The Unprovable Liar

I think there's room for both ideas. I get both of them. There is a need for clarity and an understanding of what we can know and what 'what we can know' means (in what we can agree upon through self defined concepts or 'science'). Perhaps that's the job of the Pragmatic approach.

And then there's the need to understand what we cannot really know (as in the sense above) but only vaguely conceive and what that means to us as humans. This is a more Rational approach?

As I see it, both are important pieces of the puzzle. I need pragmatism to talk properly about things so that we all (at least in theory) can agree on definitions and such. I need the Rational approach (or whatever its more formerly called - Spinoza was a Rationalist, Nay?) to let me know there is much more to the universe than what I can language, much more reality than what I can conjure up with my innate perceptions or assisted with machinery. That 'purpose' and feelings, while difficult to define pragmatically, are real 'things'. And that we don't have any idea, at root, from this vantage, what 'we' are.

As I mentioned earlier, I can fit both into my conceptual world. Each answers a different question that we ask. Trouble may come in using one to answer the others' question.

Fresco as JL Nobody are trapped in a career in Philosophy on which they spend most of their adult working lifes on this ultra relativistic perspective that undermines their own claims on close inspection. Don't expect him to change now and abandon an entire life of working in a certain current of thought. Its too late for him even if he is the best of the group at talking about it in a semi credible way.
I could deal with Fresco in gentleman good terms wasn't the case Fresco gets very arrogant when confronted with up close scrutiny of his own beliefs. From that point on he starts to behave in a really condescending manner and that is specially irritating when he happens to trump on a guy like me who happens to know exactly how to counter the whole subjectivist approach he tries to feeds all. Getting to the point beyond the epistemic problem where he denies reality itself knowable or not knowable. While I gladly admit there is an epistemic problem I keep insisting phenomenology has per se existential/realistic value no matter if what we experience is bound to be an illusion or a sort of dream on what the world looks like. The very phenomena is a REAL phenomena. Now this simple point is hard to make after a decade of talking to Fresco god go figure why...

Einstein showed that 'time' cannot be separated from 'space' in physics and at least one physicist has called it 'an illusion'. The key issue is 'change' rather than ' time' per se, and change needs an 'observer' with 'a memory' to define it. The fact that what we call 'science' is essentially about 'prediction and control' in which 'time' is a fundamental backcloth, renders questions about time based quantities (velocity etc) as secondary compared to the primary philosophical issues about science and 'reality'. It is perhaps worth considering this from an anthropological point of view in which some cultures do not have the tenses of 'past, present and future' within their language. Needless to say, such cultures might remain 'non-scientific', but value judgements can cloud the issue.

Which cultures are those?

The half quote above is the part you got right...
The "observer" is an mechanic apparatus not an agent.
In fact the observer ends up represented in a dot or a spike in a computer screen. Numerous scientists already clarified this point but some people in Philosophy keep repeating the same argument oblivious to the corrections of the experts.

He is correct that some cultures don't have the language of past tenses I have seen it in documentaries but what Fresco and his comrades failed to observe is that while these cultures lack the lingo they don't lack the behaviour which entails distinctions in what happened before or will happen after. The description of what they do from their own linguistic pov is irrelevant when their behaviour on planning hunting or gathering resources speaks the actual thing they do within time.This is a very good example on behaviour being more important then perception.

POST correction because original can no longer be edited.



The half quote above is the part you got right...
The "observer" is an mechanic measuring apparatus not an agent. One that interferes with the experiment by particle bombardment...
In fact the observed ends up represented in a dot or a spike in a computer screen. Numerous scientists already clarified this point but some people in Philosophy keep repeating the same argument oblivious to the corrections of the experts.

I seem to remember Hopi is an example.
Fil's rejoinder about 'what actually happens' is typical of a naive realist. The example given above about our anthropomorphic pov of animal behavior has clearly fallen on deaf ears.

Didn't care to notice I've spoken in the context of behaviour analysis according to human observers...I don't have the faintest clue on the ultimate colection or set of phenomena that can be associated with such tribes...For all I know they can be an algorithm in some cosmic machine. The point being that whatever interacts with this algorithm from different povs has distinct phenomenology as an outcome. Now again instead of denying the distinct phenomena depending on who or what interacts I accept them all in the set of what is real once they all attached to the base algorithm that establishes the mechanical relation between coupling systems including other "human observers". Its Realism indeed not the absurd negation of everything which entails intelectual suicide.

I get that time is really more accurately described as change, at least from a physical standpoint (as opposed to our language about it, which isn't 'time' at all). Also understood that time and space are linked.

