No.
Before anyone was around to observe, there was noone to calculate whether the Earth exists or does not exist.
And if no one sees you shoot me in the back of my head, then no one saw you shoot me in the back of my head. Nonetheless, there can be people who can prove that you did in fact shoot me in the back of my head.
The discussion has been about what exists, not what can be proven to exist. Earlier you stated that something can be said to exist as long as it has the potential to be observed. I can agree with that (as long as you don’t constrain it to direct observation). But then you stated:
And that is a different concept implying that if something is not observed, it does not exist … end of story … no concern of potential to be observed. So even if someone could eventually prove that something happened, by that definition, it still didn’t happen because it wasn’t observed.
The discussion has been about the meaning of the word existence. To know what the meaning of the word existence is, we need to look at the manner in which we determine whether something exists or not.
On the other hand, if you want to know “what [probably] exists”, then all you have to do is to infer it from your past observations. In other words, what [probably] exists is that which has a proof of existence.
In epistemological terms, non-existence is not the opposite of existence.
This is because existence refers to an observation whereas non-existence refers to a relation - a negative relation – between an expected observation and an actual observation.
The opposite of non-existence, then, is not existence, but the opposite relation – the positive relation – between an expected observation and an actual observation.
Existence does not have an opposite.
Non-observation is not non-existence.
That which is not existence cannot be non-existence. Only a form of existence can be non-existence.
Non-observation cannot be existence, but an unobserved – which really is a hypothetical – can be a probable existence.
I’ll bump this in the event that AutSider returns to the discussion…
Yes, but you never really seem willing to examine and to explore the extent to which “the foundation of objectivism” is relevant when different folks embracing conflicting value judgments insist that behaving in different/conflicting ways is more conducive to promoting survival.
When, in other words, you are not cutting off your own head but are advocating the right of a pregnant woman to shred the life of her unborn baby. Or are advocating the right of the state to execute prisoners. Or are advocating the right of a nation to pursue a particular war by engaging particular drone strikes. Or are advocating the right of rational men and women to consume the flesh of animals.
Clearly, regarding hundreds of issues that we are all familiar with, different folks insist that behaving in different ways best promotes the survival of any particular community.
Then what? That we all go to KT and choose to be in sync with whatever Satyr argues regarding issues like this…and gender roles and race and everything else?
Like you do?
Here you merely make the assumption that the manner in which you construe living “naturally” is in sync with…with what? With the manner in which all rational men and women are obligated to think and feel and behave?
Or, as those objectivists who eschew “universal truths” here seem to suggest, each individual is permitted his or her own rendition of it.
But then what happens when these renditions come into conflict? How are the “rules of behaviors” or “the laws of the land” not then merely political prejudices?
Indeed, regarding even a single issue, note where you have effectively dealt with the manner in which I construe these conflicts as embodiments of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.
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That is certainly not how most people use the term “existence”. People believe that the center of the Earth exists even though it has never been observed by anyone, much less them. They believe that the far side of the Moon exists, even without observation. They believe that germs and atoms exist, even without their own observation. People do not use the word “observation” as a synonym for “existence”.
But they do use it to mean that whatever “exists” has the potential to affect something if not already doing so.
That would be “anti-existence”. And you are right, such is an oxymoron.
Then existence cannot be observation.
Yes, that’s right. Existence is not observation.
Who are they?
That is only your own definition and not theirs as those in the philosophical community.
The opposite of p is not-p.
Therefore the opposite of existence is non-existence as in the case of non-existence of God which is illusory.
This issue of the non-existence of God is one of the most common issue within the philosophical community.
The use of any term [‘existence’ in this case] must be always be qualified to a specific Framework and System of epistemology on reality. Most of the time this is not explicit but implied.
Therefore things can ‘exist’ within the common [vulgar], the conventional, the Scientific, etc. and the ultimate philosophical perspective as long as the Framework and System of epistemology on reality is specified and qualified.
The degree of objectivity will depend on the objective quality of the respective Framework and System of epistemology on reality. E.g. the Framework and System of Science has the potential of 90% objectivity while that of Theology has zero% or at best merely 10%.
The point is the ultimate philosophical perspective overrides all the various Framework and System of epistemology on reality, and it claims an object [thing] do not exists absolutely independently by itself, i.e. there is no thing-in-itself.
