How does the past exist ? Does "the" past exist?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
122

Perhaps you are a minimalist ?

For me the word is nothing more than an indicator of belief. The whole fraught theory of truth is chasing a phantom. Related to soap opera phrases like “objective reality.”

But this is not offered as the truth about truth. I don’t see any content in the concept, and I also don’t expect others to stop chasing the phantom. I don’t want to make the tempting mistake of some logical positivists. Nonsense-from-God’s-perspective is nonsense-from-my-perspective.

We might diagnose a flight from owned belief. “Seeing is believing” gets inflated to obscure “true” reality making so-and-so’s beliefs “true.”

Likewise, the scientific image is lifted out of its soil, which is situated perception and Popper’s theory-laden basic statements.

So you get alienation from the perceptual world, now internal representation, and a dualism of enacted revisable belief, now internal meaning-stuff, and some other stuff called “truth.”

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I might agree that the “referent” is relatively stable. But my point is that we revise the story we might tell about the world as we navigate that world.

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The world is spacetime containing material objects and energies, and in our little corner of the world life emerged and evolved into organisms capable of holding true and false beliefs about the world.

125

Well you present almost the opposite view, and it’s a reasonable view.

But how do you understand consciousness ? IMV, it’s the very “being” or “presence” of the world and not something that “sparks up” and causes “internal representations” that may or may not correspond to an external true reality.

( I’m an “ontological perspectivist,” sort of like Schroedinger in the aptly titled My View of The World. )

126

One motive for this OP is as a response to After Finitude.

Thus contemporary science is in a position to precisely determine – albeit in the form of revisable hypotheses – the dates of the formation of the fossils of creatures living prior to the emergence of the first hominids, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the formation of stars, and even the ‘age’ of the universe itself. The question that interests us here is then the following: what is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, or paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of pre-human species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself?
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How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin? How is science able to think such statements, and in what sense can we eventually ascribe truth to them?

My answer is that empirical statements, seemingly about the past, are best understood as statements about the future. Only by their claim on the future are they empirical claims.

Moreover empirical claims refer to experience, of course, which grounds such statements in something like future perceptions.

Since we do not know of any observer who was there to experience the accretion of the earth – and since we do not even see how a living observer would have been able to survive had she experienced such heat – all that can be formulated about such an event is what the ‘measurements’, that is to say, the mathematical data, allow us to determine: for instance, that it began roughly 4.56 billion years ago, that it did not occur in a single instant but took place over millions of years – more precisely, tens of millions of years – that it occupied a certain volume in space, a volume which varied through time, etc.
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Accordingly, it would be necessary to insist that it makes no sense to claim that those qualities that occur whenever a living creature is present – such as colour (rather than wavelength), heat (rather than temperature), smell (rather than chemical reactions), etc. – that those secondary qualities were present at the moment of the accretion of the earth. For these qualities represent the modes of relation between a living creature and its environment and cannot be relevant when it comes to describing an event that is not only anterior to every recognized form of life but incompatible with the existence of living creatures. Consequently, our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves.
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For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us.

The problem, as I see it, is these salvaged concepts are no less dependent on perception and lifeworld significance than the others. Tegmark is on the right track when he generalizes humanity. Other scientific creatures with other sense organs might agree with us on certain structural-mathematical features of a reality that is therefore “objective” in the weak sense of “inter-species.”

127

It’s either reducible to the right kind of brain activity or it emerges from the right kind of brain activity. Either way, it depends on the existence of something like a physical brain behaving in the right kind of way.

Is that like subjective idealism?

128

No. Wittgenstein called it “pure realism” in the TLP.

But I expect that my position will sound like idealism. Mill’s phenomenalism is often misunderstood that way IMV.

Basically I reject that there is such a thing as consciousness. There is only world. Consciousness does not exist.

But people tend to connect the sign “consciousness” with a kind of “internal stuff” that is generated by brains, etc. They reify consciousness, losing the ontological difference.

Consciousness is the perspectival presence of the physical.

I completely reject any idealism of the form “all is mind,” as this again just reifies being or presence as a kind of stuff that is present in the world.

On the other hand, the emphasis on perspective as something that goes all the way down connects this position to idealism. Mach was attacked by Lenin for not being a good materialist, and Mach is a primary influence.