However, I don't see what you had to say makes time an illusion. If time is not registered the same for everyone, depending on one's speed, then clearly time is NOT illusory.

The point is that time is measured by us the same*. I have a clock. You have a clock. Our clocks agree. If I go the speed of light and you are stationary relative to me, our clocks will not agree. I'm sure you are familiar with the airplane experiments done about this with atomic clocks. This suggests that time is not something 'made up' by us. It is something that is independent of us in the same way that things 'out there' are independent of us. Or at least belong to the same category of things 'out there'.

Bertrand Russell discusses this in a critique of Schopenhauer's view that time is an illusion (in which, interestingly, Schopenhauer brings up evolution). Time is subject to the same distortions by us as any physical object can be distorted. But it apparently has a reality as 'real' as that physical object.

Now if you want to say that all objects, including time are 'illusions' dependent on an observer, well, that's another argument..

*here I'm not talking about our perception of time - like how different the perception of it can be when you're having fun versus not..

I tend to avoid the word 'illusion' in the same way I do with 'reality' in the context of philosophical overviews. That is not to say that those words don't have a function in some everyday communicative contexts in which agreement as to 'what is the case' is being negotiated. The key issue as far as I can see is that what constitutes 'explanation' in particular everyday contexts or even scientific ones, starts falling apart at those levels we call 'transcendent or 'philosophical'(You only need to look back at Hume's deconstruction of 'causality' as an example of that). Indeed, pragmatists like Rorty, or post modernists like Derrida who have exposed some of the 'language games' of philosophers, have been denigrated as iconoclasts and shunned by the so-called 'profession'. On a more positive note, I think Wittgenstein's view of philosophy as 'therapy', of Rorty's view that 'it enhances thr democratic process' are sufficient reasons to pursue that level of discourse, provided that we are aware of its profound limitations.










s view

Fair enough, I tend to think along those lines as well. I will argue by evidence and logic for pragmatic things. However, I can only appeal to logic and you're own experience for things that fall outside of this..

Time is an interesting case. Have you read Schopenhauer's view on this and Russell's (post mortem!) rebuttal? I think Russell is arguing simply that time is not as a colour - made up entirely in our heads. Again, this is to rebut Schopenhauer's conclusion about time. I do not know if that is your view or even if it has a modern ideational consonance..

Neither do I think he (Russell) is comfortable with the suggestion that things only have realities because we impart it to them. I believe the idea is that there is something that is not us that we funnel through us to make it compatible with 'what we are' (ultimately that would be, as I see it, largely for survival). But that thing that we 'change' or co-adopt? into us does have a separate reality, we just can't know it. That last bit I suppose is a belief.

However, it's possible I suppose that we have evolved to percept the universe 'as it really is' (we are, after, all, made of universe stuff) but due to the 'imperfect' processes of evolution, we haven't quite got there (yet? - probably not!) - a point capable of understanding the full reality. For now , we currently distort to some degree what we perceive, but are still 'grabbing some of its 'reality'. True or not? Who knows?

In any case, at this ontological level, we cannot know any of this. It is all speculation - but lots of fun..

I'll be looking into Schopenhauer and Russell next week with my local group. I may get back to you on that.

"As it really is" is in function of relational coupling with other things, contexts, other "systems". It per se is very little. The interesting bit is the phenomena themselves who each in its coupling unique spacetime context are themselves noumena. That is to say phenommena are real phenomena.

I have a different perspective on the validation issue of the blind spot proof for any given system.

If there is a stack of separate realities and we currently exist within one of them but are unaware that the others exist, their existence is meaningless even if they really do exist.

Why are they meaningless? Because we have no way of verifying their characteristics, we can only speculate. But this opens the door for any wild or crazy idea one wants to have, all notions are equally valid and not valid.

Therefore the blind spot is irrelevant. To prove this statement true is meaningless. Because it is both true and not. But how can this be? It is true in this reality. In another reality or unreality it becomes false. Rendering it only valid in this reality no matter how silly this reality "might" be, it's the ONLY thing we have available.

So the proof is that it is true by default because we have nothing to compare it to. If we did then we can validate it.

This HAS to be true otherwise we couldn't even communicate. The fact that we can communicate reveals that the validation of truth is self supportive when there is subjective validation.

Red is red because we agree it is red.

Those who object need to validate their objection. Why do you not see red? A fault in the sense or rebelling against the objective validation?

It's all we have. Is the proof that this statement is true.

Of course !