Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

The fundamental epistemic mystery

#1
Magical Realist Offline
How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world? How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all? We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact." Is such even possible? Or is it a cultural belief passed down to us thru years of education and training? How does the mind transcend its own subjective privacy to be able to get a handle on the "standing alone" public presence of physical beings? How can it know or apprehend a mountain as anything more than its own subjective and highly conceptualized hallucination of language and sensations?
Reply
#2
Ostronomos Offline
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world? How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all? We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact." Is such even possible? Or is it a cultural belief passed down to us thru years of education and training? How does the mind transcend its own subjective privacy to be able to get a handle on the "standing alone" public presence of physical beings? How can it know or apprehend a mountain as anything more than its own subjective and highly conceptualized hallucination of language and sensations?

This relates to Cartesian mind/ body dualism. The objective world is apprehended or perceived by the subjective which converts it, using complex biological machinery, into an image in the mind, which is nothing more than a hologram like the rest of the universe.
Reply
#3
C C Offline
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world? How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all? We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact." Is such even possible? Or is it a cultural belief passed down to us thru years of education and training? How does the mind transcend its own subjective privacy to be able to get a handle on the "standing alone" public presence of physical beings? How can it know or apprehend a mountain as anything more than its own subjective and highly conceptualized hallucination of language and sensations?


The manifestation (differentiated into multiple visual, aural, feeling, etc modes) carries its own external world in the public half of such experiences (which other individual instances of human consciousness likewise have access to). With that cosmos in turn sporting its own "internal story" and coherence of what's going on in a regulated manner, including how some of its objects like brains / bodies receive data. Or at least, we can abstract an evolving network of explanations and concepts from it.

Both the world of appearances and the abstract world descriptively outputted by science requires consciousness and intelligence in the first place to produce the empirical and intellectual evidence that they exist. So accordingly there's the endless circularity or swirling loop of what resembles a tangled hierarchy, where the manifestation needs an otherwise invisible something as its provenance and the latter needs the manifestation to validate that it has be-ing (either by "showing" it or "reasoning" it out, or both).

~
Reply
#4
C C Offline
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Or is it a cultural belief passed down to us thru years of education and training?


It kind of is the impetus of a tradition. There's no guarantee that a metempirical version of the universe -- or noumenal "something" -- even is a world. The temporary oneirocosmos that arises during a dream, for instance, is certainly not an attempt to represent its source or the "prior in rank" hierarchical cause (i.e., the brain is not a world). Likewise, a screen and speaker displayed video-game realm is not trying to be a "truth" about the nature of the computer.

Once the idea of representation is given up, the environment of outer experience can then become just that: THE "external world" rather than an intermediating flawed or suspect copy of an invisible archetype. However, there is indeed still the problem of symbolic and conceptual representation: Whether or not how we describe and understand what is manifested is true or objective with the regard to the manifestation itself. In a certain respect, this takes us right back to wrestling with metaphysics. Even though the world is "shown" there may be multiple useful ways to fathom it / think about it, with none alone and in itself sufficing as complete and minus loose ends.

We can treat facts as what an instituted system or standard approves: What multiple individuals or experts agree upon or came to a contractual consensus about in terms of incidents and conceptions abstracted from the "shown" events and repeated tendencies. An objective orientation could be construed as deriving principles which regulate the public part of experience that accordingly outrun the subjective deviations, beliefs, and wishes of the particular thinker / feeler. To avoid the infinite regress of phenomenal / material worlds nested within yet more phenomenal / material worlds, we'd actually want a noumenal level to be radically different (immaterial), anyway. With the latter simply being a nomological manner of being (without shape, location, size, mutability, etc -- but still possessing a governing potency so as to be held responsible for observed existence).

Richard Rorty's brand of anti-representationalism, crouched in neopragmatism:

SEP entry on Rorty: ". . . it is the other side of his [Rorty's] anti-representationalism, which denies that we are related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of vocabulary with which to cope with it."

S.C. Hickman (LiveJournal): "No pragmatist will dispute that there is something beyond our physical being that people have termed 'reality'. What we are saying is that, as humans, we are not separated from that reality in any objective sense of the word, that we are already so connected and part of this continuum that the idea of 'Objective truth' would be to try to distance and separate ourselves from something that we are already so interwoven with that it would be impossible.

[...] Rorty argues, since Plato, philosophers have understood our primary relationship with the world as one of representation. We attempt to represent the world as accurately as we can; the pursuit of truth is based on the hope that we might represent the World As It Really Is, the world in-itself for-us. Representation, Rorty claimed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is a worn-out metaphor, a philosophical position that leads to endless squabbles: if we believe we have represented the world accurately, we fall victim to a blinkered and arrogant dogmatism; the other extreme, the fear that we may never overcome the gap between our subjective minds and the objective world, leads us to epistemological skepticism—the idea that we can never really know anything. Rorty suggests that we replace the idea of representations of the world with the idea of descriptions of the world designed to help us achieve particular, finite purposes. Rather than ask if we are in touch with the way the world really is, Rorty asks if our descriptions and our vocabularies help us complete our projects. This is the pragamatist path...


