The philosophy thread general discussion

Sure, and many have even questioned whether or not other people exist. But you have to assume something or you cant get up in the morning.

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

My only assumptions are that I matter to me and me and anyone else who might exist, who I think probably do (though this isn't a certain thing), are probably unique. That gives me enough to get up every day. But even those I question, and everything else I try to avoid holding as assumptions.

Other things I implicitly assume, but I try to purge those things. Still other things I create for myself, but I have no pretenses those are really true.

edited 4th Jan '15 5:56:36 AM by deathpigeon

If reality is something else entirely, and everything we can experience is an illusion, or a lie, or wrong, or whatever, does it even matter what reality is if we can't experience it? Does it make any difference at all if our "reality" is not the reality?

I don't know, but it's interesting to question it, for me, I think.

Sorry, I didn't mean if the question mattered (I think it does, because we either can prove or disprove that assertion, so until there is an answer it's worth asking that question), I meant if the fact reality didn't exist, what should be the individual's reaction to that. If it doesn't, I don't particularly care, because I can't tell the difference, so I'll just go on with my life.

Why does anyone get to determine the individual's reaction to that but the individual reacting to that? Surely there's just as many reactions to it as there are individuals to react to it. My reaction is one of curiosity, but critical skepticism. Especially with the critical part. I've only ever gotten there through critique, and critique is the only way I've ever gotten out of there. Critique allows me to not hold it as true or false, but as uncertain and constantly being broken down and returned to. I don't want to assume either way, and no way has, so far, been satisfactory, for me, though many ways have ended up consistently unsatisfactory to me.

@deathpigeon

Linearism isn't a strict requirement on utilitarianism.

Utility functions that work like that are easier to optimize for, but there not the only kind.

And usually it isn't applied to individuals. 2 minutes of torture isn't simply as bad as 2*1 minute of the same torture. But 2 people being tortured for 2 minutes is all other things be equal twice as 1 person going through it.

On the other hand you could have an odd paperclip maximizer. That Assigns U=P for odd values, and U=-p for even. This utility function would be almost impossible to optimize for.

If we replace odd with prime it gets easier, but it would still be possible to massively screw up.

Of course in practice this breaks for large enough numbers. A billion people being tortured would be much more than just a billion times worst. But if this was spread among a billion worlds it would just multiple.

edited 4th Jan '15 7:48:51 AM by SuperMerlin100

Well, no, but Macintyre wasn't saying linearlism is false. He was saying in anyway calculating overall good from the good or bad of individual incidents was false. He's a virtue ethicist, anyway, so he's not a utilitarian supporter.

Ironically utilitarianism is often argued for in virtue based terms.

edited 4th Jan '15 7:59:24 AM by SuperMerlin100

@Dem: Yeah I realize individualism is a belief about how people should act, that doesn't make it conceptually coherent. It's logically inconsistent and has a number of false assumptions about people and reality generally.

edited 4th Jan '15 8:34:07 AM by CassidyTheDevil

That's some hardcore solipsism right there, and quite frankly I have little patience for it. If our perceptions don't reflect reality, then there's no way for us to know that and nothing we could do about it if we did. So what's the damn point? Nothing useful can come from that line of thought. It cannot influence our behavior or our understanding of reality in any way. So chalk it up as an assumption and move on. (ie, "we realize that our perception may be utterly false, but we choose to accept our perceptions as reflective of reality, because otherwise we're forced to believe that everything is meaningless".)

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Individualism (and collectivism for that matter) are value frameworks. They each assign a value to expressions of individuality vs. group membership. I dont see how one would apply logic to that.

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

You say that, but you every argument for that has been with strawpositions.

I'm not a solipsist. As I said before, I'm pretty sure that other people exist, though I don't have certainty in that regard. If anything, I'm closer to the Pyrrhonian skeptics since I'm doing something similar to them, though with different motivations and some different ends.

And why would I ever simply accept that my perceptions are probably somewhat accurate without any critique to it? Like, I'm trying my best to hold nothing as an assumption, to critique everything so I can purge myself of all things which seek to control me and command me, every ideological structure within me. So you're basically suggesting that I simply stop short of just this one fixed idea, and not critique it, too. I mean, even the assumptions I make (I matter to myself, and people, including myself, are unique) have faced revision and critique, and will face both of those again in the future. If I'm going to give critique to those and refuse to assume that, simply because I hold them as assumptions they aren't necessarily true since almost everything anyone, including myself, believes is probably false, then why would I not apply the same thing to my perceptions which I have plenty of reason to doubt?

