(March 21, 2018 at 8:24 pm)Hammy Wrote:(March 21, 2018 at 8:12 pm)Khemikal Wrote: Can you appreciate, at least, that the thrust of philosophy halts as soon as something is taken to be incontrovertibly true
No because that's nonsense.
Philosophy would only halt if EVERYTHING was taken to be inconvertibly true. And even that wouldn't matter if literally the correct answer to everything had somehow been discovered. That won't happen, no one is omniscient or capable of figuring out the truth or not about everything. But if someone was omniscient and did know everything, then they would be omniscient and know everything so it would be absurd to say they were dogmatic.
Someone THINKING they absolutely have the correct answer is different to someone actually absolutely having the correct answer because the alternative has really demonstrated to be impossible. There really are truths that you can be absolutely certain of, and in fact... they are *so* certain.... that in many cases the person doesn't even believe they aren't certain, they just think they don't. If you think you don't know that your consciousness exists, then you think you don't but you actually do. If you think you don't know that a square is a square, then once again... you're confused. It's not that you don't know it. You do know it you just don't know that you don't know it. If you are conscious of the reality of something, you don't magically become not conscious of it just because you think you don't. Just because you're deluded about what you experience doesn't mean that what you are experiencing is an illusion. Illusions and delusions are quite different. Thinking you don't see something when you do because you are conceptually confused is different to seeing something that isn't there because you are perceptually confused.
One problem is that there have been many times when people *thought* something to be impossible that later turned out to be possible. For example, Euclidean geometry was considered to be 'intuitively obvious' and that no alternative was possible. That is, until the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries was discovered. Also, even things like the law of excluded middle have been challenged when applied to infinite sets. And with good reasoning behind the challenge: not confusion.
So, you may know that a square is a square and a square has four sides because those are matters of definition. But the claim that a square has four right angles may be an incorrect deduction (it is false in non-Euclidean geometries). You may claim that 2 is a prime, but when you change systems to the Gaussian integers, that is no longer the case. It was long thought that a space filling curve was impossible (with 'proofs'), until examples were found. Similarly with continuous nowhere differentiable functions. I could go on and on with examples in math.
So, I disagree that it is so easy to demonstrate an impossibility. I also disagree that things like 'consciousness' are well enough defined for meaningful discussion to proceed. Some things that people have said are 'clearly true' about consciousness I simply don't find to be so obvious. This to the extent that I wonder if what I 'experience' is of a different type than what some others do. In that case, would what I 'experience' actually be consciousness? I don't know. It is definitional, and I don't quite understand the definition.
