Imagine no imagination. It's easy if you try.

As evidence against the bolded, like well named, I'm not really sure what significance your claims are meant to have, so I don't have much grasp on the gravity of your arguments either.

No they haven't. This is the motte and bailey fallacy pointed out earlier by well named. All major philosophical systems include our minds and the operations of our minds as part of their framework of the universe. I'm sure you could find a few cranks that don't do this, but this is so obvious that no major philosophical system would get any adherents if they made this mistake. Perhaps you could correctly say that this is a kind of fallacy (a common argumentative error) and I wouldn't demur much. But literally no one in this thread or more generally in this forum denies that "mentation" has to be part of our account of the universe (notice that even people who deny the reality of minds or consciousness still have to explain how this makes sense by reducing or eliminating mental phenomena). The debate has to do with the nature of this relationship.

As I was saying about not distinguishing between the map and the territory...

The problem I run into is that you aren't very familiar with standard philosophical or logical terminology, and when I try to understand what you say, or interpret it into a more common or technical language, you nearly always just reject these attempts out of hand as just wrong or fallacious (eg your comments on "perception" above). Understanding the mistakes and arguments other philosophers have made on these core questions can help us clarify our own thoughts and avoid the same mistakes in our own thinking, and I'm only willing to go so far down the path of whatever special meanings you construct for your own concepts.

Perhaps you really do think your posts are crystal clear (I respect tame_deuces's judgement, but find spank's own posts generally unclear and disorganized), but I certainly don't. You don't seem to know how to construct a logical argument, you regularly ignore requests for clarification, you make little effort to understand objections to your own view, and your grasp of basic philosophical concepts is limited at best.

I really don't know what view you're trying to argue for here. For instance, you earlier said this:

I mean, this looks a lot like a claim that there is no ultimate reality beyond your mind. That reality (the music I assume) goes out when the mind (the lights) is gone. You literally claim here that the sun only exists in your mind (given that you don't think it is possible to prove otherwise). And look, I don't think this is crazy! Idealism has a long history in philosophy, and this is plausibly a variant on that. But when I press you on this, you either just ignore the question or claim that you are just making the weaker claim that our interaction with reality is just in our mind.

Berkeley was clear: "To be is to be perceived." He claimed there is no material world, instead everything is just sensation and ideas. He provided a framework which has real problems and counterintuitive results, but also solves problems. Kant was an idealist as well, arguing that scientific knowledge is knowledge only of the phenomenal world, not the noumena or the "things-in-themselves." I don't know, I can't tell if you mean to agree with them, or if you are just saying something relatively trivial, that our knowledge of the external world is mediated through our mind's perceptions and ideas. Acting like there isn't a real difference between these claims just doesn't work.

Plausible. I would argue that (3) is false. Also C2 doesn't really follow since it doesn't follow from a mind-independent reality not being able to support existential claims that a mind-dependent reality can support existential claims. Also, I'd rewrite (1) as Only views from a perspective can support existential claims and (2) as The view from nowhere is not a view from a perspective.

Lol no it's not. It's you and well named continually misunderstanding what I'm saying including misconstruing it as a fallacy of composition and me, civilly and with my best intentions, restating it a dozen different ways so that it might click for you. Obviously in such a situation I'm going to make a few mistakes in my, to this point, hopeless translations, and for that I apologize.

There is a fundamental relation between reality writ large and mental experience that heretofore has been left out of the models we have created to understand the universe. Classical models view the universe as being separate from us, with us as mere observers of an external reality. Since we are actually also a part of reality writ large, such models are fundamentally flawed and often lead to paradoxes in our understanding at worst and limited understanding at best. You yourself have admitted this, so it's clear you at least partially "get it." Hence, in some fundamental way, the thing studying is isomorphic to the thing studied. Any map we formulate is inhered in the territory. A good map must recognize this.



I mean in a practical way this isnt the case at all. If it were, the quantum wave function collapsing wouldn't have been such an enormous and confusing surprise.




What's happening is that you are too familiar with said terminology. This requires a paradigm shift that you have not been able to make because you have dug your nails in regarding your classical understanding of the problem.

