Anti-Realism - Searle & Putnam
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- Clips of Hilary Putnam & John Searle discussing anti-realism, including various kinds of subjectivism, relativism & skepticism. Check out the following discussion between Putnam & Rorty on Truth & Pragmatism: • Pragmatism & Truth - R...
#Philosophy #Epistemology #Relativism
By interpreting Kant as an idealist like Berkeley, just less aware of what he was doing, Searle and Putnam sound here like the first generation of critics of Kant who didn't get what Kant was really getting at in the first critique.
Well Kant did think there was a real world but he also thought that the structure of the world was imposed by the mind.
While most philosophers in the logicist-positivist-pragmatic traditions also start the building up of their epistemology in exactly that way, namely treating sense data as primal and everything else as logical constructions on sense data, they do this with the firm resolve to eventually arriving at more-or-less a common-sense picture of a world, never shearing off the idea that ultimately not only does an external world exist but its properties are its own and we can however coarsely and imperfectly cognize it and build up some picture of it which can be refined as we go along
I don't think they describe him as an idealist in the same way as Berkeley.
They accuse him of manifcturing an inaccessible "empty hypothesis" of the thing in itself that stems from the moden philosophical thought that we perceive only sensations. They argue that you can prevent at even coming to this absurd conclusion. Knowing something exists without knowing any ("other") properties isn't ordinary knowledge
Yeah pretty embarrassing attempted takedown of Kant. I could care less about the philosophers who don't believe in "objective reality" but that was bad teaching in my opinion, to blithely dismiss Kant. Just really irritating like you're getting a smug cheap version of philosophical argumentation. Someone got something wrong in philosophy in your opinion and this is how you treat them? Why would anyone want to share their ideas with people like this.
Sure, Searle sees his hand when he looks at it, but his conscious perceptual experience is necessarily conditioned by the nature of his own human cognitive faculties (generally shared by all other humans so giving a '"common" object that is perceived). But a passing bee has a very different perceptual experience of the same hand (i.e. same object), because the bee's experience is conditioned by the nature of his "bee faculties" (common to all bees). So there is something common and independent of both Searle's and the bee's minds that they both perceive, yet the hand that their mind's know as presented by sense differs between man and bee.
So there is a difference in perception, not in the existence of said external world?
Humans are able to understand how a bee sees by using science and technology to understand this external world beyond our species-limiting sense organs. This reveals that there is more to the external world, but never shows that such a world does not exist.
How do you know there's something sense-independent?
@@ferdia748 read sartre's being and nothingness
The only evidence we have of an external world comes through our perception, so there is no way to know that there exists an external world independent of our perception. It's a useful and persistent idea perhaps, but so are triangles, and there are no actual triangles to be found outside our minds (just objects that resemble them).
Despite the hand waving and condescension in this video, it's not at all "obvious" unless you're emotionally attached to the view you had before you examined the issue. In fact, I'd even say that failure to accept what's going on here is just a result of emotional attachment. Kant was absolutely right! Hegel would come along later and say that it's pointless to talk about the noumenal if we truly have no way to know we have contact with it and it may as well not exist for us...and I can get behind that idea...but defending realism just seems absurd. You have nothing beyond your mental faculties!
Can we know anything about the "hand in itself" tho?
Does anyone have access to the full Searle interview? I can’t find it anywhere.
The conscious mind is entangled with reality and the interactions between the two create constant emergent outcomes.
Consciousness does not begin or end with physical life aka is not dependent on it.
So it can be said that consciousness can be a subset of greater reality and entangles with reality at every point of interaction.
I like how he admits without realizing it with look at ur hand wise to the guy he's arguing w
I mean reality exists between a cause and a viewer, whether the input to our systems is really representative of reality necessarily is the argument here
I deny the (necessity of) the existence of the external world. There are many reasons to deny it, and no philosophical system should assume it as a brute fact, for it could be wrong.
Parmenides of Elea, pupil of Xenophanes who flourished in the sixty-ninth Olympiad argued ordinary mortals (general citizens) never make the choice between 'is' and 'is not' about the subject of enquiry existing or not existing and purport all sorts of chimera as existing in the world.
Searle lumps Kant in with social constructivism. No wonder he was doing a lot of handwaving as he spoke.
