humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Mar 10, 5:31 pm, David Schwartz wrote:
> On Mar 10, 1:12 pm, Mark N wrote:
>
> > Can "a bunch of particles bouncing around" exist without consciousness?
>
> I'm not sure the question is meaningful. There can certainly be,
> without consciousness, what I understand as a "bunch of particles
> bouncing around". But I don't think it's completely clear how much of
> what I understand is coming from me and how much is not.

You don't see the (Kantian) stolen concept in that? The question is of
course perfectly meaningful. It is your questioning of it which isn't
because you are presupposing the very thing which you are questioning.
If you couldn't understand what is coming from you and what is not,
you would have no way to ever answer the question about that or
anything else.

You might as well just assume you are a brain-in-a-vat - and even that
makes no sense on your assumption.

> For example, imagine if you and I were talking 5,000 years ago, and
> you asked me if two things could be the same color without human
> beings. We have a much better understanding today of how much of color
> is intrinsic (the frequencies of light) and how much comes from us (we
> sometimes see very different mixes of frequencies as the same color).

How do you know that the frequencies of light are intrinsic? That
presupposes a myriad of relationships independent of our
consciousness.

It's also a non-sequitur to argue as you are doing here that since we
once didn't know that relationship to our perception of color that
therefore we can't be sure about any of our other perceptions. Why
don't you say that you can't be sure of our perception of frequencies
of light either? Maybe there's something else effecting the
frequencies of light and then so on ad infinitum.

It's then "turtles all the way down" and you have fallen into total
skepticism out of which there is no escape. (I'm sure you are aware
that the "probabilities" and "possibilities" of skeptics doesn't in
fact rescue them, since they have no more basis for that than you do
for your "frequencies of light").

> The principle is that the way we organize our understanding of the
> world is a factor both of how the rest of the world is and how we
> work. We are as much a part of the world as anything else and our
> understanding comes about by our interaction with the rest of the
> world.

Which, according to you, we have no way of distinguishing. Which is
"us" and which is "the world"?

> It can be a very tricky exercise to figure out where that line is.

Isn't that the point of science which in effect you are rejecting
here?

>We
> may actually need to do that should we ever encounter a consciousness
> fundamentally different from our own that we need to communicate with.
> (That doesn't seem particularly likely, so no worries.)

There are no worries in any case because *the way* that a
consciousness perceives the world doesn't effect the way the world is
and it would just then be a question of understanding their difference
with us and developing the instrumentation to enable us to
communicate.

We do it now in varying degrees with people who have no or diminished
sensory capacity, e.g. the blind or deaf. Is the sun not bigger than
the earth to a blind person who cannot see it?

Fred Weiss