DRFseven

No, within my paradigm, which has blank to do with reality but is all that is available to me, I know we don't know what is outside that paradigm.

Sure, this is true inside our box.

No, I have not said any such thing. I've said repeatedly that relative to our knowledge, some things are true and some aren't and that is what we go by (and have no choice but to go by).

It's called "taking it with a grain of salt." IT SEEMS that there is absolutely no one who has access to anything other than through his/her senses, and so IT SEEMS that what we know may or may not reflect reality. It also seems that since our evalutations on qualities of theories is a product of those same sensibilities, that our evaluations suffer from the same lack of access as everything else. It also seems unnecessary to preface every thought with "it seems", since everything is a perception, so most people, myself included, don't do it. Instead, we go about our business, feeling totally unparalyzed, figuring things out inside the structures of our changing views, all the while perceiving that reality may be related or unrelated to anything we fathom.

I don't think you have access outside your senses, do you? Nor does anyone.

DRFseven

Why is that reasonable? Isn't it just as "reasonable" to suppose that our intellectual intuition is, in terms of the absolute, false?

And I didn't get you wrong. You were disagreeing with croc that reality is hidden from us, right?

Synaesthesia

DRFseven writes,

Your position is (correct me if I’m wrong) that we can develop a reliable model of the world but, since we only know the world through sense-data, there is no way of finding “whether we truly understand anything or not.”.

The question of how we introspect is non-trivial. How do we actually know what our paradigm is, since it is only accessible to us by way of interpretive mechanisms? We know about it not because there is merely a stream of data fed into a cartesian theater but because of the logic, the consistency and the interpretive coherence of our thoughts. It is my position that for the very same reasons we can understand our internal model, we can understand how it relates to the logic and coherence of the outside world.

In fact, you yourself implicitly admit of the very same thing. When you say of the possibility of establishing truth-preference, “Sure, this is true inside our box.” you have asserted a theory of what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’, you have made a positive (and well supportable!) statement about the outside world.

All of our thoughts may be totally unrelated to eachother. This theory is patently inferior to the theory that our thoughts relate to eachother meaningfully. This is much the same reason for thinking about the physical world in terms of physics and objects and their relation to our brains.

This is a very insightful point. Everything we know or think we know is the product of an immensely complicated interpretive structure. Visual perception is not ‘raw’ data, it is being parsed and simplified and elaborated right from the moment it hits the retina. Our thoughts too have no intrinsic qualia anymore than electromagnetic radiation, their quality is the product of how connected agencies interpret them.

However, there is a very significant difference between acknowledging a web of interpretation and revision and asserting that there is a fundamental epistemic distinction between our our knowledge and our knowledge of our knowledge. I agree that our thoughts and environments are not self-evident but they are indeed evident.

Regards,
Synaesthesia
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."- Ray Bradbury

[ May 06, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

WJ

Owleye, I would agree that esentially the argument from Crock (which I'm still not sure what that is) that because the brute fact of consciousness is that the origins and make -up are unknown and somewhat mysterious at this poit in time, then this is largly the reason why we can invent things like Plato's cave and other metaphor's... . However, I believe as you alluded, that folks like Kant 'tryed' to make the 'distinction' between Platonic essentialism (via pure reason) which I would agree as failure in answering the mystery about the cave.

In that regard, I wonder what is the point? If the cathedral light represents consciousness, I can certainly make the leap (inductively reason)simply because of the mystery behind the origins of consciousness.

Walrus

DRFseven

Well, change it to "We can develop a reliable model of our interpretation of the world, but since we only know this world through sense-data, there is no way of finding whether we truly understand anything OUTSIDE of that perception or not (if there IS anything!)." That's more like it.

I don't know how that position could be reached. Can you explain?

But for all we know, there may be nothing outside the box. Or there may be something. I'm only saying we don't know.

But that all our thoughts may be unrelated to each other is not what I think. I think our thoughts are meaningfully related to each other, but may or may not have a relationship with anything that may or may not exist outside our perception. I'm afraid I'll have to ask for your indulgence; I'm unfamiliar with words to express what I'm trying to say.

owleye

DRFseven...

owleye: Notwithstanding this, it is reasonable to suppose that we do maintain some sort of intellectual intuition.

DRFseven:Why is that reasonable? Isn't it just as "reasonable" to suppose that our intellectual intuition is, in terms of the absolute, false?

owleye: I based its reasonableness on what I wrote right after I made my claim, which for some reason you chose not to cite. Perhaps you didn't read it. I'd like to think that I try to support whatever I claim in my posts, though sometimes for brevity I merely highlight it. I would hope you would do the same. In any case, here I merely referred to what others have considered to be an intellectual intuition, which I confess would require you either to look it up for yourself, or seek further clarification from me or others.