If I ignore certain requests, its invariably because they are unnecessary deviations that would do nothing to assist in your understanding of the point I'm trying to make.






If there is, you cannot perceive it, because all your perception of anything is dependent on your mind. I have earlier proven that it is in fact impossible to imagine this universe as not containing your mind. This is trivial. You may think you can perceive a possible universe that doesnt contain your mind, but if you're thinking at all then you haven't really imagined something that doesnt contain your mind. You've just set up a hypothetical third view that you're now perceiving with. As soon as you genuinely attempt to imagine reality as not containing your mind, your mind and all its perceptions vanish into oblivion. This is a bridge you cannot pass.

Everything to you is sensation and ideas, since the door of access to reality writ large is your mind. It does not follow that the material world doesnt exist, nor have I ever claimed that. But, taking it just one small step farther, that window of perception that you are experiencing is also a fundamental part of reality writ large.

The very parsing of noumena and phenomena is the mistake Kant made. To even claim that things exist "in themselves" is a claim entirely dependent on perception, or the phenomenal. In this sense its pointless to talk about noumena.

What is it like to be a bat? is an inaccessible question so long as we continue to both view and not view reality as holistically containing perception.

Edited the last section for clarity:

The very parsing of noumena and phenomena is the mistake Kant made. To even claim that things exist "in themselves" is to claim both independent of and entirely dependent on perception, or the phenomenal. In this sense its as pointless to talk about noumena as distinct from phenomena as it is to talk about phenomena as distinct from noumena. They are embedded in each other.

What is it like to be a bat? is an inaccessible question so long as we continue to both view and not view reality as holistically containing perception.

Ok. I'm going to pick tame_deuces, because I find him easier to follow, he only has two posts, and because I see how this might be useful.

I don't have any particular objection to this post:

However, I think you referring to it for support is an example of what I mean when I say you seem to equivocate between two different positions, one of which I think is perfectly reasonable (and even uncontroversial) and the other of which is not.

So for example

This is perfectly true, but it also points towards your problem with equivocating between this universe and an imagined universe when you say that it's impossible to imagine a universe without minds. Imagining such a universe is explicitly case (b) above. The imagined universe is not this, same, universe. That's rather the point in saying that we can imagine things which don't exist. It is absolutely correct (re: (a)) that in imagining such a universe I am not actually imagining something real.

He goes on to elaborate:

There's no problem here* because we're just talking about equivalent statements, expressed in language relative to different reference points. I agree that this is an awkward manner of speaking ("the universe picked up a rock" or "the universe is self aware") but to the extent that all one means to say is that everything is interdependent in reality I have no objection to that statement.

However, you seem to go much further than that. I pointed out before that your original logical argument for the self-awareness of the universe is incoherent if you take the above to be your meaning, because your argument implicitly assumes that the distinction between human and universe "is actually possible beyond language", as tame_deuces put it. Once you eliminate that distinction, you no longer are making a logical argument at all, you're just stating a fact which in tame_deuces' account can be deflated to mean no more and no less than that humans are self-aware.

All of this reminds me a little bit of a passage from Aristotle's On the Soul:

I've always thought that first bit was especially evocative: "the soul is in a way all that exists". The words "in a way" are a single Greek word: πως (pōs) -- "somehow", "in some unspecified way", "in a sense". It's a fun little word.

But to me this conversation is like you taking that first evocative sentence and trying to run with it to create an elaborate and rather mystical view of reality while ignoring the requirement of inquiring in just what way that statement is true. It's also interesting that Aristotle takes a similar approach but develops from it an argument for empiricism, whereas you seem to want to develop an argument for an idealist rationalism. I left in the bit about imagination because it's also relevant to the prior point.

* I would argue that we can make distinctions which go beyond language, and in fact science does all the time. So for example accurately predicting the results of a physics experiment requires setting up one's concepts of the entities involved in the the problem properly, and the utility of those proper conceptions clearly goes beyond language by allowing for accurate prediction. But setting that aside, I'm taking the main point simply to be the idea that analytical boundaries between logical concepts are not ontological boundaries between really separate entities. I think t_d acknowledges those distinctions when he says they are useful.