The absence is not the opposite.
It does not matter what people think but how things are. Most people confuse probable existence with existence. The center of the Earth, the far side of the moon, germs, atoms, etc are forms of what we may call “probable existence”.
What you’re doing, what most people are doing anyways, is you are eliminating distinctions by reducing them to a single concept.
The only problem I can see with my definition that “existence is observation” is that it implies that existence is only one form of existence, namely, that of observation. For observation is a form of existence.
The better way to define the term then would be “existence is that which is observed”. This includes observation, for one can observe observation.
You make a mistake of thinking that that which is not observed is non-existence. But this is not true. And I have explained why: because non-existence is a form of existence, namely, it is something that is observed.
What you’re doing, really, is not defining existence but looking for what is common in everything that is observed, and by this very fact, what is already judged as existence.
This is a higher level pursuit that is deemed to either exclude some forms of existence by limiting the concept of existence to what is common to existence or to include everything through an open, unbounded, therefore meaningless, concept of existence.
Existence is that which is observed.
Probable existence is that which is inferred from past observations.
You can join the two into a higher level concept of existence, which is what most people do, but clumsily.
Yes. This is what I have always said, especially in the case of theism and its absence, which is atheism, whereas the opposite of theism is antitheism. So atheism is not the opposite of theism.
The question was about how people use the word “existence” and thus what it means to the population in general, it’s inherent definition. Clearly people do not mean “observed” when they say “exists” because they say that things exist which they know to have never been observed.
Observation leads to “probable existence” due to the general reliability of direct, especially visual, senses. It is the innate deduction that “it must exist, else I would not have been able to see it.” But there is no equivalency such as to say, “Because I can’t see it, it must not exist.”
That is called “defining”. It is what you were supposed to be doing, not conflating (removing subtle distinctions).
Observation is an action of a conscious being. The being and the object being observed must exist for there to be an observation, but that is the only association.
You might want to rethink that one.
No. What I did was note what is common within all that is considered existent by the populous regardless of whether they thought it to be observed. Clearly they do not always believe that what is existent is only that which has been observed.
So when you observed the rabbit come out of the hat or the woman cut in half, those reflect what truly exists?
“Probable existence” is what is more directly observed to exist as well as that which is impossible to not exist.
This is because people are conflating sensed existence (which is what existence is) with intuited existence (which is a hypothetical existence that is supported by past observations.)
This is unsatisfactory because it is too abstract.
Yes, which is why I corrected myself. But in relation to my goal, this is nit-picking.
My point was clear. You are nit-picking.
Those reflect what exists. The nature of their existence is a separate concern.
“Observation” is something that happens and requires a subject and an object. If a subject observes itself, then it is both the subject and the object. “Existence” refers to something that is, regardless whether it happens or not, and does not require a subject or an object, because it tells us merely about the fact whether something is or not.
Yes, which is why I corrected myself by saying that existence is not observation but that which is observed.
This is confusing to people because it implies that that which is not observed is not existence. Which is true. That which is not observed – the unobserved – is not existence. It is a hypothetical existence, that exists in the form of idea, that may or may not be educated.
That is not true.
“Hypothetical existence” is what someone proposes or guesses to be existence. There is a serious difference between what someone hypothesizes and what is actually there, else Science would be completely meaningless nonsense.
The concept that we associate with “existence” has nothing at all to do with observations other than occasional coincidence. By very, very far, most of existence is entirely unobserved, unknown, and unsuspected.
What someone hypothetically believes to exist is an entirely different issue than what actually does exist, else there would be no means to correct misperceptions. There has to be a reality beyond perception, else it is like saying that you don’t exist unless the government says that you exist.
I don’t like where this thread has gone, but I am not surprised.
I’m sorry, but I’m not here to discuss kindergarten level shit with people. If you still deny things like the existence of objective reality, and think that reality is somehow dependent on you observing it and stuff like that, then I really have nothing to say to you. You will either grow out of such positions by yourself, or you won’t at all. The ones who possess sufficient intelligence, rationality, and honesty, will do so by themselves, without the need for somebody else to have pages long discussions with them to try and talk them out of nonsense.
