I wholeheartedly agree. But despite the fact that it is so psychologically unlikely, we can’t completely rule out phenomenal chaos (a condition in which consciousness simply pops into existence, and is the only thing that exists).
[b]That’s the point of the article above: How do we even know this is true? By direct, personal experience of the external world?
If not, we are simply taking a belief that could, despite what’s going on in our minds, be objectively false and running with it as if it were as true as the content of our empirical, subjective experience.[/b]
Great as always, though you must learn to use a pallette that doesn’t damage people’s eyes so badly.
I’ve always agreed with the “model in our heads” idea of everything sure, and there’s no real point beyond skeptical bravado of denying the existance of externality. (Sorry Imp).
But how about something made…? Sure, a waterfall is a waterfall is a waterfall, and would exist quite happily without a perceiver. But what about a motorbike or something…? Isn’t that perception made concrete…? And isn’t ‘unreal’ reality quickly overtaking the more eternal, un-perceiver-based type…?
[b]Sorry for the delayed response, people…my server has been pre-tty slow the last couple of days… but thanks so much for your responses (even thou, Form and Void).
And now…[/b]
Impenitent:
Thank you.
Sangrain:
[b]Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed the read. What you read, however, was a first draft…a habit of mine. I get so excited about the post that I rush things a bit with syntax and what not. At the time of this reading, the complete edited version should be on display.
P.S. "Perspectivism? Have to look up Faust about that one—but on first hearing it sounds a bit like “point-of-view-ism” and the way consciousness seems to exist in the form of a single person’s “perspective”. Thanks for the tip. [/b]
Form and Void:
Really?
itlog:
[b]Thank you, itlog. I try to base the style of presentation in the form of 70’s underground cartoonist Robert Crumb’s (the narrator, “Sal ‘Tell-It-Like-It-Is’ Slobinsky” is based on Crumb himself) informal dialogue combined with comic writer Alan Moore’s intellectual prose. It works for some if not for others. In the meantime, check out the recent edited version uploaded today—and see if it’s more accessible.
Last but not least…[/b]
Tab:
My apologizes…I was going for something with a little “flash” with the colors…
[b]On my part, I do not deny the existence of the external world (indeed, it would be strange, if not metaphysically impossible, if we were simply floating conscious fields in the middle of “nothing” coming into and going out of existence by random chance): my argument is that the external world is not necessarily “non-subjective” or that it necessarily contains every object appearing within our visual perception of “a” world.
Your analogy of a motorbike is a staple of Chapter Two (give it a week or more to appear: those comic book posts are a lot of [satisfying] work ). What instigates a belief in Facsimile Realism? Why–it’s the nature of visual perception (above all)! We see motorbikes, and the sight of the motorcycle is accompanied with an inference that the bike must be more than a sense impression in the mind of a perceiver. The bike, it is believed, will continue to exist even if every conscious being on the planet were to miraculously disappear (although one must wonder what a non-subjective or non-consciously perceived motorbike is even like—as things are seen to exist only within a particular person’s conscious experience)
My argument, in the end, is that the notion that there are mind-independent counterparts to motorbikes, cells, apples, etc. is ultimately a[/b] fallible belief [b](a belief that may be objective false beyond the mind of the believer): speaking in terms of psychophysicalism, the belief in Facsimile Realism itself only exists because neurons happened to exist, and happened to form connections within the cortex that in turn happen to represent or correspond to a belief in Facsimile Realism.
What mystical power do neurons have, then, to form subjective beliefs that actually KNOW the truth of what’s going on in a world inaccessible to the subjective output of neurons? This observation, in itself, is the power behind the throne of the Brain-In-A-Vat Hypothesis (Hillary Putnam’s “semantically realistic” rebuttal of BIV be damned).
But here’s the real deal:
I’m a theist. But at the same time, I want some epistemological substance to my faith. I see fellow Christians worshipping God every Sunday in church: their faith is complete and resolute and they are happy and content in their worlds. I envy them. But I am sensitive to the sound and thunder of the orcs and trolls of the Mordor of Atheism, derisively ramming the doors to theological Minas Tirith.
I determined that it is important to become an existential detective, discovering clues to the true nature of existence (or at least that aspect of it that is accessible to my experience) that allow me to honestly face my belief system once and for all to see if there is any merit in it. To this end, once I discovered that my former beliefs about the world were steeped in Naive Realism, I was able to toss naive realism off the train and begin again at ground zero:[/b] investigating the conceivable nature of and relationship between the External World And Consciousness[b]. Starting here, I (and everyone else) can build a reasonable model of the world that will either support or implicitly destroy one’s pre-established beliefs.
