tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post1718267493604214520..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: The External World: More Experimental Evidence of Its ExistenceEric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-31014325608581352842011-10-07T12:16:31.843-07:002011-10-07T12:16:31.843-07:00Another interesting, and tricky, set of questions,...Another interesting, and tricky, set of questions, Stan! To tricky, though, and contentious to solve, for me to want to incorporate answers to them into the present project.<br /><br />For what it's worth, I am pretty skeptical about robust and determinate conceptions of the "self"; my perspective on that is broadly Humean, Parfitian, Dennettian.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-8083862322847733602011-10-07T10:47:35.844-07:002011-10-07T10:47:35.844-07:00What if you tried to find a line not between your ...What if you tried to find a line not between your stream of experience and the external world (if it exists at all), but a line between you yourself and your stream of experience instead. What if you found that your stream of experience is already external - memories, rules, scientific principles etc?<br /><br />I don't think it would directly help your radical solipsism problem but it would surely put it in a different light - is there anything external to the externality you declare as "yours"? How much of the external world you lay claim to? All of it or just a part?<br /><br />Also, if you don't have control over what happens in your stream of experience, then who does? If your stream of experience is independent of you, does it depend on anything else, perhaps external to it? Or does it have life of its own? How would that work?<br /><br />Maybe it would be easier to deal with the narrow problem of radical solipsism if you put it in the broader perspective. Right now all kinds of things pop up unexpectedly - insufficient probability, knowledge of the songs or mathematical divisions and what not. If we knew where these things belong in the first place it would be much easier to avoid them when framing your experiments.Stan Gnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-29486772606535086112011-10-03T10:42:50.684-07:002011-10-03T10:42:50.684-07:00Thanks for the comment Monster. The background as...Thanks for the comment Monster. The background assumptions are supposed to be those of ordinary science, bracketing the existence of an external world. In ordinary scientific usage Goedel's proof is not ordinarily taken to call into doubt scientific reliance on the stability of 4-digit primes and decimal expansions of 4-digit fractions. Yes?Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-6626434304361595072011-10-03T10:21:57.228-07:002011-10-03T10:21:57.228-07:00I believe Gödel's incompleteness theorems seri...I believe Gödel's incompleteness theorems seriously weaken your arguments about mathematical stability, and it does not seem as if you investigated the philosophy of mathematics before calling it 'stable'.Web Monsterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14824866223356853587noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-87585067857812686162011-09-29T15:39:31.988-07:002011-09-29T15:39:31.988-07:00There is no "philosophy of science" invo...There is no "philosophy of science" involved. This is the way that science operates on a day to day basis.Jackson Davisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-17942520866878258792011-09-23T12:20:10.641-07:002011-09-23T12:20:10.641-07:00Jackson: Thanks for your comment! Obviously this ...Jackson: Thanks for your comment! Obviously this isn't the usual sort of experiment, so the standards are a bit different, as you notice. I'm not sure I accept the background philosophy of science in your comment, however. Obviously that's a big issue!Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-56344377348034358572011-09-23T10:36:40.752-07:002011-09-23T10:36:40.752-07:00According to Orteguian metaphysics, "ex-peri-...According to Orteguian metaphysics, "ex-peri-ments" only occur in your "ex-peri-ence" which is "ex-ternal" to "you" but "in-ternal" to "your life".<br /><br />Also for your "ex-peri-ment" to be "scientific" you must set up a negative hypothesis that there is no correlation between your recalled auditory or visual experiences and the subsequent observed or reported experiences. You would then attempt to prove or disprove that negative hypothesis. Science never "proves" a hypothesis. The best it can do is to fail to disprove the corresponding negative hypothesis. In the case of a correlation among multiple events ("experiences") of the kind you describe, the correspondence as you indicate is statistical. Therefore you would have to phrase your negative hypothesis in terms of "There is no statistically significant correlation between your remembered experiences and the subsequent observed or reported experiences." You would then have to make a judgement as to what would be "statistically significant". <br /><br />I'm not familiar enough with the methodology of so-called "philosophical experiments" to be able to evaluate whether or not your "ex-peri-ments" would qualify.Jackson Davishttp://www.webspawner.com/users/ortegainus/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-62758824643281309862011-09-16T16:08:09.246-07:002011-09-16T16:08:09.246-07:00This is ridiculously interesting!This is ridiculously interesting!awesomesaucehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10790303858500651622noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-7793655334085384402011-09-16T12:01:37.643-07:002011-09-16T12:01:37.643-07:00Yes, anon: I'm assuming that lack of control o...Yes, anon: I'm assuming that lack of control of my experience is not by itself evidence that there's anything beyond my experience. And, Marshall, I am also making certain assumptions about the quality of my memory. Arguably, one could go the opposite direction on both assumptions and end up with a different exercise. But for what it's worth those are part of the ground rules of the current project!Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-63824670040557882132011-09-15T18:25:47.090-07:002011-09-15T18:25:47.090-07:00Marshall-