5:33 This is where Searle hand-waves the entire debate. "Standard perceptual situations" are not always unambiguous. If you're about to take ayahuasca then of course you know you will hallucinate, and perhaps during a math test that you're sober and well-prepared for you may be confident that you are in one of these "standard perceptual situations" but what about when you wake up in the middle of the night to adjust the air conditioner? In ignoring that very important gray area (because it's this gray area where people both find and lose religions among other things) Searle overlooks the significance of the debate as a whole. It is not just Cartesian pseudo-solipsism, Berkeley's immaterialism or Kant's militant fence-sitting.
This comment deserves more recognition. Entirely agree.
@@mcurtisallen Thanks, I watched this video on my TV first and what he said at that point got me tilted so I had to get on my phone and comment that to get it out of my system lol
I don’t think hallucinating on ayahuasca is the standard perceptual situation. No doubt, cases of hallucination and illusion have to be accounted for on the realist's view. But the mere existence of such phenomena don't automatically undermine the view.
@@Philosophy_Overdose In the OP's comment, I believe that was an example of an obviously non-standard situation.
@@Philosophy_Overdose I happen to be a realist, but Searle's arguments for direct realism are trash, imo. That said, I never found them convincing enough to spend time with them in detail, so this is mostly based on the video. What he does here amounts to just saying over and over again (in the style of G. E. Moore), "But I really see my hand in front of me." There's nothing 'direct' about really seeing your hand, if you somehow have to translate the physical process of photons hitting the retina into the experience of your hand being in front of you. It's not like the photons are carrying some specifically 'handy' content; they don't 'know' or 'care about' what they're bouncing off of. The situations in which they present us with illusions is not physically different, in this respect, from the one in which we 'really see the hand.' I would argue that this kind of claim rests on the integration of multi-modal perceptual information (in this case, seeing 'the hand', the fact that I feel my hand, and that I have a proprioceptive sense of the motion of my own body which allows me to locate it in space, etc.) about which I make many many (unconscious) inferences in order to arrive at reality. If you removed all those reinforcing stimuli, and just had the rather uncanny pure vision of 'your hand' I think you would be much less confident that you "really see the hand." There's nothing direct about that integration either, imo. If 'direct' is meant to include all of these things, then I really don't know what function it's serving here. Finally, I would argue the whole concept of the 'standard perceptual experience' has serious philosophical flaws--one in which most of the actual substance of an explanation for the realism of perception is swept under the rug of ceteris-paribus-type clauses that are radically underspecified in this account.
Don't know when this was recorded but neither seen to be aware of the work of Bernardo Kastrup.
Way before Kastrup even became relevant online; and secondly, his analytical idealism still doesn't stand against transcendental arguments.
What Putnam said about “we see books” is very nearly the game winner.
Is it really that structuralists and constructivists deny reality? Isn't their claim rather that -knowledge- not -reality- is socially constructed.
Yes but to the extent they say that knowledge is uninfluenced by reality, they are suggesting that reality is not worth studying at all
@@jamespower5165 thank you, that might be a good way to explain what's off putting about constructivism to many.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on positivism in relation to our ability to study reality.
@@therealabelmagwitchI think that initially the positivists held a similar position as the logical empiricists such as Bertrand Russell who wanted to use sense impressions as the basis of our knowledge of the world and so made them the basic elements of our epistemology. But Russell and others wanted to start from this point and end up with essentially a common sense view of the world. The use of mathematical logic to build up more complex real world entities from our sense impressions was mostly done to show that such a thing is possible, without insisting too much on details.
The positivists however took the whole thing very seriously. They developed a system in which the only direct points of contact with reality we have, namely sense impressions, are the only reality alongside the abstract symbolism of logic. If something couldn't be made to correspond with some set of sense impressions, it didn't exist at all. They also had the verification principle that if you made a statement, you had to correlate it to the idea that a certain action resulted in a certain sense impression or the statement that certain actions never lead to certain sense impressions(for the latter, probabilistic evidence alone could be found by performing many such actions and seeing that indeed they did not produce the relevant sense impressions) The whole thing devolved into a kind of hygiene check on philosophy which became a constraint against speculation and world building of any sort. Up to a point, it had a positive effect in limiting metaphysical speculation and debate not backed by any empirical evidence but it was a rather barren philosophy which seemed like it couldn't produce new ideas by itself, merely criticize what others said.