With the other ILP articles and the OP piece above, I think, at last, that there is FINALLY A CLUE, like the Joker’s pencil in Christopher Nolan’s: The Dark Knight, slammed firmly in the table of epistemology about the real world. [/b]
This clue is the existence (assuming Facsimile Realism is true for the sake of argument) of theSimulacrum[b]. The very fact that conscious perception, despite the fact that it is so “real”, can cut out on us or alter in such a way that the visual field can show things that do not turn up in others’ experience, at least demonstrates that consciousness and the external world are two very different things that can exist without the other. It takes a leap of the strongest faith to believe that we perceive that which one cannot access using perception (as it exists independent of perception): at best, one can only perceive a simulation of such a world, not the world itself.
With the Simulacrum planted firmly in the table, we can move forward to discover if the Simulacrum is truly a Simulacrum, and even to question how the Simulacrum is created. From there, at the highest level, we can question how we can even KNOW if our suppositions on the existence of the external world and its true appearance and nature are even true. At the end of the road, skepticism of Process Reliabilism (see) may open the door to true plausibility of the existence of God (at a stretch).
That is, at the end of a thorough “philosophical CSI”, one may successfuly be able to readily defend theism against the speculations of the godless.
Nuff said, and once again, Tab, thanks for your input.
Let’s say a consciousness pops into existence and is the only thing which exists.
What does this consciousness perceive?
I’m assuming that the point of such a circumstance given the question of the OP is that everything we experience is potentially an invention of our own mind
If the mind perceives something within itself, technically it still perceives the external world because the consciousness itself is the only thing in existence, and therefore is the only external world to speak of.
The perceptions are created somehow. They may very well be random collisions of particles in random ways within the consciousness, but they still reflect some sort of process from the real world.
We can be sure that our consciousness or “stuff which creates our consciousness” exists in the external world.
Given memory we assume that things happen in specific ways. We measure these specifics and then create rules we call logic.
Assuming the external world is logical, what our existent consciousnesses perceives must necessarily reflect the external world.
Imagine getting drugged up and then hallucinating and seeing Dr. Frankenstein’s monster…
That “imaginary” or “hallucination” monster is a reflection of the external world in that the image of the monster stored within your brain, created by memory cells, which are composed of smaller pieces of material, all the way down to the most fundamental bits of matter, which like our consciousness (even if it is within our consciousness) exists in the external world.
Our perceptions are a direct result of the external world.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an illusion in my opinion an illusion is just a complex way of looking at a simple thing.
What created the illusion?
It was the external world.
(sorry if i am misunderstanding you and your question is actually to what extent our perceptions are distorted, that question i have yet to answer)
Correlation is a friend when doubting existential consistency…
The rules of logic don’t seem to change.
We use the same rules which say we exist and are somehow logically created (logically meaning “with specifics”), and apply them to our perceptions, reasoning that they too exist and are somehow logically created.
A noble and necessary declaration of intent. Good luck to you, I keep trying to do the same, but then I always read something that throws the whole lot out of the window.
When conceptualizing your simulacra - do you see it as an individually-stored perceptual composite, or one distributed accross a network of people and things…?
[b] The mind and whatever it perceives is inseparable and in a sense, continuous. In the hypothetical example, if the mind is the only thing that exists, then it functions as a reality (it is its own reality), but it isn’t an “external world” per se. In order for it to be an ‘external world’ it would requires something ‘internal’ or inside the mind that is not essentially a part of the mind itself (for example, something that can come into existence and then depart from existence without taking anything away from the mind). This holds even if we take into account that such a circumstance is (it seems) a logical impossibility.
If there is nothing distinct from the mind that the mind stands relative to but is not a part of, there is no “external world”; there is only a ‘world’----which is the mind itself. External=“outside”: if the mind is everything, and if everything is part of the mind, there is no “outside”, or the mind is not “outside” anything else. It isn’t like the mind is this phenomenal aether within which are thoughts, etc. Or at least it isn’t this way in conventional human mentality (from which the hypothesis no doubt derives).