However, since I am in the mood, and I do think some basic things need to be said, I’ll discuss some of the less nonsensical nonsense. To the posts/parts of the posts I won’t reply and haven’t replied yet, it is either because I disagree with it too much to consider it worth addressing (mainly Prismatic), or I mostly agree with it and the disagreements would be more a matter of working out trivial details or clearing up the different ways we use language and minor misunderstandings (Crimson Crow, Magnus Anderson). Or I simply am not interested or haven’t even read them yet. Pick whatever option suits you.
Prismatic
I am unsure what you mean by “emergent” and “pre-existing”. Since reality is constant flux (change), you could say objects are constantly disappearing and emerging. However, on a more fundamental level the emerging of objects is simply atoms changing forms by rearranging themselves, and once they’ve done so to a sufficient degree that a human will recognize it as a different object, we will assign to it a different name, or add to it its name, if it is an object that interests us. For example, an apple, after undergoing the process of rotting, will have changed its internal structure differently enough to be called differently and recognized as different than before - so now it will be called a rotten apple. You could say that rotten apple emerged. But the rotten apple emerged as a consequence of its past interactions, on what pre-existed the rotten apple, which was an ordinary apple and an environment in which an apple rots.
Objects exist independently of subjects, yes. The external world isn’t driven by subjects. Species constantly go extinct and the external world continues existing. The external world isn’t dependent on being observed by humans or any other species or any particlar living organism for its existence. The ideas of objects are dependent for existence on human minds, but what the ideas refer to, objects themselves, are not, unless they are artifices - objects created and maintained by humans, but then again, they are not ONLY dependent on human perception, but also on human action to maintain those artifices. Moreover, neither objects nor ideas emerge spontaneously. There is a pattern to their emergence.
Subjectivism is a very useful tool in controlling the masses. If you manage to convince others that there is no external world independent of humans, and that reality is dependent on human minds, you can also effectively indoctrinate them into being dependent on what YOU say is the truth about objects, and since there is no external, independent standard that we all share (REALITY) according to this position, others are helpless as they have nothing to appeal to defend themselves with except their own subjectivity. However, usually those in power will try to enforce their own particular kind of subjectivity as superior, making themselves the “authority” on the matter where what they say is “officially approved fact” while what you say is “just your opinion, man”, regardless of what is actually true. They have successfully convinced you you cannot access the objective world yourself, using your own mind and senses, but that you need the validation of others, most likely some authority, telling you what is or isn’t true. Truth stops being based on the objectve, external world, and starts being based on the subjective thoughts about the objective world of people or groups of people, such as scientists. These statements MAY be actual truths and based on accurate observations of the objective world (if they followed the scientific method without error), or they can be lies told to be truths, either because of a mistake in reasoning, or intentional and for the sake of accomplishing social/political goals or avoiding condemnation.
For an objectivist and a realist, the objective world is the standard by which they judge whether what people say about the objective world is correct or not. For an objectivist/realist, if somebody says: “There is a unicorn in the corner of this room and the current authorities agree it is so”, but an objectivist/realist doesn’t see it, he will decide there is no unicorn and the authority is wrong.
For a subjectivist, what somebody else says about the objective world is the standard by which they judge what is correct or not about the objective world. If somebody says the same thing to a subjectivist, and the subjectivist doesn’t perceive a unicorn, he will nevertheless decide that there is a unicorn simply because the authority (be it media, government, science…) said so and therefore it must be so.
Usually the political elites decide the areas where people are allowed to think freely, and the limitations of free thought, according to their own agendas.
The idea that objects emerge spontaneously is also part of this manipulation because it denies one of the crucial aspects of objective reality - PATTERNS. There is no randomness, only patterns. When the outcome of something requires a calculation of factors too complex for humans to process, we say that the outcome is random, so randomness doesn’t mean “no patterns”, it means “I couldn’t find a pattern there”. I often use the example of a coin toss or a dice roll to explain this. The dice doesn’t behave according to magic, it is just as subject to laws of physics as anything else, wouldn’t you agree? The thing is that humans simply haven’t evolved the ability to calculate all possible factors (gravity, friction of the surface, air resistance) we need to know to predict the trajectory of the dice and thus its outcome. This makes it random. However, in principle it is possible that scientists design a machine which would calculate all those factors before the throw, so the machine would know exactly at which height to throw it, using what amount of force, etc. for it to land on a particular number.
