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It feels a bit like contemporary physics has caught up to the concerns of 18/19th century philosophers. Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and others, while disagr

It feels a bit like contemporary physics has caught up to the concerns of 18/19th century philosophers. Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and others, while disagreeing with each other in major ways, all agree on one big concern: We're fundamentally limited in our knowledge about "things in themselves" outside of our consciousness and the perceptions we receive. Naively we think "oh, looks there's a flower!" but for these philosophers a big question was: how much can we really know about the actual thing that is the flower, beyond the (potentially suspect) information that our mind receives through the senses and our mental models (include the concept of 'flower'). In a very practical way I think we might be bumping into these limits. Which isn't surprising since what was driving these questions for those philosophers was concerns about the foundations of the then rapidly emerging scientific fields.

civilized 3y ago
I am not sure philosophers have so much identified limits to our knowledge, as perhaps "thing in itself" is a vague and contentless concept that we struggle to let go of.
mjburgess 3y ago
That isn't naive at all. Oh look, there really is a flower. The set of sceptical propositions, say S, which make this "naive" are far more naive than the truth of there being a flower. That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism, and when balanced against the ordinary, are far far more doubtful. What falls away, as naive, under scepticism is scepticism itself.
- indigochill 3y ago
  I probably fall in the middle. We can only make statements about what's more or less probable by getting insight into what exists beyond our perception, but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception so we have no data to determine which is more or less likely. Either position is one of faith, not logic. For that matter, trusting that logic is sound is itself a position of faith. Hofstadter in GEB refers to positions like these as "axioms": statements that are impossible to formally prove within a particular system but from which we can derive statements that follow from those axioms through rules (the most fundamental of which are themselves axioms, like the statement in geometry that two points make a line) governing symbolic manipulation within a particular system. I like the concept and find it useful for wrangling logic and philosophy although I also note that it is itself subject to accepting certain axioms.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Our perception is the perception of what's beyond it -- the world is the direct cause of our experiences which present that world. " but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception " This is one of those sceptical propositions I'm talking about. All these sceptical claims which follow "by definition" follow only by the definitions of sceptics -- definitions held (with no sense of self-awareness) with certainty. How I would define "perception" would make such a claim incoherent or trivially false. The light which hits a camera from a tree does not travel via some daemon. And a camera so-positioned can indeed photograph its own mechanism. We have for at least half a century being using perception, without trouble, to perceive the mechanism of our own perception (visual cortex, retina, lenses, etc.). All these alleged impossibilities begin from the premise that we are not within, part of, and directly causally engaged with, the world. This is the most outrageous of all 'philosophical' propositions, the most naive, the most absurd --- and yet lies as the undoubted presumption of nearly all scepticism.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays. The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey. There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.
- IKantRead 3y ago
  I'm not even sure what "really is a flower" even means. Surely you'll at least agree that the concept of "flower" is a mental object that we use to classify a set of related sense perceptions. If you're going to call skepticism "naive" then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" in relation to the experience of observing one. I think you'll find the number of propositions required is not small. > That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism Hume's fundamental point was that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real so skepticism about philosophy itself was already alive and well at that point.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Hume's starting premise is that we can only talk about ideas in our heads. Hume was wrong; outrageously so. > that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real So much for how awfully limited Hume's philosophy is. If your premises are insufficient to evidence ordinary propositions; so much for your premises. The toy model here is the deficiency, not the world. > then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" I do not. Philosophy answers to reality, not the converse. When I pick up a flower, there is a flower. Our ability to put that into words may, or may not, be limited. The power of our philosophical cognition here is irrelevant. That I am holding a flower invalidates all systems of philosophical propositions which assign that proposition 'False'. Scepticism does not falsify reality, rather, it is the converse. That there are systems of propositions which succeed in accounting for the truth of ordinary such claims makes scepticism doubly absurd. There is a world. It is the cause of my perceptions. My perceptions are caused by the world they present. I learn to perceive the structure of the world because the world has that structure. And so on.
    - IKantRead 3y ago
      > Scepticism does not falsify reality I don't understand why you're even making this statement, no philosophical skeptic would disagree with this. Skepticism has always attacked our understanding of reality, not reality itself. If anything it is the idealists, like Leibniz that argue that "reality is only in our minds", verging on solipsism. You seem to be misunderstanding Hume who more so points out that the only thing we can really "know" is our inner experience of reality, which is a bit closer to what you're arguing.
jlnho 3y ago
You might want to check out Joscha Bach and Iain McGilchrist.

civilized 3y ago

I am not sure philosophers have so much identified limits to our knowledge, as perhaps "thing in itself" is a vague and contentless concept that we struggle to let go of.

