The end of the subjectivity debate

Our situation is slightly more sinister than that, which I tried to allude to earlier…
We’re confronted with a reality of qualitative experience, that is to say a reality that can harm us, terribly.
Mistakes can cost us dearly… and frivolous beliefs are no more dangerous than doubts as we move through this space.

If you walked off the edge of a cliff, doubting you would fall, the price for that mistake can be as high as any…

The project is to construct a road map, a modus operandi, that lets us navigate this reality, whatever it may be, more effectively.
We cannot be parsimonious in the construction of that road map unless we know what is necessary and what is not.
So how can we know when we lack certainty?

And that’s where rationalists get stuck (sans a benevolent god). Conceptually it’s a dead end…
But the empiricists don’t give a damn about any of that… and merrily forge forward as warranted by the experiential evidence, claiming to know stuff in one moment that in the next they claim to have disproven.
Much to the chagrin of rationalists who berate them for it, all while they employ the road map the empiricists provide them.

The subject comes and goes in response to the things that are happening around. It is the objects that create the subject. For example, if there is no light, you have no way of looking at anything. When light falls on an “object,” the refection of that light activates the optic nerve. That in its turn activates the memory cells. When once the memory cells are activated, all the knowledge you have about it comes into operation. So, it is that which is happening there that has created the subject which is the knowledge.

Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you’. There is nothing there inside you other than that.

Sure. We have to assume stuff. WE have to take the advice and ideas of experts. We also have to doubt experts. I actually don’t think - referring ina sense to what you write below - one can manage without both rationalism or empiricism or finding ways to hone our intuition. No one likes to admit, it seems, that one must rely on intuition and cannot avoid it, but they all do.

Sure, not quite sure how this is more sinister than what I said. I wasn’t saying it was sinister, I was presenting a neutral argument. So this isn’t more sinister, but focusing on dangerous aspects of our situation and what can happen if one denies realism. But the truth is everyone believes in the power of cliffs to kill them. They cannot simply decide not to believe in them unless they are on hallucinogens or psychotic. So we really don’t know what the power of belief is, but you gotta go a hellava lot deeper down to actually shift beliefs.

I think it’s better to say, How can be develop a servicable map when we lack certainty and how can we continue to improve it.

Taken in a broad sense we are all rationalists and we all appeal rely on authority. We simply cannot be empiricists for all the decisions we make.

That’s fine as far as I am concerned, if only the humans in that camp understood that it was possible instead of giving it lip service. They treat anything that consensus science has not verified as false. They seem to have no option of agnositicism and no memory of the history of science.

They also do not understand that scientific models are nto the same as research data. Nor do they understand that science has metaphysics and this can be wrong also, so the way they look at anomolies is pathological. And interpersonally, they are very damaging, especially as a group. They are holding back knowledge because they think their models (that is metaphysics) rules this knowledge out. They are just another religion that also does empirical research within their models.

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Sure, but the empiricists are also using rationalism. Like - the universe has natural laws, for example. Sheldrake called them out for that, and got called a nutcase, though in the last decades research is now showing that things we considered laws and constants are not that. They constantly use deduction from models to rule out things, not understanding that their models have changed metaphors and paradigms in ways that not even Kuhn wanted to look at. And there is still this very harsh male mental rage guiding the communities reaction to anything that smacks to the scientists and their groupies as religious, spiritual and emotional. Couple them with the technocrats controlled by the corporations and you have some really pernicious real life changes happening worldwide by these supposedly rational people.

As I stated earlier, neither can the universe be omnipresent, that’s why it’s now called a multiverse.

Again: existence = otherness

I don’t think we’re on the same page… I’m not talking about being rational or irrational
I’m talking about rationalism as in the epistemology… not a mode of thinking.

And my statement about our situation being more dire was in reference to your proposed solution as a means to bridge the gap between us.
I meant to point out that the gap between us is wider than that…

What prismatic wants from me is a rational justification… but neither I nor he (in effect) needs one.
Only Rationalists think we need one…

Rationalists trust logic and reason above everything else to tell them what is true and what isn’t.
Without a benevolent god in our a-priori list of assumptions, we can’t trust our senses or any of our intuitions at all…
That’s gg for reationalism, presuppose a benevolent god or universe or become a skeptic.
that’s why prismatic talks about god so much.

Empiricists trust their experiences above everything else… but the mental models they rationally construct, however supported by the evidence, are always suspect
Hence why scientific theories are “theories” and the principle of falsification exists.
They view the suggestion about untrustworthy senses as a rational construct and an unfalsifiable one at that and dismiss it.

Skeptics trust nothing… or so they say, but they still don’t go galavanting off cliffs, so that’s a load of nonsense.

And pragmatists like myself, don’t give a damn about what’s really true, only about how well it works.

… so how do we bridge these gaps?

There is no escaping logic and rationality. It marks the limits of our human comprehension, so however we model reality, it must be rational for us to comprehend it.
There is no escaping experience either, that’s HOW we know logic and rationality is the limit of our comprehension… or that anything exists at all.

