Philosophy Now Forum

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:

Fundamental would be for us humans to deal with the world as it really is. Materialism and monism are fundamental.

Is the world as it really is to be discovered, or to be invented?

Both. You can't transform it to what you want it to be if you can't discover how it is.

Conde Lucanor wrote:

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:

Fundamental would be for us humans to deal with the world as it really is. Materialism and monism are fundamental.

Is the world as it really is to be discovered, or to be invented?

Both. You can't transform it to what you want it to be if you can't discover how it is.

You take a dim view of human creativity.

Surely you yourself aspire to some improvement or other during daily tasks. Or do you do all your tasks like a machine, unthinkingly ,with no ability to project your imagination into the future state of whatever it is you are doing?

Belinda wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:



Is the world as it really is to be discovered, or to be invented?

Both. You can't transform it to what you want it to be if you can't discover how it is.

You take a dim view of human creativity.

Surely you yourself aspire to some improvement or other during daily tasks. Or do you do all your tasks like a machine, unthinkingly ,with no ability to project your imagination into the future state of whatever it is you are doing?

Isn't that what I just said we do?

Do you pretend that we improve things without ever finding out what there is to improve?

Conde Lucanor wrote: That clauses and propositions can be embedded in many levels only means that they can't be more or less complex, not that they are not valid. The need for "being atomic" is an invention of yours.

It really isn't. Google 'atomic proposition' or 'atomic sentence'.

Conde Lucanor wrote:We can sum up this to 3 options. Either:
1) There is a noumenal world behind phenomena.
2) There is not a noumenal world behind phenomena.
3) We cannot know that there is or there isn't a noumenal world behind phenomena.
I pick 1. What's your pick?

Translated for you again:
1) X
2) Y
3) We cannot know X or Y.
All of the above could be either true or false.

As I have explained many times, logic is about the relationships between propositions, not the content of the propositions. When we use letters in logic those letters stand for 'any proposition', they are not 'translations' of particular propositions.

Think again of maths; if we write 2 + 3 = 5 that correctness of that sum doesn't depend on the '+3' being a translation of 'three apples', and of our really having 'three apples' to put with 'two apples'. That the 3 has the value 'plus' isn't a statement of my belief about apples, something that is 'true about apples'.

And once again, the first two options on your list are contradictions of each other (if 1 is true then 2 is false, and vice versa). But the third has a different subject, it concerns 'what we can know'. You can see this because it could be the case that (1) and (3) are both true, or (2) and (3) are both true; e.g. 'that there is a noumenal world but we cannot know that' or 'that there is not a noumenal world but we cannot know that' . Since (3) does not contradict either (1) or (2) there were really only two options.

I don't see how invoking some names adds value to this discussion. I can invoke names too. What matters is what you're actually arguing in this debate and you're not getting it right. Whether you're being faithful to the positions taken by these gentlemen, that's a matter of another debate.

The hope was that you would look at some of these people and see the sort of things they wrote about, 'the state of the art' so to speak. If (say) you read the 'ordinary language philosophy' entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy you would see how and why we think there are problems with the way natural language (and thus propositions like 'the grass is green' and 'we cannot know that there is or there isn't a noumenal world behind phenomena') relate to logic.

Me: I can only know the world that I experience.
The "world" that you mean, we must assume, is your mental states. Therefore, you're leaving your sense organs out of the experience. How can you explain your experience without your sense organs?

I never experience anything 'without my sense organs'. I can't leave them out.

I can 'explain' particular experiences in that (because I do not have just one single experience) I can place it relative to the totality of my experiences. I see a dragon, but since this contradicts the picture of the world I have built from previous experiences, I explain it to myself as a dream, or hallucination. However, as the dragon's fiery breath begins to singe my skin, I consider whether my world picture needs adjusting!

That's all we can do. I cannot jump out of my own skin and 'know the dragon' by some means that don't involve experience.

Me: I know you think you are being down-to-earth, scientific, but you aren't. Science - good science - understands that it is is deliberately restricting itself to phenomena. It does not do metaphysics. I have already quoted Newton on this.

I'm not concerned about being scientific, but about being realistic. Saying that science is deliberately "restricting itself" tries to imply that science already knows there's something beyond its objects of inquiry, but that is not the case. Science is pretty much concerned about the structure of reality, so it has to be realistic, too.

But science does know there are things beyond its objects of inquiry. For example, it cannot say anything about God because God cannot be measured. If a scientist claimed to know about God, they would not be doing science. Just like we can say 2 + 3 = 5 is correct, but only within maths. It cannot tell me how many apples I have; that is not a mathematical but an empirical question.

Me: Sure, the experiencer's body is a material object, but you think it is a different material object to the source of the experience. So that would mean that the experience involves the combination of two different material things, therefore the experience can be neither of the two things considered separately.

Exactly! The experience arises from the two objects coming in contact.

OK. Then we are agreed that we cannot know that the object we believe is one part of our experience in-itself. Our experience is only of the mix, not of a-bit-of-the object next to a-bit-of-the experiencer, such that we can distinguish between the two.

I can guess that the cake-of-experience was made of flour and eggs, but all I can ever have is the cake. It is no good looking at the cake and trying to distinguish which bits are the flour and which bits are the egg. Maybe they were separate once, but now both have gone, transformed into this new thing. Only if I could experience the cake-of-experience, before it was the cake-of experience, then could know the ingredients! But I can't.

Me: Do you think:
(a) that because we have internal experiences, we know they have a cause outside ourselves? (a 'something' causes me to have the thought 'green') or
(b) not only (a), but in addition that we can know our internal experiences are the same as that cause? (the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green)

I think we have settled with (a).
I have not settled for anything, because your formulation is false. "Internal experiences" is not a real situation.

OK. So, given that you agree that 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact', how do you know 'the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green'.? How did you separate the two, such that you can know that your perception of 'green-ness' derives only from the 'something' and not from you?

You can only do that if you could perceive something, without you being involved as 'perceiver'.

I think I have thoroughly explained what my position is regarding our primary impressions and how those impressions, as imperfect as they are for acquiring immediately all the properties of the objects presented to our perception, ultimately help us EFFECTIVELY to infer sufficient and necessary properties of the objects, as it is their objective existence, independent of our perception.

I think the use of the word EFFECTIVELY is carrying a lot of dubious baggage.

It's a great film, always loved it, but it doesn't mean its philosophical premises are correct, at least not all of the thesis we may interpret that the film conveys. So, basically, people live in a capsule where they dream their lives. Solipsism. From an independent viewer of this scenario, experience is just a mental state, a simulation, an illusion fed directly by the machines to brains. However, what's being injected into the receiver's brain is the whole cognitive package, not just the raw stimuli of sense perception, but also the conceptual framework, the connections and relationships that constitute experience. The source of consciousness will not be the subject, but the agents feeding the subject. The subject would not own his/her consciousness, not even his/her certainties and uncertainties. No knowledge possible. There would be no subject at all, proving that in this conception, anything goes.

