The Half-life of Facts.

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Sorry, Frank, but I cannot account for any absurdities you might have read into my words.

Quote:
You claim that what "humans can say and know about reality"...IS ALL THERE IS TO REALITY.

Well, can you think of anything we can't say or know that wouldn't be hypothetical?

No, I cannot...but that does not mean that anything that actually IS...no longer IS. The fact that we do not know it...does not make it any less a part of REALITY if it exists.

Quote:

This is no longer about what reality actually is. It's about the limits of language and logic.

Well, actually I think this is about you being unwilling to see the logic of some very logical arguments being offered by several people here. You have made your guesswork into a sort of religion, Cyracuz...and you will not abide anything that casts any doubt on any of its tenets.

Quote:

If something is defined as inaccessible to our senses (the only means we have of detecting reality), how the hell can it be called REALITY?

Very easily. We can simply posit that anything that ACTUALLY EXISTS whether we know it or not...IS a part of REALITY.

Why don't you do that, Cyracuz. It is a totally logical thing to do...and your religion is not the kind that causes any penalty for you if you see the truth.

Quote:

It might exist. We cannot know, so it's hypothetical. An assumption.

Fine...so posit it as an assumption. IF living beings exist on any of the planets circling the nearest 15 stars to Sol...THEY ARE A PART OF REALITY.

No problem there. Why do you treat is as though it is a game breaker?

Quote:

So, the only reality we can be entirely certain exists is the reality we experience with our senses, and which we describe and predict.

How many times and how many people have to tell you that we are not talking about the part of REALITY that we humans can verify...when we are discussing REALITY?

Why can you not divorce yourself from that kind of thinking? Why can you not at least wean yourself from it?

1 Reply

Cyracuz is all over the road. He routinely contradicts his previous statements of his thesis. However, in one of his latest dirgressions he hints at descriptions of reality. I've never had a problem with all this hoo-raw applied to descriptions of reality; i've just pointed out that there is a reality outside the descriptions. The relative inability of humans to accurately describe reality is not evidence that there is no reality but what they describe.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

A recent BBC programmwe asked physicists at CERN about "the reality of sub-atomic particles". All of them said the term "reality" was inappropriate. "Useful constructs which helped generate and account for observations" was the most common reply.

Care for some specifics? A link to the program, or better yet to a transcript of it, would be nice.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

. Either way, omission of essential referencing would flunk any candidate on Philosophy 101.

You wouldn't flunk philosophy 101 for failing to provide essential reference. You would flunk it for failing to provide arguments that the names you drop are a reference of. References help with housekeeping around ideas, arguments and the credit for them. But they cannot substitute for the ideas and arguments themselves.

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The famous "Double Slit Experiment" is where quantum physics and reality seem to collide and has had scientists scratching their heads for years on two counts-
1- individual photons appear to be in two places at once.
2- but when apparatus is installed to analyse their behaviour, they change their behaviour, as if they don't like being watched!

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

If we humans were able to swap out our senses for completely different ones, we might discover that a lot of facts and knowledge we had about reality just isn't valid anymore.

I doubt that. For example, bats and humans differ immensely in the low-level data acquisition of the shapes they find in a cave. But it ultimately makes little difference, because our consciousness doesn't concern itself with low-level data acquisition anyway. Instead it navigates an abstract, data-compressed geometry generated by our brains' image-processing. Because the geometry of the cave is the same for bat and human, I don't see why the experience of the cave in bat consciousness would have to be dramatically different from that in human consciousness. As you may know, Thomas Nagel has a thought experiment in this direction. It's fun to comtemplate, but ultimately falls flat.

Cyracuz wrote:

We might get eyes that see a different specter of radiation, through which reality would appear completely different, for instance, and every fact we knew about vision and what the world looks like would have to be revised. We might get eyes that see a different specter of radiation, through which reality would appear completely different, for instance, and every fact we knew about vision and what the world looks like would have to be revised.