~
Reply
#5
Ostronomos Offline
(Sep 8, 2018 05:23 PM)C C Wrote: Richard Rorty's brand of anti-representationalism, crouched in neopragmatism:

SEP entry on Rorty: ". . . it is the other side of his [Rorty's] anti-representationalism, which denies that we are related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of vocabulary with which to cope with it."

S.C. Hickman (LiveJournal): "No pragmatist will dispute that there is something beyond our physical being that people have termed 'reality'. What we are saying is that, as humans, we are not separated from that reality in any objective sense of the word, that we are already so connected and part of this continuum that the idea of 'Objective truth' would be to try to distance and separate ourselves from something that we are already so interwoven with that it would be impossible.

[...] Rorty argues, since Plato, philosophers have understood our primary relationship with the world as one of representation. We attempt to represent the world as accurately as we can; the pursuit of truth is based on the hope that we might represent the World As It Really Is, the world in-itself for-us. Representation, Rorty claimed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is a worn-out metaphor, a philosophical position that leads to endless squabbles: if we believe we have represented the world accurately, we fall victim to a blinkered and arrogant dogmatism; the other extreme, the fear that we may never overcome the gap between our subjective minds and the objective world, leads us to epistemological skepticism—the idea that we can never really know anything. Rorty suggests that we replace the idea of representations of the world with the idea of descriptions of the world designed to help us achieve particular, finite purposes. Rather than ask if we are in touch with the way the world really is, Rorty asks if our descriptions and our vocabularies help us complete our projects. This is the pragamatist path...


~

Semantic metaphors and representations enable closure between how the world really is and how we subjectively experience it? And that representing the world via the linguistic symbols of our own sentience confirms that awareness is limited by epistemological matters? Am I getting you right? Does this relate to our perceptual limitations and the gap between objective and subjective worlds?
Reply
#6
Yazata Offline
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world?

Regarding that one, I guess that I'd say that it's because our neural systems are causally stimulated by our surroundings. That's what our senses are about. That visual, auditory, etc. stimulation carries information about what's happening around us.

Quote:How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all?

Because light reflects off of it and then stimulates our retinas. Because we feel the strain in our legs when we try to climb it.

I don't think that I want to say that the mountain "occurs in the privacy of our own mind". Thinking that way takes us halfway down the road to a Kantian-style imagining that our inner soul is directly observing a little mountain replica "inside our head", with everything outside the mind-constructed little stage of our phenomenal 'sensorium' transformed into a 'noumenon' (including the "head" itself). That's too nihilistic for my taste.

Quote:We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact."

True. To answer that, we need to understand what a "fact" is. (That's a fundamental ontological question, I guess. What really exists out there?) Then we need to understand what 'knowing' a fact would consist of. That complicates things tremendously by introducing concepts like information, relations, properties, causal interactions, language, propositions, judgement, recognition and identification, and so on.

Frankly, I think that there are too many unknowns. We do kind of know intuitively what it means to "know a fact" (that's our 'common sense' basis), but we aren't anywhere close to having a satisfactory philosophical account of what's really happening.

Like most of reality, including its most familiar and seemingly most obvious aspects, it fades into mystery when we examine it too closely. (All of philosophy is like that.)
Reply
#7
C C Offline
(Sep 8, 2018 05:51 PM)Ostronomos Wrote:
(Sep 8, 2018 05:23 PM)C C Wrote: Richard Rorty's brand of anti-representationalism, crouched in neopragmatism:

SEP entry on Rorty: ". . . it is the other side of his [Rorty's] anti-representationalism, which denies that we are related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of vocabulary with which to cope with it."

S.C. Hickman (LiveJournal): "No pragmatist will dispute that there is something beyond our physical being that people have termed 'reality'. What we are saying is that, as humans, we are not separated from that reality in any objective sense of the word, that we are already so connected and part of this continuum that the idea of 'Objective truth' would be to try to distance and separate ourselves from something that we are already so interwoven with that it would be impossible.

[...] Rorty argues, since Plato, philosophers have understood our primary relationship with the world as one of representation. We attempt to represent the world as accurately as we can; the pursuit of truth is based on the hope that we might represent the World As It Really Is, the world in-itself for-us. Representation, Rorty claimed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is a worn-out metaphor, a philosophical position that leads to endless squabbles: if we believe we have represented the world accurately, we fall victim to a blinkered and arrogant dogmatism; the other extreme, the fear that we may never overcome the gap between our subjective minds and the objective world, leads us to epistemological skepticism—the idea that we can never really know anything. Rorty suggests that we replace the idea of representations of the world with the idea of descriptions of the world designed to help us achieve particular, finite purposes. Rather than ask if we are in touch with the way the world really is, Rorty asks if our descriptions and our vocabularies help us complete our projects. This is the pragamatist path...