The Matrix does not explain whether the bodies in the capsules are also fed a conceptual framework. They may each create their own, as we do, as they interpret (what they believe to be) their empirical experiences. If the Matrix had sent them persistent and consistent experiences of dragons they would have concluded 'the world contains dragons'. In fact, since the plot involves people becoming free of the Matrix, this implies that they create that framework itself, since those who escape are capable of readjusting it to fit their new realisation.

But just as those people in the capsules could not deduce they were in those capsules for themselves, nor can those people who escape from the Matrix know they are not now part of some meta-Matrix. Just like the people in the capsules, all they have to go on are their experiences, but (as the Matrix has taught them) our experiences cannot validate themselves.

So, I would say no knowledge is possible in the sense of absolute certainty, of knowing you are outside all possible Matrix's. But it is possible in the sense of being consistent - of making sense of experience. And I think that is how we normally interpret claims of 'knowledge'; they usually stop short of making any metaphysical claim. 'I know the boiling point of water ' is not to claim to have overcome Cartesian doubt.

Conde Lucanor wrote:

Isn't that what I just said we do?

Do you pretend that we improve things without ever finding out what there is to improve?

I must have misunderstood you.

I think that people including me, try to improve upon some status quo by using our imaginations to project how the status quo might be improved. Not always though. Sometime people have to be creative just to try to prevent the status quo getting worse.
Finding out what there is to improve is common . Sometime, happily , we create something , such as a perfect sponge cake or a great work of art, and at some critical point we as artists and creators decide it is as good as it can be and stop the creative process.

Londonder wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:The need for "being atomic" is an invention of yours.

It really isn't. Google 'atomic proposition' or 'atomic sentence'.

Or you might look it up yourself and find the related concept of "molecular propositions", valid in logic. If you read Russell and Wittgenstein, I'm sure you will not miss it. The state of the art, they told me.

Londonder wrote:As I have explained many times, logic is about the relationships between propositions, not the content of the propositions. When we use letters in logic those letters stand for 'any proposition', they are not 'translations' of particular propositions.

"Translated for you" meant transformed from sentence with meaning to a simple symbol, a letter representing a proposition. The third one left the content to illustrate the point, but it had been assigned the letter Z before. The first two work at the so called atomic level and the third one at the molecular level.

Londonder wrote:And once again, the first two options on your list are contradictions of each other (if 1 is true then 2 is false, and vice versa). But the third has a different subject, it concerns 'what we can know'. You can see this because it could be the case that (1) and (3) are both true, or (2) and (3) are both true; e.g. 'that there is a noumenal world but we cannot know that' or 'that there is not a noumenal world but we cannot know that' . Since (3) does not contradict either (1) or (2) there were really only two options.

You just said a couple of lines above that it is not of our concern in logic the meaning of the terms, just the formal relationships, but here you are concerned with the meaningful implications of the phrase "cannot know". You shouldn't care whether we talk about knowing, painting, describing, writing or washing our hands with noumena and phenomena. That X or Y are possible or not should be completely irrelevant for you, but just as I predicted, you now switched back to minding the content and meaning of the statements. And you're using more or less the same explanations I gave of what the sentences convey, which you had said were not valid because...

Londonder wrote:...Nor do I understand why you write that Claim #3 (that we cannot know) does not deny them. You cannot both assume you know something and also that you don't.

You're adding nothing new when saying that 1 and 3 or 2 and 3 could be true. The point being made is that you can only choose one as your claim of truth. You can only claim that either #1 is a fact of the world, or #2 is a fact of the world, or #3 is a fact of the world. You cannot claim that #1 is a fact of the world and that also #3 is a fact of the world. It seems unnecessary to explain, you said it yourself:

Londonder wrote:I understand why you write that Claim #3 (that we cannot know) does not deny them. You cannot both assume you know something and also that you don't.

And you also said:

Londonder wrote:
If the truth is we cannot know there is a noumenal world then that is the truth.

There you are positing #3 as a fact of the world. And then you have to accept the consequences of such claim.

Londonder wrote:I never experience anything 'without my sense organs'. I can't leave them out.

How would you know that your sense organs exist if they would belong to the noumenal and by your own definition, you "cannot know"?

Londonder wrote:I can 'explain' particular experiences in that (because I do not have just one single experience) I can place it relative to the totality of my experiences. I see a dragon, but since this contradicts the picture of the world I have built from previous experiences, I explain it to myself as a dream, or hallucination. However, as the dragon's fiery breath begins to singe my skin, I consider whether my world picture needs adjusting!

But since you "cannot know", all those previous experiences are just mental states, "internal" experiences, disconnected from the inaccessible noumena. So, making adjustments in your dream, your world picture, becomes as meaningless in relation to truth and reality, as the original dream. Remember, you may be in the capsule being fed with false experiences and you cannot know. Anything goes.

Londonder wrote:But science does know there are things beyond its objects of inquiry. For example, it cannot say anything about God because God cannot be measured. If a scientist claimed to know about God, they would not be doing science.

What god? God is a claim which equals dragons. I can start claiming the existence of an entity "X" and that does not automatically makes valid the claim that "science cannot say anything about X". It'd rather be: "science can start making questions about X". If the one claiming the existence of X knows the existence of X, why wouldn't science know about it, too?

Londonder wrote:OK. Then we are agreed that we cannot know that the object we believe is one part of our experience in-itself. Our experience is only of the mix, not of a-bit-of-the object next to a-bit-of-the experiencer, such that we can distinguish between the two.

I can guess that the cake-of-experience was made of flour and eggs, but all I can ever have is the cake. It is no good looking at the cake and trying to distinguish which bits are the flour and which bits are the egg. Maybe they were separate once, but now both have gone, transformed into this new thing. Only if I could experience the cake-of-experience, before it was the cake-of experience, then could know the ingredients! But I can't.

No, we cannot agree that and you're a bit confused. What we experience is objects coming in contact with each other, interacting. We know they interact between them even when they're not interacting with us, and by organizing our interaction with them, we infer their qualities as objects independent of us.

Londonder wrote:OK. So, given that you agree that 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact', how do you know 'the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green'.? How did you separate the two, such that you can know that your perception of 'green-ness' derives only from the 'something' and not from you?

