The Half-life of Facts.

@joefromchicago,

Its a vacuous discussion for some philosophers. See Heidegger for the distinction between being(the human process of dealing with the world by evoking objects) and beings(the assumption that objects exist prior to process).
Your anthropomorphic report of your cat's "appreciation" is touching, but somewhat off target.

1 Reply

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Its a vacuous discussion for some philosophers.

If by "vacuous" you mean "too difficult to answer," then I quite agree.

fresco wrote:

See Heidegger

No, I don't think I'll be doing that. In my limited experience reading Heidegger, he came across as a spinner of meaningless obscurities much in the fashion of Hegel. Heidegger reminds me of a description I once heard about Glen Beck: "he's what a dumb person thinks a smart person talks like."

fresco wrote:

Your anthropomorphic report of your cat's "appreciation" is touching, but somewhat off target.

He'll be happy to know that.

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@joefromchicago,

We know you like playing rhetorical tennis. Your attempt to volley my "vacuous" with "too difficult", failed because of your ontological question begging regarding the word "things". But you have rejected Heidegger as illuminating the court, so you missed the ball and did not see it go "out".

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

It means that there is no proof that reality is anything but a species specific phenomenon of experience.

Yes...the concept "reality is only a species specific phenomenon of experience" has absolutely no proof to back it up.

We agree. So why are you insisting that it has to be the case?

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It means that there is no proof that "absolute reality" is a warranted concept.

One does not need proof for a tautology, Cyracuz. Whatever IS...IS. That is the REALITY.

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It might be that without some kind of observer to experience reality, there would be no kind of phenomenon that can rightly be called reality. We do not know!

It could be. And if you had offered this thought instead of what you have been serving as a steady diet...I would never have disagreed.

But that is not what you have been offering.

I am delighted you have finally seen how absurd your previous stance is...and have made this significant change.

Quote:

The only basis on which you can argue against this is your intuitive belief in the persistence of hypothetical unexperienced reality.

I do not do "believing." (I thought I mentioned that before!) In any case, as now stated...a vast departure from the position you previously asserted...we are in agreement.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

We know you like playing rhetorical tennis. Your attempt to volley my "vacuous" with "too difficult", failed because of your ontological question begging regarding the word "things". But you have rejected Heidegger as illuminating the court, so you missed the ball and did not see it go "out".

And you, as always, took your ball and went home.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

In philosophy ,"naive realist" is a technical term which describes the position that objects exist independently of observers.

That's the technical sense, yes. But within the group dynamics of the philosophical community, it also serves as a pejorative akin to "village idiot". As I pointed out to Cyracuz, it's a rare philosopher who ever calls someone "a refined realist", "a sophisticated realist", or "a thoughtful realist".

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@Thomas,

Quote:

As I pointed out to Cyracuz, it's a rare philosopher who ever calls someone "a refined realist", "a sophisticated realist", or "a thoughtful realist".

What these cretins mean by 'naive realist' is simply 'a realist'. They'd be hard-pressed to find any form of realism sophisticated.

And how should we call 'thinkers' unable to live by their 'thinking'? They cook up a philosophy that doesn't serve any purpose, and discard it as soon as they have to make the slightest real-life decision.

Poseurs? Fakes? Wankers? Liars?

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@Thomas,

You did not mention my point about empirical findings from psychology.
Interestingly, such an omission itself demonstrates the phenomenon of "perceptual set"...a term involved with the process of active perception.

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

By the same means as I know anything is real - through evidence that establishes its reality to my satisfaction.

And every step of the way all this is related through via your human experience.

This is perhaps the simplest form of the argument I can make:
If every possible way we can access 'reality' involves experience, we cannot prove that the thing we experience has reality outside of that experience.

Again I would like to refer to rainbows.
They are real. No one questions that. But we know how they work, and that without an optical sensor present to detect the light that is fractured at that specific angle, there is no rainbow. If the sensor is moved, the rainbow's position relative to the surrounding landscape would also change.

So I ask you, in a reality where everyone was blind, would rainbows exist?

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

You did not mention my point about empirical findings from psychology.

I was not aware that I must respond to every point you ever make.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

But within the group dynamics of the philosophical community, it also serves as a pejorative akin to "village idiot".

