The Unprovable Liar

I have to say this made me laugh. Not because what you were saying did not make sense, nor because it was it not a good point.

I just find it funny that the moment we throw defining the word 'is' into the mix, then both sides realize the futility of continuing with the debate.

It seems that this simple word is seemingly impossible to define with 100% accuracy, yet so much of our lives is dependent upon this word.

So are you saying that pragmatism is the philosophical idea that might motivate someone to use a heuristic approach to solving some issue? Pragmatism is the idea, heuristic is the methodology/approach?

Still trying to figure out how the two are related and different..thanks..

And yes, I agree with others that our knowledge is necessarily incomplete and that at some point, at some depth of an analysis of something we can no longer provide formal proof and have to assume truth or validity. I think this goes back to Hume at least though it sounds like maybe Godel framed this in mathematical language?

Pragmatism is a position which rejects 'naive realism' . The latter is a technical term for the position that 'reality' is independent of the physiology, actions and needs of observers. Pragmatists argue that what we agree is 'successful' or 'useful' is all we can ever say about 'reality'. Rorty for example argues that a 'Od' concept may be useful for the psychological well being of believers, but is useless in explaining scientific issues.
Heuristic methods are any which yield desirable results even if they are 'rule of thumb' or 'far fetched'. For example, physicists like Feynman used diagrams involving particles 'travelling backwards in time' which successfully predicted the observed data. Feynman dismissed questions about 'the reality of backwards time travel' with the famous one liner "just shut up and calculate !". But even though this example involves an essence of pragmatism, heuristics can equally apply to less accepted working hypotheses such as Freud's approach to psychology or Marx to history in which 'success' may be a matter for debate.

Reality is what happens including the phenomenology of what is perceived and observed within functional finite parameters that serve the species specific needs and limits. It doesn't start nor ends with them, no matter how much you dislike or disaprove metaphysics. Observers ARE NOT DECIDERS, just witnesses. There is no alternative to whatever happens. Oh and by the way what works works for a reason and what doesn't NEVER HAPPENED !!!

...one more thing, you got no kung fu sad panda...

You picked this fairly popular answer to understanding the limits of our comprehension but such a 'language centric' view of human perception makes no sense to me.

Language only limits our ability to communicate, not comprehend.
I'd give you an example, but...

Ain't a God's Eye view wonderful !

We don't need to get there to point to unity in nature and to refute free will and give cousciousness any special magical role. Those arguments along with the limits of the species are enough to establish firmly every phenomena is real no matter how transcendental is the fundamental ordering of the world. You confuse the epistemic problem with the necessity of ontological premisses we cannot deny without washing away the very epistemic problem you trying to raise. According to your pov there is much to talk about no thing...this simply does not follow. Its the kind of argument that shots itself in the foot, and one that you keep missing time and again. Raise and reeficate the epistemic problem all you want so long you don't wash away ontology. Otherwise you will find yourself disserting much about nothing, which is patently absurd.

I don't need to count all the odd and even numbers to establish there are odd and even numbers and patterns in their relation.

Wrong ! It takes 'an observer' to count 'one'. And that's the point you keep missing, presumably because to tackle it would interfere with your transcendental mathematics fixation. Of course every 'phenomenon' can be 'real' to a language using species which has those words as communicative focal nodes. Its when we start attributing the adjective 'absolute' to 'reality' that we move into the realms of fantasy.

So you mean before language, if I hit someone on the head with a rock, they don't feel it? Or get mad? Or seek revenge? Or start a war?

We all need to STFU then!

Well, if you put it like that! Of course its true. The question isn't are observers witnesses, it's are we just observers?

There may be no alternative to what happens, but that fact (if it is one) doesn't mean that what happens isn't 'decided'.

I might agree with you that the conscious part of our minds is 'just an observer' (whatever that might mean). But I think it is unknown if our organism is 'just' an observer. We might be deciders. I don't know how we can know if we are or not. If you rule out God, you get closer. But closer from what? I don't know. I would guess that our conscious mind is probably not the only thing thinking and there is the possibility that there is some part of ourselves that is 'free' in the way we think of freedom.

I think the trouble is, that in the sense, we don't have a good definition of freedom, maybe a heuristic one, or pragmatic one (I'm still cogitating on these definitions!) in that relative to each other we can act free and understand freedom. That's enough for me. But in the larger sense..maybe..maybe not?

They seem very similar, still thinking about this one. Thanks for your post..