Easy: I could go away and leave an instrument like a photometer. Even better: I can put two photometers. I can also ask someone to press a buzzer when he sees green and another buzzer (with a different sound) when he sees red. I can then compare that to my own observation and infer that my mind is not just dreaming greenness of redness.

Londonder wrote:I think the use of the word EFFECTIVELY is carrying a lot of dubious baggage.

It would be dubious if we actually could not accomplish anything trying to affect the world we live in, but the truth is that we do a lot.

Londonder wrote:The Matrix does not explain whether the bodies in the capsules are also fed a conceptual framework. They may each create their own, as we do, as they interpret (what they believe to be) their empirical experiences.

But experiences imply the conceptual framework: you not only see a tree, we see something as a tree. And your willingness to see, your awareness of the act of seeing, is also consubstantial to experience. But you said the whole setting was about feeding experiences from another source, so they would arrive to the recipient's brain already "packaged" as experiences. To avoid the implications, your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" scenario would need to be modified to suggest that the agents feed the brain only with mere sensations, in which case we would not have a false consciousness, but just a false body. But isn't the brain part of the body? And that's just one of many problems. If the subject wanted to close his/her eyes, how the machines would know they have to send the "closing eyes" sensation? If I wanted to move my arm, hand and fingers to pinch some skin on my shoulders to feel the pain, how would the source of sensations would know that's the instruction?

Londonder wrote:If the Matrix had sent them persistent and consistent experiences of dragons they would have concluded 'the world contains dragons'.

Again, if the Matrix sent them experiences of dragons it would also be sending the conceptual framework, otherwise the problems I just mentioned. I want to install a photometer or a dragon trap. What mechanisms operate in a "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" setting to accomplish that experience?

Belinda wrote:Conde Lucanor wrote:

Isn't that what I just said we do?

Do you pretend that we improve things without ever finding out what there is to improve?

I must have misunderstood you.

I should have figured it out.

Belinda wrote:I think that people including me, try to improve upon some status quo by using our imaginations to project how the status quo might be improved. Not always though. Sometime people have to be creative just to try to prevent the status quo getting worse.
Finding out what there is to improve is common . Sometime, happily , we create something , such as a perfect sponge cake or a great work of art, and at some critical point we as artists and creators decide it is as good as it can be and stop the creative process.

Since for human action, the world is open and complex, always full of possibilities, and our needs are determined by the relation to that world, by how we have been able to transform it, there will never be an end to human creativity. And there should be no limits to what we can achieve.

Conde Lucanor wrote:

Since for human action, the world is open and complex, always full of possibilities, and our needs are determined by the relation to that world, by how we have been able to transform it, there will never be an end to human creativity. And there should be no limits to what we can achieve.

I applaud that.

Conde Lucanor wrote: Or you might look it up yourself and find the related concept of "molecular propositions", valid in logic. If you read Russell and Wittgenstein, I'm sure you will not miss it. The state of the art, they told me.

Your claim was that I had made up the term 'atomic propositions'; that was not true. And I have read Russell and Wittgenstein so I know what a 'molecular proposition' would be, but you have not, otherwise you would not think it supports your case.

"Translated for you" meant transformed from sentence with meaning to a simple symbol, a letter representing a proposition. The third one left the content to illustrate the point, but it had been assigned the letter Z before. The first two work at the so called atomic level and the third one at the molecular level.

You are just using terms without understanding them. That a proposition is 'atomic' would mean that it contained no internal logical relationships, so (for example) its meaning shouldn't depend on something outside itself. (It turns out to be difficult to identify such a proposition.)

The point about 'translating' was different. It is that when we use a symbol like 'P' in a piece of logic it represents 'a proposition' but not any particular proposition. The piece of logic would have to be valid whatever 'P' stood for.

(Think about maths; a number is atomic in that it is simply itself. It the number '5' translated as 'five apples' then the correctness of '2+3=5' would depend on what we meant by 'apple', whether a rotten apple was still an apple, how the apples needed to stand relative to each other in space to be 'five', and so on. The maths works because 5 only means 5.

You just said a couple of lines above that it is not of our concern in logic the meaning of the terms, just the formal relationships, but here you are concerned with the meaningful implications of the phrase "cannot know"...

Because what the terms in logic do have to have are truth values. In this case, because we cannot clearly identify the subject of the sentence we cannot identify the truth value.

(But once again, you need to be clear that truth value is only like a plus or minus sign in maths. It doesn't mean 'truth' in the sense of 'this is a fact about the world' or 'I am not telling lies'.)

How would you know that your sense organs exist if they would belong to the noumenal and by your own definition, you "cannot know"?

'Belong to the noumenal'? You have lost me.

Remember, you may be in the capsule being fed with false experiences and you cannot know. Anything goes.

Not 'anything'! The experiences I have are - the experiences I have! In what sense can they be 'false'? If I experience a pain it makes no sense to ask 'is this a real experience?' Nor does 'anything go' from my point of view; I cannot decide whether to have the pain or not.

Your 'anything goes' does not relate to experience, but to our metaphysical conjectures about what might lie behind experience. It might be our experiences are all generated by the Matrix, or God...then 'anything goes' in the sense that (since all we have is experience) we cannot know.

We can also speculate that since we cannot know the metaphysics behind experience, it might be that 'anything goes' in the sense that the Matrix or God might be free to choose to alter the current pattern. And that is the case. Philosophy has noted that while we must use induction we cannot justify induction. The sun has always risen in the east so far...but that might just be coincidence, the whim of God, whatever.

Me: But science does know there are things beyond its objects of inquiry. For example, it cannot say anything about God because God cannot be measured. If a scientist claimed to know about God, they would not be doing science.
What god? God is a claim which equals dragons. I can start claiming the existence of an entity "X" and that does not automatically makes valid the claim that "science cannot say anything about X". It'd rather be: "science can start making questions about X". If the one claiming the existence of X knows the existence of X, why wouldn't science know about it, too?

It depends how they know. I might 'know that my redeemer lives' through personal revelation. Science would not deny that people can and do have such revelations, however since they are subjective and cannot be quantified they are outside the scope of scientific investigation. Same with the possibility that the Matrix is creating all our world; science can only measure our world, it cannot measure what might be outside our world. Metaphysics as distinct from physics.

Me: OK. So, given that you agree that 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact', how do you know 'the nature of that 'something' that causes me to have the thought 'green', is green'.? How did you separate the two, such that you can know that your perception of 'green-ness' derives only from the 'something' and not from you?

Easy: I could go away and leave an instrument like a photometer. Even better: I can put two photometers. I can also ask someone to press a buzzer when he sees green and another buzzer (with a different sound) when he sees red. I can then compare that to my own observation and infer that my mind is not just dreaming greenness of redness.