It also clashed with common sense in ways that could only be fixed by a little disingenuous meddling with the original ideas. For example, let us say some students played a trick on an inobservent professor by calling on him as a Mr. Smith and carrying out several interviews. Except that Mr. Smith is a different student each time. In common sense ontology we would say that "Mr. Smith" never existed. But positivists ought to say that from the professor's point of view, since his experience of Mr. Smith is limited to the various epiphanies of Smith, the collection of such epiphanies is in fact what "Mr. Smith" refers to if anything. So whatever we learn about Mr. Smith when the students admit their prank, it isn't that such an entity never existed. It is doubtful any positivist would claim that, but then they are obliged to change the original definitions which they would only do because in spite of philosophical pretensions they always believed there were such things as actual persons above and beyond your limited experience of them. So it wasn't fundamentally a sincere philosophy
@@therealabelmagwitchI think that initially the positivists held a similar position as the logical empiricists such as Bertrand Russell who wanted to use sense impressions, the only direct points of contact between us and reality, as the basis of our knowledge of the world. But Russell and others wanted to start from this point and end up with essentially a common sense view of the world. The use of mathematical logic to build up more complex real world entities from sense impressions was mostly done to show that such a thing is possible, without insisting too much on details. The positivists however took the whole thing very seriously. Their ontology had just the sense impressions alongside the abstract symbolism of logic and mathematics. If something couldn't be made to correspond with some set of sense impressions, it didn't exist at all. They also had the verification principle that if you made a statement, you had to correlate it to the idea that a certain action resulted in a certain sense impression or the statement that certain actions never lead to certain sense impressions(for the latter, probabilistic evidence alone could be found by performing many such actions and seeing that indeed they did not produce the relevant sense impressions) The whole thing devolved into a kind of hygiene check on philosophy which became a constraint against speculation and world building of any sort. Up to a point, it had a positive effect in limiting empty metaphysical speculation and debate not backed by any empirical evidence but it was a rather barren philosophy which seemed like it couldn't produce new ideas by itself, merely criticize what others said. It also clashed with common sense in ways that could only be fixed by a little disingenuous meddling with the original ideas. For example, let us say some students played a trick on an inobservent professor by calling on him as a Mr. Smith and carrying out several interviews. Except that "Mr. Smith" is a different student each time. In common sense ontology we would say that "Mr. Smith" never existed. But positivists ought to say that from the professor's point of view, since his experience of Smith is limited to the various epiphanies of Smith, the collection of such epiphanies is in fact what "Mr. Smith" refers to if anything. So whatever we learn about Mr. Smith when the students admit their prank, it isn't that such an entity never existed. It is doubtful any positivist would claim that, but then they are obliged to change the original definitions which they would only do because in spite of philosophical pretensions they always believed there were such things as actual persons above and beyond your limited experience of them. So it wasn't fundamentally a sincere philosophy
@@therealabelmagwitch Initially the positivists held a similar position as the logical empiricists such as Bertrand Russell who wanted to use sense impressions, the only direct points of contact between us and reality, as the basis of our knowledge of the world. But Russell and others wanted to start from this point and end up with essentially a common sense view of the world. The use of mathematical logic to build up more complex real world entities from sense impressions was mostly done to show that such a thing is possible, without insisting too much on details. The positivists however took the whole thing very seriously. Their ontology had just the sense impressions alongside the abstract symbolism of logic and mathematics. If something couldn't be made to correspond with some set of sense impressions, it didn't exist at all. They also had the verification principle that if you made a statement, you had to correlate it to the idea that a certain action resulted in a certain sense impression or the statement that certain actions never lead to certain sense impressions(for the latter, probabilistic evidence alone could be found by performing many such actions and seeing that indeed they did not produce the relevant sense impressions) The whole thing devolved into a kind of hygiene check on philosophy which became a constraint against speculation and world building of any sort. Up to a point, it had a positive effect in limiting empty metaphysical speculation and debate not backed by any empirical evidence but it was a rather barren philosophy which seemed like it couldn't produce new ideas by itself, merely criticize what others said. It also clashed with common sense in ways that could only be fixed by a little disingenuous meddling with the original ideas. For example, let us say some students played a trick on an inobservent professor by calling on him as a Mr. Smith and carrying out several interviews. Except that "Mr. Smith" is a different student each time. In common sense ontology we would say that "Mr. Smith" never existed. But positivists ought to say that from the professor's point of view, since his experience of Smith is limited to the various epiphanies of Smith, the collection of such epiphanies is in fact what "Mr. Smith" refers to if anything. So whatever we learn about Mr. Smith when the students admit their prank, it isn't that such an entity never existed. It is doubtful any positivist would claim that, but then they are obliged to change the original definitions which they would only do because in spite of philosophical pretensions they always believed there were such things as actual persons above and beyond your limited experience of them. So it wasn't fundamentally a sincere philosophy
The way he stretched "Kaaant" 😂😂
They’re really not playing fair with the thing in itself, here.
