Is there anything more to philosophy than semantics?

[8ball]

It's a bit of a fucked reality tbf.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It's a bit of a fucked reality tbf.

Not always, no. It can be so coherent as to be indistinguishable from 'real' reality.

 

[8ball]

Not always, no. It can be so coherent as to be indistinguishable from 'real' reality.

Only because your powers of distinguishing are also fucked at the time.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Only because your powers of distinguishing are also fucked at the time.

I do not believe this to be necessarily the case.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I think Hertz's Principles of Mechanics is the best cure for Kantianism of any sort.

I shall read up on this.

 

[8ball]

I do not believe this to be necessarily the case.

People turning into mirrors is not normal.

 

[DotCommunist]

People turning into mirrors is not normal.

define normal. The fact that the mind creates false realities during sensory deprivation etc. speaks well for the idea of a scanned brain being functional in a virtual environment. Reality is just what your senses tell you and your interpretation of signals is a very sophisticated set of yes/nos developed in childhood.

 

[Jonti]

Yeah, but ... even if one is not always aware that one is dreaming (or delusional, whatever), the situation is not actually symmetrical.

You may not be aware you're in a dream -- but you are aware of when you're not. Like now

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yeah, but ... even if one is not always aware that one is dreaming (or delusional, whatever), the situation is not actually symmetrical.

You may not be aware you're in a dream -- but you are aware of when you're not. Like now

My experience is different.

I have experienced a made-up reality in a state of total lucidity and I was fooled into thinking that it was real.

 

[Jonti]

Yes; that's what I said.

You can be fooled into thinking you are not dreaming, even though you are. But not persuaded that you dream, when you are in fact awake (and in your right mind -- not hallucinating or delusional or in some other "living sea of waking dream" as John Clare might put it).

The two situations are not symmetrical.

 

[8ball]

That's not to say we couldn't ever fake sensory input sufficiently to run our internal models. Just that dreaming is a bit odd.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes; that's what I said.

You can be fooled into thinking you are not dreaming, even though you are. But not persuaded that you dream, when you are in fact awake (and in your right mind -- not hallucinating or delusional or in some other "living sea of waking dream" as John Clare might put it).

The two situations are not symmetrical.

Ok, I take your point. However, that does not mean that the brain is not capable of running its model fully formed on its own (right down to feeling solid objects that are not in fact there), merely that it is normally able to tell on some level when there is real input coming in from the senses, and when it is itself making up this input.

It's a sensible safeguard for animals that dream to have a way of telling that reality is not a dream. Less important from a safety point of view to be able to tell for sure that you are dreaming when you are dreaming.


ETA: In fact, this isn't quite right. The important point is that it is possible to be completely fooled over an extended period, while feeling yourself to be entirely lucid, by a made-up reality that may, in fact, not appear to be odd in any way – no people turning into mirrors – and then only to realise (at first the realisation may begin simply as a doubt) that this is not reality when something a bit weird does happen.

An explanation for this – the one that I feel is the most coherent – is that the brain runs a model of reality into which it feeds the input from the senses to generate our experiences (all of them). The information is always incomplete, and we are well used to filling in the holes, such as our visual blind spots. When it is very affected, it is possible for the brain to make 'best guesses' about the missing input, as it always does with the blind spots, and continue to generate experience. The guesses will sooner or later prove to be inadequate (more often sooner, but not always) and our 'knowing self' will realise that this is not real data. The model would of necessity need to be dispersed across the brain as all the different representations are made separately and combined to produce our sense of a coherent, complete, ever-changing now. (Once, with a high fever, I had the hugely disconcerting sense of things that should be happening simultaneously happening one after the other. I had the very scary feeling of my sense of self disappearing. I have heard people speak of a very similar thing happening during a psychotic episode. The ability to combine all our disparate images into a coherent whole seems to be central to our sense of self – the feeling of what it is like to be us.) I would guess that the rules would need to be coded from birth, not learned, found somewhere in our DNA. That's where I would look for them.

Given that our different representations are generated separately, it is remarkable indeed that we should be able to make up data that all comes together as a coherent whole. It is an extraordinary feat of processing. But what else could be happening? Where the model with rules has explanatory power is that as the real data dries up, the lucid experience following sensory deprivation or disassociative drug taking will take up where the last set of good data left off. The remembered last reality is taken as the starting point and the 'program' run from there.