It is not a question of dreaming. If I cannot distinguish between the flour and eggs in a cake, because both have been transformed into a third thing, that is not because I am dreaming. Nor will bringing in other people to look at that cake help; they will just see cake too. Nor will turning the cake into the sound of a buzzer or the reading of the photometer help.

It reminds me of Wittgenstein's story of the man who wanted to be sure that a story in the newspaper was true, so they went out and bought several more copies of the same newspaper.

You agree 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact'. But you are trying to formulate some way of having an experience that only involves one object; some form of experience that doesn't involve an experiencer.

But experiences imply the conceptual framework: you not only see a tree, we see something as a tree. And your willingness to see, your awareness of the act of seeing, is also consubstantial to experience. But you said the whole setting was about feeding experiences from another source, so they would arrive to the recipient's brain already "packaged" as experiences.

It depends what you think counts as the framework. If we did not already have ideas like extension and time, then we could not make any sense of sense experiences. (Kant etc.) It could be that we don't have these ideas; that when the Matrix sends us 'tree' it comes with its own discrete conceptual package, but if that was the case then anyone who left the Matrix would be helpless. They would not be able to to interpret any sensations, since they would have no notion of relative location, cause and effect and so on.

To avoid the implications, your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" scenario would need to be modified to suggest that the agents feed the brain only with mere sensations, in which case we would not have a false consciousness, but just a false body. But isn't the brain part of the body? And that's just one of many problems. If the subject wanted to close his/her eyes, how the machines would know they have to send the "closing eyes" sensation? If I wanted to move my arm, hand and fingers to pinch some skin on my shoulders to feel the pain, how would the source of sensations would know that's the instruction?

Don't we have this problem in normal life? I might say 'I have a pain in my hand' but I do not mean that literally. The pain is not in any specific location,including my brain; I cannot point to some bit of my anatomy and say; 'look, there it is!'. If we could point to consciousness it would be self-contradictory, since what are we pointing to consciousness with? (If I am conscious of a pain, then my consciousness must be distinct from that pain). So you might say that we have a false consciousness and a false body, in that neither can be justified in terms of the other.

In the film, I assume the bodies in the capsules are like us when we are asleep; we think we are doing things like moving our arms and feeling pain, but (like many other issues) this is never clearly explained or quite makes sense.

Again, if the Matrix sent them experiences of dragons it would also be sending the conceptual framework, otherwise the problems I just mentioned. I want to install a photometer or a dragon trap. What mechanisms operate in a "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" setting to accomplish that experience?[

If the Matrix sent me experiences of dragons, in the same way it sent me all my other experiences, I do not see how I could test it. It would be like (in ordinary life) my trying to construct a test to find out if my reality was really-real.

I do not see that the dragon needs its own conceptual framework. If my Matrix experience of dragons was broadly like my experience of dogs then my concept of dragons would be 'they are the same type of thing as dogs'. But if my experience of dragons was only fleeting, and not shared by others, then I might fit dragons instead into the concept 'things in dreams'. And if the Matrix was playful, and changed the nature of my experiences, I would have to alter my concept of dragons, just as we have to do sometimes in normal life.

Londonder wrote:Your claim was that I had made up the term 'atomic propositions'; that was not true.

That was not my claim. You need to read again what I said:

Conde Lucanor wrote:That clauses and propositions can be embedded in many levels only means that they can't be more or less complex, not that they are not valid. The need for "being atomic" is an invention of yours.

I didn't ever say that you had made up the term, I said clearly that you had made up the requirement of a proposition to be atomic for being used in logic. Remember that you said:

Londonder wrote:If it was complex; if the meaning of a term was not 'atomic' then it would already contain a logical relationship. In that case, before we could start we would have to break it down into a simpler form.

But of course, that is false. There are molecular propositions and they can be used in logic.

Londonder wrote:
And I have read Russell and Wittgenstein so I know what a 'molecular proposition' would be, but you have not, otherwise you would not think it supports your case.

You are just using terms without understanding them. That a proposition is 'atomic' would mean that it contained no internal logical relationships, so (for example) its meaning shouldn't depend on something outside itself. (It turns out to be difficult to identify such a proposition.)

In my favor I have that I have never proclaimed to be a frequent and insightful reader of Wittgenstein and Russell, but you have. So you were supposed to be lecturing me on their main tenets, not the other way around. But now it shows that you don't even know the basics: Wittgenstein did not believe that an atomic proposition does not contain internal logical relationships. In the Tractatus he proclaims:

Wittgenestein wrote:5.47 ... An elementary proposition really contains all logical operations in itself.

Londonder wrote:Because what the terms in logic do have to have are truth values. In this case, because we cannot clearly identify the subject of the sentence we cannot identify the truth value.

The sentence "There is a noumenal world behind phenomena" proposes a fact about the world, it has a subject: "a noumenal world" and a predicate: "(there) is behind phenomena". In grammar it's a typical existential clause. It can be true or false and expressed in formal logic as a symbol, like "X".

Londonder wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:How would you know that your sense organs exist if they would belong to the noumenal and by your own definition, you "cannot know"?

'Belong to the noumenal'? You have lost me.

An eye is posited as a thing in the world, a thing in itself. You say that we cannot know for sure there are things in themselves, therefore you cannot be sure your eye exists.

Londonder wrote:Not 'anything'! The experiences I have are - the experiences I have! In what sense can they be 'false'?

It's your own example, your own setting of "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule". You tell me if what people in the capsule think is happening must necessarily be what is happening.

Londonder wrote:If I experience a pain it makes no sense to ask 'is this a real experience?'

Why it wouldn't make sense asking myself that question? How did Londoner arrive to his inquiries about the nature of experiences? Isn't this whole thread about that question?

Londonder wrote:Nor does 'anything go' from my point of view;

If you answered the question about the nature of experiences as "something inside our minds", then the consequences are that anything goes.

Londonder wrote:I cannot decide whether to have the pain or not.

Why? If I want to have pain, tickling, smell of a flower or whatever, why I can't have it? This claim exposes clearly what is the source of your confusion and why "brain in a vat" is a preposterous idea. You only consider the possibility of passive experiences, the subject being only at the receiving end.

Londonder wrote:Your 'anything goes' does not relate to experience, but to our metaphysical conjectures about what might lie behind experience.

But if they are about experience, they do relate to experience, don't they? "Anything goes" means any experience is possible, no constraints.

Londonder wrote:We can also speculate that since we cannot know the metaphysics behind experience, it might be that 'anything goes' in the sense that the Matrix or God might be free to choose to alter the current pattern. And that is the case. Philosophy has noted that while we must use induction we cannot justify induction. The sun has always risen in the east so far...but that might just be coincidence, the whim of God, whatever.