It’s not that reality doesn’t exist, it’s that you don’t have the access to it you think you do. Quantum, relativistic matter is not what we see, and it never will be.
The sceptics were right: there is no a priori metaphysics for the thing in itself.
Problematising our access to the world- far from being anti-scientific- has been a source of great inspiration to the sciences. Einstein read Kant.
The problem with Kantian metaphysics is that it frames cognition as the spirit of God hovering over the waters, but cognition is a social phenomenon of agreed upon qualities which, independently, have no a priori conditions so are literally a posterori ad hoc
We can have access to reality. Hell, we can even know reality. The trouble is that we cannot know reality ex our social conditioning, be it mentally, biologically, linguistically, etc. Compare, for us from our perspective the sun rises and sets, but we know this is not the case. Conceptually speaking it is the same with how think of ourselves in relation to the world and what the world actually is. Even if we can know something our perception is still dependent upon factors we have little to no control of.
@@danieljliverslxxxix1164 in fairness all of Europe thought Newton had seen through the matrix and understood fundamental reality in a handful of equations. You can hardly blame him for some hyping of cognition.
Plus, though I don’t disagree with you out of hand, I think that the necessary human habit of connecting moments together into experience (a non-social phenomenon, and Kant’s starting point) does seem to structure cognition at least a little bit… even if it doesn’t produce the table of categories.
Yes, they're not really criticizing anti-realism as the title suggests but the kinds of theories that make reality unimportant because nearly all of how we see reality depends on our preconceptions etc. The Kantian conception, the constructionist conception etc
Anti-realism is simply the stance that reality cannot be taken at face value
"It’s not that reality doesn’t exist, it’s that you don’t have the access to it you think you do."
This is an entirely arbitrary (or at least unfounded) claim for all of the reasons that Searle and Putnam give.
"Quantum, relativistic matter is not what we see, and it never will be."
Please refrain from dragging in subjects which you've not actually studied. Reading math-free, pop sci treatments doesn't count.
"The sceptics were right: there is no a priori metaphysics for the thing in itself."
Arbitrary requirement.
"Problematising our access to the world- far from being anti-scientific- has been a source of great inspiration to the sciences. Einstein read Kant."
Einstein also read Schopenhauer, Goethe, Karl May . . . and probably tens of other writers. Special Relativity owes nothing to Kant, and in fact, Kantian philosophers were among Einstein's most prominent early critics.
I don't get what they are trying to argue here...
Our ability to perceive reality is limited by our perceptions. If you see an apple on a tree from afar, it may look delicious. You could get closer and notice that the other side of the apple that was previously unknown to you is damaged and rotting. The ability to assess what exactly exists hanging from the tree is dependent on senses.
Further more, the ability to perceive it exists in the past since it takes time for the electrical and chemical processes set off by our sensory organs to reach the brain and be processed in a way that provides meaning to what we are taking in.
What they are saying sounds just like "well, I know i'm right because i am right. its obvious and thinking otherwise is stupid." I mean, this is a short video, so maybe their work goes into detail a bit more about what foundations they have for their arguments but they really haven't made much of a case here.
Yeah I’ve never been able to make sense of Subjective Idealism. Kant’s Idealism, insofar as I understand it, is much more coherent.
Agreed. As wanting to maintain Indirect Realism, I think Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (as I have understood and made variations on) from the being set out in the Critique, has the best theory of human perception, cognition of the world, and understanding.
I also respect transcendental idealism highly. Kant did not deny the existence of a world in itself - ding an sich. This interview - or the cut about one minute in - seems to suggest he did.
@@newcjon agreed.
Idealism is incoherent
@@MV-vv7sgBut ultimately he still thought the mind imposed the structure of the world. So the world by itself does not have a structure. That comes of its contact with mind. Short of denying the real world, it retains its worst properties
What is their response to the Wigner's friend experiments? I think more clarity is needed about what constitutes being real.
@@MrLcowles sure they are.
@@MrLcowles just because you can't do an experiment doesnt mean they aren't quantum. That's what schrodinger's cat and wingers friend illustrate.
