If you are a anti-realistic, do you also have to be an existential nihilist?

General Philosophy
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Human existence may appear absurd say for victims of war, teenage poets, or students of human behavior. But what’s really absurd is the blind rejection of our ability to know things as they are.

It takes discipline to become an anti-realist. Fueled by psychology and skeptic philosophy, hoards of intellectually half-baked anti-realists try to lecture us that knowledge is a social or mental construct, and that there are no meanings outside or independent of it. As if the light on this electronic screen would not consist of electromagnetism but social agreements or figments of our brains. Anti-realism is absurd.

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Realists with regard to concepts such as morals, meaning, purpose, values, and so on ignore that even from a realist perspective all that is ultimately real is the physical substrate of reality and the shared existence outside of our own consciousness, which itself is an epiphenomena upon physical reality (if it was not, how could psychoactive drugs do anything?).

They ignore that concepts such as morals, meaning, purpose, values, and like cannot be real because they are epiphenomena upon human society, they are things that arise from the human existence and are not baked into the universe itself.

There is a reason that objects such as rocks do not have morals, meaning, purpose, or values (even though humans can have moral beliefs about rocks, e.g. that it is wrong for vandals to knock down rock stacks for the sake of fun).

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However, as I’ve said before on here, such concepts have practical implications that make them effectively real even if they are not real themselves.

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You said

Talk of “processing information” muddles different kinds of information, processes, and their relations.
For example, a belief about an object that you see represents the object, but the seeing presents the object in your conscious awareness. Both are processes in your nervous system, and both can be used for self-regulation.

It is indeed difficult to select a name that for an original thought. Without exception, any word you choose has connotations associated with it. Feel free to suggest a less confusing name. I think what you’re pointing out here is that all information is processed to some extent. This is indeed a fair comment. There is no such thing as pure representation, at least when it comes to our perceptual world. The retina has layers of neurons in it that process the representative information collected by the individual molecules of retinol in well understood ways. The reality of what is happening is that representative information in the form of the retinol is being filtered through layer after layer after layer after layer of processing information long before it even hits our perception. We have no introspective awareness of any representative information that hasn’t been heavily processed. I would define representative information as information that has representative value with representative value being information that is more than 0% representative about external reality. This would mean that in this particular niche usage of the word processing information, processing information would be information that is 0% of representative of external reality.
**We end up trying to delineate between what aspects of our model of reality has representative value and what aspects of a reality model does not have a representative value. This is obviously a bit of a rabbit hole, but loosely, a reasonable guide to this is that an “is” statement has representative value. The emotions and feelings that give our representations meaning do not have representative value and is therefore processing information. The ought statements are verbalisations of what we would like the output value to be and is the product of the representative information being combined with the processing information. I realise that I have changed this, I was previously trying to keep it simple. **
The representative “is” statement information has been processed and is not 100% representative, but it is more than 0% representative. The feelings and emotions that we used to process the is statement is however 0% representative. To talk more holistically about the whole organisms processing of information rather than just human , you effectively have representative information that is being processed by processing information in layer after layer maintaining some representative value after each layer but becoming more and more heavily processed. The layer of processing we have introspective access to is simply the layer just spoken about where we add in the layer of processing information we call feelings and information.
In humans and even in much simpler organisms there are different streams of representative information that is processed into different models of reality. People will describe these different models of reality as different senses. Information from these different senses are combined and unified and filtered through cultural evolution to create concepts which creates a model of the world built out of concepts. The conceptual model of reality. This conceptual model of reality contains information that is more than 0% representative of fundamental reality, but it is also very heavily processed. **
In reference to what you wrote, just thinking about an object is you accessing the concept of that object in your conceptual model of reality. Actually seeing the object is you generating a visual model of a specific example of that object in your visual model of reality. If you smelt the object, you would be representing it in an olfactory model of the object. If you touched the object, you would be representing it in a tactile model of the object. If you licked the object, you would be representing it in a model of how it tasted. All of these models would have representative value. When you can dream together these different sensory models you would be creating a concept of the object and representing that concept in your conceptual model of reality. You would have the opportunity to process each of these models of the object with reference to emotions and feelings which is 0% representational and is therefore purely processing information, into output values. The output value could be, the milk tastes bad, we ought to throw it in the trash.
You said
** But the object that you see is not a figment of the nervous system. The process in your brain is constituitive for having the visual experience, but the object of the experience is located elsewhere (whatever happens to be in your field of view).