That's what you've been claiming so far. To be uncertain of everything implies that no facts can be stated about the world. You have just mentioned gods, brains in a vat, capsules, but there could be infinite possibilities, all equally valid, even those we could find absurd, which is the same as saying "anything goes" and "whatever". And of course, one of those infinite possibilities would be that our ideas represent objects that have objective existence, that is, objects that are real. If anything goes, you would not be able to claim as a fact that the reality in which we believe we live is not a representation of this objective reality, you can only claim we cannot be certain of absolutely anything.

Londonder wrote:It depends how they know. I might 'know that my redeemer lives' through personal revelation. Science would not deny that people can and do have such revelations, however since they are subjective and cannot be quantified they are outside the scope of scientific investigation. Same with the possibility that the Matrix is creating all our world; science can only measure our world, it cannot measure what might be outside our world. Metaphysics as distinct from physics.

I wonder how you suddenly switch to claiming that something can be known, if you're stance was that we "cannot know". When are you going to make up your mind? All you could say (the logical consequence of arguing that we cannot know) is that any such experience of revelation from a god is a belief which the experiencer cannot proclaim as a fact, not even as a fact of personal experience. It could be some aliens playing the "brain in a vat" game, inducing such belief. There could be one world or millions of them and not even measurements from "our world" would account for anything that could be said to be real. That a meter measures 100 centimeters would be just a belief based on a perceived coincidence that is completely subjective.

Londonder wrote: It is not a question of dreaming. If I cannot distinguish between the flour and eggs in a cake, because both have been transformed into a third thing, that is not because I am dreaming. Nor will bringing in other people to look at that cake help; they will just see cake too. Nor will turning the cake into the sound of a buzzer or the reading of the photometer help.

I can watch as the flour and eggs combine to make the cake. I can capture the event on film. I can design many experiments with buzzers just to find valid inferences that the flour, eggs and the resulting cake are real objects, existing independent of my perception of them.

Londonder wrote:It reminds me of Wittgenstein's story of the man who wanted to be sure that a story in the newspaper was true, so they went out and bought several more copies of the same newspaper.

That's just proof that the man devised the wrong experiment. Lots of people claiming that they saw the Virgin Mary floating in the air and spelling out prophecies is not a proof that it was a real event.

Londonder wrote:You agree 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact'. But you are trying to formulate some way of having an experience that only involves one object; some form of experience that doesn't involve an experiencer.

I said one of the objects was the experiencer, didn't I?

Londonder wrote:It depends what you think counts as the framework. If we did not already have ideas like extension and time, then we could not make any sense of sense experiences. (Kant etc.) It could be that we don't have these ideas; that when the Matrix sends us 'tree' it comes with its own discrete conceptual package, but if that was the case then anyone who left the Matrix would be helpless. They would not be able to to interpret any sensations, since they would have no notion of relative location, cause and effect and so on.

Leaving the Matrix is, of course, a necessary glitch on the plot to make the movie, but from the strict philosophical view, if experiences are fed by machines, then there's no way to awaken to reality and to leave the Matrix. Not even in their capsules, the subjects would be capable of interpreting sensations, because such interpretations would be provided by another source (the machines). But it also means there would be no subject at all, all agency would come from the machines.

Londonder wrote:Don't we have this problem in normal life? I might say 'I have a pain in my hand' but I do not mean that literally. The pain is not in any specific location,including my brain; I cannot point to some bit of my anatomy and say; 'look, there it is!'. If we could point to consciousness it would be self-contradictory, since what are we pointing to consciousness with? (If I am conscious of a pain, then my consciousness must be distinct from that pain). So you might say that we have a false consciousness and a false body, in that neither can be justified in terms of the other.

You have not understood the problem, which arises from the scenarios you have proposed. Your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" settings think of the subject only as a passive recipient of experiences, but cannot account for agency. You posit experience as occurring "inside" people's minds and even allow disembodied brains, which could be fed either their sensations or whole experiences by other sources different than what the subject believes are the sources of experiences. But if the subject wanted to generate or have an effect on any of his/her experiences, it wouldn't be possible. Either because those desires would actually be generated by the machines or, because being the machines mere transmitters of sensations, they would not be able to reach his/her consciousness. So, for the purpose of the problem, it is irrelevant that the pain in my hand had nothing to do with a real hand. What is relevant is what conjunction of events can produce the pain.

Londonder wrote:If the Matrix sent me experiences of dragons, in the same way it sent me all my other experiences, I do not see how I could test it. It would be like (in ordinary life) my trying to construct a test to find out if my reality was really-real.

There wouldn't be an "I", a subject. Not even an experience of yourself. Those would be provided by the Matrix.

Londonder wrote:I do not see that the dragon needs its own conceptual framework. If my Matrix experience of dragons was broadly like my experience of dogs then my concept of dragons would be 'they are the same type of thing as dogs'. But if my experience of dragons was only fleeting, and not shared by others, then I might fit dragons instead into the concept 'things in dreams'. And if the Matrix was playful, and changed the nature of my experiences, I would have to alter my concept of dragons, just as we have to do sometimes in normal life.

If you didn't need a conceptual framework for experience, then the mere sensations would suffice. But that goes against everything you have claimed so far. Sensation, according to Kant, is not the experience, not even the perception. These two are the sensation accompanied by the representation:

Kant wrote:"Things in space and time are given only in so far as they are perceptions (That is, representations accompanied by sensation)--therefore only through empirical representation"

Kant wrote:"...the case of the sensations of colors, sounds, and heat, which, since they are mere sensations and not intuitions, do not of themselves yield knowledge of any object"

To see something as a dragon implies a representation of the dragon as a being with spatial extension, that moves in time, that belongs to a class of objects and a lot of other relationships. Either those relationships are provided by the Matrix or they aren't. In either case, the settings are quite problematic, as I have shown above. The problem stands: if I wanted to install a dragon trap, how would that experience be accomplished?

To see something as a dragon you need
1. Qualia i.e. simple sensations

2. Conceptualisation i.e. compound qualia plus meaning


3. Concept of dragon plus confabulations regarding dragons

Conde Lucanor wrote: In my favor I have that I have never proclaimed to be a frequent and insightful reader of Wittgenstein and Russell, but you have. So you were supposed to be lecturing me on their main tenets, not the other way around. But now it shows that you don't even know the basics: Wittgenstein did not believe that an atomic proposition does not contain internal logical relationships. In the Tractatus he proclaims

5.47 ... An elementary proposition really contains all logical operations in itself.

First, what I say about logic does not require any expertise in Wittgenstein. It is far more basic than that. As I said before, it was a mistake to go into the subtleties.

