Time does not exist.

[Terrapin Station]

You are not contradicting me.

Cool. If you agree with that, you're spot on.

The "PROCESS" of which you speak is mental.

No. I'm speaking of extramental processes.

Do you buy the block universe/eternalism/B-theory of time, by the way?

[OuterLimits]

The claim for which there are more reasons for belief, and certainly not the claim for which there is only possibilty. The "brain in a vat" scenario only has possibility going for it.

The power of the gut is strong.

Descartes skepticism is unassailable, as everyone comes to accept.

The question: what is the essential nature of empirical experience? What underlies or causes empirical experience?

The premise here is that all you have experienced may come from a source other than what you have concluded.

The fact that you are seeing a golden sunset does not immediately imply "the golden sunset is not coming from a simulation."

This is closely related to the currently very popular "simulation hypothesis".

Possibility 1: There is a real world full of rocks trees and golden sunsets.
Possibility 2: There is a system which is generating sense data and feeding it toward my sensory area.

*Both* are mere possibilities. That's really all that either one has going for it.

"More reasons for belief" = very much in the mental eye of the beholder, in your gut.

[Terrapin Station]

*Both* are mere possibilities.

That would only be the case if you don't accept that there's empirical evidence whatsoever, that no logical arguments can rule out any possibilities, etc.

But there is empirical evidence that there is a real world full of rocks trees and golden sunsets. That's just what we experience.

[OuterLimits]

*Both* are mere possibilities.

That would only be the case if you don't accept that there's empirical evidence whatsoever, that no logical arguments can rule out any possibilities, etc.

But there is empirical evidence that there is a real world full of rocks trees and golden sunsets. That's just what we experience.

All experience is processed through tacit beliefs. Early audiences viewing the film of the train coming at them "experienced" it as sensory realness and tried to get out of the way, which would not happen today. If I told you that everything you experienced your entire life was in fact some form of VR simulation, this would fit 100% with what you have experienced and what you have tacitly concluded about it.

[Belinda]

Prothero wrote:

Some seem to speculate independent reality is frozen, eternal and timeless or completely beyond access and therefore can neither be experienced nor known. I think the rather amazing efficacy of science and the senses in utilitarian pragmatic terms is sufficient proof of our ability to encounter and manipulate an external independent reality and to "know" a lot of about it. Of course my definition of "knowledge" is a pragmatic one, not an idealistic one.

Our ability so far to encounter and manipulate an independent external reality is cumulative despite paradigm shifts and moral disability. If one accepts this then one necessarily accepts also that we approach more closely the independent, frozen, and timeless reality. Probably as we are creatures of time we can never attain the latter.

This is not an argument for absolute progress because we have no absolute criteria but only ad hoc and culturally relative criteria. However it is an argument that supports reason and the modern as against the postmodern all -consuming nihilistic relativism.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Cool. If you agree with that, you're spot on.

The "PROCESS" of which you speak is mental.

No. I'm speaking of extramental processes.

Do you buy the block universe/eternalism/B-theory of time, by the way?

The indentification of patterns and processes is wholly mental. The universe does not know what you are thinking about, It does not care what you are thinking about and the 'process' is about what interests the human mind, about what happens in the universe. A natural process is a narrative about the universe.

Whatever the "block universe/eternalism/B-theory of time" was last year, is today, or whatever is is tomorrow is a narrative to save the appearances of the universe. I am sure we will have a better narrative in 100 years time, and the "block universe/eternalism/B-theory of time", what ever that might be will be superseded. But the universe as a whole, shall not have changed in a hundred years, but our experience of it shall.
So just like the Geocentric, then the Copernican, then the Kepler model, then the Newtonian model have all passed into history there is no particular reason to suppose that our conception of the universe as it currently stands will be robust enough to avoid revision and paradigm change.