Even though some people treat it that way, this isn’t just some pointless intellectual exercise like pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin
You cannot be a goal seeking agent without a terrain… and you cannot generate a terrain without an epistemology.
We’re talking about the literal foundation for how we move through life… and the fact remains, not a soul here is lacking in conviction regarding the existence of gravity… or the table in front of them.

The onus is on them to square their behavior with what they are professing.

wrong thread

Me too. You cannot function just on empiricism. What do you do when you wake up? Start researching everything. You have to deduce based on memory. And even to do empirical research requires assumptions that one rationalizes out. IOW you have to think that you at any given moment can using deduction and intuition reach correct conclusions, regardless of how much you argue you are an empiricist. And these deductive and intuitive processes have to do with metaphysics, reasoning itself, memory, perception - which includes the whole model of subject, perception, objects - and so on. There are no pure empiricists except maybe things like sea anemoni.

First you need to note there are many perspectives to what-is-reality from the crudest common-sense to the highest philosophical perspectives.

You are merely stuck in the common and conventional sense of reality. In these two perspectives, no normal person will doubt there is no common sense table at all. In these perspectives, there is a table for putting things on and avoid bumping into.

But to advance in knowledge one must be able to shift gears into the higher levels of knowledge.
Example, common sense tells us water, ice, steam, clouds are distinctly different to the uninformed. But for a physicist or chemist, these are all the same when they are turned to steam or all to ice, or looked when within a electron microscope.
Therefore if someone insist water, ice, steam, clouds are distinctly different, there is room for doubts to discover the higher truths that they are in fact the same from a different perspective.

There was once where physical objects down to the quarks are independently objective from the subject, but then the Wave Collapse Function proved the final object could be a wave or particle depending on the subject’s intervention.

Thus one of the greatest asset for one to doubt [a real independent permanent object table] is the opportunity to achieve higher advance knowledge that could optimize one’s well being and that of others.

The critical point here is to accept the table is real in one sense while at the same time, it is not real in another sense, i.e. accept p and not-p exists at the same time in different perspectives.

One ultimate is to recognize the self is real in one sense and at the same time an illusion in another sense in different perspectives.
This p and not-p will prevent one from clinging to a God to save the only real self [dogmatic belief] to eternal life where that God is accompanied by words and commands to kill and commit relentless evils upon non-believers.

Btw, you still have not demonstrate [against Russell’s doubts] to me there is a real independent and permanent objectively real table out there.

Note a can with 10 marbles is different from a can of 100 marbles.
A table has X number of atoms and electrons, and this number changes at every micro-second. Thus you cannot claim there is a permanent same objective table out there.

A more obvious would be an objective apple out there on a table.
That apple has X number of atoms and electrons.
At every nano-seconds, there could be atoms leaving the apple or added to it from the air.
With such nano-changes one cannot claim there is a permanently same apple.
In time that supposedly permanent objective apple out there would be a rotten apple with X minus 1-billion atoms and later becoming a mere pile of rubbish.

Well the multiverse is omnipresent then [ although its only hypothetical so it might not actually exist ]

One point;
Whatever objective statements from Science [in this case Physics] are based on intersubjective agreements within the specific group of sufficient scientists involved.
The objective statement of the existence of a multiverse from a group of Physicists [scientists] is thus grounded on an intersubjective consensus, thus fundamentally subjective.

The majority consensus of this group of physicists many total up to only 50 leveraged upon compliance to the Scientific Framework and System of obligatory processes.

To add;
undeniably useful, there is nothing great with objective scientific theories.
According to Popper POV, scientific theories are at best merely polished conjectures.

They are because of the problem of induction - even though scientific knowledge increases over time
But when a hypothesis is falsified it is the nearest science gets to what may be called objective truth

But being an empiricist or rationalist doesn’t mean you have to do without the other… it’s which one you consider to be the “reliable” source of knowledge.
bad example but if I remember that I my keys are on the table, yet discover they are actually on the night stand, I’ll assume I remembered wrong… not that they are actually on the table regardless of what my senses tell me.

The empiricist checks their reasoning, ontology, intuitions, rationality, memory, etc against the experiential evidence… if that’s what you “check” against then you are an empiricist.
For rationalists the “check” is the a-priori presuppositions… which is why it’s so hard to get anywhere without a benevolent god being presupposed.
A benevolent god would make the world such that you could know it and therefore you can trust your intuitions and senses etc… so long as you were rationally minded, of course.

Without that, checking in only tells you that you can’t really know anything… this could be a dream, you might be hallucinating, maybe there’s a demon messing with your head.
It’s a straight shot from there to epistemic nihilism and debilitating skepticism.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom… “wisdom” that you cannot live by is no wisdom at all, but mere navel gazing, self-congratulatory sophistry.

look how you treat me for not standing in awe of the revelations you bring… you assume I must be uneducated or not sophisticated enough to comprehend it.
Not much doubt in you, is there?