mjburgess 3y ago

That isn't naive at all. Oh look, there really is a flower. The set of sceptical propositions, say S, which make this "naive" are far more naive than the truth of there being a flower. That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism, and when balanced against the ordinary, are far far more doubtful. What falls away, as naive, under scepticism is scepticism itself.

indigochill 3y ago
I probably fall in the middle. We can only make statements about what's more or less probable by getting insight into what exists beyond our perception, but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception so we have no data to determine which is more or less likely. Either position is one of faith, not logic. For that matter, trusting that logic is sound is itself a position of faith. Hofstadter in GEB refers to positions like these as "axioms": statements that are impossible to formally prove within a particular system but from which we can derive statements that follow from those axioms through rules (the most fundamental of which are themselves axioms, like the statement in geometry that two points make a line) governing symbolic manipulation within a particular system. I like the concept and find it useful for wrangling logic and philosophy although I also note that it is itself subject to accepting certain axioms.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Our perception is the perception of what's beyond it -- the world is the direct cause of our experiences which present that world. " but by definition we can't perceive what's beyond our perception " This is one of those sceptical propositions I'm talking about. All these sceptical claims which follow "by definition" follow only by the definitions of sceptics -- definitions held (with no sense of self-awareness) with certainty. How I would define "perception" would make such a claim incoherent or trivially false. The light which hits a camera from a tree does not travel via some daemon. And a camera so-positioned can indeed photograph its own mechanism. We have for at least half a century being using perception, without trouble, to perceive the mechanism of our own perception (visual cortex, retina, lenses, etc.). All these alleged impossibilities begin from the premise that we are not within, part of, and directly causally engaged with, the world. This is the most outrageous of all 'philosophical' propositions, the most naive, the most absurd --- and yet lies as the undoubted presumption of nearly all scepticism.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    So much of knowledge in everything is just something some guy asserted in a book a few hundred years ago. Most of every field is just a guy saying "I think this because (argument based on rhetoric)", and a hundred years later we still just take that at face value. The only exception is physics, where people realized many hundred years ago that you should probably check these assertions against reality. Aristotle's claim that heavy things fall faster than light things was gospel for a thousand years, despite pretty much anyone being able to do a version of his thought experiment to conclusively disprove it, but nobody did, because it was thought you could just rationally argue your way to an accurate understanding of the world. Physics finally started pushing back against that in like the 1600s, and chemistry did a little too, though mostly by accident, but even psychology, born basically in the 20th century, was still based on whatever rhetorical arguments you put in your book, with that only changing, slowly, nowadays. The idea that we should discount science based on rhetoric vs science based on evidence still isn't a popular one in the lay community. People hate being told that there are things they may never understand, because the human brain is just a really good monkey. There is no evidence in rhetoric, and a more convincing argument should not be considered a more realistic one.
IKantRead 3y ago
I'm not even sure what "really is a flower" even means. Surely you'll at least agree that the concept of "flower" is a mental object that we use to classify a set of related sense perceptions. If you're going to call skepticism "naive" then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" in relation to the experience of observing one. I think you'll find the number of propositions required is not small. > That era of philosophy had yet to learn that philosophical propositions are themselves subject to scepticism Hume's fundamental point was that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real so skepticism about philosophy itself was already alive and well at that point.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Hume's starting premise is that we can only talk about ideas in our heads. Hume was wrong; outrageously so. > that even causality cannot be meaningfully verified as real So much for how awfully limited Hume's philosophy is. If your premises are insufficient to evidence ordinary propositions; so much for your premises. The toy model here is the deficiency, not the world. > then you have to at least outline what you mean by "a flower" I do not. Philosophy answers to reality, not the converse. When I pick up a flower, there is a flower. Our ability to put that into words may, or may not, be limited. The power of our philosophical cognition here is irrelevant. That I am holding a flower invalidates all systems of philosophical propositions which assign that proposition 'False'. Scepticism does not falsify reality, rather, it is the converse. That there are systems of propositions which succeed in accounting for the truth of ordinary such claims makes scepticism doubly absurd. There is a world. It is the cause of my perceptions. My perceptions are caused by the world they present. I learn to perceive the structure of the world because the world has that structure. And so on.
  - IKantRead 3y ago
    > Scepticism does not falsify reality I don't understand why you're even making this statement, no philosophical skeptic would disagree with this. Skepticism has always attacked our understanding of reality, not reality itself. If anything it is the idealists, like Leibniz that argue that "reality is only in our minds", verging on solipsism. You seem to be misunderstanding Hume who more so points out that the only thing we can really "know" is our inner experience of reality, which is a bit closer to what you're arguing.

jlnho 3y ago

You might want to check out Joscha Bach and Iain McGilchrist.