ExpectantlyIronic,
Matt: There are no real objects to work with except for appearances. And if you take the set of thoughts of sensible objects and add to them the sets of thoughts that aren't of sensible objects, you can see that the mental world is much larger than the sensible world that you are talking about. What you are talking about is just a model that you've created, which you believe to be the "real world".
ExpectantlyIronic: Alright. Back up here. You started off by describing a world-as-it-is that is in some way correspondent to the world-as-it-appears. This correspondence was implicit in your mentioning of the brain.
Well, no that's a leap that we don't need to make. The point of the other two blurbs of mine you quoted was to point out that the brain and senses are only world-as-it-appears and not the world-as-it-is. The brain, senses, physical world, etc. are the realm of science. But I'm not talking about science and grays and uncertainties. I'm talking about the realm of philosophy and black & white, either/or thinking that doesn't depend on science.
As an example of the difference between these two realms, I'm just going to use this very argument I've been trying to make: that science is forever uncertain because we'll never know if this world we experience isn't something completely different from what we think it is. But this uncertainty of science is something we can be certain of and therefore this fact, this certainty, reflects the world-as-it-is. If a fact is not certain, then it doesn't make sense to consider it to reflect the world-as-it-is, and if a fact is certain, then it must be considered part of it.
You also introduced a world-of-concepts that the world-as-it-appears is a subset of. Nevertheless, both this world-of-concepts and the world-as-it-appears is a small part of the world-as-it-is. This is what I was getting at.
I know, but I disagree that the physical world is the world-as-it-is, because it's uncertain that it even exists in the way that we think it does. For all we know this could be an elaborate computer simulation that we are part of, where all of our experiences, memories, the laws of physics and everything are merely procedures in the program.
But that doesn't mean I'm trying to reject science. I don't reject science. I mean, I do reject it as a means of finding truth, but I don't reject it as a means of figuring out what works in order to accomplish things in the world.
I do believe that all thoughts have physical causes in a brain, but it's just a belief. Science could conceivably discover something that overturns it someday. We can never be certain that it can't, since we can't predict what all we will observe in the future.
But that doesn't mean that certainty is altogether impossible, it just exists in a different mental realm, so to speak, in the realm of pure thought. Indeed, the knowledge that science is forever uncertain is a certainty that is part of this realm, like I've been saying.
