The science against metaphysical materialism

[modernPrimitive2]

The type of Idealism I'm most familiar with is Transcendental Idealism which I have expounded a great deal on in several posts, even photoshopping some lovely images together and coming up with several thought experiments to get the point across, however, it's not classical Idealism which posits the metaphysical nature of reality as "mind" because as Transcendental Idealism points out, it can't be known. So I see classical Idealism as being as metaphysical as materialism. This is precisely my interest - the epistemological gap - not to posit what the thing-in-itself is as materialism does. I'm merely using the example of a simulation to demonstrate that. The point is for me an important distinction because it changes the assumptions we make about reality and we're less likely to make mistakes in judging what empirical results actually mean.

"Transcendental Idealism points out, it can't be known." Which should be a kick in the ass for anyone who is actually trying to use reason, telling them that it is nonsense. It is the same "reasoning" used by religious nuts - "it can't be known or understood therefore that proves that it is."

You aren't talking philosophy. Philosophy is reasoning. You are talking religious faith that can't be rationally argued.

No. Our position is unfortunately analogous to the AI scientist in the hyopothetical 3D game thought experiment I had mentioned previously, but you prefer to deny that. Transcendental Idealism does not argue that we should not pursue empiricism - Kant was actually the one who revived the very idea, he just also happened to show it's limitations and that's important so as not to make incorrect assertions. At the end of the day from a practical perspective it's not that important, we know that science works and tells us about the world regardless of what the underlying fundamental nature is. What I would really like to understand is why it's important to you that it does say something about the fundamental nature of reality, or is it more about the practical aspect?

 

[skepticalbip]

"Transcendental Idealism points out, it can't be known." Which should be a kick in the ass for anyone who is actually trying to use reason, telling them that it is nonsense. It is the same "reasoning" used by religious nuts - "it can't be known or understood therefore that proves that it is."

You aren't talking philosophy. Philosophy is reasoning. You are talking religious faith that can't be rationally argued.

No. Our position is unfortunately analogous to the AI scientist in the hyopothetical 3D game thought experiment I had mentioned previously, but you prefer to deny that. Transcendental Idealism does not argue that we should not pursue empiricism - Kant was actually the one who revived the very idea, he just also happened to show it's limitations and that's important so as not to make incorrect assertions. At the end of the day from a practical perspective it's not that important, we know that science works and tells us about the world regardless of what the underlying fundamental nature is. What I would really like to understand is why it's important to you that it does say something about the fundamental nature of reality, or is it more about the practical aspect?

Again, that is falling back on the religious "argument" that "we don't know therefore that proves my faith". You are putting your faith in the truth Transcendental Idealism (rather than Allah) in the gap.

Proper reasoning would be that if you believe in your Transcendental Idealism then you should try to demonstrate or at least create a reasonable, logical argument as to why that has to be the answer to the scientific "we don't know ... yet". The fact that "we don't know... yet" is no indication that your faith is any more an answer than anyone else's faith. Thor could be the answer, or Allah, any other god, or that we just don't know yet. Why do the religious have so much fear of not having omniscience that they will grasp at any "answer" regardless of how absurd?

Science has unknowns. That is accepted and is the driving force behind science. Science is content (actually enjoys) the fact that we are not omniscient. However, we are continually answering those unknowns one by one.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

No. Our position is unfortunately analogous to the AI scientist in the hyopothetical 3D game thought experiment I had mentioned previously, but you prefer to deny that. Transcendental Idealism does not argue that we should not pursue empiricism - Kant was actually the one who revived the very idea, he just also happened to show it's limitations and that's important so as not to make incorrect assertions. At the end of the day from a practical perspective it's not that important, we know that science works and tells us about the world regardless of what the underlying fundamental nature is. What I would really like to understand is why it's important to you that it does say something about the fundamental nature of reality, or is it more about the practical aspect?

Again, that is falling back on the religious "argument" that "we don't know therefore that proves my faith". You are putting your faith in the truth Transcendental Idealism (rather than Allah) in the gap.