No, it is not a figment of your nervous system. It is being represented by your nervous system in a way that is heavily processed but retains some representative value. The object you are generating a representation of is located elsewhere and will still be located elsewhere even if you stop representing it visually by changing your field of view. I think all of this is consistent with what I’m saying.

You said

“Processing information” muddles beliefs, perceptions, hallucinations etc.

I don’t think the idea of processing information muddles, beliefs, perceptions, and hallucinations. Beliefs would exist within your conceptual model of reality. These beliefs could have representational value, or they could not have representative value. I believe that if I walk in front of a bus, the bus bus would hurt me as a belief that has representative value. I belief that killing people is bad doesn’t have representative value, it does however have value in terms of how we process representations of the world.

I think that most perceptions we have do have a representative value in general. The processing the perceptions go through happen before we have introspective experience of them. This is why we can’t introspectively separate our representation of temperature from the negative valence of cold. We know that our perceptions are constructed by processing representative information through layers of processing information. There are extremely cool examples of how this is done in the retina which through its physical structure actually processes the information. Visual illusions and existence of our blindspot tells us how processed and constructed our visual model is. Things like Phantom limb tells us how the model of our embodiment is constructed through the processing of representative information and evolutionary sensible ways. Just because we don’t have introspective access to these layers of processing doesn’t mean the representative information isn’t being processed by non-representative processing information.

With respect to hallucinations, this is an example where the information isn’t representative and probably couldn’t be considered processing information in the sense that I’m using it. I would generally say that hallucinations are considered to some degree a medical problem, it is not the normal state of being when applied to perception. Hallucinations are likely something that human evolution is trying to avoid. Hallucinating things is not good for your survival chances in general. You could see perceptual hallucinations as a defect or inaccuracy in the ability of the self relating system to represent reality.

You said

Without perceptions of real objects, we wouldn’t know of a reality, or that points (beliefs) could be matched closely.

I mean, I would switch your use of the word perception with or representation, but I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. If you are generating models with representative values, which given the existence of sense organs like the eye we must be, we would be able to represent reality in a way that actually represents reality. I think that you think that I am arguing for 100% anti-realism. I am not. I believe that fundamental reality exists and that we represent the structure of it to at least some extent with the different models of reality we generate. I am saying the way that information is processed isn’t representative of, it’s a product of genetic and cultural evolution. The part of our introspective experience this applies to and that I am an antirealist about is the feelings and emotions that give rise to meaning, which we use to process our representations of the world into output values.

Temperature sensors in your body are representing something of fundamental reality. The negative valence (feeling) that is generated when the temperature is below your set point temperature is not representative of reality. The representation of temperature has representative value, the negative valence that we associate with a temperature below your set point doesn’t have representative value. If a neurosurgeon burnt out the circuit in the brain responsible for the negative valence so we could accurately represent the temperature but didn’t feel the negative valence (feeling) associated with it, this would be to experience the representation without it being processed. It would also mean that we wouldn’t make an effort to get warm which would mean we wouldn’t be self regulating systems with respect to temperature.

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Values etc. are real but have different modes of existing than, say, molechules. The value of money, for instance, is real as long as we agree and use it accordingly. I don’t know of any realist who would ignore the reality of money, or meanings, morals etc.

Realism is the assumption that something exists independent of our social or mental constructs. It doesn’t exclude social and mental phenomena, but rejects the extreme idea that everything is socially or mentally constructed.

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Let’s take money for instance. Not the physical dollar bills, which themselves are physical objects, but the concept of money. The concept of money is an epiphenomenon (I sound repetitive right now) upon human society and human economies, and is made effectively real by its practical impact. But it can lose its reality too — take hyperinflation during the years of Weimar Germany for instance. Hyperinflation was so severe that at one point money effectively lost its money-hood — burning Marks to heat your home was cheaper than buying coal or wood to do so.

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Seems the crux of the matter is the assumption that you don’t really see the object but your own model of the object.

The fact that vision consists of optic, biochemical, neurological, psychological, social processes is frequently interpreted as a construction of a representation, a model. But what or who is then seeing the model? Another batch of processes, until infinity?

No, I think the first set of processes is enough, and the error is to interpret it as a construction of a representation. I’d say the set of processes is the seeing, and the object you see is the real object exactly as it appears under the current conditions of observation. That’s what appears in your conscious awareness when you’re looking at it. It’s the object, not your own model of it.