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Schroedinger excerpts for context:

I have therefore no hesitation in declaring quite bluntly that the acceptance of a really existing material world, as the explanation of the fact that we all find in the end that we are empirically in the same environment, is mystical and metaphysical. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to make it can do so; it is convenient, if somewhat naive. He will be missing a great deal if he does. But he certainly does not have the right to pillory other positions as metaphysical and mystical on the supposition that his own is free from such ‘weaknesses’ .
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The first alternative position to be taken up in modern times was probably Leibniz’s doctrine of monads. As far as I can understand it, he tried to base that broadly shared character of our experience to which reference has so often been made on a pre-established harmony (that is, an essential similarity laid down right from the start) in the course of events taking place in all the monads, which do not, for the rest, have any influence on each other of any kind; ‘monads have no windows’ , to use the expression which has become current. Various monads —- human, animal, and the one and only divine one— differ only according to the degree of confusion or clarity with which the self-same series of events is enacted in them.
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Briefly stated, it is the view that all of us living beings belong together in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman. A comparison used in Hinduism is of the many almost identical images which a many-faceted diamond makes of some one object such as the sun. We have already conceded that we are here dealing not with something logically deducible but with mystical metaphysics—just like the acceptance of a real object-world (usually called an external world, but it includes one’s own body).

I don’t want to steer the thread away from its topic. I’ll just say that “ontoperspectivism” is the idea that each “stream of experience” is a “face” or “side” of reality itself. A naked torrent of reality. I don’t mind if people call reality “God,” but I’m not inclined to muddy the point with theological associations. To me it makes sense as an explication of science that keeps the empirical object genuinely empirical. A perception is an aspect of an object and a piece of its genuine empirical being, not an internal representation in “mind stuff.”

Here the author basically expresses my own approach

To put it in other words: for the correlationist, in order to grasp the profound meaning of the fossil datum, one should not proceed from the ancestral past, but from the correlational present. This means that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present. What is given to us, in effect, is not something that is anterior to givenness, but merely something that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. The logical (constitutive, originary) anteriority of givenness over the being of the given therefore enjoins us to subordinate the apparent sense of the ancestral statement to a more profound counter-sense, which is alone capable of delivering its meaning: it is not ancestrality which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present which retrojects a seemingly ancestral past. To understand the fossil, it is necessary to proceed from the present to the past, following a logical order, rather than from the past to the present, following a chronological order.

130

I don’t quite understand what you mean here. I’m only saying that consciousness, like digestion or nuclear fusion, is something that only occurs when the right kind of physical stuff behaves in the right kind of way.

Material objects and energies exist in the world (universe), almost all of which is beyond what Earth-bound human organisms can see or feel.

131

I agree in the sense that I don’t call entities “conscious” if they don’t have living nervous systems.

When I say that my neighbor is conscious as he tends his garden across the street, I mean that the entire world is “present” for him from “the point of view” of his nervous system. His consciousness is the “being” of the world from another point of view.

But “being” is not intended here as a kind of stuff. I mean something like presence itself as opposed to anything present. My neighbors roses are “physical” and they are present “for” him. His daydream is “mental” and is likewise present for him.

In my view, any weaker notion of phenomenalist consciousness loses something significant. My spouse has “my” world from “her” POV. I don’t see her, fundamentally, as an object in the world. Instead she is a POV on the entire world. Her consciousness is the presence of a “face” of the world.

132

I take scientific models to refer to future possible experience. I tend to trust them, but I don’t interpret them “ontologically” as many others do.

133

Unless we have the gift of prophesy, the only way we can predict future experiences is if a) there are material objects and energies that behave in a consistent manner and b) these material objects and energies are causally responsible for the experiences we have.

There’s a lot of stuff in the world that isn’t “present” for him from “his point of view”, e.g. the debris falling from the sky that’s going to kill him unless he moves onto the next patch of roses, and people on the other side of the planet.

134

Here Meillassoux tries to stick in his rhetorical dagger.

Now, why is this interpretation of ancestrality obviously insupportable? Well, to understand why, all we have to do is ask the correlationist the following question: what is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no? In one sense, yes, the correlationist will reply, because the scientific statements pointing to such an event are objective, in other words, intersubjectively verifiable. But in another sense, no, she will go on, because the referent of such statements cannot have existed in the way in which it is naïvely described, i.e. as non-correlated with a consciousness. But then we end up with a rather extraordinary claim: the ancestral statement is a true statement, in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible event; it is an ‘objective’ statement, but it has no conceivable object. Or to put it more simply: it is a non-sense.

What do others make of this ? What move would you make if you were playing the correlationist’s side ?

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I’m all for scientific models helping us predict and control the future. Entities in scientific theories are also quite welcome. Bring on quarks and fields and so on.