Proper reasoning would be that if you believe in your Transcendental Idealism then you should try to demonstrate or at least create a reasonable, logical argument as to why that has to be the answer to the scientific "we don't know ... yet". The fact that "we don't know... yet" is no indication that your faith is any more an answer than anyone else's faith. Thor could be the answer, or Allah, any other god, or that we just don't know yet. Why do the religious have so much fear of not having omniscience that they will grasp at any "answer" regardless of how absurd?

Science has unknowns. That is accepted and is the driving force behind science. Science is content (actually enjoys) the fact that we are not omniscient. However, we are continually answering those unknowns one by one.

You don't understand. There is no faith in Transcendental Idealism. The argument is logical and self-evident. Let me summarize:

1) Space-time appears to us through our human senses and our cognition. (even if this is enhanced by instrumentation)
2) Therefore Space-time as we know it is an object of sense perception and cognition. [take note of the bold very carefully]
3) There is a "something" (the noumenal) that is the cause of these sense impressions but we cannot know it as it is in itself, rather only as it appears to us.

Feel free to point out anything faith-based or irrational.

 

[skepticalbip]

Again, that is falling back on the religious "argument" that "we don't know therefore that proves my faith". You are putting your faith in the truth Transcendental Idealism (rather than Allah) in the gap.

Proper reasoning would be that if you believe in your Transcendental Idealism then you should try to demonstrate or at least create a reasonable, logical argument as to why that has to be the answer to the scientific "we don't know ... yet". The fact that "we don't know... yet" is no indication that your faith is any more an answer than anyone else's faith. Thor could be the answer, or Allah, any other god, or that we just don't know yet. Why do the religious have so much fear of not having omniscience that they will grasp at any "answer" regardless of how absurd?

Science has unknowns. That is accepted and is the driving force behind science. Science is content (actually enjoys) the fact that we are not omniscient. However, we are continually answering those unknowns one by one.

You don't understand. There is no faith in Transcendental Idealism. The argument is logical and self-evident. Let me summarize:

1) Space-time appears to us through our human senses and our cognition. (even if this is enhanced by instrumentation)
2) Therefore Space-time as we know it is an object of sense perception and cognition. [take note of the bold very carefully]
3) There is a "something" (the noumenal) that is the cause of these sense impressions but we cannot know it as it is in itself, rather only as it appears to us.

Feel free to point out anything faith-based or irrational.

Typical... trying to change the topic. Or is it that you have no clue what you were claiming.

You were claiming transcendental idealism which has nothing to do with physical matter/energy. transcendental idealism is about ephemeral consciousness on some "ethereal plane". What Christians would call heaven and the consciousness they would identify as the soul or god depending on how you see consciousness. It denies physical matter/energy actually exists seeing the idea as only delusion.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

You don't understand. There is no faith in Transcendental Idealism. The argument is logical and self-evident. Let me summarize:

1) Space-time appears to us through our human senses and our cognition. (even if this is enhanced by instrumentation)
2) Therefore Space-time as we know it is an object of sense perception and cognition. [take note of the bold very carefully]
3) There is a "something" (the noumenal) that is the cause of these sense impressions but we cannot know it as it is in itself, rather only as it appears to us.

Feel free to point out anything faith-based or irrational.

Typical... trying to change the topic. Or is it that you have no clue what you were claiming.

You were claiming transcendental idealism which has nothing to do with physical matter/energy. transcendental idealism is about ephemeral consciousness on some "ethereal plane". What Christians would call heaven. It denies physical matter actually exists seeing the idea as only delusion.

Pffffffffft. Seriously. Hahahaha. Ok, maybe you got that impression from the name of it because it uses words like "transcendental". No what Kant meant by Transcendental was to distinguish from the kind of Idealism that you're speaking about. But don't take my word for it.

human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

You mean to tell me the whole time you thought I was arguing for classical Idealism? Obviously you didn't actually read my posts with clarity.

EDIT: Here's some more on Transcental Idealism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

 

[skepticalbip]

Typical... trying to change the topic. Or is it that you have no clue what you were claiming.