It's the same thing as imagining your own death. When you "see" the people standing around your coffin you are in fact viewing the scene from a manufactured third party perception. You step outside your own perception to see you laying there from a different point of view. To actually see your own death would require the extinguishing of your perception altogether, which isnt possible, since everything you see is dependent on your mind.

So you're really not viewing your own death at all. You're viewing it both dissociating and associating at the same time. This is a contradiction.

Any imagined universe is contained in this, real universe. So any imagination is just as dependent on your perception, which depends on this universe, as anything else you attempt to perceive. When you attempt to perceive things that dont include you, you cant both perceive it and not perceive it as that's a contradiction. So when you attempt to conceive a universe that doesnt contain yourself, you undermine the very perception that would be required to perceive it. Ergo, it's impossible to do it. You're not really perceiving a universe apart from yourself, because perceiving it requires a perception, which requires you! Its fundamentally important that you understand this.

Any, and all situations, real or imagined, that you perceive include you by definition, because you are perceiving them.



Ok. If everything is interdependent then reality is dependent on our perceptions in the same reflexive sense that our perception is dependent on reality. The claim I am making is that this interdependence is not only the fundamental precept of any reality theory, but that even attempting to undermine it is logically impossible.

At a fundamental level there is no distinction between human and universe. The distinction is and has always been the error. As I said before, the studier and the studied are in fundamental coincidence.


I've tried to establish the "way it is true" multiple times. It's true in the way that anything contrary is logically impossible.


It's not possible. In order to do so you would have to explain or at the very least think it using something other than language. Logic is itself a language. So is math. Both of which science depends on. In fact, anything intelligible whatsoever is fundamentally a language.


A prediction is a statement. A problem is a statement. And conceptions depend on the logical rules of reality, which are a language of their own. So no, I dont believe that you can dissociate anything from language. At least not anything intelligible.

You are conflating perceiving and imagining. When you imagine something, no one is claiming that you are imagining a real thing ( except you, I guess, you claimed that imaginary things are also real). You arent perceiving an imaginary universe, at best you are perceiving thoughts about an imaginary universe. No one is claiming that ones imaginary scenario of your death, is the REAL scenario of your death.



No one is claiming this ( again, apart from you , I guess).

This doesnt get you any nearer to showing your original post is true. I absolutely can imagine a universe without "mentation". I am doing it right now, I am imagining an empty dead universe. Or a universe right at the start, before the expansion. I am not claiming that its a REAL universe, or that my imaginary universe is correct, or true, or relates to the real universe, or anything like that. Of course I still need to be alive in a real universe in order to imagine this universe, but that doesnt get you anywhere that you think it does.

In this universe which contains humans capable of thought, I absolutely can imagine a universe that contains no thought.

Of course you aren't viewing it. You're imagining it.

This is the entire reason we had that whole sidebar about whether the sun fits into OrP's enormous head. As Aristotle put it: it is not the stone which is present in the soul but its form. It's not the imagined universe which is contained in my head, it's my imagination of it. The distinction is obviously subtler in this case than with the sun, but your argument leads to the rather dubious conclusion that we can't imagine counterfactuals at all, and this is not true.

Again, this is just equivocating between the act of imagining, which depends upon my mind (and the universe), and the logical coherence of the contents of my imagination which do not. I can imagine impossible things like a block of ice at the center of the sun. I can also imagine the universe just after the big bang.

I've understood this all along, but imagination is not perception. I'll try another example: you're arguing that it's impossible for me to write a fictional story about an imaginary world where I do not exist. This is trivially false. I've read many such stories, and written a few.

In some ways this is clearly true. For example, humans shape the world around them in ways which are dependent not only upon their perceptions of the world but also their cultures, which are more tenuously connected to objective reality. But it's also clearly possible to take this idea too far. The nuclear reactions happening in the sun are not dependent upon my perceptions of them to function. Scientific realism is a perfectly coherent philosophical perspective. When you say that reality is (for us) inherently subjective that is true but it's equally true that reality has a very stubbornly objective nature as well. Our subjectivity pushes out into a world that pushes back at us.