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Right, the value is highly dependent on social events, its existence fluctuates accordingly.

The concept is less so. Without value the marks are useless, but you can still talk of the concept. The concept can exist as a word or a mental state, which in turn have different modes of existing. Words are found and exist in speech. Mental states exist as biological phenomena. They emerge from brain events, which in turn respond to social events (including speech).

I’m just describing different modes in which seemingly abstract things such as values and concepts can be real.

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There’s something fundamentally problematic about large blocks of bolded text.

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Agreed. Could you (i.e. @Restitutor) hold it with the mass bolding?

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I subscribe to 4EA. I don’t think anything I said contradicts it.. I just didn’t necessarily feel like extending what I was saying towards things like embodiment, but yeah 4EA, it’s great. I don’t think this the negates the idea of representation.

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Happy we agree about is and ought. I think that true is statements have representative value which would make them at least partly perspective independent. Ought statements or at least the feelings and emotions that go into making them are generated by the person themselves. You generate the representation that there is a bowl of ice cream on the table, but the feeling that you want to eat that bowl of ice cream that leads to the ought statement is generated internally to you and is therefore perspective dependent. This seems relatively intuitive to me. if all we did was represent the world, how would we process that representation into output values? It is the processing information which we are adding to the representation and this comes from within it is how we are processing the representative information that is not perspective independent.
I completely agree that and realism is a complicated topic.

With respect to your first point, I think that we probably aren’t too far apart. I like the term representative value rather than true because people use the word true in many different ways. To use my language, I would say that if something does have representative value then you are effectively saying you are at least somewhat accurately representing something that is external to you. If you are representing something external to you then the thing that you are representing has an existence independent of your representations of it making it perspective independent. I think for me almost the definition of something being having representative value or in your language being true is that it needs to have an existence independent of our perspective. What would it mean to say something is objectively true but he’s in no way independent of our own perspectives?

With respect to

“…the philosophical view that life has no intrinsic meaning, purpose, or value, making human existence fundamentally absurd”

This is simply the definition I ripped off the Internet for existential nihilism. I am not especially invested in defending Camus’ idea of the absurd.

I think the problem here is that the notion of the absurd is both a rigid definition and has attitudinal resonance as a phrase that seems to extend beyond its rigid definition.

If the definition of the absurd is humans crave meaning of any kind in a world that does not contain meaning of any kind, then I would agree with you. The fact that we collectively “ give life meaning” would very obviously mean the absurd was not true and that’s absurdism is stupid.

I however, don’t think that this is the definition of the absurd when you read Camus, or the generally accepted definition of the word in philosophy. Camus wasn’t stupid enough to think, let alone right, that people don’t create what we refer to as meaning? For me the definition of the absurd is the human craving for an objective fundamentally real version of meaning not collectively generated by humans, and that this particular type of meaning does not exist. If this is the definition of the absurd, which as far as I’m concerned it is, then the fact that humans quite clearly generate subjective meaning that isn’t fundamentally real doesn’t undercut anything about the definition. You can like me, both believe humans create subjective meaning and believe in the absurd because the absurd is not making any claims about subjective meaning.
So, I don’t think we actually disagree on the substance. I think we just disagree on what types of meaning are encompassed by the definition of the absurd. I think in terms of the philosophy itself we agree as much as any two people should expect to agree.

I personally think that the fact that you, and in reality most people, don’t like the attitudinal resonance of the idea of the absurd clouds your judgement about what Camus is actually saying in relation to it.

I think that the argument that would be better made would be that although people might prefer it if the meanings they felt were objective, people can still live a happy and fulfilled feeling life by generating their own meanings. I think also in fairness to Camus, absurdism was his starting point and not his end point. He wanted to find happiness in the world despite he’s craving for objective meaning and his belief that objective meaning didn’t exist hence his famous quote “we must imagine Sisyphus happy”.

I think the reality is that different people will have different reactions to and different abilities to be happy in a world that doesn’t have objective meaning but has human created meaning. I think this is a question of feelings and I don’t think there is a particular right or wrong to it. The fact that one person may feel fine about the lack of objective meaning shouldn’t be told that the way they feel is wrong by somebody who doesn’t feel fine about it and vice versa, at least in my opinion. It’s not like anybody can bring any kind of imperial evidence about it forward, I would describe it as processing information and not subject to truth value.