@@MrLcowles sounds like you're just misinterpreting what he means by 'apple'
@@MrLcowles evidently not
@@MrLcowles By 'apple' the person you're replying to means all of the atoms and subatomic particles that comprise the apple. Not just the object at Newtonian level.
The thought of enjoying a cold beer on a hot day is a wholly different entity to going to the fridge and seeing a beer and the pleasure of physically drinking it. It can see no rationale to this even being questioned.
There are dreams that can be more real than reality in experiential content
@@Robinson8491 We can be sure that dreams are different from reality from observation in others. Only yesterday I watched my dog “running” in its sleep, without directly sharing the exact same experience it is very reasonable to assume that it was going through some dream type experience.
When I imagine the cold beer there can still be a physical response from my body, my saliva glands may still activate in the same way that occur during actual beverage consumption. However, I can experientially differentiate beer drinking from longing to drink beer, for only one of these leaves me feeling like crap the following day!
And now the hard question... Is it Putnam right or is it correct instead the tradition from Aristotles-rationalist-Chomsky,etc.
Tu put in another way, is it right Putnam in his famous article: "The meaning of meaning"?.
Well, I think he is right in a certain sense, but rationalist also had a point. Something in the middle could be plausible.
Good example of the hand.
I wonder if the anti-realist move is not also the cognitivist move to not only abstract perception from the outside world, the world we live in, but consciousness or the mind as well.
You can prove that the world is real, but you cannot prove that our conception of it is real. The two are incongruent with one another.
Could the confusion be resolved by simply making a distinction between ontological realism and epistemological realism?
It just devolves into more philosophical navel-gazing.
The discipline of "ontology" takes place in your head either way, so ontology is far closer to epistemology than it is to actual reality.
That way you end up with model-dependent realism.
Epistemological realism would entail ontological realism, right? Though I guess one could be an ontological realist but an epistemological idealist (this would be Kant I think?)
@ulsey982 Solipsism still entails ontological realism. There's an ontology - it's your mind.
These map/teritory distinctions always lead to the same philosophical nonsense collectively known as representationalism.
Humans - the mirrors of nature!
The knowledge of our hands, etc. is a kind of prototype of any knowledge that we can have about the external world: if we doubt about the existence of our hands, etc., then we should doubt about any knowledge we think we are having about the external world or reality, including optics, physiology, neuroscience, etc., about our head, our brain, our sense organs, - even about the existence of other sentient beings than ourselves (or, more correctly, MYSELF).
How can you be sure that you have any certain knowledge about minute particles such as elctrons, photons, etc., IF you doubt the existence of microscopes, since such particles are ONLY seen through MICROSCOPES in the science LABS? But IF you doubt the existence of your hands, etc, why are you so sure about the existence of microscopes, labs, etc., and about every elaborate scientific knowledge which can be only acquired through experiments using SUCH instruments in SUCH labs?
Also why are you so SURE about the existence of other people who supposedly have the same nerve system as you, or other kinds of animals who supposedly have wholly different perceptual system than you IF you even doubt the existence of your own hands?
When we should doubt such simple and basic knowledge as the existence of our hands, we should all the more doubt such complicated and elaborate scientific knowledge as optics, physiology, neuroscience, etc., which are ultimately based on such simple knowledge about our hands at their bottom ground, and which are regarded as providing one important basis for idealism or representationalism.
Also we should want to doubt the existence of any other sentient beings OTHER THAN myself IF we really want to doubt about our hands UNLESS we don't want to fall into such absurdity as 'solipcism', which is actually the only logical conclusion of any consistent idealistic position. As far as I know, I didn't find out any famous idealistic philosopher who bravely accepts the conclusion of solipcism, excepting a few of historicaly very obscure philosophers.
So it seems that current main idealistic positions or arguments surreptitiously and unconsciously presuppose realistic frame or thinking. That is, they actually self-defeat when they succeed in defeatig realism.
Both these guys should do 4 tabs and tell me about how real their hand is and how it’s a given perception represents reality.
They both (and it’s insanely disappointing) make no argument than “it’s a given, it’s obvious, etc”.
I’m an anti realist but I was looking for counter arguments. sad to see Putnam be this lazy (I’m not shocked by Searle)
What a superficial sweeping statement the very first is!
Kant was not saying or even setting the path towards anybody saying that the world isn't there. He was in fact striving to ground objectivity without the mind getting lost in overblown claims. Saying that everything in the world we know is mediated by intellect is not the same as saying that it's non-existent in itself or depending on such intellect.