Then again, I suppose I could quasi-concede to your argument and hold that there is a semantic behind the term: “external” to mean that the mind is “all of the outside”, even if there is no “inside”. But at the end of the day, the hypothesis leads to an infinite regress of imagination-stretching that serves little to no purpose.
This is because the hypothesis does nothing to save externalism, as the language of externalism presupposes that consciousness and the external world are distinct existences. We are mortal, and mortality itself is a road marker pointing toward the true nature of reality (regardless of whether we “get” it or not). The notion of the Simulacrum in the OP piece above derives from our mortality. It (conceptually, at least) proves that consciousness and the external world are separate entities that can, in principle, exist without each other.[/b]
[b] How do you know this? Or do you just believe it? How do we experience the ‘real world’ in order to know that there are processes in that world that cause consciousness to necessarily reflect it?
This is the ultimate flaw of externalism and epistemological realism:[/b] it’s nothing more than a belief that deludes itself that it “knows” existence in a way that works as well as experience.proponents of externalism blindly prate on, not realizing (or willfully ignoring the fact) that none of their assurances are based in experience, asserting the existence of entities and processes we know nothing about.
This is logically inferred, but the inference presumes a lot that we cannot know. How do we know that consciousness is even created? But I digress. All of this misses the point that this does nothing to show or to prove that there really are mind-independent analogs that are shaped or that appear exactly like the objects that we perceive.
[b]Why should our existent consciousness reflect the external world? What does logic have to do with whether or not the external world mimics in appearance and behavior the content of consciousness? Why should our neurons (if neurons generate consciousness) necessarily put out simulations of the external world—particularly if, if God (or some Intellligence) does not exist the universe has no idea that it exists, that we exist, or that it created us and maintains our existence and survival?
More importantly (as it always comes down to epistemology) how do we even know that our consciousness “must necessarily” reflect the external world? Once again, it is simply something that one believes…and it is one that one simply believes must be so with no direct experience of what’s outside our consciousness to back this up.[/b]
As stated in the OP piece above…unless the external world is itself composed of nothing but pure consciousness…there is no mind-independent counterpart of non-visual perception. This, to the externalist, probably includesextra-visual perception: visual perception of things that (according to externalism) are not reflected by the external world. Hallucinations fall into the class of extra-visual phenomena.
This is transparent if the external world is itself phenomenal in aspect, and our perceptions are merely collocations (jigsaw puzzle pieces combined to form a phenomenal “portrait”) of purely phenomenal microscopic entities. But this is not so transparent if consciousness is magically created ex nihilo (created from nothing) or if one holds that non-mental entities somehow cause perceptions to form.
Empirical considerations aside, I agree with the last sentence. But once again, we’re simply bandying beliefs.
This seems to go on all the time. The most common examples, of course, are when a person prays for the healing of a family member with a fatal disease and the afflicted dies—or when one reads in the Bible that God “protects the innocent and needy”, only to turn on the news to hear of that poor child found in a suitcase. Occam’s Razor points to a nonexistent or impotent God—but could these be mere appearances? Unfortunately, our explanations of the underlying nature of these events are, in the end, mere conjecture beyond the content of our direct experience (vicariously or otherwise) of these events.
[b]Depends upon the semantics. The simulacra is an individually stored composite, and “proof” of this is the fact that when someone sleeps or (God forbid) dies other conscious beings are unaffected by the change. the simulacra is “distributed across a network” in the sense that it (seems) to be a part of a larger consensus of consciousnesses reporting experience of similar objects and feelings.
[b]Christians 300 years ago probably saw paganism wane at the time in question. They are not at fault for being wrong 300 years in the future. At the time, their estimation was probably not a false empirical claim.
I hope by your last sentence that you were referring to Christian estimation of the future of paganism, not the questionable existence of facsimile realism.[/b]
You talking to me?
First, philosophy trumps empiricism (which has been foundationally refuted!).
Second, I made no empirical claims, but agreed (with F&V) with the claim that Xtianity has no future. That is verifiable. There is no such thing as a ‘future’, or a ‘past’, but only as memory and fantasy.
There is ‘Now’! Empirically.
As for the opinion on the (wasted bandwidth) ‘graffiti’ in the OP, I think that it is boring and a waste of time. ‘Flashiness’ usually tries to obfuscate and compensate for a lack of ‘content’. It is not philosophy but high school art class, and inappropriate for this philosophical venue. My opinion, so I agreed with the poster.