But I don’t personally see the need to adopt representational realism, for instance, in my account of what the world basically is.
Wheeler’s approach, which is new to me, is nevertheless more congenial with my larger philosophical approach

Yes, I agree. As Mill saw, only the tiniest fragment of the world is perceptually present at a given moment. Mill understands physical objects as enduring interpersonal possibilities of perception. I defend an updated version of his phenomenalism.

Mill accounts for unwitnessed causal interactions and so on. To me it’s preferable as an economical theory that doesn’t “push objects away from us” by understanding perceptions as epiphenomenal user-interface icons ( Hoffman, etc.) Rather he puts us “as close as possible” to those objects. It’s related to naive realism, but it allows for discordant manifestations of the world. So no “objective truth” but only shared warranted beliefs (like scientific models.)

136

I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s not that the physical existence of a star just is the possibility that I see the star if I look up; rather, it’s possible that I see the star if I look up only because the star physically exists.

Just as you exist even if I don’t see you and I exist even if you don’t see me, the star exists even if neither of us sees it. All three of our existences are more than just “possibilities of perception”, and these existences are what make us “being perceived” possible.

None of us would be here if the Sun weren’t already here before any of us.

137

All that looks misplaced. The appeal to formalism is not an appeal to a view from nowhere, or however you would phrase it; it’s an appeal to simple coherence.

Keeping with our example, let’s look at the suggestion that stating that something is true is no more than a coded way of stating one’s belief. If we treat this seriously, the inconsistencies begin to compound.

When we say that we believe something, we are making use of “truth”, not avoiding using truth; because saying we believe something is exactly saying that we believe it to be true.

Further, the difference between p’s being true, and our believing that p, is what allows us to be mistaken or in error. It allows us to believe things that are not true, and so to differentiate between what is the case and what we suppose to be the case. But bluntly, if what we believe to be the case and what is the case, what is true, were the same, we could never be wrong, and never learn.

This brings us to Fitch’s Paradox. There are things we do not know. But if what is believed is what is true, then there could be no unknown truths. So if what is believed is what is known, then it follows immediately that we know everything there is to know.

What this shows is that differentiating between knowing and believing is central to a coherent epistemology.

This sort of analytic argument utterly undermines the “truth=belief” error not by demonstrating some god-like alternative view, but by setting out the failing of the internal structure of “truth=belief”.

It shows that the claim that “the word is nothing more than an indicator of belief” leads immediately to incoherence. We can go a step further, and ask what went wrong with the sort of picture of the world that leads to such suppositions. It seems to rely on a form of solipsism, as if there were nothing but belief, and so nothing to countermand; but there is a “something more”, against which our beliefs are tested. Not just anything we say will do.

And just to tie things together, there are true statements. The one I am most fond of using is that it is true that you are reading this post, now. You can’t deny this without an extraordinary degree of contortion.

So much of what you have had to say builds on an incoherent account of belief and truth.

138

To me this gets things backwards. To say that we believe something is to say that we believe something.

The claim that belief is “taking to be true” continues to look vacuous to me.

Doing so takes “truth” to be a fundamental concept from which belief is derived as a secondary concept. It’s like deriving the human from God as God’s image.

Instead, in both cases, it’s the reverse. God is the mystified human and truth is mystified belief.

139

I’ve been through this in the pragmatism and truth thread. Is it not a triviality that we update our beliefs ?

I believe there’ a package on my porch, because the dog is barking and I am expecting a delivery. But I look at the porch, on which there is no package, and update my belief. I was “wrong.” My expectation was disappointed.

I suggest that the mystified idea of a “true” state of affairs is just an inflation of “seeing is believing.”

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This does not require that statements about the past are never true.

Rather, it suggests that we evaluate the truth value - decide what to believe - about the past by considering the future.

Notice that: there is a difference between the truth value of a sentence and what we think that truth value might be. Between what is true and what is believed.

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Yes, nothing but belief, which is the dynamic articulation of the face of a world.

I agree that you have to let go of a dualism of belief versus truth and the vague notion of “objective reality” for my “only belief” approach to make sense. This is why IMO we find Wittgenstein, in the same early notebook, writing that P is true just means P and all experience is already world and does not need the subject.

I also grant that my view will sound incoherent if you insist on understanding me as trying to “mirror” a true reality as I “confess” that I find the mirror metaphor basically empty. I am not proposing something like “nonsense-in-the-ear-of-God.”

I am proposing an entirely alternative framework, which I take to be more economical.