Article  Locke, Berkeley, & empiricism (crash course philosophy)

https://youtu.be/5C-s4JrymKM

EXCERPTS: Last time, we learned about 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes [...] Ultimately, he lit upon the idea that some of our thoughts are clear and distinct in a way that somehow guarantees their truth.

But, a lot of philosophers disagreed. They argued that thinking on its own wasn’t enough.

Like, just because you’re thinking, doesn’t mean that your thoughts correspond to material reality in any reliable way.

[...] So here, we start to see a split between two different understandings of how we can most reliably get to the nature of reality, and therefore truth. Both were responses to the constant questioning that is skepticism. On the one hand, there was rationalism. And on the other: empiricism

Descartes, like Plato long before him, was a lover of reason. He met skepticism with rationalism.

He believed that the most real things in life were ideas -- propositions that can be known through pure reason. Deductive truths, which we talked about before, fall into this category. And mathematical truths do, too.

But by contrast, empiricism is based on the principle that the most reliable source of knowledge isn’t our ideas, or our reasoning, but our senses.

Sure, we can know things through deduction and basic logic. But what actually leads us to truth, or at least gives us our best shot at getting there, are things like induction, and the scientific method -- ways of thinking that tell us about the material world.

[...] If Descartes was the original prototype of the navel-gazing philosopher -- a living example of rationalist thinking — then his foil was was the 17th century English thinker John Locke...

Locke, Berkeley, & Empiricism (Crash course philosophy)
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5C-s4JrymKM

COMMENTS: As he says, the primary properties of objects (material characteristics) would be invisible/absent without the secondary properties (phenomenal characteristics) showing or constituting them. Thus, the "hard problem of consciousness" of today, that results from having dogmatically made the material properties the only ones that objectively exist. In the context of today's non-dualist reductionism, you thereby have to explain phenomenal properties in terms of material properties that are inherently devoid of the former and their capacity to manifest. It's actually become worse since then, due to physics' dependence on abstract description that is an order further removed from even the primary/material properties of old.

Also... as is common, Berkeley gets a bit misconceived or misrepresented here, from the perspective of how he clarified some things in his later works. In terms of today's tropes, he was espousing a situation similar in some ways to the "Matrix" or the precursor conception to the latter of "brains in vats". God's data transmissions or influences on lesser minds replacing the technology, of course.

I find that I am rationalist and empiricist at different times and under different circumstances. Sometimes even both. There are moments I consult sensory experience to confirm a logical proposition. And there are other moments I test a sensory experience with a logical proposition.

When the senses and the mind conflict, which is not often, I tend to go with the experienced as the ultimate arbiter of reality. For instance Zeno's paradox of an object eternally approaching another object by only moving half the distance it has left makes logical sense. But when I observe the actual physical situation, I see that the objects do eventually touch. I tend in this case to believe my senses, as much as it seems to conflict with the logic of the proposition.

Also, one's logic is not always valid, sometimes resting on definitions or premises that aren't initially given. Objective reality ultimately shows us what is true if we are able to objectively observe and interpret it.

But there is a danger in trying to stick to a pure empiricism, of interpreting the data of our senses as all there is to reality. Without the scaffolding of concepts and theories, our sensory experience remains barren of meaning and relevance. Even science relies on the logic of theory to give meaning and context to its collected data.

Thus there has to be a balance between empiricism and rationalism. Empirical observation gives us the information, and rational/inferential thinking allows us to process that information into meaningful and practical knowledge.

Do some, most or all of the people who think nothing is real have someone else to wash their socks for them?

(Jul 18, 2023 09:51 PM)confused2 Wrote: Do some, most or all of the people who think nothing is real have someone else to wash their socks for them?

I can't speak for these hypothetical individuals who "believe nothing is real". But I have asked people to do things for me in dreams, which they often perform if they are friends, family, or non-enemies. I've also kicked or thrown chairs and other objects in dreams.

Apparently that would garner them classification as "real" if the requirement for "real" was an action or request producing a response.

Since those appearances do correspond to hidden electrochemical processes in the neural structure of my brain, that underlying "cause" of them is at least real in terms of researchers or their monitoring equipment in the waking world being able to publicly access those regions of functioning.

OTOH, it's possible to dream about researchers performing experiments on one in a dream, too. Though I personally can't recall such ever happening to my avatar's body in a dream (i.e., hooked-up to equipment, being slid into a scanner chamber, or whatever). Granted, though, I've forgotten most of my older dreams over the years.