I may be wrong, but I think Professor S...Marshall-<br /><br />I may be wrong, but I think Professor Schwitzgebel's exercise does not assume the ability to actually control his stream of experience in any way. So suffering would not constitute evidence of the existence of the external world.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-27696056347849503122011-09-15T16:34:13.819-07:002011-09-15T16:34:13.819-07:00You're assuming you have complete knowledge of...You're assuming you have complete knowledge of the contents of your memory, which is clearly not the case for humans. On the contrary; in a simple case: you can't find your keys; only when you locate them on an unusual shelf do you remember putting them there. Not to mention tricks of avoidance where the mind "deliberately" hides relevant facts from consciousness. You want to admit your subconscious as part of your self, don't you? Or do you intend these rationalist beings as a thought experiment?<br /><br />I think perhaps you are making a clean break between the stream of events that is your experience (which is completely known) and that larger stream of events we call Reality (which is beyond personal control). I'm not sure you can do that, considering that the former is an interior subset of the latter, but maybe.<br /><br />For another (natural) experiment ... I would suggest considering the experience of pain and suffering. At times pain can be gratifying, but let's call suffering an experience of pain which is intolerable although unavoidable. If you could relieve your suffering by an act of will, then surely you would, so suffering is apparently imposed by something beyond your will. This will not be convincing to people who aren't or haven't suffered, but why would people like that ask a question like this at all?Marshallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10215784276660875929noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-17967335945739675442011-09-15T07:56:14.142-07:002011-09-15T07:56:14.142-07:00Anon Sep 15: Thanks for your kind remarks -- too k...Anon Sep 15: Thanks for your kind remarks -- too kind, I suspect! I'm inclined to think that physics and economics journals wouldn't have much interest in this. We'll be pitching it as "experimental philosophy" when and if we decide it's ready for formal publication.<br /><br />As for what the external world is like, in terms of basic metaphysics and cosmology I currently favor what in an earlier post I called "crazyism".Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-56747695695916900862011-09-15T07:50:25.681-07:002011-09-15T07:50:25.681-07:00Neil F: That's an interesting way of boiling i...Neil F: That's an interesting way of boiling it down! Thank you for the suggestion. Alan and I will have to think a bit more about whether this really is the nut of the argument, or whether it's only close. In any case, it's a helpful wedge into thinking about what the several experiments all have common.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-66864818003604107872011-09-15T01:16:43.800-07:002011-09-15T01:16:43.800-07:00I like this approach because it doesn’t attempt to...I like this approach because it doesn’t attempt to go via the accuracy of what seem to be our perceptions. You could alter the experiments so that even a being who is situated in some world external to its stream of experience, but who is having some strange hallucination rather than perceiving that world, could show to its own satisfaction that there is something external to it. E.g., as long as in its hallucination there is some reliable means of quickly identifying large primes as primes that surpasses its conscious ability to identify primes (assuming that in the hallucination it’s lucid enough to run the experiment), it can think to itself that there is probably an external explanation for this.<br /><br />Of course, once we come to believe there is an external world, we’ll want to learn about it. You’ve been careful not to get into that, of course, but once your result as to the existence of an external world is published, I think the exultant scientific community will demand research into whether we can have knowledge of the external world in the way we appear to.<br /><br />Where would you have this published, by the way? In the leading journal of some field, surely; probably physics - since you’ve proved, granted some plausible assumptions, there is at least one body - or chemistry - since you’ve proved, granted etc., there is at least one substance. I think economics journals might be interested too, though. After all, there’s no fun in game theory or in trade if only one person exists. But you can show that there must be at least one other, because it can appear to you that you are facing some other person in a number of games of chess, and that they consistently beat you with moves that you can’t see to be dangerous at the time, but that you can later analyse to be tactically solid rather than merely lucky. This is much like your prime number experiment (if you were conscious of all that existed, what would explain the reliable effectiveness of moves that you can’t see to be effective at the time?) and makes it plausible that there is at least one other chess-playing agent, even if they don’t have all the other qualities of the person you appear to see on the other side of the board. You might want to put some numbers in before you send this to a journal of physics or economics, though. Can you get P(There is an external world) > 0.95?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-18919392619261376732011-09-15T00:37:58.111-07:002011-09-15T00:37:58.111-07:00I think we can boil this down:
There's a chun...I think we can boil this down:<br /><br />There's a chunk of information S which is in some way 'special'. (Ideally the meaning of 'special' should be fixed at the outset, in such a way that 'specialness' is rare.) You're given a little subchunk s of S. Later you're given the whole of S (= s + t, let's say), and you marvel at how unlikely it is that your mind could have spontaneously generated an s <i>for which a t exists such that s + t is 'special'</i>.<br /><br />You reason that it's much more likely that t existed all along, somewhere external to your conscious thoughts.Neil Fnoreply@blogger.com