And at least some philosophers labelled as "postmodern", like Foucault, were not trying to say that everything "is" a social construct, but that everything we do with our judgments and cognitive tools is mediated by social practices.
Both ways of thinking, be they correct or not or only in part, are actually meant to give us BETTER access to reality, by making us more critical and thus more aware of what conditions our judgments.
Well-put.
Regarding Kant, I agree with you. Most of what I've read about Kant is mostly his ethics rather than metaphysics (E.g. I mostly remember Kant's categorical imperative as basically saying "morality is acting such that if everyone acted that way, it would be fairest to everyone". Kant's ethics, at least, don't necessitate a dualistic worldview - they just aim to stand independently of any behavioral-evolution ethics.
As for the other point about some postmodern philosophers not arguing that reality itself is a social construct, I also agree. Take my reading of Wiggenstein: "Philosophical investigations" rejects the idea that words can have meaning outside of the myriad of contexts in which those words are used. In arguing this, Wiggenstein doesn't reject an external reality, but he does, like you said, give informative bounds on what conclusions we can draw from patterns and contexts that we experience.
Has Searle never talked to a physicist? In quantum physics it's a proven truth what we call reality is co-created by a wave function that is out there and choices we make as observers, how we interrogate the wave function. Bohr always emphasized this. Wheeler made it quite explicit. Bell clarified the logic in his 1964 proof.
That's not what quantum physics says at all. Quantum physics only says that at a small enough level you cannot distinguish between waves and particles, it says nothing about our observations of it.
No. The world is nonlocal whether or not quantum physics is true. But observer dependence is not established as all. The GRW theory makes almost identical predictions as QM(our measuring instruments cannot split the difference) ergo we cannot tell if observer dependence is true of the world or not. The matter is underdetermined by even the heavily touted success of QM. And all common sense is against observer dependence being true(and even if true, wave function collapse does not create reality, it simply makes it settle down
"In quantum physics it's a proven truth what we call reality is co-created by . . . and choices we make as observers . . ."
I have a feeling that you've never even taken a Calc 1 or Intro to Classical Mechanics class, much less studied physics at the post-grad level. The 'observer' in physical theory should never be confused with the 'observer' in ordinary language.
Please steer clear of ad hominems. I have a PhD in theoretical astrophysics. I agree that there remains controversy in the physics community about what constitutes an "observation". I'm from the school (including Schrodinger, von Neumann, and WIgner) that it is consciousness that collapses the wave function.@@alexhauser5043
The main problem with anti-realism is that it must collapse into solipsism, which is way beyond what most anti-realists are willing to accept.
If the anti-realist wants to posit the existence of other minds (or the absolute, or something like that), then he's opening himself to be attacked by the same arguments he uses against realists, losing the ontological parsimony he thought he had.
All things being equal, the realist has the advantage of conforming with intuition.
The arguments against solipsism are very different to the arguments against anti-realism though.
The problem of intersubjectivity was only really seriously tacked by antirealists and phenomenologists. The realist just assumes and says "yeah there are other minds" but has no actual argument for that, its the same as saying "yeah there is an element called Boilo which is formed when you turn the fire under a pot, Boilo heats the pot and not the fire"
@@LittleMushroomGuy It seems that, if anti-realists are 'really' serious about the intersubjectivity problem, then they should NOT remain as anti-realists any more, in order to make their interst logically consistent with their position 😄
I don't understand the taboo against solipsism. Most of the arguments I've heard against solipsism are just absurd arguments. The most common is "it's a performative contradiction to acknowledge other people." No it's not. Have you ever had a lucid dream where you talked to other people, even in the full knowledge you were dreaming? Why would you do that? I've had such dreams before. I did it because that's what you do in such dreams.
Another is, "If this is just your dream, why can't you fly or perform other such feats?" This generalizes to, "Why are there limits if this is just your dream? Can't you just choose to shape it how you want?" No. You're confusing my character in the dream with being the dreamer. Have you ever had a dream where you played a whole different character than your waking life? Did the character in the dream have the power to change the dream or was it the "real you," the dreamer, that changed it?
Spot on, at least when we're talking about anti-realism as thoroughgoing as Rorty's
I went through this phase where I thought the skeptical philosophers were silly
At the end of the day it only matters that there’s a “real world” to the extent that there are people we love and care about who live in it. Otherwise why not pretend it’s all a dream, a show?