Our narratives of the universe survive as lang as they work and seem to fit.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Prothero wrote:

Some seem to speculate independent reality is frozen, eternal and timeless or completely beyond access and therefore can neither be experienced nor known. I think the rather amazing efficacy of science and the senses in utilitarian pragmatic terms is sufficient proof of our ability to encounter and manipulate an external independent reality and to "know" a lot of about it. Of course my definition of "knowledge" is a pragmatic one, not an idealistic one.

Our ability so far to encounter and manipulate an independent external reality is cumulative despite paradigm shifts and moral disability. If one accepts this then one necessarily accepts also that we approach more closely the independent, frozen, and timeless reality. Probably as we are creatures of time we can never attain the latter.

This is not an argument for absolute progress because we have no absolute criteria but only ad hoc and culturally relative criteria. However it is an argument that supports reason and the modern as against the postmodern all -consuming nihilistic relativism.

We like to pretend that our model of the universe is getting better, closer to the reality of the situation, but we shall never know if we shall remain playing with pebbles in the shore, whilst the vast ocean of knowledge remains unknown to us.
It might be that we can only understand dry things, and the seawater is invisible to the limits of our perceptions.

[Terrapin Station]

All experience is processed through tacit beliefs.

That's a claim, alright. What, other than possibility, do you take to be a reason to buy that claim?

A handful or two of examples of us concluding that beliefs are or were inaccurate wouldn't be sufficient, because (a) the claim you're making is about all experience, not just some, and (b) to know that some experience is inaccurate, it's necessary to have concluded that some experience is accurate--that's required to know "what was really going on," so that it's necessary to conclude in at least some cases that experience being processed through tacit beliefs, if that's the case, is irrelevant for knowing what the world is really like.

If I told you that everything you experienced your entire life was in fact some form of VR simulation, this would fit 100% with what you have experienced and what you have tacitly concluded about it.

Hence why it's a possibility, otherwise it wouldn't be a possibility. But being a possibility isn't sufficient for belief. We need reasons other than possibility to buy something.

Also, I don't know why you keep using the word "tacit." What I've concluded about experience with respect to the possibility of it being a VR simulation isn't tacit. It's a belief present-to-consciousness that I've made quite explicit. And in the earlier occurrence of "tacit" from you in this post, it seems like you're suggesting unconscious beliefs. I don't buy that there are any such things.

[Terrapin Station]

The indentification of patterns and processes is wholly mental. The universe does not know what you are thinking about, It does not care what you are thinking about

I agree with you completely up to that point.

and the 'process' is about what interests the human mind, about what happens in the universe.

At that point, no. You completely lose me. Extramental processes aren't about anything. They have no intentionality. It's simply the fact that things in the world are not static. Their relations change relative to each other, and many things (all things that are not ontic simples) are the things they are by virtue of those changing relations in combination with (dynamic) structures (qua structures) and the particular simples that comprise them.

A natural process is a narrative about the universe.

I have no idea what that would be saying.

Whatever the "block universe/eternalism/B-theory of time" was last year, is today, or whatever is is tomorrow is a narrative to save the appearances of the universe.

It seems to me like you're continually conflating our thinking about things and what the thinking is about. Those are two different things. It's not like I'm going to start to agree to conflate them and not see them as two different things if you just keep repeating the conflation in different ways. You'd need an argument for why what I take to be a conflation should be made, and shouldn't be considered a conflation.

I agree that there are concepts, theories, etc. about a block universe, etc., but I don't agree that what the concepts, theories, etc. are about in this case is only our concepts, theories, etc. They're about what the world is like outside of our concepts, theories, etc.

But the universe as a whole, shall not have changed in a hundred years, but our experience of it shall.

So without calling it that, maybe, you do buy the block universe view. I don't. And in my view, the universe as a whole isn't the same from instant to instant.

[Belinda]

Prothero wrote:

Some seem to speculate independent reality is frozen, eternal and timeless or completely beyond access and therefore can neither be experienced nor known. I think the rather amazing efficacy of science and the senses in utilitarian pragmatic terms is sufficient proof of our ability to encounter and manipulate an external independent reality and to "know" a lot of about it. Of course my definition of "knowledge" is a pragmatic one, not an idealistic one.