You were claiming transcendental idealism which has nothing to do with physical matter/energy. transcendental idealism is about ephemeral consciousness on some "ethereal plane". What Christians would call heaven. It denies physical matter actually exists seeing the idea as only delusion.

Pffffffffft. Seriously. Hahahaha. Ok, maybe you got that impression from the name of it because it uses words like "transcendental". No what Kant meant by Transcendental was to distinguish from the kind of Idealism that you're speaking about.

I didn't get that impression from the name. I got it from the nonsense of the New Age WOO dispensers and their followers beliefs as to what is "reality". Apparently they either just invented their interpretation or generally accepted George Berkeley's philosophy.

But don't take my word for it.

human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us—implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_idealism

You mean to tell me the whole time you thought I was arguing for classical Idealism? Obviously you didn't actually read my posts with clarity.

I read your posts but they were pretty much gibberish. I also read the wiki link you provided to "idealism" which some of the arguments described George Berkeley's philosophy.

ETA:
But if your argument is that our understanding of reality isn't exact in every detail then that is a damned banal point. No one thinks it is.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

[
I read your posts but they were pretty much gibberish. I also read the wiki link you provided to "idealism" which some of the arguments described George Berkeley's philosophy.

ETA:
But if your argument is that our understanding of reality isn't exact in every detail then that is a damned banal point. No one thinks it is.

The link to Idealism was a response to a specific question by Juma about competing metaphysical positions to materialism.

Well, less banal than you might think because people conflate the phenomenological "space-time" (as we experience it via sense and cognition) with an actual external "noumenal" space-time (independent of human sense and cognition) and then go on to make ridiculous metaphysical assertions that due to their naive position, they seem to think empiricism actually supports, when it actually doesn't.

 

[skepticalbip]

[
I read your posts but they were pretty much gibberish. I also read the wiki link you provided to "idealism" which some of the arguments described George Berkeley's philosophy.

ETA:
But if your argument is that our understanding of reality isn't exact in every detail then that is a damned banal point. No one thinks it is.

The link to Idealism was a response to a specific question by Juma about competing metaphysical positions to materialism.

Well, less banal than you might think because people conflate the phenomenological "space-time" (as we experience it via sense and cognition) with an actual external "noumenal" space-time (independent of human sense and cognition) and then go on to make ridiculous metaphysical assertions that due to their naive position, they seem to think empiricism actually supports, when it actually doesn't.

Have you actually read (and understood) the papers that show the empirical experimental data? There are quite a few like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, gravitational lensing, the spacetime drag documented by the gravity probe b observations, recent gravity wave data, etc. We have as much and as good a reason to accept that spacetime has a physical existence as we do that the Sun or Earth does. The fact that you can't understand this is a piss poor argument against it and your hand-waving nonsense in that post you are so proud of isn't even rational. Or is it that you unquestionably accept the opinion of some guru who doesn't understand it that told you it doesn't exist?

 

[ryan]

The reason why this is so debatable is because nobody knows what Kant was talking about. From the Stanford Encyclopedia link,

"Kant’s readers have wondered, and debated, what exactly transcendental idealism is, and have developed quite different interpretations. Some, including many of Kant’s contemporaries, interpret transcendental idealism as essentially a form of phenomenalism, similar in some respects to that of Berkeley, while others think that it is not a metaphysical or ontological theory at all. There is probably no major interpretive question in Kant’s philosophy on which there is so little consensus."
.

After reading Kent's quotes, I get the same feeling. I feel like he didn't know what he was talking about. Nobody's perfect.

 

[Juma]

The reason why this is so debatable is because nobody knows what Kant was talking about. From the Stanford Encyclopedia link,

"Kant’s readers have wondered, and debated, what exactly transcendental idealism is, and have developed quite different interpretations. Some, including many of Kant’s contemporaries, interpret transcendental idealism as essentially a form of phenomenalism, similar in some respects to that of Berkeley, while others think that it is not a metaphysical or ontological theory at all. There is probably no major interpretive question in Kant’s philosophy on which there is so little consensus."
.