None of the arguments in this thread are centered around a denial of the first part of that dialectic (that knowledge is subjectively mediated and so on), only on your attempts to make logical extrapolations from it which don't follow, or your attempts to deny the second half, that reality is also objective.

Depending on what you mean by fundamental I have no particular problem with this either. The problem is you try to make this kind of reasoning do too much work, and you employ simple logical fallacies to argue for dubious conclusions.

Yes, you've tried to do so, but your arguments suffer from really obvious logical defects.

A prediction is a statement, but it is clearly more than a statement. The statements "I like tacos" and "It will rain tomorrow" have different relationships with the world outside my mind. It's like saying that love is only a word.

Okay, I’ll modify it. I split the argument up and I’m using some terms a bit unconventionally, so here are my operational definitions:

Subjective reality is reality as we perceive it.
Objective reality is reality as we conceive it.
Support is to ground, base or initiate an existential claim with.

1. Only views from a perspective can support existential claims.
2. The view from nowhere is not a view from a perspective.
C1: The view from nowhere cannot support existential claims.

C1: The view from nowhere cannot support existential claims.
3. Objective reality is a view from nowhere.
C2: Objective reality cannot support existential claims.

What I’m getting at is if we want to make any sort of existential claim it must be rooted in a perception. For example, if we want to claim the sun exists irrespective of a mind perceiving it, we need to start with a mind-dependent perception of the sun, or some other perception from which we derive the sun’s mind-independent existence. In other words, any existential claim must have as its ultimate source a perceptual claim i.e. a view from somewhere. By contrast, that’s what I mean by “a view from nowhere”—it’s a view or perceptive but not a real one; it’s a fictional one as opposed to the real perspective of perceptions. From which:

C3. Only subjective reality can support existential claims.

Occasionally. That’s like imagining imagination is new again, with no preconditions established about it by other thinking faculties. Which happens at the speed of imagination, what ever amount that is. Imagination is easy to try. Imagining all the ways one may use imagination and choosing one is doable, I can testify.

a. Either I'm conflating them, or you're unreasonably distinguishing them. Let's look at the definitions

Perception:
1. the state of being or process of becoming aware of something through the senses.
synonyms: recognition, awareness, consciousness, appreciation, realization, knowledge, grasp, understanding, comprehension, apprehension; formal cognizance
2. a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression.

Nope. Looks like my definition is just fine. Of course perception, conception, cognition, awareness, consciousness, and imagine are synonymous

and

b. It doesn't matter what definition you use. An imagination of a universe that doesn't include you is as impossible as seeing an actual one that doesn't include you. The very act of imagining? It includes you.

Regardless of what you classify as real, imagining something includes you as a perceiver, or conceiver of that thing. Any situation you can think of, perceive, conceive, imagine, or study includes you by definition, because you are the one that's doing it.




It's an inassailable fact. The contrary is logically impossible.

By mentating it.

You're not really imagining an empty dead universe, because the imagination of it requires you to imagine it, so you're part of it whether you like it or not!

By thinking it? Congrats you just proved my point.

Regardless, imagining it requires an imaginer, so the imagination itself and the imaginer (you) imagining it are fundamentally inseparable. What you're really doing is fooling yourself into imagining something that doesn't include you, by assuming a third party view. That third party view is no less you than the real you imagining something else.

In a limited way you can imagine counterfactuals, certainly. In a rigorous, holistic way, which is what reality theory requires, you cannot.



Yep, and every single one of those imaginations includes, indeed is dependent on you, whether you think they do/are or not. So any rigorous theory of reality as a whole must include the observer as much as it includes the observed.



What I'm arguing is that the fictional story you wrote includes you whether or not you realize it.