Our ability so far to encounter and manipulate an independent external reality is cumulative despite paradigm shifts and moral disability. If one accepts this then one necessarily accepts also that we approach more closely the independent, frozen, and timeless reality. Probably as we are creatures of time we can never attain the latter.

This is not an argument for absolute progress because we have no absolute criteria but only ad hoc and culturally relative criteria. However it is an argument that supports reason and the modern as against the postmodern all -consuming nihilistic relativism.

We like to pretend that our model of the universe is getting better, closer to the reality of the situation, but we shall never know if we shall remain playing with pebbles in the shore, whilst the vast ocean of knowledge remains unknown to us.
It might be that we can only understand dry things, and the seawater is invisible to the limits of our perceptions.

This from Hobbes'Choice shows the possibility of multiple realities that compose "the vast ocean ". Indeed reality as development borne along on time we have access to only two of those realities. The two realities which we perceive are the mental and the physical. Please note that I'm not implying that those two realities are separated by more than our inability to perceive two aspects of "the great ocean" at exactly the same time.

[Terrapin Station]

duplicate

[Terrapin Station]

This from Hobbes'Choice shows the possibility of multiple realities that compose "the vast ocean ". Indeed reality as development borne along on time we have access to only two of those realities. The two realities which we perceive are the mental and the physical. Please note that I'm not implying that those two realities are separated by more than our inability to perceive two aspects of "the great ocean" at exactly the same time.

In my view it's not "multiple realities" but the fact that reality is "perspectival" or "reference-pointal" ("perspectival" isn't meant to suggest mentality; it's meant more in the sense of perspective in the visual arts). In other words, properties are unique at (and thus relative to) each reference point, with there being no preferred reference point in this regard, and with reference points that are concatenations of multiple reference points simply being another reference point (so that I'm not using "point" in a literal mathematical sense, either; I'm using something closer to "reference frame," although I avoid that phrase to avoid the notion that I'm simply talking about standard relativity theory).

[OuterLimits]

But being a possibility isn't sufficient for belief. We need reasons other than possibility to buy something.

Why buy? There's no gun at your head.

You don't have to keep on buying something just because you bought it in the past.

Just note the various possibilities and move on.

[Terrapin Station]

But being a possibility isn't sufficient for belief. We need reasons other than possibility to buy something.

Why buy? There's no gun at your head.

You don't have to keep on buying something just because you bought it in the past.

Just note the various possibilities and move on.

Well, you have to buy some beliefs, otherwise you can't function in the world (as a human who is going to function as anything other than an effective "vegetable").

Aside from that, though, it's not that one is forced to buy particular beliefs, such as particular ontological beliefs, but one does buy some when they have good enough reasons (in one's estimation of course) behind them. If you have some policy of not buying any beliefs that aren't absolutely necessary for you to buy in order to function, that's fine. Not everyone is going to have that policy.

[Belinda]

This from Hobbes'Choice shows the possibility of multiple realities that compose "the vast ocean ". Indeed reality as development borne along on time we have access to only two of those realities. The two realities which we perceive are the mental and the physical. Please note that I'm not implying that those two realities are separated by more than our inability to perceive two aspects of "the great ocean" at exactly the same time.

In my view it's not "multiple realities" but the fact that reality is "perspectival" or "reference-pointal" ("perspectival" isn't meant to suggest mentality; it's meant more in the sense of perspective in the visual arts). In other words, properties are unique at (and thus relative to) each reference point, with there being no preferred reference point in this regard, and with reference points that are concatenations of multiple reference points simply being another reference point (so that I'm not using "point" in a literal mathematical sense, either; I'm using something closer to "reference frame," although I avoid that phrase to avoid the notion that I'm simply talking about standard relativity theory).

Terrapin Station, might we name it intertextuality which you call "reference-pointal" ?

I suppose that I must be a sort of religious believer as I'd rather there is a whole of which the infinity of perceptions are aspects. I'd follow Spinoza and call the whole Nature.