@@leftwingdogwhistle Lol average schizo Hegelian who thinks they can somehow come to impossible truths
@@freddiepatterson1045 Oyy, Hegel's objective realism was pretty thoroughly argued for in Robert Brandom's book 'A Spirit of Trust', maybe worth your time looking into it? Hegel is one of the least understood philosophers of all time IMHO, from young Hegelians to old Hegelians, to the Catholic church and Russell, the list of culprits is rather long. It's not that Hegel's idealism was too difficult to digest, but rather that his Logic cuts too deep.
@@evinnra2779 It's more that Hegel was an atrociously abstruse writer.
@@saintsword23 Yes and no. Indeed, Hegel is notoriously obscure . Yet, the various misrepresentations of his philosophy is more due to the fact that readers are prone to place *undue emphasis* on some aspects of his philosophy.
I like Steven Lehar's approach better.
Western philosophy from 🏴🏴
they are missing the point. the program running on the computer is in a different universe than the computer. thats like our minds
exactly, a bunch of electrons firing up in a screen don't know that a teacup is shown on screen, a graphics card calculating polygons does not know thats its a teacup, even if it has a line of code titled "teacup", it has no knowledge of what a teacup is, or even how it looks like, just how to calculate something titled "teacup"
@@MrLcowles I know a liar, the kind that always lie, who's always telling me he's lying.
Okay, now ask yourself where did you get the concept of reality from in the first place and try to separate it from your own experiences.
Are you the only existing thing in the universe? If not, then ask yourself where you got the concept of other existing things from and try to separate it from yourself and your own experiences…
It is much better to listen to Putnam.
do chinese people see the same thing on a page of putnams book? i think the only answer to questions of this type is Shackell's finite semiotics
@@MrLcowles And Quine's indeterminacy of translation? Just not valid? Searle himself is famous for a language translation problem - the Chinese Room
Ces gens ne comprennent pas le raisonnement radical des idéalistes
own ways of self living in mind works better when u feel world of sounds feelings wealth. in negative ways until you think anti realism paranoia
That's exactly why I'm a materialist.
Personally, I don't have a horse in this subject (too much I still have to study), but you may want to check John Vervaeke's talk "Neoplatonism and the Path of Transformation". In it, he presents a fairly interesting argument as to why neither materialism nor idealism by themselves are correct - i.e. reality is neither totally objective, nor subjective, rather it's transjective
You’re conflating the existence of physical objects with stand-alone existence, the latter does not entail the former.
There is no "I" to a materialist
@@LuizWarg my goodness, John Vervaeke? Hahahaaha, how low is your standard in philosophy? He's not even a philosopher. Use Barrett's rule, just because you think you understand philosophy doesnt mean you are an expert in philosophy. That is why I never gaze on Peterson and Vervaeke because of their sophistry. They think they can morph their psychology into a universal philosophy.
@@aidanhall6679 Please elucidate. What is the difference between the existence of physical objects and existence?
We need to get over ourselves, we're just animals that developed really quick thanks to mushrooms and a need for survival
"All models are wrong but some are useful"
Your model of the world is bound to be imperfect, but if that meant the world wasn't really there then all models would be equally useful in interacting with the world, but they aren't so it is
By acknowledging that realism is just another model you are straight out saying that the antirealist are correct but you personally find it easier to not acknowledge that
@@LittleMushroomGuy No, antirealism is a model too. And realism is more useful
@@joelthomastr It is not, its the assumption that philosophy is model creation, while for the realist there should be no such thing as models except for what they consider real.
Take Pierre Duhem for example and his philosophy, either antirealism is true and it is so that science describes phenomena and creates models, which when they cannot explain something need to be redefined, or realism is true and science explains reality and we cannot be sure in any theory since history has shown that Ptolomy, Gallileo, Kopernik, and Newton were wrong about their theories. Realism is "usefull" only in the low assumption that "ther is something as gravity" but as a overall model it is useless
The binary question Realism (the world is real as we see it with our universals) vs. Nominalism (the universals we use to study the world are in our minds) hides the third option: Critical Realism, that is: our universals are ours, in our mind, but there’s intent, the intention of using them to point to things, to reality, to their universals enacted there. Evolutionary Epistemology is with Critical Realism, Naturalism also, Scholasticism (Catholicism) too. Kant is with the Nominalists and Ockham, as Empiricists were before, as the Idealist called Berkely. I recommend that studying Epistemology be supplemented with Evolutionary Psychology and Chomsky’s generative grammar of Cognitive Psychology. Darwin’s concept of adaptation is key here.