Denying the existence of patterns and claiming it’s all about spontaneity is also useful if you want to make people oblivious to reality for some reason and incapable to predict things by shrouding everything in mysticism, possibly to exploit that ignorance for your own ends.
And when speaking of “assuming” the existence of objects, it is only reasonable to be uncertain and assume if you aren’t directly perceiving the objects and have an actual reason to doubt their existence. If a lion is biting off your hand, it is stupid to say you just “assume” it, we save the word “assume” for situations when you are less certain about things. For example, if a lion escaped the zoo and you live close to the zoo, you may “assume” that the lion is somewhere nearby because you aren’t actually seeing it. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption based on how far away you live and other factors, but I think we can agree that for practical reasons it is a good assumption to make to avoid potential harm. Using the word which implies a weak level of certainty such as “assume” to speak about things which are evident to a person due to simple perception and thus merit a high level of certainty, is just another one of sneaky ways of making people detached from reality by fucking up their fundamental epistemological principles and making them more prone to being convinced in bullshit.
Sure, what is evident and in your face is just an assumption, and what the official philosophical authorities tell you, namely “what is evident and in your face is an assumption” itself is somehow not a mere assumption but, for some yet to be explained reason, carries a higher level of certainty than what your senses tell you, which are mere assumptions (low level of certainty). Our senses, which evolved to help us survive and connect us to the world, are lying to us, while those who can benefit from lying to us, and thus have a motive to do so, must be telling us truth. Hmmm.
The thing is, what is an assumption and what is more than an assumption, is determined by an objective world. We say something is an assumption when we use healthy senses to recognize patterns in the objective world. If I say “there is a car X not more than 20 meters away from me”, and I know I own car X and have it in a garage within that distance, and I’ve just checked on it 5 seconds ago, then it is not a mere assumption, it is a statement of truth. If I’m saying that after coming back home and not seeing the car for hours, the statement is less certain borders on being an assumption, as the car might have been stolen, but the probability of that happening is low. If somebody else in my family told me there is a 50-50% chance they’ll use the car, I’d say in that case the statement has crossed into the assumption territory, aka, into the probability range of what we usually think of when we say “assumptions”. If I am making a claim that some random car Y is within 100 meters from me in the middle of a parking lot, that is an assumption if I don’t see the car. However, not all assumptions carry equal weight. If Y is a car that is common that assumption carries more weight than if Y was a super rare sports car. And the more I know the more accurate assumptions I can make. If I know the neighborhood the parking lot is in is poor, then the probability of Y being a super rare sports car drops drastically. If there is a sports super car owner convention and I know they’re using that parking lot, then the probability increases. The more factors I am aware of the more accurately I can predict whether an assumption is likely to be true or false.
The word assumption itself thus implies realism and objectivism, because without that, it is impossible to determine what is an assumption, and what isn’t, and how valid an assumption is.
This is really some basic level shit though, and I’m not much willing to argue about most of it.
Magnus Anderson,
No, again, whether something exists or not is NOT dependent on being observed. Rather, humans can only observe things which exist. So everything we observe exists (if we are indeed observing it instead of being mad and imagining that we are observing things), but not everything that exists is necessarily observed. Some things may exist but we may not observe them because they are not in the physical proximity of our senses, or our senses simply aren’t focused upon them. Ideas exist within reality, but only within a particular segment of reality - minds. Outside of minds, ideas don’t exist. And things don’t exist “in forms of ideas”, that is very poor wording. Instead, ideas OF some things exist, but the form of an idea of a thing, and the form of a thing itself, are different.
Anyway, since I haven’t received the kind of criticism I hoped for, I had to come up with criticisms of my own thread myself.
Mainly, I am still uncertain to what extent the dots between “is” and “ought” can really be connected. I tried to use the First Foundational objective (survival) as that which would connect the dots for all living beings, but a video by TFM made me think.