~

Semantic metaphors and representations enable closure between how the world really is and how we subjectively experience it? And that representing the world via the linguistic symbols of our own sentience confirms that awareness is limited by epistemological matters? Am I getting you right? Does this relate to our perceptual limitations and the gap between objective and subjective worlds?

The first and primary reason for converting the material phenomena of outer / public experience to signs and description, and organizing those taxonomically, is just to be able to deal with the world in a way that goes beyond the cognitive limitations of animals. Have abstract thought, become intelligent, communicate and survive better, have a thought orientation about an _x_ object or event that is more precise than emotional feeling and instinctive reaction, simulate the world in a more economical way than memory and neural-resource demanding pictures and so-forth.

The usage in metaphysical issues is secondary, and arises when there is an idle class with enough spare time from physical labor for reason to even venture in that direction. (Whether those individuals are tribal shamans and artists, moral inventors, artificers of religion, sages, philosophers, scholars, whatever.)

~
Reply
#8
Magical Realist Offline
(Sep 8, 2018 06:05 PM)Yazata Wrote:
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world?

Regarding that one, I guess that I'd say that it's because our neural systems are causally stimulated by our surroundings. That's what our senses are about. That visual, auditory, etc. stimulation carries information about what's happening around us.

Quote:How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all?

Because light reflects off of it and then stimulates our retinas. Because we feel the strain in our legs when we try to climb it.

I don't think that I want to say that the mountain "occurs in the privacy of our own mind". Thinking that way takes us halfway down the road to a Kantian-style imagining that our inner soul is directly observing a little mountain replica "inside our head", with everything outside the mind-constructed little stage of our phenomenal 'sensorium' transformed into a 'noumenon' (including the "head" itself). That's too nihilistic for my taste.

Quote:We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact."

True. To answer that, we need to understand what a "fact" is. (That's a fundamental ontological question, I guess. What really exists out there?) Then we need to understand what 'knowing' a fact would consist of. That complicates things tremendously by introducing concepts like information, relations, properties, causal interactions, language, propositions, judgement, recognition and identification, and so on.

Frankly, I think that there are too many unknowns. We do kind of know intuitively what it means to "know a fact" (that's our 'common sense' basis), but we aren't anywhere close to having a satisfactory philosophical account of what's really happening.

Like most of reality, including it's most familiar and seemingly most obvious aspects, it fades into mystery when we examine it too closely. (All of philosophy is like that.)

It's hard to locate the exact point at which a stream of photons becomes a picture of a mountain inside one's mind.
Reply
#9
Syne Offline
(Aug 16, 2018 07:17 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: How is it that we, electrochemically-reacting brains encased in dark skulls, can KNOW anything about the outer world? How is it that a mountain existing out there on its own entirely independent of us can occur in the privacy of our own mind which is not in its essence anything physical at all? We have to get at what we mean by "knowing a fact." Is such even possible? Or is it a cultural belief passed down to us thru years of education and training? How does the mind transcend its own subjective privacy to be able to get a handle on the "standing alone" public presence of physical beings? How can it know or apprehend a mountain as anything more than its own subjective and highly conceptualized hallucination of language and sensations?

Well, there are simply two options. The external world we perceive could have some existence "out there", evidenced by others sharing those perceptions in some way that lends them credence. Or solipsism is true, and nothing, including the other people we perceive, actually exists in any sense of "out there". If the former is true, the same shared and verifiable perception that leads to that conclusion affirms that we have access to some degree of "fact". If the latter is true, I (because there is no "we") am forced to admit that I am a self-deluded god of some sort. Either there's an external stimuli or we are creating all the stimuli we perceive.

In truth, it's a bit of both. The mind constructs our senses from perceptual cues, in lieu of fine enough grain processing power.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  The most fundamental question in all of philosophy Magical Realist 17 420 Dec 15, 2023 04:10 PM
Last Post: Syne
  The epistemic injustice of Lookism C C 4 228 Oct 19, 2022 10:22 PM
Last Post: confused2
  Mary Astell's take on epistemic injustice + Communism fading like fairytales C C 0 206 Feb 21, 2020 06:16 AM
Last Post: C C
  Is consciousness fundamental to reality? Ostronomos 11 1,227 Aug 5, 2019 02:31 AM
Last Post: Quantum Quack
  Illusion of personal objectivity: From fundamental error to truly fundamental error C C 2 667 Sep 26, 2018 04:55 PM
Last Post: Yazata



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)