/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13112468]

>Bro the world is all made of ideas and saying otherwise is a contradiction
How could one man be this cringe?

[Anonymous No.13112497]

>>13112468
can you name anything that exists that isn't something you're aware of

didnt think so m80 get rekt

[Anonymous No.13112504]

>>13112497
Realistically speaking I can see the world all around me and studies on the brain prove it's where consciousness comes from

[Anonymous No.13112513]

>>13112497
The universe existed just fine without my ideas for 13 billion years.

[Anonymous No.13112526]

>>13112504
youre interacting with your conscious representation of it though realistically

[Anonymous No.13112528]

>>13112513
someone else was there to think them obviously lad

[Anonymous No.13112530]

>>13112513
none of you actually understand berkelys argument if you say shit like this and its a shame because berkeleys idealism arguments are actually some of the finest in enlightenment philosophy and he even btfos hume. he only stumbles when he mentions god.

[Anonymous No.13112536]

>>13112528
One of Berkeley's main arguments against matter can also be used analogically against other minds other than one's own self. But he relies on other minds existing heavily, especially the mind of God, for his own system. Worst of all he doesn't even have an account of self-consciousness, because he says our own mind itself is not an idea that we can have. Berkeley relies on unobservables existing at a fundamental level. You're better off either going full-on Fichtean idealist, or recognizing the possibility of unperceived unobservables.

[Anonymous No.13112548]

>>13112536
>Worst of all he doesn't even have an account of self-consciousness, because he says our own mind itself is not an idea that we can have.
I mean he has a point. Youre always aware only of an idea of your awarenes, since your awareness is always the thing being aware not the idea. That's how he describes it anyway from what I remember.

[Anonymous No.13112562]

>>13112548
I think he has a point as well, but his position is partly because of how he thinks of access/acquaintance so restrictedly. To begin, he denies abstract ideas. It's partly because they aren't displayed in a sensible and spacial format. He has a nice argument (Hume follows it too) as to how abstract thought really involves thinking a particular idea and having associationist dispositions to think other ideas of the same sort, but honestly I'm not so convinced. All this just from my own careful reflection. Likewise I feel convinced self-consciousness is, after all, possible. For what it's worth I think Berkeley is a smart and underrated philosopher and an enjoyable read too, I just happen to disagree with some of his claims.

[Anonymous No.13112565]

>>13112526
Sure but thinking your consciousness sustains itself is just dumb

[Anonymous No.13112589]

>>13112562
>Likewise I feel convinced self-consciousness is, after all, possible
Care to elaborate?

[Anonymous No.13112618]

>>13112589
If you think about what "I" means when you say it (and it does mean something), then if you're not committed to self-consciousness you might think it might be some sort of description that just so happens to pick you out. Or you might even think that you pick yourself out by ostension. There's a nice 1979 paper by John Perry that criticizes both accounts and I think it's spot on. In fact Fichte has similar criticisms of the ostension route. If self-consciousness was like consciousness of an object, which in this case just happened to be your own self, it would be object-directed, and you wouldn't thereby know that the object of your consciousness is also the subject thinking it. If you try to get around this through consciousness of the entire system, so as to somehow "observe" the identity of subject and object, the problem repeats, since the entire system then becomes object to you, but how can you know the object self in that case is identical to the subject? You might think these problems make self-consciousness impossible. But in fact I think they prove the contrary. Perry demonstrates in his paper that we can learn something new, as it were, when we shift from picking ourselves ostensively or descriptively in a sentence of the form "P made a mess" to realizing that P = me, that is, I. In other words there's something that "I" means which can't be captured appropriately unless one recognizes that self-consciousness really does happen, even if it is puzzling just exactly how. You might think this would all dissolve if we just thought of the self as a bundle of perceptions in Hume's vein but honestly I find that to fail. Explaining that is another matter. One problem with Hume's bundle view is addressed in a book on Hume by Barry Stroud, and it would go into very complicated Hume studies matters for me to talk about it here.