Second, you cannot just pluck out odd sentences, you need to know what the Tractatus is about. In Tractatus, an elementary proposition stands for 'a state of affairs'; it is like a name. That is why: Truth possibilities of elementary propositions mean possibilities of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. Remember, the project here is to link ordinary language, which refers to 'states of affairs' where propositions are 'facts', with logic, which only relates to the relationship between propositions. That requires us to distinguish between the two; the 'state of affairs' and the logical connectives.

Third, the really basic thing to know about Wittgenstein is that having written the Tractatus (and gained an enormous reputation for doing so) he realised there was a flaw in it; it could not be made to work, basically because we cannot identify an 'elementary proposition', there are no elementary propositions. If you look at logic today it is a branch of maths, or computing, because the project to make ordinary language propositions fit with logic cannot be made to work. And Wittgenstein went on to adopt a completely different description of the way language relates to 'state of affairs'.

However, since you do not accept I have even a basic knowledge of Wittgenstein and I am just making this all up as I go along, there is no point in my writing further on the subject, so I won't.

An eye is posited as a thing in the world, a thing in itself. You say that we cannot know for sure there are things in themselves, therefore you cannot be sure your eye exists.

Depends what you mean by 'exists'. According to the criteria by which I normally say things do or don't exist, I can say 'eyes exist'.

But the criteria by which I normally say things do or don't exist are not sufficient to overcome all possible doubt, in the Cartesian sense.

Me: Not 'anything'! The experiences I have are - the experiences I have! In what sense can they be 'false'?
It's your own example, your own setting of "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule". You tell me if what people in the capsule think is happening must necessarily be what is happening.

The experience is happening. What might be false is my interpretation of that experience, what I guess to be the metaphysical cause of the experience.

Me: I cannot decide whether to have the pain or not.
Why? If I want to have pain, tickling, smell of a flower or whatever, why I can't have it? This claim exposes clearly what is the source of your confusion and why "brain in a vat" is a preposterous idea. You only consider the possibility of passive experiences, the subject being only at the receiving end.

I am happy to agree you can also imagine you are in pain etc., but we would not normally understand that as an experience of pain. An experience would be something imposed on us, where we can't simply choose for the pain to turn into the smell of a flower, but where it obstinately remains a pain. We assume such an imposed experience has an external cause, we say it is 'real' as opposed to 'imaginary'.

That's what you've been claiming so far. To be uncertain of everything implies that no facts can be stated about the world. You have just mentioned gods, brains in a vat, capsules, but there could be infinite possibilities, all equally valid, even those we could find absurd, which is the same as saying "anything goes" and "whatever". And of course, one of those infinite possibilities would be that our ideas represent objects that have objective existence, that is, objects that are real. If anything goes, you would not be able to claim as a fact that the reality in which we believe we live is not a representation of this objective reality, you can only claim we cannot be certain of absolutely anything.

A fact about the world is a fact about experience. Our experiences have some sort of order, they are not (entirely) under our control, so it is not true that 'anything goes'.

But regarding speculations about metaphysics, what might lie behind the world as we experience it, then yes; 'anything goes' in the sense that we cannot know.

I wonder how you suddenly switch to claiming that something can be known, if you're stance was that we "cannot know". When are you going to make up your mind? All you could say (the logical consequence of arguing that we cannot know) is that any such experience of revelation from a god is a belief which the experiencer cannot proclaim as a fact, not even as a fact of personal experience.

What you call a 'sudden switch' reflects that in language words take on somewhat different meanings depending on the context. e.g. we could say It is a fact that I imagined X - but I do not take X to be fact. or 'The dream was an experience - but I did not really experience the events in the dream'. If there is ever scope for confusion we ask 'How do you mean?' and they will explain how they are using the word 'know' or 'real' etc. in that instance.

This instance was about science. The experience of a personal revelation might be 'a fact' but not a fact in science because science does not deal with such subjective facts. Science deals with the world of experience/facts but only if it can be measured. So yes, it seems the words 'experience' and 'fact' can be understood in slightly different ways. This may be unsatisfactory but that is how human language works.

Me: It is not a question of dreaming. If I cannot distinguish between the flour and eggs in a cake, because both have been transformed into a third thing, that is not because I am dreaming. Nor will bringing in other people to look at that cake help; they will just see cake too. Nor will turning the cake into the sound of a buzzer or the reading of the photometer help.
I can watch as the flour and eggs combine to make the cake. I can capture the event on film. I can design many experiments with buzzers just to find valid inferences that the flour, eggs and the resulting cake are real objects, existing independent of my perception of them.

No, you cannot 'watch' them combine because if you are watching they are already combined. You say 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact and you wrote 'I said one of the objects was the experiencer, didn't I?'

So the 'cake' is always created because you are the 'experiencer', you must be doing the watching. You cannot have an experience of watching without a 'you', so there is always more than just 'the watched'.

Consider, when you write of 'objects existing independent of my perception of them', what would 'exist' imply? To call something an object and that it exists is to be able to say things about it; that it looks this way, it is situated at these co-ordinates, it responds this way to outside forces, and so on. But all those descriptions are derived from perception; you are talking of how they are independent of perception, so you those descriptions are excluded. So, we can say nothing about those objects. So, if we assert they 'exist', then the nature of that existence must entirely exclude all the qualities we normally use to justify existence.

'X exists' - Tell me about X - 'I know nothing about X'

You have not understood the problem, which arises from the scenarios you have proposed. Your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" settings think of the subject only as a passive recipient of experiences, but cannot account for agency

.

It would depend what we meant by 'agency'. The scenarios could allow that we had agency in the sense we do when asleep, that is we think of ourselves as separate from and interacting with the world, although the nature of the world we think we are in is created by the Matrix and we do not move our limbs etc. in the way we think we do. Or it could be that 'agency' has no real meaning, there is no thing; 'consciousness', only brains doing what brains do.

Incidentally, the 'brain in a vat' idea belongs to the philosopher Putnam. As I understand it he is really talking about language; the point about the 'brain in a vat' scenario is not whether it might be true, but whether language can describe it. That if it was true, then words like 'brain' and 'vat' would no longer mean 'brain' and 'vat', they would have lost reference.

Me: If the Matrix sent me experiences of dragons, in the same way it sent me all my other experiences, I do not see how I could test it. It would be like (in ordinary life) my trying to construct a test to find out if my reality was really-real.
There wouldn't be an "I", a subject. Not even an experience of yourself. Those would be provided by the Matrix.

In normal life I do not think I can have an 'experience of myself'. I think an experience must be an experience of something I think of as not-me. (It need not be an object; I talk of dreams as experience, but only because I am sometimes not-dreaming.) So as long as experience (via the Matrix) is of more than one kind, then I would form a sense of self, in no more or less a way than outside the Matrix.