After reading Kent's quotes, I get the same feeling. I feel like he didn't know what he was talking about. Nobody's perfect.

No, Kant knew what he was talking about: a problem within philosophy itself.

The existence of rationalism has fooled people into to believe that it is somehow the most perfect tool to describe the world, (since math and logic seems perfect) and fooled people into believing that what is thinkable then it is also, in principle, possible.

People didnt realize the impact of folk psychology that made things seems to consist of form and substance. We know today that this is wrong and something created by our mind to make the world at our scale manageable.

(Wood doesnt have some intrinsically woodennes about that makes it wood, it is simply made from a part of a tree. Wood is tubes of cellulosa consisting of atoms forming a electromagnetic structure.
Everything around us are electromagnetic structures. )

Kant identified this misguided belief in the pure rationality as a mistaken search for what Kant iddntified as "the thing in itself". A remaining mistake by Plato. Plato had it all wrong, the ideal world is in fact the dream world. The math and logic are really the shadows on the wall.

There is something "out there" causing what we experience but that is not the ideal world, it is the real world.

There is no "thing in itself".

The concept of "thing in itself" is not just the belief that there is something out there, its something more, a chimera, a mirage, its a folkpsychologic concept created by evolution that fools us to think that things are made of stuff. Its a folly that makes us ask what elementary particle really is made of, "besides all this QM mumbo jumbo".

The "thing in itself" is an artifact of how our brain works.

As is "objects".

All there is is structure and behaviour.

 

[ryan]

The reason why this is so debatable is because nobody knows what Kant was talking about. From the Stanford Encyclopedia link,

"Kant’s readers have wondered, and debated, what exactly transcendental idealism is, and have developed quite different interpretations. Some, including many of Kant’s contemporaries, interpret transcendental idealism as essentially a form of phenomenalism, similar in some respects to that of Berkeley, while others think that it is not a metaphysical or ontological theory at all. There is probably no major interpretive question in Kant’s philosophy on which there is so little consensus."
.

After reading Kent's quotes, I get the same feeling. I feel like he didn't know what he was talking about. Nobody's perfect.

No, Kant knew what he was talking about: a problem within philosophy itself.

The existence of rationalism has fooled people into to believe that it is somehow the most perfect tool to describe the world, (since math and logic seems perfect) and fooled people into believing that what is thinkable then it is also, in principle, possible.

People didnt realize the impact of folk psychology that made things seems to consist of form and substance. We know today that this is wrong and something created by our mind to make the world at our scale manageable.

(Wood doesnt have some intrinsically woodennes about that makes it wood, it is simply made from a part of a tree. Wood is tubes of cellulosa consisting of atoms forming a electromagnetic structure.
Everything around us are electromagnetic structures. )

Kant identified this misguided belief in the pure rationality as a mistaken search for what Kant iddntified as "the thing in itself". A remaining mistake by Plato. Plato had it all wrong, the ideal world is in fact the dream world. The math and logic are really the shadows on the wall.

There is something "out there" causing what we experience but that is not the ideal world, it is the real world.

There is no "thing in itself".

The concept of "thing in itself" is not just the belief that there is something out there, its something more, a chimera, a mirage, its a folkpsychologic concept created by evolution that fools us to think that things are made of stuff. Its a folly that makes us ask what elementary particle really is made of, "besides all this QM mumbo jumbo".

The "thing in itself" is an artifact of how our brain works.

As is "objects".

All there is is structure and behaviour.

How can you have a structure without an object?

 

[Juma]

No, Kant knew what he was talking about: a problem within philosophy itself.

The existence of rationalism has fooled people into to believe that it is somehow the most perfect tool to describe the world, (since math and logic seems perfect) and fooled people into believing that what is thinkable then it is also, in principle, possible.

People didnt realize the impact of folk psychology that made things seems to consist of form and substance. We know today that this is wrong and something created by our mind to make the world at our scale manageable.