Because "my perceptions do not reflect reality" is an unfalsifiable claim and therefore useless as both a path to understanding the world around you and as a guide to your behavior.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you knew for a fact that your perceptions did not reflect reality. (You can't know that for a fact, of course, but let's pretend that you can.) What now? How would that affect your understanding of the universe, or your behavior in daily life? Maybe you'd go mad with existential angst or something, but other than that, the answer is "not much". Our perceptions are the only method we have of interacting with the world. If our perceptions are false, then we have nothing else. If we cannot trust our perceptions, then we have no basis for knowing anything — and if we know nothing, then any decision we make is essentially random meaningless flailing.

Note that when I'm talking about perceptions reflecting reality, I don't mean "accurately" or "objectively", I mean at all. If our perceptions give us a warped, distorted impression of reality, then that's fine. We can learn to compensate for that and still gain knowledge of reality. But if our perceptions are completely unrelated to reality such that one cannot gain true knowledge of reality via one's perceptions, then all bets are off and the whole thing is pointless and stupid.

The same problem arises when you reach an extreme level of arbitrary skepticism in any form, really. You get to the point where you can either make a small assumption (eg, "my perceptions reflects reality") and continue on from there, or else embrace complete skepticism and be left at a dead end where nothing is known, nothing can be known, and progress is impossible.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

You appear to be confused about what I'm doing. I'm not claiming "My perceptions do not reflect reality". I'm critiquing "My perceptions reflect reality in any way."

Also, there are a lot of stuff that's unfalsifiable, yet useful as both a path to understanding the world around us and as a guide to our behavior. "There is an internal life to the people around me" is very useful for understanding others and guiding our behavior towards them, but it's also completely unfalsifiable because them being p-zombies would look exactly the same as them not being p-zombies.

It would tell us that understandig the universe with our perceptions is false.

How does this necessitate that we should accept the premise that our perception reflect reality? This is completely tangential to the truth of it.

I have done this. I just chose different assumptions.

Actually, I assume a lot of things all the time. I just immediately critique the assumption. Only two have withstood my critique effectively, and neither of them are "my perceptions reflect reality", which I'm still uncertain about. They're "I matter to me" and "people (and things, really) are unique".

I think it does no harm to wonder what might lie beyond the world of appearances. As an intellectual exercise, it could provoke us into seeing the world in a different way, which can lead to unexpected insights or a new sense of appreciation. But of course, to actually live life, we have to act as if what we see is real.

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

Or, at least, what we see is to some extent important, even if it isn't real.

This is probably because, as I mentioned earlier, you're clearly using terms in very specific ways without explaining how you're using them. For example: there's no obvious difference between claiming that your perceptions do not reflect reality and casting doubt on the idea that your perceptions do reflect reality. Obviously you see one, but since you don't explain the distinct, I'm just confused about what you mean.

You're right, perhaps I misspoke. My point is that since it's unfalsifiable, there's no way for us to prove — or even offer evidence for — one conclusion over the other. That leaves us free to make whichever assumption appeals to us more — and I certainly find the idea of reality being unknowable due to the fact that I'm inexorably trapped inside my own mind by my false perception to be less appealing than the idea that my perceptions do, in fact, reflect reality on some level.

The fact is, I honestly can't imagine someone who didn't at least go through the motions of acting like their perceptions reflect reality. What would that even look like? Would that person refuse to eat, because both food and hunger are both lies? At the very least I'd imagine someone who sincerely believed that their perceptions were false would "play along" to avoid the perception of pain. (Whether there's any difference between "perceived" pain and "real" pain is left as an exercise to the reader.) Pretty much the only other possible reaction I can imagine is committing (perceived) suicide in a fit of existential angst.

So yeah. Short of nihilistic self-destruction, the idea that your perceptions are false is a meaningless belief. It doesn't inform your actions or attitudes. It doesn't change anything. So why bother with it?

And nothing else. That's both the starting point and the ending point. If you reject your perceptions as being reflective of reality, then "my perceptions are not reflective of reality" is the only think you can ever know.