Imagine a scene in downtown Venice, where a crowd is encircling magicians doing magic tricks in the square. You are aware of your own body, and you're viewing this scene through your eyes. Now you take vertical flight, and slowly zoom out from the city, seeing the scene diminish in relative size as the buildings grow outward. Now stop the vertical motion of your body but separate your imagination from your body and continue to expand upwards, viewing your own body below you as part of the greater scene. You see that you were part of the scene the entire time (and still are). In fact it's impossible to completely be removed from it, because you've taken on a third party point of view to see your body, which is originally seeing the scene. Now do it again. There is a fourth party view viewing the third party view viewing your body, which is viewing the scene. That fourth party is no less you than you when you were originally in your body. You will see that this is an infinite regress, and anything you choose to either directly see or imagine in your mind depends on your mind.


Even the book you wrote contains you as part of it, because it's possible to view, more broadly, things from a higher perspective. That is, until you reach the bounds of all that exists (the universe), and then you really can't view things from a broader perspective.

The collapse of the wave function is dependent on perception of it, so why not the nuclear reactions in the sun? You're just assuming this for no good reason because you insist on holding onto your faulty precept that distinguishes observer from observed.




The logical extrapolations are absolutely certain. We know this because we know that attempting to disprove them leads to absurdity and incoherence.

Ok, you must have a good reason for thinking that reality is mind-independent. What is it? (warning: you can't use your mind to answer<---this is how we know I am correct. The contrary is logically impossible)

OrP went this route earlier, and backtracked by claiming he 'just believed it.'



Fortunately for reality it doesn't depend on what you have problems with. I'm just trying to help you understand.

Still on the composition thing eh? Tsk tsk.


I've already corrected you on the composition thing.

A statement is as inseparable from language as language is inseparable from its statements.

You said things can be determined beyond language. Please take a few minutes to explain how (warning: do not use language to do so).

I am asking you to think about when, precisely that was.

Why is it important? - because you believe you are both separate and apart of the universe, in some reasonable way.

Comparing the universe to any object, must be absurd when that object is not separate from the universe entirely...

There is no when. The universe is the universe. I'm as much a part of it now as I was before I was born, and will be no less part of it when I'm 'dead.'

I do not believe that.

The universe is its objects. All of them, across all times and states, everywhere at once.

Ignoring the validity of your argument, do you see how the last premise and conclusion implies a sort of separability between humans and the universe itself?

Not at all. All we have to go on is our own experience. So you're not separating humans from the universe when stating something about humans, you're just describing something you know with absolute certainty about them (or more specifically, you).

It's easy to say "the rock is not self-aware, so the universe is not self-aware." But that's not even wrong, since we don't know what it's like to be a rock (if there is such a thing). What we know for absolute certainty it that we are self-aware, so the universe must be self-aware, because we are part of the universe, and the universe can't be self-aware and not self-aware at the same time. And really, since we are aware of the universes rocks, the universe is aware of its rocks; rocks don't need to be aware of themselves.

The really intriguing thing is that this is being increasingly backed up by science itself. The wave function doesn't collapse until it's looked at. Quantum particles might exist in two places at the same time. We will probably empirically verify that we live in an observer-dependent reality.

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse

https://futurism.com/john-wheelers-p...atory-universe

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...-you-make-it-0

I'm probably not going to respond to the rest of your post, so I just wanted to acknowledge the bolded and express my appreciation for your civility in this thread.

I mostly won't quibble with this. I'm not really certain that (1) is true, given our not really understanding either self-consciousness or artificial intelligence very well, but I haven't (and don't intend to) contested this claim ITT. More seriously, I think D0DN would probably reject the distinction between objective and subjective reality as you define them here as he views ideas (or the objects of conception) as actually being a form of perception. While I do view these as different mental acts, I also wouldn't distinguish between objective and subjective reality in this way either. Finally, I think there are also potential problems in how we interpret the "ground, base, or initiate" clause, and you might with justice think I reject this based on my later comments. However, I don't think these issues really matters to the argument here, so I'll mostly try to work within this framework.

I also don't really take this as your own view (although it might be), but as an attempt to put D0DN's argument into a more technical structure, so I'll respond to this in part as his argument.