[Anonymous No.13112641]

>>13112504
>studies on the brain prove it's where consciousness comes from
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Anonymous No.13112644]

>>13112618
>you wouldn't thereby know that the object of your consciousness is also the subject thinking it.
hmm do we ever actually experience this? Seems we are only ever aware of objects, the 'I' is just kind of a property of being aware at all, which we then conflate with concepts relating to our mind and body.

Probably Im misunderstanding your argument so I will check out the two papers you mentioned.

[Anonymous No.13112651]

>"all men are created equal"
>is a once-in-a-millenium super prodigy that only needs to sleep 4 hours a night
why don't ant men like him exist anymore?

[Anonymous No.13112654]

>>13112651
why don't any men*

[Anonymous No.13112655]

>>13112497
other peoples minds

[Anonymous No.13112663]

>>13112618
Are you a metaphysical personalist?

Have you ever read the California personalists?

[Anonymous No.13112676]

OP is right imo, it's just cringe and bad thinking

kind of like how a solipsists mught say NUH HUH YOU CANT PROOOOVE YOU EXIST!!!

I think really what it comes it down to is the false idea that one needs to directly experience something in order for it to be known. as in, there is a sleight of hand going on here where 'knowledge' is just assumed to be equal to 'directly experienced' and then by concequence idealism/solipsism follows

but that's just a stupid and cringe view of knowledge

I know tonnes of things I am not directly aware of. I know various countries exist even though I haven't been there. I know there is a world outside this room even though I am not perceiving it. NO YOU DONT! is just cringe. Yes I do, there is a shared real world we all inhibat and it is childish to suggest otherwise. sense experience does not construct the world, it puts us in contact with it

[Anonymous No.13112688]

>>13112644
Yes I think things like "object", "subject", "self" often break down under scrutiny. People with psychiatric or neurological problems often have very interesting disorders that demonstrate that, losing senses of self, body ownership and agency; thinking events in the world are of their own doing.

[Anonymous No.13112690]

>>13112676
Berkeley is not arguing that things don't exist outside your perception. He's arguing that those things are also ideas, and his reason for this is that ideas are the only type of thing we are aware(well and minds as this thread has been touching on).

To go from ideas existing without your specific mind thinking them to entirely different sorts of 'things' existing which we know nothing about is in his view unfounded.

[Anonymous No.13112694]

>>13112663
I've heard of the California personalists but haven't read them.

[Anonymous No.13112696]

>>13112688
>People with psychiatric or neurological problems often have very interesting disorders that demonstrate that, losing senses of self, body ownership and agency; thinking events in the world are of their own doing.
That wouldn't surprise me though, that actually goes along with what I was saying. We just conflate a bunch of stuff as being 'I', because it is based around our mind and body, but the actual sense of 'I' is just awareness. So the psychotic can think that anything he is aware of is somehow him or caused by him, the old well-formed concept of a mind and body is fragmented, it was only ever a model(a fundamentally arbitrary model in some respects, it has no real boundaries).

[Anonymous No.13112702]

>>13112676
yes but even those indirect things are ideas. one of his famous examples is the question as to whether you can inagine a tree that isnt being observed. the point is that when you imagine it, you imagine it as if you are observing it. Hence all perception is directly entwined with the mind and the same applies for things like countries youve never seen before. His point isnt that you can only prove things exist you directly see (e.g. whats in the boundaries of my room right now). His point is that your experiences are all mental and so all they really are is ideas. I guess his arguments have something to do with: if all we experience is fundamentally mental then where is the point that we need concepts of the material? Atleast thats how I imagine it.

[Anonymous No.13112772]

>>13112690
>To go from ideas existing without your specific mind thinking them to entirely different sorts of 'things' existing which we know nothing about is in his view unfounded.

we don't perceive ideas, its cringe to think we do. it's such a stupid corruption of the fact that we know about the world through perception, to turn that into 'all we know is perception'. perception is not some free floating thing. it materially arises from an embodied nervous system situated within a particular ecology. babies come from wombs after all, minds doin't just pop into being. it's like the berekely argument is essentially, "we know about the world through perception, therefore perception is all that exists". cringe sleight of hand

I side with the rock kickers

>>13112702
is fundamentally mental then where is the point that we need concepts of the material?

drugs effect the mind, we die, we age, the world appears to correspond to our scientific theroies, our percpetions are of the nature of an external world, all human perceptions appear correlated based on a material shared world, we can kick rocks, new minds come about through material bodies being born from a womb


>one of his famous examples is the question as to whether you can inagine a tree that isnt being observed.