To see something as a dragon implies a representation of the dragon as a being with spatial extension, that moves in time, that belongs to a class of objects and a lot of other relationships. Either those relationships are provided by the Matrix or they aren't.

It isn't about being able to see something as a dragon, it is about being able to see at all. We can only translate raw sensory data into thoughts if we have some sort of a mental framework. At it's simplest, we have to think the data as having a source outside our own heads; in order to 'see' at all we have to already have the notion of extension, relative location; the object I see is there and I am here.

It might be that the Matrix has to program our brains with this stuff before it starts sending us the (false) visual signals etc., but since newborn babies and animals seem to have this ability (to some degree) it suggests that it is innate, a necessity of survival. I assumed the Matrix was working with real humans; that it created the false world because humans needed it (they could not stand a world that did not work with their mental framework) . But if the Matrix could tune, or re-tune, their brains on that basic level, why bother creating the false world? Why not simply leave the humans in the capsules as vegetables, or as 'happy to be in a capsule'?

The problem stands: if I wanted to install a dragon trap, how would that experience be accomplished?

I do not see the problem. If I build a mouse trap and catch a mouse, the reason I think I have done so is because the experience is of the same type as all my other experiences. If I build a dragon trap and catch a dragon, and that experience is like all my other experiences, I would take that for real too. Both the mouse and the dragon are in the Matrix, so am I, so everything fits. C'est normale.

Off on holiday tomorrow, so I shall have to leave it there for now. Thanks for the exchange!

Londoner wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2017 3:07 pm

SpheresOfBalance wrote: No it's not! Words are not necessarily quantifiable. Give us a real world example! Instead of just stating something you haven't proven to us.

I do not say they are. I say logic is like doing a sum in that the validity of the conclusion is determined by the formal relationship between the propositions/numbers. 2+3=5 is not a 'real world example' of any thing. It is not valid because 'there are five apples'.

You evade as usual. FORGET the numbers. Show us your logic, using word relationships to form a real world conclusion based upon valid propositions.

Londoner wrote:First, what I say about logic does not require any expertise in Wittgenstein. It is far more basic than that. As I said before, it was a mistake to go into the subtleties.

Second, you cannot just pluck out odd sentences, you need to know what the Tractatus is about. In Tractatus, an elementary proposition stands for 'a state of affairs'; it is like a name. That is why: Truth possibilities of elementary propositions mean possibilities of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. Remember, the project here is to link ordinary language, which refers to 'states of affairs' where propositions are 'facts', with logic, which only relates to the relationship between propositions. That requires us to distinguish between the two; the 'state of affairs' and the logical connectives.

The "atomic" propositions submitted referred to state of affairs, proposed facts. They were valid sentences. The third, molecular proposition submitted also stated a state of affairs. It was also valid. Any of them could be identified as a symbol and be the basis for logical constructions. If X, then not Y, etc.

Londoner wrote:Third, the really basic thing to know about Wittgenstein is that having written the Tractatus (and gained an enormous reputation for doing so) he realised there was a flaw in it; it could not be made to work, basically because we cannot identify an 'elementary proposition', there are no elementary propositions. If you look at logic today it is a branch of maths, or computing, because the project to make ordinary language propositions fit with logic cannot be made to work. And Wittgenstein went on to adopt a completely different description of the way language relates to 'state of affairs'.

However, since you do not accept I have even a basic knowledge of Wittgenstein and I am just making this all up as I go along, there is no point in my writing further on the subject, so I won't.

OK, here it is what happened: you stood all along behind the argument that a major point in the discussion had to be confined to the compliance of certain rules, said to belong to a school of logic that was the "state of the art" on the subject. Apparently it was to be held as an authority and its main tenets were supposed to be indispensable to carry on with the discussion. To master its principles was to know what was logic all about. But interestingly, now that the claims of one such proclaimed authority turned out to be not supportive of your argument, they suddenly become discredited because Mr. Authority himself may have gotten them all wrong. The "state of the art" of logic was standing all along, as it seems, on shaky grounds.

Londoner wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:An eye is posited as a thing in the world, a thing in itself. You say that we cannot know for sure there are things in themselves, therefore you cannot be sure your eye exists.

Depends what you mean by 'exists'. According to the criteria by which I normally say things do or don't exist, I can say 'eyes exist'.

But the criteria by which I normally say things do or don't exist are not sufficient to overcome all possible doubt, in the Cartesian sense.

Overcome all possible doubt of...? Fill in the blank and that's your answer to what is meant by "exist".

Londoner wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:It's your own example, your own setting of "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule". You tell me if what people in the capsule think is happening must necessarily be what is happening.

The experience is happening. What might be false is my interpretation of that experience, what I guess to be the metaphysical cause of the experience.

According to you, the experiencer can only know the experience he has in his mind, therefore what is reaally happening outside the setting of the "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" IS NOT necessarily what the subject thinks is happening. It is in that sense that the experiences are false.

Londoner wrote:I am happy to agree you can also imagine you are in pain etc., but we would not normally understand that as an experience of pain. An experience would be something imposed on us, where we can't simply choose for the pain to turn into the smell of a flower, but where it obstinately remains a pain. We assume such an imposed experience has an external cause, we say it is 'real' as opposed to 'imaginary'.

No, it's not about whether we can imagine pain or not. Remember we're testing the validity of your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" scenarios, which are scenarios of "imposed experiences". What is of our concern now is whether they can stand this basic test: what happens when we are not just passive recipients of experiences? There is a world of problems to overcome to make the scenario of "imposed experiences" feasible. If one takes the deterministic approach, then the subject simply disappears, but if one retains the autonomy of the subject, then the gate has been opened for the subject to make inquiries into the nature of his experiences and what might be behind them, at least potentially escaping the possibility of being deceived by the machines or scientists.

Londoner wrote:A fact about the world is a fact about experience. Our experiences have some sort of order, they are not (entirely) under our control, so it is not true that 'anything goes'.

But you imply experience is only about states of disembodied minds. As soon as you acknowledge the body, experience has put a foot in a world that is not mental. That world does have an order. A purely mental world doesn't need to, anything goes.

Londoner wrote:What you call a 'sudden switch' reflects that in language words take on somewhat different meanings depending on the context. e.g. we could say It is a fact that I imagined X - but I do not take X to be fact. or 'The dream was an experience - but I did not really experience the events in the dream'. If there is ever scope for confusion we ask 'How do you mean?' and they will explain how they are using the word 'know' or 'real' etc. in that instance.