First, I'll start by saying that I more or less agree with C1, C2, & C3. To make any claim about the universe, including existential claims, there has to be something making the claim. I think this is the intuitive force behind the idea that any claim must be from a perspective. My disagreement comes from what follows from C3. So here I'll add another premise:

4. Something can exist even if no existential claim about it can be supported.

Basically, even if our only direct access is to the objects of perception, it doesn't follow that everything is just the sense data or ideas in our heads. Ontology and epistemology study different domains - what is real might be completely unknowable and even unconceivable to humans. It is thus in principle possible that things could exist that we can't directly perceive. And while I'll grant that there will always remain Cartesian doubt about these whether these things exist, I also think we can reason about the nature of these objects beyond our direct perception either.

This seems absurd to D0DN. After all, any talk or imagining of something existing, even if unperceived, is itself an idea or perception in the head, and hence something subjectively real. And since the subjectively real can only be supported by a view from somewhere, we aren't really talking about an unperceived object. However, this is a misunderstanding of how perceptions and ideas work. Most fundamentally, it incorrectly conflates a perception of an object (what is in our head), with the object that perception is purported to be of. D0DN is denying that our perceptions have an "aboutness" character to them or can refer to objects/ideas that are not themselves that perception or idea.

I think this is a mischaracterization of how perception actually works. For instance, our experience of the sun is quite regular in many ways: I have roughly the same experience of the sun that you do, we can observe the effects of the sun on non-thinking objects, we can predict the path of the sun using math and physics, etc. How do we explain this? Our understanding of sense data as purely phenomena doesn't really work for this as phenomenology on its own is not bound by such regular laws (eg in dream and hallucinations).

Instead, we explain these regular features of perception by placing them within a causal framework, where we say that we are caused to have certain perceptions by the workings of a physical universe that operates according to consistent physical laws. Now, it is true that we do not have direct perceptual access to this physical universe, rather only second-hand access through our senses or cognitive access through reason. We infer the existence of an external world as a way of explaining the regularity and shared character of our first-hand perceptions.

Furthermore, we can even develop theories of perception that are consistent with these models of a physical universe, e.g. of how vision works with light, eyes, brains, etc. An implication of these theories of perceptions is that while our experience of the external world (our perception of the world) depends on the existence of a subject, the external world itself does not depend on the existence of a subject perceiving it.

Circling back to (4), we can see more clearly where the disagreement lies. In order to make an existential claim, there must be some mind making the claim. However, in order for something to exist, there needn't be any mind making the claim that it exists. Furthermore, our existential claims are not claims about the existence of our perceptions, but rather claims about the existence of what we understand our perceptions to be about, or what our ideas refer to, not to the act of thinking those thoughts.

More concretely, when I say the sun exists, I'm not saying that my perception of the sun exists, rather, I'm saying that the thing I take my perceptions to be about - the giant flaming ball of gas - that thing exists. And it follows quite easily from this that we can claim that things exist without there being a mind to perceive them. When we are thinking about things that don't exist we are not of course denying that our imagination of those things doesn't exist. This imagining is a real thing on it's own. Rather, we are claiming that the aboutness relation that normally goes along with this imagining isn't hooking onto anything outside of our minds. I can imagine a unicorn, and my mental picture of a unicorn is real as a mental picture, but it doesn't have a relation to anything in the external world and so isn't a mental picture of a real thing. Similarly, I can imagine a universe without any minds in it and have a real mental picture of this universe, including describing various features of what it be like, but since it doesn't connect to anything in the external world, it also is not a mental picture of a real thing. But is it possible? Sure, I can see that the mental picture of this universe is fully consistent with the physical and logical laws of the actual universe and so it is a possible state of the actual universe. Of course, if it were the actual universe, there wouldn't be anyone around to make existential claims or to imagine it, but the rest of the actual universe could still operate just fine.

No they arent. I have never heard anyone say "I just perceived a thought"



So what? I am still imagining a universe without me. The fact that I need to be around to imagine it , does not negate the fact that I imagined it. The fact that its impossible is irrelevant. Why is this so hard for you to grasp? I can also imagine me flying through the skies without a plane or wings. That is also impossible, but I am imagining it.


So what? I am not claiming that I disappear from this universe if I imagine a universe without me in it.


I dont see where you think this gets you. Yes, in order to imagine things, I need to be in the universe and alive. No one is disputing that.

