparate extended bodies in space. A world is "there" and each object observed is cognitively, affectively structured, as well as its "out thereness" or proximity to an egoic center.
Here is a question: you have a sprained ankle that hurts intensely. Can you doubt this pain? How "certain" is it? The answer is that one cannot doubt this pain. However, this does not mean that we understand what it is perfectly, for the moment the question of its nature comes up, we are in a language and language is the source of flaws and limitations. So the pain as such is doubt free, but the interpretation is not. A God's eye view is already in place in the affectivity of presence, or simply presence, presence as such.
I don't know what you mean by ''transcendental''? But I've made it clear that limited and flawed humans checking their observations with each other can reasonably be assumed to result in a flawed and limited shared model of reality. It doesn't follow ''that's all there is'' which exists. There's room for a difference between what I epistemologically observe to exist and what actually ontologically exists.
Do you disagree? Do you believe there's no distinction? If so, what's your argument?
I am saying that it isn't model of "reality" at all. These agreements are contextual agreements. Anything that is agreed upon has for its agreement an existing body of thought that gives the agreement its basis, its aboutness. We geologists agree that fluvial weathering wore down these rocks, but outside of all the ideas in play, implicitly, explicitly, there is nothing to say. The agreement that lies with the agreeing in a far more vast context of understanding in the science, is what actually makes up the substance of the claim. We take up the language of talk about waves, water, abrasion, erosion, etc. AS the event happening, but outside of the language, it has no identity. Outside of context of meaning making, the world is transcendental, that is, there, as an imposing presence, overwhelming often, but which cannot be spoken.
That's a bald claim. Either the fence post exists when nobodies around to observe it or it doesn't. What's the justification for your claim that it doesn't?
If you start talking like a naturalist and saying there are things that can be identified that are more than intersubjectively conceived, more than "what we say they are" you will find another discussion is needed.
Sorry I can't work out what you're getting at here.
There is a simplicity in this: ask me what a bank teller is and I can talk at length about banks and money, withdrawals, and so on. A bank teller is a contingent concept because it refers me to other ideas that refer me to other ideas, and this really has no end, though it will get repetitive. It is the very nature of finitude. But it all works, all this talking, agreeing, disagreeing. These are concepts in play. The copula 'is' is usually just pragmatic. Do you think, say, General Motors "exists"? It IS a company, IS an employer of thousands, IS an automobile maker. But does it exist? How about this lamp? Isn't most of what we talk about when this lamp comes up just like General motors? Most? Or ALL of it?
How so?
Solipsism? That if we allow skepticism to rule our thoughts about the nature of the world, then all one is left with is a kind of disembodied mind world? Never to affirm anything but mere ideas? Or the like. Who thinks like this? Naturalists, afraid that if you don't affirm physicality, the "naturalistic attitude," then objective knowledge is lost. Why not just deny the naturalistic pov and allow for things to be just as they appear to be? The cat is over there. Who is going to argue with that? The question is, what does it mean for something to be "over there"? "Over there" remains what it is, simply because to say this is descriptively affirmed. As to what the nature of it being "over there" is, this account cannot exceed what is simply given.
I'm simply saying that we agree the fence post exists fundamentally on the basis that we both observe it. You'd agree with that much right? It's also true that we need to communicate our agreement, and once we're in the territory of symbolic language and social constructs things can get incredibly complex. But when pre-language/shared conceptualised world building Ogg and Gogg went hunting, and Ogg pointed to a deer, Gogg turned and implicitly agreed he saw it too by then chucking his spear that way.
Two hunters, two worlds, brought together in language agreement. Is there something beyond a world that is a common imposition? One wants to answer in the affirmative. But since to be beyond a world is to be beyond language, I cannot say. One only encounters "it" in a world. It has to be made clear that our worlds, yours, mine, those of others, are alike as language agreement allows, and this agreement is
public. So when I am IN the public "theater" of engagement, there is a commonness, a shared "being with" others, and here things are very familiar, well understood, andI can lose myself in this world, in the idle talk and the practical matters, etc. But this public space itself is not the final authority in what is. My existence is the final authority. Why? Because it is what I "am". My thoughts agree with another's on many things, but these agreements stand apart from this existence in which the living presence of thought and feeling, call it "life", are directly encountered. In this encounter, you will find a kind of god's eye view, I hold.
We each could certainly end our pondering on the nature of reality at what we consciously experience being all there is to it. (Conscious experience includes phenomenal sensing, remembering, sensations, thinking, imagining, dreaming,etc). That's solipsism.
First order of business of a scientific approach is description. I am just being a good "scientist": I see the tree and it is over there. It is not me. Ask me what the tree is, however, and can say it occurs in the event of a perceptual apprehension--I am attitudinally attuned to its existence; I anticipate it prior (am familiar with it) to the encounter so the tree is predelineated in time; and I anticipate that it will continue as it is thatis "not yet"; and it has a conceptual "region" of possibilities that being to trees generally; and on and on. This is how analysis goes when the tree is understood as a perceptual event.
But solipsism would have to be a denial of its actually being there as it appears. that is absurd. Clear as a bell, it's there.
If you accept that science is a methodology which relies on observation and measurement of physical stuff, by flawed and limited observers and thinkers, then it becomes fairly clear what the epistemological limitations of such a methodology are.
I don't know what is meant by physical stuff here. You mean inert "stuff" just sitting there? No, I don't think this.
By ''experience'' I mean phenomenal conscious experience. What Nagel calls ''something it is like to be''. This includes observing, thinking, remembering, imagining, etc).
So hopefully my TLDR summary makes sense -
- I assume my conscious experience references an ontological reality.
- I assume that my conscious experience either is a direct/flawless observation of reality, or is an experiential representation/ model of the actual ontological world as it is in itself.
- I compares notes on my conscious experience with others who I assume are conscious experiencers like me, and together we inter-subjectively iron out anomalies and come up with a shared model of our shared world.
- Science applies this methodology to the physical things we can observe and measure, noting patterns which can be extrapolated to predictive theories.
- This eventually led to the current Physicalist model of the universe.
See all that is above.
"Direct/flawless observation of reality, or is an experiential representation/ model of the actual ontological world as it is in itself": this just confuses me. "As it is itself"? You mean independently of the perceptual event in which a world is made? Such a thing cannot even be imagined. One would have to leave experience to give it meaning, and this is absurd, for anything that could be said of this "independent" world would have to be constructed out of the possibilities afforded IN an actual world (mine or yours, say), constructed "out of"(if you will) "subjective" time and space, thoughts, affectivity, belief, concepts, affirmations and so on.
I
can't parse this.
Btw I've done my best to answer all your points and all the questions you asked me, can you do me the courtesy of answering my questions to you? Or even just this should help me grasp your position better -
''that
Your foundational ontological claim is this right - ''that which is discovered in the way the world IS''. So what's your argument - in a nutshell? And how does this fit with your other claim ''that there is indeed a world "out there".?
See the above. Causality. A physicalist position on anything MUST be causally explained. There is no substitute for this. So, here, a physical brain is said to be the generative source of a conscious life.
Question: how is this known, for knowledge is a relation concept, and all relations in a physicalist view must be causally understood in the most fundamental analysis, and knowledge has nothing epistemic about it. This is what I am driving at, this simple bit of logic.
- By Sushan
- By Cathal