Although I confess that I struggle with the lack of objective meaning at times, in general I quite like that meaning isn’t objective as for me it takes the edge of the stress of it all. It seems to me like Camuse struggled with this somewhat but did a reasonably good job at working through it. It sounds to me like you don’t quite understand what the fuss is about and that for you human generated meaning is just fine, thank you very much. This is good for you. For us mere mortals however, the idea of the absurd as I believe Camus meant it, regiment our thoughts and provide a trailhead that starts our journey of accepting that all we have to rely on are meanings we generate ourselves.

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Seems to me that the problem you are facing is induced by attempting to reconcile meaning as use with the problematic juxtaposition of subject/object.

Use is public. It is shared by a community, visible to others, and normative.

So if we look to use instead of meaning, the notion of meaning as “subjective” dissipates.

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Well antirealism states that there is no real “common” reality. Different people perceive reality , different and have with it a different world understanding. If you don’t postulate a real physical world outside of the minds of poeple but just postulate that reality that there is a “greatest commond divisor” of “human perceptions” that you call instead “reality” instead of the reality of physics. Anti-realism states that this so called definition (like a greatest common divisor of realities) does not exist. The problem is to formulate this statement in doxastic/epistimic logic terms. Since you have an amount of personally experienced worlds , but how to define the generally reality of mankind perceived from physical reality (outside of this) and how to classify the Kripke-Structures in which anty realsim is then possible.

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It sounds like, if you are an antirealist, then existential nihilism should be unreal and illusion. If you are an existential nihilist, then antirealism has no meaning and no value.

Therefore, these two isms are not compatible anyway. If you decided to take up one, then you must ditch the other.

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Logically speaking, you cannot be any of those. If you are an antirealist, then being antirealist is unreal and fake.

If you are a genuine existential nihilist, then you would feel meaningless to be an existential nihilist, so you would refuse to be one.

Despite all the logical contradictions, if you decided to become an existential nihilist, then you have ditched the belief of nihilism, so you are not an existential nihilist.

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This seems to be the core tenet of pro-life arguments (well, the ones that tend to be somewhat aggressive, instead of either wrong or brute (in the logical sense)). The concept that a human life may have meaning in the absence of an adult human mind is to me, entirely empty and without any kind of support in any arena or of any kind.

Once adult minds are in the mix, we get that meaning. Which, as best I can tell, commits everyone with a brain to contingency on meaning.

I don’t personally have a definitive view about whether the mind itself is the meaning-creator but if there’s some form of meaning which cannot be accessed, then it is, to a human, entirely irrelevant. Like the perfect ice cream cone someone in Andromeda.

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A large part of the problem here is a misunderstanding of the term “antirealism”.

The term is used roughly for the idea that the truth of some proposition is dependent on our knowing that proposition; that knowledge and truth are dependent in such a way that we can only claim something to be true if we have a proof, or evidence, or somehow verify that the proposition is true.

In more formal terms, antirealism is the view that for any proposition P, P is true only if P can be known to be true.

Now that view very quickly falls to Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, that omniscience follows from antirealism - antirealists must claim to know everything that is to be known.

And the simplest response amongst antirealists is to deny that propositions are either true or false - to deny that classical logic applies; or to restrict the applicability of antirealism to some specific subgroup of propositions on an apparently ad hoc basis.

Now from antirealism, it does not follow that all propositions are meaningless. Indeed, in order to parse the antirealist thesis, it is necessary to suppose that there are meaningful propositions. One cannot know that some proposition is true unless one knows what that proposition means.

What this shows is that a large part of the discussion here is not about antirealism, but something else, approaching hard scepticism.

In particular, the supposed argument that there are no mind-independent facts in domain D; therefore, claims in D are just subjective, is quite invalid. It relies on the hidden assumption that if a claim is not made true by mind-independent facts, then it is merely subjective, which is exactly what is in question.

And which is false. It presumes that meaning is a thing in an individual mind. It isn’t.

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The OP’s definition of anti-realism is more about the worldview than propositional idea.

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“Seems the crux of the matter is the assumption that you don’t really see the object but your own model of the object.”

No, not an assumption. It is bizarre that you would call it an assumption. How much evidence to you need?