We'll just leave it at that then. Your opinion is more important that actual definitions I guess.





No you're not imagining anything without you, that's the thing. You can say that you are a million different times, but you're not. If you imagine a scenario, you're in the scenario as a viewer. If its impossible to even imagine a universe without you, then the actual existence of reality is as dependent on you as you are on it. That's pretty relevant.




You dont disappear from the imagination either, cause its dependent on your imagination so your mind is in it.


And to imagine something, your mind is involved. When you claim you can imagine a universe without you, you're making a false claim. Anything you imagine necessarily includes you.

Man that was easy, huh?



The distinction isnt logically possible. They inhere in each other. Distinguishing between them is the error.

This is totally unsupportable. In order to prove it, you need to perceive it, and to use reason, and to reason and perceive you need a brain in the game.

You're misconstruing the claim yet again. Stop doing that.

Undermining the primary assumption of science, yet again. No one will ever take this seriously.


That claim itself is dependent on your own brain. When your brain goes, so does the claim.

Again, a totally unsupportable assertion depending on your brain.

Because it is absurd. It's not even coherent.

That would be very perceptive of you!

Argument ad populum.

But that these laws dont inhere in us completely, because you earlier claimed it's reasonable to think there are limitations to our knowledge. If such were the case, some laws of the universe dont apply to us. Which of course is ludicrous. The fact our brains can move through space and time and remain intact suggests that the universe is uniformly coherent and obeys strict laws. If those laws exist and all apply to us, then we can figure out anything about the universe and we eventually will figure it out completely.


Same stuff, all based on perception/conception/consciousness, all depending ultimately on your brain.

The more you attempt to reason your way out of this, the more you rely on perception/conception, which is dependent on your brain and ultimately proves my point.

This thread inspired me to reread a bit of the Critique of Pure Reason on the plane.

I'm happy it's a lot easier to understand now than it was the first time

I’m not hung up on the terms just so long as we note there’s a distinction between the two.

I agree. I stopped at C3 because that was as far I could get with that line of reasoning. Although I do think C3 poses a problem for the eliminative materialism argument. So if somehow the whole issue could be whittled down to monist idealism vs eliminative materialism, idealism has the edge, imo.

This ties in with above mentioned two different mental acts. There’s the act of perceiving and the resulting perception of that act. It’s like taking a picture: first there’s the live and dynamic view, then we kill and freeze it when we snap the picture. This may strike you as a little loony, but we might assume there’s a mind-independent world “out there” just because of all those mind-dependent pictures we have “in here.” In other words, the perception - as distinct from the act of perceiving it - may only refer to or be about a past experience as opposed to something out there causing it.

I don’t see how the current line of reasoning can refute that. It’s one thing to say that “claims about reality necessitate a mind/perspective/subject,” but quite another to say “reality necessitates claims about it.”

Thanks for the analysis, it was probably more thoughtful than my posts deserved, but I agree with it.

One advantage of moving the "point of reference" around is that you don't get stuck in a pure intuitive understanding of the world. That is important as the world isn't very intuitive, if it was we wouldn't had thousands of years of philosophy, science and other endeavors "slowly" eking out incremental advancements in knowledge that often show how previous views were mistaken or very incomplete. An example could be how we can now suddenly look at the fascinating idea that the universe developed from a lump of weird physics into the fundamental interactions we observe today, and not only that - but constituent parts of this universe become aware of its own existence and the universe it is part of.

I think a big future step for psychology (and related sciences) is to explain how:
a) A constituent part can feel whole
b) Something made of constituent parts can feel whole.

I realize that these questions might sound very "quasi-philosophical", but I actually think that has more to do with our current language and understanding of the world isn't yet at a place where we can adequately explain this. For me that it is one of the most fascinating aspects of our universe. What actually is this "separation of parts"? Is it possible that at some point we will move to a stage or state where we are less separated? More separated? Is there a way to build machines or life that function differently? Is it conceivable that there are beings that function differently?

I don't know if we will ever find answers to this or if the questions are even that meaningful. What I do think however is that we should be vary of language that traps us in a mindset that makes these questions void or unanswerable.