And yet you have dodged my question repeatedly… not because you’re afraid to answer it… no you think I’m asking because I’m too stupid to understand, much less ask the right questions.

But please humor this idiot and answer my god damn question.

Why should we doubt there is a table?
Why should we doubt, anything at all?

Pretend for a moment this is a serious question, give it some thought and present me with the fundamentals, not this philosophy for toddlers crap. pretty please, with sugar on top

Ok, to address the above recent posts:

I’ve already explained this. Perceptual acuity.

How there is always a sweet spot for objects.

If you take a microscope to a tree, it no longer looks like a tree. If you standback 40 miles, again, it no longer looks like a tree.

Now, let’s talk about the Higgs boson. It’s called the god particle because it’s the particle that makes mass. But even the Higgs can be split, and even that can be split.

We have infinite regress no matter where we look. Infinite regress that doesn’t look anything like what it was split from.

This is important, every object we see is an infinity, except, we never see the entire object, which is why we can process it in the first place, as no mind can count an infinity.

Neither can existence, when existence tries to be itself, infinite, it can’t count it, but this process causes motion instead of stasis.

To say that a multiverse is omnipresent is false, it’s an infinite number of universes and or realities, and infinity cannot count itself. That why we see something, instead of the nothing of infinity that doesn’t allow processing of the entire infinity if counted at once.

Just like there is a sweet spot for objects, there is a sweet spot for all existents and even existence itself, the infinity being finite as motion when it’s being itself.

Existence is not a physical thing but a state of being so it cannot be measured like something with dimensions can be
The multiverse is all that exists as a physical thing but can be treated as infinite because it also cannot be measured
We do not know what the size of our universe is compared to the multiverse as light cannot travel between universes
We know what the size of the observable universe is but nothing else

You cannot do science or empirical anything without rationalism.

But that’s not enough. You have to intuit that it is memory, that there is regularity, that there are rules, that you can trust memory, that things last in time. There is a mass of axioms and deduced truths that one must work with to work with empiricism. There is not pure empiricism.

But empiricists are not free of a-priori, as mentioned above. And Rationalists will also check empirically, otherwise all you have is thoughts.

You wake up in bed as an empiricist…

you have to have a bunch of assumptions (apriori stuff).

There is no pure empiricism or empiricist. They have to consider certian things knowledge that they did not arrive at empirically.

I can build a machine that will function just by iterative trial and error.
I don’t have to “program” it to presuppose anything for the process of trial and error to produce the most useful suppositions.
All we need… at bottom, is motivation and experience.

Which means we don’t have to intuit anything, or hold to any axioms save one… just one.
And so it’s very convenient that the only axiom we need is the one thing we can be absolutely certain of “there exists qualitative experience” full stop.

From that well we can draw everything else.

A state of being is always a physical thing. You know how in the movies ghostbusters, they have devices that trap the ghosts … im not even half kidding here, anything that manifests in some way, no matter how seemingly far removed from us, has a body, a limit that can be discerned.

Infinite things cannot be held, once there’s an infinite, it fractures, this fracturing is the otherness we see all around.

Light can’t travel between multiverse universes? This is news to me.

We dont know the size of the observable universe in standard science, we only know what we can telescope of light, better the telescope, larger the universe. All we’re doing is to try to capture light.

You missed my reply to your questions, i.e.;

Why should we doubt there is a table?
Why should we doubt, anything at all?

I’ll repeat the points I have posted earlier which you missed.
viewtopic.php?p=2724657#p2724657

Why should we doubt there is a table?

and in addition, to why we need to doubt there is a table

I also stated we have to doubt the table because there is no permanent table we can hinge on:

I have explained in earlier post we need to understand the many perspectives to reality as it is, thus the need to doubt the certainty of only one perspective;

Suggest you read my post again.
I believe you were too occupied with too many posts thus missed my points. You should not complain based on your own omission.

Well, that’s not necessarily knowledge, that behavior. But more important, no you can’t. You still have to trust that your senses are registering correctly external reality to compare error with success, and your memories of what has gone before. There are still assumptions all over that.

And assumptions about the repeatability of experience, your memory of it, perception, your ability to evaluate, and more.

And we can remember it with some accuracy, and we can perceive it with some accuracy -plus attendant assumptions about agency and ability to evaluate.

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No. We would have no reason to get out of bed, or start anything without a mass of assumptions.

WE can build a machine that puts together things and over millions of years might make accidental useful things. But 1) that is not something with knowledge and 2) that’s not what we do.

And you need intuition for all your movements, for all your choices of, for example, the angles at which you choose to look at what you made when evaluating it. You need intuition to have the ‘I have evaulated it enough and correctly’ quale, when you decide it works, or that you can move on to working on part B. And more.

There are no, none, purely empirical ways to accomplish anything. This is a myth. One must include non-rational cognitive processes. Not irrational ones, but non-rational ones. One must assume a lot of things.