This may not be right, of course. We may simply have learned from a lifetime of perceiving how things ought to go and be able to trick ourselves in this way. But where is the story made? How are all the parts of the story brought together into an integrated whole? How do we coordinate all these different images that we've made up?

 

[phildwyer]

Well (in this essay at least) Russell says that there is no such thing as either matter or mind, but rather there are events and causal laws between them. He goes out of his way to emphasise that nothing lasts, which to me is a very odd point to bring into play. He literally argues that because nothing lasts, it doesn't exist.

There's nothing "odd" about that point at all, it's basic Platonism. I'll grant you that it's odd to find Russell saying it though.

Plato's error, as an idealist, was to claim that although matter is transitory, ideas are permanent. Hegel corrected that error by historicizing ideas. Arguably pre-Scoratics like Heraclitus had made the same point in ancient times, but Plato blew them away for easily understandable historical and political reasons.

This is exactly the problem with idealism. Its got nothing to do with mind and body and various associated ontologies etc. Its simply a way of understanding the world with unnecessary rigidity.

And the same is of course true of materialism.

I'll answer your question directly. The difficulty for me is that this dual ontology leads to dual reductionism and all the subtlety in the world is hammered twice over. I can't accept that.

You lose me here. Surely the contention that ideas and matter are mutually determining is non-reductionist by definition? And in a later post you admit that I am "opposed to reductionism," so I'm confused as to your meaning.

The very question is idealist. Its very subtle, I'll grant you, but its there. You are assuming that these concepts of materialism and idealism are stable enough to compare across the centuries.

On the contrary, I am assuming that the concepts of idealism and materialism are in constant flux and change. It is this fact that enables us to compare one age's conception of these concepts with another's. If they were stable there would be nothing to compare. I have no idea why you call this historicism "idealist."

The whole question is extremely narrow. Not only are you examining the philosophy of leading philosophers to the neglect of the general population, you are examining the least important aspect of these philosopher's writings ie. their ontological generalisations.

That's what I'm doing here, because those are the issues germane to this thread. Obviously I do other things as well elsewhere.

 

[Knotted]

You lose me here. Surely the contention that ideas and matter are mutually determining is non-reductionist by definition? And in a later post you admit that I am "opposed to reductionism," so I'm confused as to your meaning.

There are, of course, many varieties of reductionism depending on what you want to reduce to what. This includes dualistic reductionism where you reduce everything to two substances (or properties or concepts or whatever).

What's much more important than the various ontological pictures these reductionisms paint, is the question of when reductionist accounts are appropriate.

All scientific accounts are reductionist to an extent. If science merely reproduced the raw facts without making sense of them by simplification it wouldn't account for anything.

Almost all modern philosophical accounts are reductionist. Think of Spinoza's axioms or Leibniz's monads as extreme examples. Hegel is also reductionist, his system operates like a machine, sorting philosophies, labelling them, filing them away as moments of the absolute. Fichte is reductionist by definition - he tried to rebrand philosophy as "Wissenschaftslehre" that is the "Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge".

Worst of all, though is Cartesian dualism. If you have matter and mind as two substances which interact then in order to make sense of this interaction, you have either made matter mind-like or mind matter-like or still worse a hodge podge of both. Cartesianism is fatally reductionist.

My definition of materialism for today is:
"Materialism is the realisation that reductionist accounts are suitable in science but unsuitable in philosophy."

I think this realisation comes about when you understand that philosophical reductionism necessarily involves lopping off a good deal of subtlety about the world. Scientific reductionism leaves the world just as rich as when you started.

On the contrary, I am assuming that the concepts of idealism and materialism are in constant flux and change. It is this fact that enables us to compare one age's conception of these concepts with another's. If they were stable there would be nothing to compare. I have no idea why you call this historicism "idealist."

That's an interesting response...

 

[Knotted]

I shall read up on this.

I can't tell you how good it is. Its so good it Hertz! Haw haw!

I'll get my coat.

 

[Jonti]

It's a sensible safeguard for animals that dream to have a way of telling that reality is not a dream. Less important from a safety point of view to be able to tell for sure that you are dreaming when you are dreaming.

Evolution is