Well, if you come to a discussion of this nature, -a thread about our very understanding of concepts like fact, reality, experience and existence, with the position that is technically known as naive realism, and then refuse to budge from that position even slightly in the course of the debate, you are at least acting like the village idiot. You are confusing a common effort to examine the very concepts that make up the foundation of our reality-perception with a contest between children of who can answer first and best.
Not accusing you of this, Thomas. But there are some people who come into this thread with the mindset that these things cannot be questioned or doubted.
That is naive realism, and what's more, it is exactly the same thing religious nuts are doing in the threads about whether or not god exists.

I am not saying that Frank or Olivier or anyone else are naive-realists. But they are defending a naive-realistic position as though their very lives depended on it.

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@Thomas,

In general you don't, but my second point was a suggestion of why the technical use of "naive" shifted to its pejorative sense (raised by you) due to ignorance of empirical findings about perception.
Were you aware of those findings ? Do you have any views on them ?

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Quote:
By the same means as I know anything is real - through evidence that establishes its reality to my satisfaction.

And every step of the way all this is related through via your human experience.

No, much of it is purely logical, not experiential.

Cyracuz wrote:

This is perhaps the simplest form of the argument I can make:
If every possible way we can access 'reality' involves experience, we cannot prove that the thing we experience has reality outside of that experience.

Well, you're not saying anything that Berkeley or Kant hadn't already said, yet even they acknowledged a world independent of the observer - for reasons that should be obvious. If everything was happening inside our heads, then we might as well be brains-in-vats, in which case we can't say anything that has any validity for anyone else. That's the corner that you've wedged yourself into.

Cyracuz wrote:

So I ask you, in a reality where everyone was blind, would rainbows exist?

Not so fast. I asked you a couple of questions in my last post to you that you still haven't answered. You expect me to answer your questions but you don't answer mine? Sorry, we can't proceed along those lines.

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@Olivier5,

I understand that you are butt hurt, but you need to get a grip.
I am sorry if I have insulted you, but if your contributions are reduced to this, I suggest you take a break before you deprive yourself of the desire to participate at all. I would consider that a loss for all of us.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

I am not saying that Frank or Olivier or anyone else are naive-realists. But they are defending a naive-realistic position as though their very lives depended on it.

Out of curiosity, what realists other than naive ones do you recognize?

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@Cyracuz,

If the alternative is between being called 'naive' by a cretin, and wasting my time cooking up an artificial philosophy that will never ever be usable in real life and makes a mockery of modern science in the process, then I'd rather be called naive. At least I don't contradict myself in each and every single sentence I make, unlike the supposedly not-so-naive-but-logically-challenged.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

I am not saying that Frank or Olivier or anyone else are naive-realists. But they are defending a naive-realistic position as though their very lives depended on it.

What are you talking about here with regard to me?

How do you see what I have written as a defense of "a naive-realistic postion"...and why do you see that defense as being "as though their very lives depend...on it?"

You are the one defending a position to that extent.

I acknowledge regularly that I do not know the true nature of the REALITY of existence.

You are saying that you do.

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@joefromchicago,

That is a low trick you pull just because we have arrived at a place where my point is clearly communicated, and you see that it has merit. But as you wish...

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If "reality" is whatever we're experiencing, isn't that the same thing as "experiencing?" What's the difference?

I do not know. I have no way of truly knowing if there is a difference or not, because I cannot have reality without experience.

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I know the Taj Mahal is real even though I've never perceived it. Do you think it isn't real?

No. I think the Taj Mahal is real. I think so because others have shared that experience with me, which was an experience in itself, in which I was made aware that there exists such a thing as the Taj Mahal.

Those were your questions in your last post. Now will you answer mine?

Given what I said about rainbows in my last post to you, in a reality where everyone was blind, would rainbows exist?

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@Thomas,

Pragmatic ones.

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@Frank Apisa,

Quote:

I acknowledge regularly that I do not know the true nature of the REALITY of existence.

And yet you seem to know that it most certainly cannot be anything involving this experience, which from our perspective is inseparable from reality itself.

1 Reply

The Half-life of Facts.

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