(Wood doesnt have some intrinsically woodennes about that makes it wood, it is simply made from a part of a tree. Wood is tubes of cellulosa consisting of atoms forming a electromagnetic structure.
Everything around us are electromagnetic structures. )

Kant identified this misguided belief in the pure rationality as a mistaken search for what Kant iddntified as "the thing in itself". A remaining mistake by Plato. Plato had it all wrong, the ideal world is in fact the dream world. The math and logic are really the shadows on the wall.

There is something "out there" causing what we experience but that is not the ideal world, it is the real world.

There is no "thing in itself".

The concept of "thing in itself" is not just the belief that there is something out there, its something more, a chimera, a mirage, its a folkpsychologic concept created by evolution that fools us to think that things are made of stuff. Its a folly that makes us ask what elementary particle really is made of, "besides all this QM mumbo jumbo".

The "thing in itself" is an artifact of how our brain works.

As is "objects".

All there is is structure and behaviour.

How can you have a structure without an object?

You may be right. I dont know a better word for it though.i mean "that which to us may look like structures"

Objects are our way to create handles on reality features.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

The link to Idealism was a response to a specific question by Juma about competing metaphysical positions to materialism.

Well, less banal than you might think because people conflate the phenomenological "space-time" (as we experience it via sense and cognition) with an actual external "noumenal" space-time (independent of human sense and cognition) and then go on to make ridiculous metaphysical assertions that due to their naive position, they seem to think empiricism actually supports, when it actually doesn't.

Have you actually read (and understood) the papers that show the empirical experimental data? There are quite a few like the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, gravitational lensing, the spacetime drag documented by the gravity probe b observations, recent gravity wave data, etc. We have as much and as good a reason to accept that spacetime has a physical existence as we do that the Sun or Earth does. The fact that you can't understand this is a piss poor argument against it and your hand-waving nonsense in that post you are so proud of isn't even rational. Or is it that you unquestionably accept the opinion of some guru who doesn't understand it that told you it doesn't exist?

Yeah but that's not the argument. This goes a lot deeper than simple distortions of perception like optical illusions. The idea is that some part of the human brain and senses are responsible for constructing how we perceive space-time as a 3 dimensional matrix (along with "time"). So Kant agrees there is "something" (neumenal) impressing upon human sense and cognition responsible for our experience of "space-time" but the inference is that we don't know how vastly different this is as a thing-in-itself versus the way humans perceive it. I don't agree with extremist interpretations of Transcendental idealism, because I think that empiricism can infer something about the noumenal, or at the very least demonstrate to us by what degree Kant was actually correct. So you skip 200 years later and the suggestions of QM (non-locality) and Black Hole Entropy (mass occupying an infinite space) suggest that space-time actually may not be a 3D matrix at all. It gets really weird and totally counter-intuitive. But that's the thing - we have approached our empiricism from the naive perspective of how space-time is represented to us by our senses and cognition and we still make assumptions about what empirical data tells us about how space-time is in-itself (the noumenal). Hence the problem of a theory of everything.

So what I'm saying is that in an attempt at intellectual honesty we need to try to see beyond the naive notion of space-time as it is represented to us through our brain when we interpret empirical data. When we do that it often tells us less than we at first have assumed.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

The reason why this is so debatable is because nobody knows what Kant was talking about. From the Stanford Encyclopedia link,

"Kant’s readers have wondered, and debated, what exactly transcendental idealism is, and have developed quite different interpretations. Some, including many of Kant’s contemporaries, interpret transcendental idealism as essentially a form of phenomenalism, similar in some respects to that of Berkeley, while others think that it is not a metaphysical or ontological theory at all. There is probably no major interpretive question in Kant’s philosophy on which there is so little consensus."
.

After reading Kent's quotes, I get the same feeling. I feel like he didn't know what he was talking about. Nobody's perfect.