It's a bit like Pascal's Wager. Either we can embrace extreme skepticism and doubt literally everything, or we can make the assumption that our perceptions reflect reality and move on from there. We can never be certain if the assumption is correct or not, but what do we lose by making it? Is life better if we act as if our perceptions are false and reality is unknowable? I certainly can't see any other criteria to use in making the decision of whether to trust my perceptions or not.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

First of all what are we even trying to talk about when we say reality?

The way I've always used the word this notion that our perceptions have noting to do with it, is nonsense. Reality is that thing that I should be concerned with. And this completely detached thing isn't it.

As for p-zombies, you can tell their fake, because they have something extra in their heads to make thing talk about experiences in the absence of experiences.

No I'm quite familiar with what actual individualists have said. It's a somewhat broad range of positions, but all are pretty closely interrelated nonetheless. For example, methodological individualism , which is a (false) metaphysical claim, political and economic individualism, etc. Just because you're not aware of what they have to say, doesn't make it a straw-man.

It's not just a value system, it also makes certain claims about reality. Ones which can be disproved. Also, yes, value systems can be logically inconsistent.

@Jovian: I'm not entirely sure I disagree with you (semantics and all), but I definitely disagree with how you worded that. I definitely disagree with naive realism, indirect realism is much more, well, realistic. It's pretty naive to think our perceptions "reflect" reality, reality is a little bit more complex than that. Real reality is quite unlike our savanna evolved brains tend to assume it's like. It's pretty unintuitive.

Simply taking our perceptions as bias-free, objective information tends to be misleading because that leads people to ignore the unconscious assumptions that underlie everyday life. Taking those everyday assumptions as fundamental facts about reality-in-general is a big error, we didn't evolve to understand quantum gravity or cosmology, it's going to be very misleading to bring in our assumptions like that. We're pretty consistently bad with our intuitions when it comes to virtually everything in science. Relying on what seems intuitive to understand reality is bad, bad, bad, bad.

Like Richard Dawkins says, we're evolved denizens in a Middle World. We are not equipped to understand things out of the womb, be a little humble and rely on the scientific method to understand the universe. Think "What am I seeing, how does this work?", not "I am seeing REALITY directly, yep I've got it".

edited 4th Jan '15 8:47:17 PM by CassidyTheDevil

Indirect realism is basically my position as well. When I say that our perception reflects reality, I mean that reality has an effect on our perceptions — that the two aren't completely independent of and unrelated to one another, like the Matrix or something.

If I perceive myself as sitting at my desk typing on my computer, but in reality I'm sitting in a machine battery-pod or whatever, they my perceptions do not reflect reality. If my perceptions are a flawed internal picture of reality, influenced as much by biology (my body) and psychology (my mind) as by reality, then my perceptions are still a reflection of reality. A distorted and limited reflection to be certain, but a reflection none the less.

I'm certainly not trying to suggest that our perceptions are a 1:1 accurate and objective representation of reality. (The existence of things like optical illusions would conclusively disprove that, if nothing else.) I'm just arguing against the idea that our perceptions are completely unrelated to reality, a la Cartesian demons or what-have-you.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

...How is the difference between the two at all confusing? Like, it's the same difference as between agnosticism and atheism.

Well, there are arguments on either side, though, you're right, no proof, and likely never any proof, so it's not just a matter of personal preference. All sides can get criticized and defended, and I'm in the business of criticizing.

Food and hunger might simply be features of the world of appearances. But that doesn't mean I won't still feel pain if I don't eat. There are plenty of reasons to eat without resorting to realism.

How is that playing along, though? It's not like such a person would simply pretend like things are real. They'd accept they aren't but consider there sufficient reasons given that they aren't real to do stuff like eating. They're as much playing along with realism as the realist is playing along with anti-realism with them doing the same things anti-realists do.

Why would anyone respond to it like that?

Only to the extent that the belief they are true is meaningless.

Realism really doesn't, either, so why bother with it?

Personally, I can't be bothered with realism or anti-realism. There's plenty of reasons to doubt both sides and we can't honestly know, so I don't accept either. Neither realism nor anti-realism hold as assumptions, or even conclusions, for me.

It's as much as the opposite tells us.

...Wait, what? How so? Something along this lines is more akin to my critical position than to the anti-realist position.