DRFseven:And I didn't get you wrong. You were disagreeing with croc that reality is hidden from us, right?

I wasn't just disagreeing. I was criticizing that view. In doing so, I made the usual assumption that if one held this view (i.e, that reality is hidden from us), that it would require an intellectual intuition (as opposed to a sensible intuition) that bypasses our senses in order to understand it. Thus, your asking me how an intellectual intuition could bypass the senses makes my point more than it criticizes it. This is why I didn't think you captured what I was saying.

owleye

owleye

WJ...

"In that regard, I wonder what is the point? If the cathedral light represents consciousness, I can certainly make the leap (inductively reason)simply because of the mystery behind the origins of consciousness."

Does the cathedral light represent consciousness? This wasn't the impression I got. I took the windows to be our sensory organs and the light which was differentially emitted from them to be from a source that was hidden from us. That is, reality is hidden from us because what we observe are only appearances, despite that they are the source of what appears.

Consciousness, of course, is also a source of what appears to us, but only in the sense in which it functions to represent what is given to us. These representations are appearances. But they are appearances of something -- of something that is real (or that could be real, in which case we would change "is" to "seems to be" or some other copula). We take objects that appear to us as real, because they are. If we didn't take them as real, our appearances would be floating, so to speak, without substance. This is how Berkelean idealists think of it. Kant solved this problem by placing substance as a category necessary for us to have the kind of experience we actually have.

Even if you don't think what we experience is real (which is how I understood the author of this thread), you might want to consider the difficulty evolution would have in selecting for it. What would in fact compensate for the falsity of consciousness? If we cannot depend on what appears to us since it is false, how is it that we are motivated by what appears to us? If we are motivated by something false, it would seem likely that we would fail miserably as a species.

Fell

DRFseven

I didn't cite it because it doesn't seem to me to address the point I am making that we don't need intellectual intuition to make statements on this side (the inside) of the box and that there is no path for intuition outside the box.

Synaesthesia

DRFseven
Without having ever seen one, I can know about the atomic particles that make up our universe. It is manifestly obvious that there is a great deal outside our direct perception! But, as you have rightly pointed out, how do we know our theories and perceptions correspond to the actual state of affairs in the universe? How do we know what we are looking at?

Let us take the most extreme scenario as you suggest. Descartes’ arbitrarily powerful demon is providing the illusion of an internal and external world. Where does that leave our “knowledge of the outside world”? Well, Some theories will elucidate, refine and expand the scope of our understanding, some theories simply will not work.

The former category gives a deeper and broader understanding of the structure of the Demon’s illusion. Even if scientists are being fooled by the Demon as to the ultimate nature of their situation, they can progressively improve their understanding of the Illusion. There is no way of being omnisciently certain of our evolving understanding but there is no need. We can dismiss radical theories as being so unlikely as to be trivial to all but philosopher's thought experiments.

I would like to hear a bit more detail about your notion that knowledge of our internal state is somehow immune to the cartesian demon; We ourselves are all that is required to fool ourselves about what we are and have been thinking. An extremely unlikely demon, it seems, is the least of our problems!

By “intuition” most people mean the ability to perform some operation (such as gathering of sense-data) without clearly understanding how. I suspect that you mean something closer to “we can justify our belief that we accurately know the contents of our own minds but we cannot justify our beliefs about the outside world.”

Our knowledge of the mind can be just as erroneous as knowledge of the outside world. Although I agree that we can justifiably believe or reject theories about our minds, the mind cannot be truly immune to the very extreme possibilities (eg. the cartesian demon) to which knowledge of the external world is subject.

Regards,
Synaesthesia

[ May 08, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

owleye

DRFseven...

"I didn't cite it because it doesn't seem to me to address the point I am making that we don't need intellectual intuition to make statements on this side (the inside) of the box and that there is no path for intuition outside the box."

This was precisely my point. What was the basis for criticism then?

In any case, it is not really important to me what your position happens to be on any given subject, though it is useful for the purposes of carrying on a dialog. What I don't appreciate is unsubstantiated claims like the ones you bring up. I'm much more interested in the reasons you can muster for your beliefs, theories, and interpretations. Besides, the cited philosophers (Husserl and Godel) would dispute your view that the intellectual intuition they describe which bypasses the senses fails to reach beyond the "box." Indeed, Godel is a Platonist, and Plato is probably the founder of the school of intellectual intuition.

owleye