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Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reas

Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reasonable extrapolation to make from our experiences, but it's not the only one.

naasking 9y ago
Not the only one, simply the most plausible one! I can't answer the ultimate skeptic except to say that not only do skeptical arguments against knowledge depend on that very same knowledge, and so undermine themselves, but even if that were not so, abstract musings will never be more plausible than the concrete reality staring you in the face.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  That's fair, but the skeptical argument isn't my main concern. The point is that subjective phenomena are the most basic facts of my existence, so it's not even meaningful for me to explain (or worse, deny) them with respect to (in favor of) things I extrapolated from them. I think last time you didn't agree that subjective phenomena were the most immediate facts of my experience. If that's still the case, perhaps I can try to be more precise.
  - naasking 9y ago
    In principle, no set of third party objective facts can capture first person subjective facts. This is part of the hard problem. The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it. Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing. Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference. [1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm
    - monktastic1 9y ago
      Sure, but I don't think the analogy holds. In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. The other would be to infer "therefore I must not experiencing [the phenomenon I'm approximating as 'seeing colored blobs' or anything else]," which is nonsense. Even the thought "I am not having a conscious experience" is a conscious experience -- though even that's often not obvious. When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake. You're not blacked out, and no amount of reasoning would make it so. The same holds here, no matter how much more consistent this reality appears to be.
      - dwaltrip 9y ago
        > In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. > When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind) How would you characterize a dream in which friends or family members are present? Are these not "facts about an external reality"? Presumably, you aren't dreaming about my family members, as you have never met them. Yet here I am, dreaming about them for some reason. I would argue this is due to the "external reality" where my family members exist and I have interacted with them.
        monktastic1 9y ago
        Yes, it's possible to have a dream about my family that's in part caused by my actual family members. But the dream parents are not my actual parents, and a pencil in water is not an actual broken pencil. This highlights one meaning of "illusion." From these sorts of examples, we can conclude that whatever we think we are experiencing might not be what we are actually experiencing -- but crucially, not that we are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever. The visual experience of a broken pencil doesn't stop happening just because you know it's not really a broken pencil. It keeps happening but means something else. If you are dead honest with yourself, and drop all your metaphysics for a moment, you will discover that various things certainly seem to be happening (sights, sounds, thoughts, etc.). Try it right now! This "sheer fact" deserves an explanation, and though logical and metaphysical games can produce the explanation "there's nothing there to explain," many people don't consider that any kind of explanation. (Furthermore, I hypothesize that for those that do consider it a valid explanation, spending more time in that "dead honest" state, where there's minimal conceptualization of one's experience, will slowly eat away at their confidence in the usefulness of the "explanation." Conversely, thinking harder and harder about it may indeed bolster it.)

naasking 9y ago

Not the only one, simply the most plausible one! I can't answer the ultimate skeptic except to say that not only do skeptical arguments against knowledge depend on that very same knowledge, and so undermine themselves, but even if that were not so, abstract musings will never be more plausible than the concrete reality staring you in the face.

monktastic1 9y ago
That's fair, but the skeptical argument isn't my main concern. The point is that subjective phenomena are the most basic facts of my existence, so it's not even meaningful for me to explain (or worse, deny) them with respect to (in favor of) things I extrapolated from them. I think last time you didn't agree that subjective phenomena were the most immediate facts of my experience. If that's still the case, perhaps I can try to be more precise.
- naasking 9y ago
  In principle, no set of third party objective facts can capture first person subjective facts. This is part of the hard problem. The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it. Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing. Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference. [1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    Sure, but I don't think the analogy holds. In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. The other would be to infer "therefore I must not experiencing [the phenomenon I'm approximating as 'seeing colored blobs' or anything else]," which is nonsense. Even the thought "I am not having a conscious experience" is a conscious experience -- though even that's often not obvious. When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake. You're not blacked out, and no amount of reasoning would make it so. The same holds here, no matter how much more consistent this reality appears to be.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      > In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. > When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind) How would you characterize a dream in which friends or family members are present? Are these not "facts about an external reality"? Presumably, you aren't dreaming about my family members, as you have never met them. Yet here I am, dreaming about them for some reason. I would argue this is due to the "external reality" where my family members exist and I have interacted with them.
      - monktastic1 9y ago
        Yes, it's possible to have a dream about my family that's in part caused by my actual family members. But the dream parents are not my actual parents, and a pencil in water is not an actual broken pencil. This highlights one meaning of "illusion." From these sorts of examples, we can conclude that whatever we think we are experiencing might not be what we are actually experiencing -- but crucially, not that we are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever. The visual experience of a broken pencil doesn't stop happening just because you know it's not really a broken pencil. It keeps happening but means something else. If you are dead honest with yourself, and drop all your metaphysics for a moment, you will discover that various things certainly seem to be happening (sights, sounds, thoughts, etc.). Try it right now! This "sheer fact" deserves an explanation, and though logical and metaphysical games can produce the explanation "there's nothing there to explain," many people don't consider that any kind of explanation. (Furthermore, I hypothesize that for those that do consider it a valid explanation, spending more time in that "dead honest" state, where there's minimal conceptualization of one's experience, will slowly eat away at their confidence in the usefulness of the "explanation." Conversely, thinking harder and harder about it may indeed bolster it.)