To me your Pinter-inspired view looks to indeed postulate a “mind-independent” substance, as calling that substance a “flux” doesn’t cancel the role it plays in explaining the shared-ness and stability of the mundane empirical world.
From over here, you are another “materialist” in B’s sense. The typical materialism is indeed a dualism where “matter” plays the dominant role in the pair. Lenin was so enraged at Mach because Mach was a genuine immaterialist, while Lenin was a dualist who favored “matter.”
What I reject is the idea that there can be such a thing as a “mind-independent object” on the level of empirical sensibility. But that doesn’t mean that the world only comprises things that I myself am capable of comprehending.
Otherwise, if you don’t acknowledge that there are real objects, then how do you avoid solipsism? As Bryan Magee said of both Kant and Schopenhauer:
“both of them believed that the abiding reality from which we are screened off by the ever-changing surface of our contingent and ephemeral experiences exists in itself, independent of minds and their perceptions or experiences. If reality had consisted only of perception, or only of experience, then it would presumably have been possible for us to encompass it exhaustively in perception or experience, to know it through and through, without remainder. But that is not so, and the chief clout of transcendental idealism is contained in the insight that while it is possible for us to perceive or experience or think or envisage only in categories determined by our own apparatus, whatever exists cannot in itself exist in terms of those categories, because existence as such cannot be in categories at all.”
That is much closer to the position I’m defending. There is a reality independent of our individual minds; what I reject is the assumption that this reality can therefore be described on the basis of empirically constituted objects existing independently of the cognitive conditions through which objects appear to us.
It’s why I can’t be involved in these discussions. I’m quite sure the cosmos existed prior to humanity, or outside all conception of it. There are plenty of elements on earth that could not have been made by first generation stars. So multiple generations of stars existed before we came along. I can’t make head nor tail of any explanation of the universe that disagrees with that, among other bits of evidence (mountains, the Grand Canyon…).
My understanding of this (and no doubt some will find this unacceptable) is that the issue is not whether there was something prior to us, but whether it is meaningful to speak of existence in a way that is completely independent of any possible perspective, experience, or conceptual scheme. In that sense, prior to conceptualisation, it is neither a cosmos nor a universe as we understand those terms. It is a pre-conceptual “something”; it only becomes a cosmos when it is brought within a framework of understanding that makes it intelligible as such.
Well said! To which I would add that the point of this distinction matters because otherwise we are liable to mistake our own limited, human perspective for insight into how reality truly is. The thing-in-itself in Kant is often misconstrued as some mysterious “unknown something” lurking behind appearances. But its real significance is epistemic: it marks the distinction between the world as it is independently of our mode of apprehending it and the world as it appears within the conditions of human cognition.
In that sense, the Ding an sich (I prefer simply ‘an sich’) is less a hypothesis about an unknowable realm than a reminder of the limits of knowledge: we must not mistake the structure of our apprehension for the structure of reality itself. That, I think, is one of the reasons Kant remains so important for modernity.
So — it’s not a matter of denying the empirical facts, so much as recognising the limitations of empiricism. Kant himself taught and respected science, in fact developing an hypothesis about the formation of nebulae (ref) which was later modified and adopted by Pierre-Simon La Place.
It is not only a world of pain and suffering.
Assuming we are in a simulation, what reasons might you think of as to why you choose to have a holiday here?
The problem is that calling it a "something’ or saying anything at all about it is no different than using empirically based terms as placeholders while acknowledging that the ‘in itself reality’ will not be as it appears to us. I mean it is self-evident that things cannot look like anything when they are not being seen, for example.
I think it’s probably not significantly different from using the term noumena, or using God to talk about the unknown or ineffable. It’s a practice we employ in metaphysical discourse, and we all recognise its limitations.
That you ask me that suggests that you don’t understand my own approach at all. I’m not saying that you owe me such understanding.
I’m saying instead that you seem from over here to be completely locked into the “internal/external” framework. This has me rethinking our previous conversation on Fasching.
So your position is just a flavor of indirect realism ?
Sure. But this is a very “safe” position. No description without describers.
Just for clarity, I also insist that reality is shared. And yet also “perspectival.” But not “internal.”
I don’t see “consciousness” a the label for an “internal stuff” that “emerges” from some other kind of stuff at some “moment” of absolute Newtonian time, etc.
Right. While I utterly reject “it’s all in people’s heads” “idealism,” the so called “anti-realists” — at their best — are far less naive on this particular issue. Some people don’t even “see” the issue. And really they can afford to ignore it. I personally can’t resist trying to hammer out a coherent less-naive story, but it’s finally just a hobby or genre of poetry in practical terms.
That is something I’m quite aware of, you know. I had drafted a note which I hadn’t posted, but this exchange now prompts it: A characteristic epistemic limitation of modern individualism is that it tends to construe our relation to reality through the subject–object dichotomy. Hence the emphasis on objectivity as the sole criterion of truth.