It depends on how you define 'comprehend'. I agree that the whole of our experience is to be included in reality. This includes sensating. As I define comprehension, though, language is comprehension. However, if you stretch its meaning from mine, then I could see how you might arrive at, to use your example, the 'comprehension' of someone causing you pain..

You keep missing the point the freaking "observer" is itself languaging under your pov...your undermine your own starting point. And that's what happens when you want to replace reality for what ? I don't even know what you mean....one thing is to pose an epistemic problem and another to deny reality altogether while expecting to be making a point about nothing ! Its nuts and dumb period !

Second language has nothing to do with awareness or consciousness. Take the fairy tale out of the deal. Language its about trading useful information in between systems.

Every phenomena is real period. Whether you can categorize how fundamental it is or where it fits in a chain of more or less functionality depending on relative povs of usefulness is another deal.

PS - This has to be the video I repeated posting more often so far on A2K...

Look at it till you get it !
Bang you heads on it till it gets in you thick bricks !!!

Agreed that experience is real.

Are you saying here that we cannot necessarily know what those experiences exactly are, what are alike, what are different and what we might categorize as one thing, but may in actuality be another thing?

Nice video, which proves that ' pattern seeking humans' have the ability to model their 'observations' using 'mathematical models' of different degrees of complexity. What we call 'counting' does exactly that. As far as 'observation' is concerned we have already discussed Maturana's view that it cannot be separated from 'languaging' behavior, albeit at the 'internal level'. As you know, he dismisses 'information' as a functional concept in his definition of lifeforms as autopoietic systems. What we call 'communication', he would call 'structural coupling'. Thus 'an observer' is 'a languager' which implies perversely that 'observation' does not occur in non human species ! What we anthropomorphically separate as individual predator and prey, say,Maturana would say is an automatically coordinated unity. So 'the observer' who 'counts one' is part of a (com)unity of languagers in which the phonetic and graphemic item 'one' has been socially acquired episodes of mutually beneficial structural coupling.
And suggestions like Maturana's, circular though they may appear, are about as far as we can go within the incestuous limits of language use. This circularity, far from shooting oneself in the foot, illustrates the intextricabilty of what we call epistemology and ontology with which you appear to be concerned. ( that circularity is discussed in the Von Glasersfeld cited recently elsewhere, and almost certainly to you previously).

What I mean is, that before language users, the concept 'before' becomes meaningless ! Try telling a dog that you took him for a walk yesterday ! The fact that you now can conjure up and verbally report now a scene involving Fred Flintstone etc 'in your minds eye' is a familiar device employed in attempts at retrodiction to ' help explain' what we see as current states of affairs.

When we drive on Interstate 280 from our home to San Francisco, we pass by Fred Flintstone's house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstone_House

I am saying that what we can categorize at any one time does not unfold all the possibilities nor fundamental orders of "usefulness", "integration", functionalism of any given object, and this includes of course concepts.
You see my difference with Fresco is that I don't dare deny reality through languaging in spite of all the limits languaging implies when coupled to our species embodied cognition and needs.
Fresco on the other hand is so lost, so disconnected, of experiencing, that he dares to confuse the epistemic problem, the limits of conceptual human expression, with the complete denial of a world. He specially forgets that his pov on the problem of languaging, the very terms "languaging" and "human" and "conscious" are themselves prone to the same criticism from which he tries to anchor a counter to the common perception on what we report about reality. Its a lost cause of replacing X for Y and making a stance without meaning anything. Funny enough I've tried to tell him that replacing X for Y does not deny reality but rather reificates it.

No. The difference is that you use 'reality' as though it were representational of some absolute state or set of states of 'being', rather than a word to denote agreement between interlocutors about what they hold 'is the case' for their common purpose.

Enter once more the celebrated philosopher Mick Dundee, in the attempted mugging scene in which the mugger pulls out a small stiletto.
GIRL: Watch out Mick...he's got a knife!
MICK: That's not a knife.....(produces his big bush knife)....That's a knife ! ....(mugger flees).

Forget about the naive neutral view that they were both 'knives' in the sense of 'cutting implements'. That's NOT how the word is contextually used here in which 'threatening weapon' is implied. Note how the meaning of the word 'knife' is negotiated with respect to the communicative situation. By extrapolation, there are no human context independent words/concepts. There is NO 'state of being a knife' separate from the behavioral contexts in which 'knife' sets up 'affordancies' (Merleau-Ponty) of behavioral expectation by language users. Concepts require conceptualizers and 'reality' is merely another concept.