TFM says in this video (youtube.com/watch?v=Fw-HZu2jqdg) that survival in the sense of what I call long-term survival (genetic propagation) is irrelevant because we don’t, really, survive to any relevant extent, as our genes become extremely diluted only after a few generations. He didn’t mention the specific numbers himself, but since parents pass on approximately 50% of genes to their child, already by the 2nd generation only half of you survives. The 3rd generation, 25%. By the tenth generation, which is only about 200-300 years, the percentage of you which survives is reduced to below 1%. And ultimately none of that matters and it will be reduced to 0% because scientists predict that just as the Big Bang happened, there will be an opposite, a Big Crunch. So whereas Big Bang was an expansion of a singularity into a universe, a big crunch would be the universe contracting back into a singularity, and erasing all life. If that doesn’t exterminate us humans, something like the explosion of the sun, or shortage of water and food, or pollution, or nuclear war or some other thing will.
So the question then becomes - Do you really have a reason to give a shit about reproducing your genes and caring about the evolutionary process, when the evolutionary process itself will eventually be extinguished when all life on earth goes extinct. It becomes more personal - what do you want? Is it worth it to give up a portion of your life to make and possibly care for offspring, or not?
Perhaps to somebody it is indeed worth it. Perhaps somebody so enjoys taking drugs that they consider the high pleasurable enough to risk their life for it. Of course, if their life is centered around that and so they don’t propagate their genes, evolution will just filter them out, because like they don’t care about evolutionary processes, evolutionary processes don’t care about them. If taking drugs is truly what they wanted and truly what made them happy, then it might have been all worth it, for them. If somebody is ugly, or stupid, or has some other deficiency which prevents them from actually accomplishing things in life, they may subconsciously realize that inebriating themselves to temporarily forget their own inferiority is the only way they can be happy, even for a little while. That inebriation can also take the form of flattering ideologies which tell them they are valuable, and beautiful, and not worse than anybody else… that they are equal to all others.
A perhaps shorter and clearer version - though some action, like drinking a beverage mixed with a deadly poison, may be in direct conflict with the first objective of survival, and thus in the long-term, with itself, since drinking such a beverage once will make it impossible for you to do it ever again since you will be dead, it is still possible that to the subject, despite of all that, IT IS STILL WORTH IT in terms of cost/benefit to drink it because the taste is just so good that it is worth dying for. It doesn’t mean the subject escaped the consequences of their actions, or the filtering (evolutionary) process of the objective world. It means that the subject accepted the consequences and costs.
The same logic applies to small poisons. Somebody may like cigarettes so much that they are willing to shorten their lifespan by smoking cigarettes for the pleasure of smoking, knowing that it will take away time of their life they could have used to do other things.
Ultimately the only judge of what we ought to do (how to accomplish happiness) are ourselves. So the only way to do it is to know ourselves - what we need and want in life. If we are unhappy it means we haven’t accomplished something which we think would make us happy, and/or we are dissatisfied with how we have previously used our time. If we haven’t done it, it is either because we couldn’t recognize what it is that would make us happy due to failing to know ourselves, or we did recognize it but didn’t have the ability to do it. Another option is that we might think something will make us happy, do it, then realize it doesn’t make us happy after all, and that we wasted our time. This is why knowing what we truly want, and what the limits of our abilities to get it are, is crucial.
Did I ever say that there is no existence beyond what humans sense? No. So why are you bringing it up?
I guess I need to make it explicit. What one senses is not necessarily everything there is to sense.
Organisms have a sensory capacity. There is only so much they can sense.
Now, since I made it clear that I never said that one’s field of view defines the totality of existence, it’s up to you show how my words appear to imply it.
What I said was this: existence is that which is sensed.
Where does that imply that what is sensed is all there is to sense?
Nowhere.
As he said, this is seems to be an issue of language use. What you said in the red, DOES say that existence is ONLY that which is sensed. Apparently you use English differently. You were correct when you said, “potential to be observed”. When you leave out that word “potential”, you directly imply that something must be observed in order for it to exist. That is just the way English works.
It comes down to this question: what is our immediate contact with existence? Is it our senses or is it our intellect?
Is existence sensory experience or is it an abstraction?
Do you really think that abstractions/intuitions are more real than facts/sensations?
In Myers-Briggs typology, I am a moderate S type whereas James is clearly an N type. This is why we think differently.