Well yeah there are a whole lot of interpretations of Kant. But if you look at a stripped down version it does not make metaphysical or ontological inferences and simply points out epistemological limitations.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

The reason why this is so debatable is because nobody knows what Kant was talking about. From the Stanford Encyclopedia link,

"Kant’s readers have wondered, and debated, what exactly transcendental idealism is, and have developed quite different interpretations. Some, including many of Kant’s contemporaries, interpret transcendental idealism as essentially a form of phenomenalism, similar in some respects to that of Berkeley, while others think that it is not a metaphysical or ontological theory at all. There is probably no major interpretive question in Kant’s philosophy on which there is so little consensus."
.

After reading Kent's quotes, I get the same feeling. I feel like he didn't know what he was talking about. Nobody's perfect.

No, Kant knew what he was talking about: a problem within philosophy itself.

The existence of rationalism has fooled people into to believe that it is somehow the most perfect tool to describe the world, (since math and logic seems perfect) and fooled people into believing that what is thinkable then it is also, in principle, possible.

People didnt realize the impact of folk psychology that made things seems to consist of form and substance. We know today that this is wrong and something created by our mind to make the world at our scale manageable.

(Wood doesnt have some intrinsically woodennes about that makes it wood, it is simply made from a part of a tree. Wood is tubes of cellulosa consisting of atoms forming a electromagnetic structure.
Everything around us are electromagnetic structures. )

Kant identified this misguided belief in the pure rationality as a mistaken search for what Kant iddntified as "the thing in itself". A remaining mistake by Plato. Plato had it all wrong, the ideal world is in fact the dream world. The math and logic are really the shadows on the wall.

There is something "out there" causing what we experience but that is not the ideal world, it is the real world.

There is no "thing in itself".

The concept of "thing in itself" is not just the belief that there is something out there, its something more, a chimera, a mirage, its a folkpsychologic concept created by evolution that fools us to think that things are made of stuff. Its a folly that makes us ask what elementary particle really is made of, "besides all this QM mumbo jumbo".

The "thing in itself" is an artifact of how our brain works.

As is "objects".

All there is is structure and behaviour.

This is much closer to what I've been trying to say all along....

 

[skepticalbip]

So what I'm saying is that in an attempt at intellectual honesty we need to try to see beyond the naive notion of space-time as it is represented to us through our brain when we interpret empirical data. When we do that it often tells us less than we at first have assumed.

You still are clinging to this strawman. There ls no one who believes that our perceptions give us full and absolute knowledge of every possible detail of what we measure. Pointing this out is banal. Let's look at your "intellectual honesty". The fact that our physical, empirical experiments tell us that something is there, we can know something is physically there regardless of how fuzzy our understanding of it is, If you accept this then you have to agree it is physically there even if we don't know all its properties. If you don't accept this then you are claiming the description I gave earlier of my understanding of your argument that you described as pfffffttt nonsense.

If I bump into something in the dark, I know it is there physically even though I have no idea what it is other than it is massive enough to stop me. My understanding of reality is that if you tried to walk along the same path it would stop you too even though you may not believe in the physical reality of objects, believing that it is consciousness that creates reality and your consciousness didn't "create" it. - well maybe after that sucker knocked you on your butt.

Deepak has gone several ways on this depending on what silly point he is trying to make at the time. Sometimes his spiel relies on something physical being there so our consciousness can "manipulate" it, sometimes his spiel is that our consciousness creates real "stuff", sometimes his spiel is that nothing exists outside our consciousness.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

You still are clinging to this strawman. There ls no one who believes that our perceptions give us full and absolute knowledge of every possible detail of what we measure. Pointing this out is banal. Let's look at your "intellectual honesty". The fact that our physical, empirical experiments tell us that something is there, we can know something is physically there regardless of how fuzzy our understanding of it is, If you accept this then you have to agree it is physically there even if we don't know all its properties. If you don't accept this then you are claiming the description I gave earlier of my understanding of your argument that you described as pfffffttt nonsense.

If I bump into something in the dark, I know it is there physically even though I have no idea what it is other than it is massive enough to stop me. My understanding of reality is that if you tried to walk along the same path it would stop you too even though you may not believe in the physical reality of objects, believing that it is consciousness that creates reality and your consciousness didn't "create" it. - well maybe after that sucker knocked you on your butt.