I can also imagine minds in this way, but other people are not dependent upon my thoughts, and neither are trees. I perceive a tree because there's a tree. We both see the same tree. Because there is a tree there. When the tree falls on us and we die, it is because a real tree has crushed our real nervous systems. it takes a retard to think that because we must perceive the tree in order to know about it's existence, that therefore all we know about are our own perceptions

it's like saying that 4chan is known about only through my visual sense, and therefore alll i know is symbols on my screen. I cannot know I am communicating with others. And yet I do. Because we are/

[Anonymous No.13112786]

>>13112772
Berkeley's definition of idea is anything a mind if a aware of. You are positing something existing apart from the objects of perception, but you're not saying why you think it exists. Are you talking about 'matter'? What is matter and why do you think it exists A nervous system and its constituents are ideas you are aware of.

[Anonymous No.13112829]

>>13112772

I think an interesting consideration however is that once you remove the mind out of existence, everything becomes unintelligible and because of this, in some sense the material world is just a placeholder to explain the regularities of our perception.

>people arent dependent on my thought etc
whether you perceive something directly or indirectly its always going to be through some perceptual mental experience. You talk as if the real tree falling over and dieing is something known without using mental or perceptual experience. A baby coming out of a womb or a person taking drugs are all things we know about through mental experience and can only know about that way. They are mental. And human perceptions dont correlate perfectly. Arguably they correlate very badly or people wouldnt have different preferences, perceptions, attitudes. How do we even make abstract art that isnt a direct reflection of the world but invented?

[Anonymous No.13112881]

>>13112530
>berkeleys idealism arguments are actually some of the finest in enlightenment philosophy
Can you explain a bit more?

[Anonymous No.13112890]

>>13112786
>A nervous system and its constituents are ideas you are aware of.

no, it's not. a nervous system is not an idea. we may know about nervous systems *through* perception, but that does not mean all we know is perception.

it's just retarded to suggest we do. all our lives we live as if we inhabit a shared material world, and then these philosophers come along with their 'logic' making bad arguments that this isn't the case. But it is.

[Anonymous No.13113000]

>>13112890
Okay. I take it you accept that everything we know and percieve is experienced mentally?
So then other than "commonsense", what is your evidence that makes a material world so obvious?

[Anonymous No.13113040]

>>13112881
He just makes very convincing yet counterintuitive arguments in regard to skepticism about the world using empirical means: how much what we know and see depends on the mind. Very influential on later philosophers like Hume whos skepticism about causality has roots in Berkeley. Kants philosophies were meant to try and resolve conflicts put forth by philosophers including the likes of Berkeley

[Anonymous No.13113113]

>>13112890
You don't seem to understand what is being claimed by Berkeley or those ITT so i'll give you a quick rundown. A perceiving subject experiences what it perceives. What they experience is, obviously, their own experiences as such. Such experiences could be considered representations of material objects, since such experiences supposedly relate to said material objects. Berkeley saw the apparent problem here, where we can easily be skeptical about the supposed relation between perceiver, representation, and represented (in this case the represented being material objects). What he did was cut off the excess and unnecessary part of this equation, the represented, and instead chose the thing we are more intimately familiar with, these actually perceived representations (which he properly labeled as Ideas, since at this point they are no longer representations, as they do not "represent" anything), to be what constituted the sole perceptions of a subject. This effectively eliminated the gap between the perceiver and the perceived; allowing a subject to perceive without having to be skeptical about what it is they are actually perceiving. Such Immaterialism, Berkeley argued, is the best defense against skepticism (which was infamously popular topic in his time).
To relate this to your post, your nervous system, perceived as such, is an idea insofar as it was perceived by you (or whoever), the subject. If you were to say that you experience your nervous system *through* perception (as in, as a perceived representation of some material thing), then you are inviting the same pervasive skepticism mentioned above. The more "common sense" (to use Berkeley's words) approach, is to recognize the perceiver and the perceived (the mind and the idea), while leaving out the assumed and problematic third party (material object).