I don't accept Pascal's Wager as is, but this one is worse. You're right, nothing is lost by making that assumption, but nor is anything gained. There is no benefit to realism. The anti-realist still has to deal with the same perceptions as the realist, so they aren't losing anything from their anti-realism.

That said, both are way to presumptuous about what we can possibly know. We don't know if our perception match reality and we likely can't, so why should I chose realism or anti-realism?

---

...Methodological individualism isn't a metaphysical claim. It's a methodology where one starts from the particular and goes from there. That's not a metaphysical claim at all.

Which you haven't addressed at all.

I'm well aware of what individualists have said and I happen to be an individualist. But you'll find nowhere in any individualist a rejection of the existence of society. Heck, many of us, such as Max Stirner, Renzo Novatore, and myself, have pointed to society as our enemy as an amalgamation of the sort of fixidity and uniformity we reject favoring insurrection to devolve society into intercourse, or relations between individuals by individuals for the benefit of individuals which are ever changing and deal always in the particulars. It's how children playing relate, how lovers relate, how friends going out to a bar relate.

Related, you'll find that we don't claim that individuals are isolated atoms. That's mostly been something imposed upon us by others or something born from the assumption that radical capitalists are in any way individualist, despite their strongly collectivist framework in which the individual is denied in favor of the sacred and the collective.

Finally, you'll find very few, if any, individualists saying that anyone should bugger off to the woods. Like, even Thoreau saw going to the woods as a temporary measure.

So, no, I'm not unaware of the diversity among individualists. You've just yet to address actual individualist arguments.

I can't agree with solipsism because I find it too implausible. Here's how I've thought about the question when it's been discussed before:

There are two possibilities.

One is that only my perception is real, and the objects I perceive do not exist even though I seem to have some sort of experience that feels as if there's something real causing it. I can only accept that my perceptions are real, and I shouldn't try to use that perception to derive truth claims about any reality independent of my perception of it. Thus I have made the assumption that my mind can somehow create all of my perceptions on its own, without there necessarily being a reality behind this phenomenon of my experience. My mind, I assume, can create the experiense of a world that is very complex and remarkably self-consistent (with regard to the rules it follows, even when I don't at first know them).

The other possibility is that there is a real world that exists independently of me, and my perception of it arises in some way of the universe itself. For this I must assume that the real world has rules that it follows (whether I'm watching or not).

On the face of it it might seem that the two claims are about equally implausible (as both suggest the existence either of an entity producing the experience of a natural world, or of that natural world itself), but at least the second comes with the possibility of a method of discovering things about the real world and its rules. If those discoveries suggest ways that the world could have caused my experience of it it's in my opinion vastly superior to the alternative. If there can also be discoveries as to how the real world itself came to be it's better still, as the smaller the question of the emergence of reality becomes the less I must assume before I can consider it sufficiently explained.

For the solipsist model I honestly don't know how one could make any sort of progress at all into discovering any reality at all behind one's experience of the world. Perhaps some philosophers can suggest ways to at least begin, but from what I've read of Hume and Kant and Descartes and Berkeley there doesn't seem to be any way out of this state of essentially nothingness other than a huge leap of faith (usually "let's assume there's a God that can create my experience" - which makes an even larger assumption than that with which the solipsist paradim began).

I must admit a personal preference in favour of the model suggesting that the world is in a sense more real than my perception of it - the physicalist model, in other words. (Of course some would take that and insert supernatural entities into it, but from my point of view they're adding unnecessary and unjustified assumptions into it, reducing its eplanatory power.)

Aside from the personal preference I believe the non-solipsist approach is better because it opens up a way to start making discoveries about the nature of our experience, with regard both to its causes in the natural world, and the natural world itself. Of course we must accept that our perceptions, though arising from natural phenomena (in the natural world), are not perfect reflections of real objects in the natural world. Still, we can design and conduct our research in a way that minimalises the effect of the distortion present in our direct perception of the world.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

I'm curious why you think that, because I've seen that repeated many a times in earnest by avowed individualists. Marget Thatcher: "And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families."

You're not an individualist simply because you say "I'm an individualist". You're an individualist if you have a preference for individuality, put the individual first, and avoid situations where the interests of the individual get lost among the interests of the collective. That's what makes one an individualist, and I don't see any of that applying to Thatcher. Thatcher was a collectivist who didn't care about the interests of the individual, only the interests of corporations and nations.