Unlike with most of our philosophical banter, you are now touching upon a field that I actually know something about. (I'm a physicist with a thesis that involved optics all across the ultraviolet, visible, and infrared spectrum.) So while I don't want to make an argument from (my) authority, I assure you I do have the professional background to say that you're mistaken about electromagnetic radiation outside the optical spectrum.

Throughout most of the electromagnetic spectrum, the world would look pitch-black to us because water completely absorbs it, and the world (including us) is full of water. (Click here to check out the absorption spectrum of water.) In other words, the visible spectrum is visible for a reason. Natural selection systematically tends to favor those eyes that are sensitive to a tiny window in the spectrum --- the part with interesting things to see in. (For rigor, feel free to translate "interesting" as "useful for survival to know about".) In the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum --- for example, in the near-ultraviolet that insects can see but we can't --- the information from our artificial detectors only complements that from our natural ones. It doesn't contradict it or renders it irrelevant.

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This simple experiment illustrates how our eyes can't see some wavelengths.
Press a button on your TV remote and look at the light on the end, and it'll look dead. Now press the button again and look at it through the viewfinder of a digicam or video recorder and you'll see it flickering like this-

PS- if you're UFO-hunting or ghost-hunting, do periodic sweeps with your cam and watch the viewfinder to see if it's seeing things that your eyes can't detect.

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@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

We can simply posit that anything that ACTUALLY EXISTS whether we know it or not...IS a part of REALITY.

Posit? A belief then. Fair enough. People are entitled to their beliefs. I don't like it when they try to peddle their beliefs as something more though...

You claim to have no beliefs...

Lol

1 Reply

From Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, the entry for posit:

Quote:

to suggest (something, such as an idea or theory) especially in order to start a discussion

There is nothing about belief in there, and in fact, the number one definition from the Oxford Dictionaries page of the Oxford University Press:

Quote:

put forward as fact or as a basis for argument

You're just playing your typical Humpty Dumpty word games.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Quote:
We can simply posit that anything that ACTUALLY EXISTS whether we know it or not...IS a part of REALITY.

Posit? A belief then. Fair enough. People are entitled to their beliefs. I don't like it when they try to peddle their beliefs as something more though...

You claim to have no beliefs...

Lol

Setanta beat me to the "posit" definition, Cyracuz.

There was no "belief" expressed in that comment. We can reference something in order to express ideas about it.

Stop trying so hard. It is not going to work. There is a REALITY. We humans are privy to at least a part of it, but there may be much of it that we do not know about or that we can describe.

The fact that we do not know about it or that we cannot describe it, Cyracuz, does not mean that it is not part of REALITY.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

The fact that we do not know about it or that we cannot describe it, Cyracuz, does not mean that it is not part of REALITY.

...

May the force be with you, Frank. We clearly don't have the same definition of REALITY.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

I see you have cited Nagel's celebrated "Bat" reference. Its a pity you don't seem to have understood Nagel's main conclusions about the uniqueness of species specific "awareness" and the imposibility of a reductionist view of "reality" in terms of human constructs like atoms and molecules.

Philosophical thinking rarely reinforces lay views of "reality". On the contrary it tends to undermine those views as significantly as Galileo undermined religious thinking in the 16th century. The irony of course is that those who now cling to lay paradigms are the present day "popes" and those who dissent are branded by them as "religious".

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Quote:
The fact that we do not know about it or that we cannot describe it, Cyracuz, does not mean that it is not part of REALITY.

...

May the force be with you, Frank. We clearly don't have the same definition of REALITY.

We do not.

I suggest that REALITY includes everything that actually IS...rather than just the stuff that humans are able to sense, comprehend, and communicate information about.

You suggest that REALITY does not.

Good luck with yours.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank. All words , including "reality", "fact", "definition", "is", "know" and "actually" only have currency (which shifts in value) in terms of negotiated human communicative and interactive experiences.

You can (and no doubt will) stick your fingers in your ears and hum your mantra of "IS-ness" till kingdom come, but it has no more significance than chanting "Hari Krishna" and smiling on those you consider unenlightened. It is not a negotiating position - it is an absolutist/religious one which assumes a nebulous ultimate reference frame which precludes any further negotiation.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

I see you have cited Nagel's celebrated "Bat" reference. Its a pity you don't seem to have understood Nagel's main conclusions about the uniqueness of species specific "awareness" and the imposibility of a reductionist view of "reality" in terms of human constructs like atoms and molecules.