The transcendental idealist insight it acutely aware of this dynamic.
Nor me. You’re reading what you think I’m saying through your perspective. I suppose it can’t be helped —but I’m not saying that.
Incidentally the publisher page for Charles Pinter Mind and the Cosmic Order can be found here. It contains chapter abstracts, at least. He doesn’t describe it in terms of philosophical idealism, although there are many references to Kant.
Part of the book description:
The book’s argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures.
I would have thought that with your affinity with the phenomenalists, and his with the British empiricists, that this might strike you as congenial.
I welcome any clarification that you can provide. I’d like to get a sense of your current position. Ideally, I can paraphrase it and you can endorse the paraphrase or correct it.
I think phenomenalists tend to be misread — in my judgement — as emphasizing the “internal stuff.” “Immaterialism” might be read as making the internal representation “absolute.”
But I read ontological phenomenalism (see Blouin on Husser) as a total demolition of the inside/outside framework. One way to express this onto-phenomenalism is : consciousness does not exist. There is no “inside stuff.” This will be “misheard” as some kind of ultra-physicalism. But phenomenalism preserves the subjective component. Subjectivity is “absolute,” and yet the empirical world is not inside the subject-as-container.
From-a-point-of-view-ness \ne inside-ness.
Instead thinkers like Locke made philosophy’s biggest mistake when they assumed, like lunatics really, that
From-a-point-of-view-ness \implies inside-ness.
Nothing is more real than other people.
The world only makes sense as “immediately shared.” But the world is also rather nakedly “from points of view.”
But monotheistic Western philosophy just could not live without a “God monad.” Without “truth.” So experience “had” to be “inside icon” and meaning “had to be” likewise “inside” the material vessel of the signifier.
Dualism, I claim, is fundamentally a echo of creator-God monotheism. Likewise our monologicism and logocentric tendencies echo this same enacted hatred of time, perspective, and flesh. “Someone” must be “Right.” Plurality is dissonance.
Even the old-fashioned logical positivists beat on their version of the bible, which was basically their own special access to God’s Dictionary. The final gasp of theo-philosophy was a claim on the “meaning” of words. “We can at least be high and holy and hovering Experts on what other people Mean.”
As you well know, Kant credited Hume, certainly a British-like empiricist, however Scottish he actually was, for awakening him from his “dogmatic slumbers”.
Be interesting to read Pinter’s exact wording for what amounts to the same thing.
As far as Charles Pinter’s book is concerned, here is my review. That should make it pretty clear. As far as my general philosophical outlook, see The Mind-Created World (which also mentions Pinter. Incidentally, I corresponded with him briefly in 2023 — he has since died. But I sent a copy of the review to his son Nicholas Pinter, a professor of Earth Sciences, who was very positive about it.)
Yes. Until there were entities for whom meaning existed, there was no meaning. Fine. And now that we, entities for whom there is meaning, exist, we still can’t say we understand reality as it is. We only understand it based on how it presents itself to us, meaning the sensory input we receive, and our interpretation of what we receive.
I’m told our understanding of reality, based on its presentation and our interpretation, is extremely, fundamentally flawed. I don’t understand why it presents itself to us and/or we interpret it in an extremely, fundamentally flawed manner.
I’d say flawed is the wrong word. Too pejorative. Partial and provisional and specific would probably be better going by most idealistic accounts.
Well that’s fair. And my question had always been why would reality present itself to us except through a limited and provisional human lens and senses?
Now as I said earlier, I am not an idealist and even if it were the right model, it doesn’t really change anything about how we life, AKAIK…
I think that’s putting the point rather too strongly. The point is that there is an unavoidable difference between reality and the way reality is given to us: we don’t simply receive a ready-made world, but organise and interpret what is given according to the conditions of our cognition. In the history of philosophy this has been known as the distinction between reality and appearance.
This does impose a demand upon us. If we are seeking Truth, we have to distinguish what is actually given from what we have added to it, question our assumptions, and be willing to give up faulty interpretations when reason requires it. The danger is not that our perspective is conditioned; it is that we mistake our particular, limited perspective for reality itself.
Science itself has its roots in this insight. Hence the emphasis on excluding prejudices, foregone conclusions, dogma and custom. It actually grew out of the soil of critical philosophy—but philosophy proper is, or at any rate used to be, concerned with the lived reality of existence, not necessarily ‘theories of existence’. That’s ‘philosophy as a way of life’ as expounded by Pierre Hadot.
To me the “inside/outside” framework is a massive ontological assumption. To be sure, reality only shows this or that part a mere piece of itself. But we need not assume that this piece is an “inside stuff representation.” Indeed, we demonstrate in non-theoretical life we do not assume so.
Another issue: many philosophical types utterly take for granted a “physics first” understanding of time. For them, this is “obvious.” For others, it is again not only a massive ontological assumption but divorced from the temporal asymmetry that we non-theoretically live.