RE: Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?
February 25, 2017 at 5:36 pm
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2017 at 5:40 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 25, 2017 at 5:03 pm)Mudhammam Wrote: By "the existence of tables" I understand you to mean the nominal definition of "table" that you gave. But that definition is derived only from one's experience of "tables." Individual experience "doesn't seem to be doing anything to prop the existence of tables up" insofar as we postulate them as objects that exist in a reality that is independent of my experience, but I do not see that I am able to say anything positive about their phenomenal appearance which isn't contingent on how it is that my hominid brain evolved to organize and translate discrete bits of sense-data into what feels like a unified stream of conscious experience; and at least some of what this involves, for example, color, smell, sound (and others would add texture, shape, solidity) etc., is not in the object itself but in my mind.An empiricist would say the same. That all knowledge is ultimately derived from sense experience. Some of that certainly seems to occur in the mind, other bits don't (there is a chemistry to fragrance and we do have noses....). To say that "it" is not in the object it self seems to miss out on some dependencies of sense apparatus. Vanillan does contain the chemical compounds we call vanilla as a taste or a smell...we can even be fooled by synthetics. A chemist can arrange for that experience by recipe. There seems to be some "mind stuff" happening and some "other stuff" in each example of sensory perception. The ready made answer to that is any number of representationalist theories.
Quote:Whether we speak of the table as it exists when momentarily unperceived, or as it exists in objective reality as opposed to subjective appearance or representation in perception, perhaps comes to the same thing; the question that both must confront is, "Can we know what are its properties as a thing-in-itself?"Don't see why we couldn't. The properties of the thing-in-itself and our idea of the thing might overlap. They certainly seem to in the case of vanilla, vanillan, and synthetics.
Quote:Yes, of course. That sense impressions seem so radically different from concepts of reason or images in memory is one of the chief stumbling blocks that I encounter when trying to reconcile the latter with eliminative materialism.Elaborate? Why would memories being different, somehow, to sense experience, be a stumbling block for the position or for you?
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