GENIUS FORUMS

ExpectantlyIronic wrote:

Cory wrote:The falsehood starts when a person 'literally' believes that the things we perceive actually exist as we perceive them outside of our minds, and then proceeds to waste resources trying to understand the how's and why's of existence via science/physics, scientific modeling, etc.

I think what you mean to suggest then is that naive realism is wrong. Of course. It can't ever be thought of in a way that it could possibly make sense. Also, there are a lot of scientists who aren't naive realists. The best of them have at least given a little thought to epistemology. A lot of the conceptual models that scientists build are just like necessary scaffolding for the true predictive theories they hide. String theory is a bit of an exception to that rule, and is really just an attempt to reconcile such conceptual models with each other, without providing predictive or descriptive power of any sort (yet). It is a worrisome deviation from the proper scientific search for pattern. Nevertheless, scientists are starting to realize this, and it is losing favor.

Ok, fine, that may be so, but even non-scientists, like many people who visit this forum, spend a great deal of time developing and arguing in favor of explanations that assume a world resembling the one we perceive, existing independently as we perceive it outside of our minds. It's only recently that I've let go of it myself.

Perhaps approaching it as an ontological issue is an adequate response to all of those people (with all of that time, brain power and money) who are approaching the question of 'how existence is' - scientifically via physics,

I don't see ontology for its own sake as a cure for the problems of ontology for its own sake. Epistemology. That's what scientists seriously need to study.

Well, if they studied it too much I suppose we could call them philosophers.

That's just like asking, if we've never experienced magic, then how do we know what a magic trick is?

It's exactly like asking how we know what magic is when we've never seen it.

But the only reason we 'ask' what magic is is because we think we've seen it, or we've imagined it. (e.g., A child gets amazed by a magic trick, and believes in magic, etc.)

That said, the second part of the post you responded to was intended to subsume the first part. Or eliminate it really, by removing the problems that it brought up. So, rather then sneak into analogy and assume we understand what magic is, I think we're better off saying we know what it is because we know how to use the term.

And how did we learn the term?

Are there any things you can think of that are not made up of different parts of things that you have experienced?

Color, texture, taste.

I'm not following you here. A color is a part of a thing I have experienced (e.g., green is part of the leaf, not to mention part of the larger spectrum of colors). A 'rough' texture is part of the sandpaper. A sweet taste is part of the ice-cream.

Things like that are considered simples. I cannot conceive of a color I've never seen.

Well, I'll admit, I've never considered that before. That's interesting.

I can imagine a car I've never seen, insofar as it is built from simples I have experienced.

That's right - the very first unicorn ever imagined was not previously seen. However, horses were seen, as well as straight horns on whales. And so it was just a matter imagining things that had already been experienced, combined.

I realize that we can look at things as such that a color is composed of different things, but that more-or-less ignores the point at hand.

I'm not sure what you think the point at hand is.

What's important is that we can identify simples that cannot be conceived of without experience, and that those things we imagine without experiencing are composed of them.

[nods]

EI wrote:

Cory wrote:What about learning about a ball by experiencing the ball for yourself and then learning the word 'ball' from others who have also experienced it?

The experiences ball are just that. There is nothing to understand about them (in a manner of speaking).

I'm not sure what your manner of speaking is. In my view, there are somethings to understand about a particular ball. That it is approximately round, that it has a color, that it's very bouncy, or not bouncy, etc.

I've already described exactly why it doesn't make sense to think we simply ostensively learned the name we give them from someone pointing. At least not upon learning language originally. How should we know what pointing is to mean after all?

[shrug] That fact is that we apparently do. Why do you think the question is important?

It is itself a language act. Also, how should we know that words are supposed to reference or indicate things?

How should a baby herring gull know to peck at it's mothers beak when it wants food? (research shows that it is an innate instinct) How should a puppy raised without any contact with others of its kind, know how to clean itself? (it's an innate instinct)

Who knows, at first a child might get confused in that manner, but it all gets sorted out.

Yes it does. The child eventually learns to better mimic others usage of language through trial, error, and correction. An important point to keep in mind here is that language does things at its heart. Children are unaware originally that the words they use are even supposed to reference anything. They just tend to mimic the behavior of others and realize that words do things. They realize that saying 'mom' gets attention from mom before they know that it is to refer to their mom.

Ok, kind of an operant conditioning sort of thing. Sounds about right.

There's a significant difference between the word unicorn and your sensory experience of an image of a unicorn.

There is nothing to understand about the sensory experiences unicorn*. Although, yes, there is a significant difference.

Well, there is something to understand about it, namely that it is a unicorn because of it's idiosyncratic trait.

Your point, I'm guessing, is that the phrase 'hidden void' is a word that is nonsense? I think the difference here is that the word hidden void does have a meaning. That it is the father of consciousness/phenomena. The word has a meaning and relationship to phenomena, functioning to account for it on some level.

I'm not saying that 'hidden void' is nonsense. I'm just saying that there is nothing to understand about it beyond its usage in particular language games.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'language games'. For instance, you explained to me 'simples', and how we can't imagine colors we haven't experienced. Was that just a language game? If so, I'd like you to go into a bit more detail about what you mean by language games.

*'Unicorn' can be thought of as referring to a pattern of sensation (in a sense). We could say that there is something to understand about how that pattern fits into the larger patterns, but going into that is a bit beyond the scope of what I'm trying to discuss here.

I just don't quite understand the point you're trying to discuss. Maybe you're just letting me know some stuff you think is interesting, but is pretty much unrelated to the theme of the thread?