Deepak has gone several ways on this depending on what silly point he is trying to make at the time. Sometimes his spiel relies on something physical being there so our consciousness can "manipulate" it, sometimes his spiel is that our consciousness creates real "stuff", sometimes his spiel is that nothing exists outside our consciousness.

Yeah, I agree you can say something is there, but I don't agree you can say it's "physical". You can say that humans perceive it as physical but assigning the property of "physical" to the thing-in-itself is would be an epistemological mistake. The whole idea of physicality starts to break down with QM, space and time get funky, there's no real substance to be found etc. That's why it's so counter-intuitive. So yes, there is "something" but I'm hesitant to make assertions about it.

 

[skepticalbip]

You still are clinging to this strawman. There ls no one who believes that our perceptions give us full and absolute knowledge of every possible detail of what we measure. Pointing this out is banal. Let's look at your "intellectual honesty". The fact that our physical, empirical experiments tell us that something is there, we can know something is physically there regardless of how fuzzy our understanding of it is, If you accept this then you have to agree it is physically there even if we don't know all its properties. If you don't accept this then you are claiming the description I gave earlier of my understanding of your argument that you described as pfffffttt nonsense.

If I bump into something in the dark, I know it is there physically even though I have no idea what it is other than it is massive enough to stop me. My understanding of reality is that if you tried to walk along the same path it would stop you too even though you may not believe in the physical reality of objects, believing that it is consciousness that creates reality and your consciousness didn't "create" it. - well maybe after that sucker knocked you on your butt.

Deepak has gone several ways on this depending on what silly point he is trying to make at the time. Sometimes his spiel relies on something physical being there so our consciousness can "manipulate" it, sometimes his spiel is that our consciousness creates real "stuff", sometimes his spiel is that nothing exists outside our consciousness.

Yeah, I agree you can say something is there, but I don't agree you can say it's "physical". You can say that humans perceive it as physical but assigning the property of "physical" to the thing-in-itself is would be an epistemological mistake. The whole idea of physicality starts to break down with QM, space and time get funky, there's no real substance to be found etc. That's why it's so counter-intuitive. So yes, there is "something" but I'm hesitant to make assertions about it.

So your whole argument is just semantics? You are agreeing that it is real and exists independent of human awareness but you just don't like the word "physical"?

If you know anything at all about QM (which I doubt) you should know better than to evoke QM to argue about anything in the macro universe.

 

[modernPrimitive2]

So your whole argument is just semantics? You are agreeing that it is real and exists independent of human awareness but you just don't like the word "physical"?

No, I don't think it's "just semantics". The semantics actually demonstrate that we have a fundamental cognitive limitation to understanding what reality actually is.

If you know anything at all about QM (which I doubt) you should know better than to evoke QM to argue about anything in the macro universe.

Well that supports my point - the fact that we can't reconcile QM with Newtonian physics infers how utterly different the "thing-in-itself" might be from our naive conception of it (and early attempts at modelling it).

 

[skepticalbip]

No, I don't think it's "just semantics". The semantics actually demonstrate that we have a fundamental cognitive limitation to understanding what reality actually is.

So it's back to your banal BS. Yes we are limited, no one disagrees. But limited does not mean completely ignorant. I know there is something in the dark on that path that will stop me, you, or anyone else that tries to walk along the path. I know it is massive. I know it occupies position in spacetime. It is there physically whether or not I know everything about it or whether or not anyone else knows it is there or even if they believe that it isn't there because they haven't tried to walk down that path in the dark.

If you know anything at all about QM (which I doubt) you should know better than to evoke QM to argue about anything in the macro universe.

Well that supports my point - the fact that we can't reconcile QM with Newtonian physics infers how utterly different the "thing-in-itself" might be from our naive conception of it (and early attempts at modelling it).

Back to the religious argument. There is a gap in our knowledge therefore we can squeeze whatever the hell we want to believe into that gap, even if what we believe is contrary to what we know outside that gap.