[Anonymous No.13113168]

>>13112504
Self refuting in 3 posts. Great.

[Anonymous No.13113171]

>>13113113
Great post number tho

[Anonymous No.13113210]

>>13113113
Good post in number and content.
Nervous system anon BTFO
*BLEEEUUUGHCOUGHS checkitlikeapolaroidpicture COUGH*

[Anonymous No.13113211]

>>13113113
>A perceiving subject experiences what it perceives. What they experience is, obviously, their own experiences as such. Such experiences could be considered representations of material objects, since such experiences supposedly relate to said material objects.

no it doesn't. we pre-theoretically inhabit a world of real objects, out there. it's as if there is only two options for you, an ideal world, or a material world represented ideally. it is only in stupid philosophy that these questions even arise. all the world is a direct realist, only a very small minority of philosophy students, and perhaps some neuroscientists even entertain any idea to the contrary.

you are flipping perception on its head. we inhabit a real world of things and stuff, our bodies are also one of these things. you can theoretically say "I am a perceiving subject, all I exist as is nothing more than phenomenal experience", but you would just be wrong. your entire life you have pre-theoretically been a body acting in a world of things and stuff

all this split between mind and world is just retarded, straight fucking retarded. you see this at it's limit in berekely and kant, autismal losers denying their own nature.

there is no 'mind' that percpetion is presented to, or inhabits. there is no perceiving 'subject' who 'feels' the phenomena. There are organisms, ecologies and interactions between the two, perception is a dynamic process wherby the world is navigated. a real world, out there.

[Anonymous No.13113226]

>>13113113
This hurr durr u can only know what u perceive brah shit was long demolished by Kant, why even bother sounding like a broken record?

[Anonymous No.13113230]

>>13112504
normiest thing I've ever heard

[Anonymous No.13113243]

>>13113226
you clearly dont know what youre talking about.

[Anonymous No.13113262]

>>13113211
But your view of a real world is a preconception based off "common sense". Not once have you given an actual argument. And no Id argue alot if not most of neuroscientists would argue for indirect realism. Why do optical illusions exist if direct realism is true anon?

>pretheoretically been a body
why is your body synonymous with you?

>no subject who perceives phenomena
then why do we speak to eachother like there is and assert that there is.

[Anonymous No.13113384]

>>13112530
>he only stumbles when he mentions god.
You mean you only disagree with him when he mentions God because you're an atheist. Tedious.

[Anonymous No.13113415]

>>13113384
God doesnt exist lad.

[Anonymous No.13113512]

>>13113415
God does exist.

[Anonymous No.13113731]

>>13113226
how so?

>doubt.jpg

[Anonymous No.13115221]

>>13113211
You are actually dumb to grasp this topic

[Anonymous No.13115507]

>>13113211
>only a very small minority of philosophy students, and perhaps some neuroscientists even entertain any idea to the contrary.
https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=All+respondents&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=fine
Scroll down to the heading "Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?"
Besides this, it seems you have already made up your mind, so it is apparent you won't be able to understand Berkeley's position. You can be a naive realist to your heart's content, but still you ought to take away this fact. The world around us has, for all of time, only been known insofar as it has been perceived. Your "organisms, ecologies and interactions between the two" are things known within our perceptions. To claim otherwise is to claim we know what we have never perceived, which obviously runs contrary to our experience of these things as such, according to Berkeley. We cannot simply appeal to some unperceived world outside our perceptions as easily as you think. This might come off as very unintuitive to your layperson sensibilities, but there are plenty of true things which are unintuitive.

[Anonymous No.13116004]

>>13115507
Im an antirepresentationalist. There is no perception. Just the physical mechanics of how photons affect the retina and cause chemical reactions in the brain. That is reality.

[Anonymous No.13116019]

>>13116004
You sound like a presuppositionalist Christian. People aren't wrong when they say naturalism is like the second coming of medieval scholasticism. Philosophy becoming handmaiden to science rather than theology, uncritically accepting dogmas and forcing philosophy to meet the dogmas. Thankfully not all of philosophy is this way today.