Lol chomskys theories have basically become useless and he just asserts that they are what are required for psychology and language even though there is no way of falsification which then leads to basically useless assertions about how psychology works
This is a really biased and bad demonstration of antirealism, something I wouldn't have expected from some big name like Putnam
Does the Little Bear really exist, is there something really between those starts that really exists and can be perceived as real by us humans, or is the constellation something that we made up and has no existence in reality? Are scientific theories real and really in nature, or are they just a way how we describe and explain things to other humans?
You are good at asking questions. Are you also good at answering them? That is what they do
@@MrLcowles I gave you a few examples, but it is obvious some people as if they were programmed to be naive realist
I think you have misinterpreted Putnam's mean, from my perspective he's not saying they don't exist he's theorizing in what way they exist.
Wisdom from stones. Feh!
The problem with Searle and Putnam is they are asserting the claim of an absolute independent external reality with too much certainty and arrogance. To reify an unperceived something without qualification is an absurd hypothesis. This insistence is a psychological issue [subliminal], not a philosophical one.
Effectively reality must always be qualified to a specific framework, i.e. within common sense, Newtonian and Einsteinian Framework, there has to be an external reality but not so within the QM framework [supported by Eastern and Ancient Idealist].Note the Buddhist's Two Truths Theory and its Tetralemma.
'To reify an unperceived something without qualification is an absurd hypothesis.' I think the gist of their argument above was that to positively claim the non existence of the unperceived is to make an even more absurd proposition.
@@evinnra2779 And thus the proper stance is an epistemological agnosticism. "I do not know if there is an external world," which is an anti-realist position. These are the same types of folks that will say denial of God based on lack of evidence is not a positive claim to the non-existence of God (which I totally agree with them), but then will turn around and fail to apply the same standard to the realist position: denial of the external world based on lack of evidence is not a positive claim to the non-existence of the external world.
This is what happens when professors of philosophy pretend to be philosophers
Philosophers are and have often been professors of philosophy, wether academic or not! A philosopher professes philosophy through writing or through the spoken word! Of course! They are historically linked, Socrates, Nietzche, Aristotle, Heidegger, Plato...
Ah analytical philosophy, wannabe mathmeticians analyzing four word sentences, not seeing past the tip of their nose
I'm no expert on the Idealists myself, but the books (a man-made object) example was really bad. The problem was trusting our perception and knowledge of nature and the external world. I don't think the Idealists would bother, for instance, doubting the existence of the clothes they wore or the houses they lived in.
Still love Putnam though.
But a book *is* part of the external world; it doesn't matter if it's man-made or not. The idealists are largely discussing a mind-independent reality, which would include books.
@@animore8626 I shouldn’t have mentioned the external world (I was thinking about Idealism in general and Subject Idealism in particular simultaneously). My bad.
The point I was trying to make was that to Subjective Idealists (like Berkeley) both the physical book and the mental book belong to the world of man, and not the world of nature, (which they deny the existence of), since the external world which we interact with is part of the mind to them.
These guys should watch The Matrix and cough up their blue pills. God is dead. And so is the real.
zopa rinpoche's and gyatrul rinpoche's very recent deaths (april 2023) can be viewed online as they remain in their post clinical death meditations called tukdam, continuing seated without bodily decomposition, maintaining very supple skin and bodies, producing a sweet fragrance from their pores, and emitting heat around their heart region. this will continue for several days or even weeks before real death occurs as their subtlest level of mind takes basis elsewhere and the body begins breaking apart.
there was another such instance in taipei 2020 by a monk in the same tradition who remained in that state for over 30 days. on that occasion scientists from the church physicalism were available to monitor and collect much scientific-breaking data such as spontaneous brain activity activation weeks post clinical death.
what these sort of ppl who have actual testable and developed methods of rigorously observing the object to be investigated ie. the mind have to say on these topics is lightyears beyond everything produced by the western lineage, especially the modern era and especially these sorts of chaps. and youre not even aware they exist. you will continue to remain confused at their leisure and until you learn better neural imaging tech so you can compare while still alive the chronic differences between ppl with a clue and those who pray to the idol of the objective physical ie. every 10yo on up.
Based on the little things I know about tukdam, no such thing as brain-activity has been observed so far, can you provide a link for that?
Ho, hum