Happy trails…
When you say something has no future, you normally mean that you are predicting it will shortly die out. I was talking to anyone who was making this claim.
Apparantly what you actually meant by quotiing f&v is that nothing has a future because only the present exists.
If this is the case then nothing has a future. Why quote “Christianity has no future” to express belief that nothing has a future? Seems odd to me; as to the philosophy I’m not sure I can abide presentism but I rarely debate this kind of metaphysics.
PG:
“When your philosophy leads you to make false empirical claims, its time to change your philosophy.”
“I hope by your last sentence that you were referring to Christian estimation of the future of paganism, not the questionable existence of facsimile realism”
To be honest I didn’t think the sentence was paticuarly cryptic. Everyone seems to have mistaken me for trying to make some sophisticated point about the philsophy of time - I suppose its the nature of the thread. The rather intuitive point I was making was that if your philosophy causes you to make empirical statements that are false, then there is a problem with your philosophy. All I was saying was that all the evidence suggests that Christianity has a very promising future and shows no signs of dying out. So, if your belief system is causing you to make the statement that Christianity is going to die out, and yet it isn’t, then it’s time to review your beliefs.
That’s about the entire size of my contribution here.
“As for the opinion on the (wasted bandwidth) ‘graffiti’ in the OP, I think that it is boring and a waste of time. ‘Flashiness’ usually tries to obfuscate and compensate for a lack of ‘content’. It is not philosophy but high school art class, and inappropriate for this philosophical venue. My opinion, so I agreed with the poster.”
I kind of enjoyed the visuals but to be honest I couldn’t make head or tail of the argument. It seemed to rest on the assumptions that externalism is badly thought out, externalists are just stupid people waiting to wake up to idealism and that this set of pretty pictures comprised of an orginal and convincing argument against externalism. I couldn’t help thinking that if the author hadn’t started with these assumptions he would have been in a lot better position to research the history of idealism and end up with something that at least showed some awareness of the general debate. In which case, he would have discovered that all of his facts are pretty much irrelevent to the externalists position.
Essentially I think nameless is right: if this was written out it would be more obvious that it is just a pile of rubbish.
[b]Point taken. I am Christian, so I’m certainly not making “empirical” statements that “prove” that Christianity has no future. New Christians are being born and raised all the time, so I’m sure the ole Christianity is not on the way out just yet—perhaps it never will.
But here’s a friendly tip:
“Empirical” equals “experience”. Empiricism is a view that all knowledge is derived from experience. Thus, any empirical statement is true, not false. If I were to say: “I’m wearing a navy blue shirt as I type this”----I would be making an empirical statement, and it would be quite true (as one near me would see that I am wearing a navy blue shirt at this very moment). Now if someone were to say: “the external world exists” or: “our visual perception mimics the appearance and behavior of the external world”, then one is making a non-empirical statement. Non-empirical statements may be true or false—but they are true or false beyond our knowledge, which is basically derived from experience.
Anything other than this, mind you, is merely a product of random neural firing (if one accepts psychophysicalism), whose content one comes to wholehearted believe.
Many non-empirical statements are foolishly and unthinkingly believed to be empirical —hence the battle between externalism v.s. anti-externalism, etc. (in fact, most if not all statements of atheists and theists in the course of atheist v.s theist arguments are essentially non-empirical).
Just a reminder, and thanks for the support.
J.
namelesss:[/b]
[b]I’m probably going to regret asking this, but:
How is Christianity without a future?[/b]
[b]The “high school art class” is simply a memorable and novel way of making a point----as well making the point less monotonous and slightly entertaining. I applaud Ilovephilosophy and its moderators for granting the freedom to express one’s views in an extravagant format for the education and overall memorable benefit of the viewers. I think more philosophy venues should make room for this type informal expression. But you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.
Now as for content. If you bother to absorb the subject matter above, the “content” is the most important in philosophy: the question of whether or not the content of our experience is mimicked by the external world. Science vitally depends upon Facsimile Realism, and to an extent—atheism does also (albeit atheism could stand the shock of the falsity of FR [if it could be proven] better than science would).
You should take note, because with the next “high school art” that appears, I’m going to demonstrate before everyone—once and for all—that the foundation of science and atheism (Facsimile Realism) epistemically has no substance at all.
). What instigates a belief in Facsimile Realism? Why–it’s the nature of visual perception (above all)! We see motorbikes, and the sight of the motorcycle is accompanied with an inference that the bike 