[Anonymous No.13116047]

>>13116004
>There is no reality except the heavily theoretical interpretation of "reality" generated by constructed tools that aid human perception, which doesn't exist, and also theory doesn't matter, despite it being the disavowed basis of my worldview in the form of theories of physical interaction, which by the way isn't perceived, except pre-theoretically-with-theory

[Anonymous No.13116346]

>>13116047
Ill take your criticism seriously when you can show me that the earth's sphericity is a construction and interpretation.

[Anonymous No.13116410]

>>13116019
t. little boy butthurt that god/santa doesnt exist

[Anonymous No.13116503]

>>13116346
How is it not? Are you ironically mocking your position or do you sincerely hold it? What about my post was unclear? That you even understand the concept of a chemical requires certain theories of the physical. Show me a perfect natural sphere

[Anonymous No.13116587]

>>13116503
If you were acquainted with wittgensteins theory of language you would know that language is not about representation but for eliciting responses in others - a causal process. Theories in science are just another part of this process. Games. Affordances. Coupling interfaces. You should read up on embodied cognition. And again, how is earth's curvature an interpretation? In what way is there uncertainty about it?

[Anonymous No.13116703]

>>13116587
>I shall get burnt if I put my hand in the fire: that is certainty. That is to say: here we see the meaning of certainty (What it amounts to, not just the meaning of the word "certainty").
Looking at this from any particular philosophical "perspective" (your materialism) will cause you to miss the point. He is describing how it is that a person is certain. And if you want to play a game with the word "interpretation," I mean by that a "way of looking," in the sense that English and physics are ways of looking. You are as certain when you say, "the earth is spherical," as you are when you say, "if I put my hand into the fire, it will get burned." I agree with that much.
>It is possible to say that "I read timidity in his face" but at all events the timidity does not seem to be merely associated, outwardly connected, with the face; but the fear is there, alive, in the features. If the features change slightly, we can speak of a corresponding change in the fear. If we were asked "Can you think of this face as an expression of courage too?" we should, as it were, not know how to lodge courage in these features. Then perhaps I say "I don't know what it would mean for this to be a courageous face." But what would an answer to such a question be like? Perhaps one says" "Yes, now I understand: the face as it were shows indifference to the outer world." So we somehow read courage into the face. Now, once more, one might say, courage fits the face. But what fits what here?

[Anonymous No.13116942]

>>13116410
How are you deriving any of that from what I said?

[Anonymous No.13116985]

>>13112651
creation =/= output

[Anonymous No.13117166]

>>13112497
Some new kind of fish, probably?

[Anonymous No.13118146]

>>13117166
probably

[Anonymous No.13118701]

>>13113210
kek nice pic

[Anonymous No.13118777]

>>13112468
>Bro the world is like made of ghosts but like half those ghosts are in us and the other half are given to us. o btw theres also SUPER GHOSTS but we cant know about them because they are liek super secret my guy, but im telling you about them because I wanna make friends :) also secrets are against the categorical imperative so fk em.

[Anonymous No.13118879]

>>13112504
What is their problem with reality being a particular type of ideas? It has zero (0) possible drawback because it has no potential for refutation but makes things at least thinkable.
'Realism' (anti-idealism) is esotericism for esotericism sake.

[Anonymous No.13118913]

>>13116004
Congratulatuons on being a non-subject, literally mindless and an object. A piece of data for us representation having Chads to represent.

[Anonymous No.13118925]

>>13118879
Representation is just pure semantics. What intrinsically makes post-synaptic summation representation? How is it different from the causal chains set in motion when we power a diesel engine with the motion of ita pistons?

[Anonymous No.13118928]

>>13113415
Read Proclus' first 7 propositions in Elements of Theology.

[Anonymous No.13118935]

>>13118928
http://www.esotericarchives.com/proclus/metaelem.htm#section1

[Anonymous No.13119199]

>>13118928
>>13118935
Ill be sure to read later; for now ill bookmark it in my bullshit section.

[Anonymous No.13119281]

>>13112497
Your ideas are created through analyzing the world, the world isn't created through analyzing your ideas. I can't believe I need to tell someone this. This would even be obvious to a learning baby.