When you say nothing can be held for certain because we "cannot know", then it's absolute uncertainty. The effect of that is that you cannot make any distinction between dream and reality, between imagination and the real world, therefore you couldn't ever be in a position to claim something like: "it is a fact that I imagined X".

Londoner wrote:This instance was about science. The experience of a personal revelation might be 'a fact' but not a fact in science because science does not deal with such subjective facts. Science deals with the world of experience/facts but only if it can be measured. So yes, it seems the words 'experience' and 'fact' can be understood in slightly different ways. This may be unsatisfactory but that is how human language works.

Again, solipsism cannot claim anything to be a fact. The concept itself of "subjective fact" is dubious and it gets completely nullified in solipsism, where "anything goes". At least some level of objectivity is required for giving any chance of a stable belief in "personal revelation".

Londoner wrote:No, you cannot 'watch' them combine because if you are watching they are already combined. You say 'experience arises from the two objects coming in contact and you wrote 'I said one of the objects was the experiencer, didn't I?'

So the 'cake' is always created because you are the 'experiencer', you must be doing the watching. You cannot have an experience of watching without a 'you', so there is always more than just 'the watched'.

The conditions under which takes place the observation of the same objects or situations may be different. I could watch the ingredients being combined from a distance of one meter or from fifty meters. My experience of coming in contact with those objects is not the same every time, but it is precisely through multiple changes of view that I start realizing that the existence of the object is independent of my perception, and that for testing it, I can even temporarily avoid any perception. I use my role of experiencer to understand my position in relation to the other object.

Londoner wrote:Consider, when you write of 'objects existing independent of my perception of them', what would 'exist' imply? To call something an object and that it exists is to be able to say things about it; that it looks this way, it is situated at these co-ordinates, it responds this way to outside forces, and so on.

Not really. To say something exists means that we claim it is an object, an entity in the domain of reality, regardless of what we think is the nature of that reality. Even those who make the most preposterous idealist assertions, like the existence of gods, will claim their objective existence, belonging to the domain of the real, and their doctrines will be aligned with that claim. By definition, if they were skeptical, they wouldn't be believers, but agnostics.

Londoner wrote:But all those descriptions are derived from perception; you are talking of how they are independent of perception, so you those descriptions are excluded. So, we can say nothing about those objects. So, if we assert they 'exist', then the nature of that existence must entirely exclude all the qualities we normally use to justify existence.

That descriptions are derived from perception just means that there is a path between the sensation and the understanding of the objects perceived, a path that is not a one time path, nor an immediate apprehension, along with sensation, of the concept of what the object is. That is what the concept of experience encompasses: an accumulation of renewable perception events, intuitions and inferences that allow the subject to make claims about the world as being necessarily true. That entails the independent existence of beings in the world, of which many things can be said.

Londoner wrote:

Conde Lucanor wrote:Your "brain in a vat" or "Matrix capsule" settings think of the subject only as a passive recipient of experiences, but cannot account for agency

It would depend what we meant by 'agency'. The scenarios could allow that we had agency in the sense we do when asleep, that is we think of ourselves as separate from and interacting with the world, although the nature of the world we think we are in is created by the Matrix and we do not move our limbs etc. in the way we think we do. Or it could be that 'agency' has no real meaning, there is no thing; 'consciousness', only brains doing what brains do.

By agency I just mean an autonomous will. It's pretty obvious that in the "brain in a vat" scenario, where the outside agent supplies all consciousness to the recipient, the recipient lacks any autonomy and will, no consciousness of its own. It's a simple simulation where the brain is just a puppet of the scientists or machines. The other scenario is where the external agents supply only sensations to the subject's brain, but again there's the problem that the faculties that are left for the brain to use cannot be reconciled with the notion that the subject is being deceived. In other words, the whole "we cannot know" falls down.

Londoner wrote:Incidentally, the 'brain in a vat' idea belongs to the philosopher Putnam. As I understand it he is really talking about language; the point about the 'brain in a vat' scenario is not whether it might be true, but whether language can describe it. That if it was true, then words like 'brain' and 'vat' would no longer mean 'brain' and 'vat', they would have lost reference.

I see that the "brain in a vat" idea is losing ground and finding refuge, as could be expected, in the labyrinths of language.

Londoner wrote:In normal life I do not think I can have an 'experience of myself'. I think an experience must be an experience of something I think of as not-me. (It need not be an object; I talk of dreams as experience, but only because I am sometimes not-dreaming.) So as long as experience (via the Matrix) is of more than one kind, then I would form a sense of self, in no more or less a way than outside the Matrix.

I simply disagree with that. I think that self-awareness if the experience of self. In the "Matrix capsule" or "brain in a vat" scenarios, which are posited as settings where external agents supply the experiences, the experience of self is also a simulation.

Londoner wrote:It isn't about being able to see something as a dragon, it is about being able to see at all. We can only translate raw sensory data into thoughts if we have some sort of a mental framework. At it's simplest, we have to think the data as having a source outside our own heads; in order to 'see' at all we have to already have the notion of extension, relative location; the object I see is there and I am here.

Being able to see is just being able to have the sensation. Being able to see things as what they appear to be is being able to experience them, and yes, a mental framework provides the enabling conditions of perception and experience, but that's not to say the causes or the only conditions of perception and experience. There are the things in themselves and among them the sense organs, which you cannot bypass by placing the sensory data directly in the brains, as if the experience of seeing, hearing, touching, etc., was reduced only to its mental dimension.

Londoner wrote:It might be that the Matrix has to program our brains with this stuff before it starts sending us the (false) visual signals etc., but since newborn babies and animals seem to have this ability (to some degree) it suggests that it is innate, a necessity of survival. I assumed the Matrix was working with real humans; that it created the false world because humans needed it (they could not stand a world that did not work with their mental framework) . But if the Matrix could tune, or re-tune, their brains on that basic level, why bother creating the false world? Why not simply leave the humans in the capsules as vegetables, or as 'happy to be in a capsule'?

It's simple: the whole concept is problematic. At so many levels. When you set a scenario where "anything goes", even the absurd is compatible with it.

Londoner wrote:I do not see the problem. If I build a mouse trap and catch a mouse, the reason I think I have done so is because the experience is of the same type as all my other experiences. If I build a dragon trap and catch a dragon, and that experience is like all my other experiences, I would take that for real too. Both the mouse and the dragon are in the Matrix, so am I, so everything fits. C'est normale.

You are again avoiding the problem. By placing yourself as a simple observer of an event, after the event and ignoring the process that made the event an action carried out by a subject, you have just reformulated the problem to keep the subject as a passive recipient of experiences. But the real problem still stands: under the proposed scenarios, how can the subject decide and carry out an action?