1 -In organisms simpler than our selves, we can see how they are self regulating systems than internalize representations of the external world. Bacteria and c. elegans we can see this in very compleat well understood ways. In c. elegans sciantiest have made all 302 of there neurons florence and produce light when they fire. You can what them in real time doing things as there bodies are see through. Every indication is that we are complex versions of these simpler self regulation system with a 100 billion neurons instead of 302. Look at retanatopic maps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhFJIgeY-ZY&t=9s . in all self regulating systems you have to internalized information into the self regulating system in order to process it into outputs by representing it. It is only the representation that can be generated in the model. No we don’t have a complete understanding of everything about how the model is generated but we very much know enough to know we are generating a model. What is the human eye doing it is isn’t internalizing external information .

2 - All the ways we interfere with the brain, drugs, magnets, electricity damage is exactly what you would expect if the realty we are experience is a model generated by the brain. If our visual model isnt a model built on representation why does severing the ocular nerve or damaging the visual cortex cause the exact expected deficit.

3 - Vislual illusions etc, the fact we don’t see our optic nerve. Phantom limb syndrome and these are just in nurologicaly normal people. You also have to explain the belafes of people who arn’t nurologicaly normal. If all we are fundamentally doing is seeing reality as it is then this is impossible. If we are just generating models of reality the fact they they differ from how we know reality to be is obvious. The way we think of the solar system as being obviously isn’t the solar system, its a model of the solar system in our heads. The actual physical solar system and the information we have about it in our heads are obviously two different things. The Ptolemy view of the solar system was a model lacking in representative value.
4 - If our experience of the world isn’t a brain generated model built out of neurons than what is is built out of, what is it made from, how does it work. Give me an alternative explanation that isn’t magical and fits within the realms of science. Bare in mind we discovered the Neutrino and they are so minimally interacting at a wall of lead a light year thick would only stop 50% of them.
5 - Points 1, 2, 3 and 4 all work together to mean that anybody operating in good faith should recognize that the brain is generating a model of the world

“The fact that vision consists of optic, biochemical, neurological, psychological, social processes is frequently interpreted as a construction of a representation, a model. But what or who is then seeing the model? Another batch of processes, until infinity?”

Why in the world would these models need to go off to infinity? Nobody is saying that. The brain does have layer after lay after layer of model. You can chart the information through each layer but there is a top set of interconnected models. This is where the diffiffernt streams of information from different senses converge to creat concepts. This is in the frontal and pre-frontal cortex. Damage to these arias will change or damage people’s sense of self and there decision making ability. The first person perspective of you as an observer looking out into the world is realy the model of self created by the frontal and pre-frontal cortex watching the visual model created by your visual cortex. This is was the totality of the information overwelimgly suggests although it is true we can’t mechanisticaly describe how this happens from top to bottom. The idea that you need infinite models is just not the case. Feel free to justify this idea if you can”

“No, I think the first set of processes is enough, and the error is to interpret it as a construction of a representation.”

What?

“I’d say the set of processes is the seeing”,

Yes, the set of processes is the seeing. The set of processes that is the seeing are a set of processes, they are not the object in itself that is external and physically distinct from the processes that is the seeing. There is the object in itself and there is the process of seeing, they are distinct.

” and the object you see is the real object”

Yes, the object is a real object, in that it has an existence that is external to you. This is why we can both look at an object and agree about different aspects of it.

“exactly as it appears under the current conditions of observation.”

Hard to unpack what you mean here. if, It appears exactly as it appears, is what you mean then fine but its not actually saying anything. If you are however saying, the real object and the appearance of the real object (the thing in itself that exists external to you) are exactly the same thing with no distinction to be made between them, then no. How would this even work from a mechanistic standpoint? This is anti-sciantific, like saying evolution isn’t real or that the earth doesn’t go around the sun.
There is a distinction between color, and a load of photons of a particular energy. There is a distinction between the molecular structure of volatile molecules and a smell. We actually model a single object with multiple models all of which model different aspect of the fundamentally real object differently. People who are color blind generate different representations. There was the whole thing about the dress that people saw as different colors in. There are lots and lots of optical illusions,. Also the 5 points i made earlier. You just an’t ether thinking it through or havent looked at the evidence if this is what you are saying.
All this is the case just as there is a different between a mountain and a map of a mounting, between elevation gain and a contour line, between a pub and the letters PH written in blue ink. If the map is accurate the pub exists and saying the map isn’t a pub isn’t to say the pub doesn’t exist.

I feel that in general you are just ignoring the mounting of evidence and believing what you want to believe.