It's a pity you don't understand the difference between name-dropping to argue from authority and crediting the originator of an idea even if you disagree with where he's taking it. Nagel's question, "what is it like to be a bat?", is a good one. My answer, "I figure it's not that different from being a human", acknowledges that, but disagrees with Nagel's answer. I was being clear on both parts. Once again, you appear unable to tell the difference between disagreeing with people and not understanding them.

Independently of this, I'm still waiting for your link to that BBC program. If you must argue from authority, please identify the authority precisely enough that people can check it for themselves.

1 Reply

@fresco,

Quote:

Philosophical thinking rarely reinforces lay views of "reality". On the contrary it tends to undermine those views as significantly as Galileo undermined religious thinking in the 16th century.

Galileo was a lay man and he undermined the POV of very learned men.

But the interesting point for me is: just because some common views are easily challenged by philosophers, does not mean that the role of philosophers should be to destroy what you call lay views. That's the biggest cliché in the field in fact, and can be expressed as: if my mother in law thinks something, then it must be false. It's like philosophers would be on a mission to destroy common sense. That's absurd.

Sometimes, a layman can easily prove a philosopher wrong. There's no lay person and no learnt person in philosophy. We're all like babies try to grasp big stuff.

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In a way, dreams are a "reality". For example I had one last night in which I was walking down the street and a massive truck carrying a dismantled fairground ride was coming at me, so I had to jump off the pavement and take cover among some tombstones to let it squeeze past..
Any dream analysts here who can explain the meaning behind it?
------------------

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/swag80_zps72962e87.gif~original

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@Thomas,

The programme I spoke of is several months old and no longer seems to be present on BBCiplayer. I suggest we both watch the current one on the "Big Bang" and see what emerges.

Your Nagel rebuttal is a "common sense confidence in science" one, rather than a considered philosophical one. The philosophical reason the article continues to be cited, is as I stated, together with its promotion of teleology as an alternative to causality to account for complex systems. I don't myself subscribe to that promotion because it might be used to fuel religious arguments for "life". On the other hand the emphasis Nagel puts on "wholes" as prior to "parts" is in accordance with Gestaltist views of "being" (in line with those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty).

You might like to re-consider your use of the word "understanding" from the point of view of "famililiarity with systems of thought from which the significance of statements get their value". A "name-dropping" jibe is pretty infantile in the face genuinely offered experience of such systems.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Quote:

I doubt that.

How can you doubt that after saying that "it (consciousness) navigates an abstract, data-compressed geometry generated by our brains' image-processing"?

If you flood that cave with the right frequencies of sound, bats will be blind in there, while humans won't notice anything.
If the cave had something in it that jammed the bat's sound signals, it would just be a black hole of nothing to the bat, while humans would still see it as a cave.

So while the "geometry of the cave is the same", as you put it, what we can detect of it differs between species with different means of detection.

My argument is that it is more accurate to refer to reality as the species-specific existence we experience. The "common geometry" is part of this experience, but if we state that it is reality, we are ignoring the possibility that it is only potential reality, becoming actual reality only within the context of a species-specific experience.

This idea or proposition is a shift in perspective from a materialistic one which puts the existence of a mind-independent reality as a fundamental axiom, to a perspective that starts with the realization that, as you put it, consciousness navigates an abstract, data-compressed geometry generated by our brains' image-processing.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Your Nagel rebuttal is a "common sense confidence in science" one, rather than a considered philosophical one.

1) I did not attempt to rebut Nagel at all. I merely tipped my had to his thought experiment by way of responding to Cyracuz.

2) There you go resorting to the courtier's-reply fallacy again. "The child's allegation that the emperor is naked derives from common-sense confidence in one's own eyes. It is not the kind of considered answer that a master tailor would give".

